15
There are no depths, Hugo had said, only distances.
16
—Rutger? Jos said.
He laid a protractor and compasses on graph paper nipped to a clipboard.
—He’s on his knees and elbows out in the ferns jumping up Meg with sweet slick liquid shoves, and his tongue’s down her throat, and his hot hands on her cool teats, having jittered her button until she was bucking. They’re real friends, those two.
Holger, on bed check with Pascal in tow, sighed and smiled his patient smile. Asgar, reading on his bed, slid his hand inside his briefs.
—I know that problem, Pascal said, studying the clipboard.
—Psychologists and poets, Jos went on, are in the absolute dark about people like Meg and Rutger. They can be talking about Reagan and Gorbachev, Marilyn Horne and Pavarotti, Joyce and Kafka, and Meg’s in there galvanizing his balls, mashing, petting, tickling, until she starts on his risen rosy pecker, giving little jumps, while he’s groping in her panties until in the middle of Reagan and Gorbachev she’s wagging her head like an idiot and Rutger’s interspersing his remarks with whistles of appreciation, and they’re both half in and half out of their clothes, a plump suntanned breast on view here for God and me to admire, a fine brace of balls there, a belly buckle, a healthy butt.
—You were there? Pascal asked.
—I’m not making this up, Jos said.
—Of course not, Holger said.
—And after they’ve made morons of each other, they resort to fucking as the only way back to sanity and this world, thumping like two rabbits.
—Ha! Pascal said, I’ve seen rabbits. The wife keeps chewing her lunch while the husband hunches her rear.
—Precisely, O infant friend, Jos said. And yes, I was not helplessly there, but there nevertheless. We were walking Meg back, I’d run into them and they insisted, so’s I could walk back with Rutger, and we sprawled in the sun in the dell awhile. I’m used to their pawing each other, and they’d probably just screwed their brains sodden in Rutger’s room after soccer practice. Anyway, once they’ve done Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit, they’re themselves again, fresh as kittens after a nap. They give each other a silly look with deep eyes, find their underpants, brush off leaf trash, say hello to me, and start in on Reagan and Gorbachev again. One keeps one’s cool with manly restraint. You hear that, Pascal? But exactly where Master Rutger is, I couldn’t say.
17
The self, Hugo said, is the body. Our knowledge of what’s other is a knowledge of our body. My seeing a Monet is a knowledge of my own eye, which is both an obstruction between me and the Monet and the medium by which I see it at all. If my eye is healthy and keen I can forget it. The self is invisible to itself when it goes economically about its real business. It is consumed in attention, and comes to being through attention. We do not watch our hand, nor yet the hammer, when driving a nail. We watch the nail. Reading, we see Robinson Crusoe with his parrot on his shoulder, yellow sands, green ocean, three goats on a knoll.
18
When Pascal and Franklin sang The Owl and the Pussycat to Mariana’s accompaniment on the harmonium, Holger had blushed: thin wisps of tickling fire ran together deep inside him, surfacing on his cheeks and forehead, seeping back again, chill and stinging. Mariana gave him a merry look.
—Didn’t half suck, did it? Franklin said.
—Did you like that? Pascal asked.
Holger’s Oh yes was weak, and he blushed again. He took courage, and said that the old-timey tone of the harmonium made him remember hymns by lamplight in Iceland, his childhood.
—I must, he said, learn to read poetry.
—Join us, Mariana said. Hugo teaches me, and Franklin has to get yards of poems off by heart, Hugo’s idea.
—Papa’s, Hugo said. Once you know a poem, you have it for good.
VESUVIUS
Standing from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in 1872 on which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle-deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava: in the midst was a mammel-like chimney, not long formed, fuming with a light corrosive breath; which to those in the plain had appeared by night as a fiery beacon with trickling lavas. Beyond was a new seat of the weak daily eruption, a pool of molten lava and wherefrom issued all that strong dinning noise and uncouth travail of the mountain; from thence the black dust, was such that we could not see our hands nor the earth under our feet; we leant upon rocking walls, the mountain incessantly throbbed under us: at a mile’s distance, in that huge loudness of the elemental strife, one almost could not hear his own or his neighbor’s voice.
A BOWL OF ROSES
Yellow kerchief, short blue pants.
—Roses? Holger said. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at one.
—Nor I, Hugo said. They are Italian opera, Austrian churches, German pastry. A proper flower is an aster, a daisy, a sunflower, something with decisive color and architecture.
—Precisely, Holger said. But Rilke’s poem you say is superb, beginning with boys fighting, like Adam and Franklin, nasty little savages baring their teeth and hammering away at each other and rolling together like a bearcub attacked by bees. And then the poem goes on to be a description of a bowl of roses?
