What has happened is that I have been returned to what, for want of a better term, one must call the daytime mind. A misnomer of course—it is rather that part of the mind which moves, according to its own style and accomplishment, at any hour of the twenty-four. Daytime is, however, its quality. It is the part of us that can mock—if it does not wholly mistrust—the midnight phase. I do not mistrust. If a djinn should smoke suddenly from a bottle, offering me two forked paths to the absolute—one bushy with exaggeration, stalked by the hypertrophic banditti of midnight, and one in which the serious is minced down to the companionable, birds in their nests disagree with jurisprudent irony, and melodrama is put out of countenance by the clear humors of morning—I know which I should still have to choose. But for the moment I am removed to the satiric distance. And from it I can see that I am still bound by that insensate word “choose.” As if one could choose between the parts of the whole blood, between the red and the serum, decreeing that only the one shall flow in the vein! Yes, Socrates is a man. And no one seeing only the “I” of these pages might suspect how antic and buoyant he can be on occasion, how reasonable a citizen of the lower-case world.
When I awoke this morning it was, as usual for these past weeks, somewhere before noon. I had been going to bed night after night at about four, stretching out each time in the quiet, sweated relief of a man who is at last at grips with the contretemps which has hovered for years. Each night I had experienced the same seven hours of intense sleep. Normally I dream the good citizen’s mumbo jumbo of the day’s palaver and anxieties, mixed with whatever hints from the vesicles are at hand. But on these nights I slept as if clasped around some chalice that led me from one night’s pages to the next, even the sexual abated in that process, profounder than any autoeroticism, by which I hoped to be regenerating myself. Mornings I awoke into the alert, whole faculty of childhood. City walks by day were no more than sanative plunges from desk to garden, in which passers-by exchanged their dioxides with me as impersonally as flowers and I took my meditation among them as the philosopher takes his to the company of the phlox. Each night, reading back on the work of the previous one, I learned to scan what I found there with surgical joy. And each night found the continuity preserved.
But this morning, awaking with the start of the malingerer, ears uneasy against the practical echoes of the street, I bounded upright, like a man on holiday who hears the business clock give a sudden, loud tick in the heart of sloth. When I stretched my cheek at the shaving mirror I did it intently; I was preparing this face for people, and I drank my coffee in the citizen’s modest twinge of retreat from a not too pedestrian dream. Only half awake, as on the groggy mornings before this account began, I could already feel the lack of that deep supportive reverie on which I had floated for so many days. Being gone, its loss is already difficult to describe. It is a sensation known to the good swimmer, drugged almost to the point of no return from his own amphibian ease, bobbed suddenly to the vertical by his ruthlessly mortal lung. His ear drumming with the depth that has nearly murdered him, he still mourns it; the heavy water of the present drags his garment, and he meets with a shock of sadness the warm, terrestrial pull at his heel. Gravitation warmed me; I felt saved, but empty of what had been snatched away.
Now I felt the familiar urge to lampoon myself, the rising barrage of acrid comment by which a clever man reminds himself he is not a fool. Reaching for the Times, nonexistent on the kitchen threshold, I marveled at how many days there had been, almost a month, since I had canceled it, asking myself now if a man of this time, this place, this ilk could be said to exist without. If the Times says it isn’t going to rain, this can’t be rain. It was not raining, however, but a brilliant morning, the sun spreading like butter on the front of the house opposite, whose flat, limestone-clay color has always obscurely pleased me. A sound truck went by, braying some exhortation—to the cinema, to the spirit, perhaps, but not to vote—one knows very well that this is not November but April. And it is Tuesday. I ran a finger along the morning’s deposit on the sill; yes, this has the look of Tuesday grit. You know very well who, when, and where you are. Day for the cleaning woman—no, cleaning lady, one of the trusty serf-shadows who flit city-wide and only for bachelors, leaving Mehitabel notes useful for breaking the ice at your parties—a shadow vaguely Czech, dimly sixty, whom you have not met in the flesh for years—was it for her that you shaved?
