Darconville's Cat (49 page)

  LI

  
Conspectus Temporum
; or

  Short Excerpts from a London Diary

  All places are distant from heaven alike.

        —ROBERT BURTON,
Anatomy of Melancholy

  
September 5th
. Blessed be God, near the end
of this year, I am in very good stealth, without any sense of my
old pain, but upon feeling sold. I live in hack’s yard, having my
strife, and servant, Disdain, and no other family than us
three.

  
6th
. When did we three meet before?

  That’s a fair question. It was neither before nor
after the lost year in Quinsyburg—the Land of Ymagier, beyond the
regions of who did it and why. Y: the forked path of Pythagoras.
Crossroads. Free choice. Unity and division. Wasn’t he, by the way,
the philosopher who put to school the idea that the opposition of
the definite and the indefinite, working in concert, creates the
world? (Check on this.)

  
10th
. I saw that girl again on the
stairwell; she smiled. What a fund of galleries, playhouses,
museums. London! Call it Pariniban or Droiland, I am still
Darconville.

  
N.B
. Buy pens, lightbulbs, wine.

  
11th
. This morning I went to Mass in the
chapel-of-ease at St. Ethelreda’s in Ely Place, Holborn, and made
thanksgiving I’d not have to teach for a while. Glasses would just
be starting.

  
12th
. Of what day is this the anniversary?
(Dissembler!) P.S. But let it be. A Friday still buries a Thursday,
a quart still drowns a tierce, and a quint a quart. Every new year
executes the privileges of the old. I was never engaged to her,
anyway. She was perfectly free.

  I’ve decided to write both morning and
afternoon.

  
14th
. I will finish
Rumpopulorum
this year or sink into hell like a sheet-anchor. Q. Can you? A. I
can. The cultivated life existed first; uncultivated life came
afterwards, with the blight of the serpent, Satan. So it is a
consolation to have to get
back
to vision, not create it
anew. (I like your mode, Mr. Bulstrode: when the mind is a hall in
which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is somehow always
that of someone else. Diaries diarticulate. The parrot’s amazed
you
can talk. Eurycles, the Athenian soothsayer, throwing
his voice, placed many a jest on another’s lips. The paradoxical
phenomenon of ventriloquist and dummy who, speaking simultaneously,
never interrupt, always agree. The death of one is that of the
other. Have I stumbled upon a parable of love?)

  Ah, but now see the fitful subjects this anti-self
can raise!

  
15th
. I picked up my cat from quarantine at
Heathrow this afternoon. That I brought him along, presently
disporting with his shadow, is a constant delight.

        Accept my gentle
visionary, Spellvexit,

        Sublimely
fanciful & kindly mild;

        Accept, and
fondly keep for Friendship’s sake,

        This favored
vision, my poetic Child!

  
16th
. Wrote.

  
17th
. I met her again, holding the door for
her. Viking hair, blue eyes, features carved out of the cliffs of
Sarjektåcko. Must I remind myself not to get involved? The half,
said Hesiod, is fuller than the whole. There is a perhaps cosmic
strength in this otherwise vain truth: to have none is closer to
having all than having one. Everything, perhaps,
is
the
only thing. Late have I learned that. And there’s enough of
distraction in this city to help me forget. (Marvelous, when you
read back your own diary it gives an advice of its own! )

  The trees are turning. Mass at Farm St.

  
18th
. My room, shaped like the move of a
chessknight, is situated in Pont St. at the very top of an old
building built around 1702, just about the time William of Orange
pipped. From my single window I can see chimneys, the wimble of a
church steeple, and a big maple tree —why, I wonder, are those on
the south side always the first to shed? —reminding me daily of the
necessity of both shade and paper, the objective-correlative wants
of a writer.

  Wrote poorly, however, all day.

  
19th
. The same. Resignation, resignation;
it will come.
Vulneratus non victus
. The d’Arconvilles are
Venetians, and do Venetians give up? No, he who so shall, so shall
he who.

  But bored, I invented a new kind of riddle. A
Dutchman had three sons. The first, named Sllaf, is a
mountain-climber; the second, Snrub, is a firefighter. The third
became a sailor. What was his name?

