It seems scarcely credible to me now that what I relate was the enchanting work of a brief morning. By noon we were already winding down the road to the little inn. On the way we came across the guardian who, though he had arrived too late, insisted on filling me with facts and dates which are utterly without sense. He spoke first in Greek and then, when he discovered I was an American, in English. When he had finished his learned recital he began talking about Coney Island. He had been a molasses-thrower on the boardwalk. He might just as well have said that he had been a wasp glued to the ceiling of an abandoned chateau for all the interest I showed. Why had he come back? The truth is he hadn’t come back. Nobody comes back who has once made the transatlantic voyage westward. He is still throwing molasses on the boardwalk. He came back to incarnate as a parrot, to talk this senseless parrot-language to other parrots who pay to listen. This is the language in which it is said that the early Greeks believed in gods, the word god no longer having any meaning but used just the same, thrown out like counterfeit money. Men who believe in nothing write learned tomes about gods who never existed. This is part of the cultural rigmarole. If you are very proficient at it you finally get a seat in the academy where you slowly degenerate into a full-fledged chimpanzee.
THE GHETTO (N.Y.)
(FROM SEXUS)
This section, as well as the rest of the book, was written in New York mostly, and written fast; it was later rewritten in Beverly Glen and in Big Sur. The war was still on, and I had little hopes of seeing it published. Little did I know that my publisher (in Paris) was still alive and that the books I had written there were selling like hot cakes.
The ghetto is the only part of New York which is dear to me. When I returned to America it was there I spent most of my time. It was only in this despised section of the city that I could meet up with an interesting character, usually a foreigner, to be sure. The crumbling architecture itself was an inspiration, to say nothing of the morbid, sordid streets leading to the water front.
What a world there was here, perhaps still is, despite all the efforts to clean it up!
Some minutes later, when we sauntered out into the violet light of early evening, I saw the ghetto with new eyes. There are summer nights in New York when the sky is pure azure, when the buildings are immediate and palpable, not only in their substance but in their essence. That dirty streaked light which reveals only the ugliness of factories and sordid tenements disappears very often with sunset, the dust settles down, the contours of the buildings become more sharply defined, like the lineaments of an ogre in a calcium spotlight. Pigeons appear in the sky, wheeling above the roof tops. A cupola bobs up, sometimes out of a Turkish Bath. There is always the stately simplicity of St. Marks-on-the-Bouwerie, the great foreign square abutting Avenue A, the low Dutch buildings above which the ruddy gas tanks loom, the intimate side streets with their incongruous American names, the triangles which bear the stamp of old landmarks, the waterfront with the Brooklyn shore so close that one can almost recognize the people walking on the other side. All the glamour of New York is squeezed into this pullulating area which is marked off by formaldehyde and sweat and tears. Nothing is so familiar, so intimate, so nostalgic to the New Yorker as this district which he spurns and rejects. The whole of New York should have been one vast ghetto: the poison should have been drained off, the misery apportioned; the joy should have been communicated through every vein and artery. The rest of New York is an abstraction; it is cold, geometrical, rigid as rigor mortis and, I might as well add, insane—if one can only stand apart and look at it undauntedly. Only in the beehive can one find the human touch, find that city of sights, sounds, smells which one hunts for in vain beyond the margins of the ghetto. To live outside the pale is to wither and die. Beyond the pale there are only dressed-up cadavers. They are wound up each day, like alarm clocks. They perform like seals; they die like box-office receipts. But in the seething honeycomb there is a growth as of plants, an animal warmth almost suffocating, a vitality which accrues from rubbing and glueing together, a hope which is physical as well as spiritual, a contamination which is dangerous but salutary. Small souls perhaps, burning like tapers, but burning steadily—and capable of throwing portentous shadows on the walls which hem them in.
Walk down any street in the soft violet light. Make the mind blank. A thousand sensations assault you at once from every direction. Here man is still furred and feathered; here cyst and quartz still speak. There are audible, voluble buildings with sheet-metal visors and windows that sweat; places of worship too, where the children drape themselves about the porticos like contortionists; rolling, ambulant streets where nothing stands still, nothing is fixed, nothing is comprehensible except through the eyes and mind of a dreamer. Hallucinating streets too, where suddenly all is silence, all is barren, as if after the passing of a plague. Streets that cough, streets that throb like a fevered temple, streets to die on and not a soul take notice. Strange, frangipanic streets, in which attar of roses mingles with the acrid bite of leek and scallion. Slippered streets, which echo with the pat and slap of lazy feet. Streets out of Euclid, which can be explained only by logic and theorem. . . .
