The Project Gutenberg eBook of Against This Age This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Against This Age Author: Maxwell Bodenheim Release date: August 3, 2019 [eBook #60044] Language: English Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGAINST THIS AGE *** Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) AGAINST THIS AGE AGAINST THIS AGE MAXWELL BODENHEIM [Illustration] BONI AND LIVERIGHT PUBLISHERS : : NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To FEDYA AND MINNA FOUR EYES WITHIN A BLIND WORLD Some of the poems in this book have appeared in _The Century_, _The Bookman_, _The Nation_, _The Dial_, _The Menorah Journal_, _Broom_, _The Double Dealer_, _Shadowland_, and _Harper’s Magazine_. CONTENTS BABY 11 NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING DELICATE 13 REGARDING AN AMERICAN VILLAGE 22 THREE PORTRAITS 25 DEFINITIONS 28 TO A CORPULENT SINGER 29 TOPSY-TURVY 30 REVILE THE ACROBAT 32 COMPULSORY TASKS 34 RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH MONEY 36 HIGHLY DELIBERATE POEM 38 POEM 40 REALISTIC CREATOR 41 CITY STREETS 42 DECADENT CRY 43 GIRL 44 COLOR AND A WOMAN 46 RELUCTANT LADY 48 PSYCHOLOGY FROM MARS 49 TO TIME 51 DECADENT DUET 52 POEM TO A POLICEMAN 54 INTIMATE SCENE 56 NEW YORK CITY 58 WE WANT LYRICS 60 A VISITOR FROM MARS SMILES 62 SURPRISE 63 AGAINST THIS AGE BABY 1 The blue beginning of your eyes Condenses the sprawling and assured Blue with which the sky retreats From those obscene confessions known as days. 2 Again, your battling mites of blue Try to stop the revolving monster of life And find the indelible persuasiveness Of single forms within the circling blur. Sundered bits of a soul Astonished at their shrunken estate, They are not sure that they have still survived, And plead for the conviction of sight. 3 But when they recollect The hugely placid manners Of their life, before the earthly exile Made them small and fastened To one pathetic puzzle, Their blue reverts to swelling reveries Whose outward circles spurn the curtained jail. 4 Upon your softly incomplete Face, where germs of devils stir in curves That tremble into questioning symmetries, A thrust of darkness sometimes interferes With secret, virgin places underneath Your eyes and where your leaf-thin nostrils pause. This darkness bends with helpless messages, Like history admonishing a world Personified in one, composite face. NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING DELICATE You mutter, with your face Pleading for more room because It has scanned a panorama: You mutter, with every difference On your face an error in size Mesmerized by the sight of a sky-line: “Life is a nightmare and something delicate.” Lady, they have made a world for you, And if you dare to leave it They will flagellate you With the bones of dead men’s thoughts, And five senses, five termagants Snapping at the uneasy mind. “No, five riotous flirts,” You say, “and each one has A thick blandishment to master the mind.” Yes, lady, through the bold disarrangement of words Life acquires with great foresight An interesting nervousness. But O lady with a decadent music Somehow silent in lines of flesh, Finding your face too small, Finding the earth too small, Have they not informed you That crowding life into seven words Is an insincere and minor epigram? And have they not reprimanded you Because you fail to observe Their vile and fervent spontaneity, These howlers of earthly shrouds? And have they neglected to drive The bluster of their knuckles against your face Because you rush from the leg and arm Anecdotes of microscopical towns, Bandying with a fantasy Which they call thin and valueless? “Life is a nightmare and something delicate,” You repeat, and then, “O yes, they have done these things To me because I take not seriously The interval between two steps Made by Death, who has grown a little tired. When Death recovers his vigor The intervals will become Shorter and shorter until No more men are alive. But now they have their chance. The wild, foul fight of life Delights in refreshing phrases-- Swift-pouring tranquillities and ecstasies Atoning for the groaning stampede That desecrates the light Between each dawn and twilight. And those who stand apart Use the edged art of their minds To cut the struggling pack of bodies Into naked, soiled distinctness.” Lady, do not let them hear you. You are too delicate-- Deliberately, nimbly, remotely, strongly Delicate--and you will remind them Too much of Death, who is also The swiftly fantastic compression Of every adjective and adverb Marching to nouns that live Beyond the intentions of men. Men are not able, lady, To strike his face, and in vengeance They will smear your face With the loose, long hatred of their words. I will wash your face With new metaphors and similes, Telling carefully with my hands That I love you not for your skin, And every bird at twilight Will be enviously astonished At your face now insubstantial Indeed, you have an irony That ironically doubts Whether its power is supreme, And at such times you accept The adequate distraction Of cold and shifting fantasy. This is your mood and mine, And with it we open the window To look upon the night. The night, with distinguished coherence, Is saying yes to the soul And mending its velvet integrity Torn by one forlorn Animal that bounds From towns and villages. The night is Blake in combat With an extraordinary wolf Whose head can take the mobile Protection of a smile; Whose heart contains the ferocious Lies of ice and fire; Whose heart with stiff and sinuous Promises swindles the lips and limbs of men; Whose heart persuades its confusion To welcome the martyred certainties Of cruelty and kindness; Whose brain is but a calmness Where the falsehoods of earth Can fashion masks of ideas. Welcome the wolf. Bring lyrics to fondle his hair. Summon your troops of words And exalt his gasping contortions. Lady, it is my fear That makes me give you these commands. Men will force upon you The garland of their spit If you fail to glorify, Or eagerly disrobe, The overbearing motives of their flesh. And every irony of yours Will be despised unless A hand of specious warmth Directs the twist of your blades. O lady, you are flashing detachment Clad in exquisitely careful Fantasy, and on your face Pity and irony unite To form the nimble light of contemplations. Men will dread you as they fear Death, the Ultimate Preciosity. Stay with me within this chamber And tell me that your heart Is near to a spiral of pain Curving perfectly From the squirming of a world. See, you have made me luminous With this news, and my heart, Fighting to be original, Ends its struggle in yours. Turning, we trace a crescent Of conscious imagination Upon the darkness of this room. Night and window still remain. Night, spiritual acrobat, Evades with great undulations The moans and exultations of men. His madly elastic invitation To the souls of men Gathers up the imagination Of one poet, starving in a room Where rats and scandals ravish the light. With conscious combinations of words The poet bounds through space with Night. Together they observe The bleeding, cheated mob Of bodies robbed by one quick thrill. Cold, exact, and fanciful, They drop the new designs of words Upon a vastly obvious contortion. Poet and night can see No difference between The peasant, groveling and marred, And smoother men who cringe more secretly. Yet they give these men The imaginary distinctions of words. Compassionate poet and night. You say: “With glaring details Attended by the voices of men, Morning will attack the poet. Men will brandish adjectives. Tenuous! Stilted! Artificial! Dreams of warm permanence Will grasp the little weapons Furnished by the servant-mind. Dreams ... ah, lady, let us leave The more precise and polished dream Of our sadness, and surpass The scoundrel, beggar, fool, and braggart Fused into a loose convulsion Called by men amusement. Laughter is the explosive trouble Of a soul that shakes the flesh. Misunderstanding the signal Men fly to an easy delight. Causes, obscure and oppressed, Cleave the flesh and become Raped by earthly intentions. Thus the surface rôles of men Throw themselves upon the stranger, Changing his cries with theirs. The aftermath is a smile Relishing the past occurrence. Lady, since you desire To clutch the meaning of this sound and pause, Laugh and smile with me more sadly And with that attenuated, cold Courage never common to men. Another