"See," he said, lifting it with a cautious yet ostentatiously off-hand gesture, "the neckband is worn ragged inside-- it's not worth it." He was cowering in some apprehension that constricted him, that even devitalized his hand. Become as the hand of a victim of infantile paralysis, it flopped over with the edge of the stuff. He had an air of shifting-- just so far-- the bandage of a wound.

Not for the first time, with Insel, I received a subliminal flash of an apostate Saint Sebastian writhing with arrows-- in such privacy, it would be indelicate to intrude upon it with whatever assistance.

On looking back, it seems inconsistent, that once the elation he inspired in me died down-- I should have continued in my obsession of conserving something very precious with an Insel changing to an incubus, playing his silly psychic tricks on his clothes-- raving of imprisonment and the gnawing of 'knochen'. It had left me with the solicitude one might have for a valued friend with whom one has been on some glorious drinking bout, when he shows up next day at a disadvantage in a particularly nasty hangover.

One last struggle with the suit-- and it turned black again. Insel must have forgotten about it.

-80-

"Breakfast," I announced.

This time Insel did not stir.

His head, although returned to normal volume scarcely indented the pillow. He was set in the perfect quadrates of a couch, having no rumple anywhere. As he lay upon it without taking contact with it, the comfortable bulges of covers tucked under a mattress sharpened to corners of trigonometric exactitude.

The smoothing systemizing vibration that straightened his surroundings, obviously did not issue from his frame, which had half-died for contributing vitality to some focus of force.

Perhaps they were transmitted by his hair. I have always presumed that hair with its electric properties will not remain unutilized in a future evolution of the brain.

His hair - what little was left - was so fine, that without amalgamating, it had the unity of surface of the horny plate with which hair furnishes the extremities in its aggregate form of a nail.

Tentatively - I touched that hair, repeating 'Breakfast' on a cheerful note - to appear as if I were patting his head to wake him up.

In a decreased microscopic degree, my fingers encountered the same onslaught as had my whole person in the corridor. A sharp crackle of inconceivably minuscule machine-guns carried to some psychic centre of my ear.

The effect was astonishing as when I had tapped him on the arm. Insel did not awaken - he turned his head as if he were pushing it up into strata of delight above him. Which on contact melted upon his face in a slow smile.

He was smiling as if the tip of the wing of an angel had fanned him.

-81-

Again, as I watched, I had the sensation of 'breaking point', an expec-
tance of a spring flying loose to whirr insanely.

His face, like stale bread smeared with his private honey, stood still.

Then it broke.

With the unforeseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging hippopotomi the
gums in their hideous defenselessness observed me-- an obscene enjoyment of
ill-will pleated his clamped lids.

His teeth had not decayed. They were worn down.

'Der Todtenkopf' hung in my tract of vision like the last of Alice in
Wonderland's Cheshire cat.

Getting in touch with Insel was the whole itinerary of Good and Evil.

In the passing away of a miasma Insel awakened. Although never much the
better for food, his temperament having relieved itself of some disproportionate
impulse in that monomaniac gape, he now seemed normalized.

It was a serene creature who began to breakfast. Whatever introspective
conflict usually engaged him, it had ceased.

"You really look rather well now. Why don't you just stay and have that
rest cure here. I'll hire Bebelle to feed you - do everything for you while
you lie down and drowse till you're quite fit. "I must get back to St. Cloud."

"Impossible," moaned Insel, instantly sagging, "I have to return to my
troubles. You do not understand. They are my life. It waits for me."

"Nonsense, you spent the night in Montparnasse in one incessant gurgle
of laughter."

"It was a hollow laughter," he intercepted, sepulchrally. Insel had
resumed his 'line' which seemed so inadequate.

Should I risk an attempt to reveal to Insel those real-essences in Insel?

-82-

Real-essences to a slight degree rationalized for my mind, they might be either the very symptoms of the so-called madness in him, or precisely the incognizable cause of his befuddlement.

"Insel," I set out determinedly, "You must get over your ugliness - it's an obsession! That's not all there is to you - you have some intrinsic quality I have never found in anyone else. It's difficult to tell you about it because I have no idea what it is. But it's something so valuable it's one's duty to keep you alive to discover its nature."

"Several alienists have offered to examine me - regularly -" said Insel, with self-complacence, "twice a week!"

"It's not pathological - only unprecedented. A kind of radio-activity you give off-- Insel," I asked puzzled, "how does the world look to you? Like an Aquarium?"

Insel looking no less puzzled than myself, I was taken aback. But I went on in the hope of striking common ground.

"It was the evening outside the Lutetia I experienced its effects. A sort of doubling of space where different selves lived different ways in different dimensions at once. Sitting on the side-walk-- floating in an Atlantic Ocean full of skyscrapers and ethereal cars. That was not particularly important - the wonder was the sense of timeless peace - of perfect happiness--"

-83-

Insel sat bolt upright in his couch and let out a thin screech like a mad cat; looking exactly as if he had caught a mouse he had watched for a long time.

"No." He wagged his poor bald head judiciously, "It cannot be - I can only love forever."

I gave one gasp - then as always when taken unawares, my mother reproved me from my subconscious - a sophisticated middle-aged woman making immodest impressions on an innocent schlosser's son.

"You misunderstand. I had thought of you as a 'Will o' the Wisp'."

Insel took no heed, he was practically licking his chops.

Quite as if it were an impulse habitual to me, I decided to slug him.

Then he began moaning again - of suffering, which one moment, he could allow me to share, and another, he refused to cause me.

"It would be too fearful for you - the Parting," he pointed out. "You see," he confided affectionately as if promising me a present, "I am going to get her back--"

A spiral craftiness wormed into his eyes as I asked, "Where is she?"

"In South Africa," he answered with some impatience, as if I should have remembered.

This girl in her role of 'only beloved' was almost as unsettled as Insel himself. Only yesterday she lived with her Lesbian in Berlin - and now "Since she left me she has married twice and borne four children." Before very long she actually split in two--

"Es war eine Schwartze und eine Blonde--"

-84-

"When was she black and blond?" I exclaimed, intrigued.

"Last night, outside the Select-- I saw at once they had fallen for me," said Insel, ignoring he had been fast asleep.

"But Insel," I laughed, "can't you remember how terribly miserable you are because you frighten the women?"

"All that is changed now," said Insel looking me over with sadistic compassion.

Quite forgetting my determination to slug him - I glowed with the satisfaction of a successful psychiatrist-- 'I have cured him of his fixed idea--' I congratulated myself--

Then with his lightening variability of mood, his eyes diluting in a difficult introspection,

"Outside the Lutetia," he pondered wonderingly. "That's funny. I had exactly the same experience."

'You couldn't', I was about to retort, 'it's not in Kafka,' but checked myself, wishing to keep him on the subject of his radiation.

"That's why I adore talking to you - why I cannot allow you to suffer for me. I know too well what suffering is." - and suddenly he threw up his head. The almost mummified chords of his throat vibrating in an ecstasy.

"Die Liebe-- wie schön -- wie schöo-o-o-n -- Love-the one beauty of Life."

He gloated with the same singing inflection with which he had been wont to celebrate steak. There is nothing else, he concluded. Evidently he was sane as any man in his therapeutic measures for saving woman from vain regret.

Without transition his fixed enchantment turned to a staggering stare.

"Dir Liebe?-- It's the strahlen!" he hooted across to me in the haunted voice of the obsessed.

"Insel," I urged, bewildered, "don't look like that. Your strahlen are

-85-

evidence of something in you-- something noble."

"So Edel--" I trilled in remembrance of my contact with that flawless spirit. But as if leaping out of himself for once to take stock of an Insel I did not know and as if what he saw was horrible, Insel took that clear, that soaring word and wrapping it in bitterness, hurled it at himself.

"So Edel," he echoed, infinitely disabused.

"At all events," I said as a pleasant jolt-- "I am going to bring you your suit. You're going to look so fine."

As I passed the table I missed the phosphorescent bone.

"Hadn't you a comb?"

"It's here," said Insel - stretching out a skeletal arm toward the floor - there stood his shoes. In one was stored the white comb. The other was stuffed with a huge white handkerchief. They were his wardrobe.

A warm appreciation stole around my heart for that adorable domesticity of the tramp, which first attracted me, when in my childhood, a clown, taking off his tattered overcoat displayed a washhandstand built into the lining.

At that moment my friend Insel was very dear to me.

Then in a sudden I realized how always, and inevitably in attempting to follow it, I must run off the track of Insel's mind-- himself unaware that nothing about him could ever stir from a so-mysteriously-appointed place, Insel had retrieved his comb 'pour se faire une beauté', awaiting my arrival with his breakfast!

With a kick of tiny annoyance at a toe of his wardrobe, "Personally, I do not admit the power of the microbe, but if you do - I fear you'll be poisoned," I warned him.

Then I gave him his suit.

-86-

When I came in again, Insel was pacing the studio in stealthy meditation. His mischievous assurance was so much his axis and at once so exteriorized that his whole implication seemed to have contracted to the finger of old fashioned comedians pressed to a nose under a crafty eyelid-- Insel was feeling so sly-- Then, going into reverse -- as it was time for him to leave, he began fiddling abstractedly with a gratitude he did not know what to do with. "You have been very good to me," he mumbled shamefacedly. "There is nothing I would not do for you-- if ever", inspired, "you have a pair of boots which need cleaning.. "

"Insel," I exclaimed encouragingly, "You needn't say things like that about yourself."

With a jerk he pulled himself out of an underlying complex.

"That was a figure of speech." And inclining towards the couch with the bowing, palm-of-the-hand-drooping, invitation with which saints in primitive pictures lead the eye to some sacred centre, "Now you be ill, and go to bed so I can nurse you," he pleaded adoringly.

I had to refuse. As I came to think of it, I wouldn't know how to be
nursed when ill.

So Insel, as if in prison or barracks, began folding up his sheets and blankets, I took a seat. With the stuff of my cape draping the chair, I felt like an emperor taking pride in a supreme buffoon.

There is no grace on earth to compare with a willowy man afflicted with levitation.

"It's pure selfishness my allowing you to do this. It's up to Bebelle - only I do so enormously enjoy your plastic geometry," I observed to Insel, who, as if fitting a label to perfection, swayed his dreary silhouette of aereal bones, against a lifted sheet bleached in the reflection of his phosphorescence.

-87-

"If you want to make a fortune" I advised him, "you should go on the Music Halls-- Have you ever heard of Baggesson - one of the geniuses of the century? He broke white plates."

"You are even more wonderful folding white things up-- "

"It would be utterly useless," Insel protested. "Nobody ever sees in me what you see in me-- "

"Well, you frighten the 'people' out of their wits, that ought to give you a hold on your audience. Of course, you'd need to rehearse - Have someone sit in the back of the theatre and tell you *where* you get your effects. You should 'come on' in the fearful clatter of an earthquake and then all you'd have to do would be to leisurely tidy it up-- I assure you you'd have the whole theatre halucinated."

When he had stacked up his covers like a deck of cards, there was still one ceremony to perform, I took him into the kitchen and gave him whatever food there was left.

Under my eyes, as he packed it up, it diminished and froze into a Chinese puzzle. The essential, he said was a minimum bulk. It did not in the least concern me that it would all be thrown away. His tying of the string was the close of a linear symphony.

Insel left with a farewell flash from his cranium and his forlorn-howl-in-the-wilderness of when shall I see you again-- Then he crept back to the door-mat and whispered shyly, "I shall explain everything to you next time."

-88-

On my way to the station I called on Mlle. Alpha. In her slacks of rust
cooled linen - her coppery hair, blown into a fresh sunburn, she appeared to
have just sailed in from a lagoon.

Her eyes like coals, continent, of their fire, were round as the eyes of
the wooden negresses supporting the violet draperies of her day-bed. Her
lacquered toe-nails played at hide and seek among the meshes of her sandals.
Her whole body was impudent with a slightly crass adolescence; it centered in
her little tummy, which dared to be round.

A hard young apple - it was immediately plain to me, how, had one been on
the other side of the fence of sex - one would have wanted to bite into it.

It was Insel who had sponsored our meeting and I gave her his message -
that he would keep an appointment at five o'clock.

"He's enthusiastic about you," she said - then, "would you think me very
indiscreet if I asked you what you find to talk to him about for six hours?"

"Oh!" I explained loyally, "we exchange our little anecdotes. There's
the girl who went off with the Lesbian - it's stupendous - to halt the endless-
ness of drama in the mere contemplation of a couple of shots."

"So he tells you that one, too?"

"Look here," I confessed. "At first I was indignant with you for launching
the opinion that Insel is mad-- . Now I am not sure-- . It occurs to me that
I can't even make out what sanity is."

"Well, I find him such an awful bore, I am constantly having to turn him
out-- "

"That's because he's too surrealistic for the surrealists."

-89-

But when Mlle. Alpha spoke of his work, it was with a profound veneration I could hardly share.

"I'm not so fond of elementals - I find that strata in the subliminal thin-- . I know his work is a technical miracle and I submit to the active hypnosis with which he has the power to infuse dead paint - still-- . There! That's one thing we're always talking about. His future work. He _shows_ me what he is going to do. Sometimes I feel he has found a short cut to consummation in defiance of the concrete. That he is filling the galleries of the increase. He seemed so worth helping, I've only just begun to notice he _never_ paints. If he ever does paint the things he _sees_-- God knows _where_-- the result will be spectacular."

"Why? Haven't you heard about Insel?" asked Mlle. Alpha, "he and the friend with whom he came to Paris took morphine together and two years ago this friend died. His death gave Insel such a jolt, he dropped the drug, and ever since has painted nothing of any account."

"Why on earth doesn't he take his old morphine?" she demanded of the universe in general, "and let himself die? At least he would have painted his pictures - while this way - where is the good in his remaining alive?"

Now drugs meant nothing to me. I had supposed they were a substitute for imagination in the unimaginative. I was prejudiced against the stories afloat of their awful destructiveness, ascribing them to one of those official dodges for preventing an exasperated humanity from having a little fun. Subconsciously, I waived this information. As if my mind were a jury refusing to be influenced by extraneous evidence. Being thus luckily prevented from putting two and two together, I was free to pursue my investigation of Insel in my own reactive way.

Moreover, was not Insel's morphinism a thing of the past?

-90-

Before I left Mlle. Alpha told me that stiff Ussif, the surrealist, had
painted a picture I ought to see. Remembering (that under the influence of his
feline screech) I had made no appointment with my strange boon companion, I
arranged to go to Ussif's the following week on my return to town.

"By the way" - I exclaimed, "I forgot--. When Insel wrote to you - did
he predict the day and hour when his resistance must give out-- ?"

"Nothing of the kind," she answered. "He wrote as usual, 'I am starving
to death.'"

When the time came for me to return I arrived to find a telephone message
from the dressmaker, who was ill. So I hurried off to do some shopping. After-
wards, on my way to the surrealist's studio, I stopped the taxi at my flat for
me to change my gloves.

As I ran up the one flight of stairs, I had to slow down. Surprisingly,
on this warm day, an iciness was creeping up my ankles. I proceeded into a
chill draught.

"Insel!" I realized.

