Seven Novels of the Last Days
Volume Three
The Productions of Time
by James David Audlin
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by James David Audlin
Cover photo by Marijke Taffein
Cover design by the author
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This novel is based on several dreams that came to me in the 1970s and early 1980s. The novel was written 8 July 1981 – 18 June 1984.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coïncidental.
IN MEMORIAM
The Rev. James Levi Tobias Bowier, Jr.
He became my brother in spirit as this novel was being written,
and he gave his life for peace in his homeland of Liberia
not long after it was completed.
May his wisdom, love, and courage never be forgotten.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the King James Version or are translated, paraphrased, or parodied by the author. All materials quoted in translation are translated by the author, except as noted below. The following sources are referenced by chapter and paragraph numbers.
The title of this novel is taken from one of the “Proverbs of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake. The full text of the proverb is: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
viii,38: the postscript from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
x,16: a line from La Comœdia Divina: Inferno, III, 9, by Dantë Alighieri.
xv,9 and xxxi,11: a line from Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Little Black Boy”, by William Blake.
xvi,4: paraphrase of a line from “The Question Answer’d”, by William Blake.
xvii,11: paraphrase of a portion of a fragment of Herakleitos (fragment 91 in Diels, fragment 51 in Kahn).
xxiii,18: parody of a passage from Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill.
xxiii,61: paraphrase of lines from Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Tyger”, by William Blake.
xxiv,14: paraphrase of a passage from The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevski.
xxv,2: a line from “Nineteen Seventy-Four”, by James David Audlin. Published in Sophia, Vol. I, No. 2, Spring 1975. Copyright © 1975 by James Audlin and David May. Used with permission of the author.
xxv,2 and xxv,16: lines from the Tao-te Ching, by Lao-tse, chapters 21, 32, and 56.
xxvi,3: a line from “St. Simeon Stylites”, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
xxxi,4: a variation on a story of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch.
xxxii,2: paraphrase of a text from the writings of Chuang-tse, XII, 13.
xxxii,2: lines from “The Descent of Inanna: From the Great Above to the Great Below”, from Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, edited and translated by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. New York: Harper and Row, 1983, page 68. Copyright © 1983 by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. Used by permission of Diane Wolkstein.
xxxii,2: a line from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, II, ii, 259, by William Shakespeare.
xxxiii, sec. 10, 3: a line from “Under Saturn”, by William Butler Yeats. Copyright © 1950 by the Macmillan Company.
xxxiii, sec. 14, 34: paraphrase of lines from The Tragedy of Julius Cæsar, I, iii, 20f, by William Shakespeare.
xxxiii, sec. 14, 35: lines from Illuminations, “Villes”, by Arthur Rimbaud.
xxxiii, sec. 14, 59: lines from “Les Déserts de l’Amour”, by Arthur Rimbaud.
Besides the above directly quoted sources, the author acknowledges a debt of kindred thinking to many authors, especially Robert Graves, C. G. Jung, John Michell, and Anaïs Nin. Thanks must also be given to those who critically read the manuscript at various stages of its completion, especially my father David John Audlin, Lani Weber, Mahlon Gilbert, and Patrick Snee.
Cleave wood, I am there;
Lift up the rock and you will find me there.
Why did you come to the field?
To see a reed resonating in the wind?
The images are manifest to the man
and the light which is within them
is hidden in the image of the light of the Father.
It will become manifest;
its image concealed by its light.
–The Gospel according to St. Thomas, 77b, 78a, 83
The statue of the Goddess in Saïs bore the following enigmatic inscription:
I AM ALL THAT HAS BEEN,
ALL THAT IS,
ALL THAT WILL BE,
AND NO MORTAL (UP TO NOW) HAS RAISED MY VEIL.
–Plutarch: Isis and Osiris, as quoted in Borges and Casares: Extraordinary Tales
Das Ewigweibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
—Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Faust (final line)
THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME
- i -
Coming home, coming home, but coming home in a bus was not how once he had planned it to be. Now it was almost embarrassing to remember that youthful vision after all that had happened to him in the war. Not that long ago, really, but how distant and alien that time now felt to him, and those boyhood dreams of an heroic return to his adoring homeland. In the books and movies it had always been glorious, returning to a ticker-tape parade, getting laid, all expenses paid. But it was not to be. The war still simmered on like a forgotten stew, and he was simply coming home, bone-weary and older, while men he could say the names of were still back there dying somewhere. War for him had once seemed a pass to the future; now it was a burial into the past, and his adolescent images, after one last exhalation, were bursting like an overfull bubble. Coming home late at night, in a bus, was not how he had planned it.
He checked his watch again. It had only been a few moments ago he had looked at it, but now he could not remember even having noticed what time it had said. Either his watch-checking was an automatic nervous habit, or else he was too tired to think clearly, or both. Anyway, it was eight-eighteen. Not really late. Once again he put his head back and tried to turn off his mind and sleep.
But it was impossible. As long as the throbbing weight of his head was supported only by his neck, there was nothing he wanted to do so much as to lay it back on the headrest, to close his eyes, to rest. But the moment he did the first two, the third became impossible. The vibration of the Diesel engine would rumble through his skull and teeth, threatening to shake his cranium apart. His senses, whenever he tried to rest, became mutinously aware of their surroundings, the deep rasping snores in the next seat up, a blue gauze of cigarette smoke from somewhere, the powerful highway lights going by at regular intervals briefly lighting up the trembling colors of the capillaries inside his closed eyelids.
