OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I remember. That’s how.
All four of us spoke at once. And here is how it was:
MARIE: was the loudest. “O-nathema! Spy in the sky! And you, you traitoress—who have turned both your pupil and yourself into a—”
SHE, MENTOR: was waving and calling, and heroically pronouncing all her aitches.
I: crouched over the abyss. I crouched, yet I felt on tiptoe. I felt such a melting feeling, and the computer said never a word. Ah you dears, you dears, I said to myself, and the abyss echoed my fears. “Hypnosis never,” I said; “hypothesis forever.” How far I had come! For of all three was I not the most various? Finally, crying aloud the name of Ours, I—did I jump? Was I pushed?
And here we all come round again.
MENTOR: “Allons, enfants de la pa-atrie-e …”
MARIE: “—a MAN!”
I fell.
The crack said: CRACK.
6. Off
LET ME NOW, IN gentler perspective and more according to your unities, describe the state of our company, as of then.
In falling, I had grazed my teacher, not to the injury of either of us, but dislodging those veils which covered the top of her. My first attention, however, was directed toward Marie, who was still discharging vituperation in a steady, mewling outrage.
“Stop!” I said—and this was cruel of me, for We never quite do, of course; motionless as we may seem to you, we are always a trifle on the tremolo. “Turn off your Observo.” This can be done only on command. “And go spin in a—in a corner.” How far had I come indeed!
Yet when I tried to look straight at my mentor, I was so abashed that I altogether failed. Slowly, a swelling of my pores—brought on by my fall—abated; technically, I could see, but between Her and me a somatic mist still prevailed. It had nothing to do with the bodily shames to either of our worlds germane. And all my questions, now answered, had vanished like itches scratched. Actually, a one of these remained but I had forgotten it; if behind those veils some change in the being there had been hidden, what could that mean to me, who had never seen its archetype?
You—or at least a one-side of You, were here. I was in Your presence. The ages, sand over sand, had shifted so that we might encounter. And a one of you, in whatever guise, was surely a surrogate for all of you—on the curve that you shared with us how could it be otherwise? The mist was of my own making; as You perspire fear, so We suspire awe. Awe is our emotion, the perfect tapering of a civilization in pause. When its mist lifted I would see You in all your opposite.
The mist lifted. I saw.
There is no O to say it with. There were no words. Of descriptions—only deficiencies. Going by the animal-plates, you were not even faintly comparable, yet I had nothing else with which to compare. Even now, used as I am to the crude manners of retrospect here—how the moment after forever corrupts the one before it—I scarcely ever look at any a one of you with a sense of deja vu. As many as I see of You, I never have seen you before. And though by now I have accustomed myself to those simplifications in which you see yourselves as viewed “fillface” or “prefile,” the truth is that, with a stubborn geometry akin to that of your own artists, I tend to see you mostly in the rind.
And now, from the neck up only but at least, I saw you. Horns, tusks, antennae, the great tongues of the giant herbivores, all floated forever out of my imagings, also those stripings behind whose bars the cats forever patrol themselves. I gave up forever all hope of the dinosauric archways, of that affinity of elephant and tapir, the brontothere, whose sweet, paleolithic expression had for long intrigued me. As for below-neck, even though it were veiled, I could see You were not wingedly archeopteryx. I had no way of knowing whether You were hoofly ungulate. You were a niggle. You were an enigma. The hints of one or other of all of these that would now and then escape into a one of You were as yet unknown to me—or that you were a niggle of them all. I saw only You. You were You.
I saw that great proboscis of the slender nares (here was there perhaps the faintest hint of Phoenicopterus, the flamingo?)—ignorant of whether I was looking at it downside up or aft fore, and who knows, perhaps I wasn’t. Fresh from otherbeing, I saw you. This is the best way to see you, and sometimes I still can. Next, observing the dark strands drawn into a great whorl at odds from the proboscis, I surmised that I might yet have the bit of fur I fancied. The leafings I presumed were ears—so unobstrusive, at least in terms of your own reference book. As I stared, the nostrils quivered. Below them, an opening, irregularly shaped but yet of a certain symmetry, tremored wide, then bud-closed. Other planes of bone-flesh might later take on their symmetric also, but at the moment my vision was untrained to see much past the fact that the classic ovaline was nowhere within you, at least in that part which I now saw. If ever I was to consider you beautiful, I would have to learn to look at you romantically. A classic is a One that may be looked at in toto, or, as We say, in Only. With You, the sight must continually wander.
