her sturdy legs, which I supposed he could not see for she was already
dressed for the street, were of such substance as sun-warmed stone.
With the promptitude of a magnet picking up a pin, he made a date
with her for the following day.

But as she was tremendously engaged in hoping to have a baby to
persuade her lover to make her his wife, she later decided it would
not be politic to turn up. Not without regret, however, for I
like him, she confided to me, squeezing her hands together in delight.

As for myself, He cleared my recollection from all of the
prejudice for his madness as he sat disseminating in my amusing
sitting room a pleasant neutrality, putting one's sympathies in his
direction. And as the afternoon drew on, it was as if a dove had
flown through the window and settled on a chair. Whenever his
features were 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 wrote a letter to a friend:

"Aaron's latest surrealist is absolutely divine. He has painted a
picture that's not so very hot, 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 London, 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 particular, but you felt you were in the room
with an invisible will-o-the-wisp, and that at any moment it might
light up. He's the son, he said, of tiny working 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 boy.

soul because he paints in evening dress-- that's just one of his
stories I remember. I shall probably find *max* this quality exists
only in my imagination because there's something fundamentally black-
magicky about the surrealists, and I feel that going in that
direction, his face, that looks almost luminous from starvation, 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. Max 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 Breton is an outrageous
ram, his wife the re-animated mummy of an Egyptian sorceress. In fact,
they are very, in their fantastic ways, expressive of their art, which,
after all, takes on such shapes as would seeme from a cauldron/by some
wizard's tortuous will."

This letter was never finished, for, once he had left, and
this was often to be the case, 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

stork

emaciated that from the waist down he looked like a stalk on one leg. His queer ashen face seemed veritably patched with the bruises of some physical defeat that had left him bare bone pretty repulsive.

One's mind, released from the unaccountable influence of his readjusted nature's emanations, accumulated the time spent in his company to the rational proportion of an interview with a plain, eccentric, rather dirty 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, by the time 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 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 of 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 presence was fortunate for me also,

for later on, in our checking up of 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 acknowledged 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 memories 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 wind their way to some extent
unbattered among the shafts and girders, hedging them in to their
appointed sphere of activity. For them, the atrocious jaws of
the gigantic organism will open at fixed intervals and spit at them
rations sufficient to sustain their inherance to the screeching,
booming, crashing dynamism of the universal 'works.' For the
revolt, for one incapable of taking it as it is, this metal forest
of coin bearing machinery will partially revert to the condition of
nature preserved in him, as if he had projected there some of the
verdure rooted in him, and showed patches of moss. Oases of leisure,
succorable, soft, if ragged lining to the cage of practical mankind.
And these mossy refugees, along the life of a wayward spirit who
refuses to do as he is told, preferring to find out for himself what
to do, are mostly the hospitalities of modest little women who find
a temporary relief from their inate anxiety in the society of an

irresponsible man in whom the honest desire to survive of a creative
impulse gets dishonesty mixed up with his amatory instinct.

Insel, who, as he talked, seemed to be recurrently emerging
from predicaments which, if some were lamentalbe many were quite
diaphanous as if nothing of him but the most subtle aspects of his
peculiar temperament had got into them' 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 mischieves dancing defiantly
in his eyes. And this entwickel I could not estimate blurred my
comprehension of Insel. I saw his image grown suddently faint, im-
ploring the shadeow of woman to "Wait-- in the end-- I shall achieve
glory."

These unfortunate separations, throwing him back upon the
dessert base from which he was ever setting out anew, formed part of
the frieze of disaster through which he represented himself as
forever fleeing under the viscous darts of his drastic horoscope.
Of all the makeshift burrows he found for himself in an unearned
earth, housing his poverty as animals tracked down enter abandoned
homes or a honeyless bee might return to an empty hive, 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 how that Insel had started

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 blacksmith, 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 of the vague accidents in which
his minor salvations depended upon keys, except for a fleeting im-
pression of Insel crawling under the床 his destitute
couch in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with
a constant flitting in and out of his history, of gas men and
electricity bill collectors who would come to cut him off and who,
owing to some wither mental or manual hokus-pokus of Insel's 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. "Well, you've inherited the keys your
father made. You'll see the whole of your life will turn on a key.

