Subtle Bodies
A Fantasia on Voice, History and René Crevel
Peter Dubé
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 Peter Dubé.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2010 by Lethe Press, Inc.
118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018
www.lethepressbooks.com • lethepress@aol.com
ISBN: 1-59021-330-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-330-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover image: Mathieu Beauséjour.
Cover design: Alex Jeffers.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dubé, Peter, 1962-
Subtle bodies : a fantasia on voice, history and René Crevel / Peter Dubé.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-330-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59021-330-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Crevel, René, 1900-1935--Fiction. 2. Poets, French--20th century--Fiction. 3. Surrealism (Literature)--France--Fiction. 4. Suicide--Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4.D82S83 2010
813’.6--dc22
2010018786
Table of contents
As always, for Mathieu, with love.
Does happiness arise from blows given or blows received, and unhappiness from those that were not given, those that were not received? It’s a strange question to ask, eyelids closed, when you have just asked the June sun, the glacier’s air, for the most intimate and most solitary metamorphosis.
René Crevel
My Body and I
Bodies of speech
When the door closes behind me, it is almost soundless.
Why does that surprise me? Why shouldn’t something, at least, be silent.
There. There. Sliding Door. One that revolves. A door that opens onto another. There. Too. A door that moves to the sound of music. There are many kinds of door; there will be more.
I walk into the apartment without turning on a light. It’s better that way; too much happens in the light. Friends turn on one another; reputations are ruined, powerful men crush the less so under their heels, dreams are destroyed, shattered past repair. All that happened today. All that happened in broad daylight. Right now, it feels as if the crimes of darkness are a little less cruel because less reasoned, less deliberate. Though I know the feeling will pass.
That is the greatest sadness of any feeling – that it passes.
Even without a burning bulb, in my mind’s eye, I see my rooms with perfect clarity. The bookshelves on one wall, my friends’ paintings on the other, the little drawing of a half-naked sailor that J. did hanging by the closet door. My armchair with the green silk cushions, the table beside it on which rests last night’s empty bottle of Pastis, six white sea shells, a bronze coffin nail with a death’s head embossed on the end, and the small, lacquered foot of some infant reptile a friend brought back for me from one of his more eccentric voyages. This room contains all my treasures: memories and fears. The darkness does nothing to hide them. So, perhaps it is not as innocent as I would like to think. No innocence in either light or dark. I turn on the electricity.
Electricity still has the power to startle me. Born with the century, I can recall rooms lit with gas growing up. A half-light that might favor cruelties bright and dark. Both of which my Mother was happy to indulge; she was such a hard woman. Inflexibly middle class, hubristic, obsessed with propriety.
I know, with great discomfort, the future will be dominated by the unblinking illumination of electricity, that whole worlds, entire ways of life, will be made possible by it while others will be wiped away; that whims will be transformed into necessities, rivers rerouted, lands submerged, all in the interest of casting out shadow, making every minute of every day lucid, clear, sensible…profitable. Soon this cold, steady light will stop being a mere service, it will be the world itself, men and women labouring for it, worshipping at its altar to endless productivity. In its relentless glow, secrets will be banished, private lives nullified, they will become the victims of a perpetual gaze made possible by the thrumming labyrinth of power lines and buried cables. A whole universe created only to be presided over by a terrible and artificial eye. It is sad and ridiculous. But, it will be. I know that much.
There’s a little Pastis left in the bottle. I pour it, and walk into the kitchen. The mirror on the wall is coated in dust. I haven’t cleaned it in weeks and weeks.
I turn the gas on. Open the oven door, draw a tiny heart in the dust and avoid looking in the newly exposed glass. I push back the fear that a vision might appear; it never does despite all the promises of legend. With me, it’s always a voice. And on the rare moments the sound is accompanied by a mental image, it is short-lived and never as concrete as a reflection in a mirror, it’s a more wavering, watery image. Hardly worth commenting on. But the voices on the other hand, they are substantial.
Yes. Yes. There will be images too. Floods of them sufficient to topple towers, raze civilizations. There. And there again. Small images in the corners of space; a girl picking out her wedding dress, a victim of violence bleeding from one ear, unable to speak for the swelling of his mouth and bitten tongue, an engineer struggling with the tensile strength of a new metal. And larger too, the map, topographical and somewhat speculative of oceanic trenches, state portraits made a span of months before a given dictator topples, the gain and loss of weight by famous faces. All such images crowding us in, crowding out our silences. And light to make them by. And darkness to see them in. Scopophilic currencies are coined to traffic in the optical. On the walls of tall buildings you will place…
Yes, voices like that, here to trouble me again. I refuse to rise to the bait.
Instead I sip my drink and admonish myself for being foolish. The truth is I don’t leave the mirror dusty for fear of visions. I’m not worried about any spirits or apocalyptic signs. I just don’t want to see myself in it. I’m sure the day’s stress and pain are clear on my face and I can’t stand the visible signs of despair. There were moments today I could literally hear my heart breaking.
The day must have been hard on André too. I’m sure he’s heard every detail of it. And I’m sure he hid his feelings from every prying eye. André is too proud to show shame or sadness. He is always too proud.
I can still remember the first time I met him. Remember it so clearly. It was more than a decade ago now, though in many ways I was more than ten years younger then. I was young enough to endure a divided life.
