from: "Islands in the Air".
by Mina Loy.

The first I heard of Insel was the story of a madman, a more or less surrealist painter, who, although he had nothing to eat, was hoping to sell a picture to buy a set of false teeth.

He wanted, to go to the brothel but feared to disgust a prostitute with a mouthful of roots. The first I saw of this pathetically maimed celebrity were the tiny fireworks he let off in his eyes when offered a ham sandwich. What an incongruous end, my subconscious idly took note, for a man who must once have had such phenomenal attraction for women. And he wants them of the consistency of motor tires.... my impression faded off. For, to my work-a-day consciousness, he only looked like an embryonic mind locked in a delapidated structure. I heard plenty of talk about his pictures, but I was afraid to visit his studio as, to all accounts, his lunacy rendered him unsafe. It rather took me aback, when a few days after his casual introduction to me, he paid me a call. I had been giving tea to my little model after the pose when he arrived. Her Slavonic person was colored a loyly luminous yellow, owing to some liver complaint, and her sturdy legs, which I suppose he could not see for she was already dressed for the street, were of such substance as sun-warmed stone. With the promptness of a magnet picking up a pin, he made a date with her for the following day.

The first I heard of Insel was the story of a madman, a more or less surrealist painter, who, although he had nothing to eat, was hoping to sell a picture to buy a set of false teeth. He wanted, he said, to go to the brothel but feared to disgust a prostitute with a mouthful of roots. The first I saw of this pathetically maimed celebrity were the tiny fireworks he let off in his eyes when offered a ham sandwich. What an incongruous end my subconscious idly took note, for a man who must once have had such phenomenal attraction for women. And he wants them of the consistency of motor tires-- my impression faded off. For, to my work-a-day consciousness, he only looked like an embryonic mind locked in a dilapidated structure. I heard plenty of talk about his pictures, but I was afraid to visit his studio as, to all accounts, his lunacy rendered him unsafe. It rather took me aback, when, a few days after his casual introduction to me, he paid me a call. I had been giving tea to my little model after the pose when he arrived. Her Slavonic person was colored a lovely luminous yellow, owing to some liver complaint, and 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.

Facing each other they possessed voluptuous attributes
the poor will find in one another unmarred by an unwholesomeness
which is mutual. The model tremendously engaged in hoping to
have a baby to persuade her lover to make her his wife, later de-
cided 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 of the pre-
judice for his madness as he sat disseminating in my amusing sitting
room a pleasant neutrality, pulling one's sympathies in his
wrote out
方向. 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 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 in 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 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 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.

3

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 Back-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 Back 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. Illness 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 Illness has the expression of 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 see the form a cauldron overcast by some wizard's tortuous will."

This 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 the waist down he looked like a stork on one leg. His queer ashen face seemed veritably patched

3

with the bruises of some physical defeat that had left him
pretty repulsive. One's mind, released from the unaccountable in-
fluence 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 im-
pression 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 visit was fortunate for me
also, for later one, 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 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 wind their way to
some extent unbattered sphere of activity. For 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 revoltè, 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, 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 association with an
irresponsible man in whom the honest desire for survival of his
creative impulse gets dishonestly mixed up with his amatory in-
stinct.

Insel, as he talked, seemed to be recurrently emerging
from predicaments of which, if some were lamentable, many were
quite diaphanous as if nothing of him but the most subtle as-
pects 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
mischieves dancing defiantly in his eyes. And this entwicklung
I could not estimate blurred my view of Insel. I saw his image
grown suddenly faint, imploring the shadow of woman "-- to only
wait-- in the end-- the end-- I shall achieve glory." end of page 5. Vicky

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 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 descending the stairs. 'Who could descend
having never ascended?' I asked myself. 'What could have embodied
itself under the roof to come down upon my isolation?' 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 foot-
steps grew greater, the pounding nearer-- to the pounding of my
heart." Frau Feirlein and I 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 bearable 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 '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 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 intermittent 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.

"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 henceforth.
He told me it all originated with his first lecture on surrealism,
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 be-
came 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 pracht vol-- 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 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 skeleton symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of. Throughout 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.~~ end of page to a viscous impression dispelled when, in courteous haste to answer a question, he shifted the half of a hard roll sandwich he was eating, out of the way, horrifyingly developing a Bali-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 ware 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 clutter 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."

"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?"

13

"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 befought, 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 absolutely silent for six months at a time."

He did not give a fig for heredity. All his relations 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 uncanily 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 tasei 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 labelled 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 greatest books 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 standing on wild moors-- alone with the elements-- elements become articulate-- <u>You</u> would care for it very much."

I began to think it improbable I should even find a basis for this biography. 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 <u>any</u> 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 Prozen," 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 ac-
quainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius,
who ever lived.

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

---00000---

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 say, wondering to what appeal, and why,
I had answered. I did not care if Insel were in trouble. Ob-
viously 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!"

"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.

"<u>Whose</u> 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," mutter 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.

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 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 as (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 *futuristic*
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 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 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 undertaking.

Something would have to be done about it. Fortunately, after more than a week of this paralyzing resistance,

lock the door.
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 moments.

In the taxi I inquired, "Was haben sie schöne erlebt
since I saw you?" What pleasant adventures have you had-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 countered.

"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 become rigid with incredulity, he murmured,
"I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful. 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 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.

"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 note 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 impression 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 himself.

"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 uni-
formity 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 skin, I had a shocking vision of Insel's
diaphanous intestines entirely disappearing 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.

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.

"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, the only thing in
the world 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 emptyness 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 ours-- 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 damn bunch of cheap flowers I put here to welcome my lonely clochard."

"But, after all, I have been here 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 intro-
spective, "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 steam?" food

"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 con-
tinuate 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.

"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 yeux'-- 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.

--00000--

"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 dressmaker 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 it is unfit for publication. But shutting the

W

he, himself, would overfly it, as now when 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 passe-pas-tout, was saying, "I want to give you
my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell." The drawing in the
passe-pas-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 dis-
turbing 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 elementals.

"This," he continued, "is the first drawing of a new
series-- all my future work will be based on it. I intend my tech-
nique 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 conjurative 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

33

"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 automatic-
ally.

"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 <u>not there</u>. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no out-
side, 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. <u>Your</u> way
of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You're so afraid
of actuality."

"I can materialize for you," he said raptly, "<u>forever</u>--
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
which 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 un-
able to create soft machines and so limited to the construction of

35

you can convince of your not being there. You might try it on the
warder, 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!"

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
into 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
müsst 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 him-
self 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 attentive-
ness. He had found such a focus. Darting his constricted fingers
cleaved to a white hair of my head which had fallen on my coat, he
made a ritual of offering it to my eyes.

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

"Ah, yes," sighed Insel, as I translated, churning me

36

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 occurring 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 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 being submitted to, 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

37

subverted exaltation, so awesomely he stressed his lonely agony,
his long starvation, the incidentless introspection of that en-
jailed 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 satis-
fy my craving for 'potted absolute'. This man sufficed me as re-
presenting all the hungry errantry of the human race.

"What are you trying to be anyhow," I asked bemused,
"La faim qui rode autour de 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 de-
ceptions 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 suddenly blunted sharpness of a "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 be 'accused' of which I had always been eager to discover in any one else who, like myself, had 'popped up' from nowhere in particular -- as if all my life I had lacked a crony of my 'own class.'

I could not point this out. It would upset Insel's self-abasement which gave him some mysterious satisfaction-- as of an Olympian in masquerade--

That sound above, once it hooked up with perception, became a squirling wail-- soaring over the driving racket of the street corner.

"Do you hear?" asked Insel, its 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

39

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 returned 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 in line with oneself, would last indefinitely. X Lawrence Karl

Time that evening lightly come 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 shoulder to shoulder with this virtual stranger living the longest period of my life.

It is almost impossible to recover the sequence or the veritable simultaneity of the states of consciousness one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of living in or rather of being surrounded by an arid aquarium-- filled with, not water, but a dim transparency: the 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: Glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where 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 mandible orchestra-- a colorless water plant growing the stumpy crevulations of a castle in a game of chess swayed in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder--

Projected effigies of Insel and myself insorcellated flotsam-- never having left any land-- never to arrive at any shore-- static in an unsuspected magnitude of being alive in the 'light of the eye' dilated to an all enclosing halo of unanalyzable insight, where

wonder is its own revelation.

Even in the world of reality Insel's ideation was an introvert exploration of a brilliancy beneath his skull, an ever-crescent clarity which in the form of inspiration ripens creative fruit. But in him by reason of some interference I could not define, aborted as the *prelude* to the introduction to an idea.

"I can see right into these people," he asserted, indicating the crowd gathered round 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 unaccountable conclusion that he was 'the

42

mæt 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 justi-
fied by the lovely equilibrium his companionship conveyed to me.
It was as if for an exceeding moment I could, rising above the dis-
tortion 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 perpetually disintegrated me as I got
out of watching a film in slow motion.

Imagining aloud the explorative kick of roaming the
mountainous blocks of Manhattan "forever in New York--," Insel
chanted, "We could have such a wonderful time together." He was
not speaking. He was praying.

Idly I wondered with what he was communicating, when
suddenly I felt myself sag; become so spineless, so raw-- . I,
a red island with its shores of suet, the most dependable substance
in an aquarium-America not so very much dimmer than the Paris cars
threading through it in the Rue de Sevres.

I did not find it extraordinary that my condition as an
undiminishable, beef steak should make me feel almost sublime, or that
the man intensely leaning towards me should pray to it.

There was another element in his unbelievable magnetism
of recoil. His air of friability warning off contact lest he
crumble. Not only was he preposterously emaciated, but even as his

gravity seemed lightened his body-- what was left of it-- seemed less ponderable than it should have been. Insel was made of extremely diaphanous stuff. Between the shrunken contour of his present volume his original 'cereal 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 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.

less
space
here

P

On 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 increase, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational quandary, 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 bony structure around the = P eye. 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 the corresponding eye-caves of my own.

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 a bit of my brow and cheek-bone flew off me, crashed onto his and stuck there.

On the spur of this subvoluntary caress-- cohesion to the telepathic center-- I definitely penetrated (into) his medium-istic 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 the 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, crushed together in blocks of shadow the outline of a giant. Dense as the dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o'-the-wisp shining from it-- I touched launched as spectator 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 whenever 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.

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 rudi-
mentary 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. Between 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 certitude his corporeal mendicancy appeared fictitious. So surely it was an exquisite nucleous that in his somewhat comatose exhaltation he struggled to 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 dadaver, 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 decision, obsessed by *an unreal* dead 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 staring straight before him as if it did not matter where I was.

"How tedious," my every-day 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 himself 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 phosphorescent as approaching
fire-flies.

As Insel consecrated our spontaneous comradeship with his tom-tom
reiterations 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 nackte 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 any-
thing might substitute in my consciousness for a man, who, however
long I looked at him I could never entirely '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 became 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 concepts by flickering out. One seldom took leave of him. Walking along with him one would unexpectedly fall 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 disgraceful grace, "When shall I see you again?" he explored, clutching his concave breast. An awesome lunar reflection lit up his face from within.

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 dis-
comforting 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 gustly 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 dis-
creet 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 em-
bracing-- 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.

metro opened at my feet. In the midst of a sentence I dropped
from sight as if impelled to conform with Insel's concepts by
flickering out. One seldom took leave of him. Walking along with
him one would unexpectedly fall sideways into a cab as Insel, in
an electric sputter, softly membled "schade-- a pity."

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

"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 one little tear for me?" he asked flirtatively.

"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 won't weep?" he implored from a gust of sad laughter.

"Not a drop."

Insel tried again. "Sterben," he sighed in the voice of a weary arch-angel, 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 muss-- 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.

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 per-
fection 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 an 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 whole-
some meal," with my usual mental ejection of the obvious man, to
whom I was slightly averse.

This unreasonable nonchalant faith in Insel's alternate
was about to be greatly rewarded. After an amusing dinner and a
good film which, when we came out, proved to have lasted much longer
than usual, on our return in my friends' car the lightening hand
of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them
in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dish-rag a
deathly inner perspiration-- as if one were about to retch a
nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being
the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would
not cease from me for days.

It was one o'clock and Insel might have waited since
half past eleven. He had. When my friends in some concern dropped
me at the Dome I could see him sitting outside.

Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an
hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize
to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection
immediately complicated, "When was he here? When was he there?
Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?"
The distant aristo' went about his simple social life with suffi-
cient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious
illness and misplaced sleep, he visited any one who would have
him on the right day.

During my absence he had changed.

I had never seen him like this before-- human-- actually
gay! As I tried to explain why I must go hom, Insel, in laughing
over something he wanted to tell me, laid a fluttering hand on
my shoulder-- the torture of my body ceased.

It was not only an interruption of pain. I was re-
galvanized. Straightening from top to toe, I inhaled limpid air--
the neon tubes caressed my eyes.

I looked at Insel amazed. In what unheard of parasitism
had I drawn this vitality out of a creature half disintegrated?

