of her own fist dislodging itself from its shadow pressing into the eye of each finger-tip. Rolling “log”-book. Stranded telephone within the dust of memory. Toppling skull, ornamental ear and mouthpiece. Half-trailing, half-knotted signal and line. Watchman. THIEF .
Nothing moved. It was the strangest discordant flight of consequences she experienced—agitated body (vacant structure), nerve-end, string (bodiless splinter), tautness of sail stiff as a comb upon whose giant brow nothing moved as if “nothing” were “something”. So obscure this shift or severance was it seemed little more than the prick of an eye-tooth, the pressure of a finger-nail upon the palm of one hand. Nothing still moved —a faint shadow perhaps against the banality and monument of solipsis: phantom erection and ejection of parts issuing from the solid tyranny of proportion to swing into new clockwise mouth and head, anti-clockwise defiant trunk and limb.
“He” addressed her from within his new spiral—oracle and orbit, buoyant vessel, hieroglyph of space—declaring art is the phenomenon of freedom. “His” voice and their “log” book rang and struck her ears like a song. The “deaf” within her stirred and listened. The “dumb” she cherished began to speak. Susan started, grasped crew and ally she had thought—in a moment of acute self-knowledge and deprivation—to smash upon the floor. The dry-rot features of the past broke into fertile drum or ear, living mouth or tongue— What does one mean by phenomenon? they cried.
“They” had hardly uttered the words through “her”, when “he” responded by summoning “them” to make an inventory of the broken pieces, skin as well as wood, flung amidst the shattered telephone wires distended upon the floor. He had gone to great pains and expense, she recalled, to assemble these—and it seemed now, in the end, a sovereign principle that they should appear to endure and incorporate her features with each “dead” figure of the past which swung into new account and life.
“What do I mean by phenomenon? The hole in the monument, that’s what I mean.” He paused. She waited, tense. He could be so shattering, so severe. “There’s an ungraspable scale to nature and appearance. Remember that when you come to tackle the mess we’ve made of our economic affairs. In fact it was always beyond our control, even when the whole collection we’d scraped together seemed most obedient in relays of supply and demand.”
She was stung by the memory of crises they had suffered , some of which he had precipitated by temperamental recklessness. “But I don’t see ,”she cried. “I don’t understand why you profess to care at one moment—and still say in the same breath it doesn’t matter at all. Are you saying that there are hidden forces …?” She was lost. She listened for the lightning rustle of vessel and “log”-book. But his or their reply was harsh as stone, “no. I never said that.”
“What then?” she pleaded.
“Appearances cannot be grasped in their entirety. That’s all I said. Not a word about hidden forces. Let me put it this way—every commission of fact involves an omission of intensity.” He paused. She waited. “Let me put it in still another way— execute something, quite naturally or unnaturally, as one imagines, isolate something in order to examine it properly, as one thinks, and one arrests—or appears to arrest—a web of processes. There’s always this “negative” race with or against something in which one is involved from beginning to end and all the way back again. And one can never keep dead in step. A little bit ahead, who knows (even this clairvoyant leap one may appear to accomplish), or a little bit behind. But never dead in step. Every apparent execution of the swift runner of life involves a loss in true pace and intensity or flight, even if it seems but a shade this way or that. And it is this fluid distinction which
Nothing moved. It was the strangest discordant flight of consequences she experienced—agitated body (vacant structure), nerve-end, string (bodiless splinter), tautness of sail stiff as a comb upon whose giant brow nothing moved as if “nothing” were “something”. So obscure this shift or severance was it seemed little more than the prick of an eye-tooth, the pressure of a finger-nail upon the palm of one hand. Nothing still moved —a faint shadow perhaps against the banality and monument of solipsis: phantom erection and ejection of parts issuing from the solid tyranny of proportion to swing into new clockwise mouth and head, anti-clockwise defiant trunk and limb.
“He” addressed her from within his new spiral—oracle and orbit, buoyant vessel, hieroglyph of space—declaring art is the phenomenon of freedom. “His” voice and their “log” book rang and struck her ears like a song. The “deaf” within her stirred and listened. The “dumb” she cherished began to speak. Susan started, grasped crew and ally she had thought—in a moment of acute self-knowledge and deprivation—to smash upon the floor. The dry-rot features of the past broke into fertile drum or ear, living mouth or tongue— What does one mean by phenomenon? they cried.
“They” had hardly uttered the words through “her”, when “he” responded by summoning “them” to make an inventory of the broken pieces, skin as well as wood, flung amidst the shattered telephone wires distended upon the floor. He had gone to great pains and expense, she recalled, to assemble these—and it seemed now, in the end, a sovereign principle that they should appear to endure and incorporate her features with each “dead” figure of the past which swung into new account and life.
“What do I mean by phenomenon? The hole in the monument, that’s what I mean.” He paused. She waited, tense. He could be so shattering, so severe. “There’s an ungraspable scale to nature and appearance. Remember that when you come to tackle the mess we’ve made of our economic affairs. In fact it was always beyond our control, even when the whole collection we’d scraped together seemed most obedient in relays of supply and demand.”
She was stung by the memory of crises they had suffered , some of which he had precipitated by temperamental recklessness. “But I don’t see ,”she cried. “I don’t understand why you profess to care at one moment—and still say in the same breath it doesn’t matter at all. Are you saying that there are hidden forces …?” She was lost. She listened for the lightning rustle of vessel and “log”-book. But his or their reply was harsh as stone, “no. I never said that.”
“What then?” she pleaded.
“Appearances cannot be grasped in their entirety. That’s all I said. Not a word about hidden forces. Let me put it this way—every commission of fact involves an omission of intensity.” He paused. She waited. “Let me put it in still another way— execute something, quite naturally or unnaturally, as one imagines, isolate something in order to examine it properly, as one thinks, and one arrests—or appears to arrest—a web of processes. There’s always this “negative” race with or against something in which one is involved from beginning to end and all the way back again. And one can never keep dead in step. A little bit ahead, who knows (even this clairvoyant leap one may appear to accomplish), or a little bit behind. But never dead in step. Every apparent execution of the swift runner of life involves a loss in true pace and intensity or flight, even if it seems but a shade this way or that. And it is this fluid distinction which
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