INTIMATELY CONFIDENTIAL ONCE MORE, INSEL was trying to disentangle before me the thousand directions. He had shown them to me previously, in answer to my asking him why he did not work although I had left him materials in my studio.
“So often at dusk I come here to stare at that white canvas,” he had told me dreamingly. “I see all the worlds I could paint upon it. But um Himmels Willen! Which one? I can create everything. Then what thing? A thousand directions are open to me, to take whichever I decide—I cannot decide.”
I had long ago worn down in contemplation of that multiplicity of direction. How far my mind had traveled; never to come to the beginning of any route. Surely, for Insel it should have been different—starting with the spectral spermatozoa that seeped from his brain through his gardening hands.
The glare in Capoulards Cafe grew dim. Insel’s brain floated up from his head, unraveled, projected its convolutions. They straightened in endless lines across a limitless canvas, a map of imminent direction. On the whole of space were only a few signboards on which grew hands, alive and beckoning.
“Of course,” I was saying, “I don’t know where you are—wherever it is is very far away. And I am just as far away. I have existed before my time.”
“How true,” said Insel.
“Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation.”
“How true,” said Insel again, devoutly.
“And by the bye,” I commented, “the sentiment of one generation is the neurosis of the next. All that stuff you have of ‘suffering for love’ is the most awful slush.”
“I know—I know,” he agreed with fervor.
—Indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of inertia, unrealizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a puddle of serum, to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficult; that volatile fungoid lichen outcrept one as one picked one’s way, grew tall until one must turn back.
My former trust in the ripening of Insel’s work had had its foundation in that very “parting of the ways” he told me he had come to, where he turned assured toward something eternally immune to his host of elementals.
It had taken so short a time for this parting of the ways to subdivide into the thousand directions. Yet even now he was rich in postponement. While that commonplace back of a woman watching for signs on his painted firmament turned in anonymous patience to this chart of unarrival.
The curtain of the sky came down and she was not there— “If the painting no longer ‘goes,’ ” Insel surprisingly was ruminating, “I shall do as you do. Write. What a profession. One carries one’s studio about with one. A sheet of paper—”
Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank of orientation faded—the thousand directions withdrew, leaving us at a destination.
Nothingness.
It was not black as night nor white as day, nor gray as death—only a nonexistent irritation as to what purposed inconsequence had led us into the illusion of ever having come into being.
The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were still there— Two unmatched arrows sprung from its meaningless center—were surrounded by a numeral halo—I had to leave Insel, it was ten to eight.