Plexus
Thus Rothermel dreams. He forgets all the heartrending scenes which have sullied this beautiful picture. He would do anything for her, even now.
And now let us leave Rothermel for a while. Let him dream in his taxicab as the ferryboat gently cradles him on the bosom of the Hudson. We will meet him again, on the shores of Manhattan.
At Forty-Second Street Mona dives into the subway to emerge in a few minutes at Sheridan Square. Here her course becomes truly erratic. Sophie, if she were still on her heels, would indeed have difficulty following her. The Village is a network of labyrinths modeled upon the corrugated reveries of the early Dutch settlers. One is constantly coming face to face with himself at the end of a tortuous street. There are alleys, lanes, cellars and garrets, squares, triangles, courts, everything anomalous, incongruous and bewildering: all that lacks are the bridges of Milwaukee. Certain doll’s houses, squeezed between somber tenements and morbid factories, have been dozing in a vacuum of time which could be described only in terms of decades. The dreamy, somnolent past exudes from the façades, from the curious names of the streets, from the miniature scale imparted by the Dutch. The present announces itself in the strident cries of the street urchins, in the muffled roar of traffic which shakes not only the chandeliers but the very foundations of the underground. Dominating everything is the confusion of races, tongues, habits. The Americans who have muscled in are off-center, whether they be bankers, politicians, magistrates, Bohemians, or genuine artists. Everything is cheap, tawdry, vulgar and phoney. Minnie Douchebag is on the same level as the prison warden round the corner. The fraternization, such as it is, takes place at the bottom of the melting pot. Everyone is trying to pretend that it is the most interesting locale in the city. It is the quarter full of characters; they collide like protons and electrons, always in a five-dimensional world whose fundament is chaos.
It is in a world like this that Mona is at home and thoroughly herself. Every few paces she runs into someone she knows. These encounters resemble to a remarkable degree the collisions of ants in the throes of work. Conversation is conducted through antennae which are manipulated frenetically. Has some devastating upheaval just occurred which vitally concerns the entire anthill? The running up and down stairs, the salutations, the handshaking, the rubbing of noses, the phantom gesticulations, the pourparlers, the gurgitations and regurgitations, the aerial transmissions, the dressing and undressing, the whispering, the warnings, the threats, the entreaties, the masquerades—all goes on in insect fashion and with a speed such as only insects seem capable of mustering. Even when snow-bound the Village is in constant commotion and effervescence. Yet nothing of the slightest importance ever ensues. In the morning there are headaches, that is all.
Sometimes, however, in one of those houses which one notices only in dream, there lives a pale, timid creature, usually of dubious sex, who belongs to the world of du Maurier, Chekhov or Alain Fournier. The name may be Alma, Frederika, Ursula, Malvina, a name consonant with the auburn tresses, the pre-Raphaelite figure, the Gaelic eyes. A creature who rarely stirs from the house, and then only in the wee hours of the morning.
Towards such types Mona is fatally drawn. A secret friendship veils all their intercourse in mystery. Those breathless errands which drive her through the runneled streets may have for objective nothing more than the purchase of a dozen white goose eggs. No other eggs will do. En passant she may take it into her head to surprise her seraphic friend by buying her an old-fashioned cameo smothered in violets, or a rocking chair from the hills of Dakota, or a snuffbox scented with sandalwood. The gift first and then a few bills fresh from the mint. She arrives breathlessly and departs breathlessly, as if between thunderclaps. Even Rothermel would be powerless to suspect how quickly and for what ends his money goes. All we know, who greet her at the end of a feverish day, is that she had managed to buy a few groceries and can dispense a little cash. On the Brooklyn side we talk in terms of coppers, which in China is “cash.” Like children we play with nickels, dimes and pennies. The dollar is an abstract conception employed only in high finance.…
Only once during our stay with the Poles did Stanley and I venture abroad together. It was to see a Western picture in which there were some extraordinary wild horses. Stanley, reminded of his days in the cavalry, became so excited that he decided not to go to work that evening. All through the meal he told yarns, with each yarn growing more tender, more sympathetic, more romantic. Suddenly he recalled the voluminous correspondence which we had exchanged when we were in our teens.
