I gazed awhile
On her cold smile,
Too cold -- too cold for me ...
~ Edgar Allan Poe, "Evening Star"
Divinity that comes to us only in dreams and shadows is worthless, as Wallace Stevens stated. Vision of a lost beloved -- a vision that wakes us from the deepest slumber, and causes the dark mirror of night to reflect, simultaneously, cold reality and warm eidetic idealizations -- that, however, is worth something ...
It is not the actions of a moment that lead to demise, but the long count of years and accumulated outbursts of pseudo-insanity that -- alas! -- pass for the real thing.
A bottle of gin at ten in the morning, strolling the grounds of Christ College, Oxford ... Speaking of Basilides to a packed room as the liquor courses through his veins ... Just one of many "perverse" actions (as Poe might put it); just one of many self-destructive attempts to inject some life into the cold monuments of intellect besmeared by sluttish time ...
Her smile faded as the lecture began, as he slurred through Irenaeus and Hippolytus, the two versions of Basilides' cosmology: aeon upon aeon, multitudes of powers separating the soul from its home on high ... If reincarnation or, to use the Greek term, metempsychosis, is a reality, then I shall return as a worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila.
So! Reality takes on the cast of a dream, especially on nights such as this when sleep is banished by a gilded oneiric specter of one who became an Ideal.
In the dream we were driving through a New England town (let us say Providence) and desire began to overtake us both. We stopped at a motel and checked in. As I watched her hips sway invitingly as she entered the room, I felt another urge: to feel liquid heat in my veins. A neon sign across the street invited me, and I excused myself ... Upon my return -- and here is the Ideal -- she was ready and willing, no condemnation, a precious body on a cheap bed, and I, staggering, gazed in agony at the fading vision ...
Upon waking, the cold smile of reality prevailed, but on the dark wall of my room that ideal Form lingered, the warmth of exceptance, the embrace of the Perfect. I know not which is worse: the memory of the cold stare as he slurred through his Oxford lecture, or the constructed perfection that exists momentarily in dreams and nocturnal reveries. Either way, this typing is an exorcism.
II.
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better then a villainous miasma.
~ Henry James, Daisy Miller
Only a fool returns to the scene of his crime; only a desperate lover returns to the site of his loss ... or worse, to the places where he and his beloved shared their inaugural moments of romance and devotion.
A little bookstore tucked behind the Philadelphia library ... John Stuart Mill in hand, discussing his grand concept of personal freedom and the self-enslavement of those who dare not to be different ... Her soft hand in mind, fantasies of what was to come overtaking the academic discourse ... And so it began: a union of free hearts and free foreheads ...
Time that devours all, and the distilled substance that rots all: in concert, they prevailed ...
Then there was another ... A substitute, sweet and free and full of the energy of youth ... Together we walked the old pathways, ate at the same restaurants, shopped at the same stores -- even the bookstore, where I bought her an anthology of Western philosophy.
No love, just fetishism: my lips on her feet, she rendered me helpless with silk scarves, caused excessive pleasure that disturbed the neighbors ... I would scream her name, over and over ... But then, one evening, in a moment of exquisite miasmic torment (she had been wearing shoes all day) I cried out to my lost beloved, her glorious name ... desire and inspiration from the depths of my soul -- and that caused it all to grind to a halt. Over.
Alone I walked the streets, went to the pier and just stared ...
It was deep night, and the lights of the city made the water black ... I smoked a cigar and allowed my mind to drift back to the effulgent past ...
Chester, England ... Roman ruins ... A cozy pub where we my beloved and I drank frothy pints of ale and I answered articulately her questions about the English past ... Charles I and his fate ... Glorious revolution, etc. ... And then it rained, and her hair was wet and I wanted to make love to her atop the wall surrounding that ancient town ...
Philadelphia, after the end ... To a hotel I went, to drink away the memories.
III.
Thus have you heard me severed from my bliss,
That by misfortunes was my life prolonged
To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.
~ Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, I. I.
Life piled on life is all too much ... An excess of experience renders the present a place to be endured ... No fervor, just stoic endurance, the worst kind of existence.
Faulkner thought that our purpose on this earth is not to merely endure, but to prevail. Over what? My mishaps are indeed my own: I am cause and effect. It is impossible to hide from the light that never sets, as Heraclitus said. My personality is the shadow that walks before me ... To attempt to make art of one's misfortunes, of one's guilt, of one's irremediable losses ... Is that a desecration of an altar upon which one must sacrifice the self for salvation? Or is it a way of sanctifying impure elements?
In certain Gnostic myths the chaotic demiurge who created this idiotic cosmos will someday, we are told, be turned to the fullness of true divinity, and be given a place in the grand scheme of spiritual history. But that epistrofh will occur only after his illicit creation and its history is propelled to completion through its own internal, combustible force.
Listening to Van Cliburn play Prokofiev, I think how pleasant it must be to escape into someone else's art, to gain satisfaction from helping a great work to endure ... But to draw a great work from one's own personality: that is to prolong one's miseries and to dwell on past happiness ... It is, in short, to become neurotic.
Having no hope of heaven and no fear of hell, I have the space of the night in which to inscribe myself, to send out into the void some words that may resonate ...
The exorcism is not complete, will never be ... But the sun rises, and sleep overtakes me ...