"Es war wirklich phar pracht vol-- we made bank notes in sheaves. You see, as a boy, as 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 phar time to reflect," he commented. "I saw other careers open to talent. In that long solitude I conceived of a greater wealth than the wealth of banks. Within myself I had 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 with 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 table elements 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

B-15

unexpectedly the schlosser one had hiterto 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.

It was some weeks later that Insel recurred to my mind.
I was writing letters when I stopped, and, as if some urgent
telepathy had impinged on my mind, dashed off a card:-

Insel,-

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

B - 16

Then I looked at the note I had so unpreparedly written,

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 bombarain
him in his dash for escape.

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

"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.

B-17

"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."

"Its 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 was (most probably) the only other being in the world who had done this very thing--visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape. But with a male difference, I must define further on.

B - 18

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 individual 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 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

B - 19

absentees?

heat warms a swarming absence. To the pure logician this association of ideas might suggest a possible transoccupation 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 catastrophic 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 were over-lean. And the room fell open, extending to space-- as such-- to remind me of my *in practical* 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 next day. But now-- I sat looking at that apartment obsessed with the necessity

B-20

of disencumbering it of personalia. The onus of trying to make up
one's mind where to begin overpowered 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 subconscious remembrance of their '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 EXIST time to undertake, one wastes triple the time in being
averse to undertaking.

B-23

one's comments on 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 solutions. The secretive exhibitionist would have felt himself unobserved, the intriguer, underrated.

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

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

B-23

"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. Insert B25X

Insel - H-2

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.

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,

E-1

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 creasless 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.

"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 that moment that, for me, Insel from a seedy man dissolved into a strange mirage. He had arrived burdened with the pictures 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 emptyness where his stomach should have been. From this profound con cavity 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. He gulped his asperine as if to alleviate a death-rattle.

"Well, you're in a nice state," I taunted him to cover my alarmed compassion. "Why didn't you write?"

"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 ours-- is so aloof."

"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 inwards
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. Inasfar as it

"I wonder," I mused, "whether you are more hopelessly situated than Colossus was, or whether he was able to create exits where none existed."

"No," said Insel, "I am not like Colossus. I am only a man who allows things to happen to him."

It is almost impossible to recover the sequence or the veritable simultaneity of the states of consciousness one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of living in or rather of being surrounded by an aquarium-- filled with, not water, but a dim transparency.

The precreational chaotic vapor in which all things may begin to grow; the coincidence of our both having evoked this in our work may be the explanation for the telepathic pictures he conveyed to me.

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.

acute celerity rhythm that perpetually disintegrated me as I got
out of watching a film in slow motion.

ĪNĒKXXI 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, was being conceived by
as the
Insel most dependable substance in an aquarium. America not so
very much dimmer than the Paris cars threading through it in the
sevres
Rue de Lavres.

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-- ; the
heathen worshipped a golden calf.

B-

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
A ?

grey festoons about its slits, I felt the liveness of the air
decrease, and "Insel" written in the archaic hand of some automatic
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 exx 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 in-
quisitively into its own mischievous eyes. Or, in some cerebral
acrobatic recoil, that being who is, in us, both outlooker and
window, in him, astonishingly, 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 existance he wished to remain
assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he must resee to insure
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 surprising an insane liaison at an 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 deep on an easel.

To her livid brow, rounded like half a moon, clung a
peculiarly clammy algaeic or fungoid substitute for hair. Beneath
it a transparent mask of horizontal 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 alternating 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 interrupted 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 BONKXXYREMIXING 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, become mouldy in adverse weathers. An incipience or reparation of harelip? And Irma? In this very same spot she puffed to a swollen convergence.

"But Insel," I asked, "her upper lip is about to burst
with some invowable ailment. 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-
emptorally, "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 hass."

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 reflected, breathing his at-
mosphere exquisite almost to sanctification, "madness is something
very beautiful."

My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value re-
turned 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 and infiltration of
rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitesimally finer
than the gossamer halo round the street lamp in a 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 unique blanket, his limp hands clasped behind his head.

"I see through the wall," he said, his voice at peace.

