Mina Loy - Insel

The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were still there — Two unmatched arrows sprung from its meaningless center — were surrounded by a numeral halo — I had to leave Insel, it was ten to eight.

“HOW GOES THE BOOK,” HE ASKED WITH HIS FORMER appreciative intimacy as we passed out of the cafe. I was feeling exceptionally “good” about my work just then, vainly imagining I had criticized my last incompletion.

“It is going wonderfully,” and with a flash of that exhibitionism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no means of communication — I threw out my hands — elatedly believing I had reached the stage prescribed by Colossus for creation, when all that one has collected rolls out with the facility of the song of a bird.

“Sehen Sie , Insel,” I explained, “ Man muss reif sein —One must be ripe.”

I felt Insel crack as if he had been shot alert.

“Can she possibly mean it,” I could “hear” him ask himself as he wheeled towards me, noticing me for the first time; and then convinced, as I stood a little exalted on the corner of the street, decide, “Here is a woman with whom there is absolutely nothing to be done.”

I must have had my hands outspread, for Insel dropped like a soft moth into my open palm— On his face was a smile unlike all the fluctuant smiles of hallucinated angels I had watched there. It was a normal smile. Yet in the old abnormal voice of whispering emotion, laying his dried branch across my shoulder, he choked, “ Ich komme nach Hause .”

He was “coming home.”

Across his gentle brow floated the will-o’-the-wisp trailing a pair of boiled oysters in its wake, Mädchen , like missiles that have not gone off, he scattered abroad.

“But Insel,” I reminded him, “you have an appointment for dinner.”

Insel gaped at me.

The illocal foci of his pupils exploding incredulously, darted in all the directions of the radial underpattern of his life. It took some moments to sort these simultaneous impressions. When I had done so, I longed to get even with Insel, to say “I have absorbed all your Strahlen. Now what are you going to do?”

I said nothing of the kind. Because firstly it was not true, and secondly, it might inspire in him a worse obsession; for one thing one feared as above all else menacing Insel was some climax in which his depredatory radioactivity must inevitably give out.

So all I said was “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” smiled Insel, his bittersweet stare both dazed and stoic, “ Danke für alles —Thanks for everything.”

I

In the organic continuity of family life, one is under the earth caught among bare roots of imperceptible plants whose flowers lean out smiling toward the solar stimulation of a heterogeneous society.

II

Women particularly — lose their lovely faces in private — so much so that it is only in the occasional hazard of a party one may gauge the effect of creatures, one has actually in some remote biological process given birth to.

III

Alda who, in a crowd, caused me to blink as at the too near approach of a brilliant star—

IV

totally extinguished on her filial visits. Her face almost blotched with a fundamental erosion my essence produced in her — developed a kind of set jowl. As she sat down before me she would clutch that soft white fist. I watched it grow rosy as it squeezed out the inadvertible tide of my futility.

“Aaron,” she announced, “doesn’t see why he should give you that hundred dollars”—and with that heinous crow I seemed to call up from the depths of so many of my intimates— “Your book!” she sneered, “It’s an excuse ___ to get money out of us!”

V

“You’re no good — never have been any good—” This blank truth struck me with the finality of unconsciousness. It was from very far away in time & space I heard her aggravation hollow out a course for my second childhood.

“You wanted the business — we gave you the business — You wanted an apartment — we gave you the apartment and you sell it for nothing & come over here!”

“But Aaron told me to sell it at that price — —”

VI

I expostulated.

“Pooh — he was drunk,” Alda retorted in a streak of decision.

It is the reverse of enlightenment to see oneself ‘in reality’. Of the image & likeness that forms our inexpressible Being — in the metamorphosis of passing through other brains — all that appears to our companions is a chimney sweep.

VII

As she drew to a close, taunting me with my “painting _ _ _ that idleness where other artists prepared a whole exhibition in two months,” Fact dilated for me. Alda’s recriminations were identical with mine of myself. Incipient in my mother’s womb their transcription effacing time in me they now reverberated from the lipsticked mouth of a child I loved.

VIIA

My year of psychic discipline of those recriminations had gone for naught. Returned, they dragged my frightened ears even in the direction of the grave.

VIII

“I can proove it” _ _ _ _ Alda was babbling her way to the door “with your awful belly-aching letters _ _ _ proove it to anybody. I’ve kept them all.”

IX

Soon my breath grew regular again. “Now tell me,” I asked Sofia who had been present—“am I a disgruntled old nitwit who imagines monstrous things being said to her _ _ or did you hear what I heard?”

“I heard,” Sofia answered, “You imagined nothing”—

then with a flat neutrality—“she intended to be cruel __ _ _ _ _ So what? Do you think it’s exceptional that a daughter should hate her mother—”

X

Sofia, after that prolonged séance with her make-up which condenses woman’s life, returned in her hat & coat.

— “Shan’t be back this evening.”

“Then would you buy me a sandwich there’s nothing to eat.”

“No time”—she objected—

Bewildered, I reminded her she had asked to housekeep for me—

XI

“I have no intention of doing so — you’re a beastly nuisance.”

“But Sofia — I don’t understand. You begged me to come—”

“I had to have you here — to be able to get off on you all I dared not ‘get off’ on Alda __ __ I’m scared of her,” she smiled engagingly.

XII

I also smiled as she left me alone. Intellectually it was refreshing, this ability of hers to express unabashed exactly what she felt with an honesty unveiling the ego. Ignoring distinctions between thee & me — she was with

XIII

precise calculation equally unbiased about the (rare) unpleasant or unfair reports of her made by other people.

XIV

Nevertheless my pain, itself behaving like an insupportable hunger, became grotesque when coupled with normal appetite, whereas, should I venture outside the cold would cleave it with a super-phenomenal blade.

XV

I ate a pat of butter & some dry corn-flakes left in the kitchen, then sickeningly relapsed to the depths of the divan. The pain stood out sharply as if in spite of the dim amber lamps it cast the impenetrable shadow of the gloomy sitting room.

XVI

I had lain there for a long while alternating that halfhearted squirm one opposes to agony & that unwilling patience imposed by agony, when, all at once the compact silence became curiously volatile. Drawn from my couch, I rose erect, walking, so far did my head turn sideways, rather like a crab. As if again I must ‘take stock’ of someone as I went my way.