So again he gave up trying to sleep. He went back to looking out the window, startling himself again with the tired face that looked back in at him, superimposed on the depth of inky black darkness outside. They were nowhere near there yet, apparently, not even in the outskirts of the city; it was just emptiness out there. No city lights yet. Fields, maybe. He cupped his hands around his eyes and strained to make out details in the night. No, it was a railroad yard. Ah; he could see it more clearly now: the faint glow of semaphores, with here and there the blotted prehistoric shapes of boxcars hunched in their sleep. So, he now mused, they must be close to the city after all, if not actually already in it.
His musing seemed to be proving correct. Suddenly there were buildings. The bus rattled under a bridge, then another, by warehouses and parking lots, still virtually the only vehicle on the road in the black night. The bus took the Delmorth Avenue ramp down off the highway, swerved into city streets. A man up forward was handing down suitcases from the overhead rack to a woman whose hollowed, tired eyes never turned from her sleeping children. Reading lights snapped off and on, conversations sparked like fireflies, people rose and began to queue up in the tiny aisle as if that would make them able to leave the bus sooner. But he waited patiently in his seat. No need to hurry. His duffle bag could be reached down in a second.
Now the night was brightly lit by streetlamps and neon, bathed in an orange-and-blue haze cast by the tinted window glass. His eyes felt dusty. He was overtired.
Movies were playing in the city theatres. He hadn’t seen a real movie in a real movie theatre in ages. Not too many theatres in the war zone, he thought with an almost-smile at his weak sleepy humor. His attention caught on one marquée swirling in flashing bulbs: a movie starring Argent de Resznay. The Distance of an Eye. He had never heard of it. With that tired humor rattling on in his brain in a disconnected way, he thought, Hard to keep up with the City Review at the front.
The bus groaned to a stop and stood dumbly in a fog of its own acrid exhalations. The aisle was now completely full of legs and luggage; he waited patiently for the crowd to straggle out. Then he stood, feeling suddenly cold as little pockets of warmth he had collected vanished, swung down his bag, and moved down the aisle on tired, almost numb legs and wobbly heels unaccustomed to walking after the long ride. He went carefully down those narrow little metal steps, out onto the dirty sidewalk. Most of his fellow bus riders were already gone. Only a couple remained, one at a pay telephone, the other getting into a taxi.
The bus door closed behind him and it pulled off with a noxious roar, leaving him alone on a sidewalk of the city, surrounded by buildings he didn’t recognize. His feet were prickling, his legs were breaking, but he forced them to go forward. Having nowhere in particular to go to, he chose at random a cheap hotel a block or two away, and signed for a night. Albion LeMat was the name he wrote in the concierge’s book, and, although the sheets were uncomfortably stiff at first, he slept soundly and dreamlessly.
- ii -
And awakened to a bright yellow morning, as rich and thick as hot lemonade. He rose with little effort and went quickly out into the city world before his unfamiliarity with its new faces could dissuade him. Across the street from the hotel he bought a newspaper and, even though he rarely smoked, a pack of cigarettes. Having little money to spare for public transportation, he walked south toward the river, puffing awkwardly.
The city had changed radically from when he had last been in it. Where many old edifices had been bombed into powder by the enemy there were glittering new skyscrapers, all steel and glass and of a beauty inhuman. He looked at them and had to admire them, but he did not like them. The Herakleitos, as always, rolled on its green-brown way through the old quarter, its thick, oily, garbage-dotted waters sometimes breaking into branches and tributaries for inexplicable reasons, and sometimes just flowing cold past the fruit vendors and the promeneurs, so dark with pollution and lost dreams that no reflection stained their shafting surfaces.
He sat in a city park on an island in the river, paying the boy who came by for the chair rental. He opened the newspaper and began to read. The war still raged on in fits and starts in various sections of the globe. “Lies! Fantasies!” he muttered to himself as he read the crabbed incoherent prose dispatched, so the paper insisted, in broken stanzas by telegraph from the front. He, however, had actually been there, and knew the truth. But even the wild propagandistic imaginings of someone who couldn’t really have been there, someone who probably worked in a clattering office only a few blocks away, still could serve to trigger the endless memories running silently through his mind like raw footage shot for a newsreel. He was reading words about glorious victories, complete extermination of enemy strongholds, overjoyed soldiers and liberated townspeople joining in spontaneous celebration. But he was seeing other things with his mind’s camera. Mud. Lice. Plains littered with dead men and horses, thrown about like dolls. Bitter raw stench, that’s what war had turned out to be. The enemy was the stench of latrines, the stink of death, of vomit, of gunpowder, of gas. They never saw any other enemy. Soon after arriving at the front he had sat up most of the night one night composing what he titled in bold printing across the top of the page, his last will and testament. He remembered feeling deliciously noble, a martyr heroically sacrificing his tiny life for his people; he remembered later feeling foolish for having thought such thoughts. He remembered chiding himself; was this not The War To End All Wars?, the war that would bring Creation to a close, the Armageddon at long last for tired humanity? And then he had struggled, because he really had nothing to put down in his will. What he had really wanted to do was to say good-bye, but he had no idea how to say it, or to whom.
There had been a bus then, too, but very unlike the one that had brought him coming home last night. That first one had been a bus that had left the city, a city that existed now only in his dreams, a bus full of laughing, singing boys, boys who thought they were men, on their summer-camp way to a death they thought they could imagine. There had been a poster, of a beautiful woman (said to be the actress Argent de Resznay, but he never had seen the resemblance) saying, “If not for anything else, will you fight for me?” They had signed up in droves, for her. Older men too, men who remembered the previous wars, though officially they were all the same war, The Last War, men who were hoping, wondering, Is this it? Is this at last truly the final battle, the Armageddon? If we fight in this one, can we at last go home? They signed up for her too.