window is behind us, Needing much our laugh and smile. II That metaphysical prank Known as chance--overwhelming Lack of respect for bodies And the position of objects-- Gathers three men and arranges them Side by side in a street-car. Freudian, poet, and priest-- Ah, lady, they have not lost The unreal snobbishness With which their different minds Withdraw from one another. Their thought does not desire Only to be distinct And adventurous. They must also maintain An extreme aloofness; Throw the obliterating adjective; Fix a rock and perch upon it. Chance, the irresistible humorist, Has lured their bodies together, With that purity of intention Not appreciated by men. With a smile not impersonal But trampling on small disputes, We scan the minds and hearts of these men. The Freudian is meditating Upon a page within his essay Where the narrative sleep of a woman Clarifies her limbs and breast. He does not know that men Within their sleep discover Creative lips and eyes stamped out by life; That coarse and drooling fish-peddlers Change to Dostoyevskies; Morbid morgue-attendants Snatch the sight of Baudelaire; Snarling, cloudy cut-throats Steal the shape of François Villon. Men within their slumber Congratulate the poetry, Prose, and art that life reviles Within their stifled consciousness. Their helpless imaginations Throw off the soiled and cramped Weight of memorized realities. The Freudian in the street-car Ties this freedom to a creed, Narrowing the broad escape Until it fits the lunge of limbs. We leave him, rubbing his nose To catch the upheaval of triumph, And look upon the more removed Body of the poet. Lady, poets heal Their slashed and poisoned loneliness With words that captivate The bald, surrounding scene: Words that grip the variations Crowded underneath each outward form, Governed by the scrutiny Of mind, and heart, and soul. Transcending the rattle of this car And every other gibberish Uttered by civilization, The poet plans his story. Life, an old man, cryptic and evanescent, Tries to sell some flowers To Death, who is young and smiles. Lady, this poet is also young-- Tingling, candid somersault of youth-- And his words only catch Surface novelties of style. Different phrases drape one thought. “An old man 3 thirds asleep” Replaces “an old man completely asleep.” Ah, these endless dressmakers. They hang a new or faded gown Upon the shapes of life: They do not cut beneath the mould And clutch the huddled forms that wait For resurrection in the inner dungeon ... Poet and Freudian leave their seats To gain the sleek encouragement of supper, And only the priest remains. From the lumbering torture of years Men have wrenched a double hope, God and Christ, and sought to calm The strained deceptions of their flesh. Lady, the tarrying soul, Patient and flexible, Must often smile at the simple, Crude anticipations of men. This priest smiles and is sleepy, Thinking of coffee with cognac, And the warm, assuring duty of prayer. The outer smile is ever An unconscious obliteration. Ah, lady, logics, masks, And ecstasies forever Spurn the pregnant, black Mystery that lets them spend The tense importance of a moment. Only fantasy and irony, Incongruous brothers, Can lift themselves above The harassed interval that Death permits. REGARDING AN AMERICAN VILLAGE I O local mannerisms, Coarsely woven cloaks Thrown upon the plodding, Emaciated days within this village, I have no contempt or praise To give you--no desire To rip you off, discovering Skin, and undulations known as sin, And no desire to revise you With glamorous endearments of rhyme. Slowly purchased garments Of cowardice, men wear you And aid their practised shrinking From one faint irritation Escaping nightly from their souls. Night makes men uncertain-- The mystery of a curtain Different from those that hang in windows. At night the confidence of flesh Becomes less strong and men Are forced to rescue it With desperate hilarities. Observe them now within the bland Refuge of manufactured light. Between the counters of a village store They arm their flesh with feigned Convictions brought by laughter. Afterwards, as they roll along The dark roads leading to their farms, The grumbling of their souls will compete With the neighing of horses And the stir of leaves and weeds. Night will lean upon them, Teasing the sturdiness of flesh. II The body of Jacob Higgins-- Belated minstrel--sings and dances On the edge of the cliff. Once fiendish and accurate, His greed has now become Frivolous and unskillful, Visualizing Death as a new Mistress who must be received with lighter manners. Preparing for her coming He buys “five cents wuth of candy” For a grandchild, and with a generous cackle Tackles a chair beside the stove. Another old man, like a blurred Report of winter, seizes The firmer meaning of a joke About the Ree-publican partee. Jacob, using one high laugh, Preens himself for celestial dallying. Old men in American villages laugh To groom the mean, untidy habits Of their past existences. (They lack the stolid frankness Of European peasants.) Behind a wire lattice Bob Wentworth separates the mail With the guise of one intent On guessing the contents of a novel. Forty years have massed Exhausted lies within him, And to ease the weight he builds Mysteries and fictions In the fifty people whom he knows. Agnes Holliday receives her letter With that erect, affected Indifference employed by village girls. The words of a distant lover Rouse the shallow somnambulist Of her heart, and it stares Reproachfully at an empty bed. Oh, she had forgotten: Sugar, corn, and loaves of bread. The famished alertness of her reading Curtsies to a cheap and orderly Trance known to her mind as life. Then an anxious, skittish youth Behind the counter invites her To the weekly dance at Parkertown. Concrete pleasures drive their boots Against the puny, fruitless dream ... And, Thomas Ainsley, they have given you Chained tricks for your legs and arms, And peevish lulls that play with women’s feet. You stroke the paper of your letter-- An incantation to the absent figure. The night upon a country-road Is waiting to pounce upon The narrow games of these people. The power of incomprehensible sounds Will cleave their breasts and join The smothered gossip of trees, And every man will lengthen his steps And crave the narcotic safety of home. Fear is only the frantic Annoyance of a soul, Misinterpreted by flesh. THREE PORTRAITS I Withdraw your hair from the simulated Interest of the moon; Take every tenuous shadow From the aimless tongues of these trees And darken your speech until it attains A fickle and fantastic Acquaintance with the eccentric night; Disarrange your dress and make it A subtle invitation to nakedness. Remove your shoes and stockings So that your feet may enjoy An embarrassed soliloquy with the grass; Place the palm of your hand Lightly against your nose, Following the slope of some grotesque feeling. Devise these careful affronts To the heavier intentions Of thought and emotion, and gratefully Accept your title of minor poet. Only trees with long roots caught by hills Will recognize your importance. II They worship musical sound, Protecting the breast of emotion. Their feelings pose as fortune-tellers And angle for coins from credulous thoughts. Shall we abandon this luxury Of mild mist and wild raptures? Your face refrains from speaking yes But your poised eyes roundly Reward the luminous question. Greece and Asia have exchanged Problems upon your face, And the fine poise of your head Tries to catch their conversation. Few people care to use Thought as a musical instrument, Bringing ingenious restraints to grief and joy, But we, with clasped arms, will descend Daringly upon this situation. The full-blown confusion of life Will detest our intrusion. III If you subtract a nose you add religion, Supine, and in a glitter of explanation Expanding the unreasonable second Of chattering, pugnacious flesh. The inquisitive elevation of noses Does not fit into the smooth Curvatures of faith. If you remove the lips you add Philosophy, for lips express the warm Quarrel of emotions and become Crimson antagonists to contemplation. If you subtract the eyes you add The fertile smugness of earth, For eyes are rapid skeptics Tossing light beyond the circles of earth. Flesh will remain and vacillate Between the cocaine of belief And times of wakefulness Designed to replenish the drug. Then reconstruct the face With shifting experiments