Darconville's Cat (22 page)

  It was late when Darconville woke up, his head
light, his body cold, the colder, somehow, for the March winds
blowing outside. He went to the front window, gazed at the leafless
hedges under the huge tree that still retained a few withered
leaves, and returned to his desk. He took up his pen, which seemed
to parch like a martyr in his hand. He began to write,
nevertheless, addressing the nine-and-ninety lies of the moment he
hoped to bargain with for a night of
saloperie
at the side
of the twisted strumpet, Fiction, who lasciviously rolled her eyes
at him, hised up her skirt, and beckoned him on. He had come to
detest every aspect of that chair and desk which began to assume
the shape of a scaffold and found now in the repetition of each
failure there a spirit of corruption and death which only confirmed
that they were the end of
all
endeavor, rendering effort
itself absurd. The room with its old-fashioned wallpaper seemed an
illusion of life, a shadow-scenery of disorganization. And the
skull! The skull, making sardonic commentary on his predicament,
seemed to cry, “I am still alive, you fool of folly, while you are
dead! Hoodoo! Hoodoo! The most beautiful things in life blossom and
fade, while only ugly things like ice-floes, boulders, and the
brainless ooze remain.
What
is to be preserved forever?
The attributes of immortality are cruelty, greed, and the dogs of
war—the serpent with its deathless coil round the concept of
Eden!”

  But Darconville wrote, and wrote while he doubted to
write, and as he wreaked his harms on ink’s poor loss, there was
nothing for the trouble in his head, and more, for always—scratch,
scratch—the pen went whispering across the page, “Govert! Govert!
Govert!” He wrote, erased, and wrote. A line here. A line there. He
worked for an hour and, weary, leaned back to look at the dead
syntax and désuète word-groupings. A face loomed up, grey. With
angry joy, he erased its filthy ears—and began again.

  But it was impossible: he saw only an incomplete and
unwieldy aftergrief in front of him. Sentences were pulling out of
paragraphs, phrases didn’t fit, and words got lost, slip-sliding
about in baffling arrangements all their own like those emanations
of God we are doomed now to curse, now to bless, in eternal
alternation, yet never fully to understand. The tragedy of writing
was that its hiding place was its habitat, those secret and
inaccessible desert places we seek to violate, like tombs, for
miracles we’d have but can only blaspheme in the touching. It was
hopeless to know and nowhere to be had. I have divided my life into
pages and pilcrows, thought Darconville: a squid’s brain is only
one-sixth the size of his ink sack.

  Refusing to abide the futility and fakery, the fear,
of ritually waiting to write, trying in surviving the world to
transfigure his survival, he resumed—until he thought he heard a
noise. He listened a moment, then went back to work. But again
there came a sudden knocking at the door. He went to the window,
threw it up, and called, “Isabel?” The world, he thought, is always
as near as my doorknocker is loud. “Isabel?”

  There was no answer.

  Darconville walked downstairs, wiping his eye, and
opened the door. It was iniquitous: in the doorway—
tacita
sudant praecordia culpa
—stood two pedantic ushers from the
School of Anabaptism who nightly went trudging about Quinsyburg,
house to house, looking for converts. He went to shut the door,
impossible for an interposed foot.

  “I have in my hand here,” said one of them, “a
personal love-letter from God, and—”

  Darconville almost came at him. The speaker’s face
fell, seeing danger, and became a patch of wavering greyness
against the blanket of night into which, the better to avoid this
gothic adversary and his mood of incorrigible refusal, both
suddenly fled. A pamphlet fluttered down in the vacuum of their
sudden departure—reading “Sparks from My Anvil” by W. C. Cloogy,
Evangelist.

  Shutting the bolt to, returning upstairs,
Darconville roamed the room in maniacal pursuit of what became only
confused and scrambled thoughts that left only shadow within
shadow, and, although his poor heart was beating at the time for
quite another cause, he took a long hard look, one out of which all
sentiment had fled, in the direction of his desk. No doom, thought
Darconville, is ever executed in the world, whether of annihilation
or any other pain, but the Destroying Angel is in the midst of that
visitation, and, not ignorant, not blinded to supernatural horror,
he could hear the overhead thrashing of evil Exterminans and his
bat-colored wings, on parole through the uni-verse, sickening the
air with his logocidal wails.