  
21st
. Postcard from Thelma Trappe. (No,
dear Miss Trappe, I have never heard of the English herb
“death-come-quickly,” and I suspect
you
shouldn’t have
either. )

  
24th
. The sky is leaden. Went to Mass: the
Feast of St. Gregory, whom I pictured kneeling by candlelight in a
cold medieval tower praying lauds. At the Gloria I felt such a new
sense of resolve I almost wept for joy and thought of the Unes: “I
Hafe set my hert so hye/Me likyt no love that lowere ys.” They came
to me in a more mystical than antihuman sense, as only, of
course—except for misinformed worldlings and Wyclifficals—they
should. It is not enough to quit sin, we must attain virtue.

  But, O, better and better! I will hate no one. There
will be forgetting, there must be forgiving. (Why, however, must
these always go together?) Forgive me, Frater Clement. I remember
you for what I should have not forgotten.

  
27th
. Wrote poorly. When one is tired,
one’s sentences are always the first to suffer. Seven pages of
bumph for one paragraph and a polysyllable. “Will I have to use a
dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,”
says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.”
Witty. But cruel. We are all too cruel.

  Long letter to Dodypol. Just gone twelve. And so to
bed.

  
30th
. My lungs hurt. Smoking. And the
weather is up. I chose England arbitrarily, would have chosen
Venice were I a freeholder—cold, but better air—and yet, the
courts, the courts! Slower than Quin-syburg justice. And this sad,
old month.

  
October 1st
. The girl’s name is Svarta
Furstinna, a Swede, and she lives across the hall. She looks like
the beautiful girl Ronsard once saw in the Château of Blois,
bending over her lute and singing the branle de Bourgogne.
Spellvexit himself was flirting. Shall I ask her over for a glass
of wine?

  Later: the courage necessary for the execution
killed the sentiment. Wrote all night, so write this another
day.

  
3rd
. Spent the day in the Victoria and
Albert Museum reading room, farming through the stacks for books on
angelology. Darconville Pseudangelos, wanting to be one? I checked,
for the record, for
The Shakeing of the Sheets
; not a
copy. I looked, however, into the Pythagoras question; to sum up:
the opposition of the limiting (odd and perfect) and the limited
(even and imperfect) organizes the world. The categories one,
right, male, at rest, straight, light, good, and square belong to
the sphere of the former; to the sphere of the even and imperfect
belong the opposites: many, left, female, moving, bent, darkness,
bad, oblong. The science of cutting pies! Art shouldn’t classify,
but declassify. A misogynist’s ontology. Boring. Meditabund.

  The idea that limitation poses a definiteness,
nevertheless, warrants further study. I’ve survived for that,
perhaps, because to know the worst is still to know what, having
never known, is worse than worst by far—indeed, to know the worst
is to know you’ll never know the worst again. When you know the
worst, in short, you don’t. So truth is then fortified by
wrongs?

  
N.B
. I love the confusion of trichotomies.
They turn me into enough of a fool to confirm by embarrassment the
rejection in which she left nothing otherwise to understand.
Furthermore, I think I’m insane.

  
4th
. The imagination consumes some part of
reality. That would be the essential salvation of writing, wouldn’t
it? Bark is cinnamon: therapy.

  
5th
. Today, I bought two tickets to the
opera. Went across the hall and redeemed the time. Wrote until
late:
nulla dies sine linea. (
Cello-tape that to the
wall!)

  
6th
. “Who can’t say, I may be some part of
your destiny?” Thus pretty Svarta, at one point in a general
discussion of lost love over a post-and-rail tea in a tiny cellar
of a Beauchamp Place restaurant. I’d sketched, prompted to it, an
abstract of the past year, following of course the parliamentary
custom of avoiding reference to any particular member by name. But
the sublime intoxication of recovered divinity was in the
conversation only; women can be too wonderful in their mystery to
need to know as individuals. I want nothing to
matter
anymore, not even enjoyment, the mystical truth near but not next
to the heresy that everything human in us is an obstacle in the way
of holiness. Henceforth, in any case, like the Stuarts I will
govern without a Parliament. (“In an uneven number heaven
delights.”
Eclogue
VIII.75)

  We walked through Kensington Gardens, saw the statue
of Peter Pan, then home.

