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 bordel but feared to disgust a prostitute with a mouthful of roots.
The first I saw of this pathetically maimed celebrity were the tiny fire-
works he let off in his eyes when offered a ham sandwich. What an incon-
gruous 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 con-
sistency 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 promptness of a magnet picking up a pin, he
made a date with her for the following day. = end of page, on No 2 B

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 decided it would not be politic to turn up. Not
without regret, however, for "I like him," she confided to me, squeezing

her hands together in delight.

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

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

-2-

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

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

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

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

that it should coincide with that of a German girl, as his absolute inability
to acquire any language to add to his own must have made his inhabitation of
a foreign land a somewhat lonely affair. But in how far I found it at last
impossible to determine, so narrowly his unformulated existence seemed
associated with itself. Her visit was fortunate for me also, for later on,
in our checking up on the subject of this very Insel, she, so common-sensed
and unimaginative, was able to clear my doubt as to whether it was I who
must be mentally deranged. Wishing to get on familiar terms with an acknow-
ledged surrealist, we took him to a cafe, and, in the embracing glare of a
locality above all others conducive to the liberal exchange of confidences
between the most heterogeneous people, the meager personality of this stranded
German opened up. end Ch 4 Copy 2B

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

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

-4-

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

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

-5-

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

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

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

-6-

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

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

His father, he said, was a schlosser, which turned out to mean 'black-
smith', and very early in Insel's life, as in the episode in the empty villa,
his destiny appeared to me to get mixed up with keys. I cannot remember in
detail the vague accidents in which his minor salvations depended upon keys
except for a fleeting impression of Insel crawling under his destitute couch
in search of some kind of key to a gas meter confused with an 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.

-7-

* Sheriff

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

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

"Where did you get it all?"

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

"How was that?"

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

-8-

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

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

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

-9-

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

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

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

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

"Write your biography."

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

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

"All," he replied decisively.

"Then start at once."

-10-

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

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

"People would recognize me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Every one," he assured me.

"What a book," I sighed with satisfaction.

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

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

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

-11-

absolutely silent for six months at a time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-12-

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

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

At last the biography aborted as had the Quaker oats.

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

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

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

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

-13-

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

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

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

-14-

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

"Insel:

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

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

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

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

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

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

-15-

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

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

"Who could have done these?"

"They are mine."

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

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

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

"Good God," muttered Insel under his breath.

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

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

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

Insel's system in such emergency was this: -

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

-16-

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

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

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

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

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

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

-17-

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

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

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

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

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

-18-

moments.

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

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

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

"Oh, no," he assured me.

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

"Yes," he concurred apologetically.

"And-- was it nice?"

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

"Not quite so *much*-- anyhow."

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

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

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

-19-

* "What beautiful experiences have you had

to pivot him for noting whether there were any creases in his aural suit.

As those who are of the body, whom other bodies have traffic with, slap each
other on the back, with Insel social intercourse depended on putting out
feelers among the loose matter of psychologic nebulae.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-29- 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-21-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-22-

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

"Yes. What on earth--?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And I thought you were *angry* because I mentioned money."

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

-23-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-24-

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

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

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

"Not I," he boasted.

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

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

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

-25-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-26-

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

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

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

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

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

-27-

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

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

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

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

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

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

-28-

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

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

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

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

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

-29-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-30-

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

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

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

"The kitchen?" I exclaimed.

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

"Die Zuppe," I joined in, entranced.

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

"All the boots?" I interrupted.

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

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

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

-31-

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

The less he seemed to be 'there', the more he spilled into the unknown, the more clearly I apprehended him, whereas Insel himself seemed ever to be seeking a reduction of focus through which to penetrate into the real world.

Suddenly he bowed his head over me in a wracking attentiveness. He had found such a focus. Darting, his constricted fingers cleaved to a white hair of my head which had fallen on my 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 with his eyes into the colorless vapours of his creation.

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

-32-

reprimanded him for ruining my coat, with an acrid cluck of refutation he would show me what he had instantly plucked from the cloth-- it was always a *white* hair-- He did not trouble to contradict me-- the evidence was clinching-- But in the end the side of my coat sitting next to him was bare of all its fancy setae.