In those days, the split I had to live with was simpler; I was a student-soldier. My situation brought on by the war and its ending – a kind of sudden solution to national need, cobbled together on the fly, a way of dealing with the young men returning from the front. I spent my mornings at the university, studying the great tradition of French literature and its centuries of lights, and my afternoon and evening in the barracks, doing what young men in barracks have undoubtedly done since barracks were invented. We muddled through training, marches, parades and drills, the endlessly repeated calisthenics. We tried to keep from accidentally shooting each other.
In those cramped quarters, my closest friend was M.; there was so much character in his round little form. The light shone off his glasses –a nearly-moist gleam, like the moon lifting into the sky – as he clambered over the garrison wall on his way to some nocturnal rendezvous. And, like the moon, he soared over our barrack’s wall every night.
I can remember the conversations we shared in that nasty little dormitory, the only thing that made the weeks, the months, livable. Long talks, late into the night, always about books and poets. The kind of books and poets that aren’t taught in university classrooms. Violent, passionate poets, half-mad poets, lustful and riotous poets. Bards of insurrection and fiery destruction. The poets of desire in its most obscure forms: singing of drugs and torments, lascivious statuary, fornicating sharks, every kind of beautiful monstrosity. We talked and talked and talked about them, praised their verses until sunrise, rhapsodized their dark nights of the soul through countless nights of our own. Once under the oak in our courtyard M., home before dawn for once and drunk, picked up the point of some empty shell and put it on his head – a crooked miter. He began to recite some blasphemous lines from Baudelaire while gesticulating with his left hand. The rest of us knelt and took sips from cheap wine between intoning our responses. At some point in our ritual, we fell asleep on the ground.
And so we sealed our friendship, we student-soldiers, and opened the vaults of our many secrets (all laughable now.) M. and the lurid accounts of his conquests. Someone poured out his jealousy of his younger brother. The other fellows shared fears and aspirations. I raged against my Mother’s cruelties, her sacrifice of any tenderness to her position, my father’s end. I alone may have raised some eyebrows in my raging against my family. So be it.
Looking back on so much love so quickly won, it seems to me that such intimacy is only possible for young men in military service. I’ve never known it to happen anywhere else. I believe it is possible in arms not for any of the obvious – and hopelessly moralizing– reasons most often cited to account for it. It has nothing to do with camaraderie, or esprit de corps. Nothing to do with shared danger, certainly, since most of barracks life, at least during those rare times of peace, is – to the contrary – shared boredom. No, I think the rapid closeness was possible because we were thrown together in our frightened lonely youth, caught in an unreal time and a place that had nothing to do with our actual lives, with the shape and the direction they might take. And lost in that terrible limbo, we clung to any kindred spirit to give shape, some semblance of meaning, to the void. It was inevitable that we should become friends, those men, like me, loved the inexhaustible vitality and pleasure of words. A group of us even established a little magazine to publish the violent, glittering anti-social kind of writing that thrilled us. The title? “Adventure.”
We were young.
And, to circle back to where I began, it was through Adventure that I would come to meet André. The first time I met him I was with the grandiosely named “Editors” of Adventure. We had attended one of the evenings of provocation that his gang of young writers scheduled with regularity, and subsequently, been invited to one of their meetings. We met them at the Cêrta, a café so unfashionable as to have reclaimed a certain glamour; it had begun to serve “avant-garde” cocktails. The zinc of the counter-top was so scuffed and scratched it appeared moiré.
I first sighted André at a table with his intimates. I would be less than entirely truthful if I did not confess at the start that the man struck me immediately – and powerfully. I spotted him the moment I passed through the doors. Saw him, as if he were alone, separate from the crowd surrounding him. His bearing was precise, the shoulders squared, the chin raised. He had a mass of dark hair brushed off a strong brow and his gaze raked across the crowd, the whole room, like a beam of powerful, dazzling light. I could tell at once that he missed nothing. And he had an inescapable presence, a field of magnetic energy, around him. The man could bring the volume of raucous conversation down with a gesture. He seemed to me an archangel, a sword-wielding seraph guarding the doors to paradise, some unfathomable kingdom of delight, of knowledge, and of marvels.
Of course, I thought he was extraordinarily handsome.
He rose to shake our hands as we approached. That cool, appraising glance fell across me. I greeted him, and he corrected my formality smiling, saying, “Please, call me André,” in a manner that was at once charming and unnerving. He held onto my hand the whole time. He grinned again, insisted that all of us forego any bourgeois protocol and gestured for us to join the group in their tumult.
And what tumult it was. The group around André took the late night barracks exchanges of my friends and me to dizzying levels. I had never heard talk like this, and – despite the years in which I was integral to the group – no other conversation has dazzled me in the same way since.
The first time a young man finds himself in company like this, awash with a passion for ideas, alive to the fire of words, is unique; it’s a kind of a first love, a great, blood-deep desire to know and experience. It churns and is unsatisfiable, but it transports you. It turned my world on its head. To say I was ready for it would be too soft: I was aching for it.
The old world vanished the moment I was seated. The university, the niggling maternal miseries, certainly my military service. It all meant nothing. Ordinary life meant nothing. For a few hours we plotted a wholesale transformation of the world. In shouts and laughter we covered a chaos of thought, image, intellect. The group spoke of: the mechanical specifics of certain articulated doll heads made at the end of the last century, tribal art from Melanesia, the viability of “propaganda of the deed,” the breeding habits of a particular species of dragonfly, the differences between Greek and Roman versions of mythology, the painting of Francis Picabia, the progress of the Russian revolution, the differences in quality of the brothels off the Rue St. Denis, the stylistic strengths of a line of popular novels about the crimes of an underworld lord, the performance of Camille, a fashionable cabaret singer, the price of apartments in the 11th arrondisement, poetry, lots and lots of poetry. And the plans for an upcoming “Congress” among writers and intellectuals that was in the works.