Of spirit, fantasy, and intellect, Intent upon violating The tyrannies of formal reiteration. Men will revile you and bestow The necessary background. DEFINITIONS Music is a treacherous sound, Seducing emotions and marking Their breathless faces with death. Art is an intrepid mountebank, Enraging philosophies and creeds By stepping into the black space beyond them. Religions are blindly tortured eyes, Paralyzing the speed of imagination With static postures of hope. History is an accidental madness, Using nations and races To simulate a cruel sanity. (In the final dust This trick will be discovered.) Psychology is a rubber-stamp Pressed upon a slippery, dodging ghost, But thousands of centuries can remove All marks of this indignity. Men, each snuggling proudly Into an inch of plausible falsehood, Will hate the careless smile That whitens these definitions. The table has been broken by fists; The fanatic has mangled his voice; The scientist cautiously repairs the room Beyond which he dares not peer. Life, they will never cease to explain you. TO A CORPULENT SINGER I Bulging maturity Constructs an unfair version Of curves not visible To eyes upon the outside face. II If a soul is more Slender than the motives of wind, Flesh provides the necessary Privacy, and in a rising voice The soul proclaims its gratefulness. III Who has watched a bear Pawing his idea of a breeze? The audience in this falsely walled Room is pouncing awkwardly Upon the small part of a singer’s voice. The actual sounds swing easily To eyes and ears beyond the edge of earth. IV And if to this meandering Of metaphysical remarks I should add a face Where tragedy experiments with lanterns To aid a long, sharp nose and wondering lips, And laughter is conscious of being The excited, misunderstood child of a soul, The singer would receive Final details of her disguise. TOPSY-TURVY I If I insist that violets Are intellectual eyes Dotting with a wave of sight The chained recalcitrance of earth, Philosophers and scientists-- Blind boys who bolt themselves within a room-- Will seek to torture me For the flashing witchcraft That rides on thunderclaps Called imagination. The crystallized escape Of fear is known as logic, And men have used it to light Small spaces in the wilderness of black. But I prefer to mount Huge horses of the wind, Whose fantastic laughter Separates to metaphors And similes that hurl their decorations Against the wide malevolence of space. When I return to the morbid Helplessness of earth And shake off the dream of freedom, Men ply their knives of gods And creeds upon my skin. Much traveling through space Has made me immune to pain, And metaphors and similes Aid my counting of blood-drops, Bringing color to mathematics. II Lady upon whose head I weave the motives of this poem, Change your sex to a barely visible Trembling that can match the fluttering charm Of the wreath that I have made for you. When this task is finished We may saunter gayly Past the cunning niches That psychology has made for us. REVILE THE ACROBAT Maiden, where are you going, With impudence that makes your arms and legs Unnecessary feathers? Your eyes have interceded Between the flesh and soul, And show a light of reconciliation. For whom have you prepared yourself? I go to see an acrobat Reviled by men, and acting Within a lonely circus owned By Mind, Soul, & Heart, Incorporated. I love his limbs whose muscles Compete with twirls of gossamer, And Oh, I love him not With the drooling, fevered weight of earth. He turns my blood to one Profusion of melted wings. Maiden, why is this acrobat Better than men who stand within The favored halls of mind and heart, Playing, with lust and dignity, Violins and trumpets? They are not better, and he, Whose thoughtful quickness combines The pliantness of mind and soul, He is not worse--the thoughts of men Stand still on high roofs of the mind, Or borrow sorceries of flesh, While he, with flimsy trails Of ruffles on a gaudy jacket, Springs into the air; assaults Every stately, fierce, robust Finality that men have made. He cares not whether he is right or wrong. He seeks a decorative speed Of thought and soul, and he is not afraid Of being insincere. Men loathe him, but I clothe him With magnificent, specific Fabrics slighter than the remorse of a child And bearing involved births of colors. Strength is not alone The size and thickness known to men! COMPULSORY TASKS Words, it is apparent That you are crucified and fondled By the pride of each new generation. O words, whose sportive formations Could make the courts of intellect Belligerent and insane, Men have sentenced you To scores of endless drudgeries. Weakened by the years, You guard the dying bonfires Of each nation and race. Again, like hordes of cattle, You drag the expectations Of social theories and remedies, Stopping only when the blood of men Washes away your useless labours. I have seen your bands Of ragged courtesans Marching in feverish lines To rescue the rites of sex. I have watched you rush To repair the cracks In breaking cathedrals and churches. With gilded, exclamatory vowels You garnish the cowering of earth, And with recurring darkness You spurn the peering mind. Again you are hands of intellect, Disrobing the flesh of men And carefully preserving Each discarded garment With a pinch of powdered emotion. Again you are driven forth In lying mobs of sighs and laughs To warm the evening hours of a nation. (“They could never restrain themselves To wait at home for the postman ... Would Copperfield marry Dora or Agnes?”) Sentimental breathlessness Fleeing from the helpless decay of thought. O words, brow-beaten bricklayers Obeying the shouts of science And raising walls upon whose top The soul is perched, contemptuously Squinting down at toiling pygmies: O words, and you can be Superbly demented skeptics, Betraying the unctuous failures of earth; Riding the wild horse of the mind: Bringing spurs into play; Summoning with pain the lurking soul. RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH MONEY How many planets have you raped, Where only animals escaped To scrape with melancholy needs The bones of last men lost in weeds? Since you are blunt and fraudulent You must receive a bare treatment. Adverbs and adjectives undress When greeted by excrescences. You are the stench on any street, Thick with the vagaries of defeat: The wench who plies her squawking crime Within the alley-ways of time. For men desire to guard with pain The limitations of their brain, And drag the numbness of their hearts Within ornate and creaking carts. And for these tasks they must be bold, Clutching endurance from a cold Squirming with you within the dark, And rising blistered with your mark. Again you give to doubting lust An argument which it can trust. Imagination spoils the scene And needs a dagger, crude and mean. For you were made by men to choke A lyric with an obscene joke And strike the mind when it is strong, With whips methodical and long. Men who are inarticulate Desire to parody their fate With gibberish of clinking coins. When life, excited thief, purloins The voice and energy of men, They lead him to a mouldy pen: They seek revenge and watch him wilt, Finding importance in his guilt. They do not know that they have made The thief to revel in his aid. And you are there to strain your cheek Against imaginations weak-- Coquettish counterfeit of strength. I have observed your metal length Of hands drop on the poet’s throat, And yet he scarcely saw you gloat. To certain men you merely feed The stoics of creative need. _Money_ I am the vicious test with which Men find that they are poor or rich. Without my challenge men might fail To leave the blurred and murderous jail. Utopias are merely death: Men need the scorching of my breath. HIGHLY DELIBERATE POEM “Mother o’ mi-i-ine, mother o’ mi-i-ine, Sweet as uh ro-ose in thuh spring-ti-i-ime”-- The man who bawls this song Has the face of a spell-bound, hairless rat. Entranced within a spotlight, He borrows unconsciously Another voice from despair. The ordinary squeak of his life Is paralyzed, and fear of death Lends him a tenor voice To supplicate the Catcher. But the audience fails to understand And makes flat sounds of glee With hands ... Death, quietly Disgusted at this blind approval, Takes away the spotlight. Now safe, the rat presents Jerks of gratitude and scampers off To gnaw at his wife within their dressing-room. That squeezed-in bag of piteous Mythologies