Some, of course I’ve never learned their names, anonymous Samoans maybe, saintly impersonal artisans who sit cross-legged braiding leaves to hang athwart their middles, take advantage of the natural terrain, incorporating, in the manner of collages, nails (around two such were drawn the feet of Christ, one nail for each, as though He had been hammered to the letter H, His hands represented in the same way except the fingers of the left were bent across a corner where a nail came through the wallboard from the other side, a shred of scarlet ribbon fluttering from the point like a trickle of blood, and I must say, though images don’t excite me very much, this one gave me a turn), and every other accident and feature: bubbles in the paint, badly patterned plaster, the tracks of mounting tape, untanned squares where notices were hung, desperate old erasures and the paths of rags; flecks, picks, cracks, the heads of screws; stains, smudges, nicks, dents, pieces of paper; chips, smears, mars, knots, tears, condom and comb dispensers; scrapes, bumps, chinks, scars, furrows, burns, and the webs of spiders; clots of lifeless flies, mineral growths at the joints of pipes, even objects hung in space, dangling strings and naked bulbs and wires, for instance (in the toilet of a rural bar and billiard hall, incredibly forlorn, when I sat down to shit, the bulb blew me hugely on the wall, humped, rising out of the shadow of the stool like a giant out of granite, something by Rodin, brutish and primordial, and then I saw an outline on the wall, faint, in chalk, unsteady, often smeared, of someone else’s body, bent like mine, nearly the same, but with an arm outstretched and fingers fanned, though whether as a plea for aid or in salute or benediction it was impossible to say, and strangely compelled, I reached out cautiously, enclosing my shadow in the lines, and they fit like Cinderella’s slipper, they fit; that nameless idiot and myself, we fit; and when I examined the drawing more carefully I saw that the outline had been dotted in with something like the soft tip of a billiard cue, the points then joined with ordinary chalk; and so observing, I wiped myself and rose and spoke boldly to the giant as I stuffed my shirt into my trousers: but do you speak the language of the French, mon frère?), and, well, simply every imaginable matter: boards and pipes, hooks and other kinds of hardware, even previous compositions, whatever elements are given, just as the Aurignacian painters in their caves.
Is there a groove where I may rest my sensitive arm? I know the joke: the grave. But what selection shall I play this three a.m. in honor of the snowing? There are twenty degrees of aged light and fat young snow. A gauge grins at me through a window whose face frost is blearing. I shall play Ella Bend swaying in her shoe, a moronic look on her face. Silly fool. I hate her. I hate them all. That’s not a manner of speaking. I have only to write down their names and I hate them. They make my stomach turn …
Except for Pister Welcome. There’s a possibility there. For something new. No need to hang another doodad of a moon in the morning sky. Do Greece? do Babylon? Of Mice and Men again? Pister Welcome was built like Gregory Peck, only he had the head of a chicken. The irony in his name was that Pister was a hermit. He lived in the woods beneath a huge pile of brush.
Ah, thank the lord—Phil! It’s you. (Phil, a friend, is knocking at the gate of my heavenly study; doubtless he wishes to come in, to see me, visit a bit.) Come in …
There is a film of dust on everything. It is August. The roads are dry. No. It is August. The roads are dry. There is a film of dust on everything. It settles slowly as the snow falls softly on my window. But dust is more enduring, stays the seasons, surfaces the wings of birds, persists through fiction, drifts from Ella Bend to me, and in an hour or so, though Ellareen has dusted thoroughly, I shall write my mene mene tekel upharsin on her dining room table, my fingernail like the skate of a ghost. Dust out of the dry August roads. Dust blown out of the dry August sky. It will dampen the ball of my thumb if I mark on the window. What might I write there? Heat from my hand will melt the frost. The gauge will grin through the lines. Does the shoe fit, princess? Let me feel the instep. You’ve an ugly ankle. Couldn’t I have done any better by you? No promise in the leg either. An ungenerous thigh. Well, look at your mother. Bad blood somewhere. I mean the albino. And your father—furious for it. Shall I trouble to describe you? How shall I describe you if I trouble? Dust drawn from the dry August roads. Ah, Theaetetus, I fear I have brought forth a wind-egg. I have few positive opinions but I’ve opinions on that … somewhere … I’ve thought of it often. Don’t I keep a journal? Foolish oversight. Notebook? No? It’s this pain in my belly that puts me off.