Evidently he was in good form. The sparks he seemed
to emit in turn gave off smaller ones; an added superficial illum-
nation induced by a few drinks, having much the same effect as
the perspective confusion of traffic lights among electric signs.

Out of all this an intimate twinkle approached me.
"Promise to sit here with me till seven o'clock tomorrow evening,"
Insel entreated.

"Naturally," I acquiesced.

There is no field of fantasy so rich as the financial
promoting of failures. Weaving in an out of our conversation was
a shuttle of money-making devices for Insel's relief, the most
practical being to star him in a horror film. It is a poor horror
which has to grime its face-- the only face on the films that has
true horror in it is Jouvets-- and that only an inkling-- and so
discreet.

Insel said he had been offered such a role. But again
he had not been able, or wishful, to pursue anything that carried

him into the future-- a future that ebbed from him as from others
the past. He would look forward with one eagerly-- always at a
certain point he reverted-- turned his blind back on the forward
direction-- .

He said, "I have worn myself out tramping the city on
fruitless quests-- to show my good will."

Now I had found another profession for him-- magnetic
healer. Suddenly I foresaw the fear my physician would inspire
nullifying his therapeutic value, and I did not suggest it to Insel.

In his unusual liveliness, words, like roomy cupboards,
dipped into the reservoir of excited honey and flapping their open
doors spilled it all over the place as they passed.

"Unglaublich," said Insel. "With you alone am I able to
express myself. You tell me exactly what I am thinking. No one
else has understood what we understand.

"You have such marvelous ideas-- "

"But Insel," I protested conscientiously, "I have touched
on my ideas so lightly-- If I knew your language well enough to
convey the subtlest shades of meaning-- ."

We decided to get a first-class dictionary. Henceforth
nothing was to be lost!

Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savour lay
in its impress of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual
definition of Insel with his whittled exterior jerking in ties of
joy a pate too loosely attached and almost worn down to the skull--
and myself expansive in some secondary glow from that icy con-
flagration strewing grey ashes over his face as it burnt itself
out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder,

as two aloft on the same telegraph exchange a titter of god-
forsaken sparrows.

As night drew out-- it got draughtier and draughtier--
we removed, as if receding into a lair, from the terrace to further
and further inside the cafe from the open to the enclosed-- each
time ordering a new 'consommation' from a different waiter-- till
we reach an inaereate core of the establishment. Here we inex-
plicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-existence in-
sured Insel's vaunted isolation. One after another the same
Germanic wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a
different face.

One-- projected that declamatory arm which under given
circumstances, present at the time, falls with a forgetful plop be-
fore completing an indication. "Who is Insel," it challenged, "to
monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?"

Another-- equally appreciative until he discovered the
hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white-- apologized
with a shudder, "I won't say it doesn't look all right on you--
but I can't bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old." He
looked less old than Insel-- He was one of the many unfortunates
who have had nothing to 'give off' but the bubbles of adolescence,
whereas Insel's rattling pelvis was trotting the leather seat in
the sitting leaps of an exuberant child.

"They are so surprised," he chortled repeatedly, "They
are accustomed to seeing me all alone-- ."

I ordered supper-- got cigarettes at the counter and
dumped them on our table on my way downstairs to buy some rouge

(probably my subconscious had taken from my critic.) When I returned it looked as if the empty space in our quiet corner had come alive, the leather padding had broken out in a parasitic formation, a double starfish whose radial extremities projected and retracted rapidly at dynamic angles.

It was Insel all cluttered up with his 'private life.' Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the milling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel's pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my supper table.

The group being occupied it was difficult to know how to greet them. I swept an inclusive smile of welcome across them as I sat down and the waiter brought the food.

As I watched this virtually prohibited conjunction with a race whose ostracism 'debunks' humanity's ostensible belief in its soul, I scarcely heard the scandalous din they were making; these negresses, with their fingers of twig, were tearing at some object-- my scarlet packet of 'High-life'!-- rapidly becoming invisible under Insel's touch-- he clung to it with such constrictive tenacity, he might have been squeezing an atom.

"Maquereau!" "Salamad!" shrieked the dark ladies to stress their pandemonium accounting of benefits bestowed.

"Insel," I addressed him authoritatively, not dreaming 'pimp' and 'skunk' were almost the only French words familiar to the poor dear, "If you could understand what they are calling you you'd let go!"

Once more I fell Sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of those unexpected carvings into profile; a zig-zag profile of a jumping jack cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert concentration blind as a nerve among the women's volume, clenching his gums in a fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression-- as this black and white flesh glanced off one another-- of their being totally unwed-- that Insel, whom I often called 'ameise' who was even now like an 'ant', occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite-- unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere-- to never let go. He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his cosmic 'tic.'

There were onlookers peering under the brass rail topping the back-to-back upholstery-- three heads left over from the crowded hours. One, the sharp mask of a jew worn to a rudder with centuries of steering through hostile tides, lowered its pale eyelashes on the neighbors insurrection as if closing a shop.

I paid the waiter, bought some more cigarettes, jumped into a taxi, undressed and went to bed, all with the delicious composure Insel instilled-- not questioning the continuity of this 'elevation of the pure in heart' even while he in whom it originated was being slapped by inexpensive harlots on their way home from work.

I was falling into blissful sleep when a hopeless S.O.S.

vibrated on the air-- an S.O.S. that sounded like a sobbing
'sterben.' I started up in horror of my selfishness. What could
I have been thinking of to leave that delicate soul to his longing
for suicide on the contemptible grounds that I was sick of the
racket he had been causing.

What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where
a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe to find that I,
his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal
ease I must have 'caught' from Insel I threw on my clothes and
more or less floating into the street together with the presage
of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners, slushing my ankles,
hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure
to be saved at all costs. Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dome.
The piebald mix-up had disappeared.

"What happened to that German I had with me an hour
ago?" I asked the major domo. "He get into a tangle with some
negresses-- Was he all right?"

Oh, perfectly," he protested as if within his reach
nothing could possibly go wrong. "You see, Madame, "confidentially,
"the fellow lives off these women of the Dome; there's bound to
be a scrap every now and then!"

finity, was laying him out in state on no bed under an awesome
canopy of poverty.

"No," I decided, "I shall put you back in your box--
my pet clochard is going to lie in a row-- under a bridge."

We wandered off in search of the Seine-- It was dawn.

Perhaps this show-case hung outside a librarie was a
prison and we therefore, suspecting an isolation, dissolved its
wire caging with the crafty focus of sight to set the content free.

We saw the primeval steam (whose last wisp straying endless-
ly had wreathed itself round Insel's brain) condense to stone in
a frayed torso.

In the darkness it was blind. As the sky broke open,
its outline entered the morning gently with the eyes of an animal.
As daylight warmed the lids widened to the vision of a pagan.

In conception past enough to absorb the centuries it
survived, now in defiance of time to surpass it-- the eternal
Thing was looking at us with the fullness of the future. All
we had ever understood that was less than itself peeled like
spoiled armour.

What enormous forboding, Insel, in his simplicity, I,
in my complexity, recognized in its ideals expression, I cannot
say. It was a recognition of something known which, in spite

of life we would know again. Insel, without speaking, turned to
me, staring at the re-impression of an impression on a book spread
out for the passer-by we had both, I could see, in identical
silence found one significance in an early Greek fragment-- I do
not remember which.

I have heard that some philosophers assume reality to be
absent without an audience. In empty streets the sun had a terrible
excessive existence for ourselves alone. We walked together, yet
repeatedly, as if having veered in an arc it took no time to
describe, Insel would be coming towards me from far away.

"Go back!" he cried in gaunt derangement, "if it dis-
gusts you to look at me." Shining uselessly, as an electric bulb
'left on' by day, his face, unshaven, was partially clouded.

We came to a Raoul Dufy in a dealer's window, His
charming 'crook's technique' disintegrated my meticulous companion.
I feared that, the shock reinforcing his perpetual cerebral fit,
he was about to throw a physical one. Instead he became covered
with verdigris.

We had to relapse at another cafe. Insel disappeared for
quite a while.

"Have you been sick?" I asked solicitously. He was
looking less green.

"Dufy," he explained.

I put down the money for the coffee and a twenty-five
centime piece rolled to the ground.

"Would you pick that up?" I begged. Insel began pulling
himself together but did nothing about it, so I picked it up myself.

"Oh dear," he wailed forlornly. I thought you pointed to me. For God's sake throw it down again-- or I shall never forgive myself," he pled and pled--

Nothing would induce me to. I foresaw him distinctly diminishing through the hole in the center of that tiny disc and I had to get him to the Seine.

At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so slightly its lazy barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. Whatever had been an 'under-the-bridge' was all boxed in and the sun had crawled so far into the sky it was needless to look for another.

After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless delight round and around the Orangerie. Insel's boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might have been following him, snapping at his legs.

With some effort, having breakfasted all night, we conceived the idea of going to 'lunch.' Insel, who was on the point of allowing the air to lift him from the railed-in terrace of the Tuilleries and set him down in the Rue de la Paix, appraised by normal standards, although it was just this 'beauty of horror' I was sure should be worth such a lot of money to him, looked really terrifying. His being unshaven became a smoke screen. Always his self illumination cast its own shadow. In shining he dragged an individual darkness into the world. I felt sure that as the thoroughfares refilled we would run less risk of being arrested for disturbing the public peace on the left bank.

"My friend _we_ are not dressed for going into town," I insisted, heading him off in another direction.

"Why," asked Insel in bewildered politeness, "you look
as lovely as you always do?"

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

In the almost gelatinous gloom of the great hall the
enclosure before the Buffet Restaurant, its boundaries set by
stifled 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 anteroom of
dissolution, where the only constructions left of a real world were
the Kiosks with their glass vats of citrous liquids, their geometric
avalanches of newspapers, and even these alined in a dusty per-
spective 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 and dripped
like black tears into limbo down a morbid adit leading to under-
ground 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 solidified sweep of the Styx.

"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. That was no

way to handle negresses.

"What? You can sleep with them, but I can't smile at them. How do you work that out?"

This muddled Insel, the theme of whose half conscious theatricals must either be that his beefsteak shared jealous passions with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prostitutes lay far beyond a patroness's permissions.

"Colored 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 _half a time_ 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 understanding why, instructed me, "You know nothing of the etiquette of _my_ underworld-- its _laws_. The rights of such women extend only to the level of the table top."

"It's like this-- I am sitting at the Dome-- she comes along--"

"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 _anything_ under the table-- she can grab a thousand francs from my pocket-- it is hers. But to lift anything _off_ the table-- ausgeschlossen!-- impermissable!"

So exactly the logic on behalf of woman 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 humorous peace as it fused with 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 *not* having beaten the negress.

"Well," I temporized, 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--."

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

"You don't have to exonerate yourself," I said, dryly overcome with compassion. "It's quite a feat-- being a pimp and starving to death." Then laughing, "Whoever heard of a maquereau without any money!" It made such a gorgeous sound when they were shouting-- almost macrusallo. Like crucified mackerel--"

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

"Six sheets against three meals or three embraces! Whichever way you put it your honor 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, an elfin at-

tempt at flirtation, miraculously coy, which played all to itself
against the greater glow and measure of his basic disarray-- a
tacit assumption of our having mutually renounced an inferior
world in spite of his repulsiveness being, as he 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'."

She was right, he had the air of being amorous of any-
thing or everything in general which left him so rapt and gentle,
or, taking an 'inner' view, his astral Venus flowed in his veins.
This was why when he met a woman, Mme. Feierlein 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 con-
summate."

For a moment I wondered if his unstaid mind had recon-
ceived in some unguessable aspect I assumed for him, its eerie
durable passion in general-- for myself. But apart from the likeli-
hood of his having no idea as to whom he alternately bewailed and
beamed upon, I remembered that one
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 this delicate soul swimming so docilely along his astral stream
under the thunder and lightenings of his distraction like a con-
fiding duck as I scattered crumbs.

At the same time a worn down record of old-fashioned in-
flection clattered out of Insel's head:

"In spite of all--"

A lesson? A suggestion? A refrain to be taken up?

Instantly I knew this to be a touch-word on which some
spring must snap, some wheel fly wild. That, as I watched, some-
thing horrible, in anguish, was _wanting to happen_-- a dangerous
inertia waiting to be acted upon by some external irritant.

Our lake of peace was draining as Insel gathered himself
together for some voluntary magnetic onslaught "in spite of all"
had swollen on the air--

Shafts from his eyes became so penetrating-I could feel
myself dissolve to a transparent target--pierced me, and, travelling
to the further side, stared through my back on their return to his
irises.

He seemed to collect electricity from the air (in the
afternoon there was a violent storm). This crackling electricity
flashed so near by without attaining to me. It was as if I were
almost leaning up against a lightening conductor. I remembered
his girl's watch was still in my hand bag-- it lay beside me-- a
kind of self-focus in his magnetic field.

He had always something about him of a lithe tree struck
by its own lightening.

