While the Liaison Officer is reading the last few sentences a bell starts to ring, at first distantly, becoming louder and more insistent as the dream grows correspondingly more transparent. Finally he is seen closing his book, preparing to remove his halo, laughing spectrally for an instant, before he dissolves altogether with the disrupted dream.
NOW I understood why I had to prevent the day world from getting real. I saw that my instinct about this was a true one. As my eyes grew more discerning, I recognized my enemy’s face and I was afraid, seeing there a danger that one day might destroy me.
Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.
TRUTH, it’s everything. The man who said, What is truth? certainly touched on a big subject. The truth of the matter is that there’s far too much truth in the world. The world, from whichever point you observe it, is altogether too full of truth. It isn’t easy to recognize this truth in the first place, but it’s impossible ever to ignore it once it’s been grasped.
Every single possibility or impossibility is true somewhere to someone at some time. It’s true that the earth is as round as an orange and as flat as a pancake. It’s true that the wicked island goddess Rangda is a good goddess when she takes off her mask. Black magic on top, white magic underneath. That proves that black’s white, doesn’t it?
It’s true that the idea of America is a bright and shining thing in the mind. It’s true that the idea of America is a crude and brutal land inhabited by adolescents and gangsters.
Defeatism’s true; war’s true. So’s idealism and the hope of a better society. You pay your money and you take your choice. Civilization’s gone down the drain. Utopia’s just round the comer.
It’s true that civilization marches on: atomic energy plus universal war. The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah; H.M.V. recording. That’s a truth, although universal war. There’s the truth that you go to bed with and the truth that wakes you up at three o’clock in the morning when the tigers are jumping up and down on the roof and eternity is flapping at the earth like somebody shaking a rug. There’s the truth of loving and hating, being an extrovert and an introvert, a success and a failure, travelling all over the world, living your whole life in one place, having security, accepting all risks. Then there’s the truth that you find with the dirty glasses stacked in the sink. That’s a different sort of truth.
Books continue to be written in one truth and read in another. The radio announces various kinds of truth to suit every listener. Atomic warfare is true and so is the Sermon on the Mount. Truth is everywhere, in everything, all the time. That’s why it’s true. It’s true that all this is obvious and has been said often before. That truth’s as true as any other truth too.
The artist paints his picture to suit himself or his client. The artist. Yes, well, let’s have a look at him now.
The artist. Traditional with beard, corduroys, big black hat, bohemian scarf. Or, if you prefer it that way, elegantly turned out in a thirty-guinea suit tailored by Simpson, Simpson, Simpson & Simpson of Savile Row. Anyhow, the artist. As a young man. Full of enthusiasm and theories and alcohol and amours. As an old man. Successful, and respectfully badgered by publishers for autobiography: or nondescript and obscure. Or forty and frustrated and amused-not-so-amused-by-it-all. The artist, anyway.
He turns his back upon Fitzroy Square and walks south down Charlotte Street with his slouching or affected, or jaunty or casual, or alert or pompous, or resigned or aggressive, or indifferent or weary step. Past the art dealers and the window full of rubber devices; past the delicatessen and the tobacconists and the sensational news placards (if not cricket results must be death and destruction tall on the placards); past the cheap restaurants, past the dirty curly-haired kids playing hopscotch. Past the dead tower (dead as all the dead days, Oxford or else Montmartre; dead ones, you who were with us in the ships at Mylæ, who had amaranth breath, who had death in the veins, dead living before the world died; dying now no longer); past the fabricators of steel candelabra.
Into Geo. Rowney & Co’s. Or Winsor & Newton Ltd., Rathbone Place. It’s really quite immaterial which because he can get any material that he wants in the way of material at either of them. Unless of course he prefers the products of M. Lefranc, in which case he may have to walk a little bit farther or maybe not if the truth were known.
As a matter of fact it isn’t anything in the paint line that he’s after just now. Not water colour or oil, artist’s or student’s or decorator’s, in any language whatever; so it’s simply a waste of breath to offer him deep ultramarine, outremer fonce, oltremare scuro, ultramar obscuro, etc.
What interests him today is a good large sheet of Whatman paper with a fairly rough surface and not tinted any colour at alclass="underline" which he fastens upon the skyline with four drawing pins, punaises or thumbtacks, according to the country he’s in at the moment: and proceeds to apply a fast wash which runs down in a double-toothed dragon’s back of black trees ridging steep foot-hills, iron-black mountains behind, down to the bottomless cañon of black-green water. A sombre landscape eventuates, worked out in blacks and greys and the very gloomiest shades of viridian. A scowling sky, ominous mountains, water cold, still and solid-looking as ice, trackless fir forests, the fine spray from the gigantic waterfalls fuming slowly like ectoplasm. No sign of life, no living creature visible anywhere. Only the forbidding and desolate silence, deathliness, of this mountainous far-off region. Till suddenly bursting from the high crags, soaring and planing above the highest pinnacles, two great birds, eagles most probably, swoop together into an extraordinary and desperate aerial encounter; plunging down headlong together, and all the time reciprocally involved, diving through a thousand feet of pure frozen emptiness, righting themselves, it seems miraculously, at the very last moment before crashing into the water, to glide interlocked over the surface, without effort, without the faintest perceptible winging, at the culmination of their appalling love flight.
With a dégagé flip of the palette knife the paper’s off and making way for a clean sheet. This time the artist has changed his style. No more romantic gloom, no more melodramatics. This time it’s a street scene that’s delineated; or rather, a part of a street scene, a shop window, a toy shop window to be precise, with a Noah’s ark in the middle. Up the gangway the animals troop, there isn’t an odd one among them, everything’s in perfect order, not a single mistake, no two of the same sex, not even the earthworms, though heaven knows one might easily make a slip. Last of all Mr. and Mrs. Noah shoulder to shoulder and carrying between them a pair of huge indescent shells stuck together like jujubes. In they go, the doors slam, Gabriel sounds his horn, the lady evangelist with gold voice and armour-plated bosom breaks a bottle of champagne over the bows to complete the launching. Don’t deplore the extravagance, friends. Replenishing the earth is no picnic, and it wasn’t the best champagne anyway.
Not the incomparable Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon Cuvée of 1921; or the great Lanson of that same year; or the magnificent Moet & Chandon Imperial Crown English Market. Not even one of the 1928s; such as a Perrier Jouet, or a Pommery & Greno, or a Bollinger, or a Krug, or an Ernest Irroy, or a Pol Roger, or a Clicquot Dry England, or a Heidsieck Monopole.
Don’t worry, folks, there’s plenty more where that came from, could be magnums, could be jeroboams. The fashionable wedding breakfast’s overflowing with gold-necked bottles in coolers, with orchids and caviare and diamonds and pearls and the creations of the most exclusive-expensive couturiers and the perfumes of a royal prince. Don’t ask awkward questions, comrades. Don’t bring all that up again now. We’ve got to increase the population somehow, haven’t we? Otherwise how are we going to keep on fighting everyone everywhere all the time?