Mina Loy - Insel

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 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 catastrophic than a state of siege.

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

The result of this lapse of protective selfishness was days of agony. I had intended to run off to the country at once. But now — I sat looking at that apartment obsessed with the necessity of disencumbering it of personalia. The onus of trying to make up one’s mind where to begin overpowered me.

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

The contemplation of a bureau whose drawers must be emptied — the idea of some sort of classification of manuscript 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 moments.

In the taxi I inquired, “ Was haben Sie schönes 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, 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 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.

“Aera,” 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 impression of criminality he gave off at intervals I did not receive as a direct impress on my own mind, but as a glimpse of a conviction he hid within himself.

“Aren’t you rather bad?” I laughingly inquired.

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

When we fell into line once more, he resumed the 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 fingernails, I had a shocking vision of Insel’s diaphanous intestines entirely disappearing should he, as would be only natural, mistake it for a graceful token of absentee hospitality — and of myself arraigned for manslaughter.