These magnetic tides would rise and ebb as we sat in
felicity around an enormous plat anglais, which I could not touch
for my absorption in Insel and of which, as Insel ate of it, the
rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void. And all the while
Insel spasmodically kept up his bum's charade pleading for variable
salvations. With his floppy pathos he impored me to take pity on
him, to take him in, (I could see how I would work with Insel keeping
house with that precision he exercised in his own dimension!) to
put him in a nursing home and surround him with angelic choirs of
pretty nurses "only to look at," he exclaimed-- persuasive or timorous.

70

I had seen the actor Moisse by the light of a little
candle remember some human tie in a prison cell; the humble flame
drawing him into itself spread his reminiscent spirit over the callous
walls to warm them. Such a candle was burning behind Insel's eyes as if
he were his own narrow room. Yet the lines of its rays shining to
infinite remoteness-- A state of consciousness closing out the world--
lay their ethereal carpets along the ceaseless levels of annihilation.

No rock, no root, no accident of Nature varied a virgin
plain that had conceived no landscape, and I saw Insel reduced to the
proportion he would have in the eye of a God-- setting out--
unaccompanied, unorientated, for here where nothing existed, no sound,
no sun, reigned an unimaginable atmosphere he longed to breathe. I
could see this, because he was seeing this, as still hanging back, he
writhed to its lure. Although I promised solicitously to send him to
a nursing home, we knew I could not come to his aid--. He had never
told me where he was. His torment tantalized pity.

With that acrobatic facility he had for immeasurable leaps
from despair to cajolery-- he readjusted himself to the station buffet--
as if to get down to some business.

His eyes now pacified in a steady human mesmerism smiled
cosily into mine.

"An wass denken sie?" he asked in coquettish anticipation
"What are you thinking of?"-- Again I had that creepy impression of
ultimate tension, of a cerebral elastic taut for the snap.

"-- of you", wheezed the battered record turning on his
brain to my sudden visualization of Insel as a grey tom-cat having
a fit in a cloud of ashes and lunar spangles.

71

I could not tell him. No thought coincided between one on the verge of dwelling among the levels he laid bare to me and one who remained outside.

Still he went on smiling a little vaingloriously. "An wass denken sie?" he asked again, of God knows what girl, in God knows what decade, and all the same of me.

In my veritable seances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity-- thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.

Thus I saw how three whole hours went by while Insel asked me what I was thinking about. They passed off in a puff as though, for a change, he had contracted time into intensity.

All the whimsical nonsense ever conceived rotated on his eyeballs which seemed to convey 'while I pretend to search for some secret in you the less danger is there of your being inquisitive as to mine'.

With every question his eyes grew greater, thrust out longer daggers, unctious in the aromatic ooze from his brain.

"What are you thinking of?" urged Insel, and the softer fell his voice, the more inflexible he knit himself together-- the more terrifically to disintegrate on some signal he invoked.

So I sat with as soothing and expressionless a smile as I could concoct and answered occasionally, "I am thinking of June 18th, 1931, or of 9 o'clock on Tuesday of the week before last.-- "What are you thinking of?" His eyes converging upon me, a yellow glow fused to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong. "-- An wass denken sie?" Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before me-- with a determination beyond all human power, in the 'last expression'

that death imposes on pain. Incredibly exact, rivalling even any
original I had seen.

"I should have preferred" he said with his voice of dead
lovers crying through the earth, "to be fit for you to look at". Then
he deliberately set himself on fire.

In exact description-- he did not consistently appear
to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparision
to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a
thread in the general mass, he retained his depth of tone. But as if
his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate instrument than
the eye for registration, so me infra-red or other invisible ray he
gave off, was immediately transferred on one's neutral current to some
dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its
brilliancy. So one saw him as a grey man and an electrified organism
at one and the same time--

--it was only the candle spluttering. Preliminary to the
most beautiful spectacle I have ever 'seen'.

Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine
a degredation, Set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull
off his face.

For those whose flesh is their rags, it is not pitiable to
undress.

As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbon-
ization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble--
one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a
moment exposed the 'man-of-light'.

He sat there inside him taking no notice at all, made of the
first jelly quivering under the sun and some final unimaginable form
of aereal substance, in the same eternal conviction as the Greek
fragment--

Once at dark in the Maine Woods, I had stumbled on a rotten stump of a tree. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.

At last Insel's eyes dying of hallucination, stared suddenly into the filtered day. Horrified almost to blindness he complained, "Ess ist zu Hell." He sounded as if deliberately quoting 'it is too light'-- That did not matter after all the ways he had been 'happening'.

"So you're starving, are you?" I mocked, exasperated with his total inability to estimate himself. "The greatest actor alive."

As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was prouetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into a cab.

In that small space he behaved like a fish on the end of a line, like a kite in the air entangled in its own tail-- carrying about with him, in his awful unrest, my hand to which he clung.. His own had clamped so fast to it, he could hardly get it off-- when I dropped him at his door.

I was ready to leave for St. Cloud with my little valise when there came a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the fall of dust. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional electrification.

"Um Gottes' Willen" he panted almost inaudibly, "I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, and now my heart is ceasing to beat."

It was remarkable he should succeed in speaking his body no longer showed much sign of life. He might be using this body-- with its interwoven identity of the living remains of a dead man and the dead remains of a man once alive-- as a medium, from a distance to which his fluctuant spirit had been temporarily released.

His face having lost its bruised appearance was set in the tidy waxen consistency that makes corpses look like sudden doles.

I might be entertaining a ghost so light a labour I found it to draw him through the glass door into the studio. As I dropped him onto an enormous couch, my everyday self broadcast a panic.

"Mrs. Jones, her daughter having sailed for New York, is discovered alone in her flat with a dead tramp."

Briefly I thought of blowing the thing out of the window. The seeming imminence of his death allowed for no other means of getting rid of him. But this was no solution. He would be found--sprawled in the court-yard.

Then it came to me that in spite of my willful descent into a forbidden psychology, I still had sufficient power to put him to rest. "Insel" I enquired, "can you hear me?" Then - very slowly - very distinctly, "You are going to sleep-- sleep till the blue moon."

There surged out of Insel a whisper of horror, "But my heart isn't beating" he protested.

"That is only a neurotic illusion" I consoled him believing

I lied.

He lay on the couch and did not die. I began to arrange
for a possible revival. "Is there anything you can drink that isn't
alcoholic?" I asked him gently.

After a while he murmered, "Pfeffermint tee."

"Try to be alive when I come back." I urged him in all
sincerity.

"Where are you going?" he wanted to know, his voice a
hoarse agony.

"To buy peppermint tee."

"No - no - you're not to leave me - ever."

With a strange grip of a limp vice his fingers clung to
my wrist. I had to sit down beside him. Now he was staring as it
bewitched, at the parquet of the floor.

"The peppermint won't grow out of the floor." I advised.

"It will." Said Insel, "you're to stay here."

And I found myself staring together with him.

It was no peppermint growing out of the planes of polished
oak. Only the creeping organic development of a microscopic under-
growth such as carpetted chaos in his work, almost as closely
cramped as the creamy convolutions of a brain. Foliage of mildew
it spread-- and spread.

"An infusion of that fungus would be bad for you" I
persuaded him, taking his fingers carefully apart, lifting their
tentacular pulp from my wrist.

Escaping I rushed to the shop at the corner and back again.
As Insel was still living, I made him his tea.

"And you will be able to sleep." He reproached me,
oblivious of his drowsiness as he fell asleep.

I could watch over my invalid through a pane of glass
incompletely covered by a curtain on the door at the far end of the
studio.

A dense oppression stole through the flat all packed up
in its iron shutters. Insel, who had no longer been able to bear
a light, lay pallid and obscure in a faint reflection from a lantern
in the hall.

His slumber the extinction of a dim volcano. Lax as a
larva, a glow worm 'gone out', his head bared of its phosphorescent
halo, seemed swollen in a meaningless hydrocephalus. As if, while
conscious electric emissions had diminished his cranial volume.

Around him the atmosphere was stale as an alcohol
preserving a foetal monster he resembled in repose.

Insel was unpleasant bereft of his radiance.

His body had dwindled in distilling an immaterial essence
to such concentration it was appreciable to the senses. One was aware
of an effulgence, which, if it waxed and waned during his waking
hours, had now altogether vanished. His body swept and garnished
like the house in the Bible-- devilishly invaded-- was no longer
human as it lay before me in the form of Insel.

There unshining and supine he seemed abandoned of all
quality except the opaque. The grey inflated spacity of his un-
seeing head, which, should one lift it from the pillow, must surely
loll on his shoulder-- the head of an idiot.

The flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I
found that further off it was filled to a weird expansion with
emanations drifting away from Insel asleep. They crowded the air,
minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of frozen fire. In my
room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized nothingness
was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable
than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he
leaking out of himself, residium of that ominous honey he stored

behind his eyes into which it was his constant, his distraught
concern to withdraw.

In his soaring, flagging excitations he might have
spent a spiritual capital and going broke, be raising exhaustive
loans on the steadily decreasing collateral of his vitality, until
an ultimate bonfire in those eerie eyes should be extinguished in
some unimaginable bankruptcy.

In him the intangible and tangible components of a human
being had come apart. As if in some ruthless extraction of Supreme
Good from a fallible pulp the vibrancy interpenetrating normal
muscular fibre had been indrawn from his physical structure to
condense in a point of flame. When some mysterious fuel failed
him, Insel remained-- a mess of profane dross.

I thought of his pictures, those queerly luminous almost
materializing projections. Curious creatures moving in levitation--
frequently cerebral abortions of cats.

Any student of ancient occultism would recognize them for
elementals. Imbecilic, vampiric-- here and there an obsessive
absence of a mouth implied an inconceivable constipation. A
conspicuous liver, so personal he might have served as his own
flouroscope, clear as a pale coral was painted as only the Masters
painted. He had no need to portray. His pictures grew out of him,
seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance
to urge tenacious roots into a plane surface.

I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued
from a man, who himself when unlit or cut into profile, became so
hauntingly animal, even insectile. Who, when asleep being the makings
of his own bestiary, was vilely void as an incubus-- wondered why
millenary monsters of a disreputable metaphysic should re-arise
intact in a modern subconscious.

Insel slept for twenty hours. With one interruption.

When I went in to see how he was I woke him up.

Through the slits in the shutters the outdoor lights
laid narrow blades along the floor, above Insel's feet on the
white washed wall they crossed and cast a double shadow of a
hanging fern. Otherwise the room was a mausoleum.

Again I could have sworn I beheld the dead. Silence
had hardened upon him in a stony armour, too heavy for the
fluttering of breath.

I listened till the sound of his rigidity grew so shrill
I was forced to make it mute. Terrified, I took hold of the door
and crashed it to.

Insel-- who after all must, of his nature, float quite
lightly on the surface of a coma-- easily lifted his lids.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you," I gasped. "It was
necessary to make a noise to know you are not dead."

With none of the daze of sudden rousing he excused me
gently. And slept anew.

Those depths through which others plunge into sleep for
him stretched shallow as moisture on a mirror.

In the morning I went out, off into the sunlight, shopping.
Leaving far behind me that darkened room, and whatever it contained.

My major purchase was kilos of brightly red beef.

When he awoke I fed him chunks from a great frying-pan.
Insel sat up and swallowed them with fairly bestial satisfaction.

"Why" I asked to make conversation, "do you always want
'Fleisch ohne Knochen?'"

I had taken it for granted he ordered boneless meat to
avoid waste. But Insel began peering about shockingly as if
suspicious of being overheard.

"When I am alone" he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, "I do not eat like this-- I have to drag <u>bones</u> into a corner-- to gnaw."

I felt curious to know how-- without teeth-- . But Insel beginning to shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.

Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish under water as a celadon tide of pale lamp light sluiced into the studio. From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the halo that was now re-forming round Insel's face.

Stark on the sommier he floated up from the floor of a pool with the wavering fungus he had sown there clinging to his cover.

He told me he had found the secret of perpetual motion if only he had the money to buy the stuff. To me it seemed he had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity.

I told him I had for many years been conceiving a ballet.

"It is the story of a maiden seeing her life in a crystal-- It would look exactly as it does here, everything translucent." I waved to Insel-- "Yet as in the days when there were maidens they had no 'life', what she sees is her future spouse sowing his 'wild oats'.

"All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijensky-- yet I once came across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned-- But I should have to do maquettes-- <u>animaged</u> maquettes of the choreography-- and I can't make <u>anything</u> grow out of the floor" I said defferentially.

"Of course he makes love to everything. A cocottes' eye.

The woman in the litmus petticoat forcasting the weather. A
rainbow," I continued, seeing Insel entranced. "The Queen of
fairyland-- Mermaids & Medusi." Envy was stealing into Insel.

"I dance divinely" he said and I could see him crossing
a ball-room floor propelled as if on invisible castors, as truly
initiate
acolytes, in reception and remittance of the Holy Book before the
high altar.

