“The physical world now,” says Tarquin, weighing his scrotum gravely in his right hand. “Take the physical world for instance.” He is gravely weighing the physical world in his right hand. Very well, then. Let us take the physical world. There is no charge. We confront that abject specimen, the modern physicist, and discover the shabby circus animal he owns, hidden away in the darker recesses of the metaphysical cage. A lousy, dejected, constipated American lion without so much as a healthy fart left in it. “The maternal instinct in mice can be aroused by subcutaneous injections of prolactin,” says Tarquin, weighing anchor at last. “This pushes your set of values sideways. Now take the thalamus. They are just doing some wonderful tricks with that. Or Bacot filling the intestines of lice with Rickettsia-infected blood. My dear fellow, can you seriously tell me whether the breath of the Holy Ghost enters from the navel, the thenar, the colon, the hip, or the lobe of the ear?”
Here is Tarquin, very excited by the new heresy, as he calls it, weighing his scrotum gravely in his right hand. Come, I say, in my pert way, separate the yolk from the white. In the hall I have a fine new cedarwood cross for you. I offer it to you free of charge. Exchange it for this dead preoccupation with components of the physical world. We are duelling now all day over this theme, and frankly it gets tiresome after a time. Tarquin has deluded himself for so long about his “psychic superiority” over me, that he is sad to see me escaping his clutches. “You’re a funny little bugger,” he says, lying on the bed while I chafe his toes and pour out the hot coffee. “I suppose you don’t understand me. You lack faith, that’s what it is. Dicky was here last night and he was saying that too.” Dicky, of course, has the brain of a newt and the dash of a sprat, so such an idea needs amplification. “He was saying that you were arrogant.”
I am pained by this; after all, it is only my abject humility which has created this omnipotent attitude in Tarquin, which he glorifies as a superiority.
“No, but you don’t understand me, really,” insists the hero. “You only see the façade: underneath there are enormous reserves of strength, withstanding crisis after crisis. If there weren’t I should be dead by now.”
I close down and sit at the desk, reading some of the latest love lyrics that the new mode of life has been hatching out for him. “The springtide of desire, my dear,” Tarquin said to me. “Positively a lyric vein running through me — a nerve of lyricism.”
There is no news. Day by day we are breaking down, boring down, into the pulp chamber of matter, and day by day the world becomes less integral, less whole; and the unison with it less pure. This is the ice age of components.
At night I fuel the car and set off on immense journeys of discovery, plotting my path across the icefields, the land of polarized light where everything is lunacy and lanterns, and the Ganges of the spirit flows between the banks of black sand. On the eastern shores the boats snub quietly at anchor. The snow pelts them, and rimes their rigging. All sorts of new languages seem to be coming within my grasp: the formulae of the sciences, the runes, the surds; I am such a vatful of broken, chaotic material that it will be a miracle if anything can ever reassemble this crude magma, detritus, gabbro, into a single organic whole — even a book. But the hunger, the ravening at the bottom of all this, I recognize at last. It is not a thirst for love or money or sex, but a thirst for living. The pulp chamber is desire, the principle a sort of mania, a love — in which you play almost no part whatsoever. I refer to you now as I refer to the moon, anoia, or sordes. In my journeys I puzzle over our relationship, our mutual acts, our occasional miseries; and find them always outside the mainspring of this principle, this progressive dementia, in which I am reaching out, forever reaching out with crooked arms and empty mind towards the inaccessible absolute. This is the theme of travel whether the towns whirl by me under the moon, or whether I am at my deal desk in the Commercial School. Thule, ultima Thule. There is a stepping-off place — a little Tibetan village, stuck like a springboard in the side of the mountains. There are no friends to see us off: our banners, our catchwords, our heroism — these things are not understood here. The natives have other criteria. Beyond us the passes open like flowers in the setting sun, the delicate gates of the unknown country’s body, the Yoni of the world, luteous, luteous, unbearably lonely. Is the journey plural or am I alone? It is a question only to be answered at the outposts. I will turn perhaps and find a shadow beside me. No tears can scald the snow, or the malevolence of the white peaks. I can invoke no help except the idiotic squeaking of the prayer wheel. We move softly down the white slopes, irresistible as a gathering landslide, towards the last gaunt limit of flesh. Now we have nothing in common but our clothes and our language. The priests have stolen the rest as gifts for God. The ice under our hoofs aches and screeches, murderous as the squeegee. This is the great beginning I planned for so long. How will it end?
I am recalled from this excursion by a rap at the door. Chamberlain. “What do you think?” he says, throwing his hat on the rack with the air of a matador. “She’s pregnant.” We sit down on the sofa and he collapses with laughter, showing every tooth in his head. Then he sits a while sniffing hysterically, stroking my knee and talking about morning sickness, evening sickness and midnight belly bumping. He is all unnerved, but filled with a kind of fanatical happiness. “So everything seems settled. God! what fools we make of ourselves. All the agony I’ve been through, over a damn ten-centimetre foetus. By the way, I’ve got a marvellous job, two hundred a year more. I’m through with the body mystical and all that stuff from now, I can tell you.…” He is planning a beautiful suburban existence, complete with lawn-mower and greenhouse, I can see that. I have not the will to mutter anything but compliments to him. The child will be stillborn, I know, but I am not allowed to tell him that. I try to see him not as a person but as part of the active world — the world I am trying to create here: the snow, I mean, the blind crooked snow like soft immense drifts of needles, and the unresponsive hotel beds to which my other mimes go at night, expecting to draw comfort from them, but get none. Lobo and Tarquin facing each other over the fire, the muffins, the counterpoint of the third Brandenburg. Two separate continents. Spanish America like the crucifix over the bed the thin gold chain round his hairy little wrist. The rows of coloured shoes in their ballet. Perez, the most elegant loafer of five continents, in whom all languages blend and become accessible, all women become a single archetype. Morgan the comic fiend of the Inferno stoking the boilers of God. Bazain, Farnol, Peters petering out in saltpetre. Or Tarquin, his great grammarian’s cranium spinning like a top in the candle-shine; his great white feet frozen in their furred slippers: participant in a European death as yet incomprehensible to most Europeans. Or Perez, on his huge twinkling feet, sparring with Morgan in front of the boilers at midnight. “Pull your punches, now. Don’t forget,” he says; and this idea Morgan holds in his mind with great difficulty, ponderously, like a dog. But when there is blood soaking into the soft leather of the gloves; blood in a long wave flowing over Perez’ mouth and chin; blood that marks his man wherever he hits him; then the control goes, and the butcher lights up in Morgan. An almost visible light, like candles shining under the skin. And the air is thick with their shuffling bodies, falling, chopped, panting.