  
7th
. Wrote.

  
8th
. We attended a performance of
The
Flying Dutchman
at Sadler’s Wells. Catharsis, I suppose. I
wonder, is that grizzled Ahasuerus of the sea correct in thinking,
since Senta is recreant to her former lover, that she’ll be so to
him? If so, death must be exacted to prove faithfulness unto death.
Novel, isn’t it? “Antilogy; or How I Relinquished What I Loved
Because I Loved So Much.” (A cutisbound edition, of course.)

        Whoso would
love

        Must make
headway

        On a ship ever
windward

        Of Table
Bay.

  God bless us out of it! Excessive joy, I’ve read,
has killed men. I kissed Svarta goodnight.

  
9th
. Wrote.

  
10th
. The leaden sky puts its very own
weather into my sentences: “With the sun a reminding touch upon
their frozen hair the winged phagones of evil flashed out of Heaven
into the fumerole of empty space, screaming, ‘
No, no! Not now!
Not yet
!’ “

  Not too bad. Not too good.

  
11th
. Wrote. The book looms up. Spellvexit
asleep by the shilling heater all day. Rain for four straight
days.

  
12th
. Spirit of the Pities! I woke tonight
in the middle of a frightful nightmare, a profane vision with a
girl, outbawling with
joy
, being dragged by her long hair
to a high wall as a sacrifice where perched the goat god, Pan,
whose pointed ears wagged lasciviously in anticipation of—Drank
until morning. Wine is poison to hemlock.

  The question is, has part of me stayed behind to
retrace what I thought I should otherwise have missed? Puritanical!
Learning may be the enemy of thinking, and thinking, of learning. I
have never known which I wanted and so am left with oneirotic
circuses: fiction —the other barber in the mirror, shaving the
other you.

  
Mem
. Never drink in afternoon.

  
14th
. Feel grey as a badger. Haven’t been
out of bed for two days. It’s been raining longer than Louis XIV.
Cramps from overdepres-sants of smoke, drink, malneirophrenia. I’ve
begun to lose the habit of attention that is strong and extreme
because I can think only of things, God forgive me, I hold in
contempt. The thing that will fail me first when I get old will be
my patience, a malefaction of Verrine, one of the Thrones.

  I must up burtons and break out.

  
15th
. Worse, pre-eminently so. And so
slept.

  
16th
.
Dies notandus
. This morning
I found several letters for me down in the foyer, one—how I, an
inventory of every anxiety, approached that little thing—a
cablegram from Fawx’s Mt., postmarked, to be Petrarchally exact,
October 12 and reading: “I love you.”

  I will not drag Pyrrho from Elis to figure on this
page. Things belong to the past quite quickly, that’s all.
(Ridiculous. The present, the past, the future are happening at
once! ) But I am thinking: to know the truth one must start by not
believing in anything. I am thinking: and so I sit here, doubting
everything. I am thinking: I think something, and then I think, ‘I
doubt that,’ and so it is false. I am thinking: that means I am
sitting here and thinking ‘I don’t think I am doubting everything,’
meaning there is something I don’t doubt. O God, don’t disappoint
me! Don’t stop time! O angels, clap your wings upon the skies, and
give this virgin crystal plaudities!
I am loved
!

  
17th
. How decisions aren’t decisions at
all! How we believe what we don’t quite realize! I’ve spent the day
shaking ink over a dozen unposted letters, read all, liked some,
mailed none. Transatlantic phone calls from the Cadogan Hotel
(Charlottesville number: no longer in service; Fawx’s Mt. number:
no one at home), but the place triggers the mind to create the
place. Sent telegram from Knightsbridge, repeating hers to the
word. Only abide, rich Penelope!

  Noctuarial entry: I can’t eat for happiness. I can’t
write. I am the masked Touareg, brigand from the desert; the Bishop
of Fun, in wonder of tabret and chimer of solisequious gold; Zeus
with effulgent forehead and attributes. The sparkle in the tail of
my eye could light up the world!