"Always at the crucial moment the youth is intercepted.
There comes floating in between him and the object of his con-
cupiscence, a--" I stopped, as Insel seemingly relieved by the
frustration of a rival, closed his eyes, and waited till he came to.
"Over and again I drop the idea in despair. Over and over again I
find a solution so simple it constantly slips my mind. I have only
to make some little people about five inches high and tell them
what to dance." Insel nodded comprehendingly. "Yet whenever I
get to work I come upon some fundamental obstacle. It takes me
hours" I complained to Insel, "to remember it cannot be done. It
is as if at the back of that memory stands another memory of having
had the power to create whatever I pleased."

Insel's eyes enlarged in ruminative stare. The stealthy
oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer
need of larynges to converse. Insel thought at me. More precisely--
vaguely conceived before me.

"To make things grow," he conveyed on his silence, "you
would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the
dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will
only grow if planted in a woman-- But my brain is a more exquisite
manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover the Oceanic
grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multipl e as sand."

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 anyone not being able to get
anything 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 into 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 page,

"that it would interfere with your 'straklen'?-- I'm not going
to wash it. You can't short-circuit."

On the contrary-- I anticiapted him distinctly renewed in
an intense radiance--

"Please," I begged-- enraptured as a nun seeking per-
mission to lay fresh lilies before a shrine. "Ich bitte sie."

He was obdurate-- it would seem, in shame. It did not
occur to me that in cleaning him up one would be cutting a slice
from his 'beggar's capital'.

"It's not distinguished to be ashamed--"
Insel in a way gave in-- .

"You try it," he warned me. "Before your eyes the suit
will turn white."

"It won't, or if it does, I'll turn it black again."
"You may clean it forever," he intoned ominously --
"the while it grows whiter-- and whiter."

"Madchens", I reminded him for bait--"or at least", as
for an instant Insel's ravaged features showed through his en-
nobling aura--"better Negresses."

Insel was pacified. But he did not go to sleep. He
evaporated.

I recognized a vapour whose drifting suspension of in-
visible myriads he copied so passionately with the over-fine point
of his pencil.

When it cleared off it had left him again an effigy straight-
ened as the level of water.

The world of the Lutetia had materialized. An infiltration
of half-light softly bursting the dark, a thin cascade, the ferns
dripping into a green gloom. Here, where dawn and noon and mid-
night were all so dim and Insel lay sensitive to clarity as a creature

of the deep sea; the closely shuttered studio with its row of glass
doors was a real replica of the irreal 'aquarium'.

Because I found the place somewhat chilly when sunless--
I had thrown a great white blanket over my thin dress. This was
due to no obsession for Insel's white miracles. Simply, everything
being put away in napthaline, this had returned from the cleaners
and the femme de menage had not yet locked it up.

Fairly inflexible-- it curved around me loosely, encaving
me-- its stiff corner trailing off like a sail.

I sat on the edge of the couch at the feet of that rigid
flotsam-- in a huge white shell.

Again I received a strictly lateral invitation to wholly
exist in a region imposing a supine inhabitance. A region whose
architecture, the aroma of an aura, being parallel to Paradise, is
only visible to a vertical gaze. Should one stand up to it, it
must disappear.

Somehow, unable to dissolve into mist, and thus too dense
to enter a mirage, the nearest I could conform to the arid aquatic
was in becoming crustacean.

Being an outsider did not interfere with my participation
in the ebullent calm behind Insel's eyelids. Where cerebral rays of
imprecision, lengthening across an aura of perfectibility, were
intercepted by resonant images audible to the eye, visible to the ear.
Where even ultimate distance was brought within reach, tangible as
a caress.

As all this 'lasted forever' it seemed incompatable that
Insel should slump back into a larva. Yet there he was-- Extinguished
again in unregenerative sleep.

I turned to go. A scatter of objects on the table attracted
my attention. Among some weary sous and tiny strangulated worms--
broken shoe laces-- lay evidently the bone of some prehistoric fish.

A white comb shrill with the accumulated phosphorous of the ages. Insel had emptied out his pockets.

I went about my cleaning. Ordering several bidons of gasoline, I poured them into an enamel tub, and suspending the suit by a wooden pincers, I dipped it in.

The sun was shining, the kitchen blazing whate. Before the open windows that which seemed most substantial about Insel, like a corpse let down from a gallows, fell to its knees in the volatile fluid.

Then the ghastly thing began to turn pale. I set upon it in opposition and that white contorted outgrowth of a brain almost tangled in the whisk-brush--

Had he really intended as much in his challenge-- or did this Polar region of a mania-- these maps of Himalayan ant-hills with their scabs of pure vegetation embossed upon the back-drop of his clothes, depend for their pictorial clarity on some accord between his cerebral vibrations and mine?

Being tired and bored, I went in to see if in exchange for some more food, I could make terms with Insel.

He appeared uneasy. Rolling his eyes like runaway wheels spoked with interrogations. His expression was such as I had never seen. Terror solidified.

"I am a prisoner here!"

It did not recur to me that his classic complaint is an echo in the corridors of asylums.

Tearing my visionary trappings of meat and such from me with his flippant accusation. Insel did not at all want to know, "When shall I see you again?"-- He had never seen me before.

My everyday self shuddered-- 'Blackmail! Almost as
awkward as dead tramps.' I reflected, but I had become so nicely
attuned to Insel's moods that my parasitic clairvoyance, of its
very nature, being constrained to see eye to eye with him, immediately
veered to his view point, I concluded I must in a temporary aberration,
have kidnapped this gaunt guest whose sharl was unsociable.

"Beefsteak", I quavered, as if enticing a surly hound.

Insel, completely jammed between infinite walls, was not
having any steak.

I must dislodge his attention.

Seemingly at hazard my *dilemma* linked up with one of the
kind of infantile anecdotes Insel always greeted with glee.

"Have you heard about the Hungarian immigrant lost in London?" I enquired as engagingly as I could. "He wanted to find his consulate and could not understand why the policeman only shrugged his shoulders when he explained he was 'Hungry'."

Strange how unerringly the unconscious picks its way.

I had 'found' Insel for himself again. To the Titan of Hunger -
the police-man's shoulders heaved in the shrug of all humanity
ignoring Insel. This recognition shook him with the most sophisticated laughter I have ever heard in my life.

"Your suit has turned white." I announced

A gleam of crafty assurance stole into his transparent
eyes.

"You will never 'get out' while your suit is white,"
I threatened, "all 'die Mädchen' are on the other side of the wall--"

"Oh," said Insel with a conciliatory smile, "I only want
them to look at."

"Well they won't look at you until your suit is black;
and as we're about it you'd better let me clean your shirt."

His shirt was of a dark grey design rather mellow. When I suggested renovation he clutched it by the open throat.

"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 cramped 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 my 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.

"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 his arm. Insel did not awake - 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.

Again, as I watched, I had the sensation of 'breaking point',
an expectance 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 unforseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging
hippopotomi <u>the gums</u> in their hideous defenceless <u>observed</u> me-- an
obscene enjoyment of ill-will pleated his clamped lids.

His teeth had not decayed. They were worn down.

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

Getting into 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
introductory conflict usually engaged him, it had ceased.

" You really look rather well now. Why, 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 to inadequate.

Should I risk an attempt to reveal to Insel those real-
essences in Insel? Real-essences to a slight degree rationalized
for my mind, they might be either the very symptoms of the so called
madness in his 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 pathalogical - 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--"

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
wiskers. chops

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

Then he began moaning again - of suffering, which one
moment, he could not 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 born four children." Before very long she actually split in two--

"Es war eine Schwartze & eine Blonde--"

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

Insel

"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 kill 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 schöbiger -- 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. "Die Liebe?-- It's the strangelike!" he hooted across to me in the haunted voice of the obsessed.

"Insel," I urged, bewildered, "don't look like that. Your strangelike are evidence of something in you-- something noble."

"So Edel--" I trilled in rememberance 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.

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-- " tuto

" Insel," I exclaimed, -terrified. " You mustn'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 pledd 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 his
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 ßebelle - 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.

" 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 got 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 doormat and whispered shyly, " I shall explain everything to you next time."

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

Her eyes like coals, continent, after 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 adolesence; it centred in her little tummy, which dared to be round.

A hard young apple - it was immediately plain to me how - had I been on the other side of the fence of sex - I should 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 endlessness 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."

But when Mlle. Alpha spoke of his work, it was with a

p rofound 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 summation in defiance of the concrete. That he is filling the galleries of the increase. He seemed so worth helping _live_, 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 morp hine 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 sympathetic way.

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

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.

"Bye the way - I exclaimed, I forgot--. When Insel wrote to you - did he predict the day and hour when his resistence 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. Afterwards, 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 start-case 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."

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."

"What am I to do with you? The taximeter is ticking, the surrealists 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 superality 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

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 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 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 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 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.

P
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 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 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---"

"Every time 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 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 is 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 modernizes 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 madchen "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 excruciating 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 in some Einsteinien contraction to
shorten the necessary distance for focussing 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."

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 com-
ments from my friends. I became almost 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-- every one 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 halucinated-- 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 sur-
face 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."

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 *dumb* 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 resource to Insel's healing 'strahlen.'
Since his screech of a vanquishing cat he had, as far as I was con-
cerned, subconsciously thrown them into reverse.

For a while I was helpless; then one day when the pain
calmed down somewhat, 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 yet occur to me how unsuccessfully I had
succeeded 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.

"Its all very well," Frau Feierlein 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 an out like himself. For the present no power on earth could dislodge from my mind that luminous effigy of generic hunger-- or shake my serene unquestioning insistance 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 infinitesimally 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 dis-
located 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 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 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. <u>Being</u> 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 some thing 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 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 unac-
countable, 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 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
exacting spirit of geometry.

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

ooooo00000000ooooo

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 conversation, woven of disjointed themes
like an inconsistent lace edged out with stocking darnings.

He recalled my promise-- to demonstrate unfortunate love
whenever a twinge of pain contracted my features. He peered en-
thralled at the havoc pain played with me. His delirious peace ex-
panded 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 exaggera-
tion 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 dis-
persed as I lay down. Indeed, like the saints whose dead bodies
did not decompose, Insel's electric exudation in some process of in-
finitesimal 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 fragrant with that faint half-holy purity that hung about
him.

1/2

"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
up on 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 be-
witched, 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 with-
drawal.' 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
whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home, there
was appropriately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom

113

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 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, / the creep-
ing 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 incor-
poreal 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 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 evolution. 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 simpli-
fied 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 in a knot of tiny twigs, haply to unravel
and root, and branch against the heavens.

115

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.'

"Do you know what a town gate is?" asked Insel pro-
fessorially, "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 writ-
ten no more.

I proffered the necessary compliments. Agog with glee, he shimmered with satisfaction. This communication of an actual trans-cription 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
of "literateurs"
alliance with me-- in literators, 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
<u>thrust</u> itself upon his attention (as in <u>my</u> case) was instantly dis-
tilled 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 wistful, 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 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 extinction, 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 marcotic 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.

1/8

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, inexplic-
ably, derision.

The painless buoyancy lasted well into the night when, as
I sat calmly at work in my hotel bedroom, I unexpectedly dis-
integrated. My body, which had hitherto made upon itself the im-
pression of a compact mass, springing a multiplicity of rifts,
changed to a fractional covering I can only compare to the 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 myself 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 dispair-- 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 puerization
peered from the ends of uncontrollable antennae for something un-
attainable.

I had more space than had Insel in his cab, yet the in-
slanting 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 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 be-
fore keeping an appointment for lunch.

Without association (as usual) the idea of Insel rose in
my mind. Quite different to thinking about some one. I was over-
come 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

120

it was always filtered with a faint derision. But even this derision I took for granted. Brought to a halt under the full of 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.

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 "Bon Jour" 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

121

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 cortiers, 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 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 fowl, 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 a anguished words revealing how she received as an awful animosity her mother's solicitous efforts to get her to 'make sense.'

One night, while undressing to go to bed, 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 disintegrating with Insel's 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-sensibility so acute it shattered itself to splinters.

123

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

Insel, who, so sensible of his essential mystery-- com-
municated 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 thatsächlich," 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.

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 produced the duplicate I had lent him in the
days of his 'eviction'-- and *forgot* (the place was still at his dis-
posal) 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 sieze it towards 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. Deter-
mined 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 contract-
ing 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 any more."

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

126

Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct enlargement of Colossus' photograph that always stood on the sitting-room mantle piece 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.

127

"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.

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

128

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 re-
marked.

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-- "

"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, re-
fused to stir.

"Listen," I admonished him, "all this is really unwhole-
some-- 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 starv-
ing 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 chessmen; 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 fluid."

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, 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 Mücke?" 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.

130

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 already decided he must have a
warm overcoat when, although it was not particularly 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, dole-
fully 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 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 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 re-
mained 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 some unknown hour must have, at last, crept into
the flat.

Some one 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 in-
solence, 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. Some one 'replacing himself,' his
mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged for a hostile creak.

This culminating phase of my eerie experience-- Insel's
<u>residence</u>-- remains confused.

