Fleeting Impressions on an Autumn Afternoon (Harvard)
After lecturing on thought and the color-sense, during which I pressed the students to investigate how the context of one’s perception shapes mental impressions, I took lunch with one of Royce’s students. A robust, poetically-minded young Platonist from New Hampshire, we navigated for an hour around the shoals of idealism and the literal embodiment of the Absolute in the lyric moment, to which he has rather romantically subscribed. Is that not a danger of the current state of the literary arts? He then inquired, sub rosa, whether the body, though withering on the vine of a man’s life, might somehow be restored to its most dangerous state of beauty by thought alone. The perils, I thought but dared not say, of a little Wilde or Swinburne, a dose of Pater or, forgive me, William Shakespeare….
Later, as I strolled along Mount Auburn Street, quietly composing, concepts racing in my head like the regattas these New Englanders love to hold, I noticed him again. The intense young colored man, a Negro most certainly, brow high, stern mien, walking briskly toward the river, his eyes fixed upon an invisible target, an imaginary star. This Du Bois, who, I am told by that collector of personalities, William James, fashions himself a philosopher, though gifted with scientific and other facilities. It is true that I have noted him haunting the precincts of the Yard, books peeking from his tattered leather satchel, his cheeks the color of tea into which several tablespoons of sweet cream have been poured, that gaze pressing intently toward some hidden point. Several times we have glimpsed each other, in wary appraisal, and I have, I shall not dissemble, hurried on. Perhaps he recognizes me as one of those who professes, an admirer of mental industry whatever the outward appearance of the bearer; or perhaps through some profounder spiritual auscultation, divined the passion and ritual in my gait.
This jeune philosophe, like the other Negro students, the handful of unassimilable Easterners, Chinese, Mexican boys, must by necessity subsist on an island even more remote than that which I sojourned during my College days, within this larger crimson archipelago. At one level, I imagine it would provide a place of refuge and some element of happiness for their small and scorned society.
He observes me as if he has already examined the catalogue of ideas and impressions which I shall tell him when we eventually speak, of the gulf between the true-self and the world outside and how the mind, through its exercises, bridges it; of the forests rising around the language of the physicist’s thought; of the importance of doubt in the philosophical method; of those fugitive joys and sincere ecstasies — that heaven that lies in the heart of the earth; of my own long and unfolding exile.
Editor's note: See the following images for the original layout:
ACROBATIQUE
H
i
g
h
e
r
,
I
h
e
a
r
f
r
o
m
somewhere far down there, below, from the sandy circle of the circus floor or a seat in the lowest ring of tiered chairs, plus haut! the voice I can easily discern, it’s the ringmaster’s, the crowd’s, the words, now a lone one in my head, höher, repeating, fleet and fluttering, soaring, past me up into the rafters, scattering among the trusses, vaulted arches, the cupola, clambering amid the bats and the blackbirds, across the brickwork seen only by its masons and ghosts, though I see it, often scale it with my eyes when I ascend, every night I am performing, on the cables or trapeze, sometimes studying that map of bricks and buttresses and plasterwork of this chocolate jewel box and nothing else, this elaborate testament to human handiwork, rather than the lights flickering blue-white against this hexadecagon’s drafts, or the violet Paris night flowing in through the high, narrow windows, or, at least at first, the flaring faces of every evening’s audience, until I dare myself to look at them too and do, all those brows and chins masked in chiaroscuro, all those muffs and fans and ruffles and opera spectacles, all those glowing pipe bowls, cigarillo embers flashing like starlight quilting the surface of the Oder on a mid-summer night, and I do but see no one, only a blur no more distinct than the ceiling’s shadows, until I fix a face fixing me, lips agape, eyes firm as beads of beryl, amazement streaming out of them that I am hovering above, the mouthpiece in my teeth and no harness or net to rescue me, or more startling when I hang upside down with the cannon suspended from my teeth, its chain clenched like a whistle, which after the build-up of the horn and drumroll one of the assistants ignites, and when it fires everyone screams, but I have never, ever let it go, never dropped it, never come close to allowing it to slip, though the metal cuts my embouchure and my jaws and head and neck ache for hours after, and someone is crying out, Bravissima, Madame La La, une miracle, magnifique, followed by the barely audible But how does she do it? and another, My God, it is impossible, but she is an angel — or do I hear an animal? — la mulâtresse-canon, la Venus noire, elle là la nôtre, a marvel of nature, cheers, applause and catcalls fire, that mouth, that body, unnatural, such strength you’d see in a monster, as I prepare for the next series of maneuvers and rest my hips and torso on the bar while the clowns caper in reprise below, awaitingmy sister butterfly, Theophila, Kaira la Blanche, her hands a doll’s in mine,
around my wrists, my ankles,
our fearlessness locked together
as we fly, and I think
