Sexus (31 page)

Night after night, from words to dreams, to flesh, to phantoms. Possession and depossession. The flowers of the moon, the broad-backed palms of jungle growth, the baying of bloodhounds, the frail white body of a child, the lava bubbles, the rallentando of the snowflakes, the floorless bottom where smoke blooms into flesh. And what is flesh but moon? and what is moon but night? Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.

“Think of
us!”
she said that night when she turned and flew up the steps rapidly. And it was as if I could think of nothing else. We two and the stairs ascending infinitely. Then “contradictory stairs”; the stairs in my father's office, the stairs leading to crime, to madness, to the portals of invention. How
could
I think of anything else?

Creation.
To create the legend in which I could fit the key which would open her soul.

A woman trying to deliver her secret. A desperate woman, seeking through love to unite herself with herself. Before the immensity of mystery one stands like a centipede that feels the ground slipping beneath its feet. Every door that opens leads to a greater void. One must swim like a star in the trackless ocean of time. One must have the patience of radium buried beneath a Himalayan peak.

It is about twenty years now since I began the study of the photogenic soul; in that time I have conducted hundreds of experiments. The result is that I know a little more—about myself. I think it must be very much the same with the political
leader or the military genius. One discovers nothing about the secrets of the universe; at the best one learns something about the nature of destiny.

In the beginning one wants to approach every problem directly. The more direct and insistent the approach, the more quickly and surely one succeeds in getting caught in the web. No one is more helpless than the heroic individual. And no one can produce more tragedy and confusion than such a type. Flashing his sword above the Gordian knot, he promises speedy deliverance. A delusion which ends in an ocean of blood.

The creative artist has something in common with the hero. Though functioning on another plane, he too believes that he has solutions to offer. He gives his life to accomplish imaginary triumphs. At the conclusion of every grand experiment, whether by statesman, warrior, poet or philosopher, the problems of life present the same enigmatic complexion. The happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those which have a history, those which have made history, seem only to have emphasized through their accomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too, eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content merely to live and to enjoy.

The creative individual (in wrestling with his medium) is supposed to experience a joy which balances, if it does not outweigh, the pain and anguish which accompany the struggle to express himself. He lives in his work, we say. But this unique kind of life varies extremely with the individual. It is only in the measure that he is aware of more life, the life abundant, that he may be said to live in his work. If there is no realization there is no purpose or advantage in substituting the imaginative life for the purely adventurous one of reality. Everyone who lifts himself above the activities of the daily round does so not only in the hope of enlarging his field of experience, or even of enriching it, but of quickening it. Only in this sense does struggle have any meaning. Accept this view, and the distinction between failure and success is nil. And this is what every great artist comes to learn en route—that the process in which he is involved has to do with another
dimension of life, that by identifying himself with this process he
augments
life. In this view of things he is permanently removed—and protected—from the insidious death which seems to triumph all about him. He divines that the great secret will never be apprehended but incorporated in his very substance. He has to make himself a part of the mystery, live
in
it as well as with it. Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an egotistical performance on the part of the intellect. Through art, then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has
not
to be put in order: the world
is
order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless. We have first to acquire vision, then discipline and forbearance. Until we have the humility to acknowledge the existence of a vision beyond our own, until we have faith and trust in superior powers, the blind must lead the blind. The men who believe that work and brains will accomplish everything must even be deceived by the quixotic and unforeseen turn of events. They are the ones who are perpetually disappointed; no longer able to blame the gods, or God, they turn on their fellow men and vent their impotent rage by crying “Treason! Stupidity!” and other hollow terms.

The great joy of the artist is to become aware of a higher order of things, to recognize by the compulsive and spontaneous manipulation of his own impulses the resemblance between human creation and what is called “divine” creation. In works of fantasy the existence of law manifesting itself through order is even more apparent than in other works of art. Nothing is less mad, less chaotic, than a work of fantasy. Such a creation, which is nothing less than pure invention, pervades all levels, creating, like water, its own level. The
endless interpretations which are offered up contribute nothing, except to heighten the significance of what is seemingly unintelligible. This unintelligibility somehow makes profound sense. Everyone is affected, including those who pretend not to be affected. Something is present, in works of fantasy, which can only be likened to an elixir. This mysterious element, often referred to as “pure nonsense,” brings with it the flavor and the aroma of that larger and utterly impenetrable world in which we and all the heavenly bodies have their being. The term “nonsense” is one of the most baffling words in our vocabulary. It has a negative quality only, like death. Nobody can explain nonsense: it can only be demonstrated. To add, moreover, that sense and nonsense are interchangeable is only to labor the point. Nonsense belongs to other worlds, other dimensions, and the gesture with which we put it from us at times, the finality with which we dismiss it, testifies to its disturbing nature. Whatever we cannot include within our narrow framework of comprehension we reject. Thus profundity and nonsense may be seen to have certain unsuspected affinities.

Why did I not launch into sheer nonsense immediately? Because, like others, I was afraid of it. And deeper than that was the fact that, far from situating myself in a beyond, I was caught in the very heart of the web. I had survived in my own destructive school of Dadaism: I had progressed, if that is the word, from scholar to critic to poleaxer. My literary experiments lay in ruins, like the cities of old which were sacked by the Vandals. I wanted to build, but the materials were unreliable and the plans had not even become blueprints. If the substance of art is the human soul, then I must confess that with dead souls I could visualize nothing germinating under my hand.