There was nobody standing at my front door. Although well lit by a
staircase window, it was hung with a square curtain of black mist.

Slowly, this mist put forth an abstract sign of concavity, and still more
slowly, a transparent diagram of my friend grew on to it.

Hunching into materialization, as a dead man who should vomit himself back
to life, Insel, whose illness was dissolution, moaned to me in the voice of a
wraith.

"I thought you would never come."

-91-

When I got him inside, we were already laughing - half apologetically - as if we found it absurd, this meeting in no-man's land without explanations to offer.

"Why didn't you say you were coming?"

"But I thought - surely--" with an anguished grin, "Friday is my 'little afternoon."

"Of course it's your little afternoon, Insel," I laughed "Only when you have turned the lady down is just when you have to specify the hour of your return; if she is to expect you -- I've got an engagement."

"My little afternoon," he raved, collapsing, "I was going to take you to my room to see my picture."

-92-

"What am I to do with you? The taximeter is ticking, the surrealist's waiting.
Pull yourself together - quick! I'll take you along."

"However did you get that hole in your trousers, it's new --" I demanded,
detecting, as we got into the taxi, a perfect round of perforation letting out
a tiny light from his thigh. I suspected him of replenishing his beggar's capital.

"It was there before" said Insel sanctimoniously, as if referring to a halo
earned by excessive martrydom.

"You might as well come up to see Ussif with me," I suggested.

"No," said Insel, "none of the surrealists will have anything to do with
me. They know only too well, if they did, I should try to borrow money."

"I should have thought you'd be *worth* a little money to a surrealist. He
might learn what supereality is about - you are organically surreal - "

"I don't do it on purpose," said Insel dejected.

"I know you don't," I assured him warmly. "You only 'do' Kafka on purpose -
you're so much better in the original."

I kept my promise of going to his room on my way back. Strangely -
the very name of the street he lived in had the sound of a ghostly exhaustion.
His attic was on the seventh story.

Along the narrow open passage with its bare iron railing the Chambres de
Bonnes moved past me as I looked for his name on the doors, when, coming to a
closed iron shutter fleeced with dust and cobwebs growing in patches like a
moss of soot or hanging in grey festoons about its slits, I felt the liveness
of the air decrease, and "Insel" written in the archaic hand of some automatic

-93-

writings drew up my eyes-- . To that darkened crack which outlines the magical
versatility of a barrier measuring a yard across and with merely the touch of a
hand diminishing to a strip three inches wide. That cover of a living book whose
history may come to an end before you can get it open; or cut short your personal
adventure by remaining shut; out of this oblong outline of Entrance and Exit
there leaked a perceptible seepage of Insel's torpor.

Noiselessly, indolently, the door vanished. I walked into its chasm and
Insel led me to his painting set in the pacific light of a large attic window.

"Dass ist die Irma?" he said with the secretive in-looking twinkle that
lit up his eyes with recurrent delights. And suddenly it dawned upon me that
one thing about this man that made him so different to other people was that
contrary to our outrunning holding-up-the-mirror self consciousness, his was
constantly turning its back on the world and tip-toe with expectancy, peeping
inquisitively into its own mischievous eyes. Or, in some cerebral acrobatic
recoil, that being who is, in us, both outlooker and window, in him, astonish-
ingly, was craning back to look in at the outlooking window of himself, as if
there were something there he might forget, some treasure as to whose existence
he wished to remain assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he must resee to in-
sure its continued projection.

"Die Irma," he repeated lovingly to introduce her to me, and the magnetic
bond uniting her painted body to his emaciated stature-- as if she were of an
ectoplasm proceeding from him-- was so apparent one felt as if one were surpris-
ing an insane liason at almost too intimate a moment. He was glittering with a
pleasure as dynamically compressed as the carbon of a diamond.

A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining obscurity was the
effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera ground, die Irma stood knee

-94-

deep on an easel.

To her livid brow, rounded like a half moon, clung a peculiarly clammy
algaeic or fungoid substitute for hair. Beneath it a transparent mask of hori-
zontal shadow was penetrated by the eyes of an hypnosis; flat disks of smoked
mirror, having the self same semblance of looking into and out of oneself as
her creator.

Perhaps in a superfine analysis, this is what all men really do, but as
a natural inter-play; whereas Insel and his picture were doing it with alterna-
ting intent. Indeed the great thin uninscribed coins of her gun-metal pupils,
returning his fascinated gaze, were tilted at such an angle as to give a dimly
illuminated reflection of an inner and outer darkness.

Her hands, as if nailed to her hips like crossed swords, jutted out from
her body which seemed to be composed of rippling lava that here and there hardened
to indentations like holly-leaves growing from her sternum-- her male hands that
hardly made a pair, for the one had the bones of the back marked all of equal
length and the other, one finger too long with an unmodeled edge which curved
like paper against the background.

He hung over die Irma like a tall insect and outside the window in the rotten
rose of an asphyxiated sunset the skeleton phallus of the Eifel Tower reared in
the distance as slim as himself.

Beside the picture I noticed that the gutter of his upper-lip was interrup-
ted by a seam, a fine thread of flesh running from the base of the nose to his
mouth that accentuated the compression of his lips in their continual retention
of the one remaining tooth which, so thin as to be atavistic in an adult, was
like a stump forgotten in a croquet ground, left over from the Game of Life.
An incipience or reparation of harelip? And Irma? In this very same spot she

-95-

puffed to a swollen convergence.

"But Insel," I asked, "her upper lip is about to burst with some inavowable disease. You have formed her of pus. Her body has already melted."

"Exactly," he answered with mysterious satisfaction.

"I don't care for it," I decided.

"And I," said Insel, with the reverent intonement with which he accompanied his tacitly implied admittance of myself to his holy-of-holies, "thought that *this* picture would be just the one that *you* would like."

Time hovered, suspended in the attic air as the powders of life in the noxious mist of the exhausted city below. When suddenly the soporific lure he sowed in his magnetic field-- shattered. Insel was snatching at the emptied flesh on his face in the recurrent anxiety inspiring his wilder gestures.

"She ought not to *be*," he cried out, "if you don't like her, I am going to destroy her."

His cerebral excitement seemed to inflate his head, rather as a balloon from which his wasted body hung in slight levitation.

"Come down to the floor, for God's sake," I said per-emptorially, "What does my opinion matter? *I'm* not the museum."

"But you're right," he insisted. "I have been going in the wrong direction. Die Irma's *out*."

"And don't use me as a sop for your terror of working."

"It's really not that-- but a technical question. Die Irma ist nass." *

"She isn't, she's bone dry. I felt her."

"I assure you, underneath---"

"Everytime I've come to Paris you've said the same thing. Pull yourself together Insel, you've got to finish this for the museum. For you it's work or

-96-

* nass = wet

death. Can't you figure it out?" I urged helpfully - "When you have money and
can eat you paint a picture so as to have more money — when you haven't any
more money."

"It's more complicated than that," he objected again - "die Irma ist wet - "

I was getting exasperated - When the balls of our eyes catching each other,
we both began to laugh.

"If you had heard the Lesbian's synopsis of Frank Harris' confessions, you
wouldn't even trouble to mention it - "

"I shouldn't care to read this Lesbian's confessions - it is a Lesbian who
has taken the love of my life away from me."

"Well now, I wouldn't mention that either. Of course, it does not matter
with me - anybody can tell me anything - you know what I mean - when you surrender
your arms, chuck them on to neutral territory. I know it's a touch that modern-
izes your romanticism, all the same, I'd advise you never to make that particular
confidence to a woman 'ou connait ca'."

But Insel was past advice. With a look of dogged emptiness he recited
for the nth time the story of those Mädchen "who shut themselves into the house
a fortnight for fear he would shoot them."

Mostly when speaking of his loves of the past he became quite normal;
subnormal really, for his adventures in the actual world had been of an excru-
ciating banality.

As I was also engaged for dinner, I asked the time. Insel who was sitting
on a wooden stool stretched out his arm - it reached much further than its actual
length would warrant.

Behind the curtain in the corner, carefully secreted under empty boxes,
neatly stacked, was his wrist watch. He did not bring it out - his arm seemed

-97-

in some Einsteinien contraction to shorten the necessary distance for focus-
ing the hands.

It was seven o'clock. I took my leave. Insel, astonished as if this
were the first break in a timeless conversation, snapped in half; or at least
bowed like a poplar in a sudden gale; his dessicated limbs the branches.

Staring vainly towards the door I was opening - he choked in the voice
of a Robot, "Morgen komm ich im gericht. Tomorrow I go to court - I am going
mad!"

"Then don't forget your little afternoon," I reminded him - "I dote on
madmen."

As I was leaving, he seized his palette and dripping an enormous brush
into a pile of ebony pigment painted with a heinous neigh of victory, "Die
Irma---Out!"

-98-

My intermittant intrusions on Insel's inexplicable Eden of mischief had set their mark upon me. Some of his secretive twinkle had seeped into my eyes and lingered there, eliciting comments from my friends. I became more popular.

Insel, however, did not like it at all-- as if I were a thief, a stark sternness shot with flashes of sadism replaced his usual intonations of abased tenderness while, awkwardly enough, I continued to feel myself elfin.

One day when I had returned from a lunch he came in to fetch his 'Kafka'. I had a good time and prattled to him sociably, "Alceste-- the duchess-- everyone was intrigued to know why I am so jolly."

"So lustig,"* Insel hissed-- a maniac sadism flaring up in his eyes, and for the first time I saw him as dangerous. "So lustig," his hiss growing shriller and I could feel his hatred twining round my throat as he took a step towards me. But a step no longer the airy step of the halucinased-- it was the pounding tread of the infuriated male. "Lustig," he squeaked, his hiss exhausted.

He approached no nearer. Probably my absorbed interest in examining his insane pupils dominated him. Anyway, although it now surprises me-- it seemed I could not be afraid of him-- our 'entente' in the visionary lethargy of that primeval chaos we were able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his surface vagaries, I felt at once collected-- as if I might have been his 'keeper' since the dawn of creation.

"Insel," I said placatingly, "If it would improve your health were I to suffer a hopeless love for you, I'm quite willing. Not today-- I have a cocktail party-- but some other time, I promise," (thinking of my bouts with the grand sympathique) "-- you shall see me suffer horribly."

*Jolly

Insel, unconvinced, let out a low growl which sounded like one more 'lustig'--
while that strange bloom, as if he were growing feathers, spread over his face.
He turned into a sugar dove. It flew about the sitting room, dropping from
under its wings a three ringed circus. In one ring echoed the cracks of a whip;
in one ring rotated an insane steed of mist; and in the other ring Insel's spirit
astride an elemental Pegasus--

"Horror," said Insel and I jumped, "Would I have to grow a beard in order
to make myself attractive to you?"

The grand sympathique (which eventually turned out to be a duodenal ulcer)
must inevitably go on the rampage again. Very soon it did. There was no re-
source to Insel's healing 'strahlen'. Since his screech of a vanquishing cat
he had, as far as I was concerned, subconsciously thrown them into reverse.

For a while I was helpless; then one day when the pain calmed down some-
what, I crawled up to Insel's-- still trusting he would finish Die Irma for
America-- to give him a hundred francs. That is, I never gave him anything. I
am not generous. The few 'billets' necessary to keep him going were fully covered
by the valuable drawing he had forced me to accept. It would be easy to sell if
I needed the money.

It did not occur yet to me how unsuccessfully I had succored him, for when
first I met him he had been merely a surrealist-- his biography was coherent--
steadily since I had 'interfered' in his affairs he had grown hallucinatory.

"It's all very well," Frau Feirlein argued with me, "I was here when you
advanced him five hundred francs for the Gallery-- the very next day he hadn't
a sou."

To me it appeared fitting Insel's finances should flicker in and out like
himself. For the present no power on earth could dislodge from my mind that

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luminous effigy of generic hunger-- or shake my serene unquestioning insistence on its preservation. Something unknowable had entered into a game with my intuition.

He let me in and returned straight to his needy couch, teetering on the end of his spine in a double triangle as he drew up his knees to replace his feet under cover. I was overcome by a rush of nervous sublimity carried by the air.

"If this is madness," I said to myself, breathing his atmosphere exquisite almost to sanctification, "Madness is something very beautiful."

My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value returned as I looked up in the bare swept room. An especial clarity of the light I had noticed before to be associated with his presence was this evening so accentuated I could actually dissect it. Its softly bedazzling quality was not of any extra brightness, but of a penetrant purity that uplifted my eyes. I could discern among the unified flood of customary light an infiltration of rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitessimally finer than the gossamer halo round a lamp in the fog-- a white candescence that made the air look shinier, with the same soothing shimmer as candles at mass in sacred houses, only indescribably acute.

I was not unfamiliar with it. That different light I had seen etherealize the heavy features of Signora Machiabene an hour before she was stricken to death. That very essence of light I had begun to perceive during the prolonged moment when a dislocated vertebra had thrown me beyond the circumscription of bodily life.

There is no saying in what bliss consists, yet I could see it incorporated with Insel's face, bathed in that different light, as he lay under his only blanket, his limp hands clasped behind his head.

"I see through the wall," he said, his voice at peace. "I can lie here hour-long watching my neighbors live their dear little lives. Sometimes they

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play a gramophone and on its way to me the music has become miraculous."

"You have never known ennuie," I laughed, forgetting as completely as he
evidently had, if indeed he had ever been conscious of, the tortured glow-worm
of the Boulevard night, the inarticulate confidences of one cut off from mankind;
the sleepless seeker after an unmentionable salvation who, blinded by his own
unnatural glitter, was so wounded by the dawn; that distracted man who, terrified
of isolation, hung onto my hand while he flopped and darted like a fish on the
end of a line, stung by a mystifying despair.

"Never," he assented, beatified, "I am eternally content. My happiness is
infinite. All the desires of the earth are consummated within myself."

"Aside from that-- What are the people in the next room *doing*?"

"Just being-- I ask no more of any one. *Being* in itself is sufficient for
us all," he answered enraptured.

Seeing I had taken up one of his drawings, he instantly arose. Always--
there was something of the depths of the sea about him and his work, also of
eventual evolution as in the drawing I was looking at where to a rock of lava
a pale subaqueous weed clung in the process of becoming a small limp hand. The
tips of its fingers were stealing into pink.

Insel himself had fearsome hands, narrow, and pallid like his face, with
a hard, square ossification towards the base of the back, and then so tapering
as if compressed in driving an instrument against some great resistance.

"You were a lithographer, not an engraver?" I had once asked him, puzzled
by what his hands looked as if they must have been in the habit of doing, and
we concluded this conformation could be an inheritance from the schlosser's
driving power. But out of this atavistic base his fingers grew into the new
sensibility of a younger generation, in his case excessive; his fingers clung

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together like a kind of pulpoid antennae, seemingly inert in their superfine
sensibility, being aquiver with such minuscule vibrations they scarcely needed
to move-- fingers almost alarmingly fresh and pink for extremities of that
bloodless carcass, the idle digits of some pampered daughter; and their fresh
tips huddled together in collective instinct to more and more microscopically
focus his infinitesimal touch. All the same, there was something unpleasantly
embryonic about them. I had never seen anything that gave this impression of
the cruel difficulty of coming apart since, in my babyhood, I had watched the
freak in Barnum's circus unjoin the ominous limpness of the legs of his undeveloped
twin.