Why, truly, did those boys sign up to fight? Certainly not out of real heroïsm or patriotism, not at seventeen years old. They fought because they were lazy and bored with their little lives, because they wanted to taste some excitement, to have a place, however small, in History, because they were tired of a hungry present and no future, because of broken love affairs, but overriding all they fought for a reason they did not see: the Death-Wish of Humanity, the desire “to get it all over with”, where “it” might mean the war and might mean the human race.
But they found their bedmate not to be death, as the romances all had had it, but the meager specter of life. Watching a grown man cry in a field of the dead as he looks down at his shattered body. Hearing the sound like a gentle rain of maggots falling from dead soldiers left to hang in the trees, but eating lunch anyway. Putting candles near the seams of their clothes to get the lice out. Once he and his buddies, what were their names?, had hidden in a chalk mine, whiling away the boring hours of their tiny lives with drawing. Some day archæologists would wonder at the scrawled pictures of nameless naked women and men with grotesquely enlarged body parts, just as archæologists now wonder at the cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux. But all they had been was laughing, nervous boys whiling away the hours of their lives with broken bits of chalk.
He forced himself to stop remembering, on the edge of tears, looked around to make sure nobody was staring, turned the page and read some local news, draped around a photograph of Argent de Resznay, advertising her new book of poems, Descending into the Zone. It had been a long time, completing this circle that had brought him home again, so wide a circle that he felt like he was not in his city at all but in an alien place on an alien river.
- iii -
The River Herakleitos flowed through the city on its winding journey between Être and Néant, but never in the same direction. It was a flow of unconnected sensory data, and in its waters Siddhartha Gautama had been baptized, and David Hume many years later. It was a saying in the city that the river today was not the same one the river was yesterday.
And as with the river, so also with the city. In truth it seemed there were many cities which in some inexplicable way were one. Perhaps they were to be distinguished topographically, perhaps temporally, perhaps even dimensionally. To some people these cities appeared to be tiered, arranged on the sides of hills like terraces. To others they interlaced in geometric planes. To yet others they succeeded each other in an ever-widening Ouroboros gyre. But suffice it to say that all of these cities that were the same City had vastly different names and different qualities. Just as the same phrase can convey entirely different meanings in different contexts, so the “same river” was different rivers of meaning, and the “same city” broke into a spectrum of qualities. Every individual, it was thought, saw a different city, but gravitated together with those whose city was essentially similar. But, as individuals changed or moved about, perceptions changed as well, and the city, which was nothing more than the aggregation of its inhabitants’ perceptions of it, changed as well. Truly in a sense the city was the river, ceaselessly flowing, breaking into new tributaries, suddenly rejoining, ever moving between Être and Néant, but never in the same direction.
People spoke of the city as named New York, or Paris, or Golgonooza, or Tokyo. One heard it called Babylon, Uruk, Greater Helium, or Mohenjo Daro. Alexandria, Xanadu, Beijing, Cuzco, Rome. And other names, coming and going on the currents of the vogue. Which city was it that one found oneself in? Usually, it seems, it depended on how one related to that rolling flow of unconnected sensory data; it depended on one’s temperament. But one could always bolt, either choosing to run from or to some city of the City, or one could wake up one morning finding oneself in vastly different conditions, a vastly different city....
- iv -
Two beggars were pawing at his sleeve, crouched down beside his bench, whining pitifully with huge eyes. They were dark, hairy, dirty; only those glazedly shining eyes were not covered with grit, and these were bloodshot and large-pupilled. They must have been junkies; also, their hands shook. Albion looked at them oddly. How long had they been there? he wondered. He realized he was only further encouraging them by looking at them; he shook off their hands and told them “No!” But they still stared at him with their large wounded eyes, plucking vaguely at his clothes, and at last he had to stand up, going, “No! No! No!” They still wouldn’t leave. He walked around, trying to get away from them, not daring to run because they might get violent. They stayed close to him, whining and pawing.
And then suddenly they left, just left, wandering off, for no apparent reason. Albion LeMat had been preparing himself to initiate a forcible encounter, but they had vanished, leaving him with lungs filled with frustration. Instead of returning to his seat, then, he went on into the public toilet facility in the park, a smelly place with peeling walls and sticky floor. There were graffiti everywhere. Above the urinal he was using, among the usual scatological filth, was one which caught his eye, written in pencil onto the scummy cement.
ARGENT DE RESZAY
3517624
It was almost invisible, partially obscured by an offering of oral entertainment and a prediction concerning the ultimate theological destination of the reader. It seemed to be a name, misspelled, and a telephone number, but inasmuch as the latter was not hyphenated one could not be sure. Albion LeMat was quite confident that the telephone number of such a famous person would not be scrawled at random on pissoir walls. Somebody must have made it up. He shoved the sweating chrome handle, and the urinal gargled, swallowed, and cleared its throat. The water remained yellow, and the floor sticky on the way out.
The day was so warm outside that he realized in comparison how cold and damp it had been in the facility. Back to the park bench; there he watched the crazies for a while, dozing a little. He would have to do something with himself, find a job or something, but he wasn’t in any hurry. It was so good just to sit in the sunlight after so much of the opposite in the war. It was, he reflected, probably the ongoing sense of oppressive imminent doom that he missed the least, yet it was the hardest thing to rid himself of. He took off his shoes and socks, wriggling his feet into the grass, and then smiled to himself because he saw a few dandelion fuckers a couple hundred feet away indulging their wont; they would consider what he was doing foreplay.
