Mina Loy - Insel

“Stop it,” I commanded, letting fly a fearful kick at Insel’s brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him — he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.

“The pet! The lamb! — it does television, too,” I told myself delightedly.

“Insel,” I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.

“ Seien wir uns wieder gut —I give you the key — dinner — My man Godfrey — the loan on your picture — you go to the Balkans — you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories.”

As for Insel, he emerged from his “raptness” babbling of Colossus — Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.

“How entirely he would have accepted me— my art — We would have been as one —”

I argued at length against this sudden conviction. “Do you know,” I asked, “who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter? — Rubens—” Only then did Insel’s illusions miserably dissolve.

AFTER THE POWELL FILM, WE INSTINCTIVELY returned to Montparnasse — eating at a chic bar. The barman and Insel behaved as brothers — I vaguely noted a sort of ritual — the passing and repassing between them of half a cigarette. They addressed each other as “du.” “No — for ‘thee’—” Insel would say, placing the stump on a glass shelf as one handles a treasure.

Some days later I saw this barman out of doors wearing one of the richest overcoats I had seen in Paris. Evidently such acquaintances could hand out “leavings” superior to the plain nourishment Insel acquired from the Quakers.

We sat around the Dôme and Insel x-rayed. All the girls, as they giggled along the Boulevard, he disrobed — more precisely, he could not see that they were dressed. As if on an expedition for collecting ivory, he handed me their variously molded thighs — weighed them with an indescribable sensitivity of touch.

“This one,” he assured me, “in the summer is firmer — turns to gold—”

Recalling how terribly Mlle Alpha had said he dated, I presumed he was claiming my interest by indulging in what Boulevardiers of the old days called “undressing the women” in his own unbelievably tangible way. “I don’t need them to take off their clothes,” he remarked.

In the Select Insel became actually involved with his watching of a red-haired girl he raved of as “die Rothaarige” —her thighs were peculiarly long and agile. “She’s a bit of a Lesbian,” he sighed, filled with some inverted reminiscence of antagonism.

“Look here, Insel — you’re crazy about that girl— and all you do is sit around x-raying her — Get up— go and speak to her—”

“She’d be too expensive—”

“Colossus never had any money.”

“Colossus was beautiful—”

“What about it? You’re looking unearthly. She might get a thrill out of it — try — forget the expense— I’ll back you — Go along.”

But Insel, subsiding in his inexplicable negativism, refused to stir.

“Listen,” I admonished him, “all this is really unwholesome — and sitting boxed up in an attic adoring that canvas Irma all day — you’ll become impotent—”

In a burst of the extravagantly sophisticated laughter I had heard him emit once before, “I only wish I could,” he assured me.

“What a subject,” I reflected, “the virility of the starving man.” But the Select was undergoing change — opening out to aqueous space in darkling shadows of metallic liquidity as in the vision of the Lutetia, that strangely etiolate phallic ghost floated like the stem of a water lily. Before it had terminated in a battlement akin to that of the castle among chessmen; now it was topped with a little crown of thorns.

Through the chill shimmer of this unreal deep— the hallucinatory blue the Coupole had painted on the backs of dreary houses as a setting for its garden cafe — the blue I would wish the sky to be showed us another dawn.

“Look.”

“There should,” said Insel, extremely worried, “be a lighted lamppost there.”

“There is,” I reassured him, “lower your head — see it was cut off by the blind.”

This was the last of the two or three nights I spent with Insel in Montparnasse.

We crossed again to the Dôme to have breakfast. Sitting beside him, I could see a man in white armor conduct a ballet. Serried rows of mustard pots drew up before him, their porcelain bellies burdened with amber. They moved to and fro as with a wooden spatula he lifted off their stale crust of night, filled and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.

“Woher kommt diese halbe Mücke?” Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an inviolate orbit, because he could not make out “Where this half a fly comes from.” I knew it was only a baby fly, yet all the same it loomed above him hugely as an insectile cherubim cut off from its entrails in a like unanatomical constipation to Insel’s monsters.

The rest of the day till two o’clock when Insel, as usual, it seemed must “appear in court,” we spent in an incredibly concentrated and somehow heartrending arithmetic, reckoning up whether Insel, out of the three thousand francs loaned on his picture, could possibly afford a new pair of boots. We had already decided he must have a warm overcoat when, although it was not particularly chilly, little muscles in the side of Insel’s nose, self-animated, leapt up and shivered. “You are freezing,” I discovered in startled concern, scanning his fragile flimsy features.

“I hardly feel it — I am used to it,” said Insel, dolefully heroic. “It is only discomforting to those who are with me.”

But I teased him a bit when we said good-bye, alluding to a lunch with the Alpha when to our mutual hilarity we had made out how only two hours after leaving my studio after that utter collapse, he had stumbled into hers.

“He looked ghastly ,” she told me. “He had not eaten, he had not slept — his heart had ceased to beat!”

Insel, whom I had seen so sly, had been vainly hoping to get his beefsteak fresher.

“How on earth,” I inquired, “do you compose your Totenkopf in so short a time? Pretending to Mlle Alpha—”

“Why,” Insel answered pat, with the queerest inflection of intimacy, as if I were some virgin he had raped, “I thought you would not like me to tell her I had been with you.”

“It’s marvellous,” I assured him in amused admiration, “your knack of dying on doorsteps. At will! At any moment! You might make a good thing out of it. Perhaps you do. Insel, I believe you put lots of money in the bank!”

I could feel a distinct change in his aural temperature, but I was laughing too much to pay attention. An impression of a sacred stronghold “blowing up,” that shadow-tower of iron rag the clochard-deity Insel had built, like an ant of his wasted tissue, was so very, very faint — In view of America, I was constantly on the hop — busy with buyers of furniture — packers littering the place with straw.

Arriving for some appointment, I was unprepared to run into an Uneasiness in the vicinity of my home, although it remained closely sealed in its shutters and nothing by day ever went in or came out. Les concierges , their aides and cronies, the grocers at the corner, all were under the apprehension of the place being haunted. Even Bebelle, whom I came across in the street, had, on going there to clean, turned and fled.