Cavilling and bilious, whenever he caught sight of me he
hardly refrained from spitting. Our relative positions entirely re-
versed, 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 con-
currence in my 'wonderful ideas,' completely wiped <u>out</u> 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 equi-
distant holes 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 viciousness 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 ex-
treme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, televisionary
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."

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-- growing out of the floor.

Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, or 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 <del>fill-o'-</del>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 the 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 lands where 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 to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.

Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man 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 ort 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 schön 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 exterior-
ized 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 <u>collusions</u> with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to
associate these opposite phenomena. Had I recalled the earlier ir-
ridescent Insel, it could only have been as a figment of <u>my</u> insanity.

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

"What are you," he sneered venemously, "and 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 com-
fortably in an arm-chair to take a look aroung-- 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
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.

138

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 re-
proach, "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; for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize
duration-forever.

["But *why?* The artist requires *color* in his life.\" This fallacious\ninsight melted Insel's imitation shame, disclosing the very really\nwounded face of a child who has long been sulking for being misjudged.", "\"You told me,\" he burst out unhappily, writhing with re-\nproach, \"that I put lots of money in the bank.\"", "So that was it. Insel, with his organic magnifications,\nhad become a foul lout, because he was feeling-- cross.", "\"I didn't,\" I fibbed, striking the suitable note, \"I said\nyou hid it under the carpet.\" Neither of us had a carpet-- we\nimmediately floated off as if on the magical mat of Bagdad, talking\non-- .", "I could feel any word I was saying fit into Insel's brain\nappeasing as a missing piece in a jig-saw puzzle.", "At once-- it was growing late-- he clamored for me to\n stay\n with him; for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize\n duration, forever.\n\n---\n
duration", "duration"]

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 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 Xray 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 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. 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.

140

Rarely, at intervals of aeons, Insel and I would look
up at each other 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 <u>the thousand directions</u>. He had showed them
to me <u>previously</u>, 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 multi-
plicity of direction. How <u>far</u> my mind had travelled; never to come
to the <u>beginning</u> 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.

"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, unrealizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a puddle of serum, to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficult. That 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 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.

Insel

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 been created.

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 ex-hibitionism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no means of communication-- I threw out my hands-- elatedly be-lieving 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."

143

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 on
some reflex of the past, "Ich komme nach hause."

He was 'coming home.'

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
the 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 für Alles-- Thanks for everything."

The End.

142

Nothingness.

It was not black as night nor white as day, nor grey as death — only a non-existent irritation as to what _purposed #consequence_ had led us into the illusion of ever having been created.

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.

"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."

"Can she possibly mean it," I could 'hear' him ask himself as he wheeled towards me, as if 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."

143

I must have had my hands outspread, for Insel dropped like a
soft moth into my open palm -- On his face a smile unlike all the fluctu-
ant smiles of hallucinated angeis 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'.

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

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?"

So all I said was, "Good-bye."

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

Facing each other they possessed voluptuous attributes
the poor will find in one another unmarried by an unwholesomeness
which is mutual. The model, tremendously engaged in hoping to
have a baby to persuade her lover to make her his wife, later de-
cided 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 of the pre-
judice for his madness as he sat disseminating in my amusing sitting
room a pleasant neutrality, pulling one's sympathies in his
方向. 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.

BEGAN

FRIEND

That evening I received 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 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 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.

Felt

Seems

33

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-MAGIC* (or *magical*) 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 *back* 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 *MUTO* has the expression of 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 *see* themselves from a cauldron overcast by some wizard's tortuous will."

This letter was never finished, for, and this was often to be the case, once he had left, his person would gradually *SEE* 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 the waist down he looked like a stork on one leg. His queer ashon face seemed veritably patched

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 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 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.

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 sphere of activity. For 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 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, 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

Insel, as he talked, seemed to be recurrently emerging
from predicaments of which, if some were lamentable, many were
THOUGH quite diaphanous as THOUGH nothing of him but the most subtle as-
pects 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 f mischievously dancing defiantly in his eyes. And this entwicklung
I could not estimate blurred my view of Insel. I saw his image
grown suddenly faint, imploring the shadow of woman "-- to only
wait-- in the end-- the end-- I shall achieve glory."

These unfortunate separations, throwing him back upon
the desert 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 vicious darts of his drastic
horoscope.

7

8

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 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 intermittent 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.

"Surely," he agreed.

* Sherrif

"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 pracht yol-- 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 *head* 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 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 skeleton, *AL* symbol of an ultimate starvation had need of a food we knew not of. Throughout his angling for

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 im-
pression 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.

12

"All," he replied decisively.

"Then start at once."

"People would recognize me."

"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!"

"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."

13

"Every one," he assured me.

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

Yes

"I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a ~~tast~~ a 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 labelled 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 greatest books 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 standing 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 biography. 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.

"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 ac-
quainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius
who ever lived.

---00000---

16

"Insel:

For a while I saw wondering to what appeal, and why,
I had answered. I did not care if Insel were in trouble. Ob-
viously 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.

"Who could have done these?"

"They are mine."

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

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 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 are over-lean. And the room fell
open, extending to space-- as such-- to remind me of my future
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.

19

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.

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

20

20

its neck and sleeves on the Singer, I obtained a corpse-like sack, and stuffing, everything that was not furniture, ornaments or utensils, 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 taxi I inquired, "Was haben Sie schones erlebt since I saw you?"

Translate

"Oh no," he assured me.

"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, he murmured, "I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful. How did I do it?" he begged himself to explain.

21

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 lose matter of psychologic nebulae.

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.

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

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

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 dissolvant for rhodoid very much stronger than
cutex which dissolves the skin, I had a shocking vision of Insel's
diaphanous intestines entirely disappearing should he, as would
be only natural, mistake it for a graceful token of absentee
hospitality-- and of myself arraigned for manslaughter.

"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."

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.

"Yes. What on earth--?"

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

Deeply bowed, he clutched his feeble fist in the empty-
ness 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.

"Yes, a comic strip. I found my flat <u>exactly</u> as I
left it."

"And I thought you were <u>angry</u> because I mentioned money."

"I had <u>told</u> you to mention money. But all my sympathy
for you was buried under that <u>bunch</u> of cheap flowers I put
here to welcome <u>my</u> lonely clochard. The
nearly

"But, after all, I have been here every day," he al-
most 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 implied. 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 from-- I am not pious," he mused, deeply intro-
spective, "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?"

As mediums on becoming professional, obliged to con-
tinue 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.

Awestrieken, 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.

"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.

"Not I," he boasted.

--00000--

"I've brought 'it'," his illusive grin seemed to be announcing, as if his visible person were a mannikin he operated on occasion. (MAKE) But 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."

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 con-
strained to descend the altar steps backwards without ceasing to
face it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could absorb such
power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would re-
ceive 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 infinitesimal 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 will leisure-
ly 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 re-
minded 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 his coming close to me effected acclimatization, turning an irreal ice into a tenuous warmth.

3/

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.

"This," he continued, "is the first drawing of a new
series-- all my future work will be based on it. I intend my tech-
nique 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."

"I'm tired of your tiring 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 actuality."

"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

74

heavy plagiarisms that sometimes crush him, had sprinkled the car-
rafour 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--
its 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 mud-
dy 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

The cloth of my coat, a fantaisie, was sown with lacquered red setae-- wisps, scarcely attached, which caught the light, and all through the evoning unusual manifestations of consciousness occurring 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 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 promotion 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--

"What are you trying to be anyhow," I asked bemused,
"La fain qui rode autour de palaces?"

A sound of anquish 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.

Still looking so extraordinarily distinguished, Insel
w as illustrating a society by means of an empty plate, a diaphragm
reducing the world to a white spot.

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--

"Do you hear?" asked Insel, "its 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."

"Nevertheless," favored Insel, and I felt it might be perilous to contradict him.

39

Insel trembled with the cowardice of those whose instinct
being to create even an iota, appear to slink into a corner before
the historic of destructive intent. This man, who, when he turned
his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great in-
tensity 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 returned to Germany, there he was Kultur
Bolshevik.

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

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

MAN Ray 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 se-
cure a moment which, stretching out in line with oneself, would
last indefinitely.

wonder is its own revelation.

Even in the world of reality Insel's ideation was an introvert exploration of a brilliancy beneath his skull, an ever-crescent clarity which in the form of inspiration ripens creative fruit. But in him by reason of some interference I could not define, aborted as the introduction to an idea

And that was all.

42

not 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 justi-
fied by the lovely equilibrium his companionship conveyed to me.
It was as if for an exceeding moment I could, rising above the dis-
tortion of life, hold inexpressable communion with Insel, where his
spirit had no flaw.

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.

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 'aereal 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 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 evidence it would seem there was no longer any hurt in it. He was calm under my touch.

On 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 increase, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational quandary, 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 benighted structure around the eye. 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 the corresponding eye-caves of my own, 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, the my skull excavating the fragile area to my subconscious a bit of my brain, crashed onto his and stuck there.

On the spur of this subvoluntary act of 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.

Out of a torso of white ash arose iron rags as puffs of curling smoke, (crushed together) in blocks of shadow, the outline of a giant. Dense as the dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o'-the-wisp shining from it-- I crouched encumbered with an enormous shell white as plaster which, having but partly taken shape, trailed to an end in a sail of mist.

Intermittently his intriguing anxieties ceased to be actual. In his cerebral connotion, 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 whenever I met him with an earnestness that, like a gentle simile, bored into my mind. The culminative

46

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. Between 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.

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 certitude his corporeal mendicancy appeared fictitious.
So surely it was an exquisite nucleous that in his somewhat comatose
exhaltation he struggled to 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 decision, obsessed by an dead responsibility. He was
toting up imaginary accounts in payment of his passage to America.

"How tedious," my every day self recoiled, the lovely es-
sence 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 im-
material algae.

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

"That is not what I mean-- "

We arose. But out 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

"That is not what I mean-- "

We arose. But our legs became 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 concepts by
flickering out. One seldom took leave of him; walking along with
him one would unexpectedly fall 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 disgraceful grace, "When shall I see you again?" he im-
plored, clutching his concave breast. An awesome lunar reflection
lit up his face from within.

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.

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

"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 harding 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.

"Not a drop."

Insel tried again. "Sterben," he sighed in the voice of a weary arch-angel, an inclemetible 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.

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 sambro ambition which stirred him whonsoever
he became aware of his real life. It looked pretty badly-- real
life-- so carelessly repaired by hand-- that obscene, that relent-
less hording. Insel, his eyes closed upon it, induced by Death
the absolute decoy, examined an integral vision lining the de-
generacy of his brain.

His dirge still hummed on the air-- .

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 an art
gallery, feeding a cagey genius in the hope of production. Insel's
indious ravings, an irritating whine-- It was ten to eight.

This unreasonable nonchalant faith in Insel's (MY) alternate
was about to be greatly rewarded. After an amusing dinner and a
good film which, when we came out, proved to have lasted much longer
than usual, on our return in my friends' car the lightening hand
of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them
in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dish-rag a
deathly inner perspiration-- as if one were about to retch a
nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being
the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would
not cease from me for days.

Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an
hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize
to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection
immediately complicated, "When was he here? When was he there?
Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?"
The distant aristo went about his simple social life with suffi-
cient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious
illness and misplaced sleep, he visited any one who would have
him on the right day.

I had never seen him like this before-- human-- actually
gay! As I tried to explain why I must go home, Insel, in laughing
over something he wanted to tell me, laid a fluttering hand on
my shoulder-- the torture of my body ceased.

"Naturally," I acquiesced.

him into the future-- a future that ebbed from him as from others the past. He would look forward with one eagerly-- always at a certain point he reverted-- turned his blind back on the forward direction--.

"You have such marvelous ideas--"

"But Insel," I protested conscientiously, "I have touched on my ideas so lightly-- If I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades of meaning--."

Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savour lay in its impress of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual definition of Insel with his whittled exterior jerking in tics of joy a pate too loosely attached and almost worn down to the skull-- and myself expansive in some secondary glow from that icy conflagration strewing grey ashes over his face as it burnt itself out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder,

as two aloft on the same telegraph exchange a titter of god-forsaken sparrows.

As night drew out-- it got draughtier and draughtier-- we removed, as if receding into a lair, from the terrace to further and further inside the cafe from the open to the enclosed-- each time ordering a new 'concentration' from a different waiter-- till we reach an innereate core of the establishment. Here we inexplicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-existence insured Insel's vaunted isolation. One after another the same Germanic wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a different face.

One-- projected that declamatory arm which under-given circumstances present at the time falls with a forgetful plop before completing an indication. "Who is Insel," it challenged, "to monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?"

Another-- equally appreciative until he discovered the hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white-- apologized with a shudder, "I won't say it doesn't look all right on you-- but I can't bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old." He looked less old than Insel-- he was one of the many unfortunatees who have had nothing to 'give off' but the bubbles of adolescence, whereas Insel's rattling pelvis was trotting the leather seat in the sitting leaps of an exuberant child.

