The “Visitation” presents Insel in terms that are at once familiar and significantly developed from his characterization in the novel. Imagery associated with light, divinity, electricity, technology, the manipulation of time, healing and doubling are carried over from Insel. Here, as before, peculiar powers are ascribed to his eyes. Some concepts relating to the pineal gland and “blind back”—charged though they are with intertextual allusions — are less immediately intelligible. The Insel of the “Visitation” is understood by the narrator to have undergone a further phase of evolution since his last appearance in the novel. While this advancement augments his powers, it also makes him vulnerable to explosion. By projecting himself into New York, Insel risks being dynamited with his “own force.” In addition to the changes undergone by Insel, a major transformation is seen to have taken place in the narrator’s perception of him. Whereas, in the novel, she shies from the suggestion that Insel’s dissipation might, after all, be a product of morphine addiction, the narrator of the “Visitation” unshrinkingly salutes the revenant as “my drug addict.”
Prior to addressing the reverberations of that revelation, I want to plot the lines by which the Insel who manifests so unexpectedly in Manhattan might be related to his characterization in the novel. In both book and addendum, Insel is figured as a semi-divine entity. In spite of his many unsavoury attributes (including lustfulness, mendacity, unproductivity and criminality) he retains a paradoxically angelic aura of sanctity. Repeatedly associated, in the novel, with an “especial clarity of the light” (this page), Insel’s status as otherworldly “man-of light” is indexed to the degree of his material tangibility. Having arrived, in the “Visitation,” at a state of absolute immateriality, he is perceived to hang from the “cosmic consciousness by a ring of light.”
Among the most striking of Insel’s attributes in the novel is his capacity to generate what he calls his Strahlen, or rays. A curious amalgam of supernatural, spiritual and corporeal elements, these rays are generated by, and temporarily obscure, the revolting appearance of his flesh. In Insel, the eponymous anti-hero’s degree of fleshliness fluctuates constantly. Watching him swing between extremes of embodiment and immateriality, Jones comes to associate these fluctuations with the waxing and waning of his Strahlen. The physical environment of those in range of his rays is repeatedly seen to alter itself in sympathy with Insel’s state of mind. Constituting a sort of fluid ephemeral exoskeleton, these rays provide the infrastructure for the psychic bridge between Insel and Mrs. Jones. These magnetic rays also possess capacities for healing; they nullify “the lightning hand of pain” (this page).
Insel retains this function as “magnetic healer” in the “Visitation.” Indeed, there inheres a suggestion in the opening fragments that the narrator’s ailment — which eventually “turned out to be a duodenal ulcer” (this page) — may have somehow summoned the surrealist spirit to her side. Upon Insel’s arrival, “the pain lay dead among the shadows”; both physical and emotional suffering are immediately salved. As Carolyn Burke, Loy’s biographer, notes, the author received a corresponding ulcer diagnosis in 1940. A psychosomatic explanation is posited by the author for the incidence of this longterm complaint. In “Islands in the Air” and the short essay, “Tuning in on the Atom Bomb,” Loy associates the ulcer with atmospheres of culpability and condemnation, and with the operation of a pernicious internalized “Voice.” A remnant of her mother’s habitual recriminations, this “Voice” was incorporated into her own psyche in childhood and persists even into her own motherhood. Given Loy’s interest in psychoanalysis, and her infamously troubled relationship with her mother, it bears highlighting that the “Visitation” pushes the role of ulcer-trigger onto the narrator’s daughter.
In the poem, “Evolution,” Loy marvels at Nature’s progressive improvement of “increasingly/complex organisms/streamlined for survival,” asking, at the end of the poem:
“what, in infinitude,
will be our contour,
our density,
our potency?”
Insel, as he appears in the “Visitation,” is the disembodiment of these speculations. With its images of prototypical growth and musings about man’s potential for future evolution, the novel prepares us for Insel’s reappearance, in the “Visitation,” as a new and improved version of himself. While the Insel of the novel remains a fundamentally corporeal being who absorbs and exudes electricity, the Insel of the “Visitation” is entirely, fleshlessly electric. Where once Jones was astonished at the extent of his arm’s reach (this page), the evolved Insel of the “Visitation” reaches across continents. In her dialogic essay “Mi & Lo,” Loy suggests that “a man aware of the fourth dimension, if enclosed within a room without exits, could get out of the room.” In the “Visitation,” Insel realizes this potential.
In Insel, Jones wondered whether her pet Surrealist was somehow capable of existing in two states at once. In the “Visitation,” she clearly perceives him as an innately binary construct. Fed by an internal circulatory system, he is supported by a quasi-internalised, exo-skeletal “phosphorescent circulation.” This inconstant layer constitutes the aura glimpsed in the novel. A further comparison is made here between the nature of the normal man, in whom “good & evil are proportionately mixed,” and that of the drug addict, in whom these opposites alternate. The description of Insel’s “amazing dédoublement” is perhaps the most obscure component of the “Visitation.” Building on the novel’s frequent allusions to doublings, halvings and bisectionalities, Loy suggests that further evolution has enabled the surrealist artist, parthenogenetically, to split. By formulating his own simulacrum, Insel can exist bodily in Europe and spiritually in America.
Although, in “History of Religion and Eros,” Loy had proposed that a “mystic” might, through training, gain control over atomic and electronic capabilities already latent within him, here it is the psychotropically enhanced surrealist artist who performs this feat. In the “Visitation” ’s depiction of how Insel achieves “the electronic transfer of his person through space” (“History of Religion and Eros”), Loy employs a number of highly elusive concepts. The genealogy of her startling image of the spinal column acting as conductor for a dynamizing life-force of immense voltage can be traced through “Mi & Lo” and the short story “Incident.” The “gland” which Insel suspects of enabling “the penetration of his mind by an extra-luminous radience” is, we can adduce from Loy’s wider oeuvre, the pineal gland. More mystical than medical, Loy’s notion of the pineal gland owes much more to the writings of Blavatsky than Bataille. The equally strange image of the “blind back” recurs in “Mi & Lo” and “The Child and the Parent.” A sort of psychic stopper which exists forever in the past, the blind back shuts off the ordinary human body from an infinite “cosmic consciousness.” It is “the shutter on the fourth dimension” which blocks off our entrance into that ordinarily unavailable zone (“Mi & Lo”). In the novel, Insel faces his blind back towards the future, thereby perverting this obstructive function (this page). Freed from the tri-dimensional incarceration that is the lot of the common man, the surrealist genius runs rampant in an invaded fourth dimension. This, we are given to understand, is how the “Visitation” came to pass.