The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (9 page)

Walking through the park in May, he saw a small brown snake slipping away from him through grass and leaves, and he went after it with a long twig, feeling as he did so the instinctive fear of man for reptiles.

Ah, he thought, our symbol of evil, and he touched the snake with the twig, making it squirm. The snake lifted its head and struck at the twig, then shot away through the grass, hurrying fearfully, and he went after it.

It was very beautiful, and it was amazingly clever, but he intended to stay with it for a while and find out something about it.

The little brown snake led him deep into the park, so that he was hidden from view and alone with it. He had a guilty feeling that in pursuing the snake he was violating some rule of the park, and he prepared a remark for anyone who might discover him. I am a student of contemporary morality, he thought he would say, or, I am a sculptor and I am studying the structure of reptiles. At any rate, he would make some sort of reasonable explanation.

He would not say that he intended to kill the snake.

He moved beside the frightened reptile, leaping now and then to keep up with it, until the snake became exhausted and could not go on. Then he squatted on his heels to have a closer view of it, holding the snake before him by touching it with the twig. He admitted to himself that he was afraid to touch it with his hands. To touch a snake was to touch something secret in the mind of man, something one ought never to bring out into the light. That sleek gliding, and that awful silence,
was
once man, and now that man had come to this last form, here were snakes still moving over the earth as if no change had ever taken place.

The first male and female, biblical; and evolution. Adam and Eve, and the human embryo.

It was a lovely snake, clean and graceful and precise. The snake’s fear frightened him and he became panic stricken thinking that perhaps all the snakes in the park would come quietly to the rescue of the little brown snake, and surround him with their malicious silence and the unbearable horror of their evil forms. It was a large park and there must be
thousands of snakes in it. If all the snakes were to find out that he was with this little snake, they would easily be able to paralyze him.

He stood up and looked around. All was quiet. The silence was almost the biblical silence of
in the beginning
. He could hear a bird hopping from twig to twig in a low earthbush near by, but he was alone with the snake. He forgot that he was in a public park, in a large city. An airplane passed overhead, but he did not see or hear it. The silence was too emphatic and his vision was too emphatically focused on the snake before him.

In the garden with the snake, unnaked, in the beginning, in the year 1931.

He squatted on his heels again and began to commune with the snake. It made him laugh, inwardly and outwardly, to have the form of the snake so substantially before him, apart from his own being, flat on the surface of the earth instead of subtly a part of his own identity. It was really a tremendous thing. At first he was afraid to speak aloud, but as time went on he became less timid, and he began to speak in English to it. It was very pleasant to speak to the snake.

All right, he said, here I am, after all these years, a young man living on the same earth, under the same sun, having the same passions. And here you are before me, the same. The situation is the same. What do you intend to do? Escape? I will not let you escape. What have you in mind? How will you defend yourself? I intend to destroy you. As an obligation to man.

The snake twitched before him helplessly, unable to avoid the twig. It struck at the twig several times
and then became too tired to bother with it. He drew away the twig, and heard the snake say, Thank you.

He began to whistle to the snake, to see if the music would have any effect on its movements, if it would make the snake dance. You are my only love, he whistled; Schubert made into a New York musical comedy;
my only love, my only love;
but the snake would not dance. Something Italian perhaps, he thought, and began to sing
la donna e mobile
, intentionally mispronouncing the words in order to amuse himself. He tried a Brahms lullaby, but the music had no effect on the snake. It was tired. It was frightened. It wanted to get away.

He was amazed at himself suddenly; it had occurred to him to let the snake flee, to let it glide away and be lost in the lowly worlds of its kind. Why should he allow it to escape?

He lifted a heavy boulder from the ground and thought: Now I shall bash your head with this rock and see you die.

To destroy that evil grace, to mangle that sinful loveliness.

But it was very strange. He could not let the rock fall on the snake’s head, and he began suddenly to feel very sorry for it. I am sorry, he said, dropping the boulder. I beg your pardon. I see now that I have only love for you.

And he wanted to touch the snake with his hands, to hold it and understand the truth of its touch. But it was difficult. The snake was frightened and each time he extended his hands to touch it, the snake turned on him and charged. I have only love for you,
he said. Do not be afraid. I am not going to hurt you.

Then, swiftly, he lifted the snake from the earth, learned the true feel of it, and dropped it. There, he said. Now I know the truth. A snake is cold, but it is clean. It is not slimy, as I thought.

He smiled upon the little brown snake. You may go now, he said. The inquisition is over. You are yet alive. You have been in the presence of man, and you are yet alive. You may go now.

But the snake would not go away. It was exhausted with fear.

He felt deeply ashamed of what he had done, and angry with himself. Jesus, he thought, I have scared the little snake. It will never get over this. It will always remember me squatting over it.