Pervading all, suspended between the layers of the skin like a distillate of ruddy smoke, is the secondary sexual sweat—pubic, Orphic, mammalian—a heavy incense smuggled in by night on velvet pads of musk. No one is immune, not even the Mongoloid idiot. It washes over you like the brush and passage of camisoled breasts. In a light rain it makes an invisible etherial mud. It is of every hour, even when rabbits are boiled to a stew. It glistens in the tubes, the follicles, the papillaries. As the earth slowly wheels, the stoops and banisters turn and the children with them; in the murky haze of sultry nights all that is terrene, volupt and fatidical hums like a zither. A heavy wheel plated with fodder and feather-beds, with little sweet-oil lamps and drops of pure animal sweat. All goes round and round, creaking, wobbling, lumbering, whimpering sometimes, but round and round and round. Then, if you become very still, standing on a stoop, for instance, and carefully think no thoughts, a myopic, bestial clarity besets your vision. There is a wheel, there are spokes, and there is a hub. And in the center of the hub there is—exactly nothing. It is where the grease goes, and the axle. And you are there, in the center of nothingness, sentient, fully expanded, whirring with the whir of planetary wheels. Everything becomes alive and meaningful, even yesterday’s snot which clings to the door knob. Everything sags and droops, is mossed with wear and care; everything has been looked at thousands of times, rubbed and caressed by the occipital eye. . . .
A man of an olden race standing in a stone trance. He smells the food which his ancestors cooked in the millenary past: the chicken, the liver paste, the stuffed fish, the herrings, the eiderdown ducks. He has lived with them and they have lived in him. Feathers float through the air, the feathers of winged creatures caged in crates—as it was in Ur, in Babylon, in Egypt and Palestine. The same shiny silks, blacks turning green with age: the silks of other times, of other cities, other ghettos, other pogroms. Now and then a coffee grinder or a samovar, a little wooden casket for spices, for the myrrh and aloes of the East. Little strips of carpet—from the souks and bazaars, from the emporiums of the Levant; bits of astrakhan, laces, shawls, nubies, and petticoats of flaming, flouncing flamingo. Some bring their birds, their little pets—warm, tender things pulsing with tremulous beat, learning no new language, no new melodies, but pining away, droopy, listless, languishing in their super-heated cages suspended above the fire escapes. The iron balconies are festooned with meat and bedding, with plants and pets—a crawling still life in which even the rust is rapturously eaten away. With the cool of the evening the young are exposed like eggplants; they lie back under the stars, lulled to dream by the obscene jabberwocky of the American street. Below, in wooden casks, are the pickles floating in brine. Without the pickle, the pretzel, the Turkish sweets, the ghetto would be without savor. Bread of every variety, with seeds and without. White, black,
brown, even gray bread—of all weights, all consistencies. . . .
The ghetto! A marble table top with a basket of bread. A bottle of seltzer water, preferably blue. A soup with egg drops. And two men talking. Talking, talking, talking, with burning cigarettes hanging from their blenched lips. Nearby a cellar with music: strange instruments, strange costumes, strange airs. The birds begin to warble, the air becomes over-heated, the bread piles up, the seltzer bottles smoke and sweat. Words are dragged like ermine through the spittled sawdust; growling, guttural dogs paw the air. Spangled women choked with tiaras doze heavily in their richly upholstered caskets of flesh. The magnetic fury of lust concentrates in dark, mahogany eyes.
In another cellar an old man sits in his overcoat on a pile of wood, counting his coal. He sits in the dark, as he did in Cracow, stroking his beard. His life is all coal and wood, little voyages from darkness to daylight. In his ears is still the ring of hoofs on cobbled streets, the sound of shrieks and screams, the clatter of sabers, the splash of bullets against a blank wall. In the cinema, in the synagogue, in the coffee house, wherever one sits, two kinds of music playing—one bitter, one sweet. One sits in the middle of a river called Nostalgia. A river filled with little souvenirs gathered from the wreckage of the world. Souvenirs of the homeless, of birds of refuge building again and again with sticks and twigs. Everywhere broken nests, egg shells, fledgelings with twisted necks and dead eyes staring into space. Nostalgic river dreams under tin copings, under rusty sheds, under capsized boats. A world of mutilated hopes, of strangled aspirations, of bullet-proof starvation. A world where even the warm breath of life has to be smuggled in, where gems big as pigeons’ hearts are traded for a yard of space, an ounce of freedom. All is compounded into a familiar liver paste which is swallowed on a tasteless wafer. In one gulp there is swallowed down five thousand years of bitterness, five thousand years of ashes, five thousand years of broken twigs, smashed egg shells, strangled fledgelings. . . .
