Sedendo et Quiescendo
DOWN YOU GET now and step around. Two hours menopause. Drag your coffin my lord. Half a day and I'll be with. HIER! The bright beer goes like water through the nearsighted Frankfort porter. In Perpignan exiled dream-Dantes screaming in the planetrees and freezing the sun with peacock feathers and at last at least a rudimentary black swan with the bloodbeak and HIC! for the bladderjerk of the little Catalan postman. Oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus. Here oh here oh art thou pale with weariness. I hope yes after a continental third-class insomnia among the reluctantly military philologists asleep and armed as to nasals and dentals. Laughter. Ten Pfenigs in such a dainty slot gives the la I am bound to concede and releases the appropriate tonic for the waning lust-affair. Moderate strength rings the bell. I don't believe it. Così fan tutte with the magic flute. Even in the Xmas holidays. Half a day and I'll be in.
Up to time then after this little railway-station rectification she advanced up the railway-platform like a Gozzi-Epstein, being careful not to lose the platform ticket that yet ten Pfenigs cost had, insisting on the Garden of Eden in Mammy's furcoat, scarcely suggesting within the mild aphrodisiac of cheap loose black leather Russian boots legs that even flexed nervously in black stockings stretched to the absolute limit of intensity and viewed from a certain very special Blickpunkt against a very special quality of hard light during a period of oestruation were not alas reasonably exciting. The truly tremendous bowl of the hips (frequent and easy) breaking out and away from the waistroot (she won't need no Lupercus) like a burdocked bulb of Ruffino and the two great melons of the buttocks received an almost Rhineline from the dark peltsheath. Sheath within sheath and the missing sword. Not forgetting this was the suit he had bought for next to nothing from a lefthanded indivisible individual, with a charitable desire to justify his fatigue he forced his right hand down past the craggy coxa (almost a woman's basin in these trousers) into the glairy gallant depths and fished up a fifty. A cigarette quick for the cheekbones and the ticket handy there in the breast of my reefer and the heavy valise to snatch him skilfully detached and extenuated into the loveglue and a smoke after that was nearly as good as in the Maison du Café.
"At last!"
"Beloved!"
"Taxi!" Vie de taxi. Je t'adore à l'égal.
Carry your coffin my lord. Manner. Moving east to the segregation of the sexes. Ausgang on the right. Rule of the road. Lady on right arm. Nonsens unique. Astuce. All the same sleep on right side. Gentle reader don't overlook will you the fact that he celebrated the signing of the armistice with a pubic lanugo and
BELACQUA
we'll call him and no indolent virgin is his sister (indolent virgin!) and he doesn't much care whether he plays the tinkle-tinkle of a fourhander or not but he won't facing the keyboard observe the rule of the road (a megalomaniac you see with his head in his thighs as a general rule) so we ask you to humour what of course naturally looks merely like so much intestinal incohesion, remember he belongs to the costermonger times of a pale and ardent generation, pray that he'll let a few sighs out of him ere it's too late and speedy promotion from the Godbirds. And the lady that even in this very short and public space of time and notwithstanding that fur has no conductive properties of the appropriate kind worth speaking of has succeeded in transmitting certain unexpectedly stimulating sensations to her young visitor, what shall we call her. What name would you suggest? I'm rather inclined myself to think
SMERALDINA-RIMA
and anything that comes in handy for short. He handed her into the cab of the Wagen with its charming deep Bluepoint zoster and spoke an address confidently to the chauffeur who but a moment previously had thought to light a cigarette and who now naturally was in no humour to start his engine and set off but was not slow to yield to the promising accent of the young tourist whose heavy fibre case he hoisted vigorously on board on his left beside him and clipping the yet intact Ova between his rubbery helix and hypertrophied mastoid process gratified in his dialogue doubtless his nearest colleagues with what no doubt was a passionate Hessian epigram, set his machine angrily in motion, suffering with a kind of hopeless interest the refracted deportment of his clients. Down the cobbled avenue then of bitter Xmas trees, trembling in many and many a shadowy stasis between tram and sidewalk, the superb Wagen ran towards the spire that eliminates in impeccable imperial alignment the now dim height of Hercules and the meagre cascade sullen and abandoned dropping, what there was of it and because it bloody well had to, down the choked channel of Hohenzollern rocaille, snowclad, upon the castle. Blocus sentimental. Belacqua took her hand and drew it down upon the skirted, nearly the thighjoy through the fingers, and all the same he enquires:
"Where did you get the hat?" A glaucous helmethat.
"Do you like it?"
"Very nice do you?"
"Oh I don't know do you?" Snotgasp of reliefhilarity in honour of private joke.
"It goes with the ring." He turned over the hand and looked at the warts. Two dwindling warts in the shadow of the Mount of Venus. Warts in the valley of the shadow of.