For God’s sake, he said to the snake, go away. Return to your kind. Tell them what you saw, you yourself, with your own eyes. Tell them what you felt. The sickly heat of the hand of man. Tell them of the presence you felt.

Suddenly the snake turned from him and spilled itself forward, away from him. Thank you, he said. And it made him laugh with joy to see the little snake throwing itself into the grass and leaves, thrusting itself away from man. Splendid, he said; hurry to them and say that you were in the presence of man and that you were not killed. Think of all the snakes that live and die without ever meeting man. Think of the distinction it will mean for you.

It seemed to him that the little snake’s movements away from him were the essence of joyous laughter,
and he felt greatly pleased. He found his way back to the path, and continued his walk.

In the evening, while she sat at the piano, playing softly, he said: A funny thing happened.

She went on playing. A funny thing? she asked.

Yes, he said. I was walking through the park and I saw a little brown snake.

She stopped playing and turned on the bench to look at him. A snake? she said. How ugly!

No, he said. It was beautiful.

What about it?

Oh, nothing, he said. I just caught it and wouldn’t let it go for a while.

But why?

For no good reason at all, he said.

She walked across the room and sat beside him, looking at him strangely.

Tell me about the snake, she said.

It was lovely, he said. Not ugly at all. When I touched it, I felt its cleanliness.

I am so glad, she said. What else?

I wanted to kill the snake, he said. But I couldn’t. It was too lovely.

I’m so glad, she said. But tell me everything.

That’s all, he said.

But it isn’t, she said. I know it isn’t. Tell me everything.

It is very funny, he said. I was going to kill the snake, and not come here again.

Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? she said.

Of course I am, he said.

What else? she said. What did you think, of me, when you had the snake before you?

You will be angry, he said.

Oh, nonsense. It is impossible for me to be angry with you. Tell me.

Well, he said, I thought you were lovely but evil.

Evil?

I told you you would be angry.

And then?

Then I touched the snake, he said. It wasn’t easy, but I picked it up with my hands. What do you make of this? You’ve read a lot of books about such things. What does it mean, my picking up the snake?

She began to laugh softly, intelligently. Why, she laughed, it means, it simply means that you are an idiot. Why, it’s splendid.

Is that according to Freud? he said.

Yes, she laughed. According to Freud.

Well, anyway, he said, it was very fine to let the snake go free.

Have you ever told me you loved me? she asked.

You ought to know, he said. I do not remember one or two things I have said to you.

No, she said. You have never told me.

She began to laugh again, feeling suddenly very happy about him. You have always talked of other things, she said. Irrelevant things. At the most amazing times. She laughed.

This snake, he said, was a little brown snake.

And that explains it, she said. You have never intruded.

What the hell are you talking about? he said.

I’m so glad you didn’t kill the snake, she said.

She returned to the piano, and placed her hands softly upon the keys.

I whistled a few songs to the snake, he said. I whistled a fragment from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. I would like to hear that. You know, the melody that was used in a musical comedy called
Blossom Time
. The part that goes,
you are my only love, my only love
, and so on.

She began to play softly, feeling his eyes on her hair, on her hands, her neck, her back, her arms, feeling him studying her as he had studied the snake.

Jew Strawinsky, the nose and mouth in the aquarium, swimming, and Russian Diaghilev, seated with legs crossed, sending the girls up on their dancing toes. The leaves of all the vines in the valley were drying, for the fruit was gone, the red and the purple; the farmers sat and talked.

Tender Cocteau, a dandy to the last, more nervously alive than alive, a boy with long fingers and a pallor. And Satie, bearded like a pawnshop ghost gone broke.

French music, silent during the war, awoke with something of a start the day after the armistice, as who did not, music or man? We lived, as it were, alertly
asleep before, but then, after that day, we lived alertly, but awake. Refer to the advertisements about automobiles. There is a place to go for every man. Debussy (the man himself) was dead, Ravel was ill and frightened, and everywhere it was dawn and at dawn man knows a sickness not known at night or during the day.

Out in the vineyards we labored with the vines, speaking fraternally with peons from Mexico, admiring Villa the bandit and Orozco the maniac with the brushes and the paint.

First of all, it was argued (by whom it does not matter) that impressionism was dead. This meant, if anything, that impressionism was
also
dead, along with the soldiers and along with the half dozen decent ideas about civilization. It was said we no longer had any. It was determined (somewhere, in some philosopher’s brain) that because we were soft, it did not necessarily follow that we were civilized. There was some discussion of the importance of softness, whether or not it meant what it was hoped it meant.

