Mexico and salvaging prisoners meant I had abdicated
my personal life. “
“Does it disturb you so much to think that
perhaps your apparently impersonal activities actually represent a personal
drama in which you yourself are involved? That you are merely re-enacting your
intimate drama through others, expressing it through others?”
“Yes, it does disturb me. It makes me feel I
have failed to escape from myself. Yet I have known all along that I failed in
some way. Because I should have been content, alive, as people are when they
give of themselves. Instead I have often felt like a depersonalized ghost, a
man without a self, a zombie. It is not a good feeling. It’s like the old
stories about the man who lost his shadow.”
“You never abdicate the self, you merely find
new ways of manifesting its activities.”
“If you know what they mean, my two obsessions,
then tell me, I would rather know. I know I have been deceiving myself. Before
we began to talk tonight, when I first sat down with you, I thought to myself,
‘Now I will act like a dead man again, talk like a guide about my new pieces…
‘”
“We never cast off the self. It persists in
living through our impersonal activities. When it is in distress it seeks to
give messages through our activities.”
“Are you trying to say that I was one of the
prisoners myself?”
“Yes, I would say that at some time or other
you were in bondage, figuratively speaking, at least kept from doing what you
wanted to do; your freedom was tampered with.”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“And every time you can get one of those jail
doors open, you feel you are settling an account with some past jailer…or at
least trying to, as I tried today…”
“Very true. At fifteen I had such a passion for
archaeology that I ran away from home. I tried to get to Yucatan. The family
sent police after me, who caught me and brought me back. From then on they kept
me under watch.”
Then his look turned once more toward the
square, and he relinquished this expedition into his personal life. His eyes
became round again and fixed. He had no more to say.
Watching him, Lillian was reminded of the way
animals took on the immobility and the color of a tree’s bark or a bush so as
not to be detected. She smiled at him, but already he was far removed from the
present, the personal, as if he had never talked to her, or known her.
She felt that imprisonment had deprived him of
communication with his family, that it was his tongue he had lost then, a vital
fragment of himself, and that no matter how many statues he unearthed and
reconstructed, no matter how many fragments of history he reassembled, one part
of him was missing and might never be found.
The marimba players interrupted their playing
as if their instruments were a juke box that could not function without the
proper amount of nickels, and began to ask for contributions.
In the morning it was the intense radium shafts
of the sun on the seas that awakened her, penetrating the native hut. The dawns
were like court scenes of Arabian magnificence. The tent of the sky took fire,
a laminated coral, dispelling all the seashell delicacies which had preceded
the birth of the sun, and it was a duel between fire and platinum. The whole
sea would seem to have caught fire, until the incendiary dawn stopped burning.
After the fire came a rearrangement of more subtle brocades, the turquoise and
the coral separated, and transparencies appeared like curtains of the sheerest
sari textiles. The rest of the day might have seemed shabby after such an
opening, but not in Golconda. The dawn was merely the rain of colors from the
sky which the earth and the sea would orchestrate all day, with fruits,
flowers, and the dress of the natives. These were not merely spots of color,
but always vividly shining and humid, as shining as human eyes, colors as alive
as flesh tones.
Just as music was an unbroken chain in
Golconda, so were the synchronizations
my personal life. “
“Does it disturb you so much to think that
perhaps your apparently impersonal activities actually represent a personal
drama in which you yourself are involved? That you are merely re-enacting your
intimate drama through others, expressing it through others?”
“Yes, it does disturb me. It makes me feel I
have failed to escape from myself. Yet I have known all along that I failed in
some way. Because I should have been content, alive, as people are when they
give of themselves. Instead I have often felt like a depersonalized ghost, a
man without a self, a zombie. It is not a good feeling. It’s like the old
stories about the man who lost his shadow.”
“You never abdicate the self, you merely find
new ways of manifesting its activities.”
“If you know what they mean, my two obsessions,
then tell me, I would rather know. I know I have been deceiving myself. Before
we began to talk tonight, when I first sat down with you, I thought to myself,
‘Now I will act like a dead man again, talk like a guide about my new pieces…
‘”
“We never cast off the self. It persists in
living through our impersonal activities. When it is in distress it seeks to
give messages through our activities.”
“Are you trying to say that I was one of the
prisoners myself?”
“Yes, I would say that at some time or other
you were in bondage, figuratively speaking, at least kept from doing what you
wanted to do; your freedom was tampered with.”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“And every time you can get one of those jail
doors open, you feel you are settling an account with some past jailer…or at
least trying to, as I tried today…”
“Very true. At fifteen I had such a passion for
archaeology that I ran away from home. I tried to get to Yucatan. The family
sent police after me, who caught me and brought me back. From then on they kept
me under watch.”
Then his look turned once more toward the
square, and he relinquished this expedition into his personal life. His eyes
became round again and fixed. He had no more to say.
Watching him, Lillian was reminded of the way
animals took on the immobility and the color of a tree’s bark or a bush so as
not to be detected. She smiled at him, but already he was far removed from the
present, the personal, as if he had never talked to her, or known her.
She felt that imprisonment had deprived him of
communication with his family, that it was his tongue he had lost then, a vital
fragment of himself, and that no matter how many statues he unearthed and
reconstructed, no matter how many fragments of history he reassembled, one part
of him was missing and might never be found.
The marimba players interrupted their playing
as if their instruments were a juke box that could not function without the
proper amount of nickels, and began to ask for contributions.
In the morning it was the intense radium shafts
of the sun on the seas that awakened her, penetrating the native hut. The dawns
were like court scenes of Arabian magnificence. The tent of the sky took fire,
a laminated coral, dispelling all the seashell delicacies which had preceded
the birth of the sun, and it was a duel between fire and platinum. The whole
sea would seem to have caught fire, until the incendiary dawn stopped burning.
After the fire came a rearrangement of more subtle brocades, the turquoise and
the coral separated, and transparencies appeared like curtains of the sheerest
sari textiles. The rest of the day might have seemed shabby after such an
opening, but not in Golconda. The dawn was merely the rain of colors from the
sky which the earth and the sea would orchestrate all day, with fruits,
flowers, and the dress of the natives. These were not merely spots of color,
but always vividly shining and humid, as shining as human eyes, colors as alive
as flesh tones.
Just as music was an unbroken chain in
Golconda, so were the synchronizations
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