Except when I hurt, this shall be your story.
Now, although the physical qualities of any lady, let’s say lady for the nonce, exist as a unity and appear for the most in the same way, her description, because it must form a sequence of words, arranges these qualities for the reader’s understanding, so that she comes into view like a distant ship, a bit at a time. Her description may be drawn in straight lines or in zigzags, out of curves or a scatter of unjoined dots, but whatever the geometry, the author will, as far as he comprehends the nature of his art and has capacity, compose a picture from the turns he gives to our attention that not only will possess the excitement of a moment-by-moment adventure, but will also, when the reader grasps it all as he grasps a theme in music, make a drama of the passage of the mind, even to its beginning, its middle, and its end, with recognition and reversal if the author’s art requires; and what can be true of the physical description of a lady can be true of the arrangement of any set of words whatever, though the point of the arrangement may be more difficult to see, the connections more subtly joined.
End lesson one. You won’t mind, will you, if I run a bit past the bell?
And. For. It? (Something’s missing here, but no matter.)
It is precisely considerations of this sort that distinguish the artist’s attitude toward language from others; it is the intensity of his concern that measures his devotion, the multiplication of these that reveals the grandeur of his vision; and it is the effect of such scruples, when successfully embodied, whether with the ease of an overflowing genius or by the pains of talent in team with ambition, to raise a fiction, or any other creative work, from what would be on most other grounds a commonplace, to the level of the beautiful.
When God wrote on Belshazzar’s wall, the critic Daniel decided the enigmatic words were “weighed weighed counted divided,” and that they meant the king’s reign had been judged inadequate and that his land would be divided. But here, instead of a judgment, they are an injunction: writer, reader, weigh everything twice, make everything count, and separate yourself from your writing reading the way the snake sheds its skin, while bearing in mind, too, who you reader writer are—you are the slough, and your common text is the sly shining snake.
I wonder what disease it is I have, whether I shall die tomorrow, or sometime later. Considerations of this kind lend no urgency to my work. That only happens in stories, and the idea of death makes me nervous. It’s two forty-five. And dustily snowing. Peg Crandall has gallstones. She’s awake with the pain. Pister Welcome is hiding from his fate. Lycoming rots in his grave. I wish it were light. And morning.
For in the morning I shall make paths over the hills, shape five-pointed stars, draw the balls of bulls, and on a steep slope like the side of an advertising sign, I shall step off the word—lemonade—in a hand that’s a double of the deity’s.
The Clairvoyant
The spirits were not easy in the house. The cupboards, for instance. And the deep malicious grass. She would have to persuade him to move.
The spirits were uneasy, restless, tossing like a sleeper at dreams, and Ella listened, filling the empty afternoons with their concerns, her husband at his insurance, autumn at the still gray mark it makes before blowing into winter. It would be hard, he loved his grass. She pulled at her teeth and felt the beginnings of one of his corrections. He was forever making mistakes and dragging that rough long redgreen angular eraser bumpily over the error, bulging the paper.
Here’s
his moonlike face coming in, not a cloud or a star, shining down on a desk leafed in paper. His plump hands finalize a crease. Rings dignify his fingers. Rolls of rubber lie like defecations. There it is: tissuey, pink. First the white, then the carbon and the flimsy. Next an art gum to neaten. He’ll whisk it all off in an instant, she thought, or blow the leavings in the air. That should belie him. His manner, his business, the whole of his duplicator life, should be exposed by the puff, but the poor tormented creatures whom he cheats, they cannot understand or care, they don’t wish in any way to believe it. He could pee out his nose, they’d not notice, they’re so frightened, so polite.