described as heart Has opened in one thousand people And received a vision Of past solicitude for other bags. The rat repeats this feat and wins Varieties of coarse sweetmeats. At sixty the rat will be a gorged Machiavelli, wondering Whether he has not blundered. Death finds no interest in killing rats And often allows them to live, Preferring instead the less buried souls Of a poet or a child of ten. But the rat has found a fear Within the second eyes of whiskey And relates it to his wife. “Say, May, this thing is funny! You won’t believe me, but tonight Just before I started the act I felt like I was gonna die. What in hell is wrong with me? This booze must be drivin’ me bughouse. Well, move a leg, and get that thousand Faulkner promised you, and stop Sitting there and staring at me.” Death, who has listened with fastidious Ennui, strolls off to slay A negro infant newly born. POEM A curious courtship in your brain Regulates the movements of your limbs. Remorse, the fanciful, abandoned Child of madness, discovers its lips Upon the breast of a hovering Madonna. How many poets present The crushed tips of their hearts Pieced carefully together as a wreath Upon the two heads of this wooing? Imagination is a wound Upon the adventures of thoughts, And one scar left behind Is known as reality. Will they give you robes Threaded with orderly shimmers of repentance, Pardoning the scar in earthly ways? REALISTIC CREATOR _A Sonnet Dedicated to T. S. Eliot_ An intimate and playful accident Common to life had placed him on a bench Beside an old and stiffly wounded wench. With erudite and careful eyes he sent A sneer to tear away her feeble mask And snatch the battered dullness of her heart. He spied her only in the scheming part Of soiled flesh bickering with some trivial task. The lacerated madness of her soul, And delicate emotions kicked by life, Did not invade the swift tricks of his mind. Regarding her, he could not see the whole, Or catch the psychic lunge behind her strife. His eyes were savagely adroit, and blind. CITY STREETS This pavement and the sordid boast of stone And brick that wins the pity of a sky Are only martyred symbols made to buy A dream of permanence for flesh and bone. The jumbled, furtive anecdotes of lips And limbs that bring their fever to this street, They will subside to fragments of defeat Within the cool republic where death trips. This is an age where flesh desires to shape Intense hyperboles in prose and verse, Transforming city streets and country lanes To backgrounds aiding physical escape. But city streets are waiting to disperse With ruins the fight and plight of earthly pains. DECADENT CRY[A] Hill-flowers salute his feet Upon the upward slant of a path. His destination does not matter. His legs divide the spacious tragedy Of distance into the small translation Of steps, and with their aid he reaches The fraudulent temple of a pause or end. Hill-flowers, important and unprejudiced, Bow to this monster-clown. His feet, ridiculous and neat, Do not stop, for they must ape A certainty and hasten to attack Or praise fixed idols made by flesh and mind. Hill-flowers, trimly polished Devices hailing preciosity; Rumpled by the wind To scores of original caprices; Bearing the transfigured skirmish Of spiritual moods that men call color; Swiftly and unassumingly Deaf to lusts and traditions-- They are not regarded By the men who walk, flat-footed, Or with scholarly exactitude, In chase of an ardent chicanery Known as flesh, and elderly Quibbles of mind and emotion. Only an intellect clad in sprightly chiffon Can spy the importance of flowers on a hill. [A] _Dedicated to a rare moment of intelligence on the part of The Dial._ GIRL The words of men are not conjectures Lunging toward your soul: They do not wish you to leave The fawning thefts of flesh. When with covered formality They tramp from actual pulpits, They merely bring celestial nonsense For one, uncurious, sanctified bed. Ah, girl, the soul that they give you Is a clumsy, white Concert-master rebuking The first-violin of your body. Again they brand a word, Sacredness, upon your breast, Claiming that your soul is tied To the pliant riot of your limbs. Girl, I can forget for a moment That hairs upon the bulge of my chest Must be praised or censured, And I have no desire To belittle you with one, Hopeless, cynical, sententious Group of words, while intellect, Flavoring its tea-cup with a sneer, Watches you from shaded balconies. When you win the torpid illness Known as virtue you are less important Than a quest for daisies in the moon, And when you merely ask For one blow and inertness, An old dream yells and ends With the quietness of sprawling pity. Girl, avoid the plentiful Drugs of seriousness and spend Pieces of your heart on every whim. Give your flesh the light and sharp Contacts of a thistle blown Across the wincing cheeks of rogues. Make your soul and body spurn Each other with a swift impertinence, And let your clawing griefs and joys Be still a moment on the couch of thought. And if at times you turn your head To spy the hatred of philosophers And panting realists, preserve the smile Of one who takes a suitable reward. COLOR AND A WOMAN Cry the names of colors And fail to reproduce The brightly worried way In which they burn ideas, Sweeping hues of intangible blood Into the conspiring fires of soul: The darkly reticent manner With which they embalm emotions, Ending the spontaneous treachery With a self-possessed attraction. Chant the names of colors And fascinate the brown Coward, who surrounds himself With crystal safeguards known as facts, But likes the dangerous sounds Of unattained realities. Or, scorn this satirical advice And storm the body of a woman With words as deliberate as wind, Yet heavier, and bearing Colors without a label. The substance of her hair-- Ethereal stems that continue their quest Beyond the warped confines of sight-- Shows the darkness of intellect Answering a miniature sunset Whose dying light does not quite succumb. The steep reserve of her forehead Has been kindled by a flat burden Pale as the cry of a child, yet carrying The hint of trouble found in late afternoon. Her eyes hold emotional evening, With spurts of dawn remaining like anxious relics Kept alive by unsatisfied designs From that derided realm where logic dies. Her breast is the color that a north wind Would have if it were visible to eyes. Upon her body, color in light and darkness Subdues the ribald ponderousness of life And brings the filmy, flashing seriousness Detested by the prostrate toil of mud; Hated in taverns at midnight; Banished from every couch when morning Rearranges the ancient jest. RELUCTANT LADY The widely bruised, shy beauty of a brain That renders dogmas bashful with its breath Will raise its last, wan offering to death-- A poise of gossamer that takes the rain Of darkness, with an unexpectant pride. Your thoughts are old and yet too young for life Whose ponderous sneer preserves their curling strife. They wait for heavy spear-points, side by side. You are a wilted pilgrim on a road Where hills and rubbish-pits receive alike The skeptical remonstrance of your pace. You pass through towns and raise your thoughtful load To shield your loves against the words that strike The sheer, elastic trouble of your face. PSYCHOLOGY FROM MARS Torban flattered the details Of his festival in brown--a beard-- With fingers that held a musical length, And spoke of psychology. The clever reproduction Of a human being, His appearance lacked A hairsbreadth of reality And barely failed to convince. His eyes, assemblages of planets Miraculously dwarfed, were small But did not hold the shifting gluttony Common to little eyes. His lips were unsubstantial fibres And the straight line of his nose Gained an unearthly sincerity. His body was muscular but failed to reveal The smug delusion of superiority That lives within physical strength. With a voice in which pity and satire Mingled bewilderedly with each other, He spoke of psychology. “Normal and average men On Mars are charged with being Insane and distorted oracles. Because they desire to resemble each other We force them to live together On drably elaborate plateaus. There they fashion cities-- Geometrical madness That censures shreds of dread and unrest Within the spaces of its heart. There they retreat to farms, And the disciplined exhaustion Of their lives reclines upon Monotonous rewards known as harvests. They cling to homes--slumbering