But, strange beyond strange, all the time I was observing this, meanwhile just on the brink of marvel, just over the border of envy—what else is criticism?—I did not quite feel You were here, You were behind somewhere.
Then, suddenly, in the midst of this protoplasmic puzzle in which pore aslant pore fought whether to flee or stay, suddenly there opened—the pit, the jewel—what great signet of what great cabalist was here? Even in the midst of a great and primitive art, as your faces so often seem to me, one tires after a while of these blind witnesses of the primordial struggle and yearns to stumble upon a sign of Our latterday consciousness. Now and then One starts, One stares—there it is!—but falls back disappointed, perhaps so, yes perhaps so—but divided now, that orb which seemed to lead both into and away from the dark interior, from the tom-tom dark. Always divided, as is the habit here, as were those glinting pairs of orbs in my source book—always divided into two.
But this one, situated north of the arch of nose, south of the ledge of the brow, seemed to stretch horizontal, from temple to temple. Had it once been two, melted by too many maybes, into one? As I watched, it closed and reopened—a sentry returning, a searchlight on the rove. I had not known that you had our form anywhere here, except in your copybooks. And here you had it, an amulet set in the very head your primer so values. I must not worship, I said to myself. I must not. Yet it was such a perfect ellipse.
There was a scream from the corner where Marie was. This is the trouble with corners and why we are so earnest not to have them, being allowed but one scream in our lifetime, and one—but anon.
“Oh my poor girl. You’ve got stuck betwee—een!”
What a state of between we were all in, to be sure—why should hers be the worst?
“Oh my poor girl,” cried Marie again. That sort of thing repeated begins to sound smug. Two-ness of this sort can be extremely tiresome, but appears to be what they expect of themselves. “Whatever, ever are you going to do!”
Typical of the transitive atmosphere here. Not what are you, but what do you. No wonder they have no strong Now but merely a gaggle of is-isn’t actions of various sizes and locations all over their globe.
She meanwhile, in one sinuous movement—how they move here!—but that will come later—so rearranged herself that from the center of her veils only that one long, lucent eye in beautiful extent, temple to temple, regarded me. What could be wrong with that?
Yet, doubts of your most tonic variety assailed me. Just as, or in somewhat the same way as I had traveled past Us, and Marie had traveled past Her, she had traveled past You. You, or precisely You—were still to come.
Or was that long amulet only my own hallucination of home, and—incited by the sight of me—theirs of their future? (What is mutation?) Here we all were for the moment, willy-nilly, in our triple vision, and armies of both of us shortly to be crossing, as theirs had once prepared to cross moonward but thought to stop there. And thought to stop there! Meanwhile
, what armies, what latitudes impossible to a fixed eternity were crossing here! Perhaps betwixt-and-between was the normal here—this mixture being the only in which a One—and a one—might get past all the eternities, or deep enough in them, to feel, crisscross for a second, what I was feeling. For under that powerful orb I grew a feeling so simple that it frightened me. So simple, the utter fantasticality of right-here, so—mortal! The rod of Here pierced me.
I felt such a right-hereness as remains inconceivable before and after it occurs—yet is the sensation one hunts for here continuously in all those tempting niches in which they keep its wandering icon; next-the-corner, around-the-door. In this improbable place-space, She and I had trapped it between us. In it, she spoke, that great elliptic eye meanwhile traversing me totally, taking in me as my vision similarly took in her.
“So, ’ere we are,” she said. “So this is You.”
Are. What can one do with such a moment except live it, and, poised on its thin cuticle, be together the collision that living is?
“So, You are here,” she said. “How unimaginable You are.”
How was it, then, that she seemed only to give me my I-ness, renewed?