—Die Rosenschale. Anger flashing, two boys rolled themselves up in a knot of naked hate, tumbling over and over like some animal beset by a beeswarm. An outrage of going the limit. A cataract of runaway horses. Lips raised as if about to be peeled away. Rilke says he saw that, and I daresay he did, at military school where his father sent him after his mother raised him as a girl. Saw it and forgot it, he said, but obviously didn’t forget it. Then the poem turns coolly to a bowl of roses. Like the battering boys they too occupy space. They are, they bend and open. They drink and digest light. They are boy and girl, stamen and pistil. Cool and ripe, their order of being is wholly beyond us, but we watch them as a lover watches his mistress. Inedible, they yet seem to belong with vegetables and fruit. But they belong to nothing but themselves, are nothing but themselves. Which means that, like us, like the pure being in us, they can take the outside in: wind, rain, the surge of springtime, shuffling chance and the inevitable, night, clouds running across the moon, on out to the most distant stars, can take all this and make an inwardness of it.
—I think I see, Holger said, but would hate awfully to be put on the spot and made to explain it. Fighting boys, roses in a bowl. Yellow roses, at that.
—The roses, Hugo said, are the boys. Where boys were, roses are.
—Lay that out flat, Holger said.
—Ha! said Pascal, coming to join them, to tie his shoelace, inspect his scuffed elbow, and look over his shoulder to see if Franklin was coming, too.
—When, Hugo said, I was a fetching spadger with rabbity teeth and big soulful eyes, out with my scout troop on a lake island, very rocky, cedary place, the air glittering with midges, I remember the heady, summery feel of it all, our scoutmaster undertook to instruct us in the facts of life.
—Facts of life, Pascal said.
—Twentyish, well built, he was a decent chap we all liked.
—By facts of life you mean sex, Pascal said.
—The very same, Hugo said, as set forth in a pamphlet. Which our competent scoutmaster consulted and followed. We sat in a half circle before him. Slapping mosquitoes and waving midges away.
—Here I am, said Franklin, trotting up and leapfrogging Pascal’s shoulders, a chaff of grass and leaves stuck to his short blue pants.
—We’re hearing about long ago, Pascal said, Hugo’s scoutmaster giving the facts of life to his troop.
—What for? Franklin asked.
—So, Pascal grinned, they’d know.
—Voir est une science, Hugo said. That’s Jules Verne.
Pascal translated for Franklin, cupping hands over his ear and whispering.
—But, as I remember, it wasn’t facts we were hungry for, but a sweeter knowledge. Not long befor
e this I had been initiated by one Gretta into the mysteries of kissing, in rather a crowd of us who flocked to one house or another that was free of grown-ups for an afternoon or morning. Some of us were spies who reported the techniques of older brothers and sisters. Gretta knew about kissing in the manner of the French.
—Which is what? Franklin asked.
—Kissing open-mouthed and wiggling tongues together.
—Like you and Mariana. Icky, if you ask me.
—Yes, Hugo said, but what Holger and I were discussing at a philosophical level before we were joined by chirping mice in blue pants and yellow kerchiefs, is that knowledge is furtive and experimental, in the idiom of nature rather than that of diagram and axiom. A verb before it is a noun. In any case, the facts of life were Gretta’s kittenish tongue and hugs and caresses, which grew less tentative in the course of things. And there was the electrifying afternoon when, as we nudged each other to take a look, a look that made my mouth dry, Hjalmar Olsen, who was on hour-long French-kissing terms with three girls, all of whom were friends and compared notes and kept score, sneaked his hand into Charlotte Heggland’s knickers, with her warm approval.
—Whee! Franklin said.
—So our lecture in a mist of midges lacked that grip on reality the young mind prefers to science from a pamphlet.
21
At afternoon, the weight of molten metal risen in the belly of the volcano hill (which is vulcanic powder wall and old lava veins, and like the plasterer’s puddle in his pan of sand) had eaten away, and leaking at mid-height through the corroded hillsides, there gushed out a cataract of lava. Upon some unhappy persons who approached there fell a spattered fiery shower of vulcanic powder, which in that fearful moment burned through their clothing and, scorched to death, they lived hardly an hour after. A young man was circumvented and swallowed up in torments by the pursuing foot of lava, whose current was very soon as large as Thames at London Bridge. The lower lavas rising after from the deep belly of the volcano, and in which is locked a greater expansive violence, way is now blasted to the head of the mountain, and vast outrageous destruction upward is begun.
LOCKER ROOM
—You have so many more resources, Holger said, as if nothing ever bothered you, a stranger to doubt.
—Doubt myself, you mean? Hugo asked, sifting talcum across his toes. Insofar as doubt’s skepticism, I live from moment to moment doubting everything. You mean depression, which is the same as despair, a sin, you know. Despair is the enemy’s most effective weapon. But despair is itself an enemy: the weapon makes the warrior. Except that depression, despair, the feeling that everything’s helpless, is not a warrior but a sneak behind the lines. His great lie is that things are necessarily so. All power stands on the necessary despair of the ruled.