  A vision rose up before him. It was Cacotopia,
suddenly, all around him, a land of nightsoil swept over by
aboriginal winds and lit by a dim moronic moon under which,
songless and illiberal, the only tribe of humans left on earth sat
around shouting and mocking all that language could, a cultureless
people who, having looked back into the past, saw there was no
future. Agitprop throttled fable, libraries had been torched, and
in the rubble of what once was were enacted scenes better imagined
than described, with words, no longer lovely magical influences on
nature anymore but now bleats of perversion serving only as a means
of evil report, slander, strife, and quarrel.

  The final day of pollution had come, and everywhere
crowds of the disaffected gathered together in an earsplitting din
to smash printing-presses, incinerate books, and befoul manuscripts
in an orgy of violence, with everyone spitting, shitting, and
bouncing up and down on his heels. Impatience was upon them! Where
can we go, they screamed, never to hear or read a word again? They
clapped in chant to be led somewhere. But where, where?

  Suddenly, political sucksters and realistic
insectivores, shoving to the front, puffed up their stomachs and
blew lies out of their fingers! A parade was formed! It was now an
assembly on the march, an enthusiastic troop of dunces,
pasquil-makers, populist scribblers and lick-penny poets,
anti-intellectual hacks, modernistic rubbishmongers, anonymuncules
of prose and anacreontic water-bibbers all screaming nonce-words
and squealing filthy ditties. They shouted scurrilities! They
pronounced words backwards! They tumbled along waggling codpieces,
shaking hogs’ bladders, and bugling from the fundament! Some sang,
shrill, purposely mispronouncing words, snarping at the language to
mock it while thumping each other with huge rubber phalluses and
roaring out farts! They snapped pens in half and turned somersaults
with quills in their ears to make each other laugh, lest they speak
and then finally came to the lip of a monstrously large hole, a
crater-like opening miles wide, which, pushing and shoving, they
circled in an obscene dance while dressed in hoods with long
earpieces and shaking firebrands, clackers, and discordant bells! A
bonfire was then lit under a huge pole, and on that pole a huge
banner, to hysterical applause, was suddenly unfurled and upon it,
upsidedown, were written the words: “
In the End Was
Wordlessness
.”

  And as the night grew darker, the noise reached a
more deafening level than ever, a thunderous earth-shaking
explosion of curses, imprecations, and terricrepant screams which
worked the crowd up to such a pitch of frenzy that, suddenly,
everyone began leaping into the hole, plummeting into the yawning
darkness, flying in feet first as if crazed by oblivion itself! And
then it was over. A few harpies and birds of Psapho circled
overhead. But not a word, not a note, not a sound was ever heard on
earth again.

  There was such hopelessness suddenly felt in the
room that night that Darconville, who took anthropomorphic devils
seriously, snatched up a page in a paroxysm of utter despair and
ripped it in half; snatched up another and did the same; then with
a spasm of savage relief, he swept the entire manuscript off his
desk and without a pause violently kicked the wastebasket into the
air. It bounced like a shot across the room—”Govert!”—and rebounded
upsidedown—”Govert!”—and then rattled toward a single spot,
foolishly spinning to the sound, again, of that enigma
variation—”Govert!” And then unable to bear it anymore, Darconville
cried out like some adenoidal moron in a gulf of high winds with a
voice that collapsed all his grief at once into a blind lamentation
that could have been the question he might have asked but, for fear
of knowing, was afraid to: “
Why must one’s double always be
one’s devil
?”

  XXX

  Examination of Conscience

  From the suffering of the world you can hold back,
you have permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your
nature; but perhaps this holding back is the one suffering you
could have avoided.

        —FRANZ KAFKA

  ST. TERESA’S, the small Catholic church in
Quinsyburg, was the one place above all others where Darconville
could always find peace. The following morning found him sitting
alone in a back pew and, while regarding the crucifix hung over the
altar with its battered, twisted corpus, feeling humiliated by the
perfection of form he sought, ignoring life, in his art. Was it
possible, had he taken his own personality merely as a debt to
discharge that he might sublimate his humanity, seeking to acquire
through the vanity of high aesthetic the power of becoming that
which he felt threatened him in the beyond? It was a terrible
mistake, to be seen as truth only by the gaslamp from which Gérard
de Nerval hanged himself.