What did I give her?
Long and long, when the wee small hours here are at their true large, I brood on it, not without pride.
“The sight of the pupil inspires the teacher.” She whispered this, sotto voce, so that perhaps only I—
Then, in a most businesslike manner, she repeated, this time without appendage, “—’voir, Marie.” And added, at no reply, “Well, I’m off. One is.”
“Not … to, to—” Marie, audienced by me, dared not move, though I noted that her Observo was on again, an ambience ordinarily not apparent except in those of us who are retarded, or otherwise incomplete.
“To Hobbs? Not quite yet. One will leave that to you others.” There was a pause in which for a trice I fancied that I heard space, saw time and smelled thought, in the old unbroken blend. “And to Harry,” she said then. She pronounced it impeccably, this sentence with which she left him. (Leavings-behind are legion here, but I am still sensitive to them.) Drawing herself up tall, she was all veil now, in which only the wish might detect a new-swelling curve. “If becoming a One is the order of the day, a one cannot avoid it. But I will drag my heels, my heart and my brain all the way. I vow it. Every step of the way, I will remember.”
Remember.
In its wake, she repeated, though fainter, that catechism of theirs, of such peculiar electric, charged with all We are charged against, but this time in such a confusion of terms, such a changing of heads as to who bled, killed, starved or bore, that I heard only the last word clearly, “—is.” Her courage seemed to me improvident—and reminiscent. “Until it dies in One-ness, the I will remember the I,” she said. “And will record it.”
And I could not speak, for remembering my One-ness. Oh lost, oh lost-lost. But found, found. For, they had it. You have it. You too have the cosmic emotion. We all.
“Adieu.”
She said no more. I was not surprised. Marie, for all her hibernatory prayers and festerings, had arrived at whatever Marie now was in the old, conventional mole-in-the-dark way of evolution; Marie was a sport. She, my mentor, and I were of a different breed—the conscious ones. We shall become—and know it. And if after that we still weren’t exactly the lights of the worlds—well, it wouldn’t have been for want of trying.
When I looked up—wherever had I been looking in the meantime?—she was gone.
“Was One deceived in what One saw?” said Marie, impudent now. “Or did that creature go—up!”
We both looked in that direction. The crack, that sly-boots, had all but disappeared now, in favor of the sky, but I was not deceived. As I have remarked in a previous context, I knew the difference between a floor and a ceiling, and all that sky brought in to confuse me made no exception. The crack was still there somewhere. Had she gone up through it?
For the first time, I took more detailed stock of the place, which, in its glorification of the busy-busy, was not unlike our orifices at home, though where at home the powers-that-be went in for bureaucracies of infinitely luminous ideas, here they hid behind the solider oligarchy of things. Three walls—I could count up to three in anything now—were patterning away at a stately rate with those calligraphies of light which meant that the observable world was being masticated, perforated and remythicated—the non-observable residue being left, as usual, to be swallowed whole. But in the wall after three, there was—ha!
“There’s a door,” I said. Just as remarkable if she went through that, far as I was concerned.
Marie was pouting. I meanwhile felt so frisky that I ventured a local joke which the computer had offered me in friendlier hours. “Just came down from Cornwall myself,” I said larkily. “What’s the matter, never seen a Cornishman before?”
By her shudder, I tipped to what the offense was. “Oh not really. You can see for yourself.” Bluff, since I had no knowledge of what there would have been to see. “But I have high hopes of gender. The straightest.”
“Shouldn’t wonder,” said Marie. “She’ll have only herself to blame. Meantime, ought to complain to the authorities, we ought. Whatever did they have in mind, sending us a runt?”
It is true that my full seventy-eight inches of You-ness was not too different from what I had been as a One. It was equally clear that Marie knew no military history, or perhaps history of any kind—including her own recent one.
I looked at her so that she curved in markedly—corners had their uses. I myself might not know as yet what I was for here, certainly not as steadily as the dear departed and revered. But I knew what I was against, and just as strongly as, a while back, had been counseled. I was against Marie-ness, and all hypothecation or extrapolation of the same. More intimately speaking—oh the advantages here—I was against Marie.
