Insel must have crossed my message for in a couple of hours he panted into my place all undone, despairingly waving a sheet of blue paper.
“Das blaue Papier,” he articulated hoarsely, ducking his head as if the Papier was one of a shower of such sheets bombarding him in his dash for escape.
“Something the matter? Have a porto. Sit on a chair. Whatever it is — out with it!”
“Das blaue Papier,” he reiterated, casting a haunted look over his shoulder. On its return that look fell in with some photographs of paintings lying on the table.
“Whose pictures are these?” asked Insel, immediately collected, and staring at each in turn with entire attention. “Who could have done these?”
“They are mine.”
“You are an extraordinarily gifted woman,” he said, still staring at them. “Oh, how I wish I could read your book.”
“It’s not like those pictures,” I laughed and told him their brief history.
“ ‘Those’ are my ‘last exhibition’ cancelled the moment the dealer set eyes on them.”
“Good God,” muttered Insel under his breath.
“I felt, if I were to go back, begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation.”
I did not know this as yet, but the man seated before me holding a photo in his somewhat invalid hand had done this very thing — visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape. But with a male difference.
Well, it turned out that the blue paper was a summons for rent involving the evacuation of his studio.
Insel’s system in such emergency was this:
Never to pay. To work himself into an individualistic kind of epilepsy whenever served with a summons or notified to appear in court to explain why the money was not forthcoming. Computing illusory accounts to find the exact sum he could promise to pay by a certain date, knowing full well he would not be able to pay anything at all, in order to scare himself into fits awaiting the fatal appointment.
Now one could watch him following the path of pursuit at an easy canter, having proved he had something definite to flee from.
His role was helplessness personified. So here he was without a roof. In spite of the ceiling a pitiless rain seemed to be falling upon him already.
Whenever I have seen poor people asleep on stone seats in the snow, like complementary colors in the eyes, there arise in my mind unused ballrooms and vacationers’ apartments whose central heating warms a swarming absence. To the pure logician this association of ideas might suggest a possible trans-occupation of cubic space, while mere experience will prove that the least of being alive is transacted in space, so much does sheer individuality exceed it; that providing a refuge for a single castaway brings results more catastrophic than a state of siege.
So I kept saying to myself, “Remember, you don’t care a damn what happens to this thin man.” While what he did was to fill the room with all men who are over-lean. And the room fell open, extending to space — as such — to remind me of my futile superposition of stone benches on ballrooms. My lips opened automatically. “Don’t be fools,” I admonished them. “Keep out of this. You’ll get me into an unnecessary jam.” In the end I must have given in, for I heard myself telling him, to my despair, he could live in my flat when I had gone to the country. “If that’s any help,” I added dubiously. “It solves half my problem,” he thanked me with appreciative warmth.
The result of this lapse of protective selfishness was days of agony. I had intended to run off to the country at once. But now — I sat looking at that apartment obsessed with the necessity of disencumbering it of personalia. The onus of trying to make up one’s mind where to begin overpowered me.
The psychic effort of retracting oneself from the creative dimension where one can remain indefinitely — like a conscious rock — immovable — in intellectual transmutation of long since absorbed actualities, while the present actuality is let to go hang — was devastating.
The contemplation of a bureau whose drawers must be emptied — the idea of some sort of classification of manuscript notes and miscellaneous papers— that in habitual jumble are easily selectable by the remembrance of their subconscious “arrangement,” the effort to concentrate on something in which one takes no interest, which is the major degradation of women, gives pain so acute that, in magnifying a plausible task to an inextricable infinity of deadly detail, the mind disintegrates. The only thing to do is to rush out of the house and forget it all. So disliking to leave one’s work in favor of some practical imperative, in begrudging the time to undertake, one wastes triple the time in being averse to thinking.
Something would have to be done about it. Fortunately, after more than a week of this paralyzing resistance, I came across a long painting overall. Its amplitude made something click in my brain. I at once became animated with that operative frenzy which succeeds to such periods of unproductive strain. Sewing up its neck and sleeves on the Singer, I obtained a corpse-like sack, and stuffing it full of scribbles I tied it up, and, throwing it into a superfluous room, locked the door on it with a sigh of relief. I was once more myself.
In the meanwhile Insel had come to take me to see one of his rare paintings in the possession of a friend who was liable to feed him at crucial moments.
In the taxi I inquired, “Was haben Sie schönes erlebt since I saw you?”
“I had two negresses at once,” he answered, all aglitter.
“Two,” I echoed anxiously. “I hope you didn’t have to pay them.”
“Oh, no,” he assured me.
“So they liked the look of you,” I teased with friendly disdain.
“Yes,” he concurred apologetically.
“And — was it nice?”
“Well,” he reflected, “I thought it was going to be nice. And now the trouble is to get rid of them. And what have you erlebt?” he commented.
“Not quite so much—anyhow.”
I saw the picture. Its various forms, at once embryonic and precocious, being half-evolved and of degenerate purpose, were overgrown with a hair that never grew anywhere else — it was so fine. And when our host had gone out of the room Insel stared at it amazed. His face became rigid with incredulity. “I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful,” he murmured. “How did I do it?” he begged himself to explain.
When we got out on the street again I walked some paces off parallel to him in order to observe him. Adverse remarks with ordinary men it is politic to keep to oneself, while to withhold one’s comments from Insel would have appeared impolite. His very personality taking the form of a question mark, it would have shown a lack of perspicacity when intentionally confronted with a self-composed conundrum, not to attempt unobserved, the intriguer, underrated.
Curiosity he constrained to stand off to take his measure, mentality, to pivot him for noting whether there were any creases in his aural suit. As those who are of the body, whom other bodies have traffic with, slap each other on the back, with Insel intercourse depended on putting out feelers among the loose matter of psychologic nebulae.
“You walk so weirdly,” I said. “Are you one of those surrealists who have taken up black magic?”