about that moment almost a year ago when a pallid, absinthe-cheeked frequenter of the local cafés ferreted his way in and asked her, as I sat beside her in the chamber where we ready ourselves and retire afterwards, about a new trick in which she spun like a corkscrew in the air before I snatched her from certain oblivion, What does it feel like to touch her, hold onto those muscles, do your fingers melt into that skin, his gaze never grazing hers but grappling in its designs upon me, Do you all live together here in the Montmartre district, can I come visit you in your lodgings, and Kaira is shivering with embarrassment as my own regard hardens to wrought iron, They say that you may be closer than sisters, is that true? the drunkard winking, fingering his lapel and drawing his chalky digits down to the open button at the head of his fly, not once releasing his stare from me, even after I dip my kerchief in the glass of peppermint water and bring it to my tongue and arcade, letting the muscles in my throat relax as I turn away; and I have heard everything, far worse, sometimes making me laugh aloud as I lie on my cot for want of weeping, but much better too, here and everywhere we have toured, greetings and grace notes of gratitude and praise from people I could have never imagined as I scrubbed the kitchen floorboards beside Mummi or walked from the schoolhouse in silence watching the carriages clatter up the Grabowerstrasse in Stettin or sitting eating taffy with Lili and Ulli and Maria in Töpffer’s Park, I write them all whenever I can about everything, they have heard every possible new technique I’ve acquired, every wire I’ve walked, every new member of the company or employee of the Cirque Fernando, though so as not to bore them I began to concentrate on the noteworthy things, such as how at the end of a performance last spring — May 18, 1878, I wrote out the letter before bed — I received a peck on the cheek from elderly M. Dumas fils, received a little melody, with camellias, from M. Saint-Saëns, how I have been feted in Lisbon and Antwerp, bathed in a bath of gifted rosewater and roses in London, how in Budapest a prince or count, I cannot remember, offered me his wizened gray palm and the castle and estates he held in it, how in Naples, that ancient, southerly city, a gentleman who I was told is richer than their king handed me a pouch of velvet as light as breath and in it sat a band of gold crowned by a sapphire; but I would never want to be entombed in a palazzo, however grand, however many jewels in my tiara or necklaces, and I already am being courted again by a former acrobat from England, my Toffee, with his buttery voice and supple juggler’s fingers, and I have not yet seen the busy streets of New York or the palaces of Saint Petersburg; and I also write about the daily miracles with the war now over and barely a memory, the Paris sky like a winter crocus, and the serpentine Seine under evening lamplight, and the thousand unforgettable treasures secreted — the restaurants, the cabarets, the music halls — along the byways radiating out from Boulevard Haussmann, and I write about the ugliness too, the throwaways sleep-standing in the nearby doorways, the streetwalkers hurrying past with their frayed hems down the rue des Martyrs, all the people from the colonies looking and wandering as if perpetually lost, so like and yet so different from the Kaiser’s capitals, and I detail the indignities also, the haggling over sous and Marks despite my contract, the pain that radiates throughout my collarbone, the battles to keep my costumes immaculate, acquire new ones, my inexhaustible appetite for new boots and perfumes, my hunt for the best maquillage for my complexion, pomade for my hair, the too-rich soups and meat dishes in sauces and the lure of sweets on every other corner, how last fall because of an extra-heavy flow and no time to get back to my rooms I had to stuff any gloves I could find into my tights and only Kaira knew, and we prayed like Catholic girls to the saints that there would be no accident — there wasn’t, though their letters in return never mention those bits, nor do they repeat a single word about all the other things I relate to them, how I intend to spend every waking hour in the air, to soar with the brio of a sparhawk and glide with a sparrow’s ease and float, as Kaira and I do, as the audience perches on the tips of their seats, with the lightness of two creatures who have fully emerged from the chrysalis, how I want to suspend the entire city of Paris or even France itself from my lips if I could achieve that, how I aim to exceed every limit placed on me unless I place it there, because that is what I think of when I think of freedom, that I have gathered around me people who understand how to translate fear into possibility, who have no wings but fly beyond the most fantastical vision of the clouds, who face death daily back out into the waiting room, and I am one of them, Olga, the kleinste Bräunchen, but no, Mummi — since Vati has only ever penned one letter I recall — never repeats any of this, instead writing The night, especially in the city, is the Devil’s playground and A groschen set aside keeps you out of the almshouse and Remember that not only an accordion makes a pretty song and Don’t forget your family and your Prussian, though how could I, whenever I hear that accent I pause to remind myself where I am, like the night a week ago when after our performance Jean-Michel said that several notable Parisians were waiting to meet us, meet me, one of them a poet I had never heard of and I prefer German novels anyway, I read the American and British ones in translation though I speak that language, my daddy’s, fluently, and all he had to say to me was Guten Abend and instantly I knew, a Pomeranian, living in Berlin, a publisher’s agent, he and one of the Frenchmen handed us each flowers and they all invited us to dinner the following night, then another group mentioning a salon exhibition that we absolutely must attend, and another with a journalist who asked me a few questions about my sense of balance, poise, not listening to a single one of my answers, and as I was heading back into our dressing room another man drew forward, bent down, gray threading his beard, his large, lidded eyes hard at me like lead shot, he introduced himself as M. Edgar Degas, a painter, he said, Kaira, I noticed, had moved to my side, I have not missed a single performance of yours these last few days, and I have been sketching you, here and at the Nouvelle Athènes, and I nodded, smiling and waiting to see his drawings, saying, Merci, M’sieur, ça me plaît beaucoup, but he did not show the sketches as he glanced from K to me and back, his eyes returning to my own, I would like to invite you to my studio on the rue Fontaine, bis no. 19, I will show you the drawings, I would even like to paint you but I know they will not allow me to set up an easel here which would be so helpful because of the complicated nature of the perspective and architecture, and I looked at K who looked at me, neither of us understanding what he was talking about, so I’ll have to work from the drafts, I already have several, even in pastels, I nodded again, noting he barely blinked,