Mina Loy - Insel

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

Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshold 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 lamppost 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 mannequin he operated on occasion. “Make what you can of it — you may wonder if I am sure of its nature myself — let us not be too precise as to what I am.”

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

He shut the door, an act I have heard an authoress describe as so banal it is unfit for publication. But shutting the 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 backwards without ceasing to face it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could absorb such power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would 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 necrophilous aura, its consistency dissolved, one came to an inner circle where serial things floated in a semi-existent aquarium. Or, at times he, himself, would overflood it, as now when his coming close to me affected 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 hallucinatory transformation, its dial advancing the gray 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 weird 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 sweet-stuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with some ineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed curiosity wanted to cry, “From what enchanted bed of love have you so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?”

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

His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black passe-partout, was saying, “I want to give you my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell.” The drawing in the passe-partout, 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 elementals.

“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 conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak.

I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be 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.

“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 actuality.”

“I can materialize for you ,” he said raptly, “ forever —on the corner of this street.”

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

Darting about amazingly in the autumn vapor 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 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 horsepower hummed in the heavens.