Lucia
Page 9
The clown now blows up the balloon, and blows up the balloon, and blows up the balloon, and all the time you are unhappy. The other clown, who it now becomes obvious is a woman the first clown is trying to impress, watches on dispassionately, as do you, until the woman falls over, which is rather typical, doesn’t he think?
Now there’s a great deal of fannying around with string which interrupts whatever momentum the performance had up to this point; is that how he always does it? Sandy? And don’t people get bored waiting? And he understands that there are real circuses people can go to?
A net is strung in silence beneath what are now trapezes, and a little trapeze artist is brought on. He swings back and forth by means of a string and leaps from trapeze to trapeze using magnets until he is chopped to the nets with a flat hand.
A man of metal wire puts his head in the mouth of a metal-wired lion, who has wool for a mane. The lion allows the trainer to live, and the trainer repays his kindness by forcing the lion to stand on a small platform. Is there a rule in life that says the beautiful and magnificent things of the world must always be cowed by the cruel and the ugly? Sandy? He does not know, and it’s coming to the end now, whatever you think. The trainer makes the lion rear up under threat of a whipping, and it dies of sadness while charioteers lurch to the sound of a bell.
You like the horse best, though you will not tell him. You like it even more when the cases are packed and closed, and his attention is reserved for you, and not for idiotic confections of wire and string, which is rarely. It will become rarer still, because, despite the fact that you love him, Lucia, he will leave without warning and return to his fiancée and take his stupid little circus with him.
It was as if the funerary priests had meticulously followed the proper procedure and then, at a time after that (but before the sealing of the tomb) they had returned to the corpse, knowing where the protections had been bound into the wrappings and, with a knife, cut them out.
Now, Egyptian mortuary rituals were a notoriously expensive business and the priesthood associated with it was held in high regard. Would they have done this without payment? Would they have done this without influence being placed on them, knowing that the desecration of a tomb was a crime against their gods? I could not imagine that they would.
‘I clean out your mouth; I open your eyes for you’
At her feet are placed the four canopic jars. In these are her mummified organs, preserved to serve her in the afterlife.
THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
LES ATELIERS DU VIEUX COLOMBIER, PARIS, SUMMER 1927 (CONT.)
The spoilsport makes its first appearance, unseen, but always there. Its presence is assumed from the change in atmosphere, a shrillness as if somewhere above a glass is rung, a wet finger around the rim, teasing out sound. Its trembling is visible in the image cast by its contents and shadowed on the table top. It is a vibration in the doorway, light creeping through the keyhole from the lines of shoddy joinery. It is the cracks of untreated, unpainted wood, dried and separating, pulled apart and left gaping, light coming in and not, as a body passes on the other side.
It pauses and passes, both their breaths held, sharing the expectation of something but hoping for different things.
Needing different things.
Back to the mark, please.
This wooden soldier does not feel the presence of the spoilsport, could never feel its presence, would never be spoiled, even, even if it was taken and broken and its parts fed into a pencil sharpener and turned into shavings. One long curved curl, blond wood at the centre with a ribbon of red at the edge, the longest curl, the whole pencil taken in one turn, a new blade and new pencil turned slowly, slowly, but never pausing, never letting a splinter catch. Hand holding, fingers in the grooves, the hexagon imprint on the fingertips ever flatter. The lead is painfully sharp, sharp as a compass point, sharp enough to blind, jabbed in the lens, inserted into the lens and pulled down into the iris so that it never recovered. Slit like a goat’s eye, a vertical stripe of black, demonic, Satanic, drawing the round eyes of all the others to it, school friend, employer, lover, forcing them to look and look away. Grind this soldier into sawdust and scatter him in the backroom of a butcher’s shop. Put him into the sausage machine, into the sausages – rusk, blood spots on fabric, on the apron, in the knickers, on the sheets. Toenails catching against the linen, whisky on the breath, pigs slaughtered, pigs sighing, half carcasses hung from hooks.