It all began the day after I saw him coming down “the street of early sorrows,” seated atop the hearse beside the driver. (After his uncle’s death Stanley’s aunt had married an undertaker, a Pole again. Stanley always had to accompany him on the burial expeditions.)
I was in the middle of the street, playing cat, when the funeral procession came along. I was certain it was Stanley who had waved to me, yet I could not believe my eyes. Had it not been a funeral procession I would have trotted alongside the vehicle and exchanged greetings. As it was, I stood rooted to the spot, watching the cortege slowly disappear round the corner.
It was the first time I had seen Stanley in six years. It made an impression on me. The following day I sat down and wrote him a letter—to the old address.
Stanley now brought out that first letter—and all the others which had followed. I was ashamed to tell him that I had long since lost his. But I could still remember the flavor of them, all written on long sheets of yellow paper, in pencil, with a flourishing hand. The hand of an autocrat. I recalled the perennial salutation he employed: “My charming fellow!” This to a boy in short pants! They were letters, to speak of style, such as Théophile Gautier might have written to an unknown sycophant. Doped with literary borrowings. But they put me in a fever, always.
What my own letters were like I had never once thought of. They belonged to a distant past, a forgotten past. Now I held them in my hand, and my hand trembled as I read. So this was me in my teens? What a pity no one had made a movie of us! Droll figures we were. Little jackanapes, bantams, cocks-o’-the-walk. Discussing such ponderous things as death and eternity, reincarnation, metempsychosis, libertinism, suicide. Pretending that the books we read were nothing to the ones we would write ourselves one day. Talking of life as if we had experienced it to the core.
But even in these pretentious exercises of youth I detected to my amazement the seeds of an imaginative faculty which was to ripen with time. Even in these flyblown missives there were those abrupt breaks and rushes which indicate the presence of hidden fires, of unsuspected conflicts. I was moved to observe that even at this period I could lose myself, I who was hardly aware that I had a self. Stanley, I recalled, never lost himself. He had a style and in it he was fixed, as if constricted by a corset. I remember that at that period I thought of him as being so much more mature, so much more sophisticated. He would be the brilliant writer; I would be the plodding ink-slinger. As a Pole he had an illustrious heritage; I was merely an American, with an ancestry which was vague and dubious. Stanley wrote as if he had stepped off the boat only the day before. I wrote as if I had learned to use the language, my real language being the language of the street, which was no language at all. Back of Stanley I always visualized a line of warriors, diplomats, poets, musicians. Myself, I had no ancestry whatever. I had to invent one.
Curious, but any feelings of lineage or of ephemeral connections with the past which might arise in me were usually evoked by one of three curiously disparate phenomena: one, narrow, olden streets with miniature houses; two, certain unreal types of human beings, generally dreamers or fanatics; three, photographs of Tibet, of the Tibetan landscape particularly. I could be disoriented in a jiffy, and was then marvelously at home, one with the world and with myself. Only in such rare moments did I know or pretend to understand myself. My connections were, so to speak, with man and not with men. Only when I was shunted back to the grand trunk line did I become awa
re of my real rhythm, my real being. Individuality expressed itself for me as a life with roots. Efflorescence meant culture—in short, the world of cyclical development. In my eyes the great figures were always identified with the trunk of the tree, not with the boughs and leaves. And the great figures were capable of losing their identity easily: they were all variations of the one man, Adam Cadmus, or whatever he be called. My lineage stemmed from him, not from my ancestors. When I became aware I was superconscious; I could make the leap back at one bound.
Stanley, like all chauvinists, traced his arboreal descent only to the beginnings of the Polish nation, that’s to say, to the Pripet Marshes. There he lay bogged, like a weasel. His antennae reached only to the frontiers which were limitrophe to Poland. He never became an American, in the true sense. For him America was merely a condition or state of trance which permitted him to transmit his Polish genes to his heredity. Any differentiations from the norm, that is, from the Polish type, were to be attributed to the rigors of adjustment and adaptation. Whatever was American in him was merely an alloy which would be dissolved in the generation that was to spring from his loins.
