Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (40 page)

As always before a war, there was fever in the air. With the end approaching,
everything became distorted, magnified, speeded up. The wealthy were as active as bees or
ants, redistributing their funds and assets, their mansions, their yachts, their gilt-edged
bonds, their mine holdings, their jewels, their art treasures. I had at the time a good friend
who was flying back and forth from one cantinent to another catering to these panicky clients
who were trying to get out from under. Fabulous were the tales he told me. Yet so familiar. So
disgustingly familiar. (Can anyone imagine an army of millionaires?) Fabulous too were the
tales of another friend, a chemical engineer, who would turn up at intervals for dinner, just
back from China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, Persia, Afghanistan, wherever there was deviltry
afoot. And always with the same story—of intrigue, plunder, bribery, treachery, plots and
projects of
the most diabolical sort. The war was still a year or so
away, but the signs were unmistakable—not only for the Second World War but for the wars and
revolutions to follow.

Even the “bohemians” were being routed out of their trenches. Amazing how many
young intellectuals were already dislocated, dispossessed, already being pushed about like
pawns in the service of their unknown masters. Every day I was receiving visits from the most
unexpected individuals. There was only one question in every one’s mind:
when?
Meanwhile make the most of it! And we did, we who were hanging on till the last boat call.

In this merry, devil-may-care atmosphere Moricand took no part. He was hardly
the sort to invite for a festive evening which promised to end up in a brawl, a drunken
stupor, or a visit from the police. Indeed, the thought never entered my head. When I did
invite him over for a meal I would carefully select the two or three guests who were to join
us. They were usually the same ones each time. Astrological buddies, so to speak.

Once he called on me unannounced, a rare breach of protocol for Moricand. He
seemed elated and explained that he had been strolling about the quays all afternoon. Finally
he fished a small package out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. “For
you!”
he
said, with much emotion in his voice. From the way he said it I understood that he was
offering a gift which only I could appreciate to the full.

The book, for that’s what it was, was Balzac’s
Seraphita
.

Had it not been for
Seraphita
I doubt very much that my adventure
with Moricand would have terminated in the manner it did. It will be seen shortly what a price
I paid for this precious gift.

What I wish to stress at this point is that, coincident with the feverishness
of the times, the increased tempo, the peculiar derangement which everyone suffered, writers
more than others perhaps, there was noticeable, in my own case at any rate, a quickening of
the spiritual pulse. The individuals who were thrown across my path, the incidents which
occurred daily and which to another
would have seemed like trifles, all
had a very special significance in my mind. There was an
enchainement
which was not
only stimulating and exciting but often hallucinating. Just to take a walk into the outskirts
of Paris—Montrouge, Gentilly, Kremlin-Bicêtre, Ivry—was sufficient to unbalance me for the
rest of the day. I enjoyed being unbalanced, derailed, disoriented early in the morning. (The
walks I refer to were “constitutionals,” taken before breakfast. My mind free and empty, I was
making myself physically and spiritually prepared for long sieges at the machine.) Taking the
rue de la Tombe-Issoire, I would head for the outer boulevards, then dive into the outskirts,
letting my feet lead me where they would. Coming back, I always steered instinctively for the
Place de Rungis, which in some mysterious way connected itself with certain phases of the film
L’Age d’or
, and more particularly with Luis Bunuel himself. With its queer street
names, its atmosphere of not belonging, its special assortment of gamins, urchins and monsters
who hailed from some other world, it was for me an eerie and seductive neighborhood. Often I
took a seat on a public bench, closed my eyes for a few moments to sink below the surface,
then suddenly opened them to look at the scene with the vacant stare of a somnambulist. Goats
from the
banlieue
, gangplanks, douche bags, safety belts, iron trusses,
passerelles
and
sauterelles
floated before my glazed eyeballs, together
with headless fowl, beribboned antlers, rusty sewing machines, dripping ikons and other
unbelievable phenomena. It was not a community or neighborhood but a vector, a very special
vector created wholly for my artistic benefit, created expressly to tie me into an emotional
knot. Walking up the rue de la Fontaine à Mulard, I struggled frantically to contain my
ecstasy, struggled to fix and hold in my mind (until after breakfast) three thoroughly
disparate images which, if I could fuse them successfully, would enable me to force a wedge
into a difficult passage (of my book) which I had been unable to penetrate the day before. The
rue Brillat-Savarin, running like a snake past the Place, balances the works of Eliphas Lévi,
the rue Butte aux Cailles (farther along) evokes the Stations of the
Cross, the rue Félicien Rops (at another angle) sets bells to ringing and with it the whir of
pigeon wings. If I was suffering from a hangover, as I frequently was, all these associations,
deformations and interpenetrations became even more quixotically vivid and colorful. On such
days it was nothing to receive in the first mail a second or third copy of the
I
Ching
, an album of Scriabin, a slim volume concerning the life of James Ensor or a
treatise on Pico della Mirandola. Beside my desk, as a reminder of recent festivities, the
empty wine bottles were always neatly ranged: Nuits Saint-Georges, Gevrey-Chambertin,
Clos-Veugeot, Vosne Romanée, Meursault, Traminer, Château Haut-Brion, Chambolle-Musigny,
Montrachet, Beaune, Beaujolais, Anjou and that
“vin de prédilection”
of
Balzac’s—Vouvray. Old friends, even though drained to the last drop. Some still retained a
slight bouquet.

