THE LESS HE SEEMED TO BE “THERE,” THE MORE HE spilled into the unknown, the more clearly I apprehended him, whereas Insel himself seemed ever to be seeking a reduction of focus through which to penetrate into the real world.
Suddenly he bowed his head over me in a wracking attentiveness. He had found such a focus. Darting, his constricted fingers cleaved to a white hair of my head which had fallen on my coat, he made a ritual of offering it to my eyes.
“Je suis la ruine féerique,” I trilled in vanity.
“Ah, yes,” sighed Insel, as I translated, churning me with his eyes into the colorless vapors of his creation.
The cloth of my coat, a FANTAISIE, was sewn with lacquered red setae—wisps, scarcely attached, which caught the light, and all through the evening unusual manifestations of consciousness occurring outside the Lutetia were punctuated by Insel’s staccato spoliation of that hairy cloth. He could not desist. Like an adult elf insanely delousing a mortal, whenever I laughingly reprimanded him for ruining my coat, with an acrid cluck of refutation he would show me what he had instantly plucked from the cloth—it was always a white hair— He did not trouble to contradict me—the evidence was clinching— But in the end the side of my coat sitting next to him was bare of all its fancy setae.
In accordance with the rules of sympathetic magic, so long concealing my one fallen hair in his palm augmented Insel’s influence over me. An influence which, rather than having submitted to it, I purposely invaded, so urgent was my premonition of some treasure he contained. His voice now setting in a glowing duskiness haunted me with wonder as to where I had heard it before—
“Black as was the stain on my name—,” I listened to Insel intoning as if he were celebrating mass, “even so white would I wash it in glory—.”
Rising for a moment from the fantastic shallows of his cerebral proximity to my normal level, “This man is fearfully banal,” I said to myself, discerning in his confidences the prim hypocrisy of a wastrel bamboozling the patroness of some charitable institution. Any such patroness would have cried for help should she receive him as he was at present plunged in the depths of a subverted exaltation, so awesomely he stressed his lonely agony, his long starvation, the incidentless introspection of that enjailed jewel, his artist spirit. As for me, the fundamental lacuna in my experience was being “stopped up” with his moral man. The pattern held out to my early ethical life. The man who stones. He who unsuspectingly lingers in the world subconscious.
I did not care whom he bamboozled. Slipping back into his sensitized zone, I swallowed his platitudes gratefully. So seldom had I come across anything sufficiently condensed to satisfy my craving for “potted absolute.” This man sufficed me as representing all the hungry errantry of the human race.
“What are you trying to be anyhow?” I asked bemused. “La faim qui rode autour des palaces?”
A sound of anguish was hovering above us but I scarcely registered it listening to his quiet soliloquy in reverence for the buried aspiration whence sprung the weedy heroism of his pretence.
“Dolefully trite in his insincerity,” my common sense intervened.
“Inflexible is his moral will,” countered the underside of my mentality which drawing comparisons to sociologists’ deceptions in criminal reform preferred to remain impressed.
“Der edler Mensch,” it breathed devoutly, “The noble creature.”
Still looking so extraordinarily distinguished, Insel was illustrating a society by means of an empty plate, a diaphragm reducing the world to a white spot.
“There are you—” pointing the tip of his nose toward the center—a comical almost four-cornered tip of a nose with the sudden sharpness of a (square tool, the name of which I have forgotten), “and here am I—on the outside—peeping over the edge at you,” he said as he crept his fingers in their incipient movement up from under the rim.
I was disappointed. One thing about Insel that had struck me was this sporadic distinction I had often been “accused” of which I had always been eager to discover in anyone else who, like myself, had “popped up” from nowhere at all—as if all my life I had lacked a crony of my “own class.”
I could not point this out. It would upset Insel’s self-abasement which gave him some mysterious satisfaction—as of an Olympian in masquerade—
That sound above, once it hooked up with perception, became a squirling wail—soaring over the driving racket of the street corner.
“Do you hear?” asked Insel, “it’s been going on for quite a while—in an aerial invasion people would sit on at their cafe tables just as we have done. Air raids,” he shuddered, shrinking into himself, “and the French so proud of their Maginot Line. They have forgotten their Stavisky was mixed up with it—Sugar,” beamed Insel, a gentle delirium stealing into his eyes, “tons and tons of sugar poured into the foundations of the Maginot Line.”
“Sugar’s rather expensive,” I ventured.
“Nevertheless,” averred Insel, and I felt it might be perilous to contradict him.
His chuckle petered out as the siren insinuating to his brain the menace of a war which would cut off any chuckling, transformed it to a shudder.
Insel trembled with the cowardice of those whose instinct being to create even an iota, appear to slink into a corner before the heroic of destructive intent. This man, who, when he turned his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great intensity of the hypnotist but with a force of concentration reaching inward and outward as if he must first subject himself to his own mysterious influence, this man in his terror had dropped from his own magnetic “line” soft as a larva. He cowered against the air. Inasmuch as it concerned him, war was not only imminent—he was already ripped open by its plough of anguish. Actually, he was in a fix—for, in the “event” being a German, here he was an enemy, whereas if he could return to Germany, there he was Kultur Bolshewik.
