Children of the Albatross
Page 11
They sat rotating around each other like nearsighted planets, they sat mutating, exchanging personalities.
Jay seemed the one nearest to the earth, for there was the dew of pleasure upon his lips, there was this roseate bloom of content on his cheeks because he was nearest to the earth. He could possess the world physically whenever he wished, he could bite into it, eat it, digest it without difficulty. He had an ample appetite, he was not discriminating, he had a good digestion. So his face shone with the solid colors of Dutch paintings, with the blood tones of a well-nourished man, in a world never far from his teeth, never made invisible or insubstantial, for he carried no inner chamber in which the present scene must repeat itself for the commentator.
He carried no inner chamber in which this scene must be stored in order to be possessed. He carried no echo and no retentions. No snail roof around his body, no veils, no insulators.
Because of his confidence in the natural movements of the planets, a pattern all arranged beforehand by some humorous astrologer, he always showed a smiling face in this lantern slide of life in Paris, and felt no strings of bondage, of restraint, and no tightrope walking as the others did.
From the first moment when he had cut utterly the umbilical cord between himself and his mother by running away from home at the age of fourteen and never once returning, he had known this absence of spools, lassos, webs, safety nets. He had eluded them all.
Thus in the sky of the café tables rotating, the others circled around him to drink of his gaiety, hoping to catch his secret formula.
Was it because he had accepted that such an indifference to effort led men to the edge of the river, to sleep under bridges, was it because he had decided that he did not mind sleeping under bridges, drinking from the fountain, smoking cigarette butts, eating soup from the soup line of the Hospital de la Santé?
Was this his secret? To relinquish, to dispossess one’s self of all wishes, to renounce, to be attached to no one, to hold no dream, to live in a state of anarchy?
Actually he never reached the last stage. He always met someone who assumed the responsibility of his existence.
But he could sense whoever unwound from the center of a spool and rewound himself back into it again at night, or the one who sought to lasso the loved one into an indissoluble spiral, or the one who flung himself from heights intent on catching the swing midway and fearful of a fatal slip into abysms.
This always incited him to grasp giant scissors and cut through all the patterns.
He began to open people before the café table as he opened bottles, not delicately, not gradually, but uncorking them, hurling direct questions at them like javelins, assaulting them with naked curiosity.
A secret, an evasion, a shrinking, drove him to repeat his thrusts like one hard of hearing: what did you say?
No secrets! No mystifications allowed! Spill open! Give yourself publicly like those fanatics who confess to the community.
He hated withdrawals, shells, veils. They aroused the barbarian in him, the violator of cities, the sacker and invader.
Dive from any place whatever!
But dive!
With large savage scissors he cut off all the moorings. Cut off responsibilities, families, shelters. He sent every one of them towards the open sea, into chaos, into poverty, into solitude, into storms.
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At first they bounced safely on the buoyant mattress of his enthusiasms. Jay became gayer and gayer as his timid passengers embarked on unfamiliar and tumultuous seas.
Some felt relieved to have been violated. There was no other way to open their beings. They were glad to have been done violence to as secrets have a way of corroding their containers. Others felt ravaged like invaded countries, felt hopelessly exhibited and ashamed of this lesser aspect of themselves.
As soon as Jay had emptied the person, and the bottle, of all it contained, down to the sediments, he was satiated.
Come, said Jay, display the worst in yourself. To laugh it is necessary to present a charade of our diminished states. To face the natural man, and the charm of his defects. Come, said Jay, let us share our flaws together. I do not believe in heroes. I believe in the natural man.
(I now know the secret of Jay’s well-being, thought Lillian. He does not care. That is his secret. He does not care! And I shall never learn this from him. I will never be able to feelas he does. I must run away from him. I will return to New York.)
And at this thought, the cord she had imagined tying her and Jay together for eternity, the cord of marriage, taut with incertitude, worn with anxiety, snapped, and she felt unmoored.
While he unmoored others, by cutting through the knots of responsibilities, he had inadvertently cut the binding, choking cord between them. From the moment she decided to sail away from him she felt elated.
