Varda also had a theory on uncouth manners which he told very often in the presence of his daughter’s sulky visitors.
“This is a modernized version of the Princess and the Dragon. Today she would be the Imperial Valley Lettuce Queen and the young man could be any one of you. The dragon had to be killed before the young man could marry the girl. The dragon had a corrugated skin, bluish and silvery and scaly like a mirror broken into a thousand small pieces. His eyes wept chronically. He spouted fire with the regularity of a lighter. The young man turned off the gas first and then cut off the dragon’s head. He took the beauty queen brusquely by the arm and pushing her ahead of him said in a Humphrey Bogart style of speech: ‘Oh, come on, we’ve wasted enough time on the old dragon. I’ve got a motel room waiting.’ The queen looked at the expiring dragon weeping at her leaving, and suddenly she put her arms around the beast and said: ‘I’ll stay with him. I don’t like the rough tone of your voice.’ And as she encircled the scaly dragon, he turned into a young man handsomer and tenderer than the one she had jilted.”
His daughter shrugged her shoulders, blew into her bubble gum of a pink Varda had never in all his life conceded to use, counted her new freckles, and went back to her science homework.
She was chewing the end of her pencil while she studied a chemical which produced visions and hallucinations. She read to her father in a flat-toned voice the effect of consciousness-expanding chemicals.
“Colors breathe and emit light.”
“But my colors do that,” said Varda.
“Figures dissolve into one another and appear at times transparent.”
“As they do in my collages,” said Varda.
“Someone saw whirling clouds, suns and moons,” she read in the same voice as she might have read: “Imperial Valley produced 20,000 head of lettuce.”
“As in the paintings of Van Gogh,” said Varda. “What need of chemicals?”
“But when you take a chemical you know it will affect you for only a few hours and then you will return to normality. You can control it, modify it, you can even stop its effects if you wish to, if you don’t like what is happening to you.”
“In other words, a return ticket,” said Varda.
“The next day the world is back again in its proper place, the real colors are back.”
“Doesn’t that prove that when you remove an inhibiting consciousness and let men dream they all dream like painters or poets?”
“But you dream all the time, whereas a pill is more scientific.”
Perhaps science would illumine his cautious child. Perhaps by way of a chemical she might respond, vibrate, shine? He watched the eyelashes pulled down like shades, the ears covered by hair, the lips parsimonious of words.
What had he absorbed through the years which had opened these worlds to him which others sought in mushrooms? Where had he learned the secret of phosphorescence, of illumination, of transfiguration? Where had he learned to take the shabbiest materials and heighten them with paint, alter their shapes with scissors?
“What I wanted to teach you is contained in one page of the dictionary. It is all the words beginning with trans:transfigure, transport, transcend, translucent, transgression, transform, transmit, transmute, transpire, all the trans-Siberian voyages.”
“You forgot the word transvestite.”
“When I was ten years old I made up my first story.”
“I’m going to be late for my expanding-consciousness lecture!”
“This is a very short story. It’s about a blind old man who had a daughter. This daughter described to him every day the world they lived in, the people who came to see him, the beauty of their house, garden, friends. One day a new doctor came to town and he cured the old man’s blindness. When he was able to see, he discovered they had been living in a shack, on an empty lot full of debris, that their friends had been hoboes and drunks. His daughter was crying, thinking he would die of shock, but his reaction was quite the opposite. He said to her: ‘It is true that the world you described does not exist but as you built that image so carefully in my mind and I can still see it so vividly, we can now set about to build it just as you made me see it.’”
His daughter remained neutral, and as silent as her rubber-soled tennis shoes. She hung her long legs over the edge of the deck and swung them like a boy. She dissected snails.
“Such cruelty,” said Varda.
“Not at all,” she said with a newborn scientist’s arrogance. “They have no nervous system.”
Meanwhile Varda continued to make collages as some women light votive candles. With scissors and glue and small pieces of fabrics, he continued to invent women who glittered, charmed, levitated and wore luminous aureoles like saints. But his daughter resisted all her father’s potions, as if she had decided from the day she was born never to become one of the women he cut out in the shape of circles, triangles, cubes, to suit the changing forms of his desires.
And then one day after she had been away for a few days she wrote Varda the following letter:
inside. I looked at the rug on the floor and it was no longer a plain rug but a moving and swaying mass like hair floating on water or like wind over a field of wheat. The door knob ceased to be a plain door knob. It melted and undulated and the door opened and all the walls and windows vanished. There was a tremor of life in everything. The once static objects in the room all flowed into a fluid and mobile and breathing world. The dazzle of the sun was multiplied, every speck of gold and diamond in it magnified. Trees, skies, clouds, lawns began to breathe, heave and waver like a landscape at the bottom of the sea. My body was both swimming and flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was perfect communicability between my body and everything surrounding me. The singing of the mocking-birds was multiplied, became a whole forest of singing birds. My senses were multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. On the walls appeared endless murals of designs I made which produced their own music to match. When I drew a long orange line it emitted its own orange tone. The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange, gold. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down my back and came out my fingertips. I was a cascade of red blue rainfall, a rainbow. I was small, light, mobile. I could use any method of levitation I wished. I could dissolve, melt, float, soar. Wavelets of light touched the rim of my clothes, phosphorescent radiations. I could see a new world with my middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the walls behind the sky, the sky behind the Infinite. The walls became fountains, the fountains became arches, the arches domes, the domes sky, the sky a flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I looked at a slender line curving over space which disappeared into infinity. I saw a million zeroes on this line, curving, shrinking in the distance and I laughed and said ‘Excuse me, I am not a mathematician.’ How can I measure the infinite? But I understand it. The zeroes vanished. I was standing on the rim of a planet, alone. I could hear the fast rushing sounds of the planets rotating in space. Then I was among them, and I was aware that a certain skill was necessary to handle this new means of transportation. The image of myself standing in space and trying to get my ‘sea legs’ or my ‘space legs’ amused me. I wondered who had been there before me and whether I could return to earth. The solitude distressed me, so I returned to my starting point. I was standing in front of an ugly garden door. But as I looked closer it was not plain or green but it was a Buddhist temple, a Hindu colonnade, Moroccan mosaic ceiling, gold spires being formed and re-formed as if I were watching the hand of a designer at work. I was designing spirals of red unfurled until they formed a rose window or a mandala with edges of radium. When one design was barely born and arranged itself, it dissolved and the next one followed without confusion. Each form, each line emitted its equivalent in music in perfect accord with the design. An undulating line emitted a sustained undulating melody, a circle had a corresponding musical notation, diaphanous colors, diaphanous sounds, a pyramid created a pyramid of ascending notes, and vanishing ones left only an echo. These designs were preparatory sketches for entire Oriental cities. I saw the temples of Java, Kashmir, Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, in all the colors of precious stones illumined from within. Then the outer forms of the temples dissolved to reveal the inner chapel and shrines. The reds and the gold inside the temples created an intricate musical orchestration like Balinese music. Two sensations began to torment me: one that it was happening too quickly and that I would not be able to remember it, another that I would not be able to tell what I saw, it was too elusive and too overwhelming. The temples grew taller, the music wilder, it became a tidal wave of sounds with gongs and bells predominating. Gold spires emitted a long flute chant. Every line and color was breathing and constantly mutating. The smoke of my cigarette became gold. The curtain on the window became gold. Then I felt my whole body becoming gold, liquid gold, scintillating warm gold. I WAS GOLD. It was the most pleasurable sensation I have ever known and I knew it was like passion. It was the secret of life, the alchemist’s secret of life.