"I can lie there hour-long watching my neighbors live their dear little lives. Sometimes they play a gramophone and on its way to me the music becomes 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, beati
"I am eternally content.
My happiness is infinite. All the desires of the earth are con-
summated 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 pailid 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 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, its 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 unaccount-
able, 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 carton, set upon a shelf, he had
stood up to the significant erectness of sentinels, their impressive
uniforms consisting in the 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
Staid
the steady spirit of geometry.

The room, with its two tiny matchboard tables, it 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
would prick through his frayed conversation, woven of disjointed
themes like an inconsistent lace edged out with stocking darnings,
a needle occasionally picking up the dropped thread of memory.

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 a smile. 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 exaggerations of
his unabating intensity.

"Gestatten Sie?" I enquired ceremonously, 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 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 smooth 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.

"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 I always would, whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home, there was always appropriately 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 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 great gourmet, for in his dimension this was a spread feast. 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 imagination (and I must say, also, in mine, for I was never at a loss to picture the possible loveliness

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 unnative ear it had a turn of the ridiculous as though a vast
process had got twisted into a knot of tiny twigs, though haply to
unravel and root, and branch against the heavens.

With a bizarre instinct for scenic effect the hazard presiding our senseless excursion drove us into the Gare d' Orléans.

In the almost gelatinous gloom of the great hall the enclosure before the buffet-restaurant, its boundaries set by stiffled shrubs offered a stage for Insel to unroll his increate existence to the fitting applause of a dead echo, the countless scurry of departed feet.

This station as he entered it became the ante-room of dissolution, where the only constructions left for a real world were the kiosks with their glass vats of citreous liquids, their geometric avalanches of newspapers, and even these alined in adusty perspective like ghosts of overgrown toys.

The place seemed deserted. There was no-one to see Insel lay out hocus-pocus negresses on the table in apologetic sacrifice.

"They were all wrong" he brooded as if he were a puritan with an ailing conscience "I was going in the wrong direction!....

...I renounce" he sobbed hurling off the negresses, who, bashed against the dingy windows of the Gare melted & dripped like black tears into limbo down a morbid adit leading to underground platforms. There to mingle with the inquietude of departure to be borne away on a hearse of the living throbbing along an iron rail which must be a solified sweep of the Styl.

"The only thing wrong with those negresses was your beating one of them up!"

Insel denied this vehemently and reproached me. I had, he said "inflamed their rebellion by smiling at them". He considered that no way to handle negresses.

"What? you can sleep with them but I cant smile at them. How do you work that out?"

This muddled Insel, the theme of whose unconscious theatrics must be either that his beefsteak shared jealous passions

with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prostitutes lay
far beyond a patronesse's permissions.

"Coloured people are not ..." he began, looking very Simon
Legree.

"But Insel in your relationship she is entitled.."

"I only slept with her three times...."

"If I had slept with a man <u>half a time</u> I'd consider I
had the right to everything he possessed."

Insel who had a fanciful ingenuity in extricating himself
from any situation he felt to be awkward without very well under-
standing why....instructed me:

"You know nothing of the etiquette of <u>my</u> underworld --
its <u>laws</u>. The rights of such women extend only to the level of the
table top. Its like this : I am sitting at the <u>DOme</u> X -- she comes
along here/ --"

"She dropped on you" I corrected ---it was fun teasing him,
like tickling a dazed gnome with a spider's silk. Ignoring my
interruption he continued :

"She may take <u>anything</u> under the table- she can grab a thou-
sand francs from my pocket - it is hers . But to lift anything <u>off</u>
the table .......Aussgeschlossen!"

So exactly the logic on behalf of women in the normal world!
that I squeaked " You haven't got a thousand francs in your pocket".

What matter if we were trivial. We must find some excuse for
our unending hazy laughter . Speech was an afterthought to that hu-
morous peace that <u>descended</u> from our incomparable exaltation. It was
ridiculous to find ourselves alone, in well being so wide there was
room for innumerable populations.

Insel harped back to <u>not</u> having beaten the negress.

"Well - I temporised, relenting" you thumped her - you did
like this" clinching every nerve in my body I tried to imitate

that excruciation which in him took the place of a sense of touch
but my fingers closed on an absence ---incipience of all volume
Insel's volume. "Didn't you know".