In accordance with the rules of sympathetic magic, so long concealing my one fallen hair in his palm augmented Insel's influence over me. An influence which, rather than having submitted to it, I purposely invaded, so urgent was my premonition of some treasure he contained. His voice now setting in a glowing duskiness haunted me with wonder as to where I had heard it before--

"Black as was the stain on my name--," I listened to Insel intoning as if he were celebrating mass, "even so white would I wash it in glory--."

Rising for a moment from the fantastic shallows of his cerebral proximity to my normal level, "This man is *fearfully* banal," I said to myself, discerning in his confidences the prim hypocrisy of a wastrel bamboozling the patroness of some charitable institution. Any such patroness would have cried for help should she receive him as he was at present plunged in the depths of a subverted exaltation, so awesomely he stressed his lonely agony, his long starvation, the incidentless introspection of that enjoiled jewel, his artist spirit. As for me, the fundamental lacune in my experience was being 'stopped up' with his moral man. The pattern held out to my early ethical life. The man who atones. He who unsuspectedly lingers in the world subconscious.

I did not care who he bamboozled. Slipping back into his sensitized zone, I swallowed his platitudes gratefully. So seldom had I come across *anything* sufficiently *condensed* to satisfy my craving for 'potted absolute'. This man sufficed me as representing all the hungry errantry of the human race.

-33-

"What are you trying to be anyhow?" I asked bemused, "La faim qui rode autour des palaces?"*

A sound of anguish was hovering above us but I scarcely registered it listening to his quiet soliloquy in reverence for the buried aspiration whence sprung the weedy heroism of his pretence.

"Dolefully trite in his insincerity," my common-sense intervened.

"Inflexible is his moral will," countered the underside of my mentality which drawing comparisons to sociologists deceptions in criminal reform preferred to remain impressed.

"Der edler Mensch," it breathed devoutly, "The noble creature."

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

"There are you--" pointing the tip of his nose toward the center-- a comical almost four-cornered tip of a nose with the sudden sharpness of a (square tool, the name of which I have forgotten) "and here am I-- on the outside-- peeping over the edge at you," he said as he crept his fingers in their incipient movement up from under the rim.

I was disappointed. One thing about Insel that had struck me was this sporadic distinction I had often been 'accused' of which I had always been eager to discover in any one else who, like myself, had 'popped up' from nowhere at all-- as if all my life I had lacked a crony of my 'own class'.

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

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

-34-

* starvation prowling palaces

"Do you hear?" asked Insel, "it's been going on for quite a while-- in an aerial invasion people would sit on at their cafe tables just as we have done. Air raids," he shuddered, shrinking into himself, "and the French so proud of their Maginot line. They have forgotten their Stavisky was mixed up with it-- Sugar," beamed Insel, a gentle delirium stealing into his eyes, "tons and tons of sugar poured into the foundations of the Maginot line." *

"Sugar's rather expensive," I ventured.

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

His chuckle petered out as the siren insinuating to his brain the menace of a war which would cut off any chuckling, transformed it to a shudder.

Insel trembled with the cowardice of those whose instinct being to create even an iota, appear to slink into a corner before the heroic of destructive intent. This man, who, when he turned his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great intensity of the hypnotist but with a force of concentration reaching inward and outward as if he must first subject himself to his own mysterious influence, this man in his terror had dropped from his own magnetic 'line' soft as a larva. He cowered against the air. Inasmuch as it concerned him, war was not only imminent-- he was already ripped open by its plough of anguish. Actually, he was in a fix-- for, in the 'event' being a German, here he was an enemy, whereas if he could return to Germany, there he was Kultur Bolshevik.

Man Ray came up and sat with us and went away. Tables filled and emptied. The dust grew denser and then lay down before the oncoming night.

I once heard somebody express surprise that instead of following it onward one should not take a cut across Time to secure a moment which, stretching out

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

in line with oneself, would last indefinitely.