It was about noon and he was hungry. Did his favorite place still exist? There was one way to find out, and his military pay would last him yet for several weeks – until they caught up with the fact that he was AWOL – even if he splurged now and then. So he took the Métro toward the hill, climbed the gargoyle-lined steps up to a familiar winding street, and –
Something out of the past, that’s what it was. Yes, it was still there. He smiled and frowned all at once, his hands shaking. Le Café Odéon. He and his friends had met there almost every evening, discussing literature, politics, and religion over too many cigarettes and bottles of cheap white wine, subsiding at last into uproarious attempts to say, how did that tongue-twister go?, “Vingt bouteilles de bon vin blanc bien vieux”?
A different waiter from the one he remembered came and took his order, and disappeared silently into the kitchen. Albion looked around. A different waiter, perhaps, but the same décor: wood panelling, clumsy Spanish paintings, and the red and white checked cloths on the tiny round tables. There was a pay telephone between the door and the hat rack that he couldn’t remember as having been there before. On a strange impulse he went over to the telephone, deposited a coin, and dialled, what was that number again?, 351-7624. He heard ringing; it was indeed a working number; but the next thing he knew he was sitting dazedly at his table, staring at the meal the waiter had brought. Panic hit him in a tempest: ringing, ringing, and had someone really answered, or did he only imagine that he heard a beautiful woman’s voice asking again and again, Qui est là?, Qui est là?
- v -
It has been suggested that to know a culture best one looks at its politics. Everything else, the arts, religion, education, technology, and business, must build on its understanding of the nature of the political structure of its particular society, and from within that structure. None of these things can function, or declare its message, as if ignorant of its environment, and how the constituents of its culture manage to get along. So, for instance, writers, artists, and musicians stand, as individuals, either in favor of or against the Establishment or its various aspects, and they make their stance clear through their creativity. But whether they accept or decry their civilization they can only speak as part of it. There is no other option.
If to look at a society’s politics is the best introduction to its nature, then what is the best way to consider its politics? Philosophers in every age, Lao-tse in his, Rousseau in his, Marx in his, have made it clear that there is a dialectic between individual freedoms, and the freedom of the state, the corporate entity. In order for all to be free, an individual can only be free to the extent that that freedom does not significantly limit the freedom of others. But from that simple idea comes a wide spectrum of interpretation. And where each culture finds the balance-point for its chaotic, top-heavy, ever-shifting superstructure, ah, that is the secret key for understanding it.
As for that culture which flowed along the banks of the Herakleitos, where was its balance? its center? The answer is that there was none. it was a civilization of regimented entropy, of chaotic formality. It was a civilization at war, not so much with an enemy as with itself. It fought, in the final analysis, no external enemy as with itself. It fought, in the final analysis, no external enemy. It was no Jacob wrestling with a tangible opponent. Rather, it hated itself, and its own violent nature, and fought wars really to try to stamp out its own violent nature, perhaps hoping thus to rub its corporate nose in its own violence. And it hated itself even more for using fire so to fight fire. “The War To End All Wars” – that was a lie, and everyone knew it. But few could face the truth of the lie without going insane themselves, internalizing the world’s insanity. The arts, the churches, none dared say it, that this was an insane civilization bent on self-destruction because it was so destructive. Much better to be insane in another less frightening manner: to tell yourself that everything was just fine, and we were only at war with an evil inhuman enemy. The only other choice was, as a humorist of the time put it, to recognize that “it’s insane to be sane in an insane world.”
Because of the war the government could not put much effort into the tortuous systems of benevolent governing. Most effort was expended on the day-to-day problems of waging war. But the people had to be governed nevertheless – a phrase which was reworded thus: the people had to be controlled, put together as part of the war machinery, pushed, regardless of humanitarian motives and individual preferences, into the self-destroying system of War, which was the real goal of the culture, and not what any individual might have told you the goal was. Who can say where the internal rot really begins to show itself? It just grows and grows until it is noticeable, and continues to grow until it is unavoidable. To say that the government was totalitarian was to belittle its evil, if not to miss it entirely. For certain freedoms, to the point of license, were certainly allowed. There are two kinds of freedom and two parallel kinds of control: freedom/control of the body, and freedom/control of the mind. Legislation sets parameters only around people’s actions: “Do not kill”, “Do not jaywalk”, “Do not speak ill of the State”.... And an example of this is totalitarianism. But governments can also choose to restrict people’s thoughts within certain parameters in such a way that not only do they not kill, jaywalk, or act against the State, but such actions become literally unthinkable. They sincerely do not want to think for themselves (if for no other reason, in the case of the particular civilization under discussion, than that to do so is to face the nightmarish insanity of the war in its fullest dæmonic reality). And this latter goal of thought-control was the goal of the Herakleitean civilization. By thus controlling its citizens they willingly became part of the vast self-destroying machine.
There were several stages to this plan, some of which had already been well implemented on a mass scale during Albion’s absence to participate in war at the front. Albion did not yet know that the malaise he had been feeling since his return had as one major cause a wide-band microwave radiation that saturated the city and its environs. Psychologists had warned the government in its early days of testing that this project might cause extremes of nervousness and depression, and perhaps even heart seizures and blindness, but this turned out only to be true to an extent, and that extent was shrinking as people built up a tolerance to the radiation. Rather, it was found that people even began to thrive on the radiation, to need it as much as food or air. It became not just a tolerated poison, but a potent drug they could not survive without. In fact, if there were any hint of a political demonstration against the State, there needed be only a moment in which the microwave towers were silent, and the anti-State feelings evaporated.