All he could remember was her stealing my cigarettes.

"Stealing" I exclaimed " the waiter told me they support
you ..B

"Everybody" Insel reflected drearily thinks I am such
an awful 'maquereau'. I only had three meals with them".

"You don't have to exonarate yourself" I said, dryly.
overcome with compassion." its quite a feat - being a pimp and
starving to death" then laughing " who ever heard of a 'maquereau'
without any money!"

"It made such a gorgeous sound when they were shouting...
almost macrusallo. Like crucified maccherel."

"They stole my sheets" Insel interrupted sternly "my six
white sheets."

"Six sheets against three meals for three embraces! which-
ever way you put it your honour is clear" I consoled him" All the
same I shall not call you clochard any more, but Macrusallo-."

Insel's luminous duality peculiar to this one night, seemed to be forming a more domestic hallucination a primitive effort at flirtation, miraculously tender which played all to itself against the greater glow & measure of his basic disarray.

A tacit assumption of our having mutually renounced an inferior world in spite of his repulsiveness being as she wailed greater than I could bear.

I had once, to get a simple opinion, asked my dressmaker to take a look at him - " Well do you think he's mad? " I asked her.

" He looks so funny " She giggled " He looks ' in love' "

That was it, he had the air of being amorous of anything or everything in general - which left him so rapt & gentle, or, taking an 'inner' view his astral Venus flowed in his veins. This was why when he met a woman Mme Flelein or any other he had an approach of continent rape, as if he were persuading her bemused see: it must be the more lovely for being already consummate.

For a moment I wondered if his unstaid mind had reconciled for myself, its eerie durable passion-in-general...but apart from the likelihood of his having no idea as to whom he alternately bewailed and beamed upon I remembered the only emotion I aroused in creative men was an impulse of 'knock-out' ( that any intuited 'opposition' of the future stirs in the subconscious) which of course was impossible with his delicate soul swimming so docilely along his astral stream under the thunder & lightenings of his distraction, like a confiding duck as I scattered crumbs.

At the same time worn down record of old fashioned inflection clattered out of Insel's head.

" In spite of all..." A lesson I... A suggestion ? to take up the refrain.

Instantly I knew this to be a touch-word on which some spring must snap, some wheel fly wild. That as I watched, something

pains, I supposed, breaking through animosity so unaccountably
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 habitable.

After my fitting I invited him to come down to the café,
intent on buttering him up, on bluffing him into forgetfulness
of having allowed me to discover his awful alter ego, ( in cases
of the same it seldom got to work until out of my sight )
I was determined to part on good terms.

As we stood face to face with nothing in common, the last
people on earth likely to become acquainted with each other, 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 that 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 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 café, 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

As we stood face to face with nothing in common the last
people on earth likely to become acquainted with each other, 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 that 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 revelation.

would be forthcoming. That which is valuable, one does not help, one responds to a cosmic imperative."

He began to look as though 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 *colour* in his life." This fallacious insight melted Insel's imitation shame, disclosing the very really wounded face of a child who has 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... we immediately floated off as if on the magic *air* mat of Bagdad. Talking on...

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

What price understanding?

At once - it was growing late - he clamoured for me to stay with him; for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize duration, for ever.

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

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

"I didn't" I fibbed, striking the suitable note. "I said you hid it under the carpet... we immediately floated off as if on the magic carpet al mat of Bagdad. Talking on..."

What price understanding?

At once-it was growing late - he clamoured for me to stay with him; for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize duration, for ever.

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 'part' in ratio to my reaction
The ultimate self, august in certainty, put forth a sophoric 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 occasionally 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 & microcosmic 'pulsation '
whether my instant - the instant of a reductive perciever - passed
through some preponderant magnifier & 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 -
infinite, soothed - along with it. For again this novel aspect
of time seemed, like light, to arrive in rays focussing 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...
... anyhow it was useless trying to analyse it - this alone was certain.
It was absolutely engrossing to their mind - although nothing
can be done yet, there could have been brief enough for us to cognise -
happened in this longer time. And
that it occured commensurately with the bit of lingering I was wedging
in for Insel between contiguous hours in defiance of occupational
Time.

