P. each 90 × 30·5. The versos of the wings of a triptych; the left one with a donkey, the right one with two oxen. Ox and donkey recur in the middle panel. The latter, depicting the Adoration of the child and the rectos of the wings are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
I went back to Zaal A and stared at the two panels. A space suggested itself between them and I waited to see what would appear in the space.
Someone was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw a tall thin man with a large light-bulb-shaped bald head and those drooping oldtime-gunfighter moustaches much favoured by American television actors. From the hang of his face however I guessed him to be European, possibly Scandinavian. He seemed to be drawing himself up into his head preparatory to speaking, and as I was the only other person in the room I waited to hear what he would say.
‘Rectos no,’ he said. ‘Mmnvs? Everything is metaphor and metaphor is the only actuality. Here we have the versos of the wings of a triptych, here we have only the other sides of the missing rectos that when folded shut covered the Adoration of the child. Mmnvs. Nnvsnu rrndu.’
‘Did I understand you to say nnvsnu rrndu?’ I said.
‘Mmnvs.’
‘You’re thinking of existing?’
His head seemed to grow larger and balder and more light-bulb-shaped. ‘You observe me, sir,’ he said. ‘You observe me consistently and three-dimensionally manifesting, with aplomb, myself both as picture and sound. Do you not?’
‘I do.’
‘I revert to the tremendour of this metaphor, the other-sideness of versos without rectos and the child gone missing, out of our sight, offering only its rejection of our potential adoration.’
‘“Tremendour.” I haven’t heard that before.’
‘Tsrungh. From its otherness of place it speaks the encrustation, the palimpsest, the ultimate dialectic of what Redon called “the deep health of the black”. This is where I get my jollies; I am a creature of the deeps.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says Sight and Sound for one. They did an eight-page piece about my work: “The Unslumbering Kraken”.’
‘I’ve stopped reading Sight and Sound, I don’t think film people should be allowed near words, it’s bad for everybody.’
‘I agree completely. I speak only in pictures. With me the image is everything, carrying within it as it does the protoimage, the after-image, and the anti-image. This is why here I have come to speak to the Vermeer girl and to hear what she will say to me but alas, she is gone over the water and here I stand looking at this enchanted wood with its missing rectos and its centre that could not be held. This utters to me most powerfully.’
‘What did you want with the Vermeer girl?’
‘I’m in love with her. She is that aspect of the Mother Goddess that dominates my being, my perception, my innermost and uttermost blackness, my seminal vesicles. She is the proto-image of the femaleness of things; always have I spoken to her in the whispering of the night, in that warm and creatureful darkness where the flickering of the here-and-gone shows its little uncertain flame.’
‘Have you no shame? How can you say such things in a public place to someone you’ve never seen before? You don’t even know my name.’
‘That signifies not at all; you know my name.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘I’ve told you it: Kraken, Gösta Kraken as you know very well. Not for one moment do I believe that you’ve stopped reading Sight and Sound. From the faltering cadence of your stare I perceive that you recognize me from those many photographs of me in that publication and elsewhere. Fnss. The self-consuming antistrophe of your silence tells me that you resent my head of Orpheus swimming up the Thames.’
‘Faltering cadence of my stare! I’m not taking that from you, nor “self-consuming antistrophe” either. Don’t you come the deconstructionist with me, you ponce. I’ve never even seen your swimming head of Orpheus.’
‘Very well then, tell me your name. I can see that you will be fractally asymptotic in your resonances until we have spoken this out.’
‘My name is Herman Orff and you’ve never heard of me.’
‘Oh, but I have. Luise has mentioned you several times.’
There was an upholstered bench behind me. I sat down on it.’
‘Luise’, I said, ‘has mentioned.’
‘You. More than several times, reverberantly and with plangency.’
‘What is Luise to you?’
‘Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.’
‘Don’t roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.’
‘Seven years ago, with my sound man.’
‘What do you suppose she heard in him?’
‘Other music.’
‘And what did she ever see in you?’
‘Flickering images.’
‘Of what?’
‘It doesn’t matter, it’s the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?’
‘Luise saw all that in you, did she?’
‘It isn’t only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I’m so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman’s natural holding-on reflex.’
‘And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.’
‘Nothing is for ever.’
‘Fallok composes electronic music; I write novels; you direct films; the one after you (whom she probably left five years ago) was a sound engineer. Before Fallok she was with a man who ran a restaurant.’
‘By now it’s a computer programmer or a doctor; into the arts she came and out of the arts she has gone, vnnvvzzz. What did we do wrong?’
‘You don’t know? You don’t know what you did wrong?’
‘My behaviour was impeccable. When she was with me she moved among top-class people — film stars, composers, painters, writers; we went to all the best restaurants, we had friends with yachts and villas on the Côte d’Azur and in the Greek islands: the whole thing was conducted in the style one would expect of me.’
‘Were you faithful to her?’
‘Faithful!’ His large face leapt back as if I had hit him with a pizza. ‘Faithful! I can only be faithful to the flickering; more than that I don’t accept the moral authority of.’
‘Two years with you. I can’t understand it. I’m rotten but you’re a real creep.’
‘Were you faithful to her?’
‘No.’
‘Then why do you look at me as if you’ve just come down from the mountain with stone tablets in your hands?’
‘Because I know I’m rotten and you don’t know that you are.’
‘You make a virtue of necessity; being a self-confessed rotten you are aware of your rottenness. Being unrotten I have not such an awareness.’
‘Why don’t you flicker off and manifest your sound and picture somewhere else.’
‘You’re a very troubled person, znnzz?’
‘I can live with it.’
‘Are you certain of that?’