"Your warts are better." Ostentatiously he dropped his mouth upon the place. She squeezed the Giudecca of her palm against the centre of distribution, nailing his cheekbones with thumb and index. In the rue Delambre with a silk handkerchief did he not staunch the vomitdribble of a littérateur deaddrunk and cornuted what's more into the bargain on Pernod and Pickmeup? How often had he not denied all knowledge of Hernani? Poor Hamlet rolling his belly waxes and tapers the spike of his navelthread for the red waistcoat. The beadlust. By no thinking shall he consume that enterprise, by no new thoughts shall he be altogether released from the postulate of his undertaking. Fast in the black sand.
Let me off the tutti chords now and tell me frankly shutting your eyes like Rouletabille what you think of my erotic so-stenutino. Crémieux hold your saliva and you Curtius, I have a note somewhere on Anteros I believe, in fact I seem to remember I once wrote a poem (Nth. Gt. George's St. diphthong Captain Duncan if you please) on him or to him cogged from the lecherous laypriest's Magic Ode and if I don't forget I'll have the good taste to use the little duckydiver as a kind of contrapuntal compensation do you comprehend me and in deference to your Pisan penchants for literary stress and strain. Well really you know and in spite of the haricot skull and a tendency to use up any odds and ends of pigment that might possibly be left over she was the living spit he thought of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede. Ne suis-je point pale? Suis-je belle? Certainly pale and belle my pale belle Braut with a winter skin like an old sail in the wind. The root and the source between and behind the little athletic or esthetic bit of a birdnose was indeed I assure you a constant source of delight and astonishment, when his solitude was not peopled and justified and beautified and even his sociability by a cold in the head, to his forefinger pad and nail, rubbing and plumbing and boring it just as for many years he polished his glasses (ecstasy of attrition!) or suffered the shakes and gracenote strangulations and enthrottlements of the Winkelmusik of Szopen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as my name is Fred, dying all his life (thank you Mr. Auber) on a sickroom talent (thank you Mr. Field) and a Kleinmeister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thank you Mr. Beckett), or crossed the Seine or the Tolka or the Pegnitz or the Fulda as the case might be and it never for one single solitary instant occurring to me that he was on all such and similar occasions (which we are sorry to say lack of space obliges us regretfully to exclude from this chronicle) indulging in and pandering to the vilest and basest excesses of sublimation of a certain kind. The wretched little wet rag of an upperlip, pugnozzling up and back in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils, was happily to some extent mollified and compensated by the full firm undershot priapism of underlip and chin, a signal recovery to say the least and a reaffirmation of the promise of sentimental vehemence already so gothically declamatory in the wedgehead of the strapping girl. From time to time she literally only had to lift off her casco to be a birdface and to have put Mr. John Kiss-mearse and Orchids in mind of his Perpetually Succourful Lady as she positively must have appeared on two probationary occasions: primo, pinned, there's no other word for it, to her loggia by the shining sage-femme: secundo, confined, by Thermidor, in the interests of her armpits, to her bathroom, shamed in mind, yes, and yet-grieving for the doomed olives. Well I must say and no offence intended, that class of egoterminal immaculate quackery and dupery gives me the sick properly. No, whatever she was she wasn't that kind. I suppose I'm entitled to say she looked like a parrot in a Pieta, a pietra serena parrot. On occasions that is. Not in the helmet of salvation I need hardly point out. By Jove when I look back and think how chaste was the passion of mutual attraction that juxtaposed those two young people in the first instance. It's out of the question to give you any idea of the reverence with which they-how shall I say?-clave the one to the other in an ecstasy and an agony of mystical adhesion. Yessir! An ecstasy and an agony! A sentimental coagulum, sir, that biggers descruption. Don't I know for a positive fact that the unhappy Belacqua (Bollocky, though it's hardly the time or the place for that, to his friends) separated from his sweet Vega by two channels and 29 hours third-class if he went over Ostend, tossing and turning and tightening the slender white cords of his nervi nervorum with the frogs' and the corncrakes' Chinese chromatism, muting the long fever of the midos and the dolas in a scorching a piacere, inscribed to his darling blue flower some of the finest Night of May hiccupsobs that ever left a fox's paw sneering and rotting in a snaptrap. For example:
At last I find in my confusèd soul,
Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses,
The certitude that I cannot be whole,
Consummate, finally achieved, unless
I be consumed and fused in the white heat
Of her sad finite essence, so that none
Shall sever us who are at last complete,
Eternally, irrevocably one,
One with the birdless cloudless colourless skies,
One with the bright purity of the fire
Of which we are and for which we must die
A strange exalted death and he entire,
Like two merged stars, intolerably bright,
Conjoined in One and in the Infinite!
