“They” had hardly uttered the words through “her”, when “he” responded by summoning “them” to make an inventory of the broken pieces, skin as well as wood, flung amidst the shattered telephone wires distended upon the floor. He had gone to great pains and expense, she recalled, to assemble these — and it seemed now, in the end, a sovereign principle that they should appear to endure and incorporate her features with each “dead” figure of the past which swung into new account and life.
“What do I mean by phenomenon? The hole in the monument, that’s what I mean.” He paused. She waited, tense. He could be so shattering, so severe. “There’s an ungraspable scale to nature and appearance. Remember that when you come to tackle the mess we’ve made of our economic affairs. In fact it was always beyond our control, even when the whole collection we’d scraped together seemed most obedient in relays of supply and demand.”
She was stung by the memory of crises they had suffered, some of which he had precipitated by temperamental recklessness. “But I don’t see,” she cried. “I don’t understand why you profess to care at one moment — and still say in the same breath it doesn’t matter at all. Are you saying that there are hidden forces …?” She was lost. She listened for the lightning rustle of vessel and “log”-book. But his or their reply was harsh as stone, “no. I never said that.”
“What then?” she pleaded.
“Appearances cannot be grasped in their entirety. That’s all I said. Not a word about hidden forces. Let me put it this way — every commission of fact involves an omission of intensity.” He paused. She waited. “Let me put it in still another way—execute something, quite naturally or unnaturally, as one imagines, isolate something in order to examine it properly, as one thinks, and one arrests — or appears to arrest — a web of processes. There’s always this “negative” race with or against something in which one is involved from beginning to end and all the way back again. And one can never keep dead in step. A little bit ahead, who knows (even this clairvoyant leap one may appear to accomplish), or a little bit behind. But never dead in step. Every apparent execution of the swift runner of life involves a loss in true pace and intensity or flight, even if it seems but a shade this way or that. And it is this fluid distinction which turns ultimately into the annihilation of forced premises. Herein lies an explosive and incalculable web upon which and out of which emerges the “equal” stride and fiction of reality.”
He stopped as if he had indeed turned upon her — in her pursuit of him — caught her and felled her to the ground in order to demonstrate to her, beyond a shadow of doubt, the truth of illusion — a marriage to the nemesis of freedom. She in turn sought to grind him into her — the racing pinnacle or beginning of things he had operated upon until all grew fanatical and still and strange. Watchman. THIEF, Sliced in half … antagonistic mating.
THREE. Fruit of the Lips
The “gap” which remained between them (as between doctor and patient, husband and wife, lover and mistress) made her cry on awaking upon the knife-edge of illusion, anaesthesia, solid bliss. She was blind. Yet she could see “his” lips move to address the apple of his eye. Eyeball of curious wood painted green stars and red. She remembered how he had fiercely cut and chiselled … their Universe…. Globe…. She flung it at him now across the room. Violent storm. He was on the point of leaving her. Was it ten years or twenty ago? Sunset. Blood. Green and red.
“Why don’t you leave me and go?” she cried. “You’ve done your worst. Now you stand there like a dolt … idiot. Dress it up as you like: the truth is — you revolve this way and that … vacillate. Always on the move. Why can’t you make up your mind whether you want to stay or go? I know what I want: security, marriage, a home. Not just roaming like your pupil to the ends of the earth. No use, I tell you. Can’t live like that any more. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? For the last time: make up your mind….”
Susan was overwhelmed by her own outcry. It had been a brutal year for her. Still she was mad to speak like that. And in fact it sounded incredibly strange in her own ears after all this time (moments or years?) as if it had never occurred save as a dream centuries old. The last straw…. And when she realized he had indeed taken her at her word and gone, she felt she had died in truth within “his” operating theatre — blown to bits, sky-high. The end of the world. The shattering of the globe they once possessed. Why had she — without thinking — flung it at him? All because of one fantastic theory of freedom which he spouted at her until it triggered off an accumulative burden … resentment … pride. Ironic feud. One always read too much into everything at a particular moment. For what remained after each explosion of habit or circumstance was never an identical character within the present and past.
Was it ten years or twenty ago one relationship had died and another begun? In our end is our beginning. Phenomenon of nature. She flung the last burning straw at him out of the declining sun — bonfire of memory. It illuminated shred and circumstance — his departure all over again. He appeared once more to seize the glistening dying fury of recollection within her like a ball in space (though how could she swear it was truly so?): in that instant of recall her eyes splintered. Spiritual horizon. Shower of sparks. OPERATION SUCCESSFUL. Theatre of darkness. Black. His face grew BLACK but not with clinical rage (as she had dreamt) but with irony and submission … irony of fate … submission…. One must not read too much into the night of things. She rounded upon him like all the midnight paradoxical furies of old: there was nothing she wanted to save to clasp him gently to her breast. Let him stay in spite of the bitterness and freedom of option she thrust at him. The truth was she wanted him to stay; not go. She wanted to bind him to her in spite of anything spoken to the contrary. How could he take her literally at her word? How could he dare to involve her (and dissolve all her craft of subtle persuasion) in one action of destiny — ultimatum of choice, motive sphere, dialectic of the vortex?
She cried to him of an essential treaty of sensibility they shared he could never break however far he professed he was at liberty to go. And yet in abandoning her was he not acting to fulfil the range and depth of both precipitate choice and agreement? Was he not freeing her — as well as himself — from the burden of hidden motive (one thing openly said, another secretly meant), with each step he took which made her see the necessary life of the soul within the material cult of dismissive opinion? She was blind, but she saw this collective treaty of feud for the first unravelling time of stars upon an eyeball of wood: sensitive borderline of a fetish they shared in which every dumb particle of conviction, splintered statement and motive, combined into deed and sphere. She had actually cried to him — stay or go. And he chose to go. But she secretly intended him to stay. No wonder she saw him still in the light of one she had not truly relinquished, quicksilver of obsession, barometer residing within her. Upon which she rode — as upon his pointer or scale — since she knew, or felt she knew, that he — in spite of his open dismissal of her — secretly desired her to leave all and follow him. Broken and cemented journey around the globe. Northern Lights. Shield of the sun. Holes for eyes. Through which they broke into Orinoco. Their first journey together long ago.