My head spun.
There’s a clatter down on the street. I can hear it despite the shut windows, some shouting from the street. A man’s voice…definitely a man’s voice. He is cursing at someone, angry about a price being asked. His voice is deep, accented. It reminds me a bit of the American poet I spent a summer with years ago. The Sun Worshipper we called him. He was beautiful and almost pagan. He loved pleasure. I will miss moments like those. That is all I will miss.
You are too quick. There will be moments for which no words yet exist. Why such precipitiousness? There are, and will be, ways of living still unconceived of. Pleasures and transformations to be learned. There – a whole generation of youth, blood hot with hunger and with need, throw themselves into their bodies and each others’: tasting, touching, teasing out sensations and when it’s done still needing more. There – they gather in an open field, or a clearing in a wood, or on a steep, clean slope. They come together brightly costumed, some playing flutes or drums, or stringed instruments; they make a music mated to their manias. Some carry tools: shovels and hammers and saws or else long, sturdy posts in wood. They come together in the world’s open places. Spaces that are sufficient to the act of love, to see, to hear, to long. And they begin to build. Digging into the cool, dark earth, setting up the fine sanded-smooth wooden posts as the sky grows full, dark clouds assemble overhead. Their labors done, they disrobe; show graceful, pale nakedness in the grey air, the deepening chill. Some among them help a friend or lover to a post and taking up a coiled length of rope, begins to bind him there. And still the music-makers play, sending slim vibrations into the tense and turbulent air. Trills. Tremors. A slow, repeating line of percussion. The clouds move down, lowering themselves. Their knots complete, the binders kiss their friends and turn to shout towards the sky. They raise their voices and hurl imprecations, crying out to the gathering storm, begging its arrival. They howl and scream, they sing and intone frenzied, spontaneous verses, summoning wind, and rain, and violent thunder. And it comes, the weather comes. With deliberate pace and a kind of grim ceremony the wind rises, a rolling bass echoes overhead and the first drops begin to fall. The chanting officiants laugh and redouble their invocations. They succeed. The storm breaks in the heavens, a terrible wind rushes over field, through woods and up every slope in the eager, lustful world. The naked bodies tied to the posts arch their backs and moan. Their bellies and their back are lashed by rain; they sigh. The wind pummels their flesh, drawing blood to the surface and the cool flow of water runs over their genitals, stiffening, engorging, ready for the touch. They cry out for their elemental lovers while their partners keep the music and the song in play. The bound youths give themselves over to the touch of the world with bliss, with blind, hungry ecstasy. The roar of the storm builds. And builds some more; the drums and flutes and singers are drowned in the deafening noise. Crying out, the lewd victims set their tongues free as at last, at last the lighting opens the sky. They shout all their secrets, every hidden desire for the joy of speaking it, the blind hope that the tempest will take them there and give them this unspeakable pleasure. No one in all the crowd hears anything but the wind and the joy around them. No one will ever know of this.
Shut up. Shut up. This is neither time nor place. I am not at my bliss, and I know no transcendence in my storm. I have known too many storms by far.
Indeed tumult – and betrayals – lay ahead. André’s congress, so eagerly discussed that evening, was, it’s safe to assume, at least partially designed to ensure he held an important place in radical artistic circles – to make him more prominent. Though it never occurred, the plans and politicking around the attempt did move him closer to the centre of things. It also provoked much resentment among certain writers and intellectuals. Despite this, and though my hesitation in taking a side did not pass unnoticed, it did not turn André against me. I grew closer to his group, even publishing some of them in the pages of Adventure. That decision to publish may have cemented my contact with André. In the days following the issue’s appearance I lunched with him. He thanked my colleagues and me for accepting his friends’ poems, and made a passionate speech about the value of community among writers committed to changing literature, and changing the place and role of literature in the world. As he spoke his face went very white, his eyes shone; even the timbre of his voice altered, as if some terrible spirit was struggling to break through his flesh. Every word seemed charged with knowledge, an assurance of what it meant. I listened intently. When we rose from the table to leave, André slipped me an envelope saying it was a token of his appreciation. It held a letter, a warm letter: one I have kept as a memory of those early days of our friendship, and it contained a little gift. An old, nineteenth-century, playing card: the Jack of Diamonds. He had drawn on it, altering the figure’s face. Drawing a sort of nimbus around the head, that suggested a blend of human eye and halo. At the top he had written the words “see everything.” I smiled at it. But I didn’t know why.
I spent the summer following this first encounter on the coast, a holiday that gave me the time to think through my relationship with my new friends and the life I wanted once I was free of my studies and my military service. The life of a writer. It was good to be away from Paris, from its feuding, its blandishments and array of pleasures. Those I had already discovered and those still waiting to be explored.
For the first week or so I found the blank regularity of sand and waves reassuring. I thought nothing could trouble me there, at the heart of so much emptiness. It was all empty space for new things to grow, air and light that might make anything possible. I can still see the garishly orange sky as the day ended, still hear the sound of the wind, raucous and reassuring. The smell of salt was filled with rough wonder. Even the company of my family was insufficient to deaden the pleasure of the place.
Though meals were a family matter, I had enough time alone, and enough ways to fill it. I would spend mornings reading and afternoons walking along the beach, or swimming. I would spend some evenings hard at work on the pieces I had begun to publish in literary magazines, the faint beginnings of a reputation.