alcoves Plentifully supplied With complimenting mirrors And altars for the mind. Sometimes a revolution Seduces their living flatness, And an original confusion Follows rumours of creation, But the sanity vanishes Into the marching unison Of their repentant madness. We who are sane live below the plateaus. ‘Home’ to us is a flitting answer: Different spots inevitably Transformed by our bodies garlanded with mind, Or requests of the heart That tarry a moment for shelter. As we wander we tear And rebuild ancient lanes and houses, Leaving a sentinel of change Behind to confront the next traveller. We stroll in twos and threes That endure for a day or an hour, And we never linger At one place to gloat over details. Restless sanity, my friend, Equips the changing cries within us. Restless sanity Prevents us from complacently Dozing over miniatures, With a dream of importance Rocking within the rhythms of our hearts!” TO TIME O Time, you are an idiot’s fluid curse. O Time, you are an uninspired hearse. O Time, you kill beneath your robe of nurse. O Time, your eyes are cherubs drowned in pools, O Time, your wisdom scorns the aid of stools, O Time, your kindness blinds the life of fools. O Time, you blur pretentious intellect. O Time, you break the thrones that thoughts erect. O Time, your hands indifferently correct The incoherent sorceries of men Who dance before a monstrous Axe and Pen, Waving the fetiches of words, and then Censure the dance with pedestals of gauze Cleverly imitating rock, and laws Whose opaque sureness broods above their cause. When irony will cease to be obscure To men whose eyes resent the cloudy lure That ends their tiny clarities, with pure And forming mists of words, then men will climb With restless regularity, like Time, Who merely seeks a changing pantomime. O Time, you are too pure and swiftly wide For men who try to check your colored stride With opaque temples and a sleeping bride. DECADENT DUET _Torban_ Lightly sharp and even, Your voice is the sound of an airplane Darting high above your unreceptive face. Your voice is unrelated To the structure of your face, And on your lips an echo merely rides, The pagan shimmerings of your face Receive the voice with a subtle disbelief. Indeed, your intellectuality, Speeding though spaces over your head, Must seem of little consequence To the nymph who listens far below. That you are thus divided is not strange, But you contain a third Self And it regards the other two With a grave and patient interest. _Woman_ Phantasmagoria, Ruling arabesques of words, Your attenuated variations Of thought and emotion will enrage The blunt convictions of more earthly men. The pagan rituals of my face Distrust your words, and my mind, Dropping its voice from fancied heights, Resents the indirectness of your style. But the third Self within me, Generous and immobile of face, Cares only for the skill With which you elevate Vainly celebrating shades Of thought and protesting emotion. Color, form, and substance-- Three complaining slaves Engraving the details of prearranged tasks Within stationary brains and hearts. My third Self would release them To an original abandon That exchanges intangible countries, With a gracious, gaudy treason. _Torban_ Lacking a better name I will call your third Self “soul.” The ancient, merry game Of fighting over labels Must not dismay our duet. To most men soul exists Only when their sensual weariness Needs to be gilded with a religion Or a deified memory of flesh. We contain a lurking wanderer Upon our inner roads, and he Sometimes stops to drop pitying hands Upon the forms of thought and emotions Branded with scores of prejudices. Men have hated him for centuries, And hatred, symbol of sly cowardice, Has draped its desire in false scorn And named him Decadence. Thus ends our decadent duet. Come, there are roads on which we must pirouette. The proper contrast will be furnished By philosophers, scientists, and sensualists. POEM TO A POLICEMAN Marionnette-fanatic, Your active club within this riot Was once the passive integrity Of a branch upon a tree. Now without success It tries to beat out fire Writhing in human skulls. The pause of nature, transformed Survival of every memory and defeat, Separates to bits of action Aiding an inexplicable fever. The hands of centuries press These bits into another Pause before corruption. O pernicious circle, I will not believe That your parsimonious farce Reiterates itself through space. The souls of men achieve An accidental dream That seems important merely Because the figures which it holds Have invented small and almost Non-existent divisions of time. Yet, trapped within these months and years, I turn to you, marionnette-fanatic. You at least can bring Diversion to my chained Impatience as I wait for death. How wildly you protect The sluggish minds of men! A calculating laziness of thought Has created you to guard its doors, While other men require An outward expression of peace Beneath which the inner struggle Can revel in privacy. And so, with buttons of brass And blue uniform that lend An incongruous dignity To your task, you defend The myriads of insincerities That drape a mutilated need. And yet, unconsciously, And at rare times you save The face of beauty from an old Insult in the fists of men. Yes, you are not entirely Without extenuation, Marionnette-fanatic. INTIMATE SCENE Bed-room, you have earned The sympathy of dirt, And bear upon your air Malevolent and thwarted Essences of men. Many contorters of bellies Have stirred an urgent travesty Shielded by your greasy dusk, And hearts have found upon your couch A brief, delicious insult. Cheap room within a lodging-house, You are not merely space For the coronation of flesh, And your odorous bed-quilts Need not only provoke The casual jeering of thought. II Woman and her master Close the door too quietly. With a mien of slinking Insecurity, the woman turns Within the dangling darkness of the room And mumbles orders to her man. Anticipation and disgust Rout each other upon her face. Then the gas-light brings Its feeble understanding to the room. Woman and man slump down Within the chairs and regard The tired amens of their feet. For a time weariness Banishes the theatrical Divisions of masculine and feminine, But returning strength Calls to the untrue drama. The man demands, with practised expectation, Money squeezed from an automatic night; Curses at the smallness of the sum, And cuffs his woman without intensity, Desiring only an excuse For the slowness of his mind. She is not a composition Waiting for its orchestra of pain: His fists can merely give An inexpensive spice To the apathy within her. Soon the man and woman laugh, To kill an inner jumble of sounds Which they cannot separate-- Nightly complaint of their souls. He pinches one of her cheeks, Like an Emperor deigning To test the softness of a bauble, And she finds within his fingers An endurable compliment. When morning light exposes Each deficiency within the room, Man and woman open their eyes. Hallucination of fire No longer streams over the moving screens. Woman and her man Stare, with disapproval, at the walls, And their souls become Querulous captives almost gaining lips. Then emotional habits Revive the earthly hoax. Rising from the bed, Man and woman use their voices Reassuringly. NEW YORK CITY New York, it would be easy to revile The flatly carnal beggar in your smile, And flagellate, with a superior bliss, The gasping routines of your avarice. Loud men reward you with an obvious ax, Or piteous laurel-wreath, and their attacks And eulogies blend to a common sin. New York, perhaps an intellectual grin That brings its bright cohesion to the warm Confusion of the heart, can mold your swarm Of huge, drab blunders into smaller grace ... With old words I shall gamble for your face. The evening kneels between your filthy brick, Darkly indifferent to each scheme and trick With which your men insult and smudge their day. When evenings metaphysically pray Above the weakening dance of men, they find That every eye that looks at them is blind. And yet, New York, I say that evenings free An insolently mystic majesty From your parades of automatic greed. For one dark moment all your narrow speed Receives the fighting blackness of a soul, And every nervous lie swings to a whole-- A pilgrim, blurred yet proud, who finds in black An arrogance that fills his straining lack. Between your undistinguished crates of stone And