Part 6
_That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness opposed to it._
XXIII.
1
Baaaa! Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! _Bebe esa purga._ It is the goats of Santo Domingo talking. _Bebe esa purga!_ Bebeesapurga! And the answer is: _Yo no lo quiero beber!_ Yonoloquierobeber!
* * * * *
_It is nearly pure luck that gets the mind turned inside out in a work of art. There is nothing more difficult than to write a poem. It is something of a matter of slight of hand. The poets of the T’ang dynasty or of the golden age in Greece or even the Elizabethans: it’s a kind of alchemy of form, a deft bottling of a fermenting language. Take Dante and his Tuscan dialect— It’s a matter of position. The empty form drops from a cloud, like a gourd from a vine; into it the poet packs his phallus-like argument._
2
The red huckleberry bushes running miraculously along the ground among the trees everywhere, except where the land’s tilled, these keep her from that tiredness the earth’s touch lays up under the soles of feet. She runs beyond the wood follows the swiftest along the roads laughing among the birch clusters her face in the yellow leaves the curls before her eyes her mouth half open. This is a person in particular there where they have her—and I have only a wraith in the birch trees.
* * * * *
_It is not the lusty bodies of the nearly naked girls in the shows about town, nor the blare of the popular tunes that make money for the manager. The girls can be procured rather more easily in other ways and the music is dirt cheap. It is that this meat is savored with a strangeness which never looses its fresh taste to generation after generation, either of dancers or those who watch. It is beauty escaping, spinning up over the heads, blown out at the overtaxed vents by the electric fans._
3
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_In many poor and sentimental households it is a custom to have cheap prints in glass frames upon the walls. These are of all sorts and many sizes and may be found in any room from the kitchen to the toilet. The drawing is always of the worst and the colors, not gaudy but almost always of faint indeterminate tints, are infirm. Yet a delicate accuracy exists between these prints and the environment which breeds them. But as if to intensify this relationship words are added. There will be a “sentiment” as it is called, a rhyme, which the picture illuminates. Many of these pertain to love. This is well enough when the bed is new and the young couple spend the long winter nights there in delightful seclusion. But childbirth follows in its time and a motto still hangs above the bed. It is only then that the full ironical meaning of these prints leaves the paper and the frame and starting through the glass takes undisputed sway over the household._
XXIV.
1
I like the boy. It’s years back I began to draw him to me—or he was pushed my way by the others. And what if there’s no sleep because the bed’s burning; is that a reason to send a chap to Greystone! Greystone! There’s a name if you’ve any tatter of mind left in you. It’s the long back, narrowing that way at the waist perhaps whets the chisel in me. How the flanks flutter and the heart races. Imagination! That’s the worm in the apple. What if it run to paralyses and blind fires, here’s sense loose in a world set on foundations. Blame buzzards for the eyes they have.
* * * * *
_Buzzards, granted their disgusting habit in regard to meat, have eyes of a power equal to that of the eagles’._
2
Five miscarriages since January is a considerable record Emily dear—but hearken to me: The Pleiades—that small cluster of lights in the sky there—. You’d better go on in the house before you catch cold. Go on now!
* * * * *
_Carelessness of heart is a virtue akin to the small lights of the stars. But it is sad to see virtues in those who have not the gift of the imagination to value them._
Damn me I feel sorry for them. Yet syphilis is no more than a wild pink in the rock’s cleft. I know that. Radicals and capitalists doing a can-can tread the ground clean. Luck to the feet then. Bring a Russian to put a fringe to the rhythm. What’s the odds? Commiseration cannot solve calculus. Calculus is a stone. Frost’ll crack it. Till then, there’s many a good back-road among the clean raked fields of hell where autumn flowers are blossoming.
_Pathology literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis covers the body with salmon-red petals. The study of medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture. Over and above all this floats the philosophy of disease which is a stern dance. One of its most delightful gestures is bringing flowers to the sick._
3
For a choice? Go to bed at three in the afternoon with your clothes on: dreams for you! Here’s an old bonnefemme in a pokebonnet staring into the rear of a locomotive. Or if this prove too difficult take a horse-drag made of green limbs, a kind of leaf cloth. Up the street with it! Ha, how the tar clings. Here’s glee for the children. All’s smeared. Green’s black. Leap like a devil, clap hands and cast around for more. Here’s a pine wood driven head down into a mud-flat to build a school on. Oh la, la! sand pipers made mathematicians at the state’s cost.
XXV.