Outside, in the back garden of the house next door, the superintendent, a richly oily Italian, hitched his brigand stomach, chirked at his dog bac bac bac Baccaloni, and shook his lovelocks don don don Giovanni at the sky—all against your private knowledge that he has a Scottish wife, a red-nosed stick of a child always screaming for “sway-ties,” and was himself born in Throg’s Neck. Despite which, when you glimpse him from the shower, you often switch from “Freude! Freude!” to “Là ci darem la mano.” Yes, this is the morning mind. It has its own diapason. By its wry self-apostrophe a man convinces himself that he holds the reins; with a thousand surface iridescences it lures him back to the representational world. Do not belittle its powers. It too is “the mind.” And its chief power is to deny its own matrix, to laugh at the demiurge.
“Listen,” it says in its cranky, comedian rattle, “we’re not alone. Always somebody under the bed. Whoever told you we were?” “My dear sir,” it says in a clear, eighteenth-century ratiocinative, “may I present my allies—and yours—the city, roaring so gently; the Times, always so ready to fill a gentleman’s empty mind with the issues proper to his station; and that entrancing garrulity of your era, the telephone. All at your gate, ready to explode their petards. Let it be a philological joke between us that pétarder means ‘to break wind.’” And so to its French. “Solipsiste!” it screamed, with the same rancor with which it might have said, “Sodome!” And then, in softer, chemise-colored tones, “Pauvre solitaire.” Last came the blunt croak of the sportsman it is—“Look ’ere, what’s that pogostick you’re ’oppin’ abaht on, call it your singularity? Picked it to place or show?” And then I stopped, or tried to, for who can hope to prestidigitate as it does? As well try to duet with the world’s best harpsichordist, with Chinese back-scratchers tied to one’s hands, and from three feet away. Let it play; you follow. Most manage that way most of their lives. I drew an experimental breath, and yes, the quondam depth I had come from seemed sunk almost to the nonsense distance—all the doggerel of sense dropping lightly to my aid.
“Demiurge” was a word I had borrowed from my painter friend Maartens. Looking through the kitchen doorway, I could see down this long room—the old ballroom of the house, with a musk of conversation still in its linenfold and a ceiling high enough to accommodate the fin de siècle. In the dimmest corner—farthest away from the oasis of gaiety in the bay, where drink, music and shadow screens interpenetrate their boxes behind a previous occupant’s sofa (dropped on their modern manner like a Crébillon joke)—is this desk, shyly battlemented beneath the books. On it I could see these pages, arrested—by some silently sliding safety door of the will—before they had come to the incriminating matter. Nothing much was in them as yet except that peccavi, common enough since Rousseau, by which a man might subtly work himself over to the demonstrably good side in the course of revealing his bad. Should I burn them then, as Maartens, in an access of overcritical rage, disgust, or fear—whose terms no one could understand but himself—sometimes burned a painting? Or should I do as he, get away before the destruction and take a therapeutic turn with what he calls “people outside”? Of whom, to him, I am one. Those periods are when I see him.
I imagine that there are many outside the arts to whom Maartens is “my painter friend,” kept much as a doge might have his dwarf, a cultivated Philistine “my poet,” an alert politician “my Jew.” He brings the dark, dye-pot range of his artistic difference just near enough for them to dip their fingers in its fascination and congratulate themselves against its dangers. When he tells them—with seeming naïveté an
d actual insolence—that he seeks their company because of their difference, they are flattered to find themselves in possession of what they never knew they had. And finally, he reassures them, since he happens to be an exceedingly ugly man. Maartens, I’m certain, has only a callous, professional interest in his own tints and composition. But as they observe orange hair vying with pink, bladdery nether lip and exophthalmic eyes (whose red-lit brown I once heard him call, in his precise Dutch voice, as he sat for himself, “the exact color of a bedbug who has just eaten”), they are comfortably reminded once again that beneath any exaggerated effort to compose the world in order or beauty, the specific neurosis is plain.