She slid one of the humps, gathering speed. OOWOO. Gum left crumbs, not rolls of rubber. She felt them between her toes unpleasantly. Never need false ones live to be a hundred. Here—’way we go. OOHOO. A body could come to grief. She never understood why vocal emanations were so easy from his office or why her husband’s voice, when he was there, was always captured in her coffeepot, escaping wanly out the spout. Dear me. Death and taxes. The Lord knew—bless His splendid hair—she didn’t like to slide that well. Edgar’s mouth was surely nothing like a spout, more like the slot in a needy box. You’ll be well taken care of, Mrs. Muvvers, a policy like this. Protection against death. SPAaa. Ella cruelly scratched and stretched her legs. Hot water would steam him out. You will always be poor at spiritual analogy, you haven’t the astral eye at all, Madame Betz had said. All rightie, Madame Smart, I’ll read a book to pick up speed. Madame Betz had a combative head. Run over by a train, the cards had said—no—Wednesday—eleventh. That would be the Central likely since it was the only one to Stocking not a block from her. Well, she’d not live to be a hundred either, thank the recumbent Lord. Not in the cards. But she’d have a good skullful of teeth—that was a comfort. Oh sliding was indeed a pleasure. She’d have to take back all her reservations. A pleasure it was. One of the few remaining. OOHOO.
Sunk in a chair, arms and shoulders aching, Ella stared at her thin brown hands as they made the motions of cutting and dealing cards, and through the lattice of their pantomime she heard and felt and saw the bodies of the ghostly dead in the pop of contracting timber, in the smokelike grain of wood in doors, in the presence of draughts in the shut house. She put water to the coils and drew the blinds until the thinnest of its patterns marked the walls; then sank with a weary groan into the flower-covered chair and held up her weary hands to cut and deal and conjure. To be water and metal and not to mind. Then a gray waste of ease for a moment. Peculiarity of quiet. Contentment of non-being. Not a star in the sky, not an eye. Gratefully she rested, bobbing softly. The water hissed and steam plumed in the kitchen. Hushush. The spirits put their palms over Ella’s ears. Through the crossing, through the interlacing of her fingers, better than any milky bowl or any smokey glass, she could hear the spirits treading the silence.
It hadn’t been easy: becoming a clairvoyant. Ella’d had to refine the organs she already had past any range and tolerance printed on their ticket, create others out of nipples, belly button, warts and scars and finger ends, then even from thumbs and elbows, the most recalcitrant pieces of her body, making them receivers of signals never before known, and refining her general dialing and directional procedures, so that each hair was an antenna, whether stationed on her head or across her eyebrows, out a mole, underarm, above her pubes, down her leg, in her ear or nose; likewise her teeth were tuned, her sunken cheeks were dishier than a radar’s, and her lobes turned like wary eyes.
Noises, I can see noises, she had once said to a neighbor, immediately regretting it, seeing the tremor in her neighbor’s face. It was a face like her own face, a famished face: narrow, high, deeply socketed, thin. There was a soul like her own soul too, behind it. Ella’s conviction was that her own had the shape and nature of molasses. Her neighbor’s face, however, was not wrinkled and brown as Ella’s body was all over. It was pale and transparent, and her skull lay like a quiet shadow under it. Ella could see, she thought, the world of her neighbor in her neighbor’s head. She had told her friend something about the spirits, a good deal in fact, too much perhaps—yes, almost certainly too much, but it was even now necessary not to surprise her. The world rolled through her like a sea, the skin no seawall to it, and no one afloat in that tide could have guessed by a sky change or by any other that they had been swept beyond her body wall and bobbed now in the basin of her brain. Her smile would be the same, her eyes would glow with the same warmth, her head incline to the same sign of sympathy and kindliness as if nothing had passed between you but a bit of the mildly interesting and sometimes useful spew of the sea. Sympathy she had, the sympathy of the ocean: vast, unconscious, and impersonal. Nevertheless, from time to time a gesture or a grimace or a tale would disappear and not return, caught in something underneath that indifferent surge which Ella decided was her neighbor’s similar soul, and then her neighbor’s eyes would narrow and her lips tremble and her skin darken. For a moment there would be a real wall between them, and Ella would think, ah, now she is conscious of herself.
