The Avignon Quintet (181 page)

Freckles of coy gold …

BLAN:
“Why should death have the monopoly, eh?
Il faut paufiner la réalité, faut bricoler dans l’immédiat!
Why remain a victim of uncouth wishes? As for love among the martial arts you must read my new study of Cleopatra, to learn the secrets of love from her. She buttered her breasts before intercourse while Antony honeyed his valves! Soft probe of human tongue – hysteria is a distress which does not come from blameless kisses exchanged between male and female adversaries. The new lovers have become philosophers and equal to the loneliness they inspire. The tremendous sadness becomes rich though the love seems profitless.
Something quite new is happening!”

These philosophic considerations sound highly sententious, and one suspects that too many of them could easily spoil your loving to the tune of this lazy night and this quite momentous sleek jazz pouring up among the lamplit trees. Can’t you be content with the soft goads of the simple flesh? Of that wonderful girl Blanford invented he wrote in his book: “Her husbands had tried to ring her like a wild swan but she was subject only to the gravitational tides of the seasons, flying north or south where the blood called, eluding settled ways and settled men. In lonely places I always found her, tide-borne, solitary, perfect, my lover and my deep friend. At night we dined by the light of a single candle, with olives and iced wine.”

BLAN:
“When Sutclifte was born it was a time of grave portents. The doctor said, ‘It is clear he will die young for he has no sense of humour.’ But his French nurse (muse?) leaned over his cot and whispered, ‘They have all brought gifts as spurs to the crib, Zeus a garlic-squeezer, Venus a foreskin-clip of purest gold portending loves without drawback. And now think: the white breast of chicken musky with dusky truffles, stippled like a trout’s belly: a pot of black aromatic olives dense in the sweet introspection of their own dark oil,
pâté de foie gras
. Admit it, my dear, you are getting an erection!’ The
demon du Midi
has him by the hair of a Sunday.

Aborted Christians drinking blood

A thirst which dates before the Flood.

I’m sick of the thirst for becoming,

The heaving and retching and humming,

I will turn to a thirst to exist

And catch up on all that I’ve missed!”

The private mind is never at rest, and always on the magic frequency of love.

SUT:
“The formula seems to be
petit talent et gros cul
. Fond as a stableful of horses’ bums polished up to mirror grooms’ grins. They burn. They burn. But nowadays you must bring your own whip. But this is how the gentry do it. With us and our little white palaeolithic chargers it is quite different, for they behave like pets and live loose on the range when they are unsaddled, prodigal of their smiles and headlong tossing of white manes, as if they had leaped out of context and no longer respected the serial order expounded by nature. Think: old men’s sperm makes not old men but infants-in-arms who will grow to form church fathers simmering in the raging paranoia of a punitive God. A thirst for magic rules. The schizoid states are uncrystallised mysticism. The kundalini of the unconscious accidentally touched off and set in motion, like an engine’s pre-ignition; it comes from incautious thinking, incautious wishing.”

BLAN:
“Art for the Prince is the representation of a reality upon a plane surface – an artefact without volume or depth. It will not stand up to interrogation. You risk by poking at it with your questions to go right through the canvas into nothing: or else everything! There are limits even to everything.
Bien sûr que non
, as you can say in French, using the cryptic Buddhic double negative. As for the woman, she is a psychic scout and pathfinder through the flesh, a lieutenant, the ship’s first mate who divides responsibility with the captain.”

When the Prince overheard Constance say, “We have started getting a poor quality of human being for whom wisdom has become mere information!” he was entranced and begged her to teach him ethnology. Together they frequented international gatherings and wistfully compared cultures in search of a thread of historic significance. Certain symbols stood out and seemed to hint. The suffering Prometheus, for example, stood with its face to the rock while the vultures fluttered and pecked; while the suffering Christian stood with its back to the cross, arms spread like a radio aerial, with a crown of wild acacia on his head … Two different approaches to human suffering! A professor had said, “The will to self-destruction seems more advanced in the more gifted nations or peoples.” The Prince gave an exclamation of impatience, for he had begun to feel that they would never find what they were looking for in this way. Also the fortune-tellers had predicted the death of the Princess, and he had begun to dream of the funeral cortège – the long procession of Rolls-Royces, nose to stern, stretching some eighteen kilometres along the blazing desert road between Cairo and Alexandria. The screeching water wheels of Egypt are the country’s cicadas. He would soon have to return to her, the one being without whom he did not think he could continue to live. “
C’est une affaire de tangences
,” somebody had remarked to him in the midst of a cocktail party on the Lake Mareotis. And now that the thought of her dying had become an echo in his mind how boring all other women seemed, how shabby his sprees! They were tergiversatile and showed him their lily-white panjandrums, that was all! (The value of the hypotenuse of the Pythagorean triangle is valued at five!) Yet he must not be unfair. With some he had learned things which profited his love for his own wife, and in one – why, she had opened her legs and revealed the whole secret of the pyramids and, yes, that of entropy also. But there is also a principle of repair which contests the irreversibility of process for a short spell – the omnifact of omnideath, the ubique of human obsolescence. “I want you to go ahead and try out the child, one of your own, it’s a great challenge,” he said to Constance, who replied in somewhat oracular fashion, “Even though you know full well that lovers are selfish as arrows?”

“Even though! Even though!”

Blanford took her in his arms, which was still an unfamiliar purchase for the two unfledged hearts, unquiet presences. He said ironically, “With this future I thee wed.” But they knew that the trick had long since been done and it only remained to live it out, to act it out. Reality is desperate for someone to believe in it; hence manifestation which is History’s party frock!