Maartens rests me. I made his acquaintance without guile and he has none, having as little façade, beyond the skin, as is possible. This is in part because words have no aura for him outside their use; he uses them for whatever, by the usual covenants, they can perform. Magic lies elsewhere for him; although he is not physically nervous, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing him wander a room not his own, aligning objects and colors, or cavalierly shutting them away, and except in those periods when he can’t work and is seeking the company of the Philistines for that obverse service he hopes they will do him, I’m rather sure that he sees the human only as another kind of “arrangement.” Nevertheless, it’s at those times, when his power “to make,” as he calls it, deserts him, that he develops a certain uncanny ability to plumb its habit for others, the way a countryman, in the city and sick for home, can speak of it like Theocritus, for an afternoon.
“Yesterday,” he tells me, “I was at work.” Then we sit a while in memoriam, as if he had just said, “Yesterday I was alive.” Fairly soon he will begin to tell me how it happened, but only in order to be able to dwell afterwards on what he has been exiled from, the way an Israelite, to whom Canaan is as much remembered as promised, might haughtily map its milk-and-honey rivers, not to a kinsman, but to some Gentile stranger who has no hope of it at all.
He sighs. “Did you happen to notice what it was like, the day before yesterday?” he asks.
I remark that it was thus and so—last time, that it was nice.
“Nice!” he will say. “Superb! Baked by a pastry cook who put on another flourish every half hour. Cordon bleu. I noticed,” he says with a certain emphasis. “Wind, girls, buses, everything. I spent the whole day at it.”
Earlier in our friendship, when he first sought me out at such a time, I would have asked “Why not!” receiving the answer reserved for fools: “Not with the upstairs eye!” But now I know that old saw of his and I nod. Suddenly he smiles—Maartens is not witty as we verbal ones class wit, but he has the broad humor of those who, lash about as they may, have an ultimate faith in themselves.
“Cecile says” (she is his wife) “that I always act just the way women do about their monthly—let them cry at a cheap movie, or feel the whole world in the small of their back, or see the pimple in the mirror; still, twelve times a year they will say to themselves, ‘I wonder why.’ And I’m the same—I never see it coming.”
And the next morning or the one after, his lapse comes. In the studio, he does not go as usual at once to the canvas, always faced to the wall, away from all eyes but his own, and turn it about, as one uncovers a child. The room’s happy confusion, ignored these six months, worries him. He spends the morning leafing through what judgment has abandoned or completed, roaming his lifework with a housewife’s sour, prophylactic stare. When he can no longer avoid it, he goes to the last canvas and turns it around. And now, shrugging at me, he throws up his hands.
“Bad?” I unwisely ask, and he gives me another of the looks he reserves for the people outside. Bad would be hopeful. It is nothing, neither one way or the other.
And now he begins what he has come for—to describe, with the sweet roweling of memory, what he has lost. The canvas is the eye, he said once, the eye on a string from the navel. The string one can drop and pick up again. But what he has lost lies behind. Stretching his lips around words, he brings them forth like a dog that, howling for its master, develops human speech. And like the dog, dangling his slack leash, he noses me back to the studio, snuffling at the fled footprint, saying “here” and “here.”
“Did you burn it this time?” I cast a glance at a small work of his, hung over my mantel, that I bought last year. No, he answers, not this time. He has locked the door on all that order, given the key to Cecile, who cries, “Oh, not again! But I knew!” gone down the stair, and come here. Inside the closed studio, as he makes me see it, the wind streams under the sash like a continuous peal of laughter, bearing in that pointillist surface which none can ever hope to abstract or diffuse. Somewhere back there too is that lost land, lost depth from which he has tried. He falls silent, despairing of its description, that pure, angry country from which a man can presume to pose a four-by-four canvas against the Augean confusion of the world.
“Demiurge, Number Three,” I say. That is the title of the picture over the mantel.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Pierre,” he says, “that’s a dealer’s word. The dealer insisted on names and we got it out of the dictionary at random. I like the words that come before and after just as well,” he says, grinning—“demitasse, demirep.” Already his voice is a little more arrogant; in my obverse way I have helped him. I know why he comes. “No,” he says. “To make. That’s as far as I’ll go with you word-mongers. To make.”
