Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel
Page 47
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.