"Let's have a look at your feet," I said as he came weightlessly towards
me. He drew off his slippers, padding over the bare boards on the drained Gothic
feet of a dying ivory Christ.

"What's this?" I teased, pointing to a lurid patch on his instep, "a chancre?"

"No, it's only where my shoe rubs me. I bought new shoes when I sold that
picture and they hurt me," he explained, frowning helplessly.

"Why not try pouring water into them and wearing them till they 'adapt?' It often works."

A strange bruise. It shone with the eerieazure of a neon light. But once
within range of Insel, nothing seemed unaccountable, as though he submitted to
an unknown law enforcing itself through him. Each item of his furnishing, he
having touched it, had undergone the precious transformation of the packet he
had folded in my home. His hand, in passing over them, must have caused their
simple structure to obtrude upon the sight in advance of their banal identity.

A row of powdered-soap cartons, set upon a shelf, he had stood up to the
significant erectness of sentinels, their impressive uniforms consisting in the

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sufficiency of their sheer sides. He showed me they were empty. Altogether
his place had an uncommon dignity. Within a stockade of right angles he had
domesticated the steady spirit of geometry.

The room, with its two tiny matchboard tables, its curtains of washed-out
cotton across an alcove, full of its supplementary radiance, had an air of
illogical grandeur beyond commercial price.

Every now and then the sharp of his flickering sadism, a needle occasionally
picking up the dropped thread of memory, would prick through his frayed conver-
sation, woven of disjointed themes like an inconsistent lace eked out with
stocking darnings.

He recalled my promise-- to demonstrate unfortunate love whenever a twinge
of pain contracted my features. He peered enthralled at the havoc pain played
with me. His delirious peace expanded to full blossom in the smile of Buddha.
One felt his utter joy at sight of my disablement had leapt to such a blaze he
must melt off it, his fragile person dissolve in his delight, were it not for
some mysterious source within him replenishing the exaggeration of his unabating
intensity.

"Gestatten Sie?" I inquired ceremoniously, unable to hold out any longer
against the pathological rat gnawing at my entrails. And I subsided on his
couch. Above a certain degree of agony, one is willing to subside anywhere.
However, my slight repulsion dispersed as I lay down. Indeed, like the saints
whose dead bodies did not decompose, Insel's electric exudation in some process

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of infinitesimal friction seemed to cleanse him of his grubbiness of the poor,
to free him of any accretion natural to normal man. His couch was almost fra-
grant with that faint half-holy purity that hung about him.

"What color was this once?" I asked, as I drew up his grey blanket.

"White," said Insel.

It was incredible. That twilight sheer duration lowers upon all pale
fabrics had so penetrated the thick wool, one could only believe with difficulty
it had not been dyed-- a perfect job at that-- no spot, no smirch, no variation
in tone disturbed the unity of its spread surface. For a moment I entertained
the idea that Insel had worked all over it with the microscopic point of his
lead pencil, for it seemed no earthly dust could defer to such patient order.
Anyhow, I decided everything in the place is bewitched, and let it go at that.

Insel, intently keeping watch, had moved his stool some distance away as
if to find his range for an inverted 'Aim of Withdrawal'. Spinning himself
into a shimmering cocoon of his magnetic rays, introvert, incomparably aloof,
"They're mine" he exulted as clearly as if he were crying aloud.

Too simple to fully imagine the effect of these rays, he had, it would
seem, only an instinctive mesmeric use for them. He might even feel them as
a sort of bodily loss compensated perhaps by rare encounters with one able to
tune in.

"I shall make you some tea," said Insel affectionately, and hushed as a
nurse, he began swimming about from his little sink to his wooden shelf-- or as
a panther softly pacing before a vanquished prey-- . I noticed now, as always,
whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home, there was appro-
priately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom of a packet for
brewing the last cup-- he would open the door to you holding precisely the fag

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end of a loaf for the last bite. But today he served a minute carton from an
automatic machine in the Metro. Out of it he rolled into my palm a bonbon,
virulent green, less than a pea in size.

"Aren't you having any?" I invited, convivial as a gourmet, for in his dimension this was a spread feast and the hot unsavoury tea had eased my pain. The very teenyness of his sweetstuff made it more seductive than a giant Christmas cake. But he shook his head impishly in abnegation. I looked inside the carton. There was nothing left.

In the concentrated one-sided luxuriance of our party he evoked his dazzling future-- the work he no longer seemed able to do waxed so sublime in his visions (and also in mine as I watched all possible loveliness evolve from his elemental mists, and the creeping to maturity of the almost invisible herbage left from under the withdrawn tide of his hovering waves.)

His fame was to be fabulous, his wealth extravagant-- so that at last the great Insel would (with a gleam of furtive cruelty for me) marry, as far as I could make out, so increasingly incorporeal he grew in his grand exhaltation, my daughter's photograph.

"That will be really nice," I responded genially. "As I come to think of it a son-in-law-- ."

"Exactly," he burst out wildly. "You and I, we could have such a wonderful time together."

"-- a son-in-law with rays--" I brought up short, "-- and what would my daughter be doing?" Then hurriedly, thinking to profit him by the occasion, I urged, "You must _paint those pictures_-- otherwise, you will grow to be too old to marry her."

"Ah, well," he waived, with that sudden doleful look he had of gazing into

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an abyss when confronted with whatever imperative of whatever consummation.

"No matter! It would suffice me just to know her, to have the joy of watching her evolve. It would be a very wonderful thing indeed to take part in the Entwicklung of a young creature." And I realized there was nothing, nothing, in all the world elementary enough to serve as object for such simplified observation as his. Everything must henceforth for him drowse in an impotence of arrested development.

This very word, Entwicklung, was so much Insel's word; its sound seemed to me onomatopoeic of his intellectual graph. For my alien ear it had a turn of the ridiculous as though a vast process had got twisted in a knot of tiny twigs, haply to unravel and root, and branch against the heavens.

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I remembered those stacks of manuscript he had assured me were at my disposal in the days of the 'biography'. "You promised to show me your notes," I reminded him. "May I not see them now?"

He was coy about his literature, sidling along side himself in a sort of dual fidget impossible to describe, as if doing sentry duty before his own secrecy.

After a long persuasion he brought out a blotter, the kind for ecoliers sold in bazaars. Covered in black, stamped with a golden sailing ship, its funereal hue intended for neutralizing ink drops in a kindergarten, this unassuming blotter, the one thing in the place having any tradition, had a decorative air of intruding from a frivolous society. It contained a single sheet of paper which he handed me with great precaution. Very few lines were written upon it. They formed a square block in the center of the page covering little more than the area of a postage stamp.

Hardly had I caught a glimpse, when "Can you see it?" he inquired suspiciously and snatched it away.

"How could I?" I demurred, "the words are scarcely visible--" Reassured, he gave it back to me.

"You've no idea," he sighed, "the pains I take when I write to you, forcing my hand to form letters big enough for you to read."

"Liebe Herr Insel," I cajoled, "You read it to me."

At last he did so.

It was a beginning.

'My sister and I walked along the road. Coming to the town gate we gave it a good thump.'

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"Do you know what a town gate is?" asked Insel professorially, "it's like a tower."

'All the townsfolk came out of the gate, swarming about us to look.'

As ever, with Insel 'to look' was a deadlock, he had written no more.

I proffered the necessary compliments. Agog with glee, he shimmered with satisfaction. This communication of an actual transcription of a mental process had reinforced his sociability. His contacts ordinarily depending almost entirely on his strahlen, for the moment our companionship was complete.

In reading aloud his manuscript he had formed an extra alliance with me-- as literateurs, producing in Insel an enormous self-respect.

Nevertheless, it was a sympathization going on in some sphere to which I had no access.

Anything he perceived sufficiently to accept or that thrust itself upon his attention (as in *my* case) was instantly distilled in his precious essence. Behind his brow a void wraith, glorified, evaporate, dissociated from its originator, myself, to mix with his gaseous cerebration.

Insel let out a shrill crow. "Ess gibt nicht zwei vie sie-- There are not two like you."

Sparkling, entranced, he sat on his wooden chair as on the throne of the conquistador, for whatever I contributed to his transcendental enjoyment he was loathe to let me go.

But I was beginning, myself, to feel unnatural. I distinctly detected my voice in ventriloquial emulation echo the wistrul, surf-like swooning singing of his-- 'Sterben' Man mü-ü-üss-- Man mü-ü-üss-- ' as, worn out with pain, assuring him I must leave because I was tired, I said, "Ich bin so mü-ü-de."

Insel, responding to this bemused inflection, or rather, fusing with a

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ullulation so singularly his own it almost obliterated our duality, I witnessed
in him an inconceivable reversion of a standard transmutation. The *changing*
of *sadism* into *love*. Not gallant love. The indiscriminate love of a saviour.

Suffering, I had so gratified him, satiating his sadism-- even to extinc-
tion, his gratitude refluent to me, enveloped me.

At last with a sacrificial decisiveness Insel consented to let me go.
"Ja," he assented, bending over me in solicitude, "Go," he stretched out one
of his thin branches in benediction, "Go and sleep." "Schlafen." His word
was drowsy-- so long drawn out. It did not cut the air as ordinary words do.
Agelessly sailing, it passed across me-- oblong and idle-- spacious as an air-
ship, its narcotic cargo a dream of a slumber unknown to normal man.

The rays that Insel so busily had been spinning around himself in an
immeasurable tenderness released, attained once more to me.

Instantly all pain vanished. I sprang up elasticized. To an identical
rhythm Insel and I, on a buoyancy, were danced toward the door bobbing and
smiling good-bye in a mutual appreciation which I felt must be glittering off
me as it did off him.

When I got to the train it was steaming out of the station; casually I
skimmed onto it scarcely noticing this, for me, at other times, impossible
achievement-- I felt so airy. In the car, whenever I thought of Insel, I was
shaken with a helpless laughter-- a strange mixture of extreme friendliness and,
inexplicably, derision.

The painless buoyancy lasted well into the night when, as I sat calmly
at work in my hotel bedroom, I unexpectedly disintegrated. My body, which had
hitherto made upon itself the impression of a compact mass, springing a multi-
plicity of rifts, changed to a fractional covering I can only compare to the

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spines of a porcupine; or rather vibrant streamers on which my density in
plastic undulation was being carried away-- perhaps into infinity. A greater
dynamism than my own rushed in to fill the interstices. Looking down at my-
self I could see my sensation. The life-force blasting me apart instead of
holding me together. It set up a harrowing excitement in my brain. An atomic
despair-- so awful-- my confines broke down. I lost contour. Once more I
found myself in the 'impossible situation' in which one cannot remain-- from
which there is no issue. I cognized this situation as Insel's. A maddening
with desire for a thing I did not know-- a thing that, while being the agent
of his-- my-- dematerialization alone could bring him together again. A desire
of which one was 'dead' and yet still alive-- radial starfish underpattern of
his life, it had communicated itself to me. I was being impelled to the pitiable
aerial choreography of Insel when in the closed cab he had chased himself along
the incalculable itinerary of his dissolution.

In a darting anguish consciousness in pulverization peered from the ends
of incontrollable antennae for something unattainable.

I had more space than had Insel in his cab, yet the inslanting facade of
my room under the eaves with the red glow of its wall paper got 'in my way'.
Having no idea of what was happening to me, I seemed to have also unsuspected
reserves of will power. I put up a pretty good fight against this incredible
dematerialization-- it took me hours to weave myself together-- but at last,
exhausted yet once more intact, I fell upon my bed and slept.

Next morning my face looked 'destroyed' like Insel's.

Although I was all of a piece, my very bones were weak. I had to walk
carefully. I found out why, when climbing slowly up the hill to the station
to buy a newspaper, I was cleft in half. Like the witch's cat when cut apart

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running in opposite directions, suddenly my left leg began to dance off on its
own. Thoroughly frightened at this bisectional automatism, I somehow hopped
to the fence on my right and clung to it in an absurd discouragement.

The day after that I thought I was normal. Walking serenely at my
habitual pace, I went to a shop in the village before keeping an appointment
for lunch.

Without association (as usual) the idea of Insel rose in my mind. Quite
different to thinking about someone. I was overcome with that imbecilic
self-satisfied laughter, that Parnassian guffaw. It had nothing to do with
any humor known to the intellect; being a sort of blank camouflage for all
intellection. With me it was always filtered with a faint derision. But even
this derision I took for granted. Brought to a halt under the full force of
my mental hilarity, I felt constrained to <u>continue to share it</u>-- with what--
with whom? To do so I turned sideways. Whenever this <u>idea</u> of Insel occurred
I could not go straight ahead-- I had to turn to it-- as when I had tried to
sum him up on the Boulevard.

My feet remembered that lightness, that skimming of the pavement-- I was
engrossed in a merriment beyond existence. When this merriment ceased, I found
myself in a part of the country I had never seen before.

I had kept track of the time to avoid being late-- as that gust of laughter
caught me it had been twenty to one. I walked into an open yard where a man
was washing a car. He informed me it was twenty to one and that it would take
me half an hour to get back to the place where by all the laws of possibility
I should still have been. He allowed me to telephone my friends, to begin
lunch without me, that I had got lost-- at the other end of the wire it was
twenty to one.

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All this was comparable to an incident that occurred when I made friends with a little girl whose intelligence was like a jewel in a case too tightly closed. A backward child, one of those partial imbeciles, who, not being 'all there', showing only half their human nature, are either angelic or diabolic. Probably their own halves are all they respond to in other people, for Fifi, when she said "Bonjour" with a smile of benediction, would discover "Madame, you are as sweet as a rose."-- "Monsieur, you are bright as gold." Her being subnormal lent an elfin prestige to her slow serenity among her associates, offspring of peasants and small tradesmen, who attended the informal court she held in the parlor behind her parents' shop.

Rigid as bygone queens in her orthopedic corset, she accepted the offering of every conceivable kind of toy duck from her wondering courtiers, with a lunar giggle that never precisely applied to anything. Her passion, her concretion of sublimity, took the form of a duck. "God is playing hide-and-seek," she would announce, "So the Virgin Mary has married a duck and they live in the top story of the Riviera." And once when I found her watching some live water fowl by a pond in a farm-yard-- "Why do you love the duck?" I asked her. "Il dort dans son dos," she perfectly replied.

A fearful future opened before her if she could never keep shop, and the medical specialists consulted on her behalf promised she would become like average children should they graft a bit of the bone in her leg as a wedge into her spine, thus rectifying her crookedness and relieving the brain. But this operation, successful they said in many other cases, failed with this half-wit angel, who, incidentally, had predicted the year of her own death.

So Fifi died most uncomfortably, lying very much like a trussed duck,

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only on her tummy-- her leg being bent up behind her for the grafting and bound to her back-- screaming in a nursing home until she had no more breath.

Only once, in talking to this little girl, had I seen her unhappy. An unhappiness intense as it was brief. A drip of anguished words revealing how she received as an awful animosity her mother's solicitous efforts to get her to 'make sense'.

