Plexus (42 page)

Stanley, like all chauvinists, traced his arboreal descent only to the beginnings of the Polish nation, that's to say, to the Pripet Marshes. There he lay bogged, like a weasel. His antennae reached only to the frontiers which were limitrophe
to Poland. He never became an American, in the true sense. For him America was merely a condition or state of trance which permitted him to transmit his Polish genes to his heredity. Any differentiations from the norm, that is, from the Polish type, were to be attributed to the rigors of adjustment and adaptation. Whatever was American in him was merely an alloy which would be dissolved in the generation that was to spring from his loins.

Preoccupations of this sort Stanley never divulged overtly, but they were there and they manifested themselves in the form of insinuations. The emphasis he gave to a word or phrase always provided the clue of his real feelings. He was thoroughly antipathetic to the new world in which he found himself. He made only enough effort to keep alive. He went through the motions, as we say, nothing more. Though his experience of life was purely negative it was none the less potent. It was a matter of charging the battery: his children would make the necessary connections with life. Through them the racial energy of the Poles, their dreams, their longings, their aspirations, would be revived. Stanley was content to inhabit an in-between world.

All this admitted, it was nevertheless a luxury for me to bathe in the effluvium of the Polish spirit. Polonesia, I called it. An inland sea, like the Caspian, surrounded by the steppes. Over the troubled, stagnant waters, over treacherous shoals and invisible sources, flew huge migratory birds, heralds of past and future—of a Polish past and future. All that surrounded this sea was inimical and poisonous. From the language alone came the much-needed sustenance.

What are the riches of English, I used to say to myself, compared to the melodious verdure of this Babel? When a Pole employs his native tongue he speaks not only to his friend but to his compatriots everywhere in the world. To the ear of a foreigner like myself, who was privileged to assist at these sacred performances, the speeches of my Polish friends seemed like interminable monologues addressed
to the innumerable ghosts of the Diaspora within and without. Every Pole regards himself as the secret custodian of the fabulous repositories of the race; with his death some secret part of the accumulated intangibles, unfathomable to aliens, dies with him. But in the language nothing is lost: so long as one Pole is left to articulate, Poland will live.

When he spoke Polish he was another man, Stanley. Even when he spoke to one as insignificant as his wife Sophie. He might have been talking of milk and crackers, but to my ears it sounded as if we were back in the Age of Chivalry. Nothing is better suited to describe the modulations, dissonances and distillations of this language than the word alchemy. Like a strong dissolvent, the Polish language converts the image, concept, symbol or metaphor into a mysterious transparent liquid of camphorous odor which, by its mellifluous resonances, suggests the perpetual alternation and interchange of idea and impulse. Issuing like a hot geyser from the crater of the human mouth, Polish music—for it is hardly a language—consumes everything with which it comes into contact, intoxicating the brain with the pungent, acrid fumes of its metallic source. A man employing this medium is no longer a mere man—he has appropriated the powers of a sorcerer. The Book of Demonology could only have been written in this language. To say that this is a quality of the Slavs explains nothing. To be a Slav does not mean to be a Pole. The Pole is unique and untouchable; he is the prime mover, the original impetus personified, and his realm is the dread realm of doom. For him the sun was extinguished long ago. For him all horizons are limited and circumscribed. He is the desperado of the race, self-accursed and self-acquitted.
Make the world over?
He would rather drag it down to the bottomless pit.

Reflections of this order always rose to the surface when I would leave the house to stretch my legs. A short distance from Stanley's home lay a world akin in many respects to
the one I had known as a child. Through it ran a canal black as ink whose stagnant waters stank like ten thousand dead horses. But all about the canal were winding lanes, eddying streets, still paved with cobblestones, the worn sidewalks flanked by diminutive shanties cluttered with shutters dislocated from their hinges, creating the impression, from a distance, of being enormous Hebrew letters. Furniture, bric-a-brac, utensils, implements and materials of all kinds littered the streets.
The fringe of the societal world
.