I walked the beach one day and saw the sky darken. Clouds were heavy and the sea choppy with small, stiff points. A bracing bite took the air despite the August date, reminding me of summer’s end and my return to Paris. I passed an orchard that grew near the coast. The smell of ripening fruit, the gold and green of apples and the silver of pears was thick. Their fleshy perfumes mated with the salt air rousing appetite and attention, sharpening every sense. I rounded a rocky point and saw, in my peripheral vision, a movement in the sand, something out of place, grey and white and mobile against the different shades of grey and white in the sand. A fluttering. A large sea-bird lay in the sand, its wings spread to their full span; only the head moved, turning right and left, the beak opened and shut with no apparent rhythm. It bent down to poke in the sand. I walked towards the creature. Its only response was to turn toward me and let out a harsh cry. I came closer, the head bobbed up and down and he cried once more. I slowed my approach; the wings stayed motionless. In a moment or two, he returned to his piercing of the ground beneath him. I took a few more steps and he was off. The bird took to the air almost instantly, with hardly a beat of those broad wings. A small point vanishing against a horizon in full fugue. Where he had lain, there were only small disturbances in the sand. A pattern, an almost perfect spiral, oval and growing tighter as it circled in. I had never seen anything like that.
The next day, on an impulse, I walked back to the same spot. The pattern was gone, wiped away by the tide. And the bird too was absent. I stood for a moment looking out at the ocean, then up at the sky, loving both for the simple blankness. Then I heard a voice behind me.
“Good afternoon,” it said. One of those blank greetings: question or affirmation? I turned around. A girl…or a young woman. Perhaps eighteen. She was pretty, bright looking, with a strange presence; she was completely involved simply saying “hello,” bending forward, putting her whole body into the greeting. She said “hello” like it was a whole conversation, or a negotiation. We talked for a while: small talk, the aimless, pleasurable divagations of young people on holiday. It was agreeable to both of us I think. Neither made any haste to bring the talk to an end, at any rate. Soon enough the ordinary exchanges took on odder dimensions. We shared confidences that, when I took my leave of her, felt surprising. Things about my family, my dreams, my anger. None of it fazed her and, when it was done, she invited me to her mother’s that evening. Caught off-guard by our little exchange, I said “yes.”
I had reason to second-guess my precipitous acceptance when I entered the house that evening. The living room was laden with esoteric bric-a-brac; incense burners and dark mirrors, astrological charts and strange carvings, celestial globes and heavy candlesticks, weighty, richly-bound tomes, something I could have sworn was a wand or a scepter, and a great, glittering ball of crystal. Taking pride of place in all of this imposing clutter was Madame Dante.
Madame Dante was an old woman, grey-haired, with a portentous, raspy voice that was given to making hierophantic pronouncements. After the introductions were made she exclaimed, “Tonight there shall be incantations!”
With that, we were all called to gather in the dining room, where, in anticipation, the table had been draped with a scarlet cloth. We took our seats, joined hands and La Dante began the aforementioned incantations. But that is all I recall, directly, of the events.
The young lady and her mother later told me that within moments my head fell to the table in a trance. They described to me the utterances I made: crazy things, visions of other times and places, mysterious voices coming through me, prophecies. But I had seen or heard none of it myself. I couldn’t remember one of my inspired messages. It was a blank – and it has remained one ever since.
Shortly after my grand initiation, my leave ended and I returned to Paris, and to the barracks, slightly shaken by my summer but still intact. Not long after that, I saw André again, who still seemed as ready as I to let the kerfuffle over his failed “Congress” slide. We spent an afternoon together on a terasse and my bedazzled first impression was confirmed. He was charming and engaging. The conversation was extravagant, ranged over everything. He told me about the excitement he felt for the automatic writing he and his friends had undertaken. The treasure trove of startling, bizarre, erotic and disturbing images they had discovered, and how obsessive they had become about them. And he recounted their exploration of dreams as well. He was passionate, serious; he leaned in close to talk to me, and I felt the same dizzy certainty in his utterances as I had our last meeting. With every word his hidden currents tugged at my own. He touched my hand at one point, stressing a point. Then he said, he was eager to hear what I had been doing, where “my most vital passions lay.”
Hesitant at first, stuttering at the risk of seeming foolish, I told him about the seance at the beach. André slapped the table and pounced on the idea. He shouted out; trances of this sort would fit perfectly among the experiments already underway. With great excitement he invited me to recreate the events at his home. And, once again, I accepted.
He walked with me to a mutually convenient metro station after our long, labyrinthine conversation. As we strolled along the Rue du Temple he told me how happy he had been with our first meeting last spring. How closely he had read an issue or two of Adventure. He stopped on a corner, and with eyes half-shut, told me how he had known since he was a boy that a new spirit was moving in the world; how he’d sworn to be a part of it – a spirit of daring creativity, committed to the most radical transformation of what it could mean to be human, fully human. He told me that the instant he read some of my texts he knew that I too was a part of this vast “adventure.” And he winked at the silly pun as he shook my hand again, saying goodbye at the top of the stairs to the platform. I am sure I blushed.
