Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (15 page)

And so bruised was I in my humilities, that I made no effort to get up. Instead, I did what any One wounded in his veils does. I lay there dreaming, in repair. And how to reveal to you, the all too solid stuffs of these laydreams, how to confess the obscene shapes of those private indulgences on which We fatten ourselves in our lowest moments!—I could not hope to open these to you, had I not recently begun to put aside our shames in exchange for yours. Even so, if there were any way to get around it, or even through—but no. You must have revealed to you what really lies at the dark root of all Our wontedly pure ovality. Know therefore, that we are not allowed to … that it is a sin to conceive of it … that—
we do not know what we are like inside.
That it is a portal sin even to enter there in the slightest, imaginatively. And that round the clock, we never stop doing it.

There. It follows that your and our spiritual paths do indeed resemble, diverging only in their blames. Things being open to dissection here, you are given to flogging yourselves for not being more ethereal, while our phantasmagoria aspire ever toward the solid, and in such seductively illegal shapes as are an everyday business with you. But while your and our emphases differ, our habits are curiously mutual. Oddly enough, you suffer modesty over certain of your appendages and orifices, of which everybody knows perfectly well. We save our blushes for our imaginary organs, the mere knowledge of the possession of which would be our miracle.

Not that we don’t have our mystic seekers after the unknowable—which, considering the difficulties of investigating creatures so incorporeal and instantaneous, it almost certainly is—at least on home ground. Nevertheless, this doesn’t prevent the paths around the crater from being crammed night and day with obscurantists staring into the opposing lava streams which respectively shape our fresh citizens and replace our stale ones, crowded there supposedly in honor of such a perfect scheme of things, but everyone knows what they’re looking for; it’s a civic scandal. Sooner, alas, can You find your inner souls by looking for them, than we our inner shapes. So, however, you and Ours have continued to do for millennia, when all the time they had better have looked at each Other.

Meanwhile, myths, legends and dreams all to the good of course, but we have our more pedestrian systems of amusement, a sub rosa traffic of risks and frolic where we disport ourselves with the shadier side of ourselves—and very inventively so, considering the flimsy we have to work with. Indeed it is here that our most exquisite caste distinctions are formed. For, not having any ideas of number in accumulation such as you, all those superiorities which you can attach to piles of gold or aggregations of power, we can ascribe only to lineage, just as you can of course in addition, but in a most contrary focus. For where you can look gloriously back to what you and Yours have been, we base all our bloodlines on our fleshly future.

And because ours are in the realms of the unknown, the categories are all the more absolute. Down at the bottom are those whose peep-show, postcard lusts are of the lazier, most unenlightened sort, running mostly to generalized visions of the interiors of Ones, jokes about such primitive apparatuses as the fluoroscopes, X rays, et cetera used by our ancestors before we became Ones of all the same ancestry. This class of Ones is given to gibes on the absence of body openings—which japes run almost parallel to yours on the presence of them. Next above is that largest cult whose rather more perfervid visions cluster around one or other of your main organs, and here too in a certain hierarchy, those addicted to lung fantasy being rather more elegant than those of the liver, but neither having the social advantages of those whose frenzies and perturbations liberate themselves around the idea of a heart. Esoteric cults, or some minor organ, or exotic or newly discovered conception of one, engage some; hangouts for these, being frowned upon as bohemia, are everywhere. There are even those introverts who adhere to the legal image and honestly worship what all of us are under guard to say we do—the empty future of Us as we Are. And of course a few neuters whose imaginative heat runs so low that they never get to do any leaning at all. For, as must be admitted, no matter how high a One’s inner fantasy places him socially, he is actually as limited as the lowest when he gets down to celebrating it. For whatever our fleshly futures may be, or how hot our desires for them, all the practice of our concupiscence cannot exceed the cylindrical coolth of our shape. No bulges defame our pure elliptic curve, no indentations. We do what we can, then—we lean.