wood, the wounded dwarfs who walked alone-- The chorus-girls, whose indiscretions hang Between the scavengers of rouge and slang; The women moulding painfully a fresh Excuse for pliant treacheries of flesh; The men who raise the tin sword of a creed, Convinced that it can kill the lunge of greed; The thieves whose poisoned vanity purloins A fancied victory from ringing coins; The staidly bloated men whose minds have sold Their quickness to an old, metallic Scold; The neatly cultured men whose hopes and fears Dwell in soft prisons honored by past years; The men whose tortured youth bends to the task Of hardening offal to a swaggering mask-- The night, with black hands, gathers each mistake And strokes a mystic challenge from each ache. The night, New York, sardonic and alert, Offers a soul to your reluctant dirt. WE WANT LYRICS Thousands of faces break To one word called dramatic: Thousands of faces attain An over-worked, realistic Clash of stupidities. At first the mob spreads out Its animated fights of lines-- Butcher with a face one degree Removed from the dead flesh which he cuts; Socialist whose face rebukes The cry for justice tumbling from his lips; Five professors of English Whose faces are essentially School-boys coerced by erudition; Bank-clerk with a face Where curiosity Weakly contends against The shrewd frown brought by counting slips of money; Girls whose first twenty years Have merely shown them the exact Shade of pouting necessary For the gain of price-marked objects; Boys with cocksure faces Where an awkward lyric Wins the vitriol of civilization; Shop-girl whose face is like The faint beginning of a courtezan Prisoned by the trance of unsought labor; Wealthy man whose face Holds a courteous, bored Reply to traces of imagination; Housewife with a round Face where dying disappointments Flirt with hosts of angel-lies; Old men with faces where a psychic doubt Invades the ruins of noses, lips, and eyes And dreams of better structures; Old woman with a face Like a bashful rag-picker Rescuing bits of cast-off deviltries Beneath the ebbing light of eyes. Stare upon these faces, With emotion cooled by every Bantering of thought, And they fade to one disorganized Defeat that craves the smooth Lubrications of music. The mob upon this street Reiterates one shout: “We want lyrics! Give us lyrics!” Space, and stars, and conscious thought Stand above the house-tops of this street; Look down with frowning interest; Regard the implacable enemy. A VISITOR FROM MARS SMILES “Erudite and burnished poets seek Pliant strength from Latin, French, and Greek Phrases, finding English incomplete. Or do they conceal their real defeat, Like some juggler, faltering, who drops Circling, rapid balls of words and stops To relate obscure, pretentious tales, Hiding nervous moments where he fails?” Torban, visiting from Mars, became Silent, and his smile, like mental fame, Rescued the obscurity of flesh. Then I answered with a careful, fresh Purchase from the scorned shop of my mind. “Men must advertise the things they find. Erudition, tired after work, Flirts with plotting vanities that lurk Poutingly upon the edge of thought. Languages and legends men have caught Practice an irrelevant parade With emotions morbidly arrayed.” Torban gave the blunt wealth of his smile. “We, in Mars, have but one tongue whose guile Does not yield to little, vain designs. Feelings are fermented thoughts whose wines Bring an aimless fierceness to the mind. And a row of eyes, convinced and blind, But we sip them carefully, for we Do not like your spontaneity. Children babbling on the rocks in Mars, Shrieking as they dart in tinseled cars, Are spontaneous, but as they grow, We remove this noisy curse and throw Nimbleness to rule their tongues and ears-- Juggling games that slay their shouts and fears. Novelty to you is almost crime: We decorate the treachery of time!” SURPRISE He knew that he was dead because his fingers had forgotten the art of touching and were trying to regain their ability. They were no longer able to separate different textures and surfaces, and everything held to them a preposterous smoothness that suggested an urbane, impenetrable sophistry. With a methodical despair they gripped one object after another, disputing the integrity of their condition, and when at last they capitulated he accepted the verity of his death. So far he had not sought to use his eyes or ears--he had existed only as a limited intensity of thought and emotion that directed his hands in a fight for variations in feeling. Now he discovered his sight, and in that moment avalanches of metaphors and similes--the detailed disguises and comparisons with which two eyes arbitrarily brand a comforting distinctness upon a mystery--rushed from his head and arranged themselves to form a world. This was a reversal of life, since in life the human eye detects and reflects the objects around it, as all good scientists will testify, and does not first project these objects and afterwards reflect them. But this man, being dead, found that his eyes had thrown myriads of determinations upon a shapeless mass and changed it to an equal number of still and animated forms. The desires within his eyes were continually altering the objects around them, so that a tree became shifting plausibilities of design and a red rose was merely an obedient chameleon. Of course, this could never have happened in life, since in life different shapes hold a fixed contour, appearance, and meaning, but this man was fortunate enough to be dead, so his eyes meddled incorrigibly with the shapes and colors which they imagined that they had made. He sat in a room constructed by himself, and after he had become conscious of the result he saw that it was a hotel-room located in Detroit, Michigan. He examined the furniture, walls, and floor, and they were to him the firmness of his imagination divided into forms that sheltered the different needs within him. If he had still been alive he would have accepted the reality of shapes made by the majority-imaginations of other men, regardless of whether they pleased him or not, but death had given him a more audacious vigor and the room in which he was sitting did not resemble to his eyes the same chamber in which he had once reclined during his living hours. He knew that the power of his desire had returned him to a hotel-room in Detroit, Michigan, and had disarranged everything except its location and exact position. The floor was an incandescent white and suggested a proudly prostrate expanse--it did not have the supine appearance that pine and oak floors hold to the eyes of life. The furniture had lost its guise of being too economically pinned down by curves and angles, and its lines were more relaxed and disordered. The chairs were comfortable without relinquishing an aesthetic sincerity of line--a semblance scarcely ever held by chairs that figure in life--and the top of the table was not flat but depressed and elevated in different places, since the imagination of this dead man had dared to become more unobstructed. The bed had an air of counseling as well as supporting, and its posters were high and curved in above the center of a gently sloping bowl that formed the bottom. Also, the walls of the room stood with a lighter erectness in place of the rooted, martinet aspect that walls present to living eyes, while the ceiling gave an impression of cloth that could be easily flung aside and had not been spread by a passion for flat concealment. As the dead man sat in this room which he had revised, his memory began to distribute pains throughout his brain, and he realized that the room had dominated the last third of his life. The room had been the scene of his final meeting with a woman whom he loved, for a week later she had died after being thrown from a horse. Within this room they had spoken and touched for the last time on earth, and afterwards the room had become to him a square world isolated in a possibly round world--a continent in quality and not in size, where he could disrupt the imaginative lines fashioned by other men, changing a rose to an intellectual face if he so desired. Every visual detail and remembered word of the woman had merged to a guardian silence, enclosing this separate world with alert sentinels of understanding. He recollected these affirmations with the satisfaction of a transforming creator, for his experiences had become fantasies which his memory strove to make real. This