In the deep subcellar of the human heart the dolorous twang of the iron harp rings out.
Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, somber, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers, the devourers, the avengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.
BIG SUR INVOCATION
(FROM BIG SUR AND THE
ORANGES OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH)
My intention, when writing this book, was to make it almost twice as long as it is. There were more portraits I intended to add, particularly of some of the amazing women who have come and gone. There was one person whose full portrait should have been included because, even in his lifetime, he had become a legendary creature: Jaime di Angulo. What little I have said about him, in the section dealing with Conrad Moricand, is nothing.
However, because of my mother’s approaching death, I cut the book short. Almost the last thing I did, before leaving for New York, was to write “In the Beginning,” which the editor aptly calls an “invocation.” (I can never think of such words when I want them!)
It was the spirit of Jaime di Angulo that I was invoking—Jaime and his dream of America—for his spirit was as wild and unpredictable as this wild and lonely coast where he finally anchored. Cultured though he was, versed in so many things—medicine, folklore, magic, anthropology, languages—what he really craved was a virginal world, a world unspoiled by man. Such a world existed here only a few short years ago. Now only the trees and wild animals are insured protection against the ravages of progress. Man everywhere is doomed to be destroyed by his own inventions.
In other, olden times there were only phantoms. In the beginning, that is. If there ever was a beginning.
It was always a wild, rocky coast, desolate and forbidding to the man of the pavements, eloquent and enchanting to the Taliessins. The homesteader never failed to unearth fresh sorrows.
There were always birds: the pirates and scavengers of the blue as well as the migratory variety. (At intervals the condor passed, huge as an ocean liner.) Gay in plumage, their beaks were hard and cruel. They strung out across the horizon like arrows tied to an invisible string. In close they seemed content to dart, dip, swoop, careen. Some followed the cliffs and breakers, others sought the canyons, the gold-crested hills, the marble-topped peaks.
There were also the creeping, crawling creatures, some sluggish as the sloth, others full of venom, but all absurdly handsome. Men feared them more than the invisible ones who chattered like monkeys at fall of night.
To advance, whether on foot or on horseback, was to tangle with spikes, thorns, creepers, with all that pricks, clings, stabs and poisons.
Who lived here first? Troglodytes perhaps. The Indian came late. Very late.
Though young, geologically speaking, the land has a hoary look. From the ocean depths there issued strange formations, contours unique and seductive. As if the Titans of the deep had labored for aeons to shape and mold the earth. Even millennia ago the great land birds were startled by the abrupt aspect of these risen shapes.
There are no ruins or relics to speak of. No history worth recounting. What was not speaks more eloquently than what was.
Here the redwood made its last stand.
At dawn its majesty is almost painful to behold. That same prehistoric look. The look of always. Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity.
Far below, the seals bask on the warm rocks, squirming like fat brown worms. Above the steady roar of the breakers their hoarse bark can be heard for miles.
Were there once two moons? Why not? There are mountains that have lost their scalps, streams that boil under the high snows. Now and then the earth rumbles, to level a city or open a new vein of gold.
At night the boulevard is studded with ruby eyes.
And what is there to match a faun as it leaps the void? Toward eventime, when nothing speaks, when the mysterious hush descends, envelops all, says all.
Hunter, put down your gun! It is not the slain which accuse you, but the silence, the emptiness. You blaspheme.
I see the one who dreamed it all as he rides beneath the stars. Silently he enters the forest. Each twig, each fallen leaf, a world beyond all knowing. Through the ragged foliage the splintered light scatters gems of fancy; huge heads emerge, the remains of stolen giants.
“My horse! My land! My kingdom!” The babble of idiots.
Moving with the night, horse and rider inhale deep draughts of pine, of camphor, of eucalyptus. Peace spreads its naked wings.
Was it ever meant to be otherwise?
Kindness, goodness, peace and mercy. Neither beginning nor end. The round. The eternal round.
And ever the sea recedes. Moon drag. To the west, new land, new figures of earth. Dreamers, outlaws, forerunners. Advancing toward the other world of long ago and far away, the world of yesterday and tomorrow. The world within the world.
From what realm of light were we shadows who darken the earth spawned?
STORIES
PICODIRIBIBI
(FROM PLEXUS)
How I ever managed to finish Plexus is now a mystery to me. Nothing but domestic troubles, financial worries, bad quarters to work in—room too small, too hot, too cold, and so on. Every now and then my daughter, Valentine, just a tot, would knock at the window and beg me to play with her. Sometimes I invited her into my office, pretending that I was a physician or an analyst, according to the mood, and we would then have a long discussion about her imaginary ailments. Delicious, nonsensical sessions—practically my only diversion.
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