While undressing to go to bed that night, as if a flash of sympathetic insight 'put me in her place', I suddenly found myself imprisoned in Fifi's mind.

Strangely enough, it was analagous to my sensation of utter helplessness when dislocating my cervical vertebra, I had found myself without any instrument with which to contact the universe.

But now I was at the mercy of an imperfect instrument. The antennae of contact with the world in some way crippled for their function seemed-like umbilical cord in abnormal birth-- to be wound round my brain in a fearful constriction, implacable as iron barriers.

My brain, like a bird in ceaseless hurt, beat its wings for the conscious liberation against a cage-- or rather, a sort of immature sieve, which would spring a hole intermittently; here and there letting a glimpse of phenomena through-- phenomena fitful and unrelated.

Caught in a horror of active impotence, I struggled in terror-- unlike Fifi, I could get out.

This gratuitous experience was as nothing to that of disintegration when, on the contrary, one became aware of forces inherent to phenomena, which, being beyond the range of registration by the normal instrument-- the conscious organism as it exists in our present stage of evolution-- resulted in a super-

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sensibility so acute it shattered itself to splinters.

The intuitional self is incapable of surprise, but my everyday self was amazed. I felt that for dabbling in the profane mysteries I had got more than was coming to me.

Less than anything on earth did I require a face destroyed as Insel's; for some while I should walk with misgivings--.

I racked my brain for an explanation of my soaring respect (respect being a sentiment foreign to me) for a loafer who in the light of common sense proved to be actually silly.

Insel, who, so sensible of his essential mystery-- communicated that sense of imminent magic inevitably, just when one was in the 'thick' of his influence would illustrate his 'power' with a story such as how, after dining with married friends, he had predicted to his wife, "That union will not last long."

"Und thatsachlich," he concluded with an expression of awe, "They separated within the year."

He suffered, it would seem, from the incredible handicap of only being able to mature in the imagination of another. His empty obsession somehow taking form in obsessing the furnished mind of a spectator.

From a distance one remembered him vaguely as an indulgence in a quaint innocuous vice. Still I could scarcely go further with him than dissolution. I decided it would be useless to see him again.

My brain still seemed to be vibrating out of time, when early one evening on leaving a library I wandered into an old church. Somebody up in the organ loft was playing Bach. A sublime repetitive patter of angels' feet soled with assuagement, giving chase to one another in a variable immobility of eternal arrival, they trod my cerebral vibrations from disarray into tempo once more.

* "And as a matter of fact"

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I had not thought of my casual prediction that the whole of Insel's life
would hang upon a key-- when on mislaying my own key to my apartment he pro-
duced the duplicate I had lent him in the days of his 'eviction'-- and *forgot*
(the place was still at his disposal) to ask me for it again.

It was a long while before it occurred to me that his girl's watch was
lying at the jewelers. By then, all that remained of Insel was a vague impression
of trompe-l'oeil. I wrote him to call for this love relic, he having assured
me that should I have it sent to his address his concierge would seize it to-
wards arrears in rent.

Insel, an eroded scarecrow, greeted me with the somber dignity of a dejected
god.

"Why did your girl give you such a rotten watch," I teased, "the jeweler
won't guarantee it."

"One takes what one can get," said Insel with no trace of emotion as I
handed him the erstwhile 'Adam and Eve in primeval embrace'." His present
concern was for getting back the key. Determined he should not have it, I
pretended I was returning to Paris.

Lolling on either end of the great couch, supported by our elbows, our
feet on the floor, we were at ease for conversation-- the conversation would
not begin-- Insel being taken up with contracting to some intense concentration
that gradually pushed out a sort of pallid ethereal moss to cover his ravaged
face.

At last, to my raised eyebrows, "Ah, Liebe Frau Jones," he complained
in prayerful peevishness, "it's not so easy for me-- I don't mean anything to
you anymore."

"I know," I said contritely, "I get these wild enthusiasms for things--

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they don't last."

"And we might have had such a wonderful time together," he sighed.

I could not make out why this fantastically beautiful creature should have
both hands round my throat, when Insel, shrunken to a nerve, his eyes fixed
as blinded granite, sat at that distance with his fists so tightly clenched.
Fingers of automatic pressure rapped their tonnage of abstract force on my
jugular-- the blood on my brain surged in a noisy confusion-- "You are going
to give in-- obsessed by my beauty-- having no hope-- endlessly resigned-- "

All the air wheezed in my exploding ears as a last breath "-- suffering--
suffering-- suffering-- choked by a robot!" This was not all that suffocated
me-- myriads upon myriads of distraught women were being strangled in my
oesophagus.

I had known exhaustive desperation but no such desperation as this-- with
its power of a universal conception-- of limitless application: Being impersonal
made it the more overwhelming.

"You -- are -- going -- to -- give -- in."

"To whom?" I wondered-- my eyes closing. "To Insel? Or this incredibly
lovely monster made of dead flesh."

"Thou art fair my beloved, thou--," rose from a subconscious abyss.

Not wholly convinced I wrenched my eyelids apart-- my cerebral current,
flowing an infinitesimal fraction of a second faster than the normal, registered
Insel. I caught him at it. Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera
when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct

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enlargement of Colossus' photograph that always stood on the sittingroom mantlepiece the other end of the flat.

Simultaneously it came back to me how Insel, on his first visit, had taken that photo between his hands to stare at it inordinately as if for reproduction, for a long time, and at length bringing it nearer to his eyes.

"Such beauty as this," he said, "could scarcely happen more than once in a hundred years." He himself put it at two thousand, I had laughingly observed.

"Stop it," I commanded, letting fly a fearful kick at Insel's brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him-- he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.

"The pet! The lamb!-- it does television, too," I told myself delightedly.

"Insel," I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.

"Seien wir uns wieder gut-- I give you the key-- dinner-- My man Godfrey-- the loan on your picture-- you go to the Balkans-- you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories."

As for Insel, he emerged from his 'raptness' babbling of Colossus-- Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.

"How entirely he would have accepted me-- my art-- We would have been as one-- "

I argued at length against this sudden conviction. "Do you know," I asked, "who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter-- Rubens-- " Only then did Insel's illusions miserably dissolve.

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After the Powell film, we instinctively returned to Montparnasse-- eating at a chic bar. The barman and Insel behaved as brothers-- I vaguely noted a sort of ritual-- the passing and repassing between them of half a cigarette. They addressed each other as 'du'. "No-- for 'thee'-- " Insel would say, placing the stump on a glass shelf as one handles a treasure.

Some days later I saw this barman out of doors wearing one of the richest overcoats I had seen in Paris. Evidently such acquaintances could hand out 'leavings' superior to the plain nourishment Insel acquired from the Quakers.

We sat around the Dome and Insel x-rayed. All the girls, as they giggled along the Boulevard, he disrobed-- more precisely, he could not see that they were dressed. As if on an expedition for collecting ivory, he handed me their variously molded thighs-- weighed them with an indescribable sensitivity of touch.

"This one," he assured me, "in the summer is firmer-- turns to gold-- "

Recalling how terribly Mlle. Alpha had said he dated, I presumed he was claiming my interest by indulging in what Boulevardiers of the old days called 'undressing the women' in his own unbelievably tangible way. "I don't need them to take off their clothes," he remarked.

In the Select Insel became actually involved with his watching of a red-haired girl he raved of as 'die Rothhaarige'-- her thighs were peculiarly long and agile. "She's a bit of a lesbian," he sighed, filled with some inverted reminiscence of antagonism.

"Look here, Insel-- You're crazy about that girl-- and all you do is sit around xraying her-- Get up-- go and speak to her-- "

"She'd be too expensive-- "

-119-

"Colossus never had any money."

"Colossus was beautiful-- "

"What about it? You're looking unearthly. She might get a thrill out of it-- try-- forget the expense-- I'll back you-- Go along."

But Insel subsiding in his inexplicable negativism, refused to stir.

"Listen," I admonished him, "all this is really unwholesome-- and sitting boxed up in an attic adoring that canvas Irma all day-- you'll become impotent-- "

In a burst of the extravagantly sophisticated laughter I had heard him emit once before, "I only wish I could," he assured me.

"What a subject," I reflected, "the virility of the starving man." But the 'Select' was undergoing change-- opening out to aqueous space in darkling shadows of metallic liquidity as in the vision of the Lutetia, that strangely etiolate phallic ghost floated like the stem of a water-lily. Before it had terminated in a battlement akin to that of the castle among chessman; now it was topped with a little crown of thorns.

Through the chill shimmer of this unreal deep-- the hallucinatory blue the 'Cupole' had painted on the backs of dreary houses as a setting for its garden cafe-- the blue I would wish the sky to be showed us another dawn.

"Look,"

"There should," said Insel, extremely worried, "be a lighted lamp-post there."

"There is," I reassured him, "lower your head-- see it was cut off by the blind."

This was the last of the two or three nights I spent with Insel in Montparnasse.

We crossed again to the "Dome" to have breakfast. Sitting beside him,

-120-

I could see a man in white armor conduct a ballet. Serried rows of mustard pots drew up before him, their porcelain bellies burdened with amber. They moved to and fro as with a wooden spatula he lifted off their stale crust of night, filled and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.

"Woher kommt diese halbe mucke?" Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an inviolate orbit, because he could not make out "Where this half a fly comes from." I knew it was only a baby fly, yet all the same it loomed above him hugely as an insectile cherubim cut off from its entrails in a like unanatomical constipation to Insel's monsters.

The rest of the day till two o'clock when Insel, as usual, it seemed must
'appear in court', we spent in an incredibly concentrated and somehow heart-
rending arithmetic, reckoning up whether Insel, out of the three thousand francs
loaned on his picture, could possibly afford a new pair of boots. We had al-
ready decided he must have a warm overcoat when, although it was not particular-
ly chilly, little muscles in the side of Insel's nose, self-animated, leapt
up and shivered. "You are freezing," I discovered in startled concern, scanning
his fragile flimsy features.

"I hardly feel it-- I am used to it," said Insel, dolefully heroic, "It
is only discomforting to those who are with me."

But I teased him a bit when we said good-bye, alluding to a lunch with
the Alpha when to our mutual hilarity we had made out how only two hours after
leaving my studio after that utter collapse, he had stumbled into hers.

"He looked ghastly," she told me, "He had not eaten, he had not slept--
his heart had ceased to beat!"

Insel, whom I had seen so sly, had been vainly hoping to get his beefsteak

-121-

fresher.

"How on earth," I inquired, "do you compose your totenkopf in so short a
time? Pretending to Mlle. Alpha-- "

"Why," Insel answered pat, with the queerest inflection of intimacy, as
if I were some virgin he had raped, "I thought you would not _like_ me to tell
her I had _been with_ you."

"It's marvellous," I assured him in amused admiration, "Your knack of
dying on doorsteps. At will! At any moment! You might make a good thing out
of it. Perhaps you do. Insel, I believe you put _lots_ of money in the bank!"

I could feel a distinct change in his aural temperature, but I was laughing too much to pay attention. An impression of a sacred stronghold 'blowing up', that shadow-tower of iron rag the clochard-deity Insel had built, like an ant of his wasted tissue, was so very, very faint--

In view of America, I was constantly on the hop-- busy with buyers of
furniture-- packers littering the place with straw.

Arriving for some appointment, I was unprepared to run into an Uneasiness
in the vicinity of my home, although it remained closely sealed in its shutters
and nothing by day ever went in or came out. Les concierges, their aides and
cronies, the grocers at the corner, all were under the apprehension of the
place being haunted. Even Bebelle, whom I came across in the street, had, on
going there to clean, turned and fled.

"Madame," she said in hushed warning, "In there it is dark at noon.
Terrible clothes have clotted on the floor-- Never before have I seen what was
lying on the bed."

Insel at last must have been evicted and at some unknown hour crept into
the flat.

-122-

Someone was living there.

On my throwing open a window, he hooked his arm round his neck, rubbing
the mastoid, "I have lain here for two whole days," he said, ferocious with
dignity, "I have a stiff neck."

A hard-eyed, low class German, his very existence an insolence, wearing
a shirt from a cheap shop-- Insel must have thrown himself away with his old
black sweater above which his former face had risen like a worn, pocked moon.

Unquestionably, I had cured him. Here was the 'normal' man. An Insel
unobsessed. Someone 'replacing himself', his mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged
for a hostile creak.

This culminating phase of my eerie experience-- Insel's residence-- remains
confused, as I was busy directing packers.

Cavilling and billious, whenever he caught sight of me he hardly refrained
from spitting. Our relative positions entirely reversed, I had become for him
a strange specimen, to whose slightest gesture he pinned an attention like that
of a vindictive psychiatrist.

"Ha-ha!" he neighed irately, "I find a little 'still life' in this flat.
It would surely be of the greatest interest to Freud."

We had, in our 'timeless conversation', with Insel's concurrence in my
'wonderful' ideas', superceded Freud. I must always have known he had never the
slightest idea of what I was talking about-- yet only now did this fact appear
as negatory.

The still-life that intrigued him was a pattern of a 'detail' to be
strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Through equidistant holes

-123-

punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a stiff
celluloid coil of the color that Schiaperelli has since called _shocking_ pink.
Made to be worn round pigeon's ankles for identification, I had picked it up
in the Bon Marche.

Out of this harmless even pretty object an ignorant bully had constructed
for me, according to his own conceptions, a libido threaded with some vicious-
ness impossible to construe--.

I was astounded.

It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave
so much like a 'polter-geist' that things when I touch them are apt to vanish,
adding a superhuman difficulty to my work) should impinge on Insel's abnormal
precision with the force of a shock, although in the hallucinatory dimension
it was this very extreme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, tele-
visionary machinery of our reciprocity.

"What do you suppose," hissed my horrid guest, who somehow behaved like
an alienated husband, "would happen to me if I were to lose anything?"

"Oh, I suppose," I countered rudely, "I'd buy you another."

Being the intrinsic complement of Insel's enmity, logically my loathing
for the real man was unconcealed, while he must actually hold himself in
check not to assassinate me, for no crueller abhorrence could ever issue from
the human heart than Insel's for me.

There were brief abatements of his fantastic normality as when on coming
up from the telephone I encountered only a creature of pathos in the hall.

"You would not notice, would you," wistfully, "that I have polished everything in the flat."

"No," I concurred, "I would not have noticed that."

-124-

Insel was long in swallowing his disappointment, then cryptically, "Gut,"
he snapped, "and I am always amorous when drunk."

And again, for fear I might forget the loan, Insel went limp as he had
to the air raid siren. That unaccountable bloom he put forth when passing
from one condition to another made his features appear to be of crumpled velvet.

Sitting on a chair of average height, he seemed to have sunk to bottomless
depths, at the same time his imploring face peered at me-- from the floor.

Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, of that meekness
befitting a supplicant at the door of heaven, Insel was knowing an alibi so
sublime-- I again lost all knowledge of who he was.

"Here," I hailed the will-o'-the-wisp, "after all I will give you the
little box." This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the
American surrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber
afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits
cut from early Ladies' Journals (Technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in
loveliness, unique, in Surrealism-- the tidal lines of engraving cooled its
static peace. Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and
one of witch's blue came raining down on the grey somnolence when one lifted
it up.

