“Copy it in your Blue Jay,” said Moise.
Since I was no more favorably impressed by the poem than I had been by its author, I was reluctant to have it occupy space in my last Blue Jay, but Moise had not spoken a request but a command.
Being her guest, an inmate of her world, I felt that I must comply and so I copied it out in small but legible script in the notebook: here it is where it doesn’t belong at all, in my opinion.
I have a vast traumatic eye
set in my forehead center
that tortures to its own design
all images that enter.
Conceiving menace in the green
beneficence of warmth and light
it cries alarm into the heart
and moves the hand to strike.
By fall of night all who were near
are put to flight or slain: the eye,
dilated still with fear,
commands an empty plain.
Then slowly as the golden horns
sound further in dispersion,
inward does the Cyclops eye
revolve on dull aversion,
Inward where the heart stripped bare
of enemy and lover
returns a burning, foxlike stare
till darkness films it over.
“Well?” Moise asked, apparently wanting my opinion of it.
“I don’t see the flush of immortality on this verse,” I said with a shrug.
“Be that as it may, who is he?”
“A stranger, an intruder, who was with me a while last night.”
“Tell me more about him.”
“There’s nothing more worth telling except that he tried to induce me to set out with him on foreign travels.”
“Which invitation you thought you declined but which you really accepted.”
“That makes no sense since I not only declined but left him alone at BON AMI where he wrote out this verse.”
“Your indifference is surprising since the man is yourself grown old!”
“Oh, make sense, Moise.”
“What the fuck do you think I’ve been making, since I have confessed to you things that make the most terrible sense imaginable in this world since you returned to it.”
“And I’ve recorded it faithfully in the—my last Blue Jay.”
“Sometimes you try me past endurance with your pencil and notebook. I am a private person. You wouldn’t let me be still. You insisted I talk, and I did, to satisfy you. And do you think it’s been easy for me to speak of my mother and the late Moppet as scavenger crones? Did you think I wished it recorded, God knows with what distortion, and what vulgarity, for submission to those indifferent or malignant—no, you see, you’ve worked me into a frenzy when I needed to be preparing quietly for—”
“Moise, don’t say what for.”
“For posterity in your Blue Jay, is that what you fondly imagined?”
She sprang up, trembling, and cried out, “Scriveners fuck off. The whole pack of you are abominations and monsters of ego with a single exception.”
She didn’t name the exception but I suppose it was the writer Jane Bowles, married to one named Paul, for the collected works of Miss Bowles are the only piece of fiction that she keeps in the built-in cabinet for her found objects and so forth.
“Collected and so she died to satisfy the collectors, not knowing, not suspecting that in her anguish she had torn truth from the world.”
She fell back onto the bed but not into silence, as I would now have preferred.
“And you,” she went on, “about this poet you encountered last night.”
“He was more of a has-been playwright attempting a comeback at the Truck and Warehouse.”
“Avoid him, he’s not for you. His loneliness makes him a monster that would destroy you as surely as your indifference would destroy him.”
“Obviously I’m not pursuing him like a coon-dog chasing down the coonskins that this old derelict was wrapped in.”
“Yes, suitably clothed in the pelts of beasts on the run. There’s something about the description that makes me think I might know him.”
“He said he had been here once and he inquired of your health.”
“Better than his, both in body and mind, that little I can assure him. He excels only in recognition of himself as demonstrated in this otherwise mediocre piece of verse, written in the future handwriting of you.”
At this point she crouched against the wall as if for protection and growled like a beast that is ambushed by a pack of hunters.
“Monsters of loneliness receive and offer no mercy. They go in terrible ways, like heretics of the Spanish Inquisition, and take with them whoever they’ve caught hold of. They are not saints but only saints can endure them. You say he proposed something to you?”
“Yes, he proposed foreign travel with him twice and was twice rejected.”
“You’ve had a narrow escape. What could be worse than living with your future?”
“I am not in the theater, Moise, I’m sure you know that.”
“I would say you are hell-bent in that direction, God help you, love. What has happened to his former companions?”
Then I told her about the lady who grinned like a pirate but was a great lady and that she had now succumbed to cirrhosis and emphysema with complications.
“If you’ve put that in a Blue Jay, scratch it out. The monster has confessed murder along with love, tear it or scratch it out quickly, such things should not be recorded, especially when they exist in your own future.”
“Oh, Moise, when I came here I expected you to say such wise and beautiful things but instead you are filling my last Blue Jay with delirium and folly.”
“You asked me to speak, I am speaking, and if it’s not what you wanted, fuck what you wanted, all I can give you is temporary refuge from the world of reason to which you’ll return with your love number three, whose footsteps I almost hear approaching at this moment.”
Her silence shuddered the room of her world for a moment.
“Well?”
I retreated from the challenge in that word to the frost-sheathed window, now delicately prismatic with the candle’s glow. It usually has a pacifying effect, the light of a candle, it is a good light to restore things shattered such as silence when ugly things have been spoken, it’s a beautiful light by which to make love till you blow it out for sleep.