Barbarians were needed. Real barbarians, things to have life explosively, the war having been waged with undue politeness, particularly in the newspapers and afterwards in the memoirs of generals. And still afterwards in the class-room history books. No victory, all nations having lost their men, the bishop still being pious and a liar, and even though the queen was vilely raped, the king quietly persisted in declaring himself potent. The truth. The truth.

It shall be known. Facts shall be substituted.

As for Teutonic robustness, rubbish. For robustness
of any kind, of any race. Such men as are, are alone in selves and amid mobs in race. In Russia: well, God and Trotzky were exiled. Flower and seed and tremble and tumble and the mouths of all the dead, the eloquence of all the silenced mouths.

As for the economic and political upheavals (you are invited to examine the terms) reverberating deeply through the bowels of the several continents, scattering rodents, reptiles and insects, it would be sheer folly to speak seriously of anything in this connection, other than, perhaps, the moustache of Mr. Morgan and the state of his digestion. It is, indeed, a very delicate and complex relation, since not once did any of his associates declare for a renaissance of capitalistic art and hatred for the proletariat. They sat quietly consuming the public, men, women, and children. It is not sad, not so very sad. They themselves had their children kidnapped by the monster they created in the mind of man. There was a gradual return to the laws of fairy tales.

The melodic vein of virtuosi cannot be compared to the steady ripening of fruit, and when the pruning of a vine is at hand, only the dullest of farmers remains unmoved by the aesthetic impulse to dance westward to the sun which brings forth the shape of peach and pear and grape.

And least of all could the peons refrain from singing while they worked.

The monumental forms, so aptly titled by the towering men of books, grew first in plants anonymously, belonging to man, tutored or unlearned, and afterwards were plagiarized by small suns whose light
was dim, whose fruit was horrible with rot. With sonority alone it is futile to be content, since a dry hole in the continent does not make a lake, or a torrent of rain without a path, a river.

Lord Berners at the piano, sipping a cocktail, while Leonidine Massine, sweet with sadness, glows angularly in ballet poses at the faces lost in the crowd.

In Venice there were festivals.

For two years I had the honor of spending most of my life in the great fiction room of the public library, and it was there that I remembered the vines. I was asked not to read Zola, and I replied to the old lady who doubtlessly loved me as she would have loved a son had she had one, I thank you piously; I intend only to have the book on my table, for the presence; I seldom read words at all; I run my fingers over the pages for the texture; thus I have held Balzac in my hand and touched the cheek of Madame Sand.

Living in the fiction room of the public library, I recalled that the vines stood in their places in the great warm valley of my awakening, and that although I might never return to tend them, they would stand beneath the sun forever, calmly bearing the ecstasy of producing leaf and fruit, calmly a part of my earth and my life and my death, calmly mothering my ghosts. I spoke casually of this to strangers I met in the fiction room, and we agreed that while the agricultural life could never be economically justified (on account of taxes, frost, lack of rain, new children, leaks in the roof, monopolies and intimidation), it could never be dismissed as unethical or improper,
as the practice of law is unethical, and the passing of judgment in courts improper, indecent and vile.

Meanwhile, it was very lively in parts of the country, and I myself, walking to the sanctuary of my room, heard one evening the tender love call of the male cat for the female. And I knew it was not lust that herded me, as cattle are herded, to the bed of the lonely harlot whose sad room overlooked the alley between Mariposa and Tulare Streets. Nevertheless, it was not without tenderness that I was sent through the darkness of the hall to the earth on the floor below, and my own life, and often it was with virtue and truth that those lips, which I knew all men had touched, touched finally my own, partly in love and partly in articulation of myself and herself, while thus we were the same, though in evil.

On the whole, however, the festival in Venice was dull and unpleasant to the memory, which is certainly our only reality, apart from instant pain or instant pleasure.

The letters of Giacomo Puccini. Farewell to Munich. A single scene from the ballet of the French postcards is hardly enough to establish a tradition of sterility for writers of prose, and certainly not enough to restore Baudelaire to the pavement in Paris. However, the eyes of Maupassant remain to this day the eyes of a Christian saint. The swift gliding of the river Seine is no parallel, but it will do. There is imitation in anything any man may do, and in the matter of escaping loneliness the imitation is pathetically obvious and tawdry.

We have a pretty slick continuity, one man, and
then another, one dead thought emerging from another dead thought; time passing, the Pacific washing away the hours. Days spent with something female of mortal substance, in the sun, by the sea, beneath trees, amid talk.

The tide of heaven, if we were to trouble about it, swells daily to the very door of our lives, yet we walk generally to the seashore to hear the whisper of our monotony; our beloved waves drown the clear fluids of silence and we stand awake and alive.