Another project, not as far along in coming to fruition, dealt with genetic control. Laboratory conception and fœtal tank nurturing had been growing acceptable to the point almost of being commonplace for a generation. In a number of ways this project had been promoted: the media repeatedly reminded citizens that it freed women from those long nine months of pregnancy and the danger of childbirth, that it cut the number of birth defects by eighty-three per cent because defective sperm usually does not survive freezing, and so on. But beyond this was a project, presently being executed, for developing a completely planned population by producing humans according to type: Soldier types, administrative types, mechano types, among others. Those who for one reason or another did not fit into this vast project of a happy hive would be sterilized or eliminated altogether.
The various institutions within this culture saw the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, and pushed these “reforms” even more heavily than the government. There was a great unspoken fear among creative individuals, clergy, artists, and teachers in particular, of being sterilized or “eliminated”, or, perhaps worse, of there being no one of their kind in the future – of being literally made extinct, were it decided that there would be no room for clergy-types or poet-types in the utopia-to-be. So sermons preached an end to sins of the mind as well as of the flesh. So artists pictured the goodness and joy of harmonious living. There was general condemnation of sexuality, even of nudity. Sensual pleasure of any kind was considered grossly animalic and inhuman. Thus without any real coërcion all institutions advertised this utopian vision. After a while the unspoken fears were not needed as a goad: even the creative types began to believe that this insanity would be good.
From time to time there were dissenters, but eventually each would disappear without explanation.
- vi -
Argent de Resznay was playing in several movies, all presently being shown in various parts of the city. Albion went that same evening after the telephone incident to see The Distance of an Eye, her latest opus, and thought it an oddly disturbing one, but brilliant nevertheless. According to the credits she had written and directed the film as well as having starred in it. But, to be honest, he noticed not so much her technical expertise as he did simply the woman herself. It was less her physical appearance, although she was certainly striking enough, that so overwhelmed him, as it was some ambient aura that seemed to envelop her. Like Garbo, the screen actress of many years previous, she had a charismatic power difficult to isolate but immediate and powerful in its force throughout the course of the film.
Before he knew it he had become a dévoté of Argent de Resznay films, which was not too difficult because, apparently, everyone else was one too. There was hardly a cinema which was not showing one of her films, and the rest were showing imitations from rival studios. There were retrospective viewings, multiple features, hot new releases. Bookstores sold her poems, music shops her compositions and film scores. By day, in the Café Odéon, he read her books, and by evening he saw her films. How easily he fell into this obsession, letting it draw his mind easily away from war. The poems at first he found amateurish and mawkishly overemotional, almost like adolescent drivel. But they started growing on him: passages demanded rereading, odd lines and phrases recurred at random moments in his mind.
The films were another matter. Some were ordinary enough, the earlier ones for the most part, but others were virtually completely inaccessible as far as Aristotelian æsthetics are concerned, as apparently chaotic as the work of any avant-garde director. But he, like everyone else, sat through them, enthralled, almost unable to move at their close, they were that draining of the emotions. He began to sense that there must be some overall pattern to them, as if each one were a tiny section of a huge scroll-painting otherwise unseen, he struggled to find the common theme, the structure which bound them all together in their creatrix’s mind. That structure, he knew, was the heart of Argent’s nature. And clues kept appearing and disappearing in her poems and in her music. And monomaniacally he kept coming back to the theatres. In the darkness of the movie houses he could almost ignore the other persons watching the film, he could almost imagine himself alone with her, and she picturing for him her secret phantasies, spelled out for him in the chapters of her chaotic dream movies. Even more, Albion began to resent those others who sat in the darkness with him, whispering, laughing, eating popcorn: were they not unworthy of seeing her soul so stripped bare, were they not unappreciative of her art, her sacred beauty? He would stop and think: the only real facts I have about this woman are that she is adaptable to many widely varying roles, and that she is beautiful. That she has shining silver-blonde hair that seems black the next, swept back and down to her shoulders as if the wind had smoothed it into rich waves, that she is not tall but seems tall, being very slender, that she has high round breasts, a narrow waist, and long legs. And her face – one scene captured its beauty best for him, and he remembered it better than the picture, burned into his memory, of her, not the character she was portraying, but her, Argent de Resznay, lighting a candle in a dark room. It was an intimate closeup, with all the clarity and composition of a fine print, all the deep chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt van Rijn, of her and the candle-flame against an umbra of shadowy depth: her eyes were shut, draped with her fine liquid eyebrows, her nostrils flared in the heat of the tiny flame, and her head leaned forward into a flickering of light and dark. There was no lie in this portrait of the woman: the camera had not flinched from the tiny imperfections in her skin, but, indeed, in giving them such clear focus, it made her seem all that much more glowing and vitally alive. One could see, almost feel, the tiny pulsing of a vein in her neck, the infinitesimal vibrations in her soft pale lower lip.
And so Albion fell in love with an unknown woman. He fell in love with many women, who were, behind the masks of rôle, the same woman. And he felt he was beginning to know her intimately, that in the pages of her books, in the darkness of the theatres, there were cryptic messages meant for him alone. He envisioned her as a human being, and unhappy and vulnerable woman lost in the unreal world of movie-making and high society, in constant danger because her art was of the confessional kind, the art of stripping oneself bare, of subjecting oneself to the glare of the light of truth, the kind of art that led to the self-immolation of van Gogh, Mishima, Plath, and Sexton. So he searched her creations for certain secret messages intended to be found by him alone – not Albion LeMat specifically, since of course they didn’t personally know each other, but messages for that one man who, if he existed, was spiritually enough of a kind with her to intuit the message and find her.
He even once wrote a letter to her, saying things like: “I know only a secretary to your secretary will read this, and that you will never see it, and that all I will get at best will be a form thank-you note or one of those studio photographs with the printed signature. But I understand you and love you... I guess I am just writing this letter to myself, to prove to myself that you are a real person, to say the debt of ‘I love you’ and remove the burden I carry...”