I should have preferred to keep it myself had I not suddenly realized
she belonged in those idle lands to which the unreal Insel intermittently
returned.

I only went twice to the flat while Insel was living there, but I flitted
in and out so busily-- those hours retain no sequence. As part of his loan
I had arranged for a strictly non-negotiable ticket and brought him a first
thousand to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.

-125-

Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man to catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically good-- such as the stellar combine of Insel and his ebony wives, his ivory eroticism in appraising thighs) was unavailing, confronted with this blatant lubricity of the normal Insel which, as he boasted, although in proper decency of word, seemed as did once an astral Venus to flow in his very veins: The dregs of all the secret gutters that carry off the unavowable residue of popular conceptions of physical life--

When I arrived with the rest of the loan, anxious to clear him out, my once luminous clochard had composed himself in the kitchen holding his usual insignia, the heel of pumpernickle, this time one in either hand-- extreme oval ends-- unbitten-- of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.

"Did you get the overcoat," I inquired amiably.

"I may as well tell you," he snarled, "that I don't care for all this supervision-- I had not the time. You understand-- the last nights in Paris," he raved ecstatically, "Es ist so schon das leben, wen mann so leben kann-- It is so beautiful living, when one can so live."

His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exteriorized act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices might have been, in some fearful ennervation, spent. Instead of being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat, were boiled to the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.

I did not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth was probably as irreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from his astral collusions with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to associate these opposite phenomena.

-126-

Had I recalled the earlier irridescent Insel, it could only have been as a figment of my insanity.

An alarming presentiment occurred to me. "Insel," I gasped, "You've blown that thousand francs."

"What are you?" he sneered venemously, "an inquisitor?"

'He has notions as to how white women should be handled, too,' I laughed to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dressmaker.

I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who would be gone when I returned to Paris. It would put me to great pains, I supposed, breaking through animosity so unaccountable it left nothing intact but surprise. Still, it was pretty bad if I could not prevent the 'epidemic quarrel with me' from spreading to even this lunatic whose essential void I had found so soothing.

After my fitting I invited him to come down to the cafe, intent on buttering him up, on bluffing him into forgetfulness of having allowed me to discover his awful alter ego, (in cases of the sane, this alter ego seldom got to work until out of my sight) curious to see if we could part on good terms.

As we stood face to face with nothing in common, the last people on earth likely to become acquainted, I saw him force back his loathing, to accept. Our mutual distaste was noxious on the palate. We each had a pressing engagement for dinner.

I remembered Geronimo taunting me that I was 'no psychologist'. "You just walk into a man's brain, seat yourself comfortably in an arm-chair to take a look around-- afterwards, you write down all you have found there," he had said. Then what the hell in Insel had I 'walked into'? His complaint was true. Nobody saw in him what I saw in him. A kind of consciousness unconscious of its own potency. Even now he was disgusting to the point of

-127-

revelation.

Insel had also the idea of bluffing a conformative wind-up to our illusory alliance. Resorting to his earlier priggish decency, once we were in the back of the cafe, he hung his head, apparently poisoning it with spurious shame, and mumbled: -

"The bad thing about me is that every now and then I come to a blind alley in my life-- where somebody has to help me."

"Now look here, Insel," I persuaded him with stimulant hypocrisy, "If it were not for that basic something in you-- no help would be forthcoming. That which is valuable one does not help, one responds to a cosmic imperative."

He began to look as if he had been overdoing the shame.

"There was some mention," I added offhandedly authoritative, "of your busting a thousand francs. You seemed on the defensive. But why? The artist requires color in his life." This fallacious insight melted Insel's imitation shame, disclosing the very really wounded face of a child who has long been sulking for being misjudged.

"You told me," he burst out unhappily, writhing with reproach, "that I put lots of money in the bank."

So that was it. Insel, with his organic magnifications, had become a foul lout, because he was feeling-- cross.

"I didn't," I fibbed, striking the suitable note, "I said you hid it under the carpet." Neither of us had a carpet-- we immediately floated off as if on the magical mat of Bagdad, talking on-- .

I could feel any word I was saying fit into Insel's brain appeasing as a missing piece in a jig-saw puzzle.

At once-- it was growing late-- he clamored for me to stay with him;

-128-

for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize duration; forever.

Probably I was the collaborative audience to his finest act, the giving off of that calm equation that always reduced me to hushed respect. He grew in power in his silent 'role' in ratio to my reaction. The ultimate self, august in certainty, put forth a soporific bloom that covered his damaged face.

Only now I remarked that on the emergence of this ultimate self in its intangible armour of nobility depended that prolongation of time I so often experienced in the company of Insel, for at present there was no aquarium diffusion, none of that virtually giggling attainment to Nirvana. No x-ray excursion nor any fractionation. His mediumship concentrated in a sole manifestation. This interference with time.

I could not make out whether the cause was a shift in the relative tempos of a cosmic and microcosmic 'pulsation', whether *my* instant-- the instant of a reductive perceiver-- passed through some preponderant magnifier and enlarged, or whether a concept (become gnarled in one's brain through restriction to the brain's capacity) unwinding at leisure, was drawing my perception-- infinitely soothed-- along with it. For again this novel aspect of time seemed, like light, to arrive in rays focusing on the brain at a minimum akin to images on retinas; and the further one projected one's being to meet it, the *broader* one found it to be. Anyway, it was useless trying to analyze it. This alone was certain. It was absolutely engrossing to the mind, although nothing brief enough for us to cognize *happened* in this longer time, which occurred commensurately with the bit of lingering I was wedging in for Insel between contiguous hours in defiance of occupational time.

Rarely, at intervals of aeons, Insel and I would look up at each other

-129-

in an utter yet somehow communicative impersonality, the final relationship
of distinct similars confronting the same phenomenon.

Intimately confidential once more, Insel was trying to disentangle before
me _the thousand directions_. He had showed 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 Himmel's
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 travelled; never to come to the _beginning_ of any route.
Surely, for Insel it should have been different-- starting with the spectral
spermatazoa that seeped from his brain through his gardening hands.

The glare in Capoulards Cafe grew dim. Insel's brain floated up from his
head, unravelled, 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 sign-boards 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.

-130-

"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 fervour.

-- indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of inertia, un-
realizable 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 some thing 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 grey as death-- only a
non-existent irritation as to what *purposed inconsequence* had led us into the
illusion of ever having come into being.

-131-

The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were *still there*-- Two unmatched arrows sprung from its meaningless centre-- were surrounded by a numeral halo-- I had to leave Insel, it was ten to eight.

"How goes the book," he asked with his former appreciative intimacy as we passed out of the cafe. I was feeling exceptionally 'good' about my work just then, vainly imagining I had criticized my last incompletion.

"It is going wonderfully," and with a flash of that exhibitionism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no means of communication-- I threw out my hands-- elatedly believing I had reached the stage prescribed by Colossus for creation, when all that one has collected rolls out with the facility of the song of a bird.

"Sehen sie, Insel," I explained, "Mann muss reif sein-- One must be ripe."

I felt Insel crack as if he had been *shot* alert.

"Can she possibly mean it," I could 'hear' him ask himself as he wheeled towards me, noticing *me* for the *first* time; and then convinced, as I stood a little exalted on the corner of the street, decide "Here is a woman with whom there is absolutely *nothing* to be done."

I must have had my hands outspread, for Insel dropped like a soft moth into my open palm-- On his face was a smile unlike all the fluctuant smiles of hallucinated angels I had watched there. It was a normal smile. Yet in the old abnormal voice of whispering emotion, laying his dried branch across my shoulder, he choked, "Ich komme nach hause."

He was 'coming home'.

-132-

Across his gentle brow floated the will-o'-the-wisp trailing a pair of
boiled oysters in its wake, Mädchen, like missiles that have not gone off,
he scattered abroad.

"But Insel," I reminded him, "You have an appointment for dinner."

Insel gaped at me.

The illocal foci of his pupils exploding incredulously, darted in all
the directions of the radial underpattern of his life. It took some moments
to sort these simultaneous impressions. When I had done so, I longed to get
even with Insel, to say "I have absorbed all your 'strahlen'. Now what are
you going to do?"

I said nothing of the kind. Because firstly it was not true, and secondly,
it might inspire in him a worse obsession; for one thing one feared as above
all else menacing Insel was some climax in which his depredatory radio-activity
must inevitably give out.

So all I said was "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," smiled Insel, his bitter-sweet stare both dazed and stoic,
"Danke fur Alles-- Thanks for everything."

-133-

her hands together in delight.

As for myself, he cleared my recollection of the prejudice for his
madness as he sat disseminating in my amusing sitting room a pleasant
neutrality, pulling one's sympathies in his direction. And as the afternoon
wore out, it was as if a dove had flown through the window and settled (on) a
chair. Whenever his features obtruded on the sight some impulse of the
mind would push them out of the way as if one obeyed an implicit appeal
not to look at him but rather give in to the mischievous peace which seemed
to enclose him in a sheath.

That evening I began a letter to a friend: "Aaron's latest surrealist
is absolutely divine. He has painted a picture that's not so very hot in
any particular detail-- a gigantic back of a commonplace woman looking at
the sky. It's here to be shipped with the consignment I am sending to Aaron,
and I swear whenever I'm in the room with it I catch myself staring at that
sky waiting, oblivious of time, for whatever is about to appear in it. Most
eerie! The man himself is just like that. He did not say anything in par-
ticular, but you felt you were in the room with an invisible will-o-the-wisp,
and that any moment it might light up. He's the son, he said, of tiny work-
ing people and seems the most delicate and refined soul I've ever come across.
He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on
when he paints his pictures, first having meticulously cleaned everything
in his studio. Now, I don't mean he's a delicate soul because he paints
in evening dress-- I that's just one of his stories I remember. I shall
probably find this quality exists only in my imagination because there's
something fundamentally black-magicy about the surrealists, and I feel that
going in that direction, his face, that looks almost luminous from starvation

-2-

will turn out to be a death's head after all.

"It's funny how people who get mixed up with black magic do suddenly look like death's heads-- they will grin and there is nothing but a skull peering at you, at once it's all over-- but you remember. Sax is an exception. He is permanently a skull with ligaments attached, having the false eyes of an angel, and, at the back of them his cranium full of intellectual dust. Often they look like goat's. While Moto has the expression of an outrageous ram, his wife the re-animated mummy of an Egyptian sorcoress. In fact, they are very, in their fantastic ways, expressive of their art, which after all takes on such shapes as would seethe from a cauldron overcast by some wizard's tortuous will."

The letter was never finished, for, and this was often to be the case, once he had left, his person would gradually gather together till at last one could normally *see* him as he really was, or had been when present. Tall, his torso concave, he was so emaciated that from his waist down he looked like a stork on one leg. His queer ashen face seemed veritably patched with the bruises of some physical defeat that had left him pretty repulsive. One's mind, released from the unaccountable influence of his nature's emanations, readjusted the time spent in his company to the rational proportion of an interview with a plain, eccentric, somewhat threadbare man, strangely pitiable in a premature old age. His manner alone remained unchanged by this surprising reverse-- it was of an extreme distinction. Owing to this, before my letter drew to a close, I had lost the impression of whatever had inspired it, finding myself very much in the situation of Titania confronted with entirely meaningless donkey's ears.

It argued a certain good fortune, in Insel's timing of his next visit,

-3-

that it should coincide with that of a German girl, as his absolute inability
to acquire any language to add to his own must have made his inhabitation of
a foreign land a somewhat lonely affair. But in how far I found it at last
impossible to determine, so narrowly his unformulated existence seemed
associated with itself. Her visit was fortunate for me also, for later on,
in our checking up on the subject of this very Insel, she, so common-sensed
and unimaginative, was able to clear my doubt as to whether it was I who
must be mentally deranged. Wishing to get on familiar terms with an acknow-
ledged surrealist, we took him to a cafe, and, in the embracing glare of a
locality above all others conducive to the liberal exchange of confidences
between the most heterogeneous people, the meager personality of this stranded
German opened up.

I still retain wisps of the irreal crises in his foot-loose career that,
as he related it, grew up, story by story, a frail edifice of lies and memory
out of our marble table top. It was securely buttressed by groups of obese
tradesmen who, in their agglomerated leisure, were playing bellotte. He
told us, his gray eyes atwinkle with the inner security the possession of a
strange surplus fortune, balancing destitution, gives to men of genius, he
had solved the problem of keeping alive without any money and thus had lived
for sixteen years.

A man who finds himself economically nude, should logically, in the
thickset iron forest of our industrial structure, be banged to death from
running into its fearfully rigid supports. He is again the primordial soft-
machine without the protective overall of the daily job in which his fellows
wend their way to some extent unbattered by this sphere of activity. For

-h-

them, the atrocious jaws of the gigantic organism will open at fixed inter-
vals and spit at them rations sufficient to sustain their coalescence with
the screeching, booming, crashing dynamism of the universal 'works'. For
the revolte, for one incapable of taking it as it is, this metal forest of
coin bearing machinery will partially revert to the condition of nature pre-
served in him, and show patches of moss as if he had projected there some of
the verdure rooted in him. Oases of leisure, succorable, soft if ragged
lining to the cage of practical mankind, these mossy refuges, along the life
of a wayward spirit who refuses to do as he is told, preferring to find out
for himself what to do, mostly materialize as the hospitalities of modest
little women who find a temporary relief from their innate anxiety in asso-
ciation with an irresponsible man in whom the honest desire for survival of
his creative impulse gets dishonestly mixed up with his amatory instinct.

Insel, as he talked, seemed to be recurrently emerging from predica-
ments of which, if some were lamentable, many were quite diaphanous as though
nothing of him but the most subtle aspects of his peculiar temperament had
got into them-- He varnished his painting of the past with a gentle irritation
of commentarial laughter. Unlike other men, he took delight in confessing that
all his women had deserted him, divorced him, thrown him out. How he had pled
with those women to have patience. "I am tired of supporting a waster,"
they would tell him at last. "But they were wrong," averred Insel, "While
I appeared irretrievably idle, Ich habe mich entwickelt-- I was developing,"
he explained, the mischief dancing defiantly in his eyes. And this entwicklung
I would not estimate blurred my view of Insel. I saw his image grown sudden-
ly faint, imploring the shadow of woman "-- to only wait-- in the end-- the
end-- I shall achieve glory."

-5-

These unfortunate separations, throwing him back upon the desert base
from which he was ever setting out anew, formed part of the frieze of disas-
ter through which he represented himself as forever fleeing under the vicious
darts of his drastic horoscope.

Housing his poverty as animals tracked down enter abandoned holes or a
honeyless bee might return to an empty hive-- of all the makeshift burrows
he found for himself in an unearned earth, so desolate and perilous seemed
his escapade in some far away, dismantled villa he described to us that it
has stuck in my mind. He had lived there one summer, in splendor, with some
caressive Mädchen who, when she left the place, had forgotten to ask him to
give up his key. And so it was that Insel, fallen once more under the heel
of fate, crept back to that love-swept lair and, shutting himself up in one
of the rooms, lived on the floor. "I could draw there," he pointed out to us
thankfully. And one saw him, day alone, morrow alone, where the air was the
breath of his own hunger, warily sneaking out at dark in search of a remnant
of food, or, just as possibly, so complex is the status of the artist, dining
with affable millionaires every other night. It comes back to me now that
Insel had started this episode as the story of a haunted house.

