These rambles taken to relax or to obtain fresh inspiration—often only to aerate the testicles—had a disturbing effect upon the work in progress. Rounding a corner at a sixty degree angle, it could happen that a conversation (with a locomotive engineer or a jobless hod-carrier) ended only a few minutes previously would suddenly blossom into a dialogue of such length, such extravagance, that I would find it impossible, on returning to my desk, to resume the thread of my narrative. For every thought that entered my head the hodcarrier or whoever would have some comment to make. No matter what answer I made the conversation continued. It was as if these corky nobodies had made up their minds to derail me.
Occasionally this same sort of bitchery would start up with statues, particularly chipped and dismantled ones. I might be loitering in some backyard gazing absent-mindedly at a marble head with one ear missing and presto! it would be talking to me … talking in the language of a pro-Consul. Some crazy urge would seize me to caress the battered features, whereupon, as if the touch of my hand had restored it to life, it would smile at me. A smile of gratitude, needless to say. Then an even stranger thing might happen. An hour later, say, passing the plate glass window of an empty shop, who would greet me from the murky depths but the same pro-Consul! Terror-stricken, I would press my nose against the show-window and stare. There he was—an ear missing, the nose bitten off. And his lips moving! A retinal haemorrhage, I would murmur, and move on. God help me if he visits me in my sleep!
Thus, not so strangely, I developed a kind of painter’s eye. Often I made it my business to return to a certain spot in order to review a still life which I had passed too hurriedly the day before or three days before. The still life as I term it, might be an artless arrangement of objects which no one in his senses would have bothered to look at twice. For example—a few playing cards lying face up on the sidewalk and next to them a toy pistol or the head of a missing chicken. Or an open parasol torn to shreds sticking out of a lumberjack’s boot, and beside the boot a tattered copy of The Golden Ass pierced with a rusty jack-knife. Wondering what so fascinated me in these chance arrangements, it would suddenly dawn on me that I had detected similar configurations in the painter’s world. Then it would be an all night task to recall which painting, which painter, and where I had first stumbled upon it. Extraordinary, when one takes up the pursuit of such chimeras, to discover what amazing trivia, what sheer insanity, infests some of the great masterpieces of art.
But the most distinctive feature associated with these jaunts, rambles, forays and reconnoiterings was the realm, panoramic in recollection, of gesture. Human gestures. All borrowed from the animal and insect worlds. Even those of refined individuals, or pseudo-refined, such as morticians, lackeys, ministers of the gospel, major-domos. The way a certain nobody, when taken by surprise, threw back his head and whinnied, would stick in my crop long after I had ceased to remember his words and deeds. There were novelists, I discovered, who made a specialty of exploiting such idiosyncrasies, who thought nothing of resorting to a little trick like the whinnying of a horse when they wished to remind the reader of a character mentioned sixty pages back. Craftsmen, the critics called them. Crafty, certainly.
Yes, in my stumbling, bumbling way I was making all manner of discoveries. One of them was that one cannot hide his identity under cover of the third person, nor establish his identity solely through the use of the first person singular. Another was—not to think before a blank page. Ce n’est pas moi, le roi, c’est l’autonome. Not I, but the Father within me, in other words.
Quite a discipline, to get words to trickle without fanning them with a feather or stirring them with a silver spoon. To learn to wait, wait patiently, like a bird of prey, even though the flies were biting like mad and the birds chirping insanely. Before Abraham was … Yes, before the Olympian Goethe, before the great Shakespeare, before the divine Dante or the immortal Homer, there was the Voice and the Voice was with every man. Man has never lacked for words. The difficulty arose only when man forced the words to do his bidding. Be still, and wait the coming of the Lord! Erase all thought, observe the still movement of the heavens! All is flow and movement, light and shadow. What is more still than a mirror, the frozen glassiness of glass—yet what frenzy, what fury, its still surface can yield!
I wish that you would kindly have the men of the Park Department prune, trim and pare off all the dead wood, twigs, sprigs, stumps, stickers, shooters, sucker-pieces, dirty and shaggy pieces, low, extra low and overhanging boughs and branches from the good trees and to prune them extra close to the bark and to have all the good trees thoroughly and properly sprayed from the base to the very top parts and all through along by all parts of each street, avenue, place, court, lane, boulevard and so on … and thereby give a great deal more light, more natural light, more air, more beauty to all the surrounding areas.
That was the sort of message I should like to have dispatched at intervals to the god of the literary realm so that I might be delivered from confusion, rescued from chaos, freed of obsessive admiration for authors living and dead whose words, phrases, images barricaded my way.
And what was it prevented my own unique thoughts from breaking out and flooding the page? For many a year now I had been scurrying to and fro like a pack-rat, borrowing this and that from the beloved masters, hiding them away, my treasures, forgetting where I had stored them, and always searching for more, more, more. In some deep, forgotten pit were buried all the thoughts and experiences which I might properly call my own, and which were certainly unique, but which I lacked the courage to resuscitate. Had some one cast a spell over me that I should labor with arthritic stumps instead of two bold fists? Had some one stood over me in my sleep and whispered: You will never do it, never do it! (Not Stanley certainly, for he would disdain to whisper. Could he not hiss like a snake?) Who then? Or was it that I was still in the cocoon stage, a worm not yet sufficiently intoxicated with the splendor and magnificence of life?
How does one know that one day he will take wing, that like the humming bird he will quiver in mid-air and dazzle with iridescent sheen? One doesn’t. One hopes and prays and bashes his head against the wall. But it knows. It can bide its time. It knows that all the errors, all the detours, all the failures and frustrations will be turned to account. To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to his limb while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When ready plop! he falls into the stream and battles for life. Is it not something like that? Or is there a fair, smiling land where at an early age the budding writer is taken aside, instructed in his art, guided by loving masters and, instead of falling thwack into mid-stream he glides like an eel through sludge, mire and ooze?
I had time unending for such vagaries in the course of my daily routine; like poplars they sprang up beside me as I labored in thought, as I walked the streets for inspiration, or as I put my head on the pillow to drown myself in sleep. What a wonderful life, the literary life! I would sometimes say to myself. Meaning this in-between realm crowded with interlacing, intertwining boughs, branches, leaves, stickers, suckers and what not. The mild activity associated with my work not only failed to drain my energy but stimulated it. I was forever buzzing, buzzing. If now and then I complained of exhaustion it was from not being able to write, never from writing too much. Did I fear, unconsciously, that if I succeeded in letting myself go I would be speaking with my own voice? Did I fear that once I found that buried treasure which I had hidden away I would never again know peace, never know surcease from toil?
The very thought of creation—how absolutely unapproachable it is! Or its opposite, chaos. Impossible ever to posit such a thing as the un-created. The more deeply we gaze the more we discover of order in disorder, the more of law in lawlessness, the more of light in darkness. Negation—the absence of things—is unthinkable; it is the ghost of a thought. Everything is humming, pushing, waxing, waning, changing—has been so since eternity. And all according to inscrutable urges, forces, which, when we recognize them, we call laws. Chaos! We know nothing of chaos. Silence! Only the dead know it. Nothingness!