Rarely-at intervals of a thousand years - Insel & I would
look up at each other in an utter & yet somehow communicative
impersonality. The final relationship of distinct similars confron-

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 'part' in ratio to my reaction.
The ultimate self, august in certainty, put forth a sophric bloom
that covered his damaged face.

Only now I remarked that on the emergence of this ultimate self
in it intangible armour of nobility depended that prolongation of
time I occasionally 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 & microcosmic 'pulsation'
whether my instant - the instant of a reductive perciever - passed
through some preponderant magnifier & 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 -
infinite, soothed - along with it. For again this novel aspect
of time seemed, like light, to arrive in rays focussing 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...
... anyhow it was useless trying to analyse it - this alone was certain.
It was absolutely engrossing to them mind- although nothing
brief enough for us to cognise - happened in this longer time. And
that it occured commensurately with the bit of lingering I was wedging
in for Insel between contiguous hours in defiance of occupational
Time.

ting the same phenomenon.

Elementarily confidential once more, Insel was trying to disentangle before me the thousand directions. He had shewed them to me before, in answer to my asking him why he did not work.

"So often at dusk I come here to stare at that white canvas. I see all the pictures I could paint upon it. But in 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 spermatozoa that seeped from his brain through his gardening hands.

The glare in Capoulard's café 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 immanent direction. On the whole of space were only a few sign-boards on which grew hands, alive & 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 I said Insel.

"Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation" "How true" said Insel again, devoutly.

"And by the bye" I commented "the sentiment of our generation is the neurosis of the next. All that stuff you have of 'suffering for love' is the most awful slush." I "I know, I know" he agreed with fervour.

Indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of

ting the same phenomenon.

"So often at dusk I come here to stare at that white canvas. I see all the pictures I could paint upon it. But in 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."

"Of course " I was saying "I don't know where you are... . wherever it is is very far away. And I am just as far away. I have existed before my time." How true " said Insel. —

"Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation" "How true " said Insel again, devoutly.

"And by the bye " I commented " the sentiment of our 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.

["inertia unrealizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a pool of serum. to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficulty. That violative (fungoid) lichin 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 foundations in that very ' parting of the ways' he told me he had come to, where he turned ~~assuredly~~ to ward 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 thousands' 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 un-arrival.", "The curtain of the sky came down & she was not there ....\n\"If the painting no longer 'goes', Insel surprisingly was rumi-\nnating- \"I shall do as you do. Write . What a profession. One car-\nries one's studio about with one. A sheet of paper.....\"", "Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank\nof orientation faded.....the thousand directions withdrew,lea-\nving us at a destination.", "Nothingness", "It was not black as night_or white as day,_nor grey as death\nultimately irritation\nOnly a non-existent ' enquiry ' as to what purposed inconsequence\nhad led us into the illusion of ever having been created.", "The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew\nwe were _still_ there. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

["inertia unrealizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a pool of serum. to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficulty. That violative fungoid lichin 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 foundations in that very parting of the ways he told me he had come to, where he turned assured to ward 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 un-arrival.", "The curtain of the sky came down & she was not there ....\n\"If the painting no longer 'goes', Insel surprisingly was rumi-\nnating- \"I shall do as you do. Write . What a profession. One car-\nries one's studio about with one. A sheet of paper.....\"", "Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank\nof orientation faded. . . . . the thousand directions withdrew, lea-\nving us at a destination.", "Nothingness", "It was not black as night or white as day, nor grey as death\nOnly a non-existent ' enquiry' as to what purposed inconsequence\nhad led us into the illusion of ever having been created.", "The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew\nwe were _still there_. . . . . . . . . . . . .

intimacy as well passed out of the café. I was feeling exceptionally 'good' about my work at the moment, vainly imagining I had criticised 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" "see Insel" I explained "Mann muss reif sein". "One must be ripe".

I felt Insel crack as he had been short 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 had, 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 palm...on his face was a smile unlike 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 on some reflex of the past.

"Ich Komme hach Hause".

He was "coming home".

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

"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 radical underpattern of his life.