Preoccupations of this sort Stanley never divulged overtly, but they were there and they manifested themselves in the form of insinuations. The emphasis he gave to a word or phrase always provided the clue of his real feelings. He was thoroughly antipathetic to the new world in which he found himself. He made only enough effort to keep alive. He went through the motions, as we say, nothing more. Though his experience of life was purely negative it was none the less potent. It was a matter of charging the battery: his children would make the necessary connections with life. Through them the racial energy of the Poles, their dreams, their longings, their aspirations, would be revived. Stanley was content to inhabit an in-between world.
All this admitted, it was nevertheless a luxury for me to bathe in the effluvium of the Polish spirit. Polonesia, I called it. An inland sea, like the Caspian, surrounded by the steppes. Over the troubled, stagnant waters, over treacherous shoals and invisible sources, flew huge migratory birds, heralds of past and future—of a Polish past and future. All that surrounded this sea was inimical and poisonous. From the language alone came the much-needed sustenance.
What are the riches of English, I used to say to myself, compared to the melodious verdure of this Babel? When a Pole employs his native tongue he speaks not only to his friend but to his compatriots everywhere in the world. To the ear of a foreigner like myself, who was privileged to assist at these sacred performances, the speeches of my Polish friends seemed like interminable monologues addressed to the innumerable ghosts of the Diaspora within and without. Every Pole regards himself as the secret custodian of the fabulous repositories of the race; with his death some secret part of the accumulated intangibles, unfathomable to aliens, dies with him. But in the language nothing is lost: so long as one Pole is left to articulate, Poland will live.
When he spoke Polish he was another man, Stanley. Even when he spoke to one as insignificant as his wife Sophie. He might have been talking of milk and crackers, but to my ears it sounded as if we were back in the Age of Chivalry. Nothing is better suited to describe the modulations, dissonances and distillations of this language than the word alchemy. Like a strong dissolvent, the Polish language converts the image, concept, symbol or metaphor into a mysterious transparent liquid of camphorous odor which, by its mellifluous resonances, suggests the perpetual alternation and interchange of idea and impulse. Issuing like a hot geyser from the crater of the human mouth, Polish music—for it is hardly a language—consumes everything with which it comes into contact, intoxicating the brain with the pungent, acrid fumes of its metallic source. A man employing this medium is no longer a mere man—he has appropriated the powers of a sorcerer. The Book of Demonology could only have been written in this language. To say that this is a quality of the Slavs explains nothing. To be a Slav does not mean to be a Pole. The Pole is unique and untouchable; he is the prime mover, the original impetus personified, and his realm is the dread realm of doom. For him the sun was extinguished long ago. For him all horizons are limited and circumscribed. He is the desperado of the race, self-accursed and self-acquitted. Make the world over? He would rather drag it down to the bottomless pit.
Reflections of this order always rose to the surface when I would leave the house to stretch my legs. A short distance from Stanley’s home lay a world akin in many respects to the one I had known as a child. Through it ran a canal black as ink whose stagnant waters stank like ten thousand dead horses. But all about the canal were winding lanes, eddying streets, still paved with cobblestones, the worn sidewalks flanked by diminutive shanties cluttered with shutters dislocated from their hinges, creating the impression, from a distance, of being enormous Hebrew letters. Furniture, bric-a-brac, utensils, implements and materials of all kinds littered the streets. The fringe of the societal world.
Each time I approached the confines of this Lilliputian world I changed back to a boy of ten. My senses became more acute, my memory more alive, my hunger more sharp. I could hold conversation with the self which I once was and with the self I had become. Who I was that walked and sniffed and explored, I knew not. An interlocutory I, doubtless. An I suborned by a superior court of justice.… In this supraliminal arena Stanley always figured tenderly. He was the invisible comrade to whom I imparted those larval thoughts which elude speech. Immigrant, orphan, derelict—of these three ingredients he was composed. We understood one another because we were complete opposites. What he envied I gave him regally; what I craved he fed me from his carrion beak. We swam like Siamese fish on the glaucous surface of the lake of childhood. We knew not our Protector. We rejoiced in our imagined freedom.