The following Monday I arrived at his studio with eagerness and no idea what might occur. André’s wife, S., showed me into an extraordinary room. It was inhabited by things. Books stood on shelves and piled in corners; little matchboxes with childlike paintings from the earliest years of the century were aligned on tables, dolls lounged atop one shelf, on his desk I could see a kabalistic necklace and a wooden snuff box in the shape of a frog. On a side board there was a collection of tromp l’oeil bottles, one of them covered in dominos and up against a corner, four or five walking sticks on which deaths’ heads, demons’ heads, the skulls of birds rested, awaited use. There were decks of cards, and tiny figurines, a strange lance from some far off island, and, of course, paintings, (though fewer than there would be later.) There were manuscripts stacked up or bound. The room was filled with more real wonders than Mme. Dante could have conjured up in her wildest imaginings. Everywhere one looked something was ready to ravish or torment the eye. And in the midst of it all, was an equally extraordinary-looking young man named R. who had large, liquid, staring eyes. S. brought me to André who was with him, waiting, and clearly pleased with my arrival. We chatted very briefly, but – though attentive and courtly as ever – my host was clearly chewing at the bit. He was desperate to get down to business. S., sensing her husband’s anxiousness, discreetly suggested we sit down, pointing towards the table. André seized on the opportunity, “Yes. Yes. René, I believe we should sit in a circle for the experiment, no?”
“Yes,” I replied. I outlined what I remembered of my seance on the coast. The position we adopted, the strange mumbled invocations of Madame Dante. And, as I did, I felt myself flush, and my stomach turn over. I began to sweat. The fact was I remembered almost nothing of that night; I had fallen into some state of unconsciousness and was only told later of what happened.
The skin around my eyes felt tight. I felt hot. What if I did not fall into a trance tonight? All of these people were here to hear me utter oracles. I had no idea if I could do so. I might fail. I might shatter this renewed friendship with André. The pit of my stomach roiled at the thought of my humiliation, the contempt and laughter that alone could greet my failure. And the consequences of that were enormous. I sweat; my breath grew ragged. Friendships evaporating. The chances of publication, of the solace of other writers with whom to linger over cups of coffee and plot the future of our collective dreams dwindled and grew transparent. I saw a great, dark gulf underneath the table we were seated at.
S. dimmed the lights. I felt André on my left, and a German painter I did not know on my right, take hold of my hands. Our host, at my instruction, spoke a few soothing words of invitation to the air, and we awaited our visitation.
I felt nothing. I sat in silence, hoping, and waiting, and longing, imploring, I would have prayed, had I any faith at all, for something, some spectral voice, the touch of an ectoplasmic hand, a visionary door thrown open, to unleash a torrent of unheard-of images, but nothing. Nothing at all. My head was a vast, desert cavern, echoing with the unspoken.
All around me I felt the anticipation. No one moved. No chair shuffled. The intake of breath was shallow and infrequent. All attention was focused on what was before us, what had yet to be recognized as a void.
The turmoil in my guts worsened and my face felt licked with fire. I had no idea what to do, shame fell over me and I saw the end of my career hurtling down, an asteroid dropping from space. Did no one else see any of this?
Every moment that crept by was a blow on a gong. I ached in my bones and in my synapses. Unable to go on – I spoke.
I let out a sigh. Then another. I followed it with a shrill little shout. I had no idea where I was going. I just could not bear the silence, the sticky sensation of shame that clung to my flesh and clothing. Desperate, I improvised a bent narrative about a woman murdering her husband. Drowning him. Then leavened it with exclamations about frogs. And madness. I wove in bits of nonsense alliteration, and fragments that came to me spontaneously. Fabulous fraud. I spoke whatever came to hand out of terror and disgrace.
Then I opened my eyes and shook myself, breaking the circle. André stared at me wide-eyed. He was astounded. Thrilled. He congratulated me heartily, decried our failure to make a record of the proceedings, insisting it would have been an “invaluable document,” a record of an immaterial state of being. He could hardly contain the torrent of enthusiasm. He insisted on repeating the experiment again, for more of the group, and in two days time. I laughed, hoping it didn’t sound nervous. Agreed. Drinks were served. I could breathe again.
That night, in my room, the sheer idiocy of my actions overtook me. I was ready to bang my head against a wall. I could fool a couple of people who wanted to see something miraculous, but a room full of viewers with varying degrees of investment in the undertaking? Who knew what could be done in that context. And that is without considering the ethical difficulties of such a deception; it was all a lie, after all. Indefensible. I was so tense, so anxious that my legs trembled as I lay on my cot trying to find something reasonable to tell myself. My mind raced, running through hundreds of different answers, different possibilities and permutations. None of them offered any comfort. I tossed and turned. I rested on one side and then the other. I traced invisible lines between the patches of paint on the barrack’s walls, imagining journeys to places far removed from that magical little apartment.
At length, in order to fake some faint peace of mind, I reminded myself that I had created my oracular speech spontaneously, from the dark places of my mind and soul; how far was that from these poets’ much loved automatic writing? How distant from “real” mediumship? I had knit together my weird images, my fractured sentences and rollicking assonances without any conscious thought at all. Surely that in itself was some sort of otherworldly transmission. It had to be. Marvels come from somewhere too, I repeated to myself. Perhaps I had done what I pretended to have done. I said it over and over, a sad nursery rhyme that, after much effort, lulled me to something like the arms of sleep.
Perhaps I had done what I pretended to have done.
That refrain would stick in my mind until I returned to the scene of the crime. When I reached the top of the stairs, I found the tiny apartment filled with people. Besides our hosts and R., there were P., the German painter, another P. and his companion G. This time, André made little attempt at the social niceties. He allowed us a brief handshaking interlude and herded us unceremoniously toward the table. Those who were expected to enter a trance were seated, while a few observers hung back. The lights went down.
