Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

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Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel Page 47

by Lawrence Durrell


  defining all death as “the

  collapse into immediacy.”

  Ah, dangerous salients of youth,

  loving in a crucial month.

  II

  Over the bridges the meandering scholars

  Deambulating flowed over the Pons Asinorum

  Of the five arts between the capable white

  Wide-flowing thighs of their seventh muse,

  A sharpshooter by a steel turret

  Waiting to smelt down whole faculties,

  Captives of youthful salt with their elaborate tensions,

  They passed and passed but always hesitated,

  Leaving their satchels when they could not pay,

  The score was kept on a matchboard wall.

  A hundred a quick one, five the whole night,

  Whole doctorates granted in prime embraces.

  The arts of the capital being matured and focused.

  Five for the collective wisdom of this great city!

  baisers 0 noirs essaims

  desires grown fair of dark

  the cross-roads of smiling eyes

  complexities of season, spring

  or winters black water

  bridges of funereal soot

  working with pink tongue or tooth

  towards some mystical emphasis,

  a life without sanctions

  in the forever, so long ago,

  so far away from all this

  contemporary whimperdom

  Solange

  sole angel of the seekers,

  their prop medal and recourse

  faces crisper than oak-leaves

  your burial service covered all

  the coward and the brave

  the perfectly solid fact as

  symbol of humanity’s education

  less a woman with legs than

  something, say that oven into which

  Descartes locked himself in order

  to enunciate the first principle

  of his system; the oven Planck

  consulted after all the

  spectroscope’s thrilling finery

  to deduce the notion of quanta.

  always the same oven, never any bread,

  the XXth century loaf is an equation

  Solange

  be like mirrors accumulating nothing.

  III

  The change from C major to A flat

  Is always associated with summary thefts,

  Certain women powdered by suns,

  Street-lamps’ fresh breath in cradles,

  As simply as birds reacting to rain

  We recover small fragments of the unknowable

  To render back to nature her darkest intents

  In allegorical bandages of old hotels

  Receiving into their no-womb the anti-heroes,

  Tang of the metro and rotting dustbins

  Needles seeking the iron vein

  Astrology’s damp syringe

  a woman of good intent

  distributing the river winds,

  drawing with scarlet fingernail

  on foggy panes high above Paris,

  one glassed-in balcony

  with tubs for plants’ green hives

  so apt for tall trees’ dews

  days robbed and nights replaced

  whatever the single vision traced

  four steps up

  four steps down

  wherever the emphasis was placed

  whoever the woman’s image finds

  dyed into living minds

  By the dead butts of infernal cinemas

  Or at the Medrano lulled by some old

  Circus animal’s tarnished roars,

  See the heads discharged by guns in baskets falling

  Smelling of new bread or blood. The muscles

  Now hanging in Museums, the thoracic cage shaken

  By typical sobs, the eyes of congers’ spawn,

  Then the plumage of soft shrieks in dark streets,

  The running feet, silence, and something lying

  In Paris on such April nights when stars

  Crunch underfoot the Luxembourg’s cool gravels,

  Night poised like a lion’s paw

  Where her prowl crosses some angle of the abstract town,

  four steps up

  four steps down

  where the sewers discharge

  by the urinal’s turret

  stairs too narrow for the coffin,

  minds too narrow for recognitions,

  hearts too severe for introspection,

  different categories of the same

  insolent vision marrying

  four steps up confederates of the darkness

  soon they must all die or

  go away, soon you will be left

  alone, writing wholly for yourself,

  struggling with the idea of a city

  a whore of the city’s inward meaning,

  animal intents all bruising

  the wingpoint of other myths

  outmoded or outvoted gods

  the muffled censors of the time

  ripening in the latest ages

  beyond the scope of liveried men

  past the intentions of the wise

  towards a death promoted by the sages.

  IV

  Even then was he somehow able to undress his dolls’ thoughts to sleep beside the sleeper, lay figures of the dreams which uncoiled among the mnemonic centres of the mind which thinks without knowing that it thinks, slips, punctures process with ideas. Faut-il enfin dépasser le point de tangence qui sépare I’art et la science, tout en les traitant comme les religions primitives en faillite? Oui mais comment? Even then, even then; but his snores might not awake the tiny amorous snores as of the congress of guinea-pigs in vivisectionists’ cages, unaware of being watched, syringe in hand. Et le chaos même, dandy ou nègre? Faut-il éprouver la plenitude charnelle d’un acte spontané?. In the cheap edition of “Causality” she had given Leibniz a moustache and printed a lipstick kiss to hide the crucial figure, adding in the margin the proverbial merde. If only she could have delivered him from the vices of introspection, the verses in p’tit nègre, the torn paper tablecloths with their thorny sketches; but alas vers libre is like le ver solitaire. The head shows and the atlas of the stare; it can be broken off by the forceps, but there will always be more packed in the gut. Beware.

  the communes raise their walls

  around the dreamer’s bed,

  cold crusts of cults devoured

  the science-mocking magics spread

  like viruses distributed

  by the redeemers’ dreams

  on altars sourly smoke

  the witnesses disperse

  among the smoke of thought

  to share the ignoble joke

  some medieval urinals

  mingle the preferred wine

  to pour from snouts of stone

  the griffins far below

  on the river’s quays

  famous star-waterways incline

  turn water into wine,

  the simple torturers go

  when night undresses all the trees

  unsleeping gargoyles tell you so.

