Read The Avignon Quintet Online
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
The Avignon Quintet (161 page)
“Two down and five across, a ruling passion.”
“Tagged by the Greeks as psyche-fed?”
“No. No. Five letters, love. I love you!”
“But psyche-fed no less, for love’s the
Four-letter word we most recall with
Never a crossword or dull moment. Two
Across and one up, never a cross word!”
To codify the appetites by yoga – all kisses and sweet stresses, sweet stretches and breathwork, guarding the deep vascularity of muscles and veins. Then meditation, like crossing the dark garden of consciousness shielding a lighted candle which the least puff of wind might extinguish. You protect this small precarious flame, treasuring it in the palm of the hand. So very gradually your meditation affirms and strengthens the flame and you can cross the dark garden with it triumphantly erect – the yoga erection of the adept in Tao is this, no? Yes, in Taoist terms even love is a predicament due to the wrong angle of inclination towards the universe.
He sees no contradiction in contradiction, and to know this is the beginning of a freakish new certainty. His poetry is concerned with the transmission of an inkling, a breath of the supreme intuition which makes you laugh inside forever!
“I am grateful to Egypt – having my back shot to pieces. I might never have bothered with this yoga jape and so missed a deeply transforming experience. A religion which harbours no ifs and buts, not even the shadow of a perhaps. No sweet neurosis this, no mental chloroform pad! Formal logic dissolves and as you orchestrate the body you exchange lard against oxygen. The hunger is not to possess, to own, but to belong.”
Parts and wholes
Wholes and parts
Private parts and
Public holes
Holy Poles
Unholy poles
Wholly wholes.
“If you suffer from a Priapus afflicted by Saturn you will do anything to make ends meet.” (Sutcliffe)
He dreamed of something as lovely and deliberate as the kisses of pretty Turkish
hanoums
in their sherbet heaven. An abundance of smiling ticklers, an alphabet of broken sighs, oriental codes of sex. And all he got was that a girl like a pterodactyl silked him off in the bus from Gatwick crying, “Bless Relaxers!” By not minding we gain a little ground.
| SUT AND BLAN SOUL AND BODY | = prototypes of love and folly lie there and play with your Vertical banjo! |
Puella lethargica dolorosa!
Just kissing you was like a telephone call from God! Why then did you go away and ride to hounds? A non-man is worse than a con-man. He will wither your sense and sap your succulence. “Not to know one’s own mind is for a woman the beginning of wisdom!” (Inscription on a Persian pisspot.)
Running along the grey-green river they had seen the famous broken bridge, still pointing its reproachful finger across the water towards the waterless
garrigue
. Neither Blanford nor Sutcliffe could resist the prompting to hum out:
Sur le pont d’Avignon
on y pense, on y pense …
sur le pont d’Avignon
on y pense, tout en rond!
“How much longer have we got together?” asked Blanford and his alter ego replied: “One more book, one more river. Then body and soul must end their association. I know. It’s too short. It’s the only criticism one can make of life. It’s too short to learn anything.”
“Constance looks ill.”
“She will recover. I promise.”
Rose de la poésie, O belle névrose!
But even God must be subject to entropy if he exists. Or has he learned to enjoy and use the death-drift from perfection to putridity? Does he live like the Taoist in a perpetual holy irreverence?
| make his bed take his life mark his pillow ‘absent wife’ |
|
| darn his heel smoke his quid doing all the other did |
|
| hunt the slipper hunt the soul Eros teach him breath control! |
|
Carry thy balls high, Coz,
les couilles bien haut! Recuser, accoler, accusez, raccolez!
When young my member diminished like a candle under her caresses; but age and meditation stiffen resolve and now she knows how to mature and guide the trophy of erectile tissue in order to make it act responsibly. Today I feel I could write cheques with it if necessary. (Sutcliffe)
The old valiant rises and retains its discharge politely like a clergyman at a tea-party, giving infinite service with infinite politeness. But it is entirely in the woman’s gift. If she wants she can blow it out like a match! (Blan)
The elephant, if you imbibe him, teaches that art is both therapy and moral construction. Its calibre and relevance may vary. Its arithmetic is hermetic. Something goes into nothing once only. Love!
Ah! But to die of sincere haemorrhoids, or by inhaling a banana, or
d’une obésité succulente —
that would be worthwhile, artistically. And pray, why not an aberrant prose style to echo the discordance at the heart of all nature? Shackle verbs, give nouns wings, disburse the seven-pronged adjective. Divulge!
