Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

SOMEBODY. Diana dear, you might tell us where you were . . while we were so patiently watching you?

(DIANA ’s chameleon rattles her emeralds. )

DIANA. Systematizing Futurist plastic velocity by the displacement of the minute-hand. . Ho capito.

SOMEBODY ELSE. Isn’t she wonderful?

A MAN. (whose monocle has been hypnotized to idea associations by the luminous dial) I don’t know anything about Marinetti; I don’t want to know anything about Marinetti but I respect him. . he has a clean collar I am willing to accept the creed of any man who wears a clean collar

SOMEBODY. Why the devil shouldn’t Marinetti wear a clean collar?

I don’t know why Marinetti shouldn’t wear a clean collar, all I say is. . Marinetti wears a clean collar!

OSSY. Di. . if you half guessed what I’ve caught in the stables, you’d throw Futurism to. .

DIANA. Don’t mean. . that I’m out of fashion again

OSSY. Since 1 p.m. . dispensing entirely with the middleman, we now have the genius served directly to the consumer

DIANA. Let us consume. .

OSSY. (to the footman) James! just fetch the whatsisname out of the whatyoumecallems and don’t let its feet touch the floor.

(The footmen carry in the HOUSELESS LOONY in his natural condition. . on a throne chair with a step to it.

The LADY DIANA has stood herself in front of a large light that hazes her yellow hair.)

SOMEBODY. Di will be able to put him at his ease!

(The importation fixes on her his fanatical eyes, set in the lewdest eyelids, the rest is stubbly.)

DIANA. There are only two kinds of people in society. . geniuses and women.

LOONY. I hang out with God and the Devil

DIANA . (continuing impressively) I am Woman.

LOONY. May be. . (sniffing her approach) . . but you smell like nothing-at-all; and all that truck on you, makes me eye sneeze

(DIANA throws the emeralds, the chame- leon and divers odds and ends vaguely in the direction of a Benozzo Gozzoli, and tries to imagine what a smell is like. .)

DIANA. I know. . I knew. . I have always known. . you alone can see beneath the. . beneath the. . beneath the truck! I am the elusion that cooed to your ado- lescent isolation, crystallized in the experience of your manhood. . (Oh do stop blinking at me, or I can’t go on). . I am that reciprocal quality you searched for among the moonlit mysteries of Battersea Bridge.

I come to you with gifts those other women had not to give

I am measured by the silence of inspiration, tuned to a laudatory discrimination. . made of the instigatory caress. . I know the moment to press the grape to thy lip. . put ice on your head; for I am the woman who understands. . so do tell me what you are going to make with those cigar-ends?

LOONY. I am going to make Life out of cigar-ends

Life

I must have Life. . more life. . I am Life. . my hair is full of life. . my clothes are alive; but I am not satisfied.

I will have more life. . I will make more life. . Life out of cigar ends

When God made Life. . he rested and saw that it was. . good. . the devil interfered, making it dangerous. But Life is more than this or that. Life is amusing! And you ( to DIANA) — you make me laugh!

DIANA. I am the merriment to float your leisure. . And what do you do when you are not picking them up?

LOONY. Sit in the pub arguing with my companion DIANA. You mentioned two. .

LOONY. One and the same. . “God gives” and “the Devil to pay!”

(The room fills rapidly with the LOONY ’s curiosity, the “taken for granted” ad- vances to audience gravenly noticeable.)

Such are the secret dens of the terrorized. Look here, you woman-as-you-may-say, strikes me I’ve wasted a lot of theoretic sympathy on the submerged. . you don’t look half sorry for yourselves. Why I’ve knocked a fellow down, out there in the Grand “cause” he says “they don’t feel” says he. . “they can’t have the same feelings as we have.” And yet, and yet. . what would happen if one scraped some of the nap off you?

SOMEBODY ELSE. So you’re stopping at the Grand?

LOONY. There is no stopping at the Grand. . the Grand is all of “Out There”. . I am the grand man let loose in it. Out there where no knick knacks nudge you into minding your p’s and q’s. . “my miracu- lous ambulance in spatial mystery”; out there where there is everything to find. . the grand man is able to pick up any- thing he is able to see.

DIANA . (Sighs) Oh!. . take me with you, I am the woman who can see.

LOONY. You know not what you ask

Your aspirations are herculean

No human beings can be so polished, so sequestered, so hermetically sealed. . but that they may still be able to aspire. I am the apostle of Fraternity. I find my brother in the most secluded coward. . But out there. . they are not all as I am. . their sympathies have narrowed to their code. Were I to take you among them. . you would suffer. . even my protection would not suffice you.

You would be slighted. . you would be criticised. . considered soft.

You with your different way of sitting down, an unfamiliar manner of gulping food. Your most fervid conversation would lose itself as an impertinent si- lence among the debonair rumble of our caste. You would be witless and a bore; koh-i-noors for the cultured ear. . the crude realism of our Imagists would call up none of the emotions of the initiated in you. .

SOMEBODY. I say Ossy. . we might be able to keep peace with ’em there.

LOONY. Not at all, with you the art of ribaldry relies entirely on technique. . dilettante. . again the cowardice of the submerged. .

Ours has the healthy spring of creative expression rooted in action. . we coin nothing but the image and superscription of personal experience. .

My poor child ( catching DIANA ’s wrist as he descends from his throne. . shuffling the velvet ). Dare you look. . look. . ( he looks for something he is surprised not to be able to find ) I was going to try to make you see the “Grand.”

OSSY. Oh Di, he wants a widow. . James! draw the curtains.

(The curtains are drawn

The gilded shutters thrown back)—

LOONY . (to the grand outdoors) What an idea to muffle It up like that

Oh thou from whom all colds are caught. . they’re afraid of you catching cold!

(to DIANA) Now my pretty house fly! Think of that mud. . that bloody awful mud. . in all the beauty of its bloody awfulness!

A quality that escapes you?

You have never felt it plasterly squelching between your toes, salving their parchment creak. . cake coveringly for warm-footed nights, or sensuous slop cheek-spattering as a wench’s spittle. . from about the Rolls-Royce passing of the pitiably immune.

SOMEBODY. He can talk about something!

LOONY. Under the lemon-peel sunslip

Human bracchalian stretches

Cautiously draw near to the feverish attainable,

The blood-shot calculations of an eye

Approximate spent ends

There are many on ’em

And there may

Be always more

Than man yet dares to wish for

I maintain

Though in those rare full hours of r-r-round numbers

Perfection looms proportionate

The ever-widening cycles of our Future

Shall shed such transcendental showers of ideo-fags

Shall muster the rear-forces of mentality To sublimate

To boons that are

For man to pounce upon.

So in the low-geared meanwhile

The humble fanatic

Collects from where he can

Those battered finger-posts

To his ideal

Ashy iotas in the Balance of