Time that evening lightly came to rest-- an unburdened nomad let its three faces linger; the future and the past were with me at present: the whole of time-- there was no more pursuing it, losing it, regretting it-- While I sat almost shoulder to shoulder with this virtual stranger living the longest period of my life.

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

Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half formulated concepts that drifted through his mind: Glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where in the bottom of slumber an immobile oncome of elementals formed of a submarine snow, and some afflicker, like drowned diamonds blew out their rudimentary bellies-- almost protruded foetal arms over all an aimless baton of inaudible orchestra-- a colorless water-plant growing the stumpy battlements of a castle in a game of chess waved in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder--

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

-36-

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

"I can see right into these people," he asserted, indicating the crowd gathered around the Hotel. "I know exactly what they are; I know what they do."

And that was all.

As if satisfied by his sense of insight, he needed not to perceive anything specifically, his mind exposed these people as brightly illuminated "whats". A reaction he accepted for entire comprehension.

His conceptions were like seeds fallen upon an iron girder. I noticed that I received them very much in the guise of photographic negatives so hollow and dusky they became in transmission, vaguely accentuated with inverted light--

Thus, as he unfolded his ardent yearning to flee to New York from a threatening war, the transparencies his presence superposed on the living scene became crowded with flimsy sky-scrapers. Up from among their floating foundations swam misty negresses, their limbs spread out at inviting angles, like starfish through the mirage of windows plunging in fathomless pools their reflections.

But this is not all that happened with him. The visions emitted by the organism of this truly congenital surrealist were only a wasted pollen drifting off from the nuclear flower of his identity. For my first unaccountable conclusion that he was 'the most delicate-- soul,' my fascinated impression of his emergence from a goddess' embrace, the dove that, when he had been still for a while would seem to take his place, were conceptions fully justified by the lovely equilibrium his companionship conveyed to me. It was as if for an

-37-

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

Within range of the crystaline of his eyes become so brightly brittle,
again I experienced the profound relief of the acute celerity rhythm that per-
petually disintegrated me as I got out of watching a film in slow motion.

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

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

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

There was another element in his unbelievable magnetism of recoil. His
air of friability warning off contact lest he crumble. Not only was he pre-
posterously emaciated, but even as his gravity seemed lightened, his body--
what was left of it-- seemed less ponderable than it should have been. Insel
was made of extremely diaphanous stuff. Between the shrunken contour of his
present volume his original 'aerial mould' was filled in with some intangible
aural matter remaining in place despite his anatomical shrinkage. An aura that
enveloped him with an extra external sensibility.

To investigate, I tapped him lightly on the arm in drawing his attention--
and actually in a tenuous way I did feel my hand pass through 'something'. The
surface of his cloth sleeve, like a stiff sieve, was letting that something

-38-

through. The effect on Insel was unforeseeable-- jerking his face over his
shoulder, he twitched away from my fingers with the acid sneer of a wounded
feline. This might be merely a reflex of physical repulsion to myself, so
later I repeated the gesture, but as if my hand in its first contact had
got coated with the psychic exudence it would seem there was no longer any
hurt in it. He was calm under my touch.

-39-

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

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

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

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

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

-40-

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

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

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

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

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

-41-

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

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

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

-42-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-43-

phosphorescent as approaching fire-flies.

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

"Die 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 anything might substitute in my
consciousness for a man, who, however long I looked at him I could never en-
tirely 'put together'.

We had been sitting outside the Lutetia for six hours.

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

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

"That is not what I mean-- "

"You mean that eternity spins round and round?"

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

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

-44-

* The naked soul

** A pity

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

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

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

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

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

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

-45-

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not a drop."

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

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

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

-46-

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

His dirge still hummed on the air-- .

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

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

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

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

-47-

greatly rewarded. After my 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 prelimi-
nary 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 aristokrat 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 home, 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 regalvanized. Straighten-
ing from top to toe, I inhaled a limpid air-- the neon tubes carressed my
eyes.

