Anna Kavan - Sleep Has His House

With delayed, lingering uncertainty this is disclosed as perhaps a web spun with grey mist-fibres of involution; perhaps a carcinoma; perhaps some sort of transparent maze. As uncertainty concentrates, involution honeycombs into greatest possible number of hexagonal cells on pyramidal base. As the honeycomb crystallizes, the cells quickly expand, differentiate; involution, now occupying the entire visual field, defines into… catacombs…? hospital…? prison…? town with antique northern buildings.

Narrow streets, spires, quadrangles, stabilize cool in still grey light; so peaceful and so extremely quiet, remote, that they seem suspended in crystal. Calm in soft pigeon-coloured stone, overlooking a lawn formal with spaced mulberry trees, a gothic façade pierced by slender windows, old, secure, rigorously remote. Figures stroll in and out of doorways, cloisters, with very faint droning accompaniment of academic discourse, distant sporadic chimings of clocks and bells. The speakers’ voices are subdued, their tones unhurried, unheated, their cadences falling. Brief snatches of talk; such topics as the abstract entities, Wren’s interiors, the migration of wild geese to Spitsbergen. Presently a more sustained ringing, bell-sounding from the high towers, reverberates with gentleness and solemnity. The figures continue to move up and down for perhaps half a minute longer: then quietly drift away.

The secluded scene is disintegrating, is blurred out, it reverts to the dead spot: the town is dissolving, it amalgamates with the dead spot (so that there is here, suddenly, the blank central eye-blur again): only the perimetral area is pulsing now at ominous speed and with the ominous growing tension of tomtom beats steadily increasing in tempo though not in loudness.

This the dream college points with the man behind the barbed-wire hunted by more and more panic, running more and more awkwardly, undirectedly, his glasses falling, his eyes screaming out of the horror of his foredoomed and sweating face.

Glued to his face, biting it to bloody bits, now presses the turgid mouth of a great thick black salivary-shiny gun: the megrimed retina pulps and gushes into the dead spot spattered with brains and buttons and the grey blur still pumping.

Clear but very dimunitive vision across the convulsing of this man-spattered superopticity, a quadrangle, empty, under watery cool clean evening sky. Lighted windows appear one after the other.

Which is being stored up? Which is being selected? Is it a quiet précis of monastic routine unwinding its neutral and satin-smooth spool of days snarled by nothing more serious than the easily unravelled knot of an examination?

Perhaps one could find out in some textbook? perhaps the Herr Professor would be able to tell us?

Does the brain choose the images to be retained? Or does the memory rest on a psychological trestle that can be pushed in any direction?

At the instant of balance, when the scale trembles between the polarities of night and day; what is it that returns?

The light rain showering in sunlight while we sheltered under the archway; and went on over green velvet grass, between mulberry trees: and strapped books on the carriers of bicycles or piled them in baskets fixed to the handlebars, on our way to the evening, to drink coffee, and to talk for hours.

And when we were sentimental, standing in front of the house where he used to live, the poet, the tears came in our eyes, and we were uplifted. We said to one another, We too will write beautiful words, we will be remembered. And we felt uplifted. While you are young you have splendid pure feelings. Afterwards it’s different, there are various euphonic substitutes.

Which are the prints to be pasted into the album out of the jumbled snapshots?

Traveller on the world’s oceans, in waking do you know the sea which rocks your temporary bed, or whether the shadow of the tropic bird or of the stormy petrel sidles across the deck? There are certain pictures which did not fade or get thrown away Look at the pictures quickly And you will catch your morning bird soaring above the towers, you will see your shadow fly over choristers and midsummer morning bells from the tower at the bridgehead.

There was a poem written for me on my comb; written very small with the nib of a pen used for mapping. And when we drifted in the punt, late, in the backwater, I combed my hair, and I was Orlando, I was not man nor girl, and I was Ariel, drifting between the worlds, and a poem in my hair.

I do not know why I must keep these pictures small eyes, mad eyes that should have been starry the lovely danger waiting beneath the lime tree or faces cheating as they pass by, frozen for ever in their fraudulent smiles with the clocks striking an uncounted hour masks

Why this one? Or that? How chosen?

Inexorable self, carried like the superfluous and tiresome piece of luggage which it is impossible to lose; franked with the customs’ stamp of every frontier, retrieved exasperatingly from the disaster where everything else is lost, companion of the dislocation of cancelled sailings and missed connections, witness of every catastrophe, survivor of all voyages and situations… I

FEELING more confidence in myself I was able to feel almost at home. At the university I met for the first time people who seemed to be of my own sort because their interests were like mine. These people could not be tigers, surely? They smiled at me, they wanted me for a friend; how could they be on the enemy side? I almost trusted them. But a barrier always stood between us, preventing friendship. I didn’t know what this barrier was. Sometimes I thought my mother’s shadow divided me from everything that went on in sunshine. I had only learnt how to be friends with shadows; it might be too late to learn the way of friendship in the sun.

Later I was thankful the barrier had not fallen. I found out that these people were not what they appeared; they were different from myself although they spoke a similar language. They were traitors who had betrayed their dark and magical origin for a cheap citizenship of the day. When I discovered this my confidence vanished, I felt afraid and ashamed. It was a terrible disappointment, a dreadful humiliation. When I saw how nearly I had been tricked into an alliance with traitors, I hid myself away in my secret room where no treacherous sight or sound could deceive me again.

HOW the summer country is with flowers. The simple country flowers, pure coloured and innocent, fill the air with their sweet freshness that is like a message telling everybody to be happy and good. Whether you go up on to the hills or down to the plain the fragrant message breathes all around you. Between the thymy aromatic cushions on the hillside, peals of harebells are soundlessly chiming. Under the burning green of the young beeches, bluebells spread a coolly translucent tide, and the wood anemones hold up their airy cups on stems as frail as the antennæ of moths. In the disused chalkpit at the foot of the hill the last primroses are lost in the long grass, together with wild white violets, themselves the colour of chalk. A small confetti of many-coloured stars trims the deserted track leading to the marshy fields where the plovers nest and fritillaries and king-cups stand up among the reeds. Milkmaids and cowslips share the meadows with daisies and buttercups; in the lanes, the hedges are spangled with dog-roses slowly turning pale in the sun.

As if to make sure that no one misses the goodwill that the flowers are everywhere distilling into the air, the birds have taken over responsibility for making their message vocal. Surely nobody could be impervious to the gay fountains of song that hundreds of invisible larks are spraying towards the sky? To say nothing about the music which comes from the thrush ambushed in lilacs, or the unearthly treble thread of the willow-wren.