Man Ray came up and sat with us and went away. Tables filled and emptied. The dust grew denser and then lay down before the oncoming night.
I once heard somebody express surprise that instead of following it onward one should not take a cut across Time to secure a moment which, stretching out in line with oneself, would last indefinitely.
Time that evening lightly came to rest—an unburdened nomad let its three faces linger; the future and the past were with me at present: the whole of time—there was no more pursuing it, losing it, regretting it—while I sat almost shoulder to shoulder with this virtual stranger living the longest period of my life.
It is almost impossible to recover the sequence or the veritable simultaneity of the states of consciousness one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of living in or rather of being surrounded by an arid aquarium—filled with, not water, but a dim transparency: the procreational chaotic vapor in which all things may begin to grow.
Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half formulated concepts that drifted through his mind: glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where in the bottom of slumber an immobile oncome of elementals formed of a submarine snow, and some aflicker, like drowned diamonds blew out their rudimentary bellies—almost protruded foetal arms over all an aimless baton of inaudible orchestra—a colorless water-plant growing the stumpy battlements of a castle in a game of chess waved in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder—.
Projected effigies of Insel and myself insorcellated flotsam—never having left any land—never to arrive at any shore—static in an unsuspected magnitude of being alive in the “light of the eye” dilated to an all enclosing halo of unanalyzable insight, where wonder is its own revelation.
Even in the world of reality Insel’s ideation was an introvert exploration of a brilliancy beneath his skull, an ever-crescent clarity which in the form of inspiration ripens creative fruit. But in him by reason of some interference I could not define, aborted as the introduction to an idea.
“I can see right into these people,” he asserted, indicating the crowd gathered around the Hotel. “I know exactly what they are; I know what they do.”
And that was all.
As if satisfied by his sense of insight, he needed not to perceive anything specifically, his mind exposed these people as brightly illuminated “whats.” A reaction he accepted for entire comprehension.
His conceptions were like seeds fallen upon an iron girder. I noticed that I received them very much in the guise of photographic negatives so hollow and dusky they became in transmission, vaguely accentuated with inverted light—.
Thus, as he unfolded his ardent yearning to flee to New York from a threatening war, the transparencies his presence superposed on the living scene became crowded with flimsy skyscrapers. Up from among their floating foundations swam misty negresses, their limbs spread out at inviting angles, like starfish through the mirage of windows plunging in fathomless pools their reflections.
But this is not all that happened with him. The visions emitted by the organism of this truly congenital surrealist were only a wasted pollen drifting off from the nuclear flower of his identity. For my first unaccountable conclusion that he was “the most delicate—soul,” my fascinated impression of his emergence from a goddess’ embrace, the dove that, when he had been still for a while would seem to take his place, were conceptions fully justified by the lovely equilibrium his companionship conveyed to me. It was as if for an exceeding moment I could, rising above the distortion of life, hold inexpressible communion with Insel, where his spirit had no flaw.
Within range of the crystalline of his eyes become so brightly brittle, again I experienced the profound relief of the acute celerity rhythm that perpetually disintegrated me as I got out of watching a film in slow motion.
Imagining aloud the explorative kick of roaming the mountainous blocks of Manhattan “forever in New York—,” Insel chanted, “we could have such a wonderful time together.” He was not speaking. He was praying.
Idly I wondered with what he was communicating, when suddenly I felt myself sag; become so spineless, so raw—. I, a red island with its shores of suet, the most dependable substance in an aquarium-America not so very much dimmer than the Paris cars threading through it in the Rue de Sèvres.
I did not find it extraordinary that my condition as an undiminishable steak should make me feel almost sublime, or that the man intensely leaning towards me should pray to it.
There was another element in his unbelievable magnetism of recoil. His air of friability warning off contact lest he crumble. Not only was he preposterously emaciated, but even as his gravity seemed lightened, his body—what was left of it—seemed less ponderable than it should have been. Insel was made of extremely diaphanous stuff. Between the shrunken contour of his present volume his original “serial mold” was filled in with some intangible aural matter remaining in place despite his anatomical shrinkage. An aura that enveloped him with an extra external sensibility.
To investigate, I tapped him lightly on the arm in drawing his attention—and actually in a tenuous way I did feel my hand pass through “something.” The surface of his cloth sleeve, like a stiff sieve, was letting that something through. The effect on Insel was unforeseeable—jerking his face over his shoulder, he twitched away from my fingers with the acid sneer of a wounded feline. This might be merely a reflex of physical repulsion to myself, so later I repeated the gesture, but as if my hand in its first contact had got coated with the psychic exudence it would seem there was no longer any hurt in it. He was calm under my touch.