Basic Forms

by Skolnik, Fred;

  The click of the balls on the green felt table was always the first sound he heard when he ran down the steps with his pocketful of jingling coins. That was the year they played the Banana Boat Song on the jukebox every day and drank soup in paper cups from the new machine.

  He saw her at the university once, walking as in a dream, with her elfin face and dreamy smile. She cried when she saw the drops of blood on the clean white sheet and he could not comfort her.

  He lived in Europe for a while and found a place near Union Square. She put up curtains and hung some paintings on the walls. Children came. He heard their laughter in the street.

  Time passes like water in the sand but the earth abides and the city of the mind is eternal, perceived, remembered, felt, its long, narrow streets like canyons steeped in shadow on a quiet Sunday afternoon. You walked down one of these streets many years ago. It was a street of warehouses or office buildings, entirely deserted, and you were alone. It must have been spring or summer. The air was hot and very still. Such heat and perfect peace and yearning and something you could almost touch. It was there on that day and would remain in me forever, and with it the seeds of this dream or vision.

  And these were the things that were at the center of his life. And he could weep when he thought of them. And he felt such pain and such regret and such shame and such remorse and he knew it would be good if he could weep, but he could not. And he waited now for a revelation, but it did not come. These women—they were forged of his own flesh, they were figments of his own imagination, though they might have lived within themselves. And his desire was so overpowering and so confused that he wanted to lose himself forever and for all time. Marion. Harriet. The woman without a face. This dream. This vision. The silence of empty rooms. The report of a woman’s heels against the pavement. The drone of a plane in the summer sky. And he could hear that music now.

  I saw her once standing in the kitchen. She was baking a cake, I think, or tasting something from a pot, and though she was somewhat overweight the fine calves of her strong legs swelled out deliciously above those high, square heels. The radio was playing. He was mixing a drink. They were bickering about some trip they planned to take—routes, gasoline, accommodations, the children’s colds.

  Or was it Marion standing there in those silver slippers with her reddish hair and slender neck, humming perhaps while she worked and the kitchen bright and cheerful and the children playing in the other room? I cannot say.

  Art, exile, rebellion—are these too not great acts of affirmation?

  To relinquish the world. To relinquish one’s dream of the world and affirm the sickness in one’s spirit. This rage, this terror, this strangled cry—to throw it into the world with yourself in all its fury, letting it drive you on through the forest and over the hills and across the river that roars like a fist or a hammer or a knife that cuts and cuts and tears and cuts and tears the world away.

  This rage, this terror, this cry that would consume the universe—it moves in me.

  It is in the renunciation of the world and the hope of the world, it is in the absence of love and the possibility of love, it is in the affirmation of oneself as he who cannot and will not that the motions of grace begin.

  Out there, that is yours, I concede the world to you, but in here this is mine, and you shall not touch it.

  Lonely is this small space, this small corner of the universe, but here I make my stand, here, in this place I choose to make my stand. Here I raise my fist and wait for my time to come.

  Truly the world diminishes us, causes us to shrink into ourselves, intimidated by those who would assume the universe with their roaring appetites and avaricious little eyes. And we would languish there, sick in spirit and crippled in our sex, suffering ourselves silently and in despair. You know the signs: resentment, doubt, the pain of wounded pride and the thousand little deceits that enable us to endure. Fires smolder, flames flare up, the heat would burn our flesh away.

  But a sickness that celebrates itself is no longer a sickness but a vital force. I am he who cannot and will not. I flee the scalpel of the healer who would cut my soul away. I affirm my condition. I celebrate it. Glad am I to be myself and none other. I will not dissipate this heat, I shall not surrender it, I will preserve it in myself, for it is mine.

  You went your way and I went my way and what a long way I have come. I take leave of you, I bid you a fond farewell. Truly we must throw ourselves away before we can redeem ourselves. So a world is given. So a world is lost. Terrible to lose a world.

  To burn the final bridge and seek oneself on the other shore with no way back—that is the most terrible freedom of all, freedom that is not a condition to be lived but truly the naked horror itself—the horror of not having a world, the terror of having a self without a world. And it is in this utter horror of losing the world rather than the idea of freedom itself that the meaning of the act is to be sought. For the act of throwing away the world is the supreme affirmation of the self.

  O this freedom that is only terror magnified a thousandfold. How one craves it! To take the plunge once and for all eternity and in that instant to be absolutely free.

  The horror can be imagined, the freedom cannot. In the instant of absolute and terrifying freedom when the plunge is made, shattering forever all hopes, dreams and illusions, there is nothing anymore but your own strangled cry. We turn to find ourselves and find nothing. And yet we are there, in a new relation to the universe. It is in the contemplation of the horror made actual that absolute freedom is found.

  Imagine now the dizzying height, the wind, the insectlike creatures down below, the traffic that flowed in every direction so far away, as if life went on like a reel of film spinning round and round in an empty room, or the earth on its axis, oblivious to the thousand little dramas unfolding all around.

  It must have been, in a way, not only terrifying but exhilarating to contemplate the moment, to savor it without

  committing oneself to it, as if that alone were enough, prolonged indefinitely, or until the doubt set in or simple cowardice took hold, shattering the illusion. It is essential therefore to regard the contemplation of the act as an essential part of it, a necessary prelude if you will. Truly it is exhilarating to contemplate the coming moment, to have the world and not to have the world, to teeter on the edge.

  This space, so high above the world, his alone, so small, the door swung shut or barricaded, the parapet where the gun stands upright and ready for use, giving him little room to pace or carry out the elaborate ceremony of preparation. You’d think there’d be a kind of frenzy in him but he is calm, a certain gravity or businesslike intensity coming over him as he considers the technical problems involved – loading and reloading, the timing and spacing, the pattern, the unfolding of the scene. He holds the gun and peers down the sights for a long moment, almost giving way to the impulse to fire all at once. But it must be done simply and naturally, the sights fixed at random on one figure and then another, the shots ringing out one after another, evenly spaced and with a long pause in between, and then he will be free at last, in one body and one soul.

  This is what had been in his mind all this time, all these years, all these months and weeks and days. Great acts liberate the spirit. Great thoughts liberate the imagination. Had it not been for this one great thought it would all have been lost, buried forever, an entire world unrealized, unrevealed, dreadful! dreadful! He was glad to have had this thought, even if it would destroy him. Truly it had been remarkable how everything had fallen into place. It had taken years really, a lifetime, but once the idea was there the rest had followed naturally, piece by piece, ever more elaborate, profound, diffuse, translucent, until the design had come to resemble the idea itself.

  I am alone again, here, in this dark place, and it is good. There was madness in me then and still it moves in me as I remember other times and other places. And her face. And her hair.
And all the things that might have been. And all the things that will never be. Three or four days. Three or four moments. This is the essence of a life. This is our share in eternity. And the rest? The rest is literature. The rest is memory. And desire. And rage, and terror—rage and terror and the anguish of living and dying.