was, however, the result of his death for, as all good men will tell you, the memory of living beings is entirely different and often adds inaccurate touches to the reality of experience, making this reality fantastic and untrue. His sense of hearing revived almost simultaneously with his memory, for hearing is the foremost aid in a capture of past happenings since its productions do not fade from the mind as rapidly as those of other senses. He found that his hearing was inextricably a part of thought and signified, indeed, the fragmentary release of thought, and this alteration drove from him every vestige of disbelief in his death, for he knew that in life hearing is almost always the sense used by men to divert the fatigue of their minds (the servant of meaningless ecstasies). Then his sense of smell, changed from an unseen drug to a floating search, collided with the odor of a woman--an odor that was less smooth and more candid than the natural ones held by women who are alive. Turning his head to the left, for the first time, he saw that the woman whom he loved was seated near him. Her naked body still gave the appearance of flesh curved as it had been during her life, but it was no longer a slyly prisoned invitation to his sense of touch. It aroused within him a feeling of thinly langourous intimacy and became a visible grave into which his thoughts could sink for future resurrection. It was as though a desire, once coarse and reeking with a defeated violence, had been transmuted to a longing for less fleeting and frantic pressures, while one former thrill became more diffused and deliberately sensitive, finding a possession to which the sense of touch was incidental, and not inevitable. The hemispheres of her breasts, imperfect and firm, and the long taperings of her limbs were to him forms which he wanted to envelope carefully with earnest refinements of motion, gaining in this way a less explanatory medium for his mind, and anything resembling an invasion would have seemed to him an abruptly senseless blunder. He saw that her face was still a gathering of boyish bewilderments beneath a mass of hair that had grown more cloudy, but these expressions were hugged by a light that made them unnecessary survivals of experience. He secured the impression that death was amusing itself with the trivialities of her features, while they held a perfect comprehension of the jest without abandoning their outward shapes. At this moment he became aware of the nakedness of his own body and felt the loss of that snug assurance which his skin had once given him. In its place there was a sheath that seemed hardly more than a visual flutter. He looked up at the woman and their smiles were adeptly synchronized. Living people are apt to smile when they have hidden too little and weep when there is nothing left to hide, but the smiles of this dead man and woman were informal exercises of candour--thought adopting more perceptible and less evasive signals. “Have you been sitting here since your death?” he asked. “No, I’ve also been creating on the streets of Detroit,” she said. “You manage it in this way. First you drive all of the alertness out of your senses and your mind, and everything around you becomes a vibrating, shapeless substance, a little thicker than mist and hued with a gray that is almost colorless. Then you give a moderate vigor to your senses and your mind, and the substance breaks into hosts of shapes. You have attained the perceptions of an ordinary, living person and you find that you are walking on a street. During all of this time you have held back the strength of your imagination, which is alone real, but now you release it and it shoots from you and follows the commands of your desires. An old man’s whiskers change to a weedy sprouting of thought, and each hair is the dangling of a different idea. You can see the decay of an empire crowding itself into a young girl’s green and mean hat, and different events emerge and group themselves to seize or obliterate the color. A woman’s leg becomes a fat blasphemy and within its shaking famous jelly you can spy a saint, writhing in the effort to free himself. A young man’s shoulders are two, dead, delicate thoughts caught in a bulging tomb, with their ghosts speaking through each unconscious movement of his arms. The street-pavement lives and is a hard, detached hatred, sapping the strength of those who have enslaved it.... Sometimes I’ve returned to this room, not to rest, for weariness springs only from that thick weakness of imagination known as flesh, but to find you here before the final emphasis of your death.” “Since I’m not accustomed to being dead I must ask questions whose answers are obvious to you,” he said. “Why are living beings unable to see you? How do you avoid their jostling and the rolling devices that they have made? How can we sit in a hotel-room, which must at the same time be occupied by living beings, without seeing or hearing them? Treat me as an earthly school-boy for a moment.” “Living beings dwell in realms made by their imaginations,” she said. “We do not fit into these realms and consequently we are not forms that can be detected by the senses and imaginations of people who are alive. The desires of these people have created a world of objects and substantiations which does not match our own, and so our world is an independent one placed over the world of living men. With different intensities and designs of imagination we invade a shapeless substance and give it the elaborate distinctness of our longings. This substance is inert imagination, and when we make our senses and minds blank we become a part of it. Of course, I use the word imagination because death has not yet taught me a better one. Beyond the earth there are stars and space which are not controlled and shaped by our individual imaginations, and when the feet of our imaginations become light enough to rise beyond the shapeless mass which gave birth to them, we shall discover what greater imaginations in turn gave birth to the feeble beginning which formed us. And so we shall be able to discard this word, imagination, which only represents the boundaries of our desire and its attendant senses and thoughts, and gain the words of greater explanations. But before we depart from these boundaries we must make ourselves entirely clear and untroubled, and it will be necessary for us to reconstruct the last meeting that we had during our lifetimes. This meeting troubles us with an unfulfillment of imagination, and if we do not alter it the strength of our imaginations will be hampered by a recollection of former weakness. All men and women who die must return to the most swiftly vivid scene that their imaginations were able to attain during the period known as life. In this way the scene is gradually made perfect by understanding, and the imagination, shaking off the terror of past weakness and indecision, is able to float away from the substance that created it. Because our imaginations were much stronger than the ones surrounding them, we can achieve this task immediately, while other dead people must slowly grapple for this emancipation, visiting their scene in those guises which living people call ghosts.” “You must direct me,” he said. “I was never much in harmony with the imaginative semblances and rituals of most living people, and now that I am dead I can scarcely remember them.” “Make your senses heavy and tight,” she said. “Reduce them to a condition that approaches a stupor--a hopeful stupor such as prevails among those living men known as mystics and priests. When you have accomplished this, make little rows of imaginative objects and force your mind to squeeze itself within them, adoring some and hating others. Then try to arouse your senses by concentrating them upon a thickly plotting form that once was flesh, while still making them retain a disturbing trace of their former coma. You remember this form--separated into hairsbreadths of worship and laceration by stunted men?” “Your description of living imagination is perfect,” he said. “It will be minutely disagreeable to follow your orders, but let us complete the task quickly.” They looked away from each other, immersed in the strain of their inner labours. The room disappeared in large pieces that receded to the background of a gray substance, and consciousness left their bodies. Her body faded out while his solidified to flesh draped by the clumsy