  It had been for more than half a year now that
Darconville, long beyond reconsidering the question as to whether
language as such was capable of expressing
anything
of the
meaning of life, actually wondered if he himself were. The
particular gifts which he had formerly possessed seemed to vanish
as he grew in consciousness, as though his very attempts to
understand himself, to accept himself, in relation to Isabel, had
dried up the springs of his creativity.

  Writing, he’d come to see, was the spiritual disease
of which it considered itself to be the cure. His “real” jealousy
of this person called Govert he aligned, with increasing
conviction, to the “ideal” coruscations of his writing, antipodal
and, for that, curiously related extreme points of dehumanization,
both, with each a fussiness that failed to comprehend that the most
important thing for lovers, as for writers, was to know how love,
how writing, can be kept vital, not what must exist without it. It
was almost a revelation. He had been for so long increating,
looking into his artistically nihilitic heart, or otherwise
excreating, looking beyond the stars for further promises of the
sky and demanding, with romantic arrogance, all suit him, that he
had failed to see just what was in front of him—stretched out, as
he was, in a hopeless parody of Vitruvian man, his arms unable to
close in anything like an embrace. Thaïes had fallen into a well
while gazing at the heavens, as Pliny had, into a volcano, while
searching the fires. Was there a lesson here?

  There was.

  It wasn’t that Darconville perceived the world and
its meaning differently—he had, in fact, found
more
meaning—but he could no longer put that meaning into words, nor
could he find reason to. The embellishments, the slippered
voluptions of his prose? It was praying into a mirror, he saw, in
which, reflecting only what was outside it, could be found only the
mock and pockless life within the symmetry of its frame. The mirror
reversed nature! He knew now why he couldn’t write, for art, like
jealousy—living upon what they must deny—considered a sphere of
facts altogether distinct from a sphere of values. Darconville
looked long at the terrible figure of Christ. Perfection of form,
unpronounceable artifice was, he realized, insufficient, and
concepts and images without any genuine relation to existence could
never any longer for him convey what was most important in life.
The Word was made
flesh
! And yet what had he made it?

  Darconville considered his idolatry: the imagination
peopling a vain theogony with creatures it is satisfied to stand
back and watch bombinate in the vacuum of art. And so was it with
jealousy. A photograph hadn’t come alive, a fancy had. The artist,
rarely emerging from himself, so deceives—a man who tries to bribe
God with examples of what he means by that deception, offering to a
coterie world what he has fashioned by staring at the universe
through an eyecard and arranged in fussy selection of what life
offers to avoid: an agglomeration of methodically ordered
masterproductions in paint and plaster, marble and music, sheetpads
and stagecraft which assume the bounds of the conceivable to be the
limits of the actual. The more orderly the art, thought
Darconville, the more dishonest. The more methodic? Then did it
render less the complexities that hide in the causes of man, his
love, his astonishment, the stunning shocks which await him in the
savage forest of equivocations and inscrutabilities. The very
nature of art—failures by which man sought to memorize his
experience—spiritually underdeveloped the very disciples who most
needed to know what it wasn’t, could not be, able to do. The symbol
of art is the tombstone, thought Darconville, an obelisk sticking
up out of the earth with the inscription, “I count!”

  It was blasphemy, concluded Darconville, who’d long
been a student of meanings that stole out in subtle replies, a
sacrilege to bang gold, hammer silverswirls, and fashion anti-vital
faces with blank and pitiless eyes squinting out cold and
one-dimensional from niches cozily recessed from the flux of the
world where suffering, if inevitable, at least proved life real.
The aesthetic mode, he saw, was that of anti-renunciation! And even
as he sat there under that crucifix, before those flickering
candles, in that silence, Darconville fully assumed this mandate,
that the man who entered a church to get out of the heat or cold
lived closer to the spirit of God than he who came there for
reasons aesthetic. Darconville prayed. Shall I, he wondered, shall
I become some ikonodule, tall and white as a paschal candle, its
aesthetic feet folded in prayer? A simulacrum of Mme. de Maupin,
that he-she-or-it draped in jumbles of jewels and flowrets,
skirting out of the world and begging entrance of the doorman of
the ideal? One of those anti-social geniuses of refusal, pteriopes
wrapped in procinian cloaks, or pale spectres who, with a delicate
extremity of leg put forward and wrists turned after the manner of
Parmigianino, floods the world with perfect tears and sighs with
pampered weariness, “O come to me, Death! Come, lovely wanton
death, to me!”?