Once again, the terror fell over my head and shoulders, a great, dark pall. Once again, I felt empty; nothing came from whatever quiet place inside of me it was supposed to arise. Even worse, I couldn’t improvise a single word. None of the stories that flowed so easily forty-eight hours earlier showed themselves to me. I could feel tears coming on. Then, I heard it. Not much. Just a single word: “there.” I heard a voice very distinctly say “there.” Then I heard it again. “There. There.” It was a word of comfort, as a parent might offer a child with skinned knees. An exhortation too, a calling out, a pointing to a breach in a wall, or some other opening. It was more. Then it repeated. once, twice, three times in succession: “There. There. There.” And each repetition was accompanied by a bright flash of light against the backs of my closed lids, in the hollow of my skull. Flashes of light and the word, the direction? Perhaps. The Exclamation, “there.”
A brief space of silence and the voice came back. “There. It is there. Look there. Your sought-after signal, your woman with her axe.” And a rush, a flood of words and images came through me so fast, so dazzling I could not keep up. I saw and heard whole worlds in a space of time I couldn’t hold on to. So many words and images and things and…experiences. Lives, whole lives, whole worlds. But I was awakened by André’s hand passing over my face. I awoke to see him radiant with emotion. If it is possible, he was more thrilled than the last time.
The rush of chatter from the group almost rivaled the flood from which I was emerging, wet with weird images. They told me what I had channeled. Naked women brandishing axes. Scenes of murder and chaos. Adultery and betrayal. And though some of it rang familiar to me, it felt partial, incomplete. I had heard and seen so much more than I had spoken. And none of it felt as exhilarating and as intimate as what I’d been through. The things I had spoken though complex, playful, ambiguous and offering a glimpse of something, someplace else…were partial. What I had experienced was different; I’d heard things simultaneously, as if parts of me were elsewhere, other places or times, directed there by mysterious guides and voices. Or rather, as if they took me to different places and times all at once. Like I was multiple, almost infinite bodies made of subtler stuff than flesh and blood that could move through walls and buildings, water and trees, through space, through time itself while talking to, hearing from, an infinite number of other people, and everyone of those hearing, seeing, listening forms all still remained me. Every one of those subtle bodies was coterminous with this one. And I discovered from my friends’ reports on awakening that this poor fleshly form still had all its limitations and could only describe one thing at a time. Hence the strange and fragmentary narrative. The broken threads and dead ends of the discursive tapestry I’d known.
Of course none of my audience knew that. They only knew what I could tell them, and that was enough to please. They were passionately ready to continue the experiment; R. wanted to attempt the trance next, and in the charged atmosphere of the room, he fell into a sleep readily enough.
His head slumped forward, hung loosely from his shoulders. Then with stiff, marionette movements his hands began to scratch at the table. Little clawing gestures. Then they stopped as abruptly as they’d began. R.’s head swung slightly, his back bent, then fell still. For a few seconds, and a few seconds more. The passing time seemed protracted, slowly dissolving over a stretch longer than the actual beat of the clock. Then suddenly his hands clawed at the table again, more violently. Rough, raking gestures. Every eye in the room turned to those hands, their violently agitated shaking. Out of some perversity, I turned to observe his slumped, sleeping head and – for the briefest of moments – I swear I saw his eyes flicker, scan the room for reaction quickly, then shut once again. I am almost certain of it.
A few moments later R. spoke a few rich, irrational sentences and spontaneously fell out of trance to find the room stunned. Bewildered.
I couldn’t help but wonder if R. too, faced with failure had to chosen to feign success. One can’t know. And either way, that night’s seances opened the floodgates. André wanted more and more of these “sleeps.” Wanted more and more access to the mysterious other worlds.
Over the weeks and months that followed, we gathered almost daily. The group would come together to storm the hidden places of the mind. And night after night the trances would come on, would deepen. For hours R. and I, and occasionally others, would go under and bring back glittering pearls from the deeps: pearls both bright and black. And each time, every new night, the trances grew more and more excessive.
Early on, in response to another of R.’s table-scratching sessions, I suggested that perhaps he wanted to write something down, eager to see what he might do with that. Immediately, he began to scribble down bizarre phrases, dated and annotated, snatches of unheard conversations, doodles and horrible scenes from a childlike inferno. And so the trances were joined to our already established interest in automatic writing. My new colleague caught the ball I tossed him with great verve and effectiveness. In later sessions he penned fabulous nonsense texts equating the poets in the group with varieties of plants and landmarks. In no time at all he was my chief rival in the macabre undertaking. And the stakes kept rising. Entranced members of the group would get up from their seats and stalk the corridors of our friends’ apartments or our patrons’ fashionable homes murmuring visionary alexandrines under their breath. People would see the dead rise again. Trees would grow upside down and the winged statues standing guard at the Opéra Garnier would piss on passers-by. In time, I could remember some of the declamations to emerge from all the tumult of my hypnogogic states, like the time I prophesied death and disease for some of my friends. Within days of the utterance, the German painter was in bed at home, coughing up blood. I sat in my darkened apartment, facing a wall for a week, after that. Happily, he pulled through.
The chaos grew and grew. There was the evening one of the sleepers locked us all in a room and vanished. How the panic built that night, the acrid smell clinging and cloying as we wondered, silently, if we had finally gone too far. There were long stretches in which the visions would grow darker and darker, wallowing in terror and in sadism.
One night R. (was he genuinely entranced, was he still faking, caught up in a dangerous game?) threatened us with a knife. Backing us up against a wall while he gestured, an irregular, shuddering motion, with the shining blade.
