The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (64 page)

Prague has a dingy airport still. A mess of huts, a transit-lounge like a canteen just evacuated by an army leaving a scattering of mimeographed news-sheets on the square table and a few tourist pamphlets. Map and Travel Information for your visit to Czechoslovakia. Carte géographique-
Informations
sur la Tchécoslovaquie. Landkarte der
Tschechoslowakei
und Turistische Informationen. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic consists of two equally privileged nations, the Czechs and the Slovaks. The highest organ of State power, the National Assembly has 300 deputies elected for 4 years. At the head of the State stands
Natural
Resources
:
coal, kaolin, iron, uranium, manganese and copper ore, pyrites, mercury silver, antimony, tin, tungsten, graphite, magnesite, naphtha and natural gas.
Transport.
Principal
Mountain
Ranges.
Principal
Rivers.
Folklore
Regions.
Tourist
Season
—Czechoslovakia has a year-round tourist season. The mimeographed news-sheet says that the Slovak National Council met in Bratislava yesterday. The Council unanimously re-elected Minister Adam Smetny, member of the Praesidium of the Central Committee, as chairman of the Council. The Minister then took the floor.

Mesdames messieurs. Je tiens
d’abord à remercier le Président du Congrès pour ses éloges que je n’ai pas conscience de mériter. We have come here in this beautiful old city to discuss a new and vital theme, The Writer and Communication.

The bottle of Vidago stands on the bedside-table, poderosamente radio-activas, bicarbonatadas, liticas, arsenicais und so weiter as the cock crows loud and long at crack of dawn triumphant in some shed or other on the flat roofs of Lisbon among the hanging sheets and the potted geraniums. The bathroom door faces the bed, at right angles with the window so that it has its window out on to the crowing cock triumphant instead of a mere ventilation-shaft. Soon someone will come in with a breakfast-tray and put it down on the plastic table that flaps out from the seat in front by the small rectangular window beyond which the enormous wing spreads back on the blue temperature of minus forty-eight degrees. The cloud has cleared. Way down below the window-seat the coastline glints metallic to the clay-like sea that divides into two distinct patterns one plain one purl from different winds invisible as Casual girls take the easy way to colour. Smoulder, tempt, threaten. The girl who knows about Lil-lets and widthways expansion feels confident and carefree. Life begins to beam again. You seem mixed up in some artistic venture, such as decorating, designing or painting. You will go to the forefront with original thought and if you want to make an important change do it now before you lose courage. Eine arbeitsreiche Woche—Sie kommen aber zum Zug wo und wann immer Sie jetzt möchten. Vielleicht sollten Sie trotz der enormen beruflichen Chancen das Privatleben nicht ganz ausser acht lassen. Achtung am 20ten. Saturn wirkt sich recht
verschieden
aus. But on this day or that the corridor encased in teak and glass reaches out to the door of the plane and on into the airport hall of hot air clean teak and glass galleries with black square plastic low armchairs and a board covered with blue messages in alphabetical order. No one calls out no name responded to at any level through the Customs Hall where swift electric trolleys bring the loaded plastic luggage up a sloping-lane at speed and out in simultaneous
ownership
. In some countries the women would segregate to the left of the conveyor-belt, the men less numerous to the right. But all in all and civilisation considered the chromosomes lie quietly mixed among the hundred million others or so that multiply in geometrical progression while nobody does anything at all.

So that the hum of voices echoes loud in the Palais des Papes as the mayor speaks into a microphone bidding everyone welcome to this ancient city of Avignon, the acoustics of the stone palace carrying the words unheard into the high ceiling as the members of the Congress on Tradition and Innovation unless perhaps The Role of the Writer in the Modern World burble on almost excluding the introduction of Dame Janet McThingummy and Madame Hélène
Chose-Truc
as well as Monsieur le Maire’s speech on hands across the frontiers over floating stomachs that move about and shshsh! Que cherchez-vous madame? A travers la cour. Au fond à droite. Ah, la sortie? A gauche madame. Oui il fait bon dehors, une belle soirée, comme toujours ici. Vous avez senti le froid dans ces murs de pierre? Or else inside the whale and out in simultaneous wonder. Und haben Sie noch einen Wunsch? Madame désire encore quelque chose? No, nothing at all, just personal effects.

Between the enormous wings the body floats.

 

nearer the hairline further up the brow but dimmed as in a glass tarnished by the close-cropped mat of hair they peer through

The mat of hair is khaki, growing a bit too low on the brow the nose too big.

Who speaks?

or the vizir looming grey eminence behind the consultan listener how many times leaning a little to the right to peer into how many rectangles a thousand and one in which there is a flaw?

 

 

But when the muscular shoulders shift back to the correct position the cars that loom grey eminent into the retrovizor do not look double-faced or even quadruple-eyed top two through crinkly hair, for the hair has moved away out of focus together with the four eyes; the cars untarnished, with single metal grins between two pale gold eyes, one on either side, or else two smaller city slickers lower down but never both pairs together.

 

                                             BUT
the retrovizor has a bluish tinge. At a flick of a switch the rectangle turns smoky grey to dim the dazzle of floodlights undipped or even gently dipped but the glare is preferable to the sudden isolation of almost not seeing behind a head

 

The dancing hoops. For the gold eyes when distant turn into hoops (at night in the correct position) of luminous green red amber white bouncing in out of through and through each other narrowing to slim ovals vertical horizontal swaying undoing swiftly changing shape as if juggled by a mad magician or by the black recumbent street beneath overhead bridges that make perhaps the optical illusion?

She shifts the mirror to her rearward glance. It doesn’t work for her the mistress of the moment of sudden isolation at not seeing back to the black magician who fantastically juggles luminous hoops in the retro-rectangular hey put my mirror back.

So it needs adjusting.

Why at that precise point introduce this or that?

Intensity of illusion is what matters to the narrator through a flaw in the glass darkly perhaps making four clear eyes stare back, two of them in their proper place at height of bridge of nose and, further up the brow, the

other two, exact replicas but dimned as in a tarnished reflection, tarnished fay the hairline they peer through. A

second pair of eyes hidden higher up the brow would have its uses despite psychic invisibility or because of. Gazing they do not see themselves. They reflect nothing, nor do they look at their bright replicas below in their proper place on either side of the nose a fraction too large according to whoever speaks in this instance. Only these lower eyes, reflecting the eyes of the real face as it leans for vanity to the right, see the upper eyes, looking up at the brow which some teller or other thinks too low. Who?

Oh her.

w

h

o

’

s

h

e

w

h

e

n

s

h

e

’

s

a

t

h

o

m

e

?

 

                    blue lacuna of learning

and unlearning a text within a text passed on from generation to generation of an increasing vastness that nevertheless dwindles to an elite initiated to a text no-one else will read by means maybe of the flick of a switch for the overhead projector and diagrams drawn into a boxed screen to the right of the desk with a spirit-loaded pen thus not losing eye-contact.

Hang it all we have the story of an 
O but is not incompetent performance a non-disjunction at level of deep structure? I me if it be possible despite non equivalence to rewrite I as O and O as I

which has been suggested,

here,

you see,

 

should you start structuring your te
thattaway