“Only an auxiliary,” I say. “Make peace. Make money.”
“Basic,” he says, getting up to go. “Make water. Make love.” I watch him go down my staircase and stop at the landing.
“You know what Cecile shouted after me when I left,” he says, looking up. “‘Burn it, why didn’t you,’ she says, ‘you flâneur, the ones that are left will only be worth all the more.’”
I laugh, and he joins me, for since he is already being collected by both bankers and museums, that is probably true. “What will you be doing now?” I call after him, but he has not heard me.
On his febrilely merry “Be seeing you,” the door slams.
As, for the months of his dry season, I shall. For what Maartens will do now will be to bury himself, at first desperate, then with calculating fervor, in the nonvisual world. He may be heard of as attending a music school six hours a day five times a week—he is a fair cellist; on another of his “tours,” as he calls them, he will earn his certificate at a cooking school—two uncles were chefs, on the Swiss mother’s side.
On his afternoon visits to me, he becomes less and less expository; he is forming his secrets again, nursing up his slow, fruitful anger against “the people outside.” It is at that stage that one meets him, as I did first, at their parties, drinking in as if it were elixir the heliumated gabble of those who do everything but make. He listens with interest to their version of him, how to one he is a primitive, to another an artist made healthy by his “hobbies,” to all a House and Garden version of the Renaissance man. “Ah, Maartens,” says a lady lay psychiatrist, summing him up, “he lives everything out”—and she gives him the smile with which the viviparous are regarded by those who have learned, like Jove, to give birth only from the brow. Maartens says nothing but one hand nurses his stomach—he has rather a tidy pot—the way pregnant women do, and I amuse myself with the surmise that he is congratulating himself on having a navel, in the specious presence of so many who might almost be imagined to have none. For what is he doing there if not using them, by night, as by day he uses modes of expression that are foreign to his, as he would haunt even the world of the blind in order to be sent back with force on his own?
And on one of these nights one meets him in that gay-dreary little backroom cloaca of all such parties. He is looking down at the bed and there is pity on his face for the mink and polo cloth exploded so hopefully on the counterpane, for that touching pile of pupa-cases left in the back room by those who expect so faithfully to find themselves angels, breathing the Zeitgeist, in the front. As he tug
s on his muffler, however, he is muttering expletive in one of his languages—dirty Marseillaise lingo maybe, or outhouse Flemish, or perhaps only the universal guttural of nausea. Be seeing you, he says with some embarrassment, for we both know that now he will not. He has got it back again, that hard and temporary country of his dominion. Will he remember from there that I have listened and half understood him, being halfway between him and those others outside? Of course not. Were I to call the next day, Cecile would tell me that he is at work. And the messages he sends from there are indiscriminately for all.
No, I thought this morning, one does not call upon Maartens. He does what he can by doing what he must—while the rest of us have only the chronicle of ourselves. I walked over to the desk and looked down at these pages. Through the open sash the greening wind of April riffled them, turning up on page after page the same watermark—footprint of the self up from its own depth and pacing its own cubicle—I, I; I, I. I gathered them up roughly and held them over the grate. They trod a circle, but until they crossed its center could I burn them? Or would they plague me forever, bringing me round again to the dead-end bar at midnight, to the point at which I sat down here and began? No, until they bore up their trophy they would not burn. Yet even the most doting autobiographer must feel the shame of the ceaseless monotone that to others is only “he.” Was that why the morning wind had brought me Maartens? The satiric distance has its uses even for him, I thought, and on an impulse to dramatize it, I put down the papers and went round the room snapping up every blind, meanwhile smiling at the thought of the cleaning woman who, imposing her Grundy code, would tour the room again pulling them severely halfway down. Then I flung open the window, leaned on the sill, feeling the hot purr of the sun, and regarded the world.
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