Each time I approached the confines of this Lilliputian world I changed back to a boy of ten. My senses became more acute, my memory more alive, my hunger more sharp. I could hold conversation with the self which I once was and with the self I had become. Who
I
was that walked and sniffed and explored, I knew not. An interlocutory I, doubtless. An I suborned by a superior court of justice.… In this supraliminal arena Stanley always figured tenderly. He was the invisible comrade to whom I imparted those larval thoughts which elude speech. Immigrant, orphan, derelict—of these three ingredients he was composed. We understood one another because we were complete opposites. What he envied I gave him regally; what I craved he fed me from his carrion beak. We swam like Siamese fish on the glaucous surface of the lake of childhood. We knew not our Protector. We rejoiced in our imagined freedom.

What intrigued me as a child, what intrigues me to this day, is the glory and the wonder of eclosion. There are balmy days in childhood when, perhaps because of the great retardation of time, one steps outdoors into a world which is dozing. It is not the world of humans, nor is it the world of nature which is drowsing—it is the inanimate world of stones, minerals, objects. The inanimate world in bud.… With the slow-motion eyes of childhood one watches breathlessly as this latent realm of life slowly reveals its pulse beat. One becomes aware of the existence
of those invisible rays which emanate perpetually from the most remote parts of the cosmos and which radiate from the microcosm as well as from the macrocosm. “As above, so below.” In the twinkle of an eye one is divorced from the illusory world of material reality; with every step one places himself anew at the
carrefour
of these concentric radiations which are the true substance of an all-encompassing and all-pervading reality. Death has no meaning. All is change, vibration, creation and re-creation. The song of the world, registered in every particle of that specious substance called matter, issues forth in an inequable harmony which filters through the angelic being lying dormant in the shell of the physical creature called man. Once the angel assumes dominion, the physical being flowers. Throughout all realms a quiet, persistent blossoming takes place.

Why is it that angels, whom we foolishly associate with the vast interstellar spaces, love everything which is
mignon?

As soon as I reach the banks of the canal, where my world in miniature lies waiting, the angel takes over. I no longer scrutinize the world—the world is inside me. I see it as clearly with eyes closed as with eyes wide open. Enchantment, not sorcery. Surrender, and the bliss which accompanies surrender. What was dilapidation, decay, sordidness, is transmuted. The microscopic eye of the angel sees the infinite parts which compose the divine whole; the telescopic eye of the angel sees nothing but totality, which is perfect. In the wake of the angel there are only universes to behold—size means nothing.

When man, with his pitiful sense of relativity, looks through the telescope and marvels at the immensity of creation, he means to confess that he has succeeded in reducing the limitless to the limited. He acquires, as it were, an optic lease on the boundless grandeur of a creation which is unfathomable to him. What matter if he succeed in putting a thousand universes within the focus of his
microscopic telescope? The process of enlargement merely enhances the sense of the miniature. But man feels more at home in his little universe, or pretends he does, when he has uncovered what lies beyond its bounds. The thought that his universe may be no bigger than a tiny blood corpuscle entrances him, lulls his desperate anguish. But the use of an artificial eye, no matter to what monstrous proportions it be magnified, never brings him joys. The greater his physical vision, the more awed he becomes. He understands, though he refuses to believe, that with this eye he will never penetrate, still less partake of, the mystery of creation. To re-enter the mysterious world from which he sprang he realizes, in a vague, dim way, that other eyes are needed.

It is with the angelic eye that man beholds the world of his true substance.

These miniature realms, where all is sunken, muted and transformed, emerge often as not in books. A page of Hamsun frequently yielded the same mysterious harmonies of enchantment as a walk by the canal. For a brief moment one experiences the same sort of vertigo as when the motorman deserts his post with the trolley in full flight. After that it is pure
volupté
. Surrender again. Surrender to the spell which has rendered the author superfluous. Immediately one's rhythm is retarded. One lingers before the verbal structures which palpitate like living houses. One knows that someone never encountered before, and never to be encountered again, will emerge and take possession of one. It may be a personage as innocuous as Sophie. It may be a question of large white goose eggs which will dominate the whole passage. No governing the cosmic fluid in which the events and situations are now bathed. The dialogue may become pure nonsense, astral in its implications. The author has made it clear that he is absent. The reader is face to face with an angelic sport. He will live this scene, this protracted moment, over and over again, and with a sharpened sense of reality verging on the hallucinatory.
Only a little street—perhaps not a block long. Diminutive gardens tended by trolls. Perpetual sunshine. And remembered music, toned down to blend with the hum of insects and the rustle of leaves. Joy, joy, joy. The intimate presence of flowers, of birds, of stones which have preserved the record of similar magical days.

