Mina Loy - Insel

“It’s like this — I am sitting at the Dôme — she comes along—”

“She dropped on you,” I corrected— It was fun teasing him. Like tickling 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 t able — ausgeschlossen! — impermissible!”

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 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 why, 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 re-conceived in some unguessable 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 lightnings of his distraction like a confiding duck as I scattered crumbs.

At the same time a worn down record of old-fashioned inflection clattered 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 nearby without attaining to me. It was as if I were almost leaning up against a lightning conductor. I remembered his girl’s watch was still in my handbag — 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 lightning.

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 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 burning 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 — laid 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 was 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.

“—of you,” wheezed the battered record turning on his brain to my sudden visualization of Insel as a gray tomcat 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 was denken Sie?” he asked again, of God knows what girl, in God knows what decade, and all the same of me.

In my veritable séances with Insel, the clock alone retrieved me from nonentity — thrusting its real face into mine as reminder of the temporal.