"One day when I had hidden there so long," he said, "as to make one with
the everlasting silence, I was startled by the sound of footfalls descend-
ing the stairs. 'Who could descend having never ascended?' I asked myself.
'What could have embodied itself under the roof to come down upon my isola-
tion?' I at once turned the key in my lock and waited, listening to those
fearful feet. At intervals they would halt, and at every halt I could hear
the echoes of heavy fists pounding on a door. And the footsteps grew greater,
the pounding nearer-- to the pounding of my heart." Frau Feirlein and I

-6-

hung on his words while, "Those heavy unreal fists fell in a rain of blows
on the last door-- the door," continued Insel, "that shut off the unbearable
emptiness of the room I was living in from the unbearable emptiness of the
house as a whole."

I imagined his quivering breast receiving, through the transmission of
his fear, the ghostly blows aimed at the door affording his outer defense
as he stood face to face with it. "Not daring to stir," he proceeded, "I
was almost choking for terror it would hear me breathe, when gradually I
perceived a softer noise come to succeed that ominous pounding. I do not
know what impulse this aroused in me, my one desire having been to remain
undiscovered, that caused me so suddenly to fling myself on that door and to
open it-- outside stood a very severe looking Huissier.* He was sealing up
the rooms. And, as usual," added Insel in utter discouragement, "They hauled
me before a magistrate."

His father, he said, was a schlosser, which turned out to mean 'black-
smith', and very early in Insel's life, as in the episode in the empty villa,
his destiny appeared to me to get mixed up with keys. I cannot remember in
detail the vague accidents in which his minor salvations depended upon keys
except for a fleeting impression of Insel crawling under his destitute couch
in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with an intermittant
flitting in and out of gas men and electricity bill collectors who would come
to cut him off and who, owing to some either mental or manual hokus-pokus
of Insel with the key, ended by turning the gas or electricity on. Thus
leaving him at least two elements of life.

"Don't schlossers make keys?" I asked.

"Surely," he agreed.

-7-

* Sheriff

"Well, you've _inherited_ the keys your father made. You'll see the whole of your life will turn on a key. Some people are accompanied throughout their career by a fixation of their destiny-- yours is a key. While Dali, for instance, is fated to the most extravagant of publicities. He is inclined to accept my theory, for some of the shrillest gags in his already fabulous advertisement were the result of sheer coincidence, yet pointing out plainly the effective procedure to be followed thenceforth. He told me it all originated with his first lecture on surrealism in Spain, when the mayor, who was acting as chairman, fell down dead at his feet, almost as soon as he began-- a windfall for journalists."

Insel, as if after this he feared his trips along the road to ruin might fall a little flat, changing his tempo, began to show off, surprising us with a burst of magnificence, he became so hilariously wealthy he juggled a fortune. "I spent ten millions in a year," he enthused. "Not one car, but bunches of cars I gave each of my friends and the orchestras I ordered, the clusters of beautiful women I hung upon myself in those Berlin nights."

"Where did you get it all?"

"Forging," he replied, with the same elation with which he had dispensed for our entertainment his retrospective largess. "Es war wirklich prachtvol-- we made bank notes in sheaves. You see, as a boy I was apprentice lithographer, and my technique was so remarkable I got raked in by a gang of crooks. We practically bought up Berlin before we were caught, and I was only in jail nine months."

"How was that?"

"Oh, one of the gang who escaped arrest used his influence. But I had time to reflect," he commented. "I saw other careers open to talent. In

-8-

that long solitude I conceived of a greater wealth than the wealth of banks.
Within myself I found the artist."

On the grounds that he was starving to death, he would exact from us the minutiae of advice on his alimentary problems to subsequently toss all advice aside in his audacious irresponsibility. Presenting himself as a pauper to the charitable organization of the Quakers, he had harvested, among other things, packages of macaroni and several pounds of cocoa, and as if these staple aliments were already consumed, he begged us to counsel him what to do now. He shook his head over the suggestion that he go there again.
"My last supply is yet too recent," he objected. But, Frau Feirlein told me, on the morrow he presented himself at her flat with these same Quaker gifts intact as an offering preliminary to his indistinct courtship. "What is the use of cocoa to me," he argued with my bewilderment, "I have no sugar." And, for some vague reason, one took the opposition of his prodigality to his mendicancy as a matter of course. This reason consisted in an intuition, so deeply imbedded in one's subconscious it would not rise to the surface of the mind until the final phase in one's analysis of him-- that this skeletal symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of. Through-out his angling for compassion on behalf of his utter destitution, one never resented his open carelessness in throwing back the fish.

Meanwhile, his reserved distinction, as of an aristocrat who should in a lasting revolution have experienced yet unimaginably survived the guillotine, was so consistent it claimed one's respect for his nonsensical manner of being

alive. But once was this impression dispelled when, in courteous haste to answer
a question, he shifted the part of a hard roll sandwich he was eating, out of
the way, horrifyingly developing a Dali-like protuberance of elongated flesh
with his flaccid facial tissue. As if unexpectedly the schlosser one had
hitherto been incapable of relating to him had at length intruded upon us with
his anvil stuffed in his cheek.

Only towards the close of his reminiscences did he seem to have shared
a responsibility with normal men. "They sent me to war," he told us wryly,
voicing that unconvincing complaint against their perpetual situation in the
ridiculous made by people who, pleasing to laugh at themselves, one suspects
of aiding destiny in detaining them there, "in two left-foot boots, and,"
trotting his fingers along the table in a swerve, "the one would follow the
other," he explained as the mental eye also followed that earlier Insel--
out of the ranks; on the march to a war that, at its blasting zenith, ceased
to be war, for, in elaborating his martial adventures, Insel turned out to
have been taking part in a film.

A wound up automaton running down, Insel ceased among the clatter of our
amusement.

"I know how you can make money," I exclaimed agog with enthusiasm.
"Write your biography."

"I am a painter," he objected, "It would take too long building a style."

"You'd only have to write the way you paint. Minutely, meticulously--
like an ant! Can you remember every moment, every least incident of your
life?"

"All," he replied decisively.

"Then start at once."

-10-

10

10

"It would need so much careful editing. In the raw it would be scandalous--"

"Scandalous," I cried scandalized-- "the truth? Anyway you can write under a pseudonym."

"People would recognize me."

"Don't you know anything of the world? The artist's vindication does not lie in 'what happens to him' but in what shape he comes out."

"Oh," said Insel disinhibiting, "very well. It's not the material that is wanting," he sighed wearily, "the stacks of manuscript notes I have accumulated!"

Then, "No," he reversed, "it's not my medium."

"Insel," I asked breathlessly, "would you let me write it?"

"That would be feasible," he answered interested. "We will make a pact. Get me to America and you have the biography."

"Done," I decided. "I'll write at once. America shall clamour for you."

"Don't overdo it," warned Insel, "it never works."

"You can have your dinners with me and tell me-- Can you really remember-- the minutest details?"

"Every one," he assured me.

"What a book," I sighed with satisfaction.

"Flight from Doom-- every incident distorted to the pattern of an absurd destiny," Insel was looking delighted with himself.

He came out to dinner on a few evenings and I would talk with him for hours. The minute details were fewer than I had bargained for, his leit-motif being his strangeness in so seldom having spoken.

"My parents noticed it at once," he told me. "As a child I would remain

-11-

absolutely silent for six months at a time."

He did not give a fig for heredity. All his relatives were chatty.

Another thing he had found in himself was his aptitude for housework.

He had once married a stenographer, who simply _could_ not arrange the kitchen with the same precision as he.

"She tried so hard-- for so long. She never came up to the mark. What I disliked was her plagiarism. Why," demanded Insel with retrospective annoyance, "could she not have worked out a system of her own?"

So they separated. Later, when Insel and I became uncannily intimate I understood what his unique orderliness had done to the girl-- given her the jitters!

Nevertheless, he himself seemed sometimes to have difficulty in locating things. Once during coffee he drifted off to the lavabo and on his return took a seat some tables away from the one at which he had left me. In the same slightly deferent sociable concern he continued to 'pay attention'--

The strain on this biography would consist in his too facile superposing of separate time-- his reminiscences flitted about from one end of his life to the other.

"I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a taxi the other day-- a portrait of some women. They were extraordinarily attractive to me; I was sure we would have been profoundly congenial. It was labeled 'the Bronte Sisters'. Do you know of any one by that name?" asked Insel, who had not read Goethe nor heard of Shakespeare. "The dealer told me they were authoresses-- I feel I should care for what they have written."

"The sister Emily wrote 'Wuthering Heights'. I suppose it is one of the

-12-

greatest novels ever written. I never remember for very long, after having
read it, what it's about-- yet whenever I think of it-- I find myself stand-
ing on wild moors-- alone with the elements-- elements become articulate--
*You* would care for it very much."

I began to think it improbable I should even find a basis for this bio-
graphy. He was so at variance with himself, he existed on either side of a
paradox. Even as he begged for food to throw away, forever in search of a
haven, he preferred *any* discomfort to going home. Constantly he thanked his
stars for an iron constitution-- while obviously in an alarming state of
health.

At last the biography aborted as had the Quaker oats.

The first stage of Insel's intimacy completed, when he evidently intended
to let you further 'in on' his show, he insisted on your reading Kafka, just
as on assisting at a foreign opera one is handed a book of the words.

Study this well he tacitly commended. It will give you an angle of
approach. "In Kafka," he explained, "I found a foreshadowing of my hounded
existence, recognized the relentless drive of my peculiar misfortune."

"Der Prozess" was the volume he borrowed to lend me, and I lay awake
reading on and on and on, curious for the book to begin, when, with one eye
still open, I came upon the end to fall asleep in the unsatisfied certainty
of having become acquainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless,
genius who ever lived.

Enraged with bitter disappointment, "Zum Teufel," I berated Insel, when

-13-

he appeared for our next session. If he was a lunatic, he was prodigious,
dressing up his insanity in another man's madness. It was no use to me.
Flight from Doom, with its pattern of absurd destiny, had already been written.

"You atrocious fake-- you have no life to write-- you're _acting_ Kafka!"

"And I," answered Insel, as I turned him out, "see clearly into _you_. Your
brain is all Bronte." Flying the colors of his victory, he sauntered off.

-14-

I thought I had dropped Insel. I was mistaken. Some weeks later I was writing letters when all of a sudden I stopped. An urgent telepathy impinging on my mind, I automatically dashed off a card. When I looked to see what I had so unpreparedly written-- this is how it began:

"Insel:

In a hole? If its of use, can advance you what you are getting from the ... Gallery."

"It is interesting," Insel was to remark significantly later on, "Your note to me was couched in flawless German."

For a while I sat wondering to what appeal, and why, I had answered. I did not care if Insel were in trouble. Obviously he fabricated trouble and far be it from me to deprive him of it-- . I threw the card into the waste paper basket, and started for the post. When I had opened the front door I shut it again and retrieved the postcard. Before the letter-box I put it in my pocket and turned away, only to go back-- with a relieved determination I posted it.

Insel must have crossed my message for in a couple of hours he panted into my place all undone, despairingly waving a sheet of blue paper.

"Dass Blaue papier," he articulated hoarsely, ducking his head as if the 'papier' was one of a shower of such sheets bombarding him in his dash for escape.

"Something the matter? Have a porto. Sit on a chair. Whatever it is-- out with it!"

-15-

"Dass blaue papier," he reiterated, casting a haunted look over his
shoulder. On its return that look fell in with some photographs of paintings
lying on the table.

"Whose pictures are these?" asked Insel, immediately collected, and
staring at each in turn with entire attention.

"Who could have done these?"

"They are mine."

"You are an extraordinarily gifted woman," he said, still staring at
them. "Oh, how I wish I could read your book."

"It's not like those pictures," I laughed and told him their brief history.

"Those' are my 'last exhibition' cancelled the moment the dealer set
eyes on them."

"Good God," muttered Insel under his breath.

"I felt, if I were to go back, begin a universe all over again, forget
all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth
incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation."

I did not know this as yet, but the man seated before me holding a
photo in his somewhat invalid hand had done this very thing-- visualized the
mists of chaos curdling into shape. But with a male difference.

Well, it turned out that the blue paper was a summons for rent involving
the evacuation of his studio.

Insel's system in such emergency was this: -

Never to pay. To work himself into an individualistic kind of epilepsy
whenever served with a summons or notified to appear in court to explain why
the money was not forthcoming. Computing illusory accounts to find the
exact sum he could promise to pay by a certain date, knowing full well he

-16-

would not be able to pay anything at all; in order to scare himself into
fits awaiting the fatal appointment.

Now one could watch him following the path of pursuit at an easy canter,
having proved he had something definite to flee from.

His role was helplessness personified. So here he was without a roof.
In spite of the ceiling a pitiless rain seemed to be falling upon him already.

Whenever I have seen poor people asleep on stone seats in the snow,
like complementary colors in the eyes, there arise in my mind unused ballrooms
and vacationers' apartments whose central heating warms a swarming absence.
To the pure logician this association of ideas might suggest a possible trans-
occupation of cubic space, while mere experience will prove that the least of
being alive is transacted in space, so much does sheer individuality exceed
it; that providing a refuge for a single castaway brings results more catas-
trophic than a state of siege.

So I kept saying to myself, "Remember, you don't care a damn what happens
to this thin man." While what he did was to fill the room with all men who
are over-lean. And the room fell open, extending to space-- as such-- to
remind me of my futile superposition of stone benches on ballrooms. My lips
opened automatically. "Don't be fools," I admonished them, "keep out of
this. You'll get me into an unnecessary jam." In the end I must have given
in, for I heard myself telling him, to my despair, he could live in my flat
when I had gone to the country. "If that's any help," I added dubiously.
"It solves half my problem," he thanked me with appreciative warmth.

The result of this lapse of protective selfishness was days of agony.
I had intended to run off to the country at once. But now-- I sat looking
at that apartment obsessed with the necessity of disencumbering it of

-17-

personalia. The onus of trying to make up one's mind where to begin over-
powered me.

The psychic effort of retracting oneself from the creative dimension
where one can remain indefinitely-- like a conscious rock-- immovable-- in
intellectual transmutation of long since absorbed actualities, while the
present actuality is let to go hang-- was devastating.

The contemplation of a bureau whose drawers must be emptied-- the idea
of some sort of classification of M.S.S. notes and miscellaneous papers--
that in habitual jumble are easily selectable by the remembrance of their
subconscious 'arrangement', the effort to concentrate on something in which
one takes no interest, which is the major degradation of women, gives pain
so acute that, in magnifying a plausible task to an inextricable infinity
of deadly detail, the mind disintegrates. The only thing to do is to rush
out of the house and forget it all. So disliking to leave one's work in
favor of some practical imperative, in begrudging the time to undertake,
one wastes triple the time in being averse to thinking.

