The iguanodon's high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split; the brontosaurus was coming up the path.
Her husband, the diplodocus, was with her. They moved together, rhythmic twins, buoyed by the hollow assurance of the huge. She paused to tear with her lips a clump of leaf from an overhanging paleocycas. From her deliberate grace the iguanodon received the impression that she knew he was watching her. Indeed, she had long guessed his love, as had her husband. The two saurischians entered his party with the languid confidence of the specially cherished. In the teeth of the iguanodon's ironic stance, her bulk, her gorgeous size, enraptured him, swelled to fill the massive ache he carried when she was not there. She rolled outward across his senses — the dawn-pale underparts, the reticulate skin, the vast bluish muscles whose management required a second brain at the base of her spine.
Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned an orthodox business career to enter the Episcopalian seminary. This regression — as the iguanodon felt it — seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.
How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was delicate. Her facial essence seemed to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realised, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs — strange adaptation! — were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.
"Comment va le bon Dieu?"
"Ah?" The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humoured. Minutes elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.
The iguanodon insisted. "How are things in the supernatural?"
"The supernatural? I don't think that category exists in the new theology."
"N'est-ce pas? What does exist in the new theology?"
"Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith."
"Work? I had thought you had quit work."
"That's an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I've changed employers."
The iguanodon felt in the other's politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said, gnashing, "The Void pays wages?"
"Ah?"
"You mean there's a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense."
"Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I'm not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my life, I feel on the verge of finding myself."
"Yourself? That little thing? Cette petite chose? That's all you're looking for? Have you tried pain? Myself, I have found pain to be a great illuminator. Permettez-moi." The iguanodon essayed to bite the veined base of the serpentine throat lazily upheld before him; but his teeth were too specialised and could not tear flesh. He abraded his lips and tasted his own salt blood. Disoriented, crazed, he thrust one thumb deep into a yielding gray flank that hove through the smoke and chatter of the party like a dull wave. But the nerves of his victim lagged in reporting the pain, and by the time the distant head of the diplodocus was notified, the wound would have healed.
The drinks were flowing freely. The mammal crept up to him and murmured that the dry vermouth was running out.
The iguanodon told him to use the sweet. Behind the sofa the stegosauri were Indian-wrestling; each time one went over, his spinal plates raked the recently papered wall. The hypsilophoden, tipsy, perched on a bannister; the allosaurus darted forward suddenly and ceremoniously nibbled her tail. On the far side of the room, by the great slack-stringed harp, the compsognathus and the brontosaurus were talking. He was drawn to them: amazed that his wife would presume to delay the much larger creature; to insert herself, with her scrabbling nervous motions and chattering leaf-shaped teeth, into the crevices of that queenly presence. As he drew closer to them, music began. His wife said to him, "The salad is running out." He murmured to the brontosaurus, "Chère madame, voulez-vous danser avec moi?"
Her dancing was awkward, but even in this awkwardness, this ponderous stiffness, he felt the charm of her abundance. "I've been talking to your husband about religion," he told her, as they settled into the steps they could do.
"I've given up," she said. "It's such a deprivation for me and the children."
"He says he's looking for himself."
"It's so selfish," she said. "The children are teased at school."
"Come live with me."
"Can you support me?"
"No, but I would gladly sink under you."
"You're sweet."
""Je t'aime."
"Don't. Not here."
"Somewhere, then?"
"No. Nowhere. Never." With what delightful precision did her miniature mouth encompass these infinitesimal concepts!
"But I," he said, "but I lo — "
"Stop it. You embarrass me. Deliberately."
"You know what I wish? I wish all these beasts would disappear. What do we see in each other? Why do we keep getting together?"
She shrugged. "If they disappear, we will too."
"I'm not so sure. There's something about us that would survive. It's not in you and not in me but between us, where we almost meet. Some vibration, some enduring cosmic factor. Don't you feel it?"
"Let's stop. It's too painful."
"Stop dancing?"
"Stop being."
"That's a beautiful idea. Une belle idée. I will if you will."
"In time," she said;, and her fine little face precisely fitted this laconic promise; and as the summer night yielded warmth to the multiplying stars, he felt his blood sympathetically cool, and grow thunderously, fruitfully slow.
Few books today are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social 'reality'. Around us are 'pseudo events', to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not ...
What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.
(R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise)
The Fall of Frenchy Steiner
Hilary Bailey
1954 was not a year of progress. A week before Christmas I walked into the bar of the Merrie Englande in Leicester Square, my guitar in its case, my hat in my hand. Two constables were sitting on wooden stools at the counter. Their helmets turned together as I walked in. The place was badly lit by candles, hiding the run-down look but not the run-down smell of homebrew and damp rot.