I said nothing of the kind. Because firstly it was not true, and secondly, it might inspire in him a worse obsession; for one thing one feared as above all else menacing Insel was some climax in which his depredatory radioactivity must inevitably give out.
So all I said was “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” smiled Insel, his bittersweet stare both dazed and stoic, “Danke für alles—Thanks for everything.”
VISITATION
I
In the organic continuity of family life, one is under the earth caught among bare roots of imperceptible plants whose flowers lean out smiling toward the solar stimulation of a heterogeneous society.
II
Women particularly — lose their lovely faces in private — so much so that it is only in the occasional hazard of a party one may gauge the effect of creatures, one has actually in some remote biological process given birth to.
III
Alda who, in a crowd, caused me to blink as at the too near approach of a brilliant star—
IV
totally extinguished on her filial visits. Her face almost blotched with a fundamental erosion my essence produced in her — developed a kind of set jowl. As she sat down before me she would clutch that soft white fist. I watched it grow rosy as it squeezed out the inadvertible tide of my futility.
“Aaron,” she announced, “doesn’t see why he should give you that hundred dollars”—and with that heinous crow I seemed to call up from the depths of so many of my intimates—“Your book!” she sneered, “It’s an excuse ___ to get money out of us!”
V
“You’re no good — never have been any good—” This blank truth struck me with the finality of unconsciousness. It was from very far away in time & space I heard her aggravation hollow out a course for my second childhood.
“You wanted the business — we gave you the business — You wanted an apartment — we gave you the apartment and you sell it for nothing & come over here!”
“But Aaron told me to sell it at that price — —”
VI
I expostulated.
“Pooh — he was drunk,” Alda retorted in a streak of decision.
It is the reverse of enlightenment to see oneself ‘in reality’. Of the image & likeness that forms our inexpressible Being — in the metamorphosis of passing through other brains — all that appears to our companions is a chimney sweep.
VII
As she drew to a close, taunting me with my “painting _ _ _ that idleness where other artists prepared a whole exhibition in two months,” Fact dilated for me. Alda’s recriminations were identical with mine of myself. Incipient in my mother’s womb their transcription effacing time in me they now reverberated from the lipsticked mouth of a child I loved.
VIIA
My year of psychic discipline of those recriminations had gone for naught. Returned, they dragged my frightened ears even in the direction of the grave.
VIII
“I can proove it” _ _ _ _ Alda was babbling her way to the door “with your awful belly-aching letters _ _ _ proove it to anybody. I’ve kept them all.”
IX
Soon my breath grew regular again. “Now tell me,” I asked Sofia who had been present—“am I a disgruntled old nitwit who imagines monstrous things being said to her _ _ or did you hear what I heard?”
“I heard,” Sofia answered, “You imagined nothing”—
then with a flat neutrality—“she intended to be cruel __ _ _ _ _ So what? Do you think it’s exceptional that a daughter should hate her mother—”
X
Sofia, after that prolonged séance with her make-up which condenses woman’s life, returned in her hat & coat.
— “Shan’t be back this evening.”
“Then would you buy me a sandwich there’s nothing to eat.”
“No time”—she objected—
Bewildered, I reminded her she had asked to housekeep for me—
XI
“I have no intention of doing so — you’re a beastly nuisance.”
“But Sofia — I don’t understand. You begged me to come—”
“I had to have you here — to be able to get off on you all I dared not ‘get off’ on Alda __ __ I’m scared of her,” she smiled engagingly.
XII
I also smiled as she left me alone. Intellectually it was refreshing, this ability of hers to express unabashed exactly what she felt with an honesty unveiling the ego. Ignoring distinctions between thee & me — she was with
XIII
precise calculation equally unbiased about the (rare) unpleasant or unfair reports of her made by other people.
XIV
Nevertheless my pain, itself behaving like an insupportable hunger, became grotesque when coupled with normal appetite, whereas, should I venture outside the cold would cleave it with a super-phenomenal blade.
XV
I ate a pat of butter & some dry corn-flakes left in the kitchen, then sickeningly relapsed to the depths of the divan. The pain stood out sharply as if in spite of the dim amber lamps it cast the impenetrable shadow of the gloomy sitting room.
XVI
I had lain there for a long while alternating that halfhearted squirm one opposes to agony & that unwilling patience imposed by agony, when, all at once the compact silence became curiously volatile. Drawn from my couch, I rose erect, walking, so far did my head turn sideways, rather like a crab. As if again I must ‘take stock’ of someone as I went my way.
XVII
There was no mistaking this ecclesiastic ‘current’. Here was my drug addict; divested of those shreds of flesh, easily as an aria relayed across the Atlantic, a recognisable ‘invisibility’ come to visit me.
XVIII
As an automaton I returned his salute, with the same ecstatic, friendly yet clerical benediction whose significance I realised, as I inclined in that direction, to be our mutual forgiveness. For his dope-ring duplicity? My written account of him?
XIX
His ‘presence’, conveying a solemn hilarity, declared in my brain “Ess ist doch nicht schlimm genüg __ _ _ Nothing they can do to you is bad enough _ _ _ _ you’re a revenge on your unfair advantage __ _ _ they cannot see what we see.”
And the pain lay dead among the shadows.
XX
This reminder of the strange attributes of the drug fiend renewed my curiosity as to the major factor in the human make-up.
Man’s dynamism.
According to my experience in Geneva the force that drives us is of incalculable voltage conducted by the spinal column in the manner of a lightening rod.
XXI
If, as I suspect, we have our existence in an intelligential ether this force [flux] of life conveys to us not only our animation but also our intellectual concepts.
[MISSING XXI A]
XXII
There are two modes in meditation, one in which the intellect functions with supernormal rapidity; one in which eased of even the normal staccato it slows down to the tempo of a prevalent wisdom at peace.