Dull carnivorous males in love

A-playing the game of hand-in-glove;

Projections of our self-esteem

Reflected into love’s young dream.

Gonads rehearse the Primal Scream

Man, sublime mud of all he thinks

Sleepwalks in darkness with his jinx,

Gaunt fellatrix with urban curves,

Each gets the partner he deserves.

SUT:
“Passing down the village street they were reflected in the shop windows, the three mounted figures; the gold leaf of her sunburn glowed against the blonde head like a declaration of intent. Living without awe is living without a full consciousness of reality – of its value. Men without awe will never be wise. Ah! for men who realise that reality consistently outstrips intellectual formulations. Sometimes we could not help seeing the world as a sort of farmyard – with humanity quacking or honking rather than talking. Ontology – the study of being! Ours is perhaps the first civilisation which cannot decide if the answers lie in art or in science. They appear to flow from different centres in the same animal, man. And a man now must realise himself through a sort of religious experience yet stay a man. But if a woman has a religious experience she is obliged to forsake her womanhood and become a nun. Can you have the grin without the cat? I am not sure. A suicide wrote recently, ‘In leaving you I am inheriting the whole world!’ For dinner he had eaten lobsters tender as Christian children and an overloaded conscience is as bad as an overloaded bowel – something has to give! Then bang!”

They had started to make love as if their embraces were extensions of their thoughts, and he realised the full extent of her power over him; it was a little frightening because he realised that later he would be called upon to take over this power, this domination – it belonged to the male demesne. She was only trying to waken him to his responsibilities. They hardly talked now. The long silent rides were wonderfully tonic beside bulky seas. And their little tavern was as abominable as ever, serving slices of ancient donkey badly cooked and served tepid, covered in rancid oil. The tavern should have been called the Bloodstained Toothpick instead of the Mistral. The proprietor had the specially dead look you see in the eyes of a fly. One knew it was no use arguing because he did not understand. Yet the wine was marvellous. It came from St Saturnin. Suddenly one had thoughts of pith. “
Oui, en toi j’ ai bien vendangè ma mere!
” he told her. It was a declaration of love of the most absolute kind and she recognised it as such, good Freudian that she was, or seemed!

So they rode in sweet symbiosis, while the ravenous blue sea lopped at the land, honed down their horizons of sand, extended its bony contours cradled by the heartfelt blue meniscus which was sky. She had finally convinced him of the existence of lovers as philosophers, and of the need for a joint approach to time through the atom of their love. And this sometimes made them both a bit of a bore. “For me the
Aetvologie of Hysteria
is the great document of the twentieth century, the great Sutra, so to speak, and the Freudian denial of its truth is quite inexplicable; it is as momentous as the other great philosophic denial (‘Thou shalt deny me thrice!’) which ended with the crucifixion scene.” What she meant was that the child would be clear-eyed and vigorous and unshocked in its beginnings – she knew it must be so. On the other hand … “I had this
dream
which suggested that it was going to be the ending of the whole book. You went back to Tu Duc to tidy up and I to England in order most appropriately to begin my opus. And there the telephone rang with news of your … I have never accepted the unique word.” “Say it!” “No! It must be lived to be swallowed!”

Death!

BLAN:
“Your consciousness bears witness to the historic
now
which you are living while your memory recalls other nows, fading slowly into indistinctness as they move into the prehistory you call the
past
. This temporal series, indistinct and overlapping, you attach to one individual whom you call ‘I’. But … in the course of a few years, about seven I think, every cell in the body of this ‘I’, this individual, has been modified and even replaced. His thoughts, judgements, emotions, desires have all undergone a similar metamorphosis! What then is the permanence which you designate as an ‘I’? Surely not simply a name which marks his (‘its’?) difference from his (‘its?’) fellow men … A discrete sequence of rather disjointed recollections which begin some time in infancy and terminate with a jolt
now
, in the
present
– such is time as a datum of consciousness! (Despite this stone wall, I love you more than myself!) When all this raw material has undergone the strange refining process which we know as physical intuition it is transformed into something close to a meditative state – a version of ‘calm abiding’ as the Tibetans would say, and it becomes an ark or house for the love-child to inhabit, afloat upon the waters of the eternal darkness, backcloth of everything we do or every kiss we exchange. When if ever one has the luck to arrive at an inferential consciousness the steps of the reasoning process that preceded it are no longer necessary; one can let them go! Kick away the ladder, so to speak.”

Sutcliffe will write us epitaphs

In poems acerb and wise

In rhythms the pendulums adore

And human metronomes despise.

Constance turned her smiling head and sighed: “You have not seen as much of death as I have in my work. Finally, I have got on to good terms with the ugly fellow! Somewhere in the middle of the whole thing there comes a sudden luxurious feeling of surrender to inevitability in the dying themselves. It belongs, this mood of gradually deepening amnesia, to the rhythms of plant life. It makes one realise that all love passes into obsolescence in the very act – it illustrates the nothingness we have decorated with our trashy narcissism. A soft withering surrender to a death without throes. Lying alone by oneself there guided by the merciful paralysis of fading thoughts which cradle one and lead on and on and on … until snap! Kiss me. Hold me. And then for some time the echo of an emptiness will follow you about the house, invisible as gravity but as omnipresent, the emphasis on a vanished presence.”

Yes, Rob’s poems will come all tension-charged with the original perfect illness to undo our knots and make us thrive on images of unimpeded loves … He knows that the flesh cools also like a pot of clay in freshly ovened silence, set out in gardens like women beautiful and purposeless as fruit but just as suave in their archaic silence as the grave.