And as with most widely practiced venial sins, Leaning has its recognizable variations; indeed it is the only preoccupation where a One may run a little wild among the various. There is much fashion and preference of place, those who rate the pastoral over the urban, et cetera, et cetera ad infinitum. Leaning in crowds is least sinful, and evening occasions of it the most common, from intimate soirees to those huge quasi-public affairs, in places of extravagant decor, which are the ultimate of the vulgar. Leaning by Ones, that is, by a One and a One, is a more serious offense, since it affords the most multiple sensation, having in addition to the preponderantly social pleasure above, all the extra delicacies of more refined angles of inclination, at what point one turns off one’s electrical field, and at what stage one does actually permit—touch. And in what arc of oneself one submits to it, until that final, oblivious moment, achieved only by the most devoted or the more agile, when One and One ellipses manage to touch arcs from top to low in such rapid succession and so simultaneously rocking that their continuous curves seem for one moment of ambiguity—a single line.

And having already the reverse advantage of caste, we have also these possibilities of misalliance and miscegenation which make Our world a livelier place to live in and gossip about—such as the lung-dreamer’s taste for the postcard type, or the actual sight of some great, fair heart-One going off into the bush with some dark little exoticker. For, due to our transparency and sameness, the nature of our dream organs is perceptibly evident in the complexions, and most of us can spell these out pretty well. We feel that this is the grace always granted on the other side of sinfulness. For, even among Us, there has to be some way to
tell.

And finally, there is one more possibility—certainly by now you will have thought of it? Since it vitally concerns me, I shall approach it gradually, as I am able. For, should you ever come to us, you will see well enough how, from one world to another, these modesties cling. Wait, for instance, until the first time you have to turn off your electrical field and just stand there. Whereas I am utterly hardened to that, and—alas for it, in my world—to much more. But let me now go back to the spectacle of me lying there prone in that glass house in Bucks, hoping that as I talk, what I am hinting at will steal over you, in mutual embarrassment. Let me tell you the nature—and icon—of my dream.

Well, I was lying there, trying out my humilities, such a whole arpeggio of aches that there was no use trying to poultice them up one at a time. What was needed was a whole lovely web of dream, and I knew well enough where to find it, having done so more often than I care to say. Finally, I gave in. I began, in the usual way, the usual interior imaginings. When I tell you that I had no allegiance to one single organ, you may guess that there was indeed something very wrong with me. For a while, as preamble, I did entertain myself with visions of myself with heart, myself with lungs, et cetera, all separately. But very quickly I advanced—and here began the real dreaming—to a vision of such a being as … Such a Being … as might have, inside itself, such organs … and in such an intertwined congress of processes
inter-
and infra-parietal, peritoneal, pericardial and perichondrial … such a being as in fact
might have them all.
So far had I come then in dreaming, that one would have thought this sufficient of evil. But—no. Are you beginning to suspect? I fear you may be, but in the wrong direction.

You are thinking perhaps, that in all the categories I haven’t mentioned your reproductive ones? True, but not because we don’t know of them. We do envision these, but as the most vestigial of organs, in no way—as the other organs might still be—pertinent to our way of life. And though even these poor
primitifs
have their devotees, the latter Ones have no status among us and are indeed considered—Well, they are called—silly. To be a One of these worshippers is scarcely to be venial, merely ridiculous.

Or have you guessed that I wasn’t quite truthful when I said that we never lie down? Well, I wasn’t, but only out of a decent sense of reserve toward those of our old Ones who manage to do so before we can push them back into the lava stream of Return. The majority of these do it because they can’t help themselves. Now and then we have a few rakes who prate of
leaning
in that position, but this is mere senility, and is quickly taken care of. The overwhelming majority of us elect to elide permanently before we reach either of these pitiable states. Once an Ellipse is down, it’s Out.

And now … I must. Now, since our flesh is at least cognate, brood with me, tremble over the abyss of such a One as I. Even to imagine such a supremely equipped being was not enough for me, a being having within it a pleiades and more of organs at their music, or, if you prefer—and as we were reared to rate it in comparison with our veils within veils—such a monster of the lowest obscenities of matter. No, I had to be One to crawl out on the farthest cliff of the imagination; I had had the arrogance to dream—So. Ah? Yes. I had become a One who could in fancy assault the holiest—our pure Outline. At night, such an army of incubi and succubi attacked me, such nightmare visions of how that most perfect of curves might be contorted, that although as yet I hadn’t the vaguest of preferences toward these appendages and indentations, and was even affrighted to envision
any
being who might own them, much less myself, I had for safety’s sake given up leaning altogether. Later on, in those months when I was listening to your signals, I discovered among Us a little band of Others like me; I was not alone. But I must confess it fully now, and of course now that I am Here it is easier. In Ours, I was without honor. I was one of those whose imagination dared do violence to the very form decreed for us in perpetual onus. Yes, I am that One. I am a pervert.