Of course, he got no response.
Albion looked up from his attempts at finding acrostics in one of Argent’s poems, sensing someone standing over him, looking at his unintelligible scribblings on a bar napkin. Stooped, paunchy, balding, horrible sleepless wrinkled yellow skin, the familiar impish grin with a sputtering Camel inserted in it –
“Charles! Charles, by God!”
“Nope, just me this time. God couldn’t make it.” The same Charles as ever, quick with the bad repartée.
Albion, smiling, asked, “Don’t tell me you’re still all meeting here, what with the war and all.”
“All right, I won’t tell you.” Charles took his arm. “Come here. Sit down again. I have a lot to tell you.” He suddenly became very serious, a strangely serious Charles Albion had rarely seen before. “Yes, we all still meet here. But, it hasn’t been the same since you went off into the war. They’ve all, they’ve changed somehow.” He butted out his cigarette, started another. “Listen; they’ll all be here soon. We haven’t been meeting as regularly as we used to –”
“I know. I’ve been here almost every day since I got back...”
“Well, that’s just it. It hasn’t been the same since you left to fight. We’ve, ah, we’ve been drifting our separate ways. This tonight is to be our last meeting.” Albion just listened; he had never seen Charles so serious. “Listen, Albion. They don’t know you’ve come back. I had no idea myself that you’d be here, tonight of all nights... You’ve got to inspire them, make them stay together, give them something to hold on to.” Charles was thumping the table for emphases; the waiter, as silent as he had been since Albion’s first return visit to the café glared as he put down a glass of wine for Charles.
“Why, Charles? What’s wrong? What’s happened to them?”
“Happened? Happened?” he repeated as if hard of hearing. “It’s what’s not happened to them that’s the problem!”
“What do you mean? Has Henry developed writer’s block again? Isn’t Victor composing? You mean something like that?”
“No... no... They are all writing, or painting, or composing, same as always. It’s not that, it’s... They’ve lost their power... they’re getting older; their eyes don’t shine any more..., they’ve...”
“They’ve gone over to the middle-class proletariat way of life?”
“No, Albion. Please. I’m serious. No, they...” And Charles began to recite lines from Argent de Resznay’s Les Pendus:
Nous sommes les enfants d’une génération perdue,
peuple naît dans le silence entre deux tempêtes,
le résidu ruiné d’un rêve détruit par la guerre,
nous n’avons point d’objectif, de vie, d’esprit dans nos os,
nous sommes accables par la Vague de la vie...
- vii -
It was to be Albion LeMat’s first battle experience. Taken to the front in a massive transport, waiting for days in cold drafty barracks without having been told that for which they waited, suddenly being thrust into a plane with hasty instructions from the pilot..., and now he was in a Locust LT-4, and the vibration was nearly enough to shake his teeth out. The pilot was repeating his instructions, and Albion could hardly hear the voice coming from the tiny speaker over the engine noise. But he knew what his instructions were anyway. Open bomb bay over the enemy city when the cross-hairs converged on the circular red tower To let these stillborn fœtuses drop untimely from the pregnant flying monster’s swollen middle, to crash and split open on the earth below, spreading their death. He did as he had been told, and the single bomb, an H-bomb, fell away slowly into silent oceans of air. It seemed to dance slightly on the currents, a thing almost beautiful for those brief moments. How hard to associate it in that eternal instant with death. Then it was gone, vanished into the hazy clutter that was the city beneath.
Noise from the speaker aroused him. “Close the bay doors!” He could make out the pilot’s words, raised in excitement. “Do you want us to get caught in the blast?!” So he closed the bomb bay again, and leaned over to watch from his tiny window. There was a small white flower on the ground, the tiniest blossom just beginning to poke through the grey wreckage left by the previous winter. White flowers... he remembered a tree with flowers that glowed in the dusk, he remembered a field of white flowers grown so thick they looked like a field of snow... Slowly the flower spread its petals and put on growth, rising up on its spindly stalk, being nodded by a breeze. It was such a soft thing, soft..., and then the shock wave hit the aëroplane, a giant hand swatting them out of the sky...
And the next day, there he was in formation, marching with the others through the destroyed city. “We are your liberators!” they told the people. “We have brought you freedom!” But there were not many to hear the loudspeaker’s cries, and fewer who listened. Most were dead, powdered, vaporized, in the harrowing burst of energy that had surged from ground zero, from the bomb Albion had released. No matter; the millipede army marched in as conquering armies have done for millennia, supplying its own cheers, its own adulating audience.
A few living city folk stood beside the road, among the ruins where some bluish-colored fires still raged, mutely watching this blare of alien victory with their strange foreign eyes. These people looked to Albion as fragile as some of the naked walls still left standing, overlooked by the bomb blast, as if the merest breath of wind would send them all toppling over. He knew suddenly in a cold sweat of anguished horror that they, themselves bombed in spirit and vaguely jealous of the dead, saw not their “liberators”, but still that shrill scream of the solitary plane overhead, the fall of a tiny meteor, and the muffled blast of the deadly white flower, followed by the high wind, the blast of heat. Did these people know they were looking at the eyes that last saw their city whole?, the hands that had released the bomb?