  V

  Born of torpid country-folk versed in cumbrous ways and too haphazard to chime with this spawn of factories with anvils and poisonous oxygen, this decomposing fabric of stone, the sepia cards of churches begging for disablement pensions; but kindly stubborn intractable stock, she imported into the deadly estate of the town frail rural virtues, rotted in a primeval humus. Gone this Solange or that, but the mould remained unbroken revolving through worlds of dissimulation, spheres, hatcheries of unique sensation, seen through the pinshead of a tiny mind. Turning slightly towards the sun as winter flowers may do, the bonfires and speeches and the eternal inquests within the frontiers of the self, still the fated questions yawned as they do for all of us. And what then of Pascal, the man she loved: sullen, moros
e and leaden when not in the air flying from ring to ring with an acrobat’s fury, the webbed feet, sympelmous toes, O rabid specialist in a bird’s beauty. They exchanged wordless days, and doses, the sempiternal clap. In full flight over the city he took her like a ring, swung over the edge of the abyss. I studied their famous loves to reimburse myself. Once I saw the expression on his face which must have settled her fate—in mid-air swinging in an orgasm of fear and stress, but shriven too; this look had impaled her mind. Then he went, without saying goodbye, perhaps on tour, but never to return I believe; perhaps much later to dangle from some whore’s rafter or at the end of a silken parachute illustrating some mysterious law. But his undertow haunted her body for a season, celebrated in absinthe and funereal silences; many profited from this experience, many coupled through her with the wiry loins and loafing smile.

  statues on cubes of frost

  equestrian pigments of the snow

  somewhere the carrefour was crossed

  munching footsteps trail and slow

  stealthy gravels underfoot

  sectioned by the tawny bars

  street lamps fiction up the dusk

  world unending of past wars

  when will the exemplars come

  four steps up

  four steps down

  where the sewers discharge

  by the urinal’s turret.

  VI

  The dreams of Solange confused no issues, solved no problems, for on the auto-screen among our faces appeared always and most often others like Papillon the tramp, a childhood scarecrow built of thorns. He turned the passive albums of her sleep with long fingers, one of them a steel hook. Papillon represented a confederacy of buried impulses which could resurrect among the tangled sheet, a world of obscure resentments, fine and brutal as lace, the wedding-lake lying under its elaborate pastry. His ancient visions sited in that crocodile-mask fired her. And such dreams as he recounted revived among her own—Paris as some huge penis sliced up and served around a whole restaurant by masked waiters. And the lovers murmuring “I love you so much I could eat you.” She takes up knife and fork and begins to eat. The screams might awake her, bathed in sweat, to hear the real face of Marc the underwriter saying something like: “All our ills come from incautious dreaming.” There were so many people in the world, how to count them all? Perhaps causality was a way of uniting god with laughter? Solange avec son ceil luisant et avide, holding a handbag full of unposted cards.

  Add to the faces the Japanese student whose halting English was full of felicities only one could notice; as when “Lord Byron committed incense with his sister, and afterwards took refuse in the church.” He too for a season cast a spell. Then one day he recited a poem which met with her disfavour.

  She was eighteen but already god-avowed,

  She sought out the old philosopher

  Expressly to couple with him, so to be

  Bathed in the spray of his sperm

  The pheuma of his inner idea.

  Pleasure and instruction were hers,

  She corrected her course by his visions.

  But of all this a child was born,

  But in him, not in her, as a poem

  With as many legs as a spider

  In a web the size of a world.

  Then Deutre, the latest of our company

  Who believed all knowledge to be founded

  Deep in the orgasm, rising into emphasis

  As individual consciousness, the know-thyself,

  Bit by bit, with checks and halts, but always

  By successive amnesias dragged into conception,

  A school of penuma for the inward eye

  Reflecting rays which pass in deliberate tangence

  To the ordinary waking sense, focuses the heart.

  Patiently must Solange pan for male gold

  White legs spread like geometer’s compasses

  Over her native city. The milk-teeth fall at last.

  Gradually the fangs develop, breathing changes,

  And out of the tapestry of monkey grimaces

  Born of no diagrams no act of will

  But simple subservience to a natural law,

  He comes, He emerges, He is there. Who? I do not know.

  Deutre presumably in the guise of Rilke’s angel

  Or Balzac’s double mirrored androgyne.

  Deutre makes up his lips at dusk,

  His sputumn is tinged with venous blood.

  Nevertheless a purity of intent is established

  Simple as on its axis spins an earth.