Thank God for travel.

For what an exquisite relief it could be, this lying prone! Especially must it be regarded here, I mused, as that dear posture in which one smiles backward at the anxieties of yesterday, lulla-lulla, and can perhaps even anticipate a change of shape one might just have the luck to earn or fall into, on the morrow. Above me, on the shelves, were the picture books of all the fauna here down the geological ages, those great plates I had so pored over during my early incubation here, wondering which of those shapes would turn out to be Yours—and in time, in the foolness of time, perhaps Mine. Although at that period I had been unable to focus on the print of the descriptions, each large plate was accompanied by enough small ones to give me a fairly canny idea of each creature’s habits, habitats and foods. Nothing gave any suggestion that all these magnificoes—I had after a few days persuaded myself not to regard them as terrors—did not exist simultaneously, our Now being so different from your little “now.” My real shock at the sight of all this—all these waving waterfalls of mane, saurian extensions, anthropoid pugs, rhino-ish craters and cattish patterns under which the pure oval had forever vanished—was not so much at the extremity of the exaggerations, as after a while an intense irritation, then a degrading melancholia, over the piffling scope of my own. How wee, shrunken and ignominious those defamatory little sins-against-the-curve such as I had been able to imagine. In the face of this grandeur, I was scarcely a pervert at all.

Once I had got over this, I had to buckle down to an important question: when presented a choice of all this imperial grab bag, which shape would I choose to become? Try as I did, I could raise no enthusiasm to be any of these creatures, much less that lyric rush of self-discovery which had been the lecher-hope of my small dreams. But the primer had certainly promised a change. For hours I pored over the herbivores and the carnivores, unable to decide between them, or to come to any conclusion other than that, if it were left to me, I should fancy a little fur. In the intervals, I searched in vain for pictures of that Lava-stream which must produce them, but although I kept forever coming upon mountains which almost lifted themselves from the page, and vegetation-rimmed tarns of a certain mystery, there seemed to be nothing akin to Our all-embracing system, and not much coherence that I could descry, to any. There was a day when, suddenly noticing a preponderance of eggs, I brooded over this at first wistfully, then almost angrily—they had promised more of a change than
this.
I had no choice really but to trust them.

So, when the dialogues started, I kept my own counsel, in time came to understand my delusion, and began to be taught my real profit. The shape I would sin under was not going to be left up to me; this they call resignation. Almost as with us, except for that subdivision which was still to be understood, there was One creature here only. And as I lay there now, I practiced ever newer dreams of this being, manufactured out of fresher, more sophisticated dissatisfactions—give or take a tusk or two, subtract a horn there. And after an hour or two of this pleasantest of siesta occupations, I made an accordingly new discovery. Posture! Perhaps only a One of an essentially gyroscopic people, used to the luxury of moving pavements in whose trolley grooves We may incline all at the same comfortable angle, can appreciate how basic is posture here to the rhythms of philosophy, and indeed to the practice of ideals. How sensitively I was getting to understand you. It was not wholly comfortable then, to lie too long prone.

And no sooner had I discovered this, than I felt myself pulled powerfully upright, as eager for action as if I had just bounded out of the crater. At home, my line of action would have been ready for me; here it took only nominally longer for posture to suggest one. Carefully, very carefully this time, I approached the door. At this point in my education I had never really seen one up close; what has instantaneity to do with doors? Answer: it learns to reason itself through them, just as you, by reverse process, will soon find yourselves flashily able to do forever without them. At a certain distance, I found that, even when thinking the most lethargic thoughts and overcasting myself with the heaviest feelings I yet knew, there was still an unnatural tension between door and me, which boded ill. Then suddenly the source of it occurred to me; my electrical field was being opposed by another. Even their doors wear them, I thought. And perhaps not only their doors, perhaps all other objects which might offer resistance of any kind are required to be clothed so, while they themselves walk nakedly, proudly among these obeisant; what aristocrats they are! And I—?