It was Insel all cluttered up with his 'private life.' Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the muddling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel's pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my suppor table.

As I watched this virtually prohibited conjunction with a race whose ostracism 'debunks' humanity's ostensible belief in its soul, I scarcely heard the scandalous din they were making; these negresses, with their fingers of twig, were tearing at some object--- my scarlet packet of 'High-life'!--- rapidly becoming invisible under Insel's touch-- he clung to it with such constrictive tenacity, he might have been squeezing an atom.

"Maquereau!" "Saland!" shrieked the dark ladies to stress their pandemonium accounting of benefits bestowed.

"Insel," I addressed him authoritatively, not dreaming 'pimp' and 'skunk' were almost the only French words familiar to the poor dear, "If you could understand what they are calling you-- you'd let go!"

fallen

Once more *gallen* sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of those unexpected carvings into profile; a zig-zag profile of a jumping jack cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert concentration blind as a nerve among the women's volume, clenching his guns in a fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression-- as this black and white flesh glanced off one another-- of their being totally unwed-- that Insel, whom I often called 'ameise' who was even now like an 'ant', occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite-- unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere-- to never let go. He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his cosmic 'tick'.

There were onlookers peering under the brass rail topping the back-to-back upholstery-- three heads left over from the crowded hours. One, the sharp mask of a jew worn to a rudder with centuries of steering through hostile masses, lowered its pale eyelashes on the neighbors insurrection as if closing a shop.

What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where
a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe, to find that I,
his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal
ease I must have 'caught' from Insel I threw on my clothes and
more or less floating into the street together with the presage
of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners, slushing my ankles,
hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure
to be saved at all costs. Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dome.
The piebald mix-up had disappeared.

"What happened to that skeleton I had with me an hour
ago?" I asked the major dome. "He get into a tangle with some
negresses-- Was he all right?"

"-- one who has greatly suffered," I was asounded to
hear myself telling the man-- like a nice old maid with illusions--
in precisely the sombre tones of Insel's 'patroness drive.'
Equally astounded, he shrugged his shoulders.

"You'll find him in one of the little bars round here--
he won't be far, madame."

I knew better. I had my own vision of him-- it was the
rustiness of that nail that haunted me. Or would I reach his attic
only after an ebony vampire had sucked the last drop of blood from
his corrupted carcass.

Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong xixis
sight of Insel standing disproportionately at the end of a row
of little men before a 'zinc', his head, appearing enormous, shone
with a muted gleam.

Without stopping I raised my hand. Insel, although he
had his back to me, rushed into the street-- he seemed to be con-
tinuing to run around.

In his gesture I could see a conclusion of distressful
searching in which he had circled during my absence-- beating his
breast, "Warum, warum ist diese Frau davon gegangen?-- Why did
this woman go away? I have not ceased to ask myself," Insel
complained again and again in miserable bewilderment, "You went
away-- Why did you go away!"

"Only to fetch something I left at the other cafe."

Tenderly confidential he bent his neck-- a gnarl in a
stricken tree-- I was about to learn what urgent anxiety had drawn
me out of bed.

"There was a waiter," he whispered hoarsely into my
hat, "who wouldn't let me out of the Dome until I had paid for
two cafe fines." (They had forgotten to include them when I paid
for the supper.) "It isn't that I want you to pay me back," he
protested with his so distinguished courtesy--."

I always had to order the same drinks for myself as
for Insel, or he would not have taken anything-- but I made him
drink my fine. It would, I felt, have superfluous results were
I to even sip alcohol in the company of this weirdly intoxicating
 creature. At the same time in accordance with my mission as a
life-saver, I begged him to take cafe au lait-- which roused a
pitious opposition. As if wound up he went on beating a mea
culpa on his absent breast.

I caught him by the arm.

Instantaneously he displaced to a distance. I was left
with my own arm articulated at a right angle, holding in my hand
a few inches of grey bone. It had come away with a bit of his
sleeve, acutely decorated with the jagged edge of torn black cloth.
At the same time, Insel, laying his hand on my shoulder, the rag
and the bone did a 'fade out'.

"Promise me to stay here," he whispered hoarsely into my
hat, "while I go to the bar. These people would not like it if I
did not pay."

Insel, who seemed to remember our pact, wanted to go
back to the Dome. But I refused.

"It's time for you to sleep," I commanded. That persistent teeter in my mind which was always tipping Insel up in a stiff horizontal straight line, his immovable eyes glued to in-

In conception Vast enough to absorb the centuries it
survived, now in defiance of time to surpass it-- the eternal
Thing was looking at us with the fullness of the future. All
we had ever understood that was less than itself peeled like
spoiled armour.

of life we would know again. Insel, without speaking, turned to
me staring at the re-impression of an impression on a book spread
out for the passer-by we had both, I could see, in identical
silence found one significance in an early Greek fragment-- I do
not remember which.

"Dufy," he explained.

I put down the money for the coffee and a twenty-five
contine piece rolled to the ground.

"Oh dear," he wailed forlornly. "I thought you pointed
to me. For God's sake throw it down again-- or I shall never
forgive myself," he pled and pled--

At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so
lightly its lazy barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. What-
ever had been an 'under-the-bridge' was all boxed in and the sun
had crawled so far into the sky it was needless to look for another.

After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless de-
light round and around the Orangerie. Insel's boots were hurting.
His pain was impersonal; it might have been following him, snapping
at his legs.

With some effort, having breakfasted all night, we
conceived the idea of going to 'lunch.' Insel, who was on the
point of allowing the air to lift him from the railed-in terrace
of the Tuilleries and set him down in the Rue de la Paix, ap-
praised by normal standards, although it was just this 'beauty of
horror' I was sure should be worth such a lot of money to him,
looked really terrifying. His being unshaven became a smoke screen.
Always his self illumination cast its own shadow. In shining he
dragged an individual darkness into the world. I felt sure that
as the thoroughfares refilled we would run less risk of being ar-
rested for disturbing the public peace on the left bank.

way to handle negresses.

This muddled Insel, the theme of whose half conscious
theatricals must either be that his beefsteak shared jealous
passions with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prosti-
tutes lay far beyond a patroness's permissions.

"If I had slept with a man half a time I consider he
has the right to everything he possessed."

Insel, who had a fanciful ingenuity in extricating him-
self from any situation he felt to be awkward without very well
understanding why, instructed me, "You know nothing of the etiquette
of my underworld-- its laws. The rights of such women extend only
to the level of the table top.

Ignoring my interruption, he continued, "She may take
anything under the table-- she can grab a thousand francs from
my pocket-- it is hers. But to lift anything off the table--
ausgeschlossen!-- impermissable!"

67

"Steeling," I exclaimed, "the waiter told me they support you--."

"You don't have to exonerate yourself," I said, dryly, overcome with compassion. "It's quite a feat-- being a pimp and starving to death." Then laughing, "Whoever heard of a maquereau without any money!" It made such a gorgeous sound when they were shouting-- almost macrusallo. Like crucified mackerel--"

"Six sheets against three meals or three embraces! Whichever way you put it you honor is clear," I consoled him, "All the same, I shall not call you clochard any more, but macrusallo."

She was right, he had the air of being amorous of any-
thing or everything in general which left him so rapt and gentle,
or, taking an 'inner' view, his astral Venus flowed in his veins.
This was why when he met a woman, Mme. Feirlein 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 con-
summate."

For a moment I wondered if his unstaid mind had recon-
ceived in some unguessable aspect I assumed for him, its eerie
durable passion in general-- for myself. But apart from the likeli-
hood 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 this delicate soul swimming so docilely along his astral stream
under the thunder and lightenings of his distraction like a con-
fiding duck as I scattered crumbs.

"In spite of all--"

Shafts from his eyes became so penetrating I could feel
myself dissolve to a transparent target, pierced me, and, travelling
to the further side, stared through my back on their return to his
irises.

He had always something about him of a lithe tree struck
by its own lightning.

These magnetic tides would rise and ebb as we sat in
felicity around an enormous plat anglais, which I could not touch
for my absorption in Insel and of which, as Insel ate of it, the
rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void. And all the while
Insel spasmodically kept up his bum's charade pleading for variable
salvations. With his floppy pathos he improved me to take pity on
him, to take him in, I would see how I would work with Insel keeping
house with that precision he exercised in his own dimension!! to
put him in a nursing home and surround him with angelic choirs of
pretty nurses "only to look at," he exclaimed-- persuasive or
timorous.

I had seen the actor Moisse by the light of a little
candle remember some human tie in a prison cell; the humble flame
drawing him into itself spread his reminiscent spirit over the callous
walls to warm them. Such a candle was burning behind Insel's eyes as if
he were his own narrow room. Yet the lines of its rays shining to
infinite remoteness-- A state of consciousness closing out the world--
lay their ethereal cappets along the ceaseless levels of annihilation.

With that agrobatic facility he had for immeasurable leaps
from despair to cajolery-- he readjusted himself to the station buffet--
as if to get down to some business.

I could not tell him, No thought coincided between one
on the verge of dwelling among the levels he laid bare to me and one
who remained outside.

In my veritable seances with Insel, the clock alone re-
trieved me from nonentity-- thrusting its real face into mine as
reminder of the temporal.

In exact description-- he did not consistently appear
to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparison
to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a
thread in the general mass, he retained his depth of tone. But as if
his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate instrument than
the eye for registration. So me infra-red or other invisible ray he
gave off, was immediately transferred on one's neural current to some
dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its
brilliancy. So one saw him as a grey man and an electrified organism
at one and the same time--

--it was only the candle spluttering... Preliminary to the
most beautiful spectacle I have ever 'seen'.

Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine
a degredation, set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull
off his face.

As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbon-
ization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bite upon the marble--
one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a
moment exposed the 'man-of-light'.

73

Once at dark in the Maine Woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.

As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was piroetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into a cab.

I was ready to leave for St. Cloud with my little valise when there came a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the fall of dusk. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional electrification.

His face having lost its bruised appearance was set in the tidy waxen consistency that makes corpses look like sudden dolls.

I might be entertaining a ghost so light a labour I found it to draw him through the glass doors into the studio. As I dropped him onto an enormous couch, my everyday self broadcast a panic.

I lied.

"To buy peppermint tee."

With a strange grip of a limp vice his fingers clung to
my wrist. I had to sit down beside him. Now he was staring as if
bewitched, at the parquet of the floor.

02

Insel

A dense oppression stole through the flat all packed up in its iron shutters. Insel, who had no longer been able to bear a light, lay pallid and obscure in a faint reflection from a lantern in the hall,

There unshining and supine he seemed abandoned of all quality except the opaque. The grey inflated opacity of his un-seeing head, which, should one lift it from the pillow, must surely loll on his shoulder-- the head of an idiot.

The flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I found that further off it was filled to a weird expansion with emanations drifting away from Insel asleep. They crowded the air, minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of frozen fire. In the room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized nothingness was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he leaking out of himself, residium of that ominous honey he stored

77

Any student of ancient occultism would recognize them for elementals. Imbecilic, vampiric-- here and there an obsessive absence of a mouth implied an inconceivable constipation. A conspicuous liver, so personal he might have served as his own flouroscope, clear as a pale coral was painted as only the Masters painted. He had no need to portray. His pictures grew, out of him, seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance to urge tenacious roots into a plane surface.

I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued from a man, who himself when unlit or cut into profile, became so hauntingly animal, even insectile. Who, when asleep, being the makings of his own bestiary, was vilely void as an incubus-- wondered why millenary monsters of a disreputable metaphysic should re-arise intact in a modern subconscious.

78

My major purchase was kilos of bright red beef.

"Why" I asked to make conversation, "do you always want
'Fleisch ohne Knochen'?"

Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish under water as a celadon tide of pale lamp-light sluiced into the studio. From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the halo that was now re-forming round Insel's face.

I told him I had for *many* years been conceiving a ballet.

"All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijinsky-- yet I once came across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned-- But I should have to do maquettes-- *animated* maquettes of the choreography-- and I can't make *anything* grow out of the floor" I said deferentially.

"Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte's eye.

Insel's eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy
oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer
need of larynges to converse. Insel _thought at me_. More precisely--
vaguely conceived before me.

"To make things grow," he conveyed on his silence, "you
would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the
dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will
only grow if planted in a woman-- But _my brain_ is a more exquisite
manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover the Oceanic
grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiplie as sand."

"For God's sake," I implored, 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 anyone not being able to get
anything 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'.

"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
6 months".

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

"that it would interfere with your 'strahlen'?-- I'm not going
to wash it. You can't short-circuit."

On the contrary-- I anticipated him distinctly renewed in
an intense radiance--

"It's not distinguished to be ashamed-- "

Insel in a way gave in-- .

"Mädchens", I reminded him for bait--"or at least", as
for an instant Insel's ravaged features showed through his en-
nobling aura-- "better Negresses."

Again I received a strictly lateral invitation to wholly
exist in a region imposing a supine inhabitance. A region whose
architecture, the aroma of an aura, being parallel to Paradise, is
only visible to a horizontal gaze. Should one stand up to it, it
must disappear.