-48-

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 illumination 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 and 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

-49-

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 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 wire exchange a titter of godforsaken
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 reached an inaereate core of the establish-
ment. Here we inexplicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-exis-
tence insured Insel's vaunted isolation. One after another the same Germanic

-50-

wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a different face.

One-- projected that declamatory arm which in a certain condition 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 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 on a cue 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.

-51-

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!" "Saland!" shrieked the dark ladies to stress their panc-
monium 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 fallen 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 con-
centration 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 comic 'tic'.

-52-

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.

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 skeleton I had with me an hour ago?" I asked the major domo. "He got into a tangle with some negresses-- Was he all right?"

-53-

"-- one who has greatly suffered," I was astounded 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 vampier had sucked the last drop of blood from his corrupted carcass.

Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong 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!"

"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-- ."

-55-

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, "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 infinity, 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."

-56-

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 endlessly 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 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.

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 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

-57-

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 disgusts 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 tech-
nique' disintegrated my meticulous companion. I feared that, the shock reinforc-
ing 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 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 delight round and round
the Orangerie. Insel's boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might

-58-

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 illu-
mination 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 sense-
less 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 avalanches of newspapers,
and even these alined in a dusty perspective like ghosts of overgrown toys.

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

"They were all wrong," he brooded, as if he were a puritan with an ailing

-59-

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 underground platforms-- there to mingle with the inquietude of departure to be borne away on a hearse of the living throbbing along an iron rail which must be a 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 she had slept with you half a time I consider she has the right to everything you possess."

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

-60-

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

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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 attempt 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 anything 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 shy 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 consummate."

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

At the same time a worn down record of old-fashioned inflection clattered

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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, something 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, they 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 implored me to take pity on him, to take him in, -(I would see how I would work with Insel keeping house for me with that precision he exercised in his own dimension!)- to put him in a

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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 burn-
ing 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.

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"-- 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.

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 of. 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 spears, 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 on 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

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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 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. Some infra-red or there 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.

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

As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization 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 log. The

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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 fil-
tered 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 in-
ability to estimate himself. "The greatest actor alive."

As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was
pirouetting 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.

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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.

"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 he 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 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.

"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

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psychology, I still had sufficient power to put him to rest. "Insel" I inquired,
"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 murmured, "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 pfeffermint 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 if 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 undergrowth such as carpeted 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.

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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 con-
centration 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 opacity of his unseeing 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

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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 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 extin-
guished 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. Im-
becilic, 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 tena-
cious roots into a plane surface.

I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued from a man,

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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 meta-physic 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 bright red beef.

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

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"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 bones 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 waver-
ing 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 some while 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 Nijinsky-- yet once I came
across one who possessed a dual <u>équipoise</u> 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

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maquettes-- animated maquettes of the shoreography-- and I can't make anything grow out of the floor" I said defferentially.

"Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte's eye. The woman in the litmus petticoat forecasting the weather. A rainbow," I continued, seeing Insel entranced. "The Queen of Fairyland-- Mermaids and Medusi." Envy was stealing into Insel.

"I dance divinely" he said and I could see him crossing a ballroom 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 concupiscence, 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 a ruminative stare. The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes 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

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the Oceanic grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiple 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 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 Bebelle to clean your suit--

"I'll tell you what--," I said, overcome by my inherent conviction of personal blame for <u>anyone</u> not being able to get <u>anything</u> they want--. And in Insel it seemed his need was for something so sublime that over all his aspirations hovered crowns of glory-- Mädchen-- something entirely outside my zone of attraction, in his regret for them, took on enchanting attributes-- even those in a mountain village who ate such quantities of garlic it breathed from the pores of their skin-- so much so that Insel, with the heartiest will in the world, had found it impossible to 'hug them close enough'.

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

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

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

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

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own.

"Are you afraid," I asked, in a 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 intenser
radiance--

"Please," I begged-- enraptured as a nun seeking permission 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."

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

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

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

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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 horizontal 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 crustacian.

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 unregenera-
tive sleep.

I turned to go. A scatter of objects on the table attracted my attention.

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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 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.

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.'

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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 snarl 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 inquired 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 madchen' 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.

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