I would like to have retreated further into the magic world of candlelight refracted by glass between it and deepening winter dusk: a good light to die by.
But Moise repeated the challenge of “Well?”
I turned from the window as if forcibly turned. I saw that her head also turned on her long, ageless throat. Her pallor was gone, her eyes were incandescent. I knew that now she was going to speak in that tongue of angels, that glorious, heightened speech for which the Blue Jay is kept here.
“Here!” She hurled the notebook at me, then pencil, and I caught them both as skillfully as an infielder for the Mets: fortunate, since she had risen and stalked to the center of the room as if to a podium with banners behind it.
“Diminished space with increase of occupants! Incontinent spawning of more and more bellies to feed with continually less, shrinkage of rivers and seas, polluted, sea ferns, amoebic life dying, the huge submarine disaster of oxygen-maker the plankton perishing in fouled oceans. And hands of infants suckling will turn to claws at the dry breasts of their mothers, no cross on the door to spare from death by famine. And still the great churches called faiths approve no limit of increase, twist the cross to a cabalistic emblem like the swastika, east, west, in all lands. Nothing is sanctioned but the sanctity of the mercifully unborn to enter the world of reason where to live is to clutch and claw for a while and to die with hands empty as hearts. Oh, withering world, I cannot push thee far enough away from me!”
(She changed her position slightly, the movement stylized as a gesture of Martha Graham. Her right hand to
uched her groin which had rejected its life-bearing power, a thing she condemned as malign, and so had a flower’s first beauty: and with the other hand she made a delicate motion like that of a juggler in space, a gesture of perilous balance without a sense of peril.)
“I know that a few days ago a beautiful blond acrobat executed a dance step on a wire which he’d illegally stretched between the two tallest buildings of the Borough Manhattan, performed a metaphor there when he danced his defiance of death, gracefully, as if to praise it, between those two tallest towers called the Trade Mart Towers, or World Trade something, over the death of the furious borough where to breathe is to wither and blacken the lungs slowly. Oh, he was acclaimed for it, but with no understanding of what it expressed which is this.”
(Balancing hand now joining the other to cup her vaginal lips.)
“To give death a dare is better than to fertilize the seeds of the famished future’s dry-sucking billions. And meanwhile, isn’t it true that an international peace corps translates between warring nations and races nothing but what but nothing, while the big mouths blah-blah, this or that blah-blah, written for them to read, memorial pens distributed whenever the blah-blah is signed, oh, everything’s said and is signed but a covenant for the only possible things, sucking the seed off or licensing the anus as preferable entrance, with sometimes, of course, a bit of—”
(She turned to her bed, speech over, with an exhausted smile, that of a devout believer, dying, when the sacrament’s done.)
“—a bit of—petroleum—jelly. . . .”
She sat down on the bed.
“Have I been speaking?”
“Yes, quite a lot, Moise.”
“What did I say, child?”
“I can’t tell you now but I will play it back later from the Blue Jay.”
“There’s something a little meretricious about you, isn’t there, dear?”
(This time she said it no more unkindly than you’d remark to a friend that he seemed to be catching a cold.)
A slight pause then, and then, very faintly and sadly, she sang a paraphrase of an old song, giving it dreadful words. There’ll be a hot time in Lakehurst, New Jersey, when the Hindenburg lands tonight. . . .
“Moise, come to the window and look at the candleglow on the frost, it’s a metaphor, too.”
Her reply was a choking sound. I whirled to face her and saw that now she had gone into a seizure. I snatched up the wooden spatula to depress her tongue. Her eyes circled like gray pinwheels for a few moments: then rose halfway under her upper eyelids as her twitching and salivating lips uttered an unconscious and long-drawn “Ahhh,” and I knew then that she’d gone into sleep for a while. I touched her small, lovely breast to make sure that it was moving with breath. Then I used the interlude of her slumber to set things straight in the Blue Jay.
About Moise’s tirade, I had mixed feelings. I didn’t doubt it was meant, since followed by the seizure and her breaths of exhaustion, but still it struck me somewhat as a theater curtain does after a climactic explosion of speeches. Spurious, no, but a thing that is set and built up to.
I was writing it down with all reasonable accuracy when she came out of her sleep and in a faint and faraway voice said to me, “Well, what happened, did I blow it?”
“Well, frankly”
“What?”
“If you mean your cool, I would say yes.”
“Well, I feel much better after my”
“Hour of?”
“Oblivion to Mother, Moppet, and all scavenger crones, oh, if only I had equipment for painting. The pigments and the canvas are my milieu, not the words and the impossible telling of things. You know, if blood weren’t red and my palette cool color, I’d cut your throat and finger-paint with your blood on the walls of the room.”
“Moise, you are a savage.”
“So are you and all the honest remaining”
“Nothing will be published and nothing will be painted anymore now in the future.”
“Right as rain in dry country.”