I think of Hamsun because it was with Stanley that I shared so often these extraordinary experiences. Our grotesque life in the street, as boys, had prepared us for these mysterious encounters. In some unknown way we had undergone the proper initiation. We were, without knowing it, members of that traditional underground which vomits forth at suitable intervals those writers who will later be called Romantics, mystics, visionaries or diabolists. It was for such as us—then mere embryonic beings—that certain “outlandish” passages were written. It is we who keep alive these books which are constantly threatening to fall back into oblivion. We lie in wait, like beasts of prey, for moments of reality which will not only match but confirm and corroborate these literary extravaganzas. We grow like corkscrews, we become lopsided, we squint and stammer in a vain endeavor to fit our world into the existent one. In us the angel sleeps lightly, ready at the slightest tremor to assume command. Only solitary vigils restore us. Only when we are cruelly separated do we really communicate with each other.

Often it is in dreams that we communicate.… I am on a familiar street searching for a particular house. The moment I set foot in this street my heart beats wildly. Though I have never seen the street it is more familiar to me, more intimate, more significant, than any street I have known. It is the street by which I return to the past. Every house, every porch, every gate, every lawn, every stone, stick, twig or leaf speaks eloquently. The sense of recognition, compounded of ñ yriad layers of memory, is so powerful that I am almost dissolved.

The street has no beginning nor end it is a detached
segment swimming in a fuzzy aura and complete in itself. A vibrant portion of the infinite whole. Though there is never any activity in this street it is not empty or deserted. Indeed, it is the most alive street I can think of. It is alive with memories, like an arcane grove which pullulates with its swarms of invisible hosts. I can't say that I
walk
down this street, nor can I say either that I
glide
through it. The street invests me. I am devoured by it. Perhaps only in the insect world are there sensations to match this harrowing form of bliss. To eat is wonderful, but to be eaten is a treat beyond description. Perhaps it is another, more extravagant, kind of union with the external world. An inverted sort of communion.

The end of this ritual is always the same. Suddenly I am aware that Stanley is waiting for me. He stands not at the end of the street, for there is no end… he stands at that fuzzy edge where light and substance fuse. His summons is always curt and brusque: “Come on, let's go!” Immediately I adapt my pace to his.
Forward march!
The beloved street wheels softly around, like a turntable operated by an unseen switchman, and as we reach the corner it joins neatly and inexorably with the intersecting streets which form the pattern of our childhood precincts. From here on it is an exploration of the past, but a different past from that of the memorial street. This past is an active one, cluttered with souvenirs, but souvenirs only skin deep. The other past, so profound, so fluid, so sparkling, made no separation between itself, present and future. It was timeless, and if I speak of it as a past it is only to suggest a return which is not really a return but a restoration. The fish swimming back to the source of its own being.

When the inaudible music begins, one knows for a certainty that he is alive.

Stanley's part in the second half of the dream is to rekindle the flame. I will take leave of him when he has set all the mnemonic filaments aquiver. This function, which
he performs with instinctive adroitness, might be likened to the quivering oscillations of a compass needle. He holds me to the path, a tortuous, zigzag path, but saturated with reminiscences. We buzz from flower to flower, like bees. When we have extracted our fill of nectar we return to the honeycomb. At the entrance I take leave of him, plunging into the very hub of transformation. My ears resound with the oceanic hum. All memory is stifled. I am deep in the labyrinthian shell, as secure and alive as a particle of energy adrift in the stellar sea of light. This is the deep sleep which restores the soul. When I awaken I am newborn. The day stretches before me like a velvet meadow. I have no recollection of anything. I am a freshly minted coin ready to fall into the palm of the first comer.