The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Christ!” he said. “Thanks to you I have come awake for the first time. The horrible sleeping dummy awakens! Lady Utterly, fancy seeing you! What brings you here?” She settled more closely into the crook of his arm, but did not speak. She knew that the information she had passed on came from her dead lover, Affad. He had always said: “What is too finely explained becomes inoperative, dead, incapable of realisation. Never talk about love unless you are looking elsewhere when you do. Otherwise the self-defeating pillow-music will lead you astray.” Blanford was saying: “Darling, you will be able to exhibit me in a glass case outside your consulting-room as ‘The man who came back from the dead – the ape erect!’” Ah! but she knew that science is not interested in happy endings – that is the privilege of art!

  As Sutcliffe used to hum:

  What he believed in cannot be expressed,

  That’s why his ideas seem partly undressed

  When insight hardens into dogma it goes dead, so they kept everything fluid yet kept on praying for more and yet more insight with which to discipline the heart. How dull the old world of “before” seemed now with its inappropriate lusts and dilapidated attachments. In the Camargue on the verandah of their little house they sat in silence watching the night falling and the fireflies twinkling like minds realising themselves briefly, abruptly before disappearing. Meanwhile she was making notes for her psychoanalytic essay on that forgotten novel Gynacocrasy the reading of which (it was comically pornographic in the stark naivety of its love scenes) had brought them both so much fun. It had clearly been written by a woman and Constance was setting out to prove the fact (which was nowhere stated) purely by internal evidence of a psychoanalytic-sexual kind. Blanford was amazed when he thought how much she had taught him, even physically. She had learned that the priapic conjunction is a force-harness which builds the field in which the future, as exemplified by the human child, can secure a foothold in reality. Half-joking she could say: “Now you know what you are doing when you couple with me you will never be able to leave me – it would be dangerous for your insight! For your art, the merchandise of breath, oxygen! We’ve done it, darling! The orgasm if shared in this way admits you to the realm between death and rebirth, the workshop of both past and future. To grasp this simultaneity is the key. Meanwhile in between births – the orgasm is a shadow-play of this chrysalis stage – we exist in five-skanda form, aggregates, parcels, lots, congeries. They cohere to form a human being when you come together and create the old force-field quinx, the five-sided being with two arms, two legs and the kundalini as properties!”

  “Well,” he said somewhat ironically, “in the new age it will be the man who is the Sleeping Beauty and who is kissed awake by the woman! Their paths join and bifurcate at the command of nature. And human truth, damn it, must become coeval with nature’s basic nonchalance for the miracle to come about. As if one had to stop caring and start improvising! Of course love can be reduced to a pleasant conviviality but the wavelength or scale is low and it cannot fecundate the heart or the insight. A mere discharge cannot instruct!”

  “You need to go away from me for a bit now. Not for too long. But to get your focus right for what you want to start building.”

  “I know,” he said. “I shan’t be happy until I have had a real try to make it the way I want – being serious without being grave. (The malevolence of too much goodness is to be feared!) If I could create such an edifice it would point the finger at the notion of discrete identity as being very much in question – ‘Be ye members of one another’ or ‘spare parts’, pièces détachées!”

  “What else?” she said in loving triumph.

  “Make a playdoyer for coexisting time-tracks in the human imagination. Deal seriously at last with human love which is a yogic thought form, the rudder of the human ship of fools: for hidden in the blissful amnesia we have just shared is the five-sided truth about human personality. Meanwhile the text should show high contrivance as well as utter a plea for bliss as being the object of art. Am I talking rubbish? It’s euphoria, then!”

  But in fact he was right for the idea of chronology had become disturbed – history was not past but was something which was always just about to happen. It was the part of reality that was poised! He would have gone out of his mind with all these intimations of another version of reality but for the indispensable beauty and loneliness of her presence. She had said: “If you want to do good without moralising write a poem”, and this is what he began to feel might lie within his powers one day soon!

  “You will soon be in a position to write a study of the woman as placebo – the therapy takes place even if she is not a goddess but an ordinary woman!” (Sutcliffe sounded a little jealous, perhaps he was.) She said: “But you are right. It’s her role. And each orgasm is a dress rehearsal for something deeper, namely death, which becomes more and more explicit until it happens and revives the whole universe in us at a blow. Knowing this you know that everything is to be forgiven, none of our trespasses need be taken too seriously. Fundamentally everyone is panning for gold.”

  “I hate this kind of moralising,” he said, “because it smells of self-righteousness. I want to be bad, just bad. It’s also a way of loving – or isn’t it? I know you are thinking of the philosopher Daimonax, but was he right when he said that nobody really wanted to be bad? We must ask Sabine.”