It took some moments to sort these almost 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 new obsession for the thing one feared as above all else, menacing Insel was some climaw in which his depradatory radioactivity must inevitably give out. So all I said was "Good bye"

"Good bye" said Insel with a bitter stare and relieved "Danke fur alles".

"Good bye" said Insel with a stunning smile. Bitter & unbelieving "Danke fur Alles".

It took some moments to sort these almost 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 new obsession for the thing one feared as above all else, menacing Insel was some climax in which his depradatory radio-activity must inevitably give out. So all I said was "Good bye"

"Good bye" said Insel with a bitter stare both dazed and relieved." Danke fur alles".

Then the silence of Insel took on voice once more--
A voice which as if returning from diffusion among the mists--
might be coming from 'anywhere', resumed his ever recurrent cries
of horror on behalf of women who could no longer love him.

"For God's sake," I implores, for Insel returned to his
'normal' state, I followed suit-- "Stop agonizing-- Go to sleep--
To negresses every white man looks-- white."

"It's the teeth," he groaned-- "Die Mädchen-- "

At least you'd have more chance with the girls if you
got 'Bebel' to clean your suit--

"I'll tell you what--" I said overcome by my inherent
conviction of personal blame for <u>anyone</u> not being able to get
<u>anything</u> they want--.

And in Insel it seemed his need was for something so
sublime that over all his aspirations hovered crowns of glory--
Mädchen-- something entirely outside my zone of attraction, in his
regret for them took on, enchanting attributes-- even those in a
mountain village who ate such quantities of garlic it breathed from
the pores of their skin-- so much so that Insel, with the heartiest
will in the world, had found it impossible to 'hug them close enough'.

"You'd better get <u>into</u> that couch and leave your suit in
the hall-- when I come home I'll throw it into a bath of gasoline."

Insel was horrified. "I don't want anybody to see the dirt
in that suit-- let alone you-- I've worn it for five years.

"All I shall see is the gasoline go dark-- it would seem
just as dark if I were cleaning something that had only been worn
a month."

But Insel was actually writhing in a bitter determination
to protect his own.

"Are you afraid," I asked, in sudden concern for his rags,

ontimacy as we passed out of the café. I was feeling exception-
ally 'good' about my work at the moment, vainly imagining I had
criticised my last incompletion.

"It is going wonderfully" and with a flash of that exhibitio-
nism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no me-
ans of communication.

"Sehen" "see Insel" I explained " Mann muss reif sein". " One
must be ripe".

"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 was, 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 palm.......on his face was a smile unlike the
fluctuant smiles of hallucinated angels I had watched there. it
uite a
was a normal smile. Yet in the old abnormal voice of whispering
emotion, laying his dried branch across my shoulder, he choked on
some reflex of the past.

"Ich Komme nach Hause".

He was "coming home".

Insel gaped at me.

lit up in the flare of one human acceptance; the dope unconsciously
radiating radio-ing his supernormal state of happiness in a
pharmaceutical Elysee are all educative.

one
We have made splendid opportunity of getting more fully in
touch with the down-and-out, they who live according to no program
feed to menu, are clothed to no design, (like a system of
planets in irrational rotation) when compared to the routine
of a society whose parts of home and meals and raiment, fitting into
each other with the precision of a Chinese puzzle are ensured by
what appears to the uninitiated to be an occult power,-- the annual
income. This standardized society is invaded by that kind of
creative outsider who would seem to require to be wrecked before
he can land on the firm island of his conception when his need become
greater than his shame he sets out to borrow a little money.
Only the threatening eye-sockets of starvation can scare him into
accosting those also empty eyes of the well-to-do man he would like
to 'touch', the man who looks through his economic problem, which
the more absurd is the more insolvable, with determined clairvoyance
of its easy solution in some space and time in which he personally

"So lustig," Insel hissed-- a maniac sadism flaring up
in his eyes, and for the first time I saw him as a madman. "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 halucinated-- it was the pounding
tread of the infuriated male. "Lustig," he squeaked, his hiss
exhausted.

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

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 the 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 cam upon the end to fall asleep in the unsatisfied certainty of having come into contact with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius who ever lived.