Mina Loy - Insel

Thus I saw how three whole hours went by while Insel asked me what I was thinking of. They passed off in a puff as though, for a change, he had contracted time into intensity.

All the whimsical nonsense ever conceived rotated on his eyeballs which seemed to convey “while I pretend to search for some secret in you the less danger is there of your being inquisitive as to mine.”

With every question his eyes grew greater, thrust out longer spears, unctuous in the aromatic ooze from his brain.

“What are you thinking of?” urged Insel, and the softer fell his voice, the more inflexible he knit himself together — the more terrifically to disintegrate on some signal he invoked.

So I sat with as soothing and expressionless a smile as I could concoct and answered occasionally, “I am thinking of June 18th, 1931, or of nine o’clock on Tuesday of the week before last. — What are you thinking of?” His eyes converging on me, a yellow glow fused to a single planetary dilation rapped on the sun gong. “—An was denken Sie?” Insel, discouraged, petrified his face before me — with a determination beyond all human power, in the “last expression” that death imposes on pain. Incredibly exact, rivalling even any original I had seen.

“I should have preferred,” he said with his voice of dead lovers crying through the earth, “to be fit for you to look at.” Then he deliberately set himself on fire.

In exact description — he did not consistently appear to the naked eye, as a bonfire, in a normal degree of comparison to the morning murk sifting through the glassed environment. As a thread in the general mass, he retained his depth of tone. But as if his astounding vibratory flux required a more delicate instrument than the eye for registration. Some infrared or there invisible ray he gave off, was immediately transferred on one’s neural current to some dark room in the brain for instantaneous development in all its brilliancy. So one saw him as a gray man and an electrified organism at one and the same time—

— it was only the candle spluttering … preliminary to the most beautiful spectacle I have ever “seen.”

Shaken with an unearthly anxiety, this creature of so divine a degradation, set upon himself with his queer hands and began to pull off his face.

For those whose flesh is their rags, it is not pitiable to undress.

As Insel dropped the scabs of his peculiar astral carbonization upon the table, his cheeks torn down, in bits upon the marble — one rift ran the whole length of his imperfect insulation, and for a moment exposed the “man-of-light.”

He sat there inside him taking no notice at all, made of the first jelly quivering under the sun and some final unimaginable form of aereal substance, in the same eternal conviction as the Greek fragment—

Once at dark in the Maine woods, I had stumbled on a rotten log. The scabs of foetid bark flew off revealing a solid cellulose jewel. It glowed in the tremendous tepidity of phosphorescence from a store of moonlight similar to condensed sun in living vegetables.

At last Insel’s eyes dying of hallucination, stared suddenly into the filtered day. Horrified almost to blindness he complained, “ Es ist zu hell .” He sounded as if deliberately quoting “it is too light”— That did not matter after all the ways he had been “happening.”

“So you’re starving, are you?” I mocked, exasperated with his total inability to estimate himself. “The greatest actor alive.”

As I took him out, Insel suddenly blew hundreds of yards ahead. He was pirouetting perplexedly around himself when I caught up with him and we got into a cab.

In that small space he behaved like a fish on the end of a line, like a kite in the air entangled in its own tail — carrying about with him, in his awful unrest, my hand to which he clung — his own had clamped so fast to it, he could hardly get it off — when I dropped him at his door.

I WAS READY TO LEAVE FOR SAINT-CLOUD WITH my little valise when there came a soft knocking on the door I was about to open, a knocking irreal as the fall of dusk. Insel had turned up again. He collapsed before me like a stricken gull having received some unavowable hurt in the unknown wastes where he belonged. The storm must have completely disintegrated his exceptional electrification.

“Um Gottes Willen ,” he panted almost inaudibly. “I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, and now my heart is ceasing to beat.”

It was remarkable he should succeed in speaking — his body no longer showed much sign of life. He might be using this body — with its interwoven identity of the living remains of a dead man and the dead remains of a man once alive — as a medium, from a distance to which his fluctuant spirit had been temporarily released.

His face having lost its bruised appearance was set in the tidy waxen consistency that makes corpses look like sudden dolls.

I might be entertaining a ghost, so light a labor I found it to draw him through the glass doors into the studio. As I dropped him onto an enormous couch, my everyday self broadcast a panic.

“Mrs. Jones, her daughter having sailed for New York, is discovered alone in her flat with a dead tramp.”

Briefly I thought of blowing the thing out of the window. The seeming imminence of his death allowed for no other means of getting rid of him. But this was no solution. He would be found — sprawled in the courtyard.

Then it came to me that in spite of my willful descent into a forbidden psychology, I still had sufficient power to put him to rest. “Insel,” I inquired, “can you hear me?” Then — very slowly — very distinctly, “You are going to sleep — sleep till the blue moon.”

There surged out of Insel a whisper of horror, “But my heart isn’t beating,” he protested.

“That is only a neurotic illusion,” I consoled him, believing I lied.

He lay on the couch and did not die. I began to arrange for a possible revival. “Is there anything you can drink that isn’t alcoholic?” I asked him quietly.

After a while he murmured, “Pfeffermintztee.”

“Try to be alive when I come back,” I urged him in all sincerity.

“Where are you going?” he wanted to know, his voice a hoarse agony.

“To buy pfeffermintztee .”

“No — no — you’re not to leave me— ever .”

With a strange grip of a limp vice his fingers clung to my wrist. I had to sit down beside him. Now he was staring as if bewitched, at the parquet of the floor.

“The peppermint won’t grow out of the floor,” I advised.

“It will,” said Insel. “You’re to stay here.”

And I found myself staring together with him.

It was no peppermint growing out of the planes of polished oak. Only the creeping organic development of a microscopic undergrowth such as carpeted chaos in his work, almost as closely cramped as the creamy convolutions of a brain. Foliage of mildew it spread — and spread.

“An infusion of that fungus would be bad for you,” I persuaded him, taking his fingers carefully apart, lifting their tentacular pulp from my wrist.

Escaping I rushed to the shop at the corner and back again. As Insel was still living, I made him his tea.

“And you will be able to sleep,” he reproached me, oblivious of his drowsiness as he fell asleep.

I could watch over my invalid through a pane of glass incompletely covered by a curtain on the door at the far end of the studio.

A dense oppression stole through the flat all packed up in its iron shutters. Insel, who had no longer been able to bear a light, lay pallid and obscure in a faint reflection from a lantern in the hall, his slumber the extinction of a dim volcano. Lax as a larva, a glow worm “gone out,” his head bared of its phosphorescent halo, seemed swollen in a meaningless hydrocephalus. As if, while conscious, electric emissions had diminished his cranial volume.