Yet, I had to get on. All I knew about my American destination was its name—Hobbs—and its purpose—that second dialogue which would complete my preparation for this world. Where I was to be quartered, and who my interlocutor, was still unknown to me. Unless I wanted to bumble out among the populace—which, in the way events were let run free here, might cause anything from fatality to inconvenience—Marie was my sole connect.
“Dear a One,” I said. “Do not think that this a One will ever cease to be grateful for the part that you a One have played in Our education.” Always talk to parvenus in the most formal language one possesses; your dignity will that way be preserved, and theirs—to their delight—created.
No reply. She would tend to be suspicious of my good will, not having much of it toward me. Ah, these psychological, the air here was simply ringing with them. Then I remembered a plainer fact, that she was still in the corner.
“Do come forward,” I said, which released her. “Spin anywhere. Feel free. Really, One would never know you had not been One of Us from the beginning.” Actually, her texture was awful, in fact visible. “One wishes particularly to thank you a One for the gift of that most useful of phrases for the expression of the celebratizzical and amazingular; in fact, might One not be right if One sometimes suspects it to be the most supremely useful phrase in all variation?” Ask for information; it flatters.
A tough customer not to be soothed, or perhaps a fearful one. For the newcomer, as I had begun to take note of in myself, floating clouds of paranoia lurk everywhere. And when I recalled what it was she did me the honor to suspect me of—“Good God!” I said, then recovered myself neatly. “You may perhaps still recall the phrase: good God.”
“Aeow. Aeow quite. As One recalls, rather dimmishly to be sure, that’s only the half of it.”
“Indeed,” I said, all new and just gushing from the crater—perhaps that was the tack. “One would indeed be grateful if—if Your One-ness would—would consider giving me the other half, in that case. One did rather think that, given the hyphenated state of affairs here, there must be also
some other phrase, some antonym—”
“You’ll find it on one Wall, once One is off. One oneself would rather not—” Here Marie very subtly spun away from my vicinity, this time ducking the corner; no doubt about it their curving is very deft; or is it coy? They? “One must be getting off, or rather, on. Well, see You, One day-day. See You around-the-around.”
I’m afraid—I mean I’m proud to say—I lost control of myself; I was evolving beautifully. “But what about my Orders!” I even wailed it. “The hospitality here—every a One is always leaving. I’m always being left behind, left to myself, left, left, left! You’re all so swervous. I’ve never been so much a loner in my—I demand my orders!”
How could I have forgotten that a One must never be charged or addressed that directly, Our whole nature being ovoidal, not confrontal. Our?
“You’ll find things here are not so out-in-the-oval as at home.” Her voice was already hypnoid with going; she was on the fade. Whatever would i do? i felt myself shrinking to the nothing-without-company that the i so often is here.
Luckily, she had a last twinge of her former hasty, botchy self. “You might find them in that little collection of objects she appears to have let drop. Over there on the floor, runt. You seem to be getting all blind behind.”
I was, was I? I. Immediately I felt reinvigorated. I wasn’t only being left behind. According to the familiar multiple here, I was acquiring behindness in other ways—in fact I must already have it. I had a behind. Which must mean I also had a befront. Scrutinizing me as best I could, so far I found none of the coveted lumps, buds, et cetera—but, yes, if rather patchily, the beginnings of opacity. Then, even that interesting new envelopment lost my attention, in favor of—there it was on the floor, behind behind-me. The little collection.
It seemed to rest there in an aura of its owner, its former owner. Indeed, formerness interfused it, perhaps to show me how that emotion could sometimes be located here. The very floor seemed to hold its small group discriminately, if not with positive leaning. They were few, these objects. They were: a one, a two, a three thin little books, and a one as thin but in size more to the folio, a glass-and-silver folding lorgnette whose function and form I knew from our own museum specimens, and two-three to several, slender U-shapes whose use I didn’t know—those made of bone having a few humps center-oval, those of slim wire or metal being a plain U. Twist together the ends of any of these latter and each would make quite a passable ellipse—there was much of the curve in her nature.
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 18