The fear in the group mounted, outstripped only by our fascination with the seances. We talked of nothing else. Every one of us believed that we were digging deeper into the buried roots of the mind and soul than anyone had ever gone before. Each of us felt that just one or two more sessions and real, transcendent marvels would reveal themselves. We lived for them; we rushed to every meeting; we slept very little, ate even less. We grew thin, our faces hollowed out, dark patches circled our eyes, framing a distant, distracted glassiness. Any risk was justified by the thought that we were close, so close to the absolute. We were not merely willing; we were desperate to gamble everything for such a reward.
And certainly, though fearful, I was too. Night after night my visions grew deeper, wider, more complex.
As I “slept” my subtle emanations recounted the buzz and business of hundreds of other worlds. Teeming, living worlds that were filled with life and passion. Their contours would blur, sliding across time and space. One moment it was a far off star, a dry desert world circling it, the next a distant future on this blue planet. Sometimes those things would blend together, glorious hybridity whose meaning was impossible to discern. I heard brief glimpses, saw fugitive images, flickering vistas. My subtler selves held long talks with disembodied interlocutors who dwelled in them and harvested their stories. All of this, all at once. And for the span of a sleep they were real, as real, as palpable as André, P., G…. As any of them. And they were amazing.
Once a voice came to me whispering of revolution, of young people taken to the streets and giddy with rage and laughter and lust. Intoxicated they would sing before policemen and cast flowers at armies. With broad grins they followed flowers with rocks, smashed the windows of banks and set vehicles aflame for the glory of it. I heard long, meandering accounts of barricades set up in the street, of workers fleeing their places of employment to join the transfigured people of the streets. I heard snatches of the songs they sang: loud, clamorous, played on instruments still to be invented, with rhythms of overwhelming power, insistent, coarse – and melodies as sinuous as eels crawling atop each other in a barrel. I heard stories of pitched battles fought in the twilight of shattered street lamps, of orgies joined in the vacated battlefields. In one long stretch of history, I heard the tale of young man who gathered friends around him to plot a total transformation of human life. Of their long nights of conspiring and days of mind-crushing meetings. The voice giggled as it shifted from this to his long slow suicide, accomplished by bottles of whiskey and deep embitterment. The visiting voice described scenes of grim hope lit and subsequently crushed and from time to time I saw quick, bright images of it: streets that might have been Paris, but not the Paris I knew. Brilliant with color day and night, more peopled than I could conceive, on every corner, young men with great manes and murder in their eyes piling up debris to shut down the streets of St. Germain, machinery called in to oppose them. Then there were voices on the air, brittle and at vast volumes, ripping through the branches of the oaks along the boulevards. It was beautiful and horrible and I can still remember so much of this account. But this is the first I’ve spoken of it.
In a different sleep another voice came, this one more sensual, with an impossible tale. A whole civilization, this time dedicated to tunnels. A world obsessed with a single project, the elaboration of subterranean passages in a precise, predetermined pattern, the complete graphic representation of their cosmological system, the shape of their image of the universe. The voice told me that entire generations had been harnessed to the task, families and clans, and vast holdings of wealth been sacrificed to the delirious vision of a world of artificial caves; young and old, rich and poor pouring out their lives, digging in the dark. The construction was central to a belief system that turned around the necessity for the invisible to reflect the visible, an elaborate scheme concerning the tensile strength of reality itself. If they failed to create a world that was invisible, but that still literally was, the visible world would dissipate. And they defined invisible as what is hidden from the light, what the eye cannot perceive. So, vast populations were sentenced to a subterranean labor, the carving out of a cosmos that could never be seen, and that was – literally – hollow. In a long, hushed aside, the voice began to explain the mechanics of the thing, the crazy conviction, the dizzy mathematics that made it all possible; but it was pushed aside by another voice, another speaker’s account of a woman who loved the sea and nightly immersed her head in order to sing to it.
I remember too, the fantastic narrative of a library – a vast glittering structure of books, of writing, measureless and beyond counting. Thousands of millions of books, the accumulation of the art and knowledge of an almost equally uncountable number of civilizations. Histories and epics. Treatises and novels. Herbaria and plays. Medical handbooks and bestiaries. Poems. Biographies. Epistemological renderings. Thousands of books of laws. Genealogies. Recipes. Instruction manuals and legislation. And more. So very, very much more. All of it housed in architecture composed on rigidly binaristic principles. A whole snaking, labyrinthine form built on a system of simple “yeses” and “noes,” blacks and whites, ones and zeroes. Turn here and open an army of volumes on the history of battles under a particularly bloodthirsty dynasty of kings. Say “no” and have a door open onto an orgiastic room whose shelves heave with breathless erotic poetry. Push a black door and find a ten-kilometer shelf of titles on the feeding and mating habits of birds. Turn the knob on the white and read forever on the case law of a culture too attached to capital punishment. One way there is only delight, turn another corner and the horrors lay slumbering, waiting for new discoverers. An almost infinite library, endlessly capacious, absolutely informative. Tumults of text vibratingly present waiting to be read. Indeed, not even waiting because one text leads to another, is intimately tied to every other title in the library. The reader who opens one cover makes sentences quiver in rooms far, far removed, on the far side of this library world, this labyrinth of words. One might start reading the life story of one’s grandfather and finish in a Buddhist poet’s images of hell. There is no definitive division between one tale and the next, between the Petrarchean sonnet in one’s hands and the equation solved a generation ago, in another country, in another language. Simply rooms and spaces and shelves and pages and pages and pages. And one never has to go to the books, the voice told me, with a kind pleasure almost audible in it, because the words, the books, the heavy shelves were in themselves the world, surrounded you all the time while were you seated in your chair. And there was more mixed with it.