A puppet moves very jerkily, but not like an epileptic. Such are the directions of Jean Renoir, who knows more about dancing than the dancer Lucia Joyce knows. The elbows are held high, the wrists too, and the knees are perpetually half bent – there is no gracefulness to it, the opposite, and this poses a problem. Lucia’s instinct is to form lines of beauty, to create unity of form, to act in consonance with some underlying order, or method, or aesthetic, but the puppet is imperfect – stop jerking like an epileptic!
Not like that!
The limbs flow to the ground when the string is relaxed, the head slumps to the chest. When the string is made taut again the flow only gradually returns to the horizontal – it’s the knees that cause the problem. The puppet is poorly constructed – it doesn’t joint in the way God made the body – it’s perfectly possible for a puppet’s knees to go in reverse, like a dog’s. It has a characteristic angularity on rising that is hard to recreate.
Not impossible!
Perhaps a puppet can be captured first during its rising, but then the real woman can take its place and perform its dance, waiting at the end for the real puppet to be brought off, a brief cut and the seams stitched and the effect is created. Easier certainly than bending the knee back on itself, the elbows and the neck.
This is not about ease; try again.
Relax the joints, relax the ligaments, relax the things that we know, the expectations, relax the self. Let it bend back, relax into it, relax. Not possible when you are so tense. It’s not that bad. Relax and enjoy it. The knees won’t work against themselves, but they can be put to the side to give the impression of inversion, and so the spine, laid straight, and the neck, in contraposition. Place the limbs both on the same side, both left, like an Egyptian in an exhibition receiving the benediction of an animal-headed Jesus, all the rights wrong.
Much better! Wonderful. That’s it. That’s it. Good. Good girl. Pig squealing, blood sausage, weight crushing out the breath, the Ba, the Ka, the Akh, emerging from the sinuses, organs in jars, panting horses at the last race. 4.30.
Are you getting all this?
No, the lighting is wrong, all wrong.
Go again.
This time is too much like the last time, too similar, trying too hard for something lost, aiming to recreate the absent thing. Gut feeling.
Having begun the preliminary sketches, my colleague put down his pencil and drew my attention to a scene on the side of the sarcophagus. In it, the deceased, obvious in that her likeness had been chiselled out, stood before the figure of the sem priest at the weighing of the heart, both overlooked by Meskhenet, the goddess of childbirth present in her form as a brick with the head of a woman, and also as a goddess from whose head a stylised cow uterus sprouts. Representations of Meskhenet are not at all unusual in tombs of this period, but what was strange was the presence of the sem priest, whose function is funerary, and who is generally only depicted in scenes of the funeral preparations. It was as if the deceased was presenting herself to him rather than to the goddess (who would outrank such a priest). We exchanged looks and I directed his attention to the inscriptions, but these were nearly nonsensical, referring to a song or liturgy that neither of us could understand.
‘Take the Eye of Horus, may your face not be devoid of it’
Each of the jars is made in the form of one of the sons of Horus and has a tutelary goddess. Qebesenuef, the hawk, overlooked by Serket, protects the intestines of the deceased.
THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
IN A LECTURE,
1930
In an abattoir it is not uncommon to come across tapeworms of ten meters in length – when one eviscerates the slaughtered animal and cleans the offal for sale they are flushed out of the gut. Tapeworms of pigs are of one length, tapeworms of cows are of another, but if length is disregarded it would take an expert with a microscope to tell the difference between them.
Rather than a head, like a mammal might have, the tapeworm has a scolex, which contains the sucker, a ring of barbed teeth, and a primitive cerebral ganglion which manages the autonomic functions and the limited senses a creature who dwells in the bowels of another creature requires.
In order to reproduce, the tapeworm finds another tapeworm inside the digestive tract and they exchange spermatozoa via their genital pores. One might imagine the love life of these parasites as they thrash around inside the bowel, and there are some parallels with human romance, the worms having a concentration of nerves of sensation around their genital pores through which pleasure is no doubt produced in the scolex.