To be caught in a glut of dramatic episodes, to be ceaselessly participating, means among other things that one is unaware of the outlines of that bigger drama of which human activity is but a small part. The act of writing puts a stop to one kind of activity in order to release another. When a monk, prayerfully meditating, walks slowly and silently down the hall of a temple, and thus walking sets in motion one
prayer wheel after another, he gives a living illustration of the act of sitting down to write. The mind of the writer, no longer preoccupied with observing and knowing, wanders meditatively amidst a world of forms which are set spinning by a mere brush of his wings. No tyrant, this, wreaking his will upon the subjugated minions of his ill-gotten kingdom. An explorer, rather, calling to life the slumbering entities of his dream. The act of dreaming, like a draught of fresh air in an abandoned house, situates the furniture of the mind in a new
ambiance.
The chairs and tables collaborate; an effluvium is given off, a game is begun.

To ask the purpose of the game, how it is related to life, is idle. As well ask the Creator why volcanoes? why hurricanes? since obviously they contribute nothing but disaster. But, since disasters are disastrous only for those who are engulfed in them, whereas they can be illuminating for those who survive and study them, so it is in the creative world. The dreamer who returns from his voyage, if he is not shipwrecked en route, may and usually does convert the collapse of his tenuous fabric into other stuff. For a child the pricking of a bubble may offer nothing but astonishment and delight. The student of illusions and mirages may react differently. A scientist may bring to a bubble the emotional wealth of a world of thought. The same phenomenon which causes the child to scream with delight may give birth, in the mind of an earnest experimenter, to a dazzling vision of truth. In the artist these contrasting reactions seem to combine or merge, producing that ultimate one, the great catalyzer called
realization.
Seeing, knowing, discovering, enjoying—these faculties or powers are pale and lifeless without realization. The artist's game is to move over into reality. It is to see beyond the mere “disaster” which the picture of a lost battlefield renders to the naked eye. For, since the beginning of time the picture which the world has presented to the naked human eye can hardly seem anything but a hideous battleground of lost causes. It has been so and will be so until man ceases to regard himself as the mere seat of conflict. Until he takes up the task of becoming the “I of his I.”

Saturdays I usually quit work at noon, lunching either with Hymie Laubscher and Romero or with O'Rourke and O'Mara. Sometimes Curley joined us, or George Miltiades, a Greek poet and scholar who was one of the messenger force. Now and then O'Mara would invite Irma and Dolores to join us; they had worked their way up from humble secretaries in the Cosmococcic employment bureau to buyers in a big department store on Fifth Avenue. The meal usually stretched out until three or four in the afternoon. Then, with dragging feet, I would wend my way over to Brooklyn to pay my weekly visit to Maude and the little one.

As the snow was still on the ground we were no longer able to take our walks through the park. Maude was generally attired in a negligee and bathrobe; her long hair hung loosely, almost to her waist. The rooms were superheated and encumbered with furniture. She usually kept a box of candy near the couch where she reclined.

The greetings we exchanged would make one think we were old friends. Sometimes the child was not there when I arrived, having gone to a neighbor's house to play with one of her little friends.

“She waited for you until three o'clock,” Maude would say, with an air of mild reproach, but secretly thrilled that it had turned out thus.

I would explain that my work had detained me at the office. To this she would give me a look which signified—“I know your excuses. Why don't you think up something different?”

“How is your friend Dolores?” she would ask abruptly. “Or,” giving me a sharp look, “isn't she your friend any more?”

A question like this was meant as a gentle insinuation that she hoped I was not deceiving the other woman (Mona) as I had her. She would never mention Mona's name, of course,
nor would I. She would say “she” or “her” in a way that was unmistakably clear as to whom she meant.

There was also, in these questions, an overtone of deeper implications. Since the divorce proceedings were only in the preliminary stages, since the rupture had not yet been definitely created by law, there was no telling what might happen in the meantime. We were no longer enemies, at least. There was always the child between us—a strong bond. And, until she could arrange her life differently, they were both dependent on me. She would like to have known more about my life with Mona, whether it was going as smoothly as we had expected or not, but pride prevented her from inquiring too openly. She doubtless reasoned to herself that the seven years we had lived together constituted a not altogether negligible factor in this now seemingly tenuous situation. One false move on Mona's part and I would fall back into the old pattern. It behooved her to make the most of this strange new friendship which we had established. It might prepare the ground for another and deeper relationship.

I felt sorry for her sometimes when this unexpressed hope manifested itself only too clearly. There was never the slightest fear on my part that I would sink back into the old pattern of conjugal life. Should anything happen to Mona—the only threat of separation I could think of was death—I would certainly never resume a life with Maude. It was much more plausible that I should turn to someone like Irma or Dolores, or even Monica, the little waitress from the Greek restaurant.

“Why don't you come over here and sit beside me—I won't bite you.”

Her voice seemed to come from far away. Often it happened that when we were left alone, Maude and I, my mind would wander off. As now, for example, I would often respond in a semitrance, the body obedient to her wishes but the rest of me absent. A brief struggle of wills always ensued, a struggle rather between her will and my absence of will. I had no desire to tickle her erotic fancies; I was there to kill a few hours and be off without opening any fresh wounds. Usually, however, my hand would absent-mindedly stray over her voluptuous form. There was nothing more to it at first
than the involuntary caress that one would give a pet. But little by little she would make we aware that she was responding with concealed pleasure; then, just when she had succeeded in riveting my attention upon her body, she would make some abrupt move to break the connection.