Breakfast,
chez moi
. Strong coffee with hot milk, two or three
delicious warm croissants with sweet butter and a touch of jam. And with the breakfast a
snatch of Segovia. An emperor couldn’t do better.

Belching a little, picking my teeth, my fingers tingling, I take a quick look
around (as if to see if everything’s in order!), lock the door, and plunk myself in front of
the machine. Set to go. My brain afire.

But what drawer of my Chinese cabinet mind will I open first? Each one
contains a recipe, a prescription, a formula. Some of the items go back to 6,000
B.C
. Some still further back.

First I must blow the dust away. Particularly the dust of Paris, so fine, so
penetrating, so nearly invisible. I must submerge to the root taps—Williamsburg, Canarsie,
Greenpoint, Hoboken, the Gowanus Canal, Erie Basin, to playmates now moldering in the grave,
to places of enchantment like Glendale, Glen Island, Sayville, Patchogue, to parks and islands
and coves now transformed into garbage dumps. I must think French and write English, be very
still and talk wild, act the sage and remain a fool or a dunce. I
must
balance what is unbalanced without falling off the tightrope. I must summon to the hall of
vertigo the lyre known as the Brooklyn Bridge yet preserve the flavor and the aroma of the
Place de Rungis. It must be of this moment but pregnant with the ebb of the Great Return….

And it was just at this time—too much to do, too much to see, too much to
drink, too much to digest—that, like heralds from distant yet strangely familiar worlds, the
books began to come. Nijinsky’s
Diary, The Eternal Husband, The Spirit of Zen, The Voice
of the Silence, The Absolute Collective
, the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, l’
Eubage
, the
Life of Milarepa, War Dance, Musings of a Chinese Mystic…
.

Some day, when I acquire a house with a large room and bare walls, I intend to
compose a huge chart or graph which will tell better than any book the story of my friends,
and another telling the story of the books in my life. One on each wall, facing each other,
impregnating each other, erasing each other. No man can hope to live long enough to round out
these happenings, these unfathomable experiences, in words. It can only be done symbolically,
graphically, as the stars write their constellated
mysterium
.

Why do I speak thus? Because during this period—too much to do, too much to
see, taste, and so forth—the past and the future converged with such clarity and precision
that not only friends and books but creatures, objects, dreams, historical events, monuments,
streets, names of places, walks, encounters, conversations, reveries, half-thoughts, all came
sharply into focus, broke into angles, chasms, waves, shadows, revealing to me in one
harmonious, understandable pattern their essence and significance.