Something would have to be done about it. Fortunately, after more than
a week of this paralyzing resistance, I came across a long painting overall.
Its amplitude made something click in my brain. I at once became animated
with that operative frenzy which succeeds to such periods of unproductive
strain. Sewing up its neck and sleeves on the Singer, I obtained a corpse-
like sack, and stuffing it full of scribbles I tied it up, and, throwing it
into a superfluous room, locked the door on it with a sigh of relief. I was
once more myself.

In the meanwhile Insel had come to take me to see one of his rare
paintings in the possession of a friend who was liable to feed him at crucial

-18-

18

moments.

In the taxi I inquired, "Was haben Sie schones erlebt * since I saw
you?"

"I had two negresses at once," he answered, all aglitter.

"Two," I echoed anxiously. "I hope you didn't have to pay them."

"Oh, no," he assured me.

"So they liked the look of you," I teased with friendly disdain.

"Yes," he concurred apologetically.

"And-- was it nice?"

"Well," he reflected, "I thought it was going to be nice. And now the
trouble is to get rid of them. And what have you erlebt?" he commented.

"Not quite so much-- anyhow."

I saw the picture. Its various forms, at once embryonic and precocious,
being half evolved and of degenerate purpose, were overgrown with a hair
that never grew anywhere else-- it was so fine. And when our host had gone
out of the room Insel stared at it amazed. His face became rigid with
incredulity. "I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful," he
murmured. "How did I do it?" he begged himself to explain.

When we got out on the street again I walked some paces off parallel
to him in order to observe him. Adverse remarks with ordinary men it is
politic to keep to oneself, while to withhold one's comments from Insel would
have appeared impolite. His very personality taking the form of a question
mark, it would have shown a lack of perspicacity when intentionally confronted
with a self-composed conundrum, not to attempt unobserved, the intriguer,
underrated.

Curiosity he constrained to stand off to take his measure, mentality,

-19-

* "What beautiful experiences have you had

19

to pivot him for noting whether there were any creases in his aural suit.
As those who are of the body, whom other bodies have traffic with, slap each
other on the back, with Insel social intercourse depended on putting out
feelers among the loose matter of psychologic nebulae.

"You walk so weirdly," I said. "Are you one of those surrealists who
have taken up black magic?"

Totally bewildered, he exclaimed, "Whatever is that?" Yet, like all
who have to do with any form of magic, he apparently had lost some of his
specific gravity.

He was passing over the light-reflecting pavement in his shabby black
as if a rigid crow, although with folded wings should skim.

"Acra," I said, "sends dreams across the Atlantic."

"He could not," protested Insel, off his guard. "He has not got the
power."

There is a way of speaking that word peculiar to those alone who have
wielded it-- that way was his.

And he glided on, turning towards me his face hung with deflated muscles
one felt could be blown about by the wind.

"You cannot glide," it defied me, and I noticed how I was keeping my
distance in my effort to 'get at him.'

He had for the moment the stick-fast aloofness of an evil presentiment--
the air of a priest of some criminal cult. All the same, this slight impres-
sion of criminality he gave off at intervals I did not receive as a direct
impress on my own mind, but as a glimpse of a conviction he hid within him-
self.

-29-

"Aren't you rather bad?" I laughingly inquired.

"Everybody imagines I am the devil, and," he answered forlornly shrugging
his shoulders, "there's no harm in me at all."

When we fell into line once more, he resumed the uniformity of all
people making for a cafe.

I finally gave Insel the key. His mimicry of salvation convinced me
my distress, after all, had not been in vain.

But, oh horror! On arriving at the country, I suddenly _seemed_ to remember
the charwoman pouring some Normanol from an antique bottle I had told her to
clean into an empty gin bottle. Normanol, being a dissolvent for rhodoid very
much stronger than cutex which dissolves the cuticle around the finger nails,
I had a shocking vision of Insel's diaphanous intestines entirely disappear-
ing should he, as would be only natural, mistake it for a graceful token of
absentee hospitality-- and of myself arraigned for manslaughter.

"For God's sake, don't drink anything out of any kind of bottle in that
flat," I wrote him immediately, "It might kill you."

"Dear Mrs. Jones; However do you think I am comporting myself in your
home," Insel answered. "Were there thirty bottles of the finest 'schnaps' I
should not touch them. Rest assured you will find your apartment _exactly_ as
you left it."

He sounded quite comfortably settled. I had also written him to get my
charwoman to clean his suit with odorless gasoline at my expense, and inquired
how much money he had left.

"Your suggestion for my suit is most kind-- however, I am convinced that
it is only on account of the dirt in it that it still holds together."

He had, he said, enough money to last him for a 'little' week.

-21-

We had agreed that I should come every few days for a dressmaker's fitting at the further end of the flat where it would not disturb him. When I did go, a bewildered concierge informed me, "Madam, the artist who was to live in your apartment never came."

"That only means he has not yet been 'turned out'," I explained to her, while to myself I reflected, "You will find your apartment exactly-- the monkey!"

I felt that the end of his little week was no longer my concern, and I forgot all about him.

I would run into Paris for the dressmaker, a tea, a dinner and back to my little hotel in St. Cloud again, until at last the time drew near for exporting pictures-- among them were to be included some of Insel's.

"Pictures, drawings, three o'clock," I wired him. At a quarter past, he had not arrived and I went to tea with a friend who hailed me from the courtyard, leaving a note on the door, "Will be back shortly."

When I returned the place was different-- in the smoothed out air there was a suspicion of a collapse in time. As if by a magnet, I was drawn into the studio and up to the dark oak table. Upon it lay a flat packet. I could have sworn it emitted a faint phosphorescence that advanced from all the rest of the room. The wrapping paper was so strikingly creaseless it looked unusual. It had in some inexplicable manner become precious as ivory; its squareness was instinctively exact as the hexagons of wasps.

"He has left the drawings," I supposed, almost reluctantly undoing this magnetic focus of an uncanny precision. But once unfolded, I found it contained only a shabby block of writing paper that had been left lying there and from which I had torn the note I left for him.

-22-

"Did you find anything?" he asked when, later having resuscitated from the moribond state in which he preferred to arrive, he was able to articulate.

"Yes. What on earth-- ?"

"I wrapped it up," said Insel-- an enormous intention fixed in his eyes.

It was at this moment that, for me, Insel, from a seedy man, dissolved into a strange mirage, the only thing in the world at that time to stir my curiosity.

On his arrival with the pictures he had appeared the phantom of himself as I had seen him last. He had so weakened, become so transparent.

Deeply bowed, he clutched his feeble fist in the emptiness where his stomach should have been. From this profound concavity arose a dying whimper of, "Water-- asperine" as out of the abdominal void rode the unclenching fist-- his tremulous fingers, hovering over the bureau, grasped a cigarette.

"Well, you're in a nice state," I taunted him to cover my alarmed compassion.

"Why didn't you write?"

He gulped his asperine as if to alleviate a death rattle. "I did write."

"Yes, a comic strip. I found my flat _exactly_ as I left it."

"I know," said Insel, gently abashed, "I ought to have told you 'I am not here.'"

"Even the least of philanthropists," I laughed, "has sensibilities-- I thought I had been intrusive. You see, Insel, any possible gesture in the face of poverty must inevitably be insolent, its very necessity-- in not being outs-- makes poverty so aloof."

"And I thought you were _angry_ because I mentioned money."

"I had _told_ you to mention money. But all my sympathy for you was buried under that bunch of cheap flowers I put here to welcome the lonely clochard."

-23-

"But, after all, I have been here nearly every day," he almost sobbed, "to look for you. I could never find you. I knew when you had been here for where you trod there lay little fragments of stuff. I could trace your movements by the pins you shed on the floor. Think what it was like-- to seek after a woman, a vanishing woman, and in her stead, to find nothing but pins," he implored. Then brightening, "I picked them all up. Look," said Insel, hurriedly reversing the lapel of his jacket. On the underside stuck in rows as precise as in packages from the factory, were my dressmaker's fallen pins. He dropped the lapel into place again as if too long he had bared this precious hoard of his compelling exactitude.

With an interminable cautiousness Insel had revived. "Ich bin nicht fromm-- I am not pious," he mused, deeply introspective, "And yet how I have prayed, I prayed," he burst out, a blind agony falling upon his eyes, "I prayed that you would come back!"

"You seem to have been thinking about me a good deal-- hadn't you any steak?"

"I never _cease_ thinking of you," he muttered, as if fearful I should overhear-- and aloud, "None," he answered flatly yet without reproach.

As mediums on becoming professional, obliged to continue an intermittent condition, lapse to the most lamentable dupery, Insel would actually plagiarize his innate mediumistic quality of which he appeared to be but partially conscious.

It would seem unnecessary after the intrinsic wizardry of his simple packet to resort to the untenable mystery of a lie. Yet he did.

Awestricken, solemn, he recounted to me that while I had, as it were, struck myself off his menu, Mlle. Alpha had sent him a card to know how he was getting on.

-24-

"The world is populated with people anxious to know how I am getting on. But when I tell them-- the world immediately depopulates! I wrote her in answer, 'Am starving to death except for a miracle-- three o'clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end.' -- And then your telegram! for three o'clock. Today is Tuesday.

"Of course she did not answer," he commented, "I had rather thought she might be good for fifty francs. Nobody ever sends one fifty francs," he ended despondently.

"Oh, what's the matter with you, Insel? That girl has more sex appeal than almost any one in Paris. And all your reaction is that she might be good for fifty francs. I never could interpret, until I saw her, the French 'Elle n'a pas froid aux yeus'-- the Alpha's eyes are volcanic. All the men are in love with her."

"Not I," he boasted.

"No-o? I should say that clochards were hardly in her line."

"Grade-- exactly," Insel concurred as if relieved of a responsibility.

Characteristically, after swearing he would ask her for his card as proof of a miraculous coincidence with his usual unconcern in breaking up his plots it was Insel who insisted on my meeting Mlle. Alpha whom I knew only slightly.

-25-

"Fleische ohne knochen," Insel especially hollow-voiced begged me when I took him to dine. This insistence on boneless pieces of meat was habitual with him.

"Do I look any fatter?" he inquired after he had eaten, as if consulting his doctor.

I thought it best to reply in the affirmative. As a matter of fact the disquieting thing about Insel was that however much food you sunk in him it no more seemed to amalgamate with him than would a concrete mass with a gaseous compound.

From now on Insel turned up regularly as soon as my fitting by the dress-maker was over.

Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshhold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. It radiated round his face and formed a halo hovering above the rod of his rigid body. He looked like a lamp post alight. Perhaps in that moment before the door opened he recreated himself out of a nothingness into which he must relapse when being alone his magnetism had no one to contact.

"I've brought 'it'," his illusive grin seemed to be announcing, as if his visible person were a mannikin he operated on occasion. "Make what you can of it-- you may wonder if I am sure of its nature myself-- Let us not be too precise as to what I am."

I led him down the corridor, feeling that he, so recently non-existent, was all-surprised at finding himself to be anything at all.

He shut the door, an act I have heard an authoress describe as so banal

-26-

it is unfit for publication. But shutting the door, like all automatism we
take for granted, is stupendous in its implications.

As the ancients built temples as isolators for the power of the Almighty,
which their ritual focused on the altar, a force so dynamic that officiating
priests, having evoked it, were constrained to descend the altar steps back-
wards without ceasing to fact it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could
absorb such power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would
receive a shock that flung them to the ground.

So the shutting of doors is a concentration of our radiations in rectangular containers, to economize the essences of our being we dispense to those with whom we communicate.

Thus, when Insel shut the door infinitessimal currents ran out of him into
the atmosphere as if he were growing a soft invisible fur that, when reciprocal
conditions were sufficiently suave, grew longer and longer as the hair of the
dead, it is maintained, will leisurely fill a coffin until it seemed with its
measured infiltration even to interfere with Time. The mesmeric rhythm of a
film slowed down conducted the tempo of thought and sentience in response to
his half petrified tepidity, for he moved within an outer circle of partial
decease-- a ring of death surrounding him-- that reminded one of those magically-
animated corpses described by William Seabrook. Even before he came into one's
presence, one received a draughty intimation of his frosty approach. He
chilled the air, flattened the hour, faded color.

But if one could crash through this necropholous aura, its consistency
dissolved, one came to an inner circle where aerial things floated in a semi-
existent aquarium. Or, at times he, himself, would overflood it, as now when

-27-

27

his coming close to me effected acclimatization, turning an irreal ice into a
tenuous warmth.

"I was so terribly afraid I should miss you. I got to bed at seven this
morning--(quite exceptional" he added hurriedly as if wishing to efface a bad
impression, "I shall not do it again), and when I woke up my watch said twenty
past six. I was convinced you would be gone, but-- is it not astounding-- a
moment later it said half past four."

To these teeny nothings that marked out his life (as momentous events are
the milestones of others) he imparted an interest peculiarly visual. You saw
the watch in halucinatory transformation, its dial advancing the grey diamonds
of his eyes out of a murk more mysterious than darkness instead of correcting
the eyes' mistake. He possessed some mental conjury enabling him to infuse an
actual detail with the magical contrariness surrealism merely portrays.
Perhaps it was the operation of this wierd power that necessitated his speaking
with such drilling intensity.

He had brought me a present-- As he bowed his head over what he held in
his hands, all the sweetstuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an
exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with some
ineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring
little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My
charmed curiosity wanted to cry, "From what enchanted bed of love have you so
lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?"

It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious inquiry of this
bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with years of wear, yet
deodorized by continuous exposure to the all-night air.

His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black

-28-

passe-par-tout, was saying, "I want to give you my own drawing; the only one
I refuse to sell." The drawing in the passe-par-tout, like his atmosphere
that clung to him as ours clings to the earth, seemed almost astir with that
somnolent arrested motion revealing his nature.

It was so white, the flocking skies of a strangely disturbing purity drifted
above vortices of snow-like mist in travail of taking shape, coiling the mind
into following the spiral, eventual materialization of blindly virginal ele-
mentals.

"This," he continued, "is the first drawing of a new series-- all my future
work will be based on it. I intend my technique to become more and more minute,
until, the grain becoming entirely invisible, it will look like a photograph.
Then, when my monsters do evolve, they will create the illusion that they
really exist; that they _have_ been photographed.

The while the drift of his words swept me together with the frozen drawing
along a current of quiet reverence, expressing gratitude. As under his con-
jurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions
of a colossal beef steak.

I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of
economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be sold for him; but at
length when he inquired sadly, "It doesn't please you? I will give you another"
I promised to keep it.

-29-

"I'm so ugly naked," he told me most unexpectedly, in a tone of intense
and anxious confidence. "I can't go to the public baths because I daren't
walk down to the water."

"Your face is naked and you walk about with it."

"Yes," he assented miserably, "and it frightens the women. I used to be
so beautiful. Is it imaginable," he asked, peering expectantly into my face.

"I'm tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are."

"All women are terrified of me," he continued automatically.

"I said tired-- not terrified, and I'll tell you why. I've never really
seen you. You always give me the impression that you are _not there_. Sometimes
you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to
entirely materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one
gets a glimpse of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch. _Your_
way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You're so afraid of actuali-
ty."