Once it is pregnant with fertilised eggs, the tapeworm migrates to the anus of its host, where it finds egress into the world, there writhing, white and seeking, until it sheds the proglottid containing the spawn onto the pasture, where it is eaten by a new host. The eggs lodge in either the stomach or the brain of the new host, where cysts may be formed which cause aberrations of behaviour.
A woman wishing to lose weight who finds herself unable to do so by the exercise of willpower may ingest the eggs of a tapeworm in the form of a small pill and, once pregnant with the parasites, will vomit and pass – through diarrhoea – a great portion of that which she eats. The rest will be eaten by the tapeworms, allowing her to maintain a shapely figure simply by taking an anti-parasitic preparation. After the tapeworms die, regardless of their own state of pregnancy, they will be passed in the stool, gorged on the chocolates, Turkish Delights, and fatty treats that are served at dinner parties to which the girl is not invited, but of which she avails herself once the adults are in bed and she can sneak around unwatched.
If a tapeworm infects the uterus it can lead to miscarriage, either via the worm eating the blastocyst, or the worm drawing on the resources properly produced by the placenta for the foetus, depriving it of them at a vital stage and causing it to wither on the branch. It is possible that the tapeworm will be purged when menstruation forces the shedding of the cells by which it is attached to the wall of the uterus, but it is also possible that it will not, at which point an anti-parasitic should be administered and care taken that the uterus does not become a locus of infection.
If a girl comes to you with the intention of inducing a miscarriage via tapeworm, she should be discouraged, since other more reliable methods exist. If a girl comes to you having attempted to miscarry by tapeworm, she should be chided in the strongest terms to prevent her doing anything so damned stupid in future. Tapeworm cysts may migrate anywhere in the body, including the eyes and the brain, where they will cause blindness and aberrations of behaviour and necessitate long and difficult treatment, up to and including surgery. During surgery, areas of the skull will need to be removed to give access to the cyst in which the parasite now resides, putting pressure on the brain. Perhaps this is why there is such a thing as trepanning, which might, if you think about it for a little while, have been why it was attempted at all. Certainly, if one wished to relieve the symptoms of a tapeworm infection of the brain, or neurocysticercosis more generally, then drilling into the infection site would certainly offer the possibility of a cure, though not for the reasons the ancients imagined (bad humours, spirit release, et al.).
If one’s dreams were affected by the residence in the part of the brain responsible for the generation of dreamscapes of a tapeworm, or a culture of tapeworms, then would one dream of tapeworms, or dream as a tapeworm dreams? Or would the tapeworm dream as a man dreams?
There is in the animal kingdom ample evidence of symbiosis between species, so would this be another example? The tapeworm would seem to benefit here, having use of the superior facilities of the human mind to expand the possibilities of its dreaming, but it may also be the case that a man might benefit from the clarity of focus that the primitive ganglia of the scolex provide for the tapeworm. A tapeworm is not constantly bothered by drifting ruminations on this or that matter of which it has read in the papers, or vistas culled from memories of visits to Bavaria. Nor does it feel anxiety bubbling up from its unconscious, nor the requirements of its place in the collective unconscious of its race. A tapeworm’s culture is little more than darkness and the pleasure it receives from the stimulation of its genital pore, and the urge then to pass to the anus and shed the proglottid engorged with eggs. As a hermaphroditic culture, there are not even archetypal genderings to pull it in one direction or the other. So might a man’s dreams be freer of weight if he dreams as a tapeworm allows him to dream?
What if he should write down his dreams? Would there not be something in this tapeworm-inspired material that would be useful for others to read, if only as a relief from the terribly mannered and intellectual writings his readership is used to? What can a man tell another man anyway that he does not already know using words in an order he recognises, in a form he already recognises, on subjects he already recognises? By definition, if he already recognises these things it is because he knows them already.
