I stand in the midst of the desert waiting for the train. In my heart there is a little glass bell and under the bell there is an edelweiss. All my cares have dropped away. Even under the ice I sense the bloom which the earth prepares in the night.
Reclining in the luxurious leather seat I have a vague feeling that it is a German line on which I am traveling. I sit by the window reading a book; I am aware that some one is reading over my shoulder. It is my own book and there is a passage in it which baffles me. The words are incomprehensible. At Darmstadt we descend a moment while the engines are being changed. The glass shed rises to a nave supported by lacy black girders. The severity of the glass shed has a good deal the appearance of my book-when it lay open on my lap and the ribs showed through. In my heart I can feel the edelweiss blooming.
At night in Germany, when you pace up and down the platform, there is always some one to explain things to you. The round heads and the long heads get together in a cloud of vapor and all the wheels are taken apart and put together again. The sound of the language seems more penetrating than other tongues, as if it were food for the brain, substantial, nourishing, appetizing. Glutinous particles detach themselves and they dissipate slowly, months after the voyage, like a smoker exhaling a fine stream of smoke through his nostrils after he has taken a drink of water. The word gut is the longest lasting word of all. “Es war gut!” says some one, and his gut rumbles in my bowels like a rich pheasant. Surely nothing is better than to take a train at night when all the inhabitants are asleep and to drain from their open mouths the rich succulent morsels of their unspoken tongue. When every one sleeps the mind is crowded with events; the mind travels in a swarm, like summer flies that are sucked along by the train.
Suddenly I am at the seashore and no recollection of the train stopping. No remembrance of it departing even. Just swept up on the shore of the ocean like a comet.
Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind. The amusement shacks are running full blast, the shelves full of chinaware and dolls stuffed with straw and alarm clocks and spittoons. Every shop has three balls over it and every game is a ball game. The Jews are walking around in mackintoshes, the Japs are smiling, the air is full of chopped onions and sizzling hamburgers. Jabber, jabber, and over it all in a muffled roar comes the steady hiss and boom of the breakers, a long uninterrupted adenoidal wheeze that spreads a clammy catarrh over the dirty shebang. Behind the pasteboard streetfront the breakers are ploughing up the night with luminous argent teeth; the clams are lying on their backs squirting ozone from their anal orifices. In the oceanic night Steeplechase looks like a wintry beard. Everything is sliding and crumbling, everything glitters, totters, teeters, titters.
Where is the warm summer’s day when first I saw the green-carpeted earth revolving and men and women moving like panthers? Where is the soft gurgling music which I heard welling up from the sappy roots of the earth? Where am I to go if everywhere there are trapdoors and grinning skeletons, a world turned inside out and all the flesh peeled off? Where am I to lay my head if there is nothing but beards and mackintoshes and peanut whistles and broken slats? Am I to walk forever along this endless pasteboard street, this pasteboard which I can punch a hole in, which I can blow down with my breath, which I can set fire to with a match? The world has become a mystic maze erected by a gang of carpenters during the night. Everything is a lie, a fake. Pasteboard.
I walk along the ocean front. The sand is strewn with human clams waiting for some one to pry their shells apart. In the roar and hubbub their pissing anguish goes unnoticed. The breakers club them, the lights deafen them, the tide drowns them. They lie behind the pasteboard street in the onyx-colored night and they listen to the hamburgers sizzling. Jabber, jabber, a sneezing and wheezing, balls rolling down the long smooth troughs into tiny little holes filled with bric-a-brac, with chinaware and spittoons and flowerpots and stuffed dolls. Greasy Japs wiping the rubberplants with wet rags, Armenians chopping onions into microcosmic particles, Macedonians throwing the lasso with molasses arms. Every man, woman, and child in a mackintosh has adenoids, spreads catarrh, diabetes, whooping cough, meningitis. Everything that stands upright, that slides. rolls, tumbles, spins, shoots, teeters, sways and crumble; is made of nuts and bolts. The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench. Sovereign pasteboard power.
The clams have fallen asleep, the stars are dying out. Everything that is made of water snoozes now in the flap-pocket of a hyena. Morning comes like a glass roof over the world. The glassy ocean sways in its depths, a still, transparent sleep.
It is neither night nor day. It is the dawn traveling in short waves with the flir of an albatross’s wings. The sounds that reach me are cushioned, gonged, muffled, as if man’s labors were being performed under water. I feel the tide ebbing without fear of being sucked in; I hear the waves splashing without fear of drowning. I walk amidst the wrack and debris of the world, but my feet are not bruised. There is no finitude of sky, no division of land and sea. I move through sluice and orifice with gliding slippery feet. I smell nothing, I hear nothing, I see nothing, I feel nothing. Whether on my back or on my belly, whether sidewise like the crab or spiral like a bird, all is bliss downy and undifferentiated.
The white chalk breath of Plymouth stirs the geologic spine; the tip of her dragon’s tail clasps the broken continent. Unspeakably brown earth and men with green hair, the old image recreated in soft, milky whiteness. A last wag of the tail in non-human tranquility; an indifference to hope or despair or melancholy. The brown earth and the oxide green are not of air or sky or sight or touch. The peace and solemnity, the far-off, intangible tranquility of the chalk cliffs, distils a poison, a noxious, croaking breath of evil that hangs over the land like the tip of a dragon’s tail. I feel the invisible claws that grip the rocks. The heavy, sunken green of the earth is not the green of grass or hope but of slime, of foul, invincible courage. I feel the brown hoods of the martyrs, their matted hair, their sharp talons hidden in scabrous vestments, the brown wool of their hatred, their ennui, their emptiness. I have a tremendous longing for this land that lies at the end of the earth, this irregular spread of earth like an alligator basking. From the heavy, sexless lid of her batted eye there emanates a deceptive, poisonous calm. Her yawning mouth is open like a vision. It is as if the sea and all who had been drowned in it, their bones, their hopes, their dreamy edifices, had made the white amalgam which is England.
My mind searches vainly for some remembrance which is older than any remembrance, for the myth engraved on a tablet of stone which lies buried under a mountain. Under the elevated structure, the windows full of pies and hamburgers, the rails swiftly turning, the old sensations, the old memories invade me again. All that belongs with docks and wharves, with funnels, cranes, pistons, wheels, ties, bridges, all the paraphernalia of travel and hunger repeats itself like a blind mechanism. As I come to the crossroads the living street spreads out like a map studded with awnings and wine shops. The noonday heat cracks the glazed surface of the map. The streets buckle and snap.
Where a rusty star marks the boundary of the past there rises up a clutter of sharp, triangular buildings with black mouths and broken teeth. There is the smell of iodoform and ether, of formaldehyde and ammonia, of fresh tin and wet iron molds. The buildings are sagging, the roofs are crushed and battered. So heavy is the air, so acrid and choking, that the buildings can no longer hold themselves erect. The entrance ways have sunk to below the level of the street. There is something croaking and froglike about the atmosphere. A dank, poisonous vapor envelops the neighborhood, as if a marsh-bog underlay the very foundations.
When I reach my father’s home I find him standing at the window shaving, or rather not shaving, but stropping his razor. Never before has he failed me, but now in my need he is deaf. I notice now the rusty blade he is using. Mornings with my coffee there was always the bright flash of his blade, the bright German steel laid against the smooth dull hide of the strop, the splash of lather like cream in my coffee, the