In 1918 jazz arrived. It existed always, but in 1918 it reached music where it was emphasized. It is wrong to blame the war for this. A school of minnows, darting in a shallow stream, is jazz. A school of tired office girls, darting in a deep tub of New York ooze, is also jazz. The very small difference is not worth noticing: the minnows live in the water naturally, while the girls perish in it naturally, and whatever happens is to be accepted as proper under the circumstances. If prosperity is preferable, this is what to expect.

The fertile soil of the valley was the bed of vine roots, the fountain where they drank. I remembered (in the fiction room) how when, as it sometimes happened, I clipped off a good twig, a twig which would have borne fruit, I would feel guilty of a spiritual misdemeanor, and would therefore ask the vine, as one might ask a mother whose child one has unintentionally hurt, to forgive me. This would happen apart from speech, apart from actual articulation, but it would happen just the same. It would be because I could not bear to destroy a decent thing without experiencing regret, without begging forgiveness.

Again the vines were green with foliage and all the Armenians were going in their automobiles to the vineyards and gathering the tenderest leaves for the spring feasts. The children, born in California, stood among the vines, plucking the young leaves, holding dozens of them in their hands, speaking in Armenian. The leaf of the vine is a food, and the taste is never to be forgotten, even by those who are not Armenians. To Armenians the taste is the very taste of Armenia, and by eating the food each spring all Armenians, wherever they may be, declare to God and Armenia that they have remained loyal. Gathering the leaves of the vine is no small matter, and it is not purely an affair of the table.

For the present, we may presume that the war is beginning to be over, years after the dead have been counted and plans for a new war made, but alas it is not so, and the war is nowhere near beginning to be over. There is no longer any noise (except in the moving pictures of the war, in which the war is being waged all over again; this time on behalf of art), but the unbrave soldiers who have survived are just beginning to cry out because they were forced to be unbrave, because they were unmanned, loosened, driven mad.

All the remaining vices remain unknown, and the dawn, during which man is ill, the dawn of experimentation occurs. There is no sorrow, there is no joy, there is no more than the asking about sorrow and joy. Drama is impossible because everyone is interested in himself, as an experiment, and will not therefore perform any rash act for its own sake, as
an inevitability, and the result is that no man can be jealous of any woman, or vice versa. The blurring of specific character among universal precepts is whole, and man, the individualist, is a lie for the next generation. Man is a document, the subject of bad poems. There is no dignity anywhere, not even among peasants, they having been slowly introduced to the vulgarity of modern conveniences, contraceptives, civil rights, etc. They having been taught to read the newspapers. The aspects of experimentation are few. Man is awake, he knows he is awake, he denies destiny, he wishes to observe and he wishes above all things to observe himself. This brings about a state of irresponsibility, Pirandello aiding.

To seek the sane men is to walk alone, sadly.

Working with the peons, though, I kept in touch with the earth. And I picked up a little Mexican.

The most notorious event of history, if one is thoughtful about such occurrences, was not the crucifixion of Christ, but the discovery of America. The crucifixion resulted in Christianity which at its best has been useful and at its worst a form of romanticism for those not writers. On the other hand, the discovery of America (the continent itself) resulted in the moment we now know, in Lincoln, Tom Sawyer, Hollywood, Hearst, and the NRA. Other consequences are innumerable, and if one is to choose between a man and a continent, one must be a materialist not to choose the man; still, it is distressing to try to be a Christian when the name enjoys such capitalistic disgrace, when the greatest Christian church is so fat, so
purely ornamental, and so statistical about the soul.

I refer, finally, to the vineyard, from which I have come. I refer, as a last word of these days on earth, to the soil which I have known and which has known me and in which I was nourished.

We had quarrels, of course; the peons and myself and the Greek Stepan, but mostly our conversations were of eternal things, shadows and so on. Stepan, who worked against his better judgment, being by birth a gambler, was nevertheless able to regard his labor in the vineyard as worth the time involved. Twenty years from now, he said, for this work my chin shall be firmer, and my hand, in dealing the cards, shall be swifter, which is important, since I shall have to cheat.

Also Rubio, the tall peon, spoke, but only when silence became too burdensome for him. He was interested mostly in food, fearing, more than death, starvation. One day he asked: What do you eat, you Armenian people? and I told him we ate grape leaves. I myself, I said, eat bread and print. He could not understand how a man could eat print, so I explained to him that food was used by man to nourish the soul, but that in doing so it also stimulated the basest of passions, and that therefore it was advisable to use any substitute that accomplished the end more artfully. And, I said, compared with print no substitute is worth talking about, certainly not love.

Ah, he replied in serious Mexican, you people who read books . . . ah, I cannot be like you. How do you do it?

In the great fiction room of the public library I used to remember the vineyard under the sun, and our talk of eternal things.