Max Blecher - Adventures In Immediate Irreality

I left, depressed, never to return.

Autumn came with its red sun and misty mornings. The houses in the outlying districts, crowded together in the light, smelled of fresh whitewash. There were lackluster days as well, with clouds like dirty laundry, days when the rain pattered endlessly in the deserted park, heavy curtains of water swaying through the paths as if in a vast empty hall, streaming in torrents down my hair and arms as I waded through the wet grass.

The doors in the dirty back streets would shut the moment the rain began, and the houses gasped for air. Their rooms were humbly furnished with wardrobes fresh from the lathe, bouquets of artificial flowers on the dressers, plaster statuettes painted bronze, and snapshots of relatives in America. I knew nothing of the lives wasted in those musty, low-ceilinged rooms, lives sublime in their indifference and resignation. I would have liked to live in those houses, get to the root of their most intimate secrets, let my dreams, my bitter dreams dissolve in their atmosphere like a powerful acid.

What I would have given to enter one or another of those rooms as if I belonged there, flinging myself exhausted onto the old sofa’s floral-patterned cretonne pillows, to breathe another air, acquire another inner intimacy, become a completely different person, to contemplate the street I had been walking along stretched out on the sofa, from the inside, from behind the curtains (I tried to conjure up as accurate a picture as I could of the way the street looked from the sofa through the open door), suddenly discovering memories in myself, memories I had not lived, strange memories of a life I perpetually carried with me and belonging to the intimacy of bronze statues and an old light bulb with its blue and purple butterflies. How good I would have felt in the confines of that cheap, indifferent decor which knew nothing of me. .

The dirty street’s muddy paste still stretched out before me. Some houses spread like fans, others resembled cubes of white sugar, and others small, their roofs pulled down over their eyes, clenching their jaws like boxers. I met hay carts and, now and then, extraordinary things, like a man in the rain carrying a chandelier with crystal ornaments that sounded like a symphony of hand bells on his back while heavy drops of rain dripped down the shiny facets. It made me wonder what constitutes the gravity of the world.

The rain washed the flowers and withered plants in the gardens. Autumn had lit them with copper, red, and blue fires, flames flaring up just before they died. The water and mud in the marketplace was flowing wantonly down enormous stacks of vegetables, the deep red blood of the soil suddenly appearing in the slash of the beets, docile potatoes lying side by side with the split heads of swollen cabbages, and off in a corner an exasperatingly beautiful pile of bloated and repulsive pumpkins, their skins riddled with cracks from the sun they had imbibed all summer.

Clouds grouping together in the middle of the sky only to disperse left corridors leading off into infinity or immense holes setting off the heart-rending void forever hovering above the town. Then the rain would fall from afar, from this sky with no end. I liked the new color of the wood when wet and the water trickling down the rusty gates in front of the prim, well-kept gardens swept by a wind mixed with torrents of water like a horse’s tail.

Sometimes I wished I were a dog so I could see this sodden world from an oblique animal perspective — from below, closer to the ground — or fix my eyes on that ground, at one with the purple color of its mud. This desire, which I had long since harbored, broke loose one autumn day and somersaulted across the wasteland.

On that day my walk had taken me all the way to the edge of town, to the field where the cattle market was held. The sun was setting against a tattered backdrop of gold and purple. The field stretched out before me, a vast muddy swamp, sopping wet, warm and soft, its manure exhaling an acrid urine smell. What could fill my heart with joy if not this pure, sublime mass of filth?

I hesitated at first, the last traces of good upbringing doing vehement battle within me like so many dying gladiators, but all at once they coalesced into a dark night and I lost all knowledge of myself. I stepped into the mud first with one foot then with the other, my shoes sinking pleasantly into the viscous, elastic slime. I was now one with it: I had sprouted from, gushed forth from that earth. Nor were the trees anything but coagulated mud fashioned of the earth’s crust. Their color made that abundantly clear. And not only the trees. The houses too, and the people. The people above all. All mankind. And, rest assured, this was no simple-minded legend of the “dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return” variety. That is too vague, too abstract for the wasteland, inconsistent with its mud. People and things came forth from the very dung and urine into which I had sunk my very concrete shoes.

In vain did man wrap himself in white silky skin and dress in raiments of cloth. In vain, in vain. . Implacable, imperious, elemental mud lay inside him, warm, slimy, putrid mud. The tedium and stupidity with which he filled his life made this amply clear.

As for me, I was a special creation of the mud, a missionary it had sent into this world. Such moments awoke its memory in me; I revisited my nights of torment and dark fever when my essence, my mud, seethed with futile attempts to break through the surface. As long as I kept my eyes shut, it would continue to churn its incomprehensible sputterings into the dark.

The wasteland stretching all around me was my true flesh — stripped of clothing, stripped of muscle, stripped to the mud . Its dank elasticity and crude odor reached deep into my innards because deep down I wholly belonged to them. Only some purely accidental external features — the few gestures I am capable of, for example, or the fine, gossamer-like hair on my head or my moist, glassy eyes — separated me from its primordial immobility. But they were little, precious and little, in the face of the immense majesty of muck.

I walked in every direction, my feet sinking to the ankles. The rain was gentler now, and the sun was setting in the distance behind a curtain of bloody, purulent clouds. I suddenly bent down and plunged my hands into the manure. Why not? Why not? I felt like howling.

The slime was lukewarm and soft: my hands had no difficulty moving through it. When I made a fist, the muck oozed through my fingers in beautiful, black, shiny slices. What had my hands been doing till then? Where had they been wasting their time? I had been gallivanting about with them to my heart’s content. What had they been all the while but prisoners, pitiful birds chained to my arms and shoulders by the formidable bonds of skin and muscle, birds taught to fly in stupid patterns of what passed for good taste. Now they had gradually grown wild again and were enjoying their old freedom by rolling their heads in the dung, cooing like doves, beating their wings, happy. . happy. .

I too was so happy I began waving them above my head, making them fly. Large splotches of mud ran down my face and over my clothes. Was there any reason to wipe them off? What for? It was only a beginning. My deed had had no serious consequences: the sky had not fallen nor had the earth trembled. The next thing I did was smear a handful of mud across my face. I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of joy. It was ages since I had felt so exhilarated. I placed my hands on my face, then on my neck, then ran them through my hair.

All at once a fine yet heavier rain began to fall, but the sun continued to illuminate the field like a gigantic lamp in the rear of a hall of gray marble. It rained by the light of the sun; it rained a rain of gold; it rained a rain of the scent of newly washed linen.