  It was his pleasure to recite

  With an emphasis worthy of the Vedas

  Passages from the Analysis Situs: as

  la géometrie à n dimensions

  a un objet reel, personne n’en

  doute aujourd’hui. Les Etres

  de l’hyperespace sont susceptibles

  de définitions précises comme ceux

  de l’espace ordinaire, et si nous

  ne pouvons les répresenter nous

  pouvons les concevoir et les étudier.

  The third eye belongs to spatial consciousness

  He seems to say; there is a way of growing.

  It was he who persuaded me at Christmas to go away.

  Far southwards to submit myself to other towns

  To landscapes more infernal and less purifying.

  He persuaded Solange to lend me the money and she

  Was glad to repay what the acrobat had spent,

  But she saw no point in it, “Who can live outside

  Paris, among barbarians, and to what end?

  Besides all these places are full of bugs

  And you can see them on the cinema without moving

  For just a few francs, within reach of a café

  But if go you must I will see you off.”

  Remoter than Aldebaran, Deutre smiled.

  Only many years later was I able

  To repay him with such words as:

  “Throughout the living world as we know it

  The genetic code is based on four letters,

  The Pythagorean Quarternary, as you might say.”

  He did not even smile, for he was dying.

  Man’s achievement of a bipedal gait has freed

  His hands for tools, weapons and the embrace.

  the days will be lengthening

  into centuries, Solange

  and neither witness will be there,

  seek no comparisons among

  dolls’ houses of the rational mind

  coevals don’t compare

  a gesture broken off by dusk

  heartless as boredom is or hope

  blood seeks the soil it has to soak

  in the fulfilment of a scope

  fibres of consciousness will grow

  lavish as any coffin load

  and every touching entity

  the puritan grave will swallow up

  the silences will atrophy.

  So we came, riding through the soft lithograph

  Of Paris in the rain, the spires

  Empting their light, the mercury falling,

  Streets draining into the sewers,

  The yokel clockface of the Gare de Lyon

  On a warehouse wall the word “Imputrescible”

  Then slowly night: but suddenly

  The station was full of special trains,

  Long hospital trains with red crosses

  Drawn blinds, uniformed nurses, doctors.

  Dimly as fish in tanks moved pyjama-clad figures

  Severed from the world, one would have said

  Fresh from catastrophe, a great battlefield.

  “O well the war has come” she said with resignation.

  But it was only the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes,

  The crippled the lame the insane the halt

  All heading southwards towards the hopeless miracle.

  Each one felt himself the outside chance,

 
Thousands of sick outsiders.

  A barrel organ played a rotting waltz.

  The Government was determined to root out gambling.

  My path was not this one; but it equally needed

  A sense of goodbye. Firm handclasp of hard little paw.

  The clasp of faithful business associates, and

  “When you come back, you know where to find me.”

  four steps up

  four steps down

  the station ramp eludes

  the mangy town

  the temporary visa with

  the scarlet stamp

  flowers of soda

  shower the quays

  engines piss hot spume

  giants in labour

  drip and sweat like these

  slam the carriage door

  only this and nothing more.

  I write these lines towards dusk

  On the other side of the world,

  A country with stranger inhabitants,

  Chestnut candles, fevers, and white water.

  Such small perplexities as vex the mind,

  Solange, became for writers precious to growth,

  But the fluttering sails disarm them,

  Wet petals sticking to a sky born nude.

  The magnitudes, insights, fears and proofs

  Were your unconscious gift. They still weigh

  With the weight of Paris forever hanging

  White throat wearing icy gems,

  A parody of stars as yet undiscovered.

  Here they tell me I have come to terms.

  But supposing I had chosen to march on you

  Instead of on such a star—what then?

  Instead of this incubus of infinite duration,

  I mean to say, whose single glance

  Brings loving to its knees?

  Yes, wherever the ant-hills empty

  Swarm the fecund associations, crossing

  And recrossing the sky-pathways of sleep.

  We labour only to be relatively

  Sincere as ants perhaps are sincere.

  Yet always the absolute vision must keep

  The healthy lodestar of its stake in love.

  You’ll see somewhere always the crystal body

  Transparent, held high against the light

  Blaze like a diamond in the deep.

  How can a love of life be ever indiscreet

  For even in that far dispersing city today

  Ants must turn over in their sleep.

  Down the Styx

  Published in Two Cities. Paris. Spring 1961.

  Privately printed in an edition of 250 copies,

  with a translation into French by F.-J. Temple.

  Montpellier. 1964.

  Dear Auntie Prudence,

  I am writing to reassure you about the journey. There is no cause for alarm. It is very simply done and many facilities are available. If you were one of the quick while living everything will be all right, as in the case of Uncle Sam. They will bring you down to the water’s edge with the obol sewed into your mouth for safety, and leave you alone to wait for Charon. There will be no sign of the black barge as yet, but do not get impatient. Realize that there are not many services per day because the toll is not high enough for the old man to make a decent turnover. Spend the time in rearranging your emotional luggage and drawing on your long white gloves.

 

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