Mina Loy - Insel

Around him the atmosphere was stale as an alcohol preserving a foetal monster he resembled in repose.

Insel was unpleasant bereft of his radiance.

His body had dwindled in distilling an immaterial essence to such concentration it was appreciable to the senses. One was aware of an effulgence, which, if it waxed and waned during his waking hours, had now altogether vanished. His body swept and garnished like the house in the Bible — devilishly invaded — was no longer human as it lay before me in the form of Insel.

There unshining and supine he seemed abandoned of all quality except the opaque. The gray inflated opacity of his unseeing head, which, should one lift it from the pillow, must surely loll on his shoulder — the head of an idiot.

The flat seemed emptier for his being there, until I found that further off it was filled to a weird expansion with emanations drifting away from Insel asleep. They crowded the air, minute horizontal icicles, with a tingling of frozen fire. In the room at the end of the corridor their force of vitalized nothingness was pushing back the walls. Why should Insel, less ponderable than other men, impart perceptible properties to the Air? Was he leaking out of himself, residuum of that ominous honey he stored behind his eyes into which it was his constant, his distraught concern to withdraw?

In his soaring, flagging excitations he might have spent a spiritual capital and going broke, be raising exhaustive loans on the steadily decreasing collateral of his vitality, until an ultimate bonfire in those eerie eyes should be extinguished in some unimaginable bankruptcy.

In him the intangible and tangible components of a human being had come apart. As if in some ruthless extraction of Supreme Good from a fallible pulp, the vibrancy interpenetrating normal muscular fiber had been indrawn from his physical structure to condense in a point of flame. When some mysterious fuel failed him, Insel remained — a mess of profane dross.

I thought of his pictures, those queerly luminous almost materializing projections. Curious creatures moving in levitation — frequently cerebral abortions of cats.

Any student of ancient occultism would recognize them for elementals. Imbecilic, vampiric — here and there an obsessive absence of a mouth implied an inconceivable constipation. A conspicuous liver, so personal he might have served as his own fluoroscope, clear as a pale coral was painted as only the Masters painted. He had no need to portray. His pictures grew, out of him, seeding through the inter-atomic spaces in his digital substance to urge tenacious roots into a plane surface.

I wondered in what psychic succession these monsters issued from a man, who himself when unlit or cut into profile, became so hauntingly animal, even insectile. Who, when asleep, being the makings of his own bestiary, was vilely void as an incubus — wondered why millenary monsters of a disreputable metaphysic should re-arise intact in a modern subconscious.

Insel slept for twenty hours. With one interruption. When I went in to see how he was I woke him up.

Through the slits in the shutters the outdoor lights laid narrow blades along the floor, above Insel’s feet on the whitewashed wall they crossed and cast a double shadow of a hanging fern. Otherwise the room was a mausoleum.

Again I could have sworn I beheld the dead. Silence had hardened upon him in a stony armor, too heavy for the fluttering of breath.

I listened till the sound of his rigidity grew so shrill I was forced to make it mute. Terrified, I took hold of the door and crashed it to.

Insel — who after all must, of his nature, float quite lightly on the surface of a coma — easily lifted his lids.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I gasped. “It was necessary to make a noise to know you are not dead.”

With none of the daze of sudden rousing he excused me gently. And slept anew.

Those depths through which others plunge into sleep for him stretched shallow as moisture on a mirror.

In the morning I went out, off into the sunlight, shopping. Leaving far behind me that darkened room, and whatever it contained.

My major purchase was kilos of bright red beef.

When he awoke I fed him chunks from a great frying pan. Insel sat up and swallowed them with fairly bestial satisfaction.

“Why,” I asked to make conversation, “do you always want ‘Fleisch ohne Knochen’? ”

I had taken it for granted he ordered boneless meat to avoid waste. But Insel began peering about shockingly as if suspicious of being overheard.

“When I am alone,” he explained, in an unexpectedly vacuous voice, “I do not eat like this — I have to drag bones into a corner — to gnaw.”

I felt curious to know how — without teeth—. But Insel beginning to shine again put off the animal, to become the clown of an angel.

Through the row of glass doors the ornaments in the hall looked like fish under water as a celadon tide of pale lamplight sluiced into the studio. From the shutters on either side, entangled reflections flickered into the halo that was now re-forming round Insel’s face.

Stark on the sommier he floated up from the floor of a pool with the wavering fungus he had sown there clinging to his cover.

He told me he had found the secret of perpetual motion if only he had the money to buy the stuff. To me it seemed he had rather discovered a slow time that must result in eternity.

I told him I had for some while been conceiving a ballet.

“It is the story of a maiden seeing her life in a crystal— It would look exactly as it does here, everything translucent.” I waved to Insel— “Yet as in the days when there were maidens they had no ‘life,’ what she sees is her future spouse sowing his ‘wild oats.’

“All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijinsky — yet once I came across one who possessed a dual equipoise which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned— But I should have to do maquettes — animated maquettes of the choreography — and I can’t make anything grow out of the floor,” I said deferentially.

“Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte’s eye. The woman in the litmus petticoat forecasting the weather. A rainbow,” I continued, seeing Insel entranced. “The Queen of Fairyland— Mermaids and Medusae.” Envy was stealing into Insel.

“I dance divinely,” he said and I could see him crossing a ballroom floor propelled as if on invisible casters, as truly initiate acolytes, in reception and remittance of the Holy Book before the high altar.

“Always at the crucial moment the youth is intercepted. There comes floating in between him and the object of his concupiscence, a—” I stopped, as Insel, seemingly relieved by the frustration of a rival, closed his eyes, and waited till he came to. “Over and again I drop the idea in despair. Over and over again I find a solution so simple it constantly slips my mind. I have only to make some little people about five inches high and tell them what to dance.” Insel nodded comprehendingly. “Yet whenever I get to work I come upon some fundamental obstacle. It takes me hours ,” I complained to Insel, “to remember it cannot be done. It is as if at the back of that memory stands another memory of having had the power to create whatever I pleased.”

Insel’s eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes to converse. Insel thought at me . More precisely— vaguely conceived before me.

“To make things grow,” he conveyed on his silence, “you would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will only grow if planted in a woman— But my brain is a more exquisite manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover the Oceanic grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiple as sand.”