Would he know the thoughts of a tapeworm? Only if the writers of works he has read were also written by men whose brains were infected with tapeworms, and who were also inspired by the thoughts present in the scolices of tapeworms living in cysts in the areas of their brains responsible for the generation of dreamscapes. Which raises the possibility that all the writers of the past were writing in this manner, and that the literature we take for canonical is not of our species, but is the literature of tapeworms, and what should be done about this?
First, we should apply an anti-parasitic to writers of note like those provided to women who wish to lose weight but find they cannot stop stuffing their faces with cake and butter all day long and half the night. While the worms will not be passed in stools, they might bleed out of the ear, or be absorbed by the body, or purged through the lymph after having first been destroyed by defensive white blood cells. Then we must prevent the transmission of the tapeworm cysts into the brains of writers by encouraging them first not to have intercourse with girls who have attempted to induce miscarriage by tapeworm. The migration of the tapeworm to the mouth of the cervix and the shedding of the proglottid engorged with eggs might well result in the proglottid being transmitted through the meatus, up the urethra, and by turns to the brain (via the circulatory system).
Also, writers should avoid undercooked pork and always wash their hands.
If this is not sufficient, then all contact with girls and pork must be prohibited, at least for as long as it takes to determine whether the canon is a function of the mind of a human, or the scolex of a tapeworm. A survey must be carried out in which writers who are known to be free of parasitic infection are induced to write on whatever topics they prefer and the results read by learned critics, and then that these writers be forcibly infected with tapeworms and induced to write on whatever topics they prefer and this work handed in too.
It must also be determined whether the critical function displayed by learned critics is itself unduly affected by the thoughts of tapeworms, since critics are integral to canon formation. Children must be raised who are, firstly, free of tapeworm cysts, and, secondly, riddled with tapeworms, and these two groups of children raised in a very literary culture, with books of all sorts, or only books produced by men who are riddled with tapeworms, or only books produced by men who are not riddled with tapeworms (if these are found to exist), and then allowed to generate critical faculties, and then allowed to read the books from the writers engaged in the survey.
It should be noted that this is a rather time consuming procedure.
If, in the meantime, the daughter of a write
r whose writing is suspected of being produced by the scolex of a tapeworm – James Joyce, for example – should come to you, Carl Jung, for the treatment of neuroses, there are several considerations that must be taken into account. Firstly, is the presence or otherwise of tapeworms in the mind of the father relevant to the treatment of the daughter? It is perfectly possible that there is no intersection of the two issues, though this is unlikely. Secondly, is the presence or otherwise of tapeworms in the mind of the father central to the treatment of the daughter? It is perfectly possible that there is an overwhelming intersection of the two issues, so that if one were to draw a Venn diagram of the intersection it would almost appear as if there were only one circle present, rather than two. You would have to take an eyeglass from the drawer in the writing table, such as the one that is used to consult the dictionary produced in two volumes rather than twenty-four that was received as a gift from your father long before he died, this must have been forty years ago now, to see that at the very edges of the circles there are two more lines only a fraction of a hair’s breadth separate, but separate nonetheless. Thirdly, is the presence or otherwise of tapeworms in the mind of the father only marginally relevant to the treatment of the daughter?
You must also ask yourself whether the daughter is infected with tapeworms, since if the father is infected with them, and the father lives in close proximity to the daughter, might the daughter not also be infected? It is not an easy matter to determine infection in vivo, but inspection of the anus for proglottides might be one way, or to ask if proglottides have been noted in the stool. The presence of diet preparations in the handbag of the daughter might also answer this question. If she leaves the bag unattended while she answers a call of nature, it is not improper to peek inside if it is open, and only a little improper to undo the clasp and look around. Place the tip of your nose an inch or two away from the slit, and the scent of violets will fill the nostrils. If she returns unexpectedly, then adopt a surly indifference to questioning and urge her to return to the point and stop changing the subject.