Later on they were given the freedom to loot the city. Those same eyes walked about through the frighteningly empty ruins, blown with dust of concrete and glass, pulverized into the anonymity of Dresden, Hiroshima, and every other city ever destroyed by war. Those same hands that had released the bomb lifted chunks of concrete with bit of steel reïnforcing rods still imbedded in them, twisted and broken off like licorice sticks. Ruins in the sunlight. Certainly light from the hot noonday sun fell full on them, but still they seemed bent back into their own shadows. Although they were surrounded by pools of the sun, no light seemed to touch their bony grey masses. Flies buzzed wearily about the wreckage; no signs survived of a once-thriving city: No billboards, no statues, no fountains, no traffic lights, no bodies. Just dust and rubble.
Shortly most of the people who still lived in the city would be dead or dying from radiation. Death had reaped the fruits of war.
Albion found a boy sitting on cold stone steps in a broken field where once there had been buildings, probably apartment houses. Night was now coming on, and the boy looked at the soldier. Tears streaked the little dusty face. “Young man,” Albion said, trying to sound friendly, “you’ll catch a cold on that stone. Why don’t you come to the PX? They’ve set things up for you displaced persons, uh, I mean, people like you who’ve lost their homes. There’s a nice bed and free soup waiting for you.”
“No,” the boy answered.
“Come on,” urged Albion, gently pulling the boy’s hand. “It’s okay.”
“No. Gotta stay here.” The boy looked up, seeming at last to recognize Albion for what he was. “This is my house,” he explained, pointing behind him and the stone steps he sat on to a waste of brick and pipe and glass. “I gotta stay here or I might not find it again.”
“But aren’t you hungry? Sleepy?”
“Yeah, but my mom and dad said to wait for them here.”
And somehow Albion knew a truth the boy was unable to face, that they were not coming back. “When did they tell you that?”
“Three days ago.”
Before the bomb.
- viii -
“And what have you seen, Albion?”
They were, or had been, The Movement, the self-styled cutting edge of future artistic destiny. Theirs they had seen as the joyous task of charting the unknown realms of times yet to be. Young they had been when they had banded together, barely out of college years, and full of idealism. Knowing that in the past any such group of talented young geniuses such as theirs had founded some sociocultural movement, they had, in the early days of their fellowship, cast about for a name for the one they should found (of a nature as yet undefined). Charles, the wit, had suggested in a sanctimonious tone “The Bowel Movement”, and that name had stuck, although shortened by the removal of the central word. But that original form of Charles’s suggestion remained in their minds and served well to keep them from being too smugly hubristic.
The group had now been in existence to a greater or lesser extent for several years. It was mainly due to Charles’s efforts that it had not faded away entirely with Albion’s leaving them to go to war. The number that had showed up had been at times smaller, but, tonight, they were all there. Tonight there were the six present. There was Henry, the writer, a large-boned balding bullet-headed man of euphorias and depressions. Seated next to him at the round café table was Willy, a psychologist, small, goatéed, overintellectual and given to overexamination of his own psyche to the point that he couldn’t find it any more, a man with beady intensely piercing eyes. Next was François, the actor, tall and emaciated, nearly ruined by drugs, but when he went into character a superhuman energy still charged him like a dynamo. Then there was Charles himself, of no great talent; his was the role of tension reliever, of comic remarks intentional and not, and the affectionate butt of their insults. Then Victor, the composer and concert pianist, taciturn and grim except when performing his own compositions, when he became feverishly impassioned. And at last there was Albion, the sculptor, Albion, whom they all could sense was not the Albion they remembered from before but some new, disturbingly unknown quantity.
Albion put down his wine, and lit his third cigarette of the day. “I have seen war,” he answered.
“And what was it like?” Henry asked, probably hoping for material for one of his romans à fleuve.
“No,” with finality. “Another time.” And, remembering Charles’s remarks that afternoon, Albion added, “How goes the war at home? How does The Movement progress?”
“How do you expect?” Charles mumbled, his head resting on his folded arms, looking sideways at the purple evening outside the café through his wine. “Like shit, that’s how. What else would you expect from les Bowelistes? The harder we try the more constipated we become.”
Only a couple of modest chuckles, none of the laughter Charles used to receive. Even Charles, Albion thought, was not up to his old vigor. Even Charles.
François grated, “Charles, you’re hung up on shit,” and Charles wearily snapped back, “I would expect that’s Willy’s line, not yours.”
To forestall any argument, Albion suggested, “The city seems changed from how it was when I left it.”
“Yes,” Willy responded. His speech was too correct to be native-learned. “It is the government. They are ruining us with their perfection.”
Henry sucked on his cigarette. “I can’t publish any more. All they want is socially uplifting crap, about the nobility of industrial work and combine farm work and duty to the state, and I can’t write shit like that without puking. Willy’s right: too much perfection spoils the human in us.” Henry was known as a writer who experimented with the form as well as the content of the novel; his audience had been small but loyal, mostly people like himself, particularly other writers.
For a while now there was silence, a silence which, Albion realized, was one of unexpressed agreement with Henry’s implied assertion. And that was that Henry, and all of them, were losing their center, the drive that gave them direction. Why? Perhaps what Charles had suggested to Albion that afternoon: perhaps because they were getting older, more middle-aged. Or perhaps the world had just gotten uglier, duller, and had no room in its bland perfection for eccentric geniuses. With a sudden burst of admiration and respect for Charles, Albion realized that the other had indeed that afternoon analyzed their common problem acutely. For was this not an ailment that Albion himself shared? Why, after all, had he suddenly gone off to the wars? Was it not because he had felt – not the sculptor’s equivalent of writer’s block, but because he had felt somehow inappropriate, as if his work was pointless unnecessary work, each completed sculpture not an embodiment of the Truth, but a powerless imitation of all his other works? – just so much junk? Did he not go to war, he, a staunch pacifist, seeking to be torn out of himself and given a whole new context, a whole new language of energy, of self-discovery and expression?