  And fortunately Sabine was there to ask, sitting at the table on the balcony with her eternal spread of cards before her, scrutinising the future. She was smoking a cheroot as she worked – for skrying is hard work. She said: “It’s better than that, even, for the whole universe; the whole of process, to the degree that it is natural, becomes pain-free, anxiety-free, stress-free. The lion was made to lie down with the lamb – only anxiety causes fear, causes war. The same with us. Love and lust are forms of spiritual traction which a girl knows instinctively how to handle – the push and pull of sexual and bisexual feeling, the dear old Oedipus group. Unless one grasps this one goes on living with sadness – the horror at the meaninglessness of things keeps on increasing. But reality is really bliss-side-up if we want it so. Constance must purge your nursery desires, evolve your feeling for emptiness, develop the vatic sense, and persuade the heart to become festive!”

  “Yes!” said Constance slowly. “And birth is no trauma but an apotheosis: here I part company with my Viennese colleagues for they were born into sin. But in reality one is born into bliss – it is we who cause the trauma with these mad doctrines based on guilt and fear. Pathology begins at home!”

  “Instinct has its own logic which we must obey, we can’t do otherwise. We must roll with the hunch, so to speak. It is independent of the quantitative method which just brings up samples to analyse, all parts of an incommensurable whole.”

  It was now that she told them the tale of Julio, the gipsy poet, and the story of his legs. He had been the only child produced by the Mother and nobody knew what his origins were for She had never been seen to “accept” a man in her caravan. It was understood that such a weakness would have in some way qualified her “sight”, diminished her powers of prophesy. Julio grew up into a godly magnificence, physically of fine stature, and composed as if he had already lived on earth before. Not to mention une sexualité à tout va … He made up for his mother’s shortcomings and had all the beauties of the tribe in love with him. He became the tribal bard, so to speak, though among gipsies there is no such thing. His compositions were improvised to the guitar but the words were so striking they became popular sayings. He still lives on in quotation, so to speak.

  “But it was not only love-making that Julio favoured, he was also an athlete and enjoyed cattle-rustling and cockade-snatching – the variety of bull-fighting favoured by all Provence. He liked the taste of danger in the cockade fight and became a champion – unusual for a gipsy. Then came his downfall.” Pain entered Sabine’s quiet voice. “He was matched against the famous bull Sanglier who was also a champion, and a fierce combat en
sued. Julio almost flew in this battle, and the old bull used every trick in his repertoire, for he was a seasoned defender of the little red cockade. Then came the climax. Julio slipped as he came to the barrier and lost his advantage over the bull. Sanglier bustled him to the barricades and with an experienced maliciousness savaged him. When you are passing in the Camargue and you come across the tomb of this heroic Homeric animal, say a prayer for the ghost of Julio for he had both legs so badly crushed against the barrier that they were forced to amputate them. We thought he would die of misery and physical humiliation but after a period of despair, during which he selected and rejected every form of suicide, he took on a new life. His poetry increased in vigour and gravity. He had asked for his legs back, and these he had beautifully embalmed as an ex voto for Saint Sara. They were placed in the grotto with the spring at the Pont-du-Gard and a cult of fertility grew up about them. But this was after his death, for he lived on for a number of years just as a stump of flesh with arms, and strangely enough his success with the women increased rather than diminished. He never wanted for women. It was said that the infertile conceived after a love-bout with Julio. All the sexual power of his lost legs seemed to have entered his member. It grew enormous, he was in permanent erection it seemed. I went to him myself once or twice out of curiosity and he was extraordinary. He seemed to bore to the very heart of the orgasm – the psyche’s point of repair, the site of its sexual health. With the missing legs one could see that the spinal column was really a sort of Giant’s Causeway towards the yogic self-comprehension – the kundalini, serpent-erect business. Julio had imbibed this from his mother’s milk. I myself realised for the first time that sex is not dying, it is coming of age with the freedom of the woman. Its real secrets are as yet only half-fathomed in the West. The mathematics of the sexual act remain obscure. The power of five is really the riddle of the Quinx – solve it if you dare! But the problem of Julio is a very grave political one for us. Unless they are rediscovered and the shrine of Sara given back to us the Tribe can neither march nor procreate!”

  “Two down and five across, a ruling passion.”

  “Tagged by the Greeks as psyche-fed?”

  “No. No. Five letters, love. I love you!”

  “But psyche-fed no less, for love’s the

  Four-letter word we most recall with

  Never a crossword or dull moment. Two

  Across and one up, never a cross word!”

  To codify the appetites by yoga – all kisses and sweet stresses, sweet stretches and breathwork, guarding the deep vascularity of muscles and veins. Then meditation, like crossing the dark garden of consciousness shielding a lighted candle which the least puff of wind might extinguish. You protect this small precarious flame, treasuring it in the palm of the hand. So very gradually your meditation affirms and strengthens the flame and you can cross the dark garden with it triumphantly erect – the yoga erection of the adept in Tao is this, no? Yes, in Taoist terms even love is a predicament due to the wrong angle of inclination towards the universe.