Where my friends were concerned, I had only to think a moment in order to
evoke a company or a regiment. Without effort on my part they ranged themselves in order of
magnitude, influence, duration, proximity, spiritual weight and density, and so on. As they
took their stations I myself seemed to be moving through the ether with the sweep and rhythm
of an absent-minded angel,
yet falling in with each in turn at exactly
the right zodiacal point and at precisely the destined moment, good or bad, to tune in. What a
medley of apparitions they presented! Some were shrouded in fog, some sharp as sentinels, some
rigid as phantom ice-bergs, some wilted like autumn flowers, some racing toward death, some
rolling along like drunks on rubber wheels, some pushing laboriously through endless mazes,
some skating over the heads of their comrades as if muffled in luminol, some lifting crushing
weights, some glued to the books in which they burrowed, some trying to fly though anchored
with ball and chain, but all of them vivid, named, classified, identified according to need,
depth, insight, flavor, aura, fragrance and pulse beat. Some were suspended like blazing
planets, others like cold, distant stars. Some burgeoned with frightening rapidity, like
novae, then faded into dust; some moved along discreetly, always within calling distance, as
it were, like beneficent planets. Some stood apart, not haughtily but as if waiting to be
summoned—like authors (Novalis, for example) whose names alone are so freighted with promise
that one postpones reading them until that ideal moment which never arrives.

And Moricand, had he any part in all this scintillating turmoil? I doubt it.
He was merely part of the décor, another phenomenon pertinent to the epoch. I can see him
still as he then appeared in my mind’s eye. In a penumbra he lurks, cool, gray, imperturbable,
with a twinkle in his eyes and a metallic
“Ouais!”
shaping his lips. As if saying to
himself:
“Ouais!
Know it all. Heard it before. Forgot it long ago.
Ouais! Tu
parles!
The labyrinth, the chamois with the golden horns, the grail, the argonaut, the
kermesse à la
Breughel, the wounded groin of Scorpio, the profanation of the host,
the Areopagite, translunacy, symbiotic neurosis, and in a wilderness of pebbles a lone
katydid. Keep it up, the wheel is softly turning. A time comes when….” Now he is bent over his
pantâcles
. Reads with a Geiger counter. Unlatching his gold fountain pen, he writes
in purple milk: Porphyry, Proclus, Plotinus, Saint Valentin, Julian the Apostate, Hermes
Trismegistus, Apollonius
of Tyana, Claude Saint-Martin. In his vest
pocket he carries a little phial; it contains myrrh, frankincense and a dash of wild
sarsparilla.
The odor of sanctity!
On the little finger of his left hand he wears a
jade ring marked with yin and yang. Cautiously he brings out a heavy brass watch, a
stem-winder, and lays it on the floor. It is 9:30, sidereal time, the moon on the cusp of
panic, the ecliptic freckled with cometary warts. Saturn is there with her ominous milky hue.
“Ouais!”
he exclaims, as if clinching the argument. “I say nothing against
anything. I observe. I analyze. I calculate. I distillate. Wisdom is becoming, but knowledge
is the certainty of certitude. To the surgeon his scalpel, to the gravedigger his pick and
shovel, to the analyst his dream books, to the fool his dunce cap. As for me, I have a
bellyache. The atmosphere is too rarefied, the stones too heavy to digest.
Kali Yuga
.
Only 9,765,854 years to go and we will be out of the snake pit.
Du courage, mon
vieux!”

Let us take a last look backward. The year is 1939. The month is June. I am
not waiting for the Huns to rout me out. I am taking a vacation. Another few hours and I shall
be leaving for Greece.

All that remains of my presence in the studio at the Villa Seurat is my natal
chart done in chalk on the wall facing the door. It’s for whomever takes over to ponder on.
I’m sure it will be an officer of the line. Perhaps an erudite.

Oh yes, and on the other wall, high up near the ceiling, these two lines:

Jetzt müsste die Welt versinken,
Jetzt muszte ein Wunder
gescheh’n
.

Clear, what?

And now it is my last evening with my good friend Moricand. A modest repast in
a restaurant on the rue Fontaine, diagonally opposite the living quarters of the Father of
Surrealism. We spoke
of him as we broke bread.
Nadja
once more.
And the “Profanation of the Host.”

He is sad, Moricand. So am I, in a faint way. I am only partly there. My mind
is already reaching out for Rocamadour where I expect to be on the morrow. In the morning
Moricand will once again face his chart, observe the sway of the pendulum—undoubtedly it has
moved to the left!—see if Regulus, Rigel, Antares or Betelgeuse can aid him just a wee, wee
bit. Only 9,765,854 years before the climate changes….