And then suddenly I get a real inspiration. I take it to the sink and after soaking it well I scrub it with the nail brush. I scrub and scrub and then I hold the picture upside down, letting the colors coagulate. Then gin gerly, very gingerly, I flatten it out on my desk. It’s a masterpiece, I tell you! I’ve been studying it for the last three hours….
You may say it’s just an accident, this masterpiece, and so it is! But then, so is the Twenty-third Psalm. Every birth is miraculous-and inspired. What appears now before my eyes is the result of innumerable mistakes, withdrawals, erasures, hesitations; it is also the result of certitude. You would like to give the nail brush credit, and the water credit. Do so-by all means. Give everybody and everything credit. Credit Dante, credit Spinoza, credit Hieronymus Bosch. Credit Cash and debit Societe Anonyme. Put in the Day Book: Tante Melia. So. Draw a balance. Out by a penny, eh? If you could take a penny from your pocket and balance the books you would do so. But you are no longer dealing with actual pennies. There is no machine clever enough to devise, to counterfeit, this penny which does not exist. The world of real and counterfeit is behind us. Out of the tangible we have invented the intangible.
When you can draw up a clean balance you will no longer have a picture. Now you have an intangible, an accident, and you sit up all night with the open ledger cracking your skull over it. You have a minus sign on your hands. All live, interesting data is labeled minus. When you find the plus equivalent you have-nothing. You have that imaginary, momentary something called “a balance.” A balance never is. It’s a fraud, like stopping the clock, or like calling a truce. You strike a balance in order to add a hypothetical weight, in order to create a reason for your existence.
I have never been able to draw a balance. I am always minus something. I have a reason therefore to go on. I am putting my whole life into the balance in order that it may produce nothing. To get to nothing you have to lay out an infinitude of figures. That’s just it: in the living equation the sign for myself is infinity. To get nowhere you must traverse every known universe: you must be everywhere in order to be nowhere. To have disorder you must destroy every form of order. To go mad you must have a terrific accumulation of sanities. All the madmen whose works have inspired me were touched by a cold sanity. They have taught me nothing-because the balance sheets which they bequeathed to us have been falsified. Their calculations are meaningless to me-because the figures have been altered. The marvelous gilt-edged ledgers which they handed down have the hideous beauty of plants which are forced in the night.
My masterpiece! It’s like a splinter under the nail. I ask you, now that you are looking at it, do you see in it the lakes beyond the Urals? do you see the mad Kotchei balancing himself with a paper parasol? do you see the arch of Trajan breaking through the smoke of Asia? do you see the penguins thawing in the Himalayas? do you see the Creeks and the Seminoles gliding through the cemetery gates? do you see the fresco from the Upper Nile, with its flying geese, its bats and aviaries? do you see the marvelous pommels of the Crusaders and the saliva that washed them down? do you see the wigwams belching fire? do you see the alkali sinks and the mule bones and the gleaming borax? do you see the tomb of Belshazzar, or the ghoul who is rifling it? do you see the new mouths which the Colorado will open up? do you see the starfish lying on their backs and the molecules supporting them? do you see the bursting eyes of Alexander, or the grief that inspired it? do you see the ink on which the squibs are feeding?
No, I’m afraid you don’t! You see only the bleak blue angel frozen by the glaciers. You do not even see the umbrella ribs, because you are not trained to look for umbrella ribs. But you see an angel, and you see a horse’s ass. And you may keep them: they are for you! There are no pockmarks on the angel now-only a cold blue spotlight which throws into relief his fallen stomach and his broken arches. The angel is there to lead you to Heaven, where it is all plus and no minus. The angel is there like a watermark, a guarantee of your faultless vision. The angel has no goiter; it is the artist who has the goiter. The angel is there to drop sprigs of parsley in your omelette, to put a shamrock in your buttonhole. I could scrub the mythology out of the horse’s mane; I could scrub the yellow out of the Yangtsze Kiang; I could scrub the date out of the man in the gondola; I could scrub out the clouds and the tissue paper in which were wrapped the bouquets with forked lightning…. But the angel 1 can’t scrub out. The angel is my watermark.
The Tailor Shop
I’ve got a motter: always merry and bright!
The day used to start like this: “Ask so-and-so for a little something on account, but don’t insult him!” They were ticklish bastards, all these old farts we catered to. It was enough to drive any man to drink. There we were, just opposite the Olcott, Fifth Avenue tailors even though we weren’t on the Avenue. A joint corporation of father and son, with mother holding the boodle.
Mornings, eight A.M. or thereabouts, a brisk intellectual walk from Delancey Street and the Bowery to just below the Waldorf. No matter how fast I walked old man Bendix was sure to be there ahead of me, raising hell with the cutter because neither of the bosses was on the job. How was it we could never get there ahead of that old buzzard Bendix? He had nothing to do, Bendix, but run from the tailor to the shirtmaker and from the shirtmaker to the jeweler’s; his rings were either too loose or too tight, his watch was either twentyfive seconds slow or thirty-three seconds fast. He raised hell with everybody, including the family doctor, because the latter couldn’t keep his kidneys clear of gravel. If we made him a sack coat in August by October it was too large for him, or too small.
When he could find nothing to complain about he would dress on the right side so as to have the pleasure of bawling the pants maker out because he was strangling his, H. W. Bendix’s, balls. A difficult guy. Touchy, whimsical, mean, crotchety, miserly, capricious, malevolent. When I look back on it all now, see the old man sitting down to table with his boozy breath and saying shit why don’t some one smile, why do you all look so glum, I feel sorry for him and for all merchant tailors who have to kiss rich people’s asses. If it hadn’t been for the Olcott bar across the way and the sots he picked up there God knows what would have become of the old man. He certainly got no sympathy at home. My mother hadn’t the least idea what it meant to be kissing rich people’s backsides. All she knew how to do was to groan and lament all day, and with her groaning and lamenting she brought on the boozy breath and the potato dumplings grown cold. She got us so damned jumpy with her anxiety that we would choke on our own spittle, my brother and I. My brother was a halfwit and he got on the old man’s nerves even more than H. W. Bendix with his “Pastor So-and-so’s going to Europe…. Pastor So-and-so’s going to open a bowling alley,” etc. “Pastor So-and-so’s an ass,” the old man would say, “and why aren’t the dumplings hot?”
There were three Bendixes-H. W., the grumpy one, A. F., whom the old man referred to in the ledger as Albert, and R.N., who never visited the shop because his legs were cut off, a circumstance, however, which did not prevent him from wearing out his trousers in due season. R. N. I never saw in the flesh. He was an item in the ledger which Bunchek the cutter spoke of glowingly because there was always a little schnapps about when it came time to try on the new trousers. The three brothers were eternal enemies; they never referred to one another in our presence. If Albert, who was a little cracked and had a penchant for dotted vests, happened to see a cutaway hanging on the rack with the words H. W. Bendix written in green ink on the try-on notice, he would give a feeble little grunt and say-“feels like spring today, eh?” There was not supposed to be a man by the name of H. W. Bendix in existence, though it was obvious to all and sundry that we were not making clothes for ghosts.
Of the three brothers I liked Albert the best. He had arrived at that ripe age when the bones become as brittle as glass. His