  He sees no contradiction in contradiction, and to know this is the beginning of a freakish new certainty. His poetry is concerned with the transmission of an inkling, a breath of the supreme intuition which makes you laugh inside forever!

  “I am grateful to Egypt – having my back shot to pieces. I might never have bothered with this yoga jape and so missed a deeply transforming experience. A religion which harbours no ifs and buts, not even the shadow of a perhaps. No sweet neurosis this, no mental chloroform pad! Formal logic dissolves and as you orchestrate the body you exchange lard against oxygen. The hunger is not to possess, to own, but to belong.”

  Parts and wholes

  Wholes and parts

  Private parts and

  Public holes

  Holy Poles

  Unholy poles

  Wholly wholes.

  “If you suffer from a Priapus afflicted by Saturn you will do anything to make ends meet.” (Sutcliffe)

  He dreamed of something as lovely and deliberate as the kisses of pretty Turkish hanoums in their sherbet heaven. An abundance of smiling ticklers, an alphabet of broken sighs, oriental codes of sex. And all he got was that a girl like a pterodactyl silked him off in the bus from Gatwick crying, “Bless Relaxers!” By not minding we gain a little ground.

  SUT AND BLAN SOUL AND BODY = prototypes of love and folly lie there and play with your Vertical banjo!

  Puella lethargica dolorosa! Just kissing you was like a telephone call from God! Why then did you go away and ride to hounds? A non-man is worse than a con-man. He will wither your sense and sap your succulence. “Not to know one’s own mind is for a woman the beginning of wisdom!” (Inscription on a Persian pisspot.)

  Running along the grey-green river they had seen the famous broken bridge, still pointing its reproachful finger across the water towards the waterless garrigue. Neither Blanford nor Sutcliffe could resist the prompting to hum out:

  Sur le pont d’Avignon

  on y pense, on y pense …

  sur le pont d’Avignon

  on y pense, tout en rond!

  “How much longer have we got together?” asked Blanford and his alter ego replied: “One more book, one more river. Then body and soul must end their association. I know. It’s too short. It’s the only criticism one can make of life. It’s too short to learn anything.”

  “Constance looks ill.”

  “She will recover. I promise.”

  Rose de la poésie, O belle névrose!

  But even God must be subject to entropy if he exists. Or has he learned to enjoy and use the death-drift from perfection to putridity? Does he live like the Taoist in a perpetual holy irreverence?

  make his bed take his life mark his pillow ‘absent wife’ perhaps some passages in primal scene verse? Maybe Sutcliffe would share a Hearts-and-Flowers act with his alter ego?

  darn his heel smoke his quid doing all the other did scene or the epilepsy, the pearl saliva, The tongue bitten in half, almost swallowed.

  hunt the slipper hunt the soul Eros teach him breath control! “Cybele! What’s for dinner?” “Uterus!” she said.

  Carry thy balls high, Coz, les couilles bien haut! Recuser, accoler, accusez, raccolez!

  When young my member diminished like a candle under her caresses; but age and meditation stiffen resolve and now she knows how to mature and guide the trophy of erectile tissue in order to make it act responsibly. Today I feel I could write cheques with it if necessary. (Sutcliffe)

  The old valiant rises and retains its discharge politely like a clergyman at a tea-party, giving infinite service with infinite politeness. But it is entirely in the woman’s gift. If she wants she can blow it out like a match! (Blan)

  The elephant, if you imbibe him, teaches that art is both therapy and moral construction. Its calibre and relevance may vary. Its arithmetic is hermetic. Something goes into nothing once only. Love!

  Ah! But to die of sincere haemorrhoids, or by inhaling a banana, or d’une obésité succulente — that would be worthwhile, artistically. And pray, why not an aberrant prose style to echo the discordance at the heart of all nature? Shackle verbs, give nouns wings, disburse the seven-pronged adjective. Divulge!

  Often when they had drunk too much they would have the illusion that it might still be possible to get to the bottom of things. Dialogues like:

  BLAN: What would you do if someone said you were not true to life? Eh? Reveal!

  SUT: I would be vastly put out. I would sulk.

  BLAN: You see, for us in the cinema age reality is recognisable and identifiable only at twenty-eight frames a second. But undercrank and the image goes out of true and becomes aberrant, that of a paranormal person, schizo or parano, whichever you wish.

  SUT: Is that the complaint? Not true to life, they say? So there is such a thing to compare me with? I am under-cranked and feverish? So this is what mere Relativity has done for us? Catapulted us into the Provisional, with reality
as a shadow-world?

  BLAN: When I asked Einstein about you, about how much reality I could accord you, he said: “You mean that pink chap who looks like a pig? Tell him from me that man only has a tendency towards existing. I can’t go any further towards unqualified certainty about his actually being: short of a telex from God, that is!”