What intrigued me as a child, what intrigues me to this day, is the glory and the wonder of eclosion. There are balmy days in childhood when, perhaps because of the great retardation of time, one steps outdoors into a world which is dozing. It is not the world of humans, nor is it the world of nature which is drowsing—it is the inanimate world of stones, minerals, objects. The inanimate world in bud.… With the slow-motion eyes of childhood one watches breathlessly as this latent realm of life slowly reveals its pulse beat. One becomes aware of the existence of those invisible rays which emanate perpetually from the most remote parts of the cosmos and which radiate from the microcosm as well as from the macrocosm. “As above, so below.” In the twinkle of an eye one is divorced from the illusory world of material reality; with every step one places himself anew at the carrefour of these concentric radiations which are the true substance of an all-encompassing and all-pervading reality. Death has no meaning. All is change, vibration, creation and re-creation. The song of the world, registered in every particle of that specious substance called matter, issues forth in an inequable harmony which filters through the angelic being lying dormant in the shell of the physical creature called man. Once the angel assumes dominion, the physical being flowers. Throughout all realms a quiet, persistent blossoming takes place.
Why is it that angels, whom we foolishly associate with the vast interstellar spaces, love everything which is mignon?
As soon as I reach the banks of the canal, where my world in miniature lies waiting, the angel takes over. I no longer scrutinize the world—the world is inside me. I see it as clearly with eyes closed as with eyes wide open. Enchantment, not sorcery. Surrender, and the bliss which accompanies surrender. What was dilapidation, decay, sordidness, is transmuted. The microscopic eye of the angel sees the infinite parts which compose the divine whole; the telescopic eye of the angel sees nothing but totality, which is perfect. In the wake of the angel there are only universes to behold—size means nothing.
When man, with his pitiful sense of relativity, looks through the telescope and marvels at the immensity of creation, he means to confess that he has succeeded in reducing the limitless to the limited. He acquires, as it were, an optic lease on the boundless grandeur of a creation which
is unfathomable to him. What matter if he succeed in putting a thousand universes within the focus of his microscopic telescope? The process of enlargement merely enhances the sense of the miniature. But man feels more at home in his little universe, or pretends he does, when he has uncovered what lies beyond its bounds. The thought that his universe may be no bigger than a tiny blood corpuscle entrances him, lulls his desperate anguish. But the use of an artificial eye, no matter to what monstrous proportions it be magnified, never brings him joys. The greater his physical vision, the more awed he becomes. He understands, though he refuses to believe, that with this eye he will never penetrate, still less partake of, the mystery of creation. To re-enter the mysterious world from which he sprang he realizes, in a vague, dim way, that other eyes are needed.
It is with the angelic eye that man beholds the world of his true substance.
These miniature realms, where all is sunken, muted and transformed, emerge often as not in books. A page of Hamsun frequently yielded the same mysterious harmonies of enchantment as a walk by the canal. For a brief moment one experiences the same sort of vertigo as when the motorman deserts his post with the trolley in full flight. After that it is pure volupté. Surrender again. Surrender to the spell which has rendered the author superfluous. Immediately one’s rhythm is retarded. One lingers before the verbal structures which palpitate like living houses. One knows that someone never encountered before, and never to be encountered again, will emerge and take possession of one. It may be a personage as innocuous as Sophie. It may be a question of large white goose eggs which will dominate the whole passage. No governing the cosmic fluid in which the events and situations are now bathed. The dialogue may become pure nonsense, astral in its implications. The author has made it clear that he is absent. The reader is face to face with an angelic sport. He will live this scene, this protracted moment, over and over again, and with a sharpened sense of reality verging on the hallucinatory. Only a little street—perhaps not a block long. Diminutive gardens tended by trolls. Perpetual sunshine. And remembered music, toned down to blend with the hum of insects and the rustle of leaves. Joy, joy, joy. The intimate presence of flowers, of birds, of stones which have preserved the record of similar magical days.