"I can materialize for you," he said raptly, "forever-- on the corner of
this street."

Somehow we were sitting on the Terrasse of the Hotel Lutetia. It stood
behind us dressed in its name of a pagan Paris. It might very well be
actually surviving for our blind backs which, taking no part in the present, are
carried around with us as if concrete in the past.

Darting about amazingly in the autumn vapour innumerable metal beetles
of various species with which modern man, still unable to create soft machines
and so limited to the construction of heavy plagiarism that sometimes crush

-30-

him, had sprinkled the carrefour facing us, where gasoline impregnating the
dust had begotten a vitiated yet exhilarating up-to-date breath of life.

A distant gnat of a thousand horse-power hummed in the heavens.

"If only we could sit here eternally it would be Wunderbar-- it's just
like sitting in the kitchen."

"The kitchen?" I exclaimed.

"Ah, yes," he sighed. "All my youth I ate in the kitchen together with
my Vater und Mutter and the other five children." Then, inhaling the effluvia
of the streets, "There was lots of steam," he said invigorated. "All the washing
hung up to dry, the muddy boots stood in a row, and on the good hot stove--"

"Die Zuppe," I joined in, entranced.

"Ja, die Zuppe," he confirmed ecstatically. "You see, it is not so much a
matter of materializing but of being able to speak. Before I found you I had
never any one I could speak to. I should never have been able to tell about all
this-- "

"All the boots?" I interrupted.

"-- to any one else," he concluded, his voice trailing off as if calling
to me from another world.

"Allein-- allein," he chanted forsakenly. Something was happening to this
man's voice, the most musical modulations were stealing into it. "Always alone--
alone in Berlin-- alone in Paris-- " The words floated out of him like wisps
of a dream, "more than alone in prison."

"In prison," I responded, "where there is no one, _no one_ you can convince
of your not being there. You might try it on the warden, but the moment he
began to suspect would be the very moment he assured himself of your presence--
I mean-- let's leave that and have something more to eat!"

-31-

In sitting so close to Insel at the small terrace table all the filaments of what has been called the astral body, that network of vibrational force were being drawn out of me towards a terrific magnet, while I sat unmoved beside the half-rotten looking man of flesh. My astral inclination, withheld by a counter-active physical repulsion, could not gain its presumable end of flying onto that magnet-- It was as though he had achieved an impossible confusion of his positive and negative polarity-- Out of a dim past echoed the din of a music hall refrain I had heard in Berlin "Du musst heruber-- You must come over."

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 cost, he made a ritual of offering it to my eyes.

"Je suis la ruine feerique," I trilled in vanity.

"Ah, yes," sighed Insel, as I translated, churning me with his eyes into the colorless vapours of his creation.

The cloth of my coat, a fantaisie, was sown with lacquered red setae-- wisps, scarcely attached, which caught the light, and all through the evening unusual manifestations of consciousness occuring outside the Lutetia were punctuated by Insel's staccato spoilation of that hairy cloth. He could not desist. Like an adult elf insolently delousing a mortal, whenever I laughingly

-32-

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 lacune in my experience was being 'stopped up' with his moral man. The pattern held out to my early ethical life. The man who atones. He who unsuspectedly lingers in the world subconscious.

I did not care who 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 any one 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.

-34-

* starvation prowling palaces

"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 Bolshevik.

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

* I read later that sugar was used for strengthening concrete.

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 simul-
taneity 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 afflicker, 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.

-36-

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 sky-scrapers. 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 unsaccountable 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

-37-

37

exceeding moment I could, rising above the distortion of life, hold inexpressable
communion with Insel, where his spirit had no flaw.

Within range of the crystaline of his eyes become so brightly brittle,
again I experienced the profound relief of the acute celerity rhythm that per-
petually 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 Sevres.

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 pre-
posterously 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 'aerial mould' 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

-38-

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.

-39-

The reverse of his aloofness was a hollow invitation to my intrusion.
Urged to cross the frontier of his individuality, I got in the way of that
faintly electric current he emitted. His magnetic pull steadily on the in-
crease, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational
quandry, until as if it were imperative for me to make a connection with the
emissive agency of my accidental clairvoyance, with a supernormal acumen he
inspired, I located the one point of contact; the temple. Straightway I
found myself possessed of an ability to form a 'mental double' (for no portion
of my palpable substantiality was in any way involved) a mental double of
my own temple.

This was one manifestation of how in Insel's vicinity pieces of bodies
would seem to break off as astral fractions and on occasion hang, visually
suspended in the air. Quite apparently to my subconscious the bit of my skull
encaving the fragile area flew off me, crashed onto his and stuck there.

On the spur of this subvoluntary cohesion to the telepathic center--
I definitely penetrated (into) his mediumistic world where illusory experience
which had so far escaped as scarcely whispered pictures took on a fair degree
of resemblance to three dimensional concretion; the sculpture of hallucination
succeeding to the visionary film.

Insel straightened as a water level, his petrified eyes drilling the image
of his coma into the ultimate ceiling, broke into a right angle of prostration
and ascension.

Out of a torso of white ash arose iron rags as puffs of curling smoke,
blocks of shadow crushed together in the outline of a giant. Dense as the

-40-

dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o'-the-wisp
shining from it-- I crouched alongside encumbered with an enormous shell white
as plaster which, having but partly taken shape, trailed to an end in a sail of
mist.

And all the while Insel kept up his mixture of Beggars' Opera and oratorio,
showing a tragi-comic duality in his confidences. A coxcomb in purgatory, he
enlivened a suppliant self-abasement with pranks he was proud to have played
on a short-sighted mistress. Vast tracks of his barren universe were fixed
in her monocle.

Our discussions of his tribulations had the light hilarity of conversation
between clowns. Our shoulders almost touching, we seemed to have come within
risible distance of each other. As if our imbecilic mirth were due to an
assurance that suffering loses weight when tossed to and fro.

Intermittently his intriguing anxieties ceased to be actual. In his
cerebral commotion, Trouble, attaining an inflation at which it burst, had no
further existence except in the fragments constituting his exortations for help
which, at that, were his means of entertaining one.

Albert Londres tells of a lunatic who periodically would drop whatever
he was doing to go up to the wall and say peculiar prayers to it. So Insel
had two or three intimate anecdotes he had to 'get off'. He told them when-
ever I met him with an earnestness that, like a gentle gimlet, bored into my
mind. The culminative point of his corporeal life had been his threat to
shoot a girl who left him for a lesbian, and of his psychic life, his magnetic
rays drawing some other girl out of bed on to her balcony whenever he passed
below at night.

-41-

As a prayer, repeated over and over, becoming auto-hypnotic, attains
to faith in each retelling, these stories grew vaster, lasted longer, reached
farther into a kind of absolute of confidence. As if with incantations he
must summon up his past because some unimaginable impediment withheld the
present and the future from him. His mind besieged the barred outlet of today-
into-tomorrow in an effort to break it down and gather fresh material, but on
finding itself impotent revoked to memory, dilating his souvenirs until for
him the story of the universe was blotted out by the gigantism of his meagre
individual experience.

Externally his aspect was vague as, internally the rudimentary ideas
stored in his cerebral cells. His person withdrawing in approaching, his eyes
appeared to start their staring in advance of the brows that encaved them. Be-
tween his 'expression' preceding his face and his speech which so often sounded
as if issuing from a distance behind him, his person melted from view. In
him everything seemed inverted. His voice in its drilling intensity getting
softer, louder, would go up higher, lower.

My casual ability to partake of his moods evoked my own anxiety of the
past which joining in his terror of the aerial omen made it doubly real. The
nomistic warning which recurred to my mind, 'He who looks back returns to the
maze' I disobeyed; so intense was my intuitional curiosity as to the leak in
Insel's magnetic coherence. I felt that giving in to a dislocation of my
identity, which is usually perilous or demoralizing, must in this exceptional
case, be finally vindicated by a revelation of what supremely lovely essence
was being conveyed to me by this human wreck. In the light of this my cer-
titude his corporeal mendicancy appeared fictitious. So surely it was an
exquisite nucleous that in his somewhat comatose exhaltation he struggled to

-42-

save. On the instant I accepted this salvation as equally my affair. Memory
in euthanasia will come to life when fed on the same sort of stuff as that
which formed it-- .

Insel, the animate cadaver, stretched with the pliancy of decay from the
last war into the next-- while walls of solid murder with soldiers for bricks
came marching in on a living aspiration-- to enclose it-- waste it-- it must
not happen again.

"Vielleicht verkaufen," I could hear Insel muttering as I made this de-
cision, obsessed by an impersonal responsibility. He was toting up imaginary
accounts in payment of his passage to America.

"Promise to be my guide and companion?" he implored earnestly while star-
ing straight before him as if it did not matter where I was.

"How tedious," my everyday self recoiled, the lovely essence evaporating,
for whenever Insel turned his profile he sort of extinguished. It was only
when both his eyes were fixed upon me I entered his Edenic region of unreasoning
bliss to sway among immaterial algae.

In profile, as if he cut himself in half and in halving should leave him-
self evil, he became so alien, so very elfin, he induced aversion. The notch
at the spring of the nose was further back than the drop of the upper lip.
These angles of his pasty face were over-acute and out of plumb. A kink near
the ear suggested the wire-hung jaw of a ventriloquist's dummy. In profile, this
nit-wit infused with the secret ghost, seemed to have been carved for a joke
out of mouldy wood.

"Immer-- immer spazieren-- eternally taking a walk," he insisted, once
more aware of my presence; his voice dwindled to a pathos so unearthly it
could only converse with the unconscious. His eyes, for dusk had fallen, were

-43-

phosphorescent as approaching fire-flies.

As Insel consecrated our spontaneous comradeship with his tom-tom reitera-
tions of how he delighted to talk to me, and I, non-plussed, would hazily
inquire "what about" I kept on naming him to myself.

"Die fröhliche Seele," and again, "Die nachte Seele." *

It seemed quite fortuitous that sitting beside him I should feel I was
up against 'the naked soul'. Practically anything might substitute in my
consciousness for a man, who, however long I looked at him I could never en-
tirely put together'.

We had been sitting outside the Lutetia for six hours.

"Now," laughed Insel, "Man Ray should pass again."

"To conclude, we have no use for time."

"That is not what I mean-- "

"You mean that eternity spins round and round?"

We arose. But our legs become paralyzed from sitting so long on the
hard little chairs, we barely saved ourselves from toppling over and staggered
across the pavement. Suddenly the Metro opened at my feet. In the midst of
a sentence I dropped from sight as if impelled to conform with Insel's con-
cepts by flickering out. One seldom took leave of him; (walking along with
him one would unexpectedly drift sideways into a cab) as Insel, in an electric
sputter, softly mumbled "schade".**

So now I descended the stairway-- Insel leaned over it in his disgrace-
ful grace, "When shall I see you again?" he implored, clutching his concave
breast. An awesome lunar reflection lit up his face from within.

-44-

* The naked soul

** A pity

On one of my visits to town Insel did not turn up, but when I left home to dine with friends I met him drifting round the corner with the wild concern of having too lately thrown off an unguessable inertia.

He greeted me with the relief of an object which, having fallen apart, should chance upon its other half again. His discomforting friable surface had slightly embodied; he even-- I felt, but was not sure-- took my arm: A brittle elbowing into the prelude of some dance macabre.

With a kind of epileptic cajolery he beseeched me to break my appointment. Finding this ghostly courtesy agreeable as any other, I decided to give him half an hour. I would drive to my friends instead of walking. So down we sat to suffuse another stray cafe with the ineffable haze of his contagion.

Insel, leaning back against his chair in a tall recline of felicity, groped in his pocket and took out something I could not see for he held it like a conjuror. Signing for me to hold out my hand he placed his over it as a cupola showering so discreet a sensitiveness my hand responded as a plot of invisible grasses grazed by an imperceptible breath.

"The girl," he whispered, and the grasses parted under a couple of atomies cupped in my palm; Insel and his girl embracing-- or were they Adam and Eve? "The girl gave me this," he said, puckering his face in helpless incomprehension, "And it won't go."

I looked at what he had dropped in my hand-- a sordid silver watch on a worn leather strap.

-45-

"Will you take it to be mended?" he wooed me, "You can speak French."

As soon as I was seated beside him I had reached the extremity of optimism. The landscape of a spattered hording across the street was too lovely to look at. I had to lower my eyelids. Insel already had lowered his on a face falling lower and lower into the excavation of his breast.

He started up, elated to impart what he had found there. Evidently a death warrant.

"I am to die," he rejoiced, "And will you weep <u>one</u> little tear for me?" he asked flirtatiously.

"Yum, yum," I gibed, intent on the beauty of the silver rivers he had loosened in the veins of the ugly marble table top. "Does ums want to be pitied-- you've struck a hunk of granite."

"You <u>won't</u> weep?" he implored from a gust of sad laughter.

"Not a drop."

Insel tried again. "Sterben," he sighed in the voice of a weary archangel, an incommemorable voice burying the endlessness of death in two syllables. I was disturbed-- if he should peter out on that annihilating refrain I would never know what was so weirdly, so wonderfully the matter with this exquisite scarecrow.

"Insel," I shook him gently, "You're much more likely to make people weep by remaining alive."

But Insel, passionately in love with Death, raved in a soft, a sublime sibilance, "Sterben-- man müss-- man-- mü-- üss." This fair decease in which he infinitely delighted, vaster and more dimly distant than the lesser deaths of his usual aberrations sailed with Insel on its wings to heights of a stratospheric purity.

-46-

At once the hording became abominable, the marble of the table the color
of nausea, the whole of the world depressing, and Insel, a dilapidated suicide,
hung aloft from a terrifyingly rusty nail together with all his unpainted
pictures-- . This was a recollection of the sombre ambition which stirred
him whensoever he became aware of his real life. It looked pretty badly-- real
life-- so carelessly repaired by hand-- that obscene, that relentless hording.
Insel, his eyes closed upon it, induced by Death the absolute decoy, examined
an integral vision lining the degeneracy of his brain.

His dirge still hummed on the air-- .

Life without world, how starkly lovely, stripped of despair. The soul,
inhabiting the body of an ethic ascended to the sapphire in the attic. Here
was no need for salvage. If he preferred to attain perfection, I would let
Insel loose to die as he pleased. But my unconscious, with an inkling of what
perfection was like after sharing to some degree in his increase eden, squirmed
with envy.

If Insel committed suicide-- I could share in that, too. My envy at
once supplanted by a flowering peace-- filling with fragrance-- space. Through
a break in the cool white blot of its branches-- I perceived the cafe clock.
On that uncompromising dial all things converged to normal. I was a tout for
a friend's art gallery, feeding a cagey genius in the hope of production.
Insel's melodious ravings, an irritating whine-- It was ten to eight.

Nevertheless, as Insel was going to sterben-- the word now sounded flatly
banal-- I promised to meet him at the Dome after the cinema, "Take this," I
said, "Be sure you eat a wholesome meal," with my usual mental ejection of the
obvious man, to whom I was definitely averse.

This unreasonable nonchalant faith in Insel's alter ego was about to be

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