Lilly Neary has a lovely Gee and her poor Paddy got his B.A. and by the holy fly I wouldn't recommend you to ask me what class of a tree they were under when he put his hand on her and enjoyed that. The thighjoy through the fingers. What does she want for her thighbeauty? A bitch-melba and a long long come before breakfast, toast and. Keycold Lucrece the chaste and the castaway in the cruel tights and Christ the useful culmination, footpounds through the fingers. No, more-more?-other than that to my bright agenesia. No no don't admire that. No but I thought perhaps honeysuckle round the cradle, custard and nutmeg on my grave, and the Eingang? Then he reddied his nose with the hand that came off her. Christ that was fine too. I wouldn't look at your Haus Albrecht Dürer, Adam Kraft my iron buck virgin. No smoking in the torture-chamber. Not really you don't mean to tell me well well! Now the thin little sandy the others do the streets but I go and dien in the, furchtbar, all of a sudden with tears, now I must go and dien in the, the others do the streets but I go and dien in the, furchtbar, find a hotel, take a Wagen, no?, aufwiedersehen, write, to hell with you, strive for your stout little hoffentlich ballbearing bastardpimp, I'll spend the night in the station without the Benedictina, my old bald darling, you slip in and dien, your room stinks of spunksweat, I won't kiss your playful hand, dass heisst spielen, my dolorific nymphae and a tic douleureux in my imperforate hymen, what's the Deutsch for randy, my dirty little hungry bony vulture of a whorchen away up first floor Burgwards over the stream, I'll send you a Schein when I have a Schwips. No f--smoking in the f---Folterzimmer. I had to ask her sister and she closed me the vowel. I wonder did I do well to leave my notes at home, in 39 under the east wind, weind please. Well then when he'd picked his nose for a little bit and the thighs there Gott sei dank up he rose didn't he and left her playing there against the oak before the ash oh don't infuriate me don't bother me, let me pay let me buy you was, eat my little Augen Celeryice, didn't he, and wandered uphill and downdale like the cat and the mouse in business together or the Marienkind. No no I won't say everything, I wont tell you everything. No but surely now you see what he am? See! Heiliger Brahmaputra! A hedgecreeper! A peeping Tom in bicycle clips! I once said that otherwise. Well then up he rose and apprehended without passion round and about the weekend brushwood foothill copulations. Yes indeed of course you're right it'd be hard for you to understand my meaning, you see he led a fairly small fleshy maiden I might have said Jungfrau into the wood I might have said Wald and creeped and peeped at the Sabbath fornications instead of. Oh did I do right to leave my notes at home! So then after another little bit he came back through the leaves and stood looking with his tongue in his cheek instead of.
J'aime et je veux paalir. Livid rapture of a Zurbaran St. Onan. Schwindsucht and pollution in a tunnel in de Thebaid. Strange exalted death! Plus précieuse que la vie, the dirty dog! But right enough all the same what more miserable than the miserable being who commiserates not himself, caesura, with a new grief grieves not for his grief, is not worn by a double sorrow, drowns not in ken of shore. Who said that? Turned he hath the audacious soul, turned he hath and turned again upon back sides and belly, like Miss Florence on the mattress while Virgil and Sordello, yet all was painful. As an herpetic spider (do you recognise the style?) hath he consumed away. He dared to grow wild with his shadowy love and he daily watered by daily littles the ground under his face and beerbibbing did not lay siege to his spirit and he was continent and he was not sustenant and many of his months have since run out with him the pestilent person to take him from behind his crooked back and set him before his ulcerous gob in the boiling over of his fornications and in chambering and wantonness and in deafness and death and bitter and blind bawling against the honey what honey bloody well you know the honey and in canvassing and getting and weltering in filth and scratching off the scabies of lust. All on a mild scale of course, don't be misled, Paterson's Camp Coffee is the Best, perhaps I let my pen run away with me, don't for a moment imagine Bollocky's down the drain, of course he's got a bit wasted that was bound to happen and his feet have gone to bits and his bitch of a heart knocks hell out of his bosom three or four nights a week and to make a long story short Lucy and Jude are kept going pretty well from dawn to dark with his shingles and his graphospasmus and his weeping eczema and his general condition, but for all that we'll all agree I feel sure that there's a long call from feeling a bit slack and run down to lying senseless in a deathsweat. Here we are. Out we get. Step around. Thank you. You put on the light. Up we go. Out of step. Ran-dygasp of ruthilarity in honour of private joke. Here we are. There they are. Hello. Great to be here. Grand to be here. Same old Wohnung. Wonderful to be here. Prosit. God bless. Lav on the left. Won't be a sec. Mind the bike. Mind the skis. Beschissenes Dasein beschissenes Dasein Augenblick bitte beschissenes Dasein Augenblickchen bitte beschissenes.