Being an outsider did not interfere with my participation
in the ebullent calm behind Insel's eyelids, where cerebral rays of
imprecision, lengthening across an area of perfectibility, were
intercepted by resonant images audible to the eye, visible to the ear;
where even ultimate distance was brought within reach, tangible as
a caress.

As all this 'lasted forever' it seemed incompatable that
Insel should slump back into a larva. Yet there he was-- extinguished
again in unregenerative sleep.

The sun was shining, the kitchen blazing white. Before the open windows that which seemed most substantial about Insel, like a corpse let down from a gallows, fell to its knees in the volatile fluid.

"I am a prisoner here!"

My everyday self shuddered-- 'Blackmail! Almost as
awkward as dead tramps.' I reflected, but I had become so nicely
attuned to Insel's moods that my parasitic clairvoyance, of its
very nature, being constrained to see eye to eye with him, immediately
veered to his view-point, I concluded I must in a temporary abberation,
have kidnapped this gaunt guest whose sharl was unsociable.

Strange how unerringly the unconscious picks its way.
I had 'found' Insel for himself again. To the Titan of Hunger -
the police- man's shoulders heaved in the shrug of all humanity
ignoring Insel. This recognition shook him with the most sophis-
ticated laughter I have ever heard in my life.

"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.

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.

"Breakfast, " I announced.

This time Insel did not stir.

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.

Then it broke.

With the unforeseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging hippopotomu <u>the gums</u> in their hideous defen<u>geless</u> <u>observed</u> me-- an obscene enjoyment of ill-will pleated his clamped lids.

His teeth had not decayed. They were <u>worn</u> down.

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

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 you just stay and have that rest cure <u>here</u>. I'll hire Bebelle to feed you - do everything for you while you lie down and drowse till you're quite fit. "I <u>must</u> get back to St. Cloud."

"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? 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.

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

"It's not pathalogical - 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 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."

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

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

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

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--

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

"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.

"Die Liebe-- wie schön -- wie schöblich -- 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 for measures for saving woman from vain regret.

Without transition his fixed enchantment turned to a staggering stare. "Die 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 evidence of something in you-- something noble."

"Hadn't you a comb?"

Then I gave him his suit.

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."

"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 plead adoringly.

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 baking pride in a
supreme buffoon.

"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.

" 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."

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

"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."

A

" 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 summation in defiance of the concrete. That he is filling the galleries of the increase. He seemed so worth helping _live_, 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."

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 resistence must give out-- ?"

"Insel!" I realized.

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.

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

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

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
golds 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.

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 puffed to a swollen convergence.

Die Irma ist hass.*

NASS* (wet)

"I assure you, underneath---"

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."

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

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-- every one 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 halucinated-- it was the rounding 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 la thargy of that primeval chaos we were
able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his sur-
face vagaries, I felt at once collected-- as if I might have been
his'keeper' since the dawn of creation.

106

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?"

"It's all very well," Frau Feierlein 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."

108

"You have never known ennui," 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 con-
s summated within myself."

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

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. Resistance

110

"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.

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 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.

ooooo00000000ooooo

"White," said Insel.

It was incredible. That twilight sheer duration lowers
up on 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 seam, 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 be-
witched, 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 with-
drawal.' Spinning himself into a shimmering cocoon of his magnetic
rays, introvert, uncomparably aloof, "They're mine" he exulted as
clearly as if he were crying aloud.

Too simple to fully imagine the effect of those 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
~~where~~ one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home; there
was appropriately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom

113

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
and all possible loveliness evolve from his elemental mists, the creep-
ing 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 extrovagant-- so
tht at last the great Insel would (with a gleam of furtive cruelty
for me) marry, as far as I could make out, so increasingly incor-
poreal he drew 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-- ."

"-- 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 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 _evolution_. 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 simpli-
fied 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.

115

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

At last he did so.

It was a beginning.

I proffered the necessary compliments. Agog with glee, he
shimmered with satisfaction. This communication of an actual trans-
cription 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-- in literateurs, producing in Insel an enormous
self-respect.

Anything he perceived sufficiently to accept or that
thrust itself upon his attention (as in my case) was instantly dis-
tilled 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. "Ese gibt nicht zwei vie
sie-- There are not two like you."

117

1/8

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 multiplicity of rifts, changed to a fractional covering I can only compare to the 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 myself 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 dispair-- 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 purification peered from the ends of uncontrollable antennae for something attainable.

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.

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 some one. 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 intelllection. 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 continue to share it-- with what-- with whom? To do so I turned sideways. Whenever this idea 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.

121

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.'

122

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

123

The intuitive 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.

I racked my brains 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 tatsächlich," 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.

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"

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 any more."

125

"I know," I said contritely, "I get these wild enthusiisms for things-- they don't last."

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.

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

126

Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct enlargement of Colossus' photograph that always stood on the sitting-room mantle-piece the other end of the flat.

127

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

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.

128

"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-- "

"Colossus was beautiful-- "

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

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

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--.

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.

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

132

Some one was living there.

This culminating phase of my eerie experience-- Insel's
<u>residence</u>-- 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 re-
versed, 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 laughed 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 con-
currence in my 'wonderful ideas,' completely <u>superceded</u> Freu-
d. 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.

133

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 Marché.

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

I was astounded.

It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave so much like a 'poltergeist' 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, televisionary machinery of our reciprocity.

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.

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

Craven to a degree that rendered his covering august, or 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 the 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.

Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man 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 award of pumpernickle, this time one in either hand-- extreme oval ends-- unbitten-- of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.

"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 schön das leben, wen kann so leben kann-- It is so beautiful living, when one can so live."

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

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

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 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. 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.

Intimately confidential once more, Insel was trying to
disentangle before me <u>the thousand directions</u>. He had showed them
to me before, 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 point 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."

The glare in Capoulard's 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.

"How true," said Insel.

"Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation."

"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."

-- indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of inertia, unrealizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a puddle of serum, to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficult. That viola fungoid lichin outrept one as one picked one's way, grew tall until one must turn back.

Nothingness.

"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.

He was 'coming home.'

Insel gaped at me.

So all I said was "Good-bye."

INSEL

As for myself, he cleared my recollection of the pre-
judice 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 drew on, 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.

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 back-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 back 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. Man 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 has the expression of 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 see the from a cauldron overcast by some wizard's tortuous will."

Copy B

pages missing 79
page 4

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 sphere of activity. For 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 revolté, 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, and
show patches of moss as if he had projected there some of the
verdure rooted in him. Cases 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

Insel, as he talked, seemed to be recurrently emerging
from predicaments of which, if some were lamentable, many were
quite diaphanous as if nothing of him but the most subtle as-
pects 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
mischieves dancing defiantly in his eyes. And this entwicklung
I could not estimate blurred my view of Insel. I saw his image
grown suddenly faint, imploring the shadow of woman "-- to only
wait-- in the end-- the end-- I shall achieve glory."

These unfortunate separations, throwing him back upon
the desert 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 vicious darts of his drastic
horoscope.

7

"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 descending the stairs. 'Who could descend
having never ascended?' I asked myself. 'What could have embodied
itself under the roof to come down upon my isolation?' I at once
turned the key in my lock and waited, listening to those fearful
footfalls. At intervals they would halt, and at every halt I could
hear the echoes of heavy fist pounding on a door. And the foot-
steps grew greater, the pounding nearer-- to the pounding of my
heart." Frau feirlein and I hung on his words while, "Those heavy
unreal fist fell in a rain of blows on the last door-- the door,"
continued Insel, "that shut off the bearable 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
came to succeed that ominous pounding. I do not know what impulse
this aroused in me, my one desire having been to remain undis-
covered, 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 the vague acci-
dents in which his minor salvations depended upon keys, except
for a floating impression of Insel crawling under his destitute
couch in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with
an intermittent 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 hocus-pocus of Insel with the key,
ended by turning the gas or electricity on. Thus leaving him at
least two elements of life.

"Surely," he agreed.

"Where did you get it all?"

"How was that?"

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 irresponsi-
bility. Presenting himself as a pauper to the charitable organiza-
tion 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 shock 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 skeleton symbol of an ultimate starva-
tion had need of a food we know not of. Throughout his angling for

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 im-
pression dispelled when, in courteous haste to answer a question,
he shifted the half 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.

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

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

"All," he replied decisively.

"Then start at once."

"People would recognize me."

13

"Every one," he assured me.

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

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

"I saw an antique dealer carrying a picture to a tapei 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 labelled 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 greatest books 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 standing 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 biography. 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 cats.

"Der Prozen," 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 ac-
quainted with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius
who ever lived.

"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.

---00000---

"Insel:

"<u>Those</u> pictures are those?" asked Insel, immediately
collected, and staring at each in turn with entire attention.

"Who could have done these?"

"They are mine."

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

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 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.

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 everything that was not furniture or ornaments or ever jotted
down. I tied it up, and, throwing it into a super-
fluous room, locked the door on it with a sigh of relief. I was
once more myself.

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

"Oh no," he assured me.

"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."

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

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

25

"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.

"Not I," he boasted.

--00000--

"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 actuality."

"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, that 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.

"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 mud-
dy boots stood in a row, and on the good hot stove-- "

"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-- "

36

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--

37

I was disappointed. One thing about Insel that had struck me was this sporadic distinction I had often be '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.'

"Do you hear?" asked Insel, 'its 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."

Insel trembled with the cowardice of those whose instinct
being to create even an iota, appear to slink into a corner before
theitic of destructive intent. This man, who, when he turned
has face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great in-
tensity 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 returned to Germany, there he was Kultur
Bolshevik.

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

40

Time that evening lightly come 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 shoulder to shoulder with this virtual stranger living the longest period of my life.

It is almost impossible to recover the sequence or the veritable simultaneity of the states of consciousness one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of living in or rather of being surrounded by an arid aquarium-- filled with, not water, but a dim transparency: the precreational chaotic vapor in which all things may begin to grow; the coincidence of our both having evoked this in our work may be have had a part in 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: Glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where 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 mandible orchestra-- a colorless water plant growing the stumpy crevulations of a castle in a game of chess swayed in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder--.

wonder is its own revelation.

Even in the world of reality Insel's ideation was an introvert exploration of a brilliancy beneath his skull, an ever-crescent clarity which in the form of inspiration ripens creative fruit. But in him by reason of some interference I could not define, aborted as the introduction to an idea.

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.

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 justi-
fied by the lovely equilibrium his companionship conveyed to me.
It was as if for an exceeding moment I could, rising above the dis-
tortion of life, hold inexpressable communion with Insel, where his
spirit had no flaw.

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 'aereal 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.

Out of a torso of white ash arose iron rags as puffs of curling smoke, crushed together in blocks of shadow the outline of a giant. Dense as the dark, high as a tower, the almost imperceptible radiance of a will-o'-the-wisp shining from it-- I crouched encumbered with an enormous shell white as plaster which, having but partly taken shape, trailed to an end in a sail of mist.

Insel, the animate dadaver, 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 decision, obsessed by a dead responsibility. He was
toting up imaginary accounts in payment of his passage to America.

"That is not what I mean-- "

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

With a kind of epileptic cajolery he beseeched me to
break my appointment. Finding this nastly 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.

"Not a drop."

But Insel, passionately in love with Death, raved in a soft, a sublime sibilance, "Sterben-- man müss-- man-- mü-- üss."

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 relent-
less hording. Insel, his eyes closed upon it, induced by Death
the absolute decoy, examined an integral vision lining the de-
generacy of his brain.

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 per-
fection was like after sharing to some degree in his increate
eden, squirmed with envy.

"Naturally," I acquiesced.

In his unusual liveliness, words, like roamy cupboards,
dipped into the reservoir of excited honey and flapping their open
doors spilled it all over the place as they passed.

Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savour lay
in its impress of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual
definition of Insel with his whittled exterior jerking in tics of
joy a pate too loosely attached and almost worn down to the skull--
and myself expansive in some secondary glow from that icy con-
flagration strewing grey ashes over his face as it burnt itself
out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder,

as two aloft on the same telegraph exchange a titer of god-
forsaken sparrows.

One-- projected that declamatory arm which under given
circumstances present at the time falls with a forgetful plop be-
fore completing an indication. "Who is Insel," it challenged, "to
monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?"

It was Insel, all cluttered up with his 'private life.' Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the nulling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel's pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my supper table.

Once more gallen sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of those unexpected carvings into profile; a zig-zag profile of a jumping jack cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert concentration blind as a nerve among the women's volume, clenching his gums in a fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression-- as this black and white flesh glanced off one another-- of their being totally unwed-- that Insel, whom I often called 'ameise' who was even now like an 'ant', occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite-- Unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere-- to never let go. He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his cosmic 'tic.'

What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where
a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe to find that I,
his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal
ease I must have 'caught' from Insel I threw on my clothes and
more or less floating into the street together with the presage
of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners, slushing my ankles,
hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure
to be saved at all costs, Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dome.
The piebald mix-up had disappeared.