This you’ve forgotten. The thing you should most recall; generations of people enslaved to narrations. The myths that formed their cities and their wars. The lies of the powerful forcing their ways into homes, public squares, their very dreams. Freedoms that are not. Rhetoric able to turn black to white, war to peace, grinding poverty to the simple circulation of wealth. Here is a man whose voice seduces, false-hardy and with a surface of poor syntax. Listen to it sweeten and cajole, gentle distractions made of impossible promises, the jaws of sharks less cruel than all his warmth. Rose words and punctuation as sensual on the tongue as cactus fruit. Rivers of lost potential. Walls of possibilities.
Ignore them. I awoke from that account to find myself, and a half-dozen of my friends and collaborators in a dining room. A rope was in my hands, and in the hands of a few of them, and we were tying nooses. One rough rope was already hung, the great open coil of it waiting for a willing neck. A quivering sign hanging in the air. The still-entranced had busy hands, weaving more to join with it. We were all preparing our own deaths.
André was blanched. The shadow of the hanging rope a dark stain on his face. We had gone too far for him. And though he would never tell me in any detail what I had said that night, or how the group of us ended in that room, ended at our grim tasks, he slowed the pace of our seances. But even without André’s report, I knew at least some of what I’d heard. Shortly thereafter he would stop the sessions altogether.
I knew part of his decision lay in fear: a new feeling for him. I also believe he was ready to end them, because he had learned what he could.
Oh, but there is more we can tell you. More world than that. More you can learn. Other worlds: a world of boiling water, its banks held aloft by the heated air and steam, hovering above everything, a world of loquacious cats, and one of cemeteries, its inhabitants erecting tiny, imperfectly functional residences among the massive monuments to their dead. A labyrinthine university. A speeding dorimitory on a trestle hurries towards you.
I’m sure there is, but I have little time left, and other things to do.
André was done with the sessions. For the last weeks he constantly took notes during them; writing in that elegant little book he carried everywhere. His face firm, his eyes bright. André’s powers of concentration were vast. So intense was his expression, I thought I saw it radiate. It was foolish, I admit, but despite that naiveté I was sure where André fixed his archangelic glance, he could burn away darkness. And though the evidence seems grim right now, one can still hope that it is true.
When the period of sleeps finally came to end, I had the first of my bouts with illness. I spent a long time in bed recuperating. I spent the weeks reading and writing. Trying my hand at a couple of longer pieces, seeing where they led me. Testing the waters. I saw few of my friends, unable to join them in the chatter-filled evenings in cafes, the long, aimless afternoons drifting through dark movie houses. But André came to visit me a couple of times. I was startled by his solicitousness, and pleased.
The first visit we talked for an hour or so, about the trances and events around them. The disturbing eruption of coincidences that accompanied our nightly visions fascinated both he and I, but I said nothing of my secret narrations. André shared his fears about the aimlessness he saw in our companions, told me how much he felt the need for a new direction, a reinvigorating program for our generation of writers and artists, a great shared passion that might shape the course of things. Then we talked a bit about a woman he’d seen on the street and the curious sensation he felt of knowing her from somewhere else. It felt to me like he was changing the subject, but one never knew with André…he was constantly investigating the movement of his own mind; he could have been perfectly sincere in the sudden shift.
On his next visit, he was elated; he entered smiling and seated himself on my bed, took my hand in his and told me he wanted to share something special with me. I couldn’t meet his gaze. He pulled some sheets from his pocket. The paper crinkled as he unfolded it. The sharp little sounds reminded me of the snaps and crackles of a fire as it gets going. Memory has its own ironies.
He began to read to me. As he did – impassioned but still firm – I knew by the slant of his forehead, the blaze that seemed to shine from it, that he cared past all reason about what he was reading. My hand burned where he had held it. A kind of flame whose progress I couldn’t determine; was something tunneling to the surface from deep inside me, or was some invisible fire making its way towards my heart.
André read from the sheets steadily ignoring how they shook in his grasp. He spoke about the mind’s terrible freedom, the infinite elasticity of language, its capacity to create vivid new images, scarcely conceivable new ways of thinking and being. He spoke of an infinite power of desire that ran through the word, through the heart, through the world.
His voice rose and fell with a strong, bodily rhythm, but never faltered, never shook. Never failed.
He spoke of a secret place in the mind where all the spirit’s tensions stopped their antagonisms and light and dark, fire and ice, love and revolution fell together fornicating, and I could see a planet rise above a golden sea just past his left shoulder, a flight of giant birds with wings like mist lift from the rippling water as the mast of a sunken ship broke surface where they had been resting. Coming back, over and over again, to this place, this secret place in the mind, this absolute point of sure stillness where everything made sense and every possible contradiction was resolved. Where the shape of things, whole armies of meaning, was made clear. It shook me; how it shook me. But we did not linger at that edge.
André read on, speaking of tumult in the street, acts of random violence flowering in the desperate need for some space to feel free. A storm rose in his throat. Dreams and desire and death rolling over in a rushing stream, careless of the rocks where they lay.
He turned the page and chanted a litany of the names of our friends, and he aggrandized shamelessly their still small accomplishments.
Then I heard my own name, spoken as a devotee of the absolute limit. I saw a flicker of feeling on André’s handsome face; he didn’t pause, but he had clearly smiled at my sudden appearance in his text. He went on, the awesome golden vision in his voice more compelling by far than any offered me by my disembodied interlocutors.