1
There’s force to this cold sun, makes beard stubble stand shinily. We look, we pretend great things to our glass—rubbing our chin: This is a profound comedian who grimaces deeds into slothful breasts. This is a sleepy president, without followers save oak leaves—but their coats are of the wrong color. This is a farmer—plowed a field in his dreams and since that time—goes stroking the weeds that choke his furrows. This is a poet left his own country—
* * * * *
_The simple expedient of a mirror has practical use for arranging the hair, for observation of the set of a coat, etc. But as an exercise for the mind the use of a mirror cannot be too highly recommended. Nothing of a mechanical nature could be more conducive to that elasticity of the attention which frees the mind for the enjoyment of its special prerogatives._
2
A man can shoot his spirit up out of a wooden house, that is, through the roof—the roof’s slate—but how far? It is of final importance to know that. To say the world turns under my feet and that I watch it passing with a smile is neither the truth nor my desire. But I would wish to stand—you’ve seen the kingfisher do it—where the largest town might be taken in my two hands, as high let us say as a man’s head—some one man not too far above the clouds. What would I do then? Oh I’d hold my sleeve over the sun awhile to make church bells ring.
* * * * *
_It is obvious that if in flying an airplane one reached such an altitude that all sense of direction and every intelligible perception of the world were lost there would be nothing left to do but to come down to that point at which eyes regained their power._
Towels will stay in a heap—if the window’s shut and oil in a bottle—if the cork’s there. But if the meat’s not cut to suit it’s no use rising before sun up, you’ll never sweep the dust from these floors. Hide smiles among the tall glasses in the cupboard, come back when you think the trick’s done and you’ll find only dead flies there. It’s beyond hope. You were not born of a Monday.
* * * * *
_There are divergences of humor that cannot be reconciled. A young woman of much natural grace of manner and very apt at a certain color of lie is desirous of winning the good graces of one only slightly her elder but nothing comes of her exertions. Instead of yielding to a superficial advantage she finally gives up the task and continues in her own delicate bias of peculiar and beautiful design much to the secret delight of the onlooker who is thus regaled by the spectacle of two exquisite and divergent natures playing one against the other._
3
Hark! There’s laughter! These fight and draw nearer, we—fight and draw apart. They know the things they say are true bothways, we miss the joke—try to—Oh, try to. Let it go at that. There again! Real laughter. At least we have each other in the ring of that music. “He saved a little then had to go and die”. But isn’t it the same with all of us? Not at all. Some laugh and laugh, with little grey eyes looking out through the chinks—but not brown eyes rolled up in a full roar. One can’t have everything.
* * * * *
_Going along an illworn dirt road on the outskirts of a mill town one Sunday afternoon two lovers who have quarreled hear the loud cursing and shouts of drunken laborers and their women, followed by loud laughter and wish that their bodies were two fluids in the same vessel. Then they fall to twitting each other on the many ways of laughing._
XXVI.
1
Doors have a back side also. And grass blades are double-edged. It’s no use trying to deceive me, leaves fall more by the buds that push them off than by lack of greenness. Or throw two shoes on the floor and see how they’ll lie if you think it’s all one way.
2
There is no truth—sh!—but the honest truth and that is that touch-me-nots mean nothing, that daisies at a distance seem mushrooms and that—your japanese silk today was not the sky’s blue but your pajamas now as you lean over the crib’s edge are and day’s in! Grassgreen the mosquito net caught over your head’s butt for foliage. What else? except odors—an old hallway. Moresco. Salvago. —and a game of socker. I was too nervous and young to win—that day.
3
All that seem solid: melancholias, _idees fixes_, eight years at the academy, Mr. Locke, this year and the next and the next—one like another—whee!—they are April zephyrs, were one a Botticelli, between their chinks, pink anemones.
* * * * *
_Often it happens that in a community of no great distinction some fellow of superficial learning but great stupidity will seem to be rooted in the earth of the place the most solid figure imaginable impossible to remove him._
XXVII.
1
The particular thing, whether it be four pinches of four divers white powders cleverly compounded to cure surely, safely, pleasantly a painful twitching of the eyelids or say a pencil sharpened at one end, dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass: the gist of poetry. _D. C. al fin._
2
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you—in your apron running to catch—say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings to your heels, at your knees.
3
Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch long since and summer: they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed: crisp summer!—neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark—twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh!
* * * * *
_Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fulness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a mockery of the warmth or frozeness which is within ourselves. The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piece from one end to the other._
THE END.