The Avignon Quintet (40 page)

On gazing at my reflection in a mirror: “Even a God can be the victim of binocular vision.”

Flesh-hating zealots avaunt! I am for all the soft collisions I can get. I have been decocted. Soft as a boxing-glove by moonlight. Houris! Hear my call to prayer!

Roheim tells us that the Central Australian Mother eats every second child, sharing it with the older baby. He adds that they are “all heroes” and “as happy as wolves” and goes on to attribute their idyllic characters to the fact that they have suffered no weaning period and no sex-repression (latency period). A link with gnostics? Hum. “We are born mad,” writes Dr. Eder. “We acquire morality and become stupid and unhappy. Then we die.”

The deliberate practice of helplessness in saints and women elicits sympathy and wonder.

Toby, in a flash of sincerity, said: “I have never spoken a truthful word in my life and I have always given several conflicting accounts of the same incident – so aware am I of the relativity of knowledge and the distortion of human vision. I am a born historian, so to speak.”

Trapped between conflicting notions of rest and motion, man panics his way into the tomb, rest never bringing him the peace and reassurance he needs, motion only sterile change and ideal sorrow. O! Time the great Howler!

Mille baisers
,
Trash, gelatineuses et patibulaires. Va caresser un chameau, Garce
. I am an old elephant and my back legs need polishing.

They were actually connected by the empty space between them, the interstices between feelings so to speak, which set up this electrical impulse called desire.

SUPPOSED POEM FOR PIA

Sweet valves, in breath you will correct

The soft ellipses of my husband’s sleep,

And the dull
Quand? Quand?
Repeat the

Chink-Chink of the French town’s little clocks

In bogus belfries on a sour note of final

Twang. Clang! Was that someone at the door?

Today he drank pints of decorated wine,

Rods of gold wine all prizewinners.

Could one presuppose that the death

Of an ageing writer somewhere alters

Reality, diminishing a space the size of him?

It is not possible to contrast man’s view

Of himself with the reality he presents

And not to feel sick unto death at such

Pretensions of a complacent little ape.

And we who say we love – how much the worse

For us and for those who possess us. Think.

Rain on my fingers, the smoke of Ithaca,

An old blind dog waiting at a garden gate.

Last night he dreamed a negress for me, another Trash,

Took her in a thicket of whispers with a smile

That smelt of freshly turned earth, the open grave.

Pia writes: “The old Asian doctor had the face of a wistful cobra, but the mind was worn like the coping-stone of an ancient well; the ropes had grooved the stone. The well of knowledge is deep and the thirst of men is endless. But they know that the wells are drying out, the levels falling.”

“Mirrors were originally invented to capture the reflection of flying swallows.” Sylvie. She had read it somewhere no doubt.