Ella had been wrinkled when she married. Now her edges were yellow and her hair streaked; her eyes like the holes of pebbles in the moment after striking water. Her nose was pinched and her eyes were angular and sharp, as were her chin and the bones at the base of her neck. Between her meager breasts, because of a cheap crucifix (now pitted with sweat) she had worn since a child, there was always an oblong green smudge. The skin at that place had several times become infected, raising once a lump the size and shape of a peanut in its shell, which while it stayed Ella regarded with religious awe as the mark of her talisman and thus the sign of her faith, staring down an hour a day as might a Hindu holy man to where the crucifix rubbed against the swelling and turned it successively green and pink and curd.
What Ella had said to her neighbor was true, she could see sound, and as plainly there in space and with its own distinct shape and feature as one might see an elk—antlered, hoofed, and bearded. All her senses were acute, but she could hear and see and feel most marvelously well: the tremor in her neighbor’s face, the scrape of cloud, the grumble of molasses, like her soul, folding from its bottle, the rattle of smoke in a pipe, and the squeak of a suede glove fingering a chair tassel like the startled outcry of a mouse.
Cut, said Mrs. Maggies, off. Shut of her pains, if she had any, Mrs. Granley said. With the good Lord now, I hope, poor soul, said Mrs. Panishome. A sweet lady she was, so kind, though I hardly knew her she kept to herself and never returned a civil word a civil word …
Hush. Sugar crock. Left the lid off. How did they get in there? The cards would never tell Ella the date of Ella’s demise, but Mrs. Maggies always sounded elderly. Ella’d have to live long enough for Mrs. Maggies’ voice to crack. She returned to her chair with sugar in a cup, water raining in the pot. We shall simply have to move. The spirits are uneasy. It’s that cupboard, to be sure, the sugar lid ajar again and they get out. She peered in the cup and shivered from the cold. The pattern on the wall grew pale. The pulse is low, she thought. They’re out.
Her husband hadn’t known of the smudge when he married her, although he could hardly have been blind to her drying eyes and broken lips, and, if he chose, he could have simply imagined the rest; but he was not an amorous man, easily discouraged, preferring vulgar dreams in which vague shapes performed the act at his behest; so but rarely, tired, after bowling as it happened sometimes, when sleep had stopped his senses up with nightmare and he reached out for a form within it vague enough to violate, did he roll upon her, grubbing in her nightclothes with his hands and thrashing wildly with his body, while rigid, silent, dry, Ella thrust his penis in. She became pregnant once in this way. Shortly after their baby’s birth its father developed a severe condition of the back that required him to sleep on a board on the floor. Ella so cheerfully accepted this arrangement that she gave her husband, on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary, a wide and highly polished maple plank.
Sanding all those years like a burglar sharpening his fingers, and he squat always by the ace of swords, she was worn too finely now, her senses were so smoothly turned they seeped through locks ahead of picking them and sacked the world. How he frightened Madame Betz with his bellowing, poor trampled lady. Well, no harm to the astral body. Still all those pieces of brain about. Perhaps she should visit to say goodby, that would be friendly, but there would be that thick wintergreen odor of death she couldn’t abide, it made her sneeze, and the spectral skulls jabbering and glowing, and she would almost certainly fall in the glass, as she did the last time, though the last time on the sea beach it was pleasant, like a postcard land with no wind blowing, the clouds pinned and the long white scratch on her globe showing against the sky absurdly like a long jag of thunderless lightning.
The nerves in her shoulders twitched and her eyes ached. Dangerous to shut them. She would fall back in the darkness behind the lids, soon somersaulting, and who knew how far the acrobat would take her down. When you were clairvoyant, as she was, you had to guard your entrances, but if you did not leave them open, if you fearfully closed them all, then you’d be alone in there … alone. It was a wet cold castle. Better to pass into any other thing, the most outlandish lampshade, and let hot bulbs beat against you, or flatten yourself in military garments, stiff as metal, or otherwise dangle in a drape or a string, feckless and loose and gentle, or ooze through a wall like the damp in the spring. Sometimes they were surprisingly sweet modes of being. In Madame’s bowl upon a painted sea a pond of ducks, one tipping under, another tipping up, across the bill of the upward one a smile as silver as a fish for knowing what the mud at the bottom of the lake was like. Bite. That pain in her shoulder again. She wondered, suddenly, how a pipe felt, bent.
Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Page 3