Oh, perfectly," he protested as if within his reach
nothing could possibly go wrong. "You see, Madame," confidentially,
"the fellow lives off these women of the Dome; there's bound to
be a scrap every now and then!"

Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong glance sight of Insel standing disproportionately at the end of a row of little men before a 'zinc', his head, appearing enormous, shone with a muted gleam.

Without stopping I raised my hand. Insel, although he had his back to me, rushed into the street-- he seemed to be continuing to run around.

In his gesture I could see a conclusion of distressful searching in which he had circled during my absence-- beating his breast, "Warum, warum ist diese Frau davon gegangen?-- Why did this woman go away? I have not ceased to ask myself," Insel complained again and again in miserable bewilderment. "You went away-- Why did you go away?"

"There was a waiter," he whispered hoarsely into my
hat, "who wouldn't let me out of the...Dame until I had paid for
two cafe fines." (They had forgotten to include them when I paid
for the supper.) "It isn't that I want you to pay me back," he
protested with his so distinguished courtesy--."

I caught him by the arm.

Perhaps this show-case hung outside a librarie was a
prison and we ,therefore, suspecting an isolation, dissolved its
wire caging with the crafty focus of sight to set the content free.

In conception fast enough to absorb the centuries it
survived; now in defiance of time to surpass it-- the eternal
Thing was looking at us with the fullness of the future. All
we had ever understood that was less than itself peeled like
spoiled armour.

What enormous forboding, Insel, in his simplicity, I,
in my complexity, recognized in its ideal expression, I cannot
say. It was a recognition of something known which, in spite

"Dufy," he explained.

At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so lightly its lazy barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. Whatever had been an 'under-the-bridge' was all boxed in and the sun had crawled so far into the sky it was needless to look for another.

After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless de-light round and around the Orangerie. Insel's boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might have been following him, snapping at his legs.

"My friend we are not dressed for going into town," I insisted, heading him off in another direction.

In the almost gelatinous gloom of the great hall the
enclosure before the Buffet Restaurant, its boundaries set by
stifled shrubs, offered a stage for Insel to unroll his increase
existence to the fitting applause of a dead echo, the countless
scurry of departed feet.

way to handle negresses.

This muddled Insel, the theme of whose half-conscious theatricals must either be that his beefsteak shared jealous passions with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prostitutes lay far beyond a patroness's permissions.

"If I had slept with a man half a time 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 understanding why, instructed me, "You know nothing of the etiquette of my underworld-- its laws. The rights of such women extend only to the level of the table top."

"It's like this-- I am sitting at the table-- she comes along--"

Ignoring my interruption, he continued, "She may take anything under the table-- she can grab a thousand francs from my pocket-- it is hers. But to lift anything off the table-- ausgeschlossen!-- impermissible!"

What matter if we were trivial. We must find some excuse for our unending hazy laughter. Speech was an afterthought to that humorous peace as it fused with our incomparable exaltation. It was ridiculous to find ourselves, alone, in well-being so wide there was room for innumerable populations.

"Six sheets against three meals or three embraces! Whichever way you put it, you honor is clear," I consoled him, "All the same, I shall not call you clochard any more, but macrusallo."

68

"In spite of all--"

Shafts from his eyes become so penetrating (I could feel
myself dissolve to a transparent target) pierced me, and, travelling
to the further side, stared through my back on their return to his
irises.

These magnetic tides would rise and ebb as we sat in
felicity around an enormous 'plat anglais,' which I could not touch
for my absorption in Insel and of which, as Insel ate of it, the
rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void. And all the while
Insel spasmodically kept up his bum's charade pleading for variable
salvations. With his floppy pathos he impored me to take pity on
him, to take him in, (I could see how I would work with Insel keeping
house with that precision he exercised in his own dimension!!) to
put him in a nursing home and surround him with angelic choirs of
pretty nurses "only to look at," he exclaimed-- persuasive or
timorous.

With that aerobatic facility he had for immeasurable leaps
from despair to cajolery-- he readjusted himself to the station buffet--
as if to get down to some business.

So I sat with as soothing and expressionless as smile as I
could concoct and answered occasionally, "I am thinking of June 18th,
1931, or of 9 o'clock on Tuesday of the week before last.-- "What are
you thinking of?" His eyes converging upon me, a yellow glow fused
to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong. "-- An wass
denken sie?" Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before me-- with
a determination beyond all human power, in the 'last expression'

In exact description-- he did not consistently appear
to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparision
to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a
thread in the general mass, he retained his dep of tone. But as if
his astounding vibratory flue required a more delicate instrument than
the eye for registration, So me infra-red or other invisible ray he
gave off, was immediately transferred on one's neutral current to some
dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its
brilliancy. So one saw him as a grey man and an electrified organism
at one and the same time--

I lied.

After a while he murdered, "peppermint tee."

"To buy peppermint tee."

His slumber the extinction of a dim volcano. Lax as a larva, a glow worm 'gone out', his head bared of its phosphorescent halo, seemed swollen in a meaningless hydrocephalus. As if, while conscious electric emissions had diminished his cranial volume,

Now the flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I found that further off it was filled to a weird expansion with emanations drifting away from Insel asleep. They crowded the air, minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of frozen fire. In my room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized nothingness was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he leaking out of himself, residium of that ominous honey he stored

77

78

Insel-- who after all must of his nature, float quite
lightly on the surface of a coma-- easily lifted his lids.

"Why" I asked to make conversation, "do you always want
'Pleisch ohne Knochen'?"

"When I am alone" he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, "I do not eat like this-- I have to drag bones into a corner-- to gnaw."

I felt curious to know how-- without teeth-- . But Insel began to shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.

"All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijensky-- yet I once came across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned-- But I should have to do maquettes-- *animated* maquettes of the choreography-- and I can't make *anything* grow out of the floor" I said defferentially.

Insel's eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy
oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer
need of larynges to converse. Insel thought at me. More precisely--
vaguely conceived before me.

"Please," I begged-- enraptured as a nun seeking permission to lay fresh lilies before a shrine. "Ich bitte Sie."

Insel in a way gave in--

"Madchens", I reminded him for bait--"or at least", as for an instant Insel's ravaged features showed through his ennobling aura-- "better Negresses."

I recognized a vapour whose drifting suspension of invisible myriads he copied so passionately with the over-fine point of his pencil.

When it cleared off it had left him again an effigy straightened as the level of water.

The world of the Lutetia had materialized. An infiltration of half-light softly bursting the dark, a thin cascade, the ferns dripping into a green gloom. Here, where dawn and noon and midnight were all so dim and Insel lay sensitive to clarity as a creature

63

Because I found the place somewhat chilly when sunless--
I had thrown a great white blanket over my thin dress. This was
due to no obsession for Insel's white miracles. Simply, everything
being put away in napthaline, this had returned from the cleaners
and the femme de monage had not yet locked it up.

Being an outsider did not interfere with my participation
in the ebullent calm behind Insel's eyelids. Where cerebral rays of
imprecision, lengthening across an area of perfectibility, were
intercepted by resonant images audible to the eye, visible to the ear.
Where even ultimate distance was brought within reach, tangible as
a caress.

I went about my cleaning, ordering several bidons of gasoline, I poured them into an enamel tub, and suspending the suit by a wooden pincers, I dipped it in.

He appeared uneasy. Rolling his eyes like runaway wheels spoke with interrogations. His expression was such as I had never seen. Terror solidified.

"I am a prisoner here!"

85

My everyday self shuddered-- 'Blackmail! Almost as
awkward as dead tramps.' I reflected, but I had become so nicely
attuned to Insel's moods that my parasitic clairvoyance, of its
very nature, being constrained to see eye to eye with him, immediately
veered to his view point, I concluded I must in a temporary abberation,
have kidnapped this gaunt guest whose shard was unsociable.

Seemingly at hazard my dilemma linked up with one of the
kind of infantile anecdotes Insel always greeted with glee.

"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 cramped 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.

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.

"Breakfast, " I announced.

This time Insel did not stir.

Then it broke.

With the unforeseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging hippopotomu <u>the gums</u> in their hideous defenceless <u>observed</u> me-- an obscene enjoyment of ill-will pleated his clamped lid.

His teeth <u>had not decayed</u>, <u>but they were worn</u> down.

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

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

Should I risk an attempt to reveal to Insel those real-
essences in Insel? Real-essences to a slight degree rationalized
for my mind, they might be either the very symptoms of the so called
madness in his or precisely the Ancognizable cause of his
befuddlement.

grates

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

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

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

"You misunderstand. I had thought of you as a 'will o'
the wisp'."

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 bore four children." Before very long she actually split in two--

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

" 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 schößо-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 bay measures for saving woman from vain regret.

"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 huge white handkerchief. They
were his wardrobe.

Then 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!

Then I gave him his suit.

73

When I came in again, Insel was facing 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, horrified. " You mustn't say things like that about yourself."

" 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 pledd adoringly.

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.

" It's pure selfishness my allowing you to do this. It's up to Nebelle - 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.

" 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 got 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."

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 or the string was the close of a linear symphony.

Her eyes like coals, continent, after 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 centred in her little tummy, which dared to be round.

A hard young ap ple - it was immediately plain to me now - had I been on the other side of the fence of sex - I should have wanted to bite into it.

"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-- "

I rofound 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 summation in defiance of the concrete. That he is filling the galleries of the increase. He seemed so worth helping live, 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."

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.

"Insel!" I realized.

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

"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 existence he wished to remain
assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he must resee to insure
its continued projection.

A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining
ob security was the effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera
ground, die Irma stood knee deep on an easel.

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 one remaining tooth

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

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

"I assure you, underneath---"

"It's more complicated than that," he objected again - "die
Irna is wet - "

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

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

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 in some Einsteinien contraction to
shorten the necessary distance for focussing the hands.

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 le thargy of that primeval chaos we were
able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his sur-
face vagaries, I felt at once collected-- as if I might have been
his'keeper' since the dawn of creation.

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

To me it appeared fitting Insel's finances should flicker in an out like himself. For the present no power on earth could dislodge from my mind that luminous effigy of generic hunger-- or shake my serene unquestioning insistence on its preservation. Something unknowable had entered into a game with my intuition.

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.

ooooo000000000000

"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 so subside anywhere. However, my slight repulsion dis-
persed as I lay down. Indeed, like the saints whose dead bodies
did not decompose, Insel's electric exudation in some process of in-
finitesimal 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 fragrant with that faint half-holy purity that hung about
him.

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

"White," said Insel.

Insel, intently keeping watch, had moved his stool some
distance away as if to find his range for an inverted 'aim of with-
drawal.' 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.

"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
whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at hom, there
was appropriately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom

1/3

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

114

"-- 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 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 evolution. 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 simpli-
fied observation as his. Everything must henceforth for him drowse
in an impotence of arrested development.

7

115

At last he did so.

It was a beginning.

116

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

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

117

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

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.

118

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

121

Rigid as bygone queens in her orthopedic corset, she accepted the offering of every conceivable kind of toy duck from her wondering cortiers, 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. He slept in her back

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.

123

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

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 newly married friends, he had predicted to his wife, "That union will not last long."

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

"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 away 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-- "

Not wholly convinced I wrenched my eyelids apart-- my cerebral current, flowing as usual, an infinitesimal fraction of a second faster than the normal, registered Insel. I caught him at it.'

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.

127

128

"She'd be too expensive-- "

"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."

"Look,"

Oh, 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, 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 to the top and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.

"Woher kommt diese halbe Mücke?" Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an in-violate 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.

130

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 already decided he must have a
warm overcoat when, although it was not particularly 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.

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

"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!"

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.

132

Some one was living there.

We had, in our 'timeless conversation,' with Insel's con-
currence in my 'wonderful ideas,' completely wiped out 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.

133

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.

I was astounded.

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 Cornelle, the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of the 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.

135

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 to speed the acquisition of that overcoat. <u>recovered from</u>

Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically <u>good</u>-- 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--.

"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 schön das leben, wen mann so leben kann-- It is so beautiful living, when one <u>can</u> so live."

136

His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exterior-
ized act of the flesh in which the last oozing 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. Had I recalled the earlier ir-
ridescent 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."

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. X Destruction of Die Brae.

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.
X Des. J. Irne.

137

I remembered Geronimo taunting me that I was 'no
psychologist. You just walk into a man's brain, seat yourself com-
fortably in an arm-chair to take a look aroung-- 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 p oint of
revelation.

"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 <u>help</u>, one
responds to a cosmic imperative."

Intimately confidential once more, Insel was trying to
disentangle before me _the thousand directions_. He had showed them
to me before, in answer to my asking him why he did not work although
I had left him materials in my studio.

I had long ago worn down in contemplation of that multi-
plicity 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.

"How true," said Insel.

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 been created.

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.

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 shoulders, he choked on
some reflex of the past, "Ich komme nach hause."

He was 'coming home.'

Insel gaped at me.

So all I said was "Good-bye."