23
Before the morrow the tunnel and cup of the mountain had become a cauldron of lavas, great as a city, whose simmering (a fearful earth-shuddering hubbub) troubles the soil for half a day’s journey all around. The upper liquid mineral matter, blasted into the air, and dispersed minutely with the shooting steam, had suddenly cooled to falling powder; the sky of rainy vapor and smoke which hung so wide over, and enfolded the hideous vulcanic tempest, was overcharged with electricity; the thunders that broke forth could not be heard in that most tremendous dinning. The air was filled for many days, for miles around, with heavy rumor, and this fearful bellowing of the mountain. The meteoric powder rained with the wind over a great breadth of country; small cinders fell down about the circuit of the mountain, the glowing upcast of great slags fell after their weight higher upon the flanks and nearer the mouth of the eruption; and among them were some quarters of strange rocks, which were rent from the underlying frame of the earth (5000 feet lower) upon Vesuvius, they were limestone. The eruption seen in the night, from the saddle of the mountain, was a mile-great, sheaflike blast of purple-glowing and red flames belching fearfully and uprolling black smoke from the vulcanic gulf, now half a mile wide. The terrible light of the planetary conflagration was dimmed by the thin veil of vulcanic powder falling; the darkness, from time to time tossed aloft, and slung into the air, a swarm of half-molten wreathing missiles. I approached the dreadful ferment, and watched that fiery pool heaving in the sides and welling over, and swimming in the midst as a fount of metal, and marked how there was cooled at the air a film, like that floating web upon hot milk, a soft drossy scum, which endured but for a moment, in the next, with terrific blast as of a steam-gun, by the furious breaking in wind of the pent vapors rising from the infernal magma beneath, this pan was shot up sheetwise in the air, where, whirling as it rose with rushing sound, the slaggy sheet parted diversely, and I saw it slung out into many great and lesser shreds. The pumy writhen slags fell whistling again in the air, yet soft, from their often half-mile-high parabolas, the most were great as bricks, a few were huge crusts as flagstones. The poolside spewed down a reeking gutter of lavas.
GYM
Folding in, Holger said to Hugo, folding out. What one learns from the American geographers Ullman and Sauer is that if you really know anything, everything else comes into your subject. This is because, I think, you’re on speaking terms with lots of other minds and consequently able to converse with yourself. I’ve often felt, you know, that I have not met parts of myself. I don’t mean to be mystical. Scientific, rather, as the self in modern psychology seems to be a kind of averaging of several personalities.
25
Two raps on the door, Pascal with his complete turn on his axis, closing the door by backing against it. A bright look, as always, by way of hello. Holger, reading, gave his happy grin of welcome. Pascal took a deep breath, as of resolution, marched over with exaggerated steps, halted, heaved another resolute breath, and, leaning, kissed Holger on the cheek.
—Because, he said quickly, Franklin gives Hugo and Mariana a kiss when he comes in. Christians, way back, kissed when they met. Besides, Franklin said I should.
LAURELDARK TRAILWAYS
—Eglund, Hugo said to Holger, is all for drawing classes, and I threw in photography and printmaking as well while I had him in a good mood, and academic listings will soon sport an ad for a Grundtvig art teacher. Meanwhile, Jos jumped at the chance to sit for studies and an oil. And is right on time.
In floppy long sweatpants that rode low on his hips, so shallow in the seat that when he sat, as now, affable and open, the fact was shaped in compliant cotton soft from many launderings that he was the happy owner of two large testicles and a stout penis wide of rondure at the glans, Jos looked from Holger to Hugo to Holger, clowning pouts, smiles, and solemn faces.
—Off everything, Hugo said.
Jos peeled the tight tank top from the mounds of his pectorals, forced off his heavy gym shoes and thick socks, untied the drawstring of his pants, which he pushed to his ankles, and stood brown and naked, as unselfconscious as a dog. There was, near him, a spicily acrid musk, causing Holger to discover that Hugo always smelled of some expensive and far-fetched soap or gentlemanly lotion, lilac and cucumber, and that Pascal gave off whiffs of mown hay and peppermint toothpaste.
—You could take photographs of me, Jos said, and sell them in Copenhagen for God knows what.
With a merry smile for Holger, he asked if he were the chaperon.
—For me, not you, Hugo said.
—I’m here, Holger said, to see Hugo draw. I stand in awe of his talents. I was so wrongheadedly mistaken about him when he first joined the faculty, charming as he obviously was.
—Theology and classics mark a man, Hugo said. Here, Jos, put your weight on both feet, that’s right, and cross your wrists on top of your head. I’ll draw as fast as I can. As well as I can.
27
—I’ve been thinking about your question, which I answered so peremptorily, Hugo said, and thought you might have felt I was dismissing rather than answering it.
The Death of Picasso Page 37