“Let’s face it frontally, not with”
“Prevaricating backsides. Agreed, d’accord, but—”
Whatever qualification she was about to mention was interrupted by a loud thump outside the door on Bleecker. She seemed not to hear it. . . . However, I did, clearly, and had the courage to get up and run down the long, long, shuddering corridor to . . .
The thumping sound at the door was that of an act of divine providence occurring in the form of a great package delivered outside Moise’s door, and it was an act so divinely providential that I think it justifies my frequent allusions to God in the course of this writing and even concluding this sentence with that debased form of punctuation the exclamation point, but having referred to that mark I can spare myself the use of it.
Of course I don’t mean to confuse you. The act of divine providence, the delivery at the door of Moise, was a collaborative act, or actions, by the living Actress Invicta and Tony Smith of Hunter and South Orange with possibly Celebrity Service involved as
Intermediary or entrepreneur, you name it, but anyway the Actress Invicta has been phenomenally quick in delivering the appeal to the Smiths in South Orange, considering her whirlwind involvement in the social life of upper-class Manhattan and her emotional involvement in tracking down Big Lot.
Implements of painting have been delivered by the discreetly hastily departing deliverer of them, no running footsteps heard or motor starting. There is a carefully chosen number of tubes of paint, brushes for bold strokes and for delicate touches and various sizes of stretched canvas, a tube of Perma-Gel, large bottles of linseed and turp, a casserole dish of shrimp curry, and along with all this a note in an irregular hand to the effect that when stores are opened, a supply of tinned goods will be ordered for deposit at Moise’s door each Monday, until she is prepared to submit herself to the strain of a small exhibition at Hunter with guests of discriminate selection.
It was evident that the Actress Invicta had mentioned the hissing incident of Skates, there was a postscript that read, “If Skates should crash the exhibit, the tongue with which she hisses will be torn out with hot pincers.”
It was almost immediately after this event that Moise had another seizure and I depressed her tongue again with the dingy wooden spatula by the bed.
She came out of it with a sigh and a smile and one of those oracular or visionary utterances for whose recording I had kept a Blue Jay here.
“I am deeply saddened by the necessity of declining their invitation to join the Symbionese Liberation Army as their Field Marshal’s mate. Please contact them for me and explain that the flattering offer has arrived a day late but that I hope that God and time will permit me to use new pigments and brushes from South Orange, New Jersey, to attempt a canvas which they can use as an anarchistic emblem, provided my inescapably oblique style of work is not insufficiently forceful. Oh, but say I must wait till I have forgotten their emblem of serpents, having lately”
Her breath expired at this point but the reference to serpents and to lately made me aware that, after all, she had not been oblivious to Skates’s performance the evening before.
As for her knowing of the Symbionese Liberation Army and its Field Marshal, all I can say is that madness is visionary, since she no longer permits any kind or article of mass media to come into her room.
Just now she has interrupted this entry into the Blue Jay by approaching me on her bare knees with a damp rag and has addressed me as “mon petit capitain” (presumably of the S.L.A.) and has begun to bathe my bare feet in warm water. And now she is bending to dry them with her long hair let down.
I had to take a firm hand.
“Stop this foolishness, dear, and get to work on your anarchistic banner.”
“Yes, mon petit capitain,” she whispered.
I helped her to her feet and then she made a gesture toward a canvas on an easel and, to my astonishment, there was the beginning of her work on a desig
n for the emblem to replace the snakes, in her “oblique” style but with touches of orange and pink and red.
It had already the oblique suggestion of an artist committed to a spirit of revolution but waiting for God and time.
I am back into the Blue Jay but aware that Moise has admitted the pair of men with the box cameras to the room and in their dark and beautifully tailored mohairs they are moving about to photograph her new canvas in its initial stage. The room is full of faint whispers and equally faint clickings and outside is also a faint sound of Jack Frost dissolving his etching on the window through which comes the faintness of late winter afternoon light.
A glimmer of light refracted from the remarkably large crystal lens of a box camera has made me lift my eyes, and now once again I have to record a bizarre distraction and one of such an agreeable nature that I suspect that I will not continue this day’s work much longer.
When I looked up I observed that the younger of the two men with the fantastic box cameras was looking directly at me, his eyes containing a very blue and open declaration of love. Naturally I returned it, it would have been completely impossible not to. But he is apparently shy and the instant that I answered his look of love with my own he turned his back to me and I observed a very interesting thing. He had removed his jacket and I observed that his shoulders are twice the breadth of his hips and that the silky dark mohair of his trouser-legs adheres to his upper thighs as closely as paint to canvas and I also observed that his hair is not prematurely white but a very pale natural gold.
It will soon be dark in the room and I wonder if the boldness that makes my heart slap a beat will somehow manage to exorcise his timidity, his Northern but elegant restraint, and whether or not in answer to that question, to me a question of almost suffocating excitement, three more faint sounds in close but not hurried succession are heard in the world of Moise: the click of a box with a square crystal eye, a click of frost on the window, and from Moise a whisper.
Moise and the World of Reason Page 15