Mina Loy - Insel

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

“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 hoarding across the street was too lovely to look at. I had to lower my eyelids. Insel already had lowered his on a face falling lower and lower into the excavation of his breast.

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

“I am to die,” he rejoiced. “And will you weep one little tear for me?” he asked flirtatiously.

“Yum, yum,” I jibed, intent on the beauty of the silver rivers he had loosened in the veins of the ugly marble table top. “Does ums want to be pitied? — you’ve struck a hunk of granite.”

“You won’t weep?” he implored from a gust of sad laughter.

“Not a drop.”

Insel tried again. “ Sterben ,” he sighed in the voice of a weary 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 muss — man — mu — uss.” This fair decease in which he infinitely delighted, vaster and more dimly distant than the lesser deaths of his usual aberrations, sailed with Insel on its wings to heights of a stratospheric purity.

At once the hoarding 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 somber ambition which stirred him whensoever he became aware of his real life. It looked pretty bad — real life — so carelessly repaired by hand — that obscene, that relentless hoarding. 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 Dôme 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 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 lightning hand of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dishrag a deathly inner perspiration — as if one were about to retch a nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would not cease from me for days.

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

Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection immediately complicated, “When was he here? When was he there? Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?” The distant aristo went about his simple social life with sufficient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious illness and misplaced sleep, he visited anyone 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. Straightening from top to toe, I inhaled a limpid air — the neon tubes caressed my eyes.

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

Evidently he was in good form. The sparks he seemed to emit in turn gave off smaller ones; an added superficial 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 Jouvet’s — and that only an inkling — and so discreet.

Insel said he had been offered such a role. But again he had not been able, or wishful, to pursue anything that carried him into the future — a future that ebbed from him as from others the past. He would look forward with one eagerly — always at a certain point he reverted — turned his blind back on the forward direction—.

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

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

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

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

“You have such marvelous ideas—”

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

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

Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savor 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 gray 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.