Often when they had drunk too much they would have the illusion that it might still be possible to get to the bottom of things. Dialogues like:
| BLAN: | What would you do if someone said you were not true to life? Eh? Reveal! |
| SUT: | I would be vastly put out. I would sulk. |
| BLAN : | You see, for us in the cinema age reality is recognisable and identifiable only at twenty-eight frames a second. But undercrank and the image goes out of true and becomes aberrant, that of a paranormal person, schizo or parano, whichever you wish. |
| SUT: | Is that the complaint? Not true to life, they say? So there is such a thing to compare me with? I am under-cranked and feverish? So this is what mere Relativity has done for us? Catapulted us into the Provisional, with reality as a shadow-world? |
| BLAN: | When I asked Einstein about you, about how much reality I could accord you, he said: “You mean that pink chap who looks like a pig? Tell him from me that man only has a tendency towards existing. I can’t go any further towards unqualified certainty about his actually being: short of a telex from God, that is!” |
| SUT: | What a dilemma! I am simply symbolic you might say. Symbolic merely, like a teddy bear full of caviar? The people who say this seem unaware that they only camp temporally in their body as in a chrysalis. Then pouf! a moth dedicated to eating cloth. One day I shall acquire a meaning. As in the average novel, “A careful analysis of Nothing reveals that … Ambulances bleating for blood all night, flesh and blood. Who can sleep?” |
| BLAN: | Wake then and write our book – a new Ulysses dying of a liturgical elephantiasis. Or dream of a girl on long thirsty legs but as shy as glue. Art has a stance but no specific creed. |
| SUT: | It could borrow one if need be. A smother of girls would be better. You see, we only live in the instant between inhalation and ex-. This point in yoga time is the only history. But suppose we refine and purge and strengthen this small glimpse of truthful time, why, we would redeem eternity, the heraldic vision, the panoramic insight! |
| BLAN: | Oh well, so what then? |
| SUT: | You have me there. What then indeed? |
| BLAN: | Philosophâtre or Psycholope Come and join the Bank of Hope Like royal swans in helpless rut Or dirty ducks in hopeless goose Wake Psyche from her trance Lest she should die of self-abuse And take a lesson from the dead For history is a running noose. |
| SUT : | So I really mean nothing? Symbol without translation? |
| BLAN: | All symbols start like that. Happily meaning has a tendency to accrete in time around an enigma. I don’t know why. As if nature could not rest without offering a gloss. In poetry the obscure becomes slowly invested with meaning as if by natural law. The big enigmas of art, simply by dint of continuing to exist, finally accumulate their own explanations by the force of critical projection. Mozart’s Commendatore, for example, is regarded as so mysterious, yet because he still lives, thanks to the electric charge conferred on him by his maker, he becomes daily more significant. One day soon the “meaning” will burst upon us. |
| SUT: | Agreed. But this information is available to the woman from the resources of her female intuition. It may remain unformulated but somewhere she knows that she is the custodian of his poetry, her role is to recognise and release the rare moth which can be housed in the most loathsome caterpillar’s form. The act of sex bursts through the container of the flesh in an act of recognition. Presto! Liberation of poet-moth! |
| BLAN: | Wow! |
| SUT: | As you say, wow! |
| BLAN: | Touche-partout, couche-partout , |
| Bon à rien, prêt à tout . |
What about love?
A girl in grey with one dark note,
Pitched somewhere between fox and dove,
Soft as the driven television must
Like all our lovers come to dust.
Think of others who have passed this way. Lust for a comprehensive vision which death repays in. dust. Nicholas De S. Better to become a best seller and spend your life fingering the moister parts of the Goddess of Pelf! E.A.P. his brain burst on the job. The perilous ascension of artistic ichor in the bloodstream, the panoramic vision – it was too much for him. It swallowed him. He was dragged by the hair into the cave of the oceanic consciousness, the Grendel’s cave of art’s origins; drink drank him.
(Sutcliffe pours out a drink.)
And K? As his mind ran down he grew more yellow and wasted, blooming now like a waxlight, a Jewish taper burning inside a coffin. His hands grew covered with warts which suppurated. Staring into the maw of the Jewish superego.
Tolle lege, tolle lege
. Voices that St Augustine heard, of children in some forsaken garden singing for the birthday of an angel. The imperative of the poet. Hush, can you hear them?
The doomboat of our culture filling up, the ship of fools. But it only looks like that. Actually if you believe, as I do, that all people are slowly becoming the same person, and that all countries are merging into one country, one world, you will be bound to see all these so-called characters as illustrations of a trend. They may be studied through their weaknesses of which the greatest and most revealing is their disposition to love and produce copies in flesh of their psychic needs. Do you see?
B. thinks: Death seems various and quite particular because our friends die in scattered fashion, one by one, slipping out of the decor and leaving holes in it. But as a principle it is as universal as all becoming is –
semper ubique
, old boy – though the effect is slow-motion. The ship shakes itself and settles with a shiver before she dives. Experienced sailors notice the premonitory quiver and cry, “She’s settling!” long before the cry goes up, “There she goes!” The spring will seem endless once back in Avignon. Constance: I love you and I want to die.
Sutcliffe had a friend who died in action but continued his erection into
rigor mortis
. This was quite a sight and caused an admiring crowd of nurses who had been on short commons for some time and were anxious for novelties. A thing like this mauve member could satisfy an army of them, they thought, and kept coming back to look and exult. But it faded with the sunset when they came to lay him out.
Blan said grumpily: “But we shall end like some old bow-wow and toddle off to Doggy Heaven in Disneyland or Forest Lawns where telegrams are delivered to Little Fido when he has crossed the Styx. Charon delivers them without a word, pocketing the dollar with a grin as he rows away.
To each his tuffet