All these tangled cords, from the first to the last, from the mother to the husband, to the children, and to Jay, all dissolved at once, and Jay was surprised to hear Lillian laugh in a different tone, for most times her laughter had a rusty quality which brought it closer to a sob, as if she had never determined which she intended to do.
At the same hour at the tip of the Observatory astronomers were tabulating mileage between planets, and just as Djuna had learned to measure such mileage by the oscillations of her heart (he is warm and near, he is remote and cool) from her first experience with Michael, past master in the art of creating distance between human beings, Michael himself arrived with Donald and she could see instantly that he was suffering from his full awareness of the impenetrable distance between himself and Donald, between himself and the world of adolescence he wanted to remain in forever and from which his lack of playfulness and recklessness barred him.
As soon as Michael saw Djuna’s eyes he had the feeling of being restored to visibility, as if by gazing into the clear mirrors of her compassion he were reincarnated, for the relentless work accomplished by Donald’s exclusion of him from his boyish world deprived him of his very existence.
Djuna needed only to say: Hello, Michael! for him to feel he was no longer a kindly protective ghost necessary to Donald’s existence. For Djuna saw him handsome, gifted in astronomy and mathematics, rich with many knowledges, eloquent when roperly warmed.
Hello, Michael! Djuna said, and the 100000000000000000000000000 miles between himself and human beings became like a small pencil addition on a note paper and not a state of being. They were laid aside like a student’s abstractions, and now he was sitting in a café and Donald at his right was merely a very beautiful boy of which there were so many, cut out like a clay pigeon at the fair, with only a façade, and that is what Djuna had called him from the very beginning (the first time she had said it he had been angry and brooded on the insufferable jealousy of woman). Hello, Michael! How is your clay pigeon today?
Such fine threads passed between Michael and Djuna. He could always seize the intermediary color of her mood. That was his charm, his quality, this fine incision from his knowledge of woman, this capacity for dealing in essences.
This love without possibility of incarnation which took place between Djuna and all the descendants of Michael, the lineage of these carriers of subtleties known only to men of his race.
They had found a territory which existed beyond sensual countries, and by a communion of swift words could charm each other actively in spite of the knowledge that this enchantment would have no ordinary culmination.
“Djuna,” said Michael, “I see all your thoughts running in all directions, like minnows.”
Then immediately he knew this in her was a symptom of anxiety, and he avoided the question which would have wounded her: “Has Paul’s father sent him to India?”
For in the way she sat there he knew she was awaiting a mortal blow.
At this moment there appeared on the marble-topped tables the stains of drink, the sediments and dregs of false beatitudes.
At this moment the organ grinder changed his tune, and cea
sed to shower the profligacies of Carmen.
The laughter of Pagliacci bleached by city fumes, wailed like a loon out of the organ, so that the monkey cornered by a joviality which had neither a sound of man or monkey rattled his chains in greater desperation and saluted with his red Turkish hat every stranger who might deliver him from this loud-speaker tree to which he had been tied.
He danced a pleading dance to be delivered from this tree from which the twisting of a handle brought forth black birds of corrugated melodies.
But as the pennies fell he remembered his responsibilities, his prayer for silent trees vanished from his eyes as he attempted a gesture of gratitude with his red Turkish hat.
Djuna walked back again into her labyrinthian cities of the interior.
Where music bears no titles flowing like a subterranean river carrying all the moods, sensations and impressions into dissolutions forming and reorming a world in terms of flow…
where houses wear but façades exposed to easy entrances and exits
where streets do not bear a name because they are the streets of secret sorrows
where the birds who sing are the birds of peace, the birds of paradise, the colored birds of desire which appear in our dreams
there are those who feared to be lost in this voyage without compass, barometers, steering wheel or encyclopedias
but Djuna knew that at this surrender of the self began a sinking into deeper layers of awareness deeper and deeper starting at the topsoil of gaiety and descending through the geological stairways carrying only the delicate weighing machine of the heart to weigh the imponderable
through these streets of secret sorrows in which the music was anonymous and people lost their identities to better be carried and swept back and forth through the years to find only the points of ecstasy…
registering only the dates and titles of emotion which alone enter the flesh and lodge themselves against the flux and loss of memory
that only the important dates of deep feeling may recur again and again each time anew through the wells, fountains and rivers of music…
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