“What are you thinking, Albion?” Charles asked.
“I am thinking I am in love with Argent de Resznay.” He swallowed, nearly choking, in mild surprise. That was not the answer Charles had been hoping for, and certainly not the one he had intended to give in response to their private conversation earlier that day. He had pretty much already decided to encourage the Movement to join the growing resistance to the government’s new policies – both for the world’s sake as well as their own sake: present psychological health and future existence. But the response he got to his odd unplanned statement startled him even more than the statement itself.
“Ah, that woman!” breathed Victor, with a passion found far oftener in his performing than in his speech. “What man would not like to lie in her arms?”
“Or woman?” Willy chuckled. “She has universal appeal that goes far beyond mere sexual attraction. She is the anima or the collective unconscious of our culture. She is the Σοφια incarnate, the Ewig-Weibliche, the presence among this generation of the Sacred Goddess.”
“How did she come to play such a role?” Albion asked Willy. “How did she come to have such power in us?” The waiter silently put down more bottles of wine, and one was almost immediately poured out.
“I don’t know. These things happen by chance, or some Design we call chance. Synchronicity, perhaps. Remember, she is an actress. She is used to roles! It is in her books, her music –”
“True. Perhaps where normally it is l’actrice qui joue; in this case the Goddess is the one qui joue l’actrice. Psychologically speaking, it is more likely the rôle simply took her up as a raw material rather than the opposite. Much like those many men who were thrust almost against their wills into the rôle of being christs in Jesus’s day, or revolutionaries in Bolivar’s, all because of the great desire of the people for these saviors, and the archetypical purity and power of the rôle. But in this case it has parallels also to the man who projects his phantasies of what is to him the perfect woman onto women singularly unsuited to fit that role. We are men like him in the way we project onto Argent de Resznay: witness this conversation. I would imagine she is, in reality, a reality we can never know, a woman just like any other: at times critical, selfish, childish, and so on.” Willy was a divorcé.
Albion, remembering the many women who beyond the darkness of the theatre were the same woman, and thinking Willy must be wrong, heard François speak, and the words jarred him to the present moment again. “I know her. I have worked with her in films. We were both in Krishna.” All eyes were on the actor’s sallow face, dancing beyond the candle now lit in the center of their table. Yes..., yes, Albion did remember now, as he looked at the gaunt features of the man who had played Lord Krishna. She was so overwhelming in any of her pictures that one could easily forget the other actors. In the silence waiting for François to elaborate, Albion looked at the other men. And each man’s eyes reflected along with a tiny inverted candle-flame a deep yearning, a longing. It was in his own eyes too, he was quite sure, there with the candle-flame. And it was not merely a longing for that woman – Willy was right in so much at least – but for what she represented. Because in all their eyes this longing kindled again for a brief moment, so it seemed to Albion, the fire of what they once had been. This woman represented the finding again of all they had lost: intensity of feeling, the reason to create, a means, and a goal.
Even Willy, dear overanalytical, overeducated, over-verbal Willy, looked as if Argent could have blown him over with a kiss. But he said, anticlimactically, indeed probably to defuse his own longing because, truly, he did not “understand” it according to his scholastic cerebrality, these words: “And was she not, François, just like other women, if perhaps more beautiful and talented? Was she not intermittently petulant, dull, insipid, tiresome...?”
“No!” and François’ reply, though not uttered loudly, rang like the report of gunfire. The actor scrabbled madly to light another cigarette. Willy held up a lighter, and blue clouds veiled his cadaverous face for a moment. It was pitch dark outside; the lamplighter had gone by. “She is unlike any other woman I have ever known. I would give my soul for her.” And François was a homosexual, Albion remembered, and still this deeply affected by a woman.
“Is she like what we see of her in the movies?” Henry inquired.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. She is powerful, magnetic in personality. All the time you are with her you feel scared and self-conscious, like looking down and suddenly realizing you’ve been wearing your nightclothes all day – and yet, when you have left her presence, you ache for it all over again.”
“The Σοφια, breathed Willy, “The Κορη.”
“What do you know about her?” Albion asked.
And François thought the rest of the way through his cigarette. And all eyes watched the glow in the semi-darkness alternately move up the spectrum to orange-yellow then back down to ruddy, finally to be extinguished in the ash tray, leaving a streaked afterimage on their retinas. “I know she is beautiful. I know she is talented. I know everyone wants her for something or other, but she always disdains friendship. I know she has her own circle of friends, but I don’t even know who they are. I know she keeps a diary. Whenever we were not rehearsing or shooting a scene she was off somewhere writing in it. I asked her once, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’, and she said, ‘C’est mon journal.’“
“Is that all you know?”
“Ah, yes! I know one more thing. I know where she lives!”
And if François had had their attention before, then now the actor had his audience of five unable to breathe. “At least –” he said through lips clamping a fresh cigarette, Willy automatically holding up his lighter, François hardly aware of taking the flame; “At least, I have a good idea of where. At least I do not think she was joking. She told me, as we were doing – you remember it? – the Ganges scene for Krishna, that she also lives on the river, in a houseboat on the Herakleitos. And that its name, and that its name... It was a name in honor of Jeanne Darc...”
“The Alouette?” suggested Henry.
“Yes. I think that was it; l’Alouette.”
They silently finished their wine, looking at each other over the rims of their raised glasses. Charles was the first of course: he began giggling uncontrollably. Very shortly Henry and François joined suit, and then they were all laughing, tears even streaming down their faces. Albion too laughed, but nevertheless he had a certain knowledge of why he and they all were laughing: because that woman overwhelmed them so and laughter was the only socially acceptable release for the pent-up emotion.