fears of clothes. Then the gray substance slowly adopted the shapes, colours, and details of a railroad station. Once more he was a suffering and encumbered poet, standing in the battling race of people and waiting for the train that would bring her to Detroit, Michigan. He paced up and down the cement platform, erasing his thoughts with the long strokes of his limbs and obsessed only by the belief that he was walking nearer to her in this fashion, since he was weary of being over-awed by distance. Because he did not associate her qualities and thoughts with those of other people he could never convince himself that she was real unless she stood beside him and spoke, and when her body was absent she became the unreal confirmation of his desires--a dream to which he had given the plausible tricks of flesh and voice. Only the return of these two things could reassure him, for she was to him far too delicately exact and mentally unperturbed to exist actually in the sweating, dense, malaria-saturated revolutions of a world. The train arrived and he stood near the gate. People streamed out--a regiment disbanded after a lonely and forced conflict with thought in uncomfortable seats, or with diluted chatter that fascinated their inner emptiness. They were the people whose vast insistence and blundering control of the earth made him doubt the reality of the woman whom he loved. Oh, to feel once more certain that she was human--that her incredibly tenuous aloofness could stoop to the shields of flesh! Yes, she would come now, an alien straggler passively submitting to the momentum of a regiment of people. When she failed to appear he still lingered near the gate, inventing practical reasons for her absence--the packing of baggage, a delayed toilette. The iron gates shut with a thud that was to him the boot-sound of reality against his head. He bought a newspaper; sat down in the waiting-room; and sought to submerge his distress in the hasty and distorted versions of murders, robberies, scandals, controversies, and machinations that defiled white sheets of paper. But he could see nothing save a hazy host of men fighting against or accepting the complexly sinister fever that made them mutilate each other, and weary of this often-repeated vision he dropped the paper. His mind gathered itself to that tight and aching lunge known as emotion, and morbidly he involved her in disasters--train-wrecks, suicide, the assault of another person. He began to feel that melodrama was the only overwhelming sincerity in a tangle of crafty or poorly adjusted disguises, and his emotional activity fed eagerly upon this belief. All of the paraphernalia of fatalism rose before his eyes--the small, lit stage with its puppets; the myriads of strings extending into a frame of darkness and pulled by invisible hands; the sudden and prearranged descent of catastrophe; the laughter of an audience of gods, examining the spectacle with a mixture of sardonic and bored moments. But abruptly he felt that these were merely the devices of a self-pity that sought to raise its stature by imagining itself the victim of a sublime conspiracy. He whistled some bars of a popular song, deliberately snatching at an inane relief from the industries of his mind. Then he walked back to the gates and waited for the next train, which was about to arrive. Once more the importantly fatigued stream of people; once more her absence. He had turned away from the gate when her hand questioned his shoulder. “And so you are real and I have not been deceived,” he said. “I am as real as you care to make me,” she answered. “I was hunting for a comb in my valise when the train came in. Combs always elude me.” She mentioned the name of a hotel and they walked to it in silence, for speech to them demanded an impregnable privacy that was violated by even the swiftly passing eyes and ears of other people. When they were alone in the hotel-room he watched her remove outer garments and don a kimono, with a pleasure that coerced sensual longing into an enslaved contemplation--a fire that glowed without burning. “When I see your flesh then you are most unreal,” he said. “It becomes a last garment that you have neglected to unfasten because you wish to pretend that you belong to the earth. The cupped appeal of your breasts is the subtle lie with which something infinitely abstract evades the weight of a world. There is a surprised element attached to your legs and they never seem assured in their task of supporting your torso. And yet, when your body is beyond my actual sight your reality is still doubtful, for then I lack even the uncertain evidence of your flesh. I am helpless--I cannot mingle you with cities and men, and even country roads seem heavily unwilling to hold you.” “And is it impossible for you to accept this body as a necessary, insincere contrast to my thoughts and emotions?” she asked, with lightness. “You are tensely morbid, Max. Now I shall sit on your knee. The scene is prearranged. You must promptly clutch me, in that involved manner that has made novelists famous and blurred the integrity of poets. The earth has anointed and pointed riots waiting for you!” His fingers studied the short brown curls on her head and his lips touched the less obvious parts of her face--her chin, the tip of her inwardly curving nose, her temples, the meeting-place of forehead and hair. “I can see two men looking at me now,” he said. “To one I am an emasculated fool who places a dainty overtone upon his weakness, and to the other I am chaining strong desires with the lies of vain and pretty gestures. Olga, the earth is bulky and profane, and dreads anything that delicately, aloofly disputes its size!” She carefully fitted her head between his shoulder and neck. “This listening peace that you bring me, and the softer intentions of your hands, they are more important than the lunges of men,” she said. “We are spontaneous in ways whose breathlike intensity has not been corrupted by the screaming of nerves, and Oh, we must prepare ourselves for the indifference and ridicules of a coarser audience. They cannot peer into this room, yet afterwards something within the buoyant removal of our bodies tells them to punish us with poverty and little food.” He grinned, and crowded flights of defiance were on his face. “I’ve been eating onions and bread for the last week,” he said. “I cut the onions into various shapes, making them resemble different articles of food. With an imaginative seriousness one can almost overcome the sense of taste. Almost.” “It is only that word that keeps us here,” she said. “We are almost free illusions.” She walked to the bureau and brushed her hair, for she did not want him to see an expression on her face. He guessed it and became repentantly merry. “Sold a poem two weeks ago,” he said. “The editor wrote something about ‘great originality but rather tenuous’ and ‘this is not a spiritual age.’ It isn’t.” “Let me hear it,” she said. It concerned a circle of men dumped into chairs in the lobby of a cheap lodging-house--rag-dolls twitching now and then, as though an outside hand were poking them with curiosity. Then the spirit of the lodging-house, sallow and indecently shallow, sidled into the lobby, correctly aimed its tobacco at a spitoon, and gave the dolls snores to create a false appearance of life, whereupon one of them rose and cursed the invisible intruder in his sleep. The spirit of the lodging-house, frightened and angry at the appearance of a soul whose existence it had not imagined, whisked them all off to the torture of their beds. The poem had spoken to Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky but within it a stunned hatred of the world was experimenting with appropriate symbols. “Irrelevantly, perhaps, I’m thinking of a time when I washed dishes in a lunch-room in St. Louis,” she said. “I was hunting in my mind for something that could deceive the greasy monotone of defiled chinaware. Suddenly the brown and turbid dish-water became a heavy wine, spiced with the aftermaths of earthly pleasures--decay to which a spiritual release had given a liquid significance. I became obsessed by the verity of this idea, and finally, quite entranced, I raised the pan of dirty water to my lips and was about to drink it when, at that moment, the proprietor came in. He squawked ‘crazee-e,’ ‘crazee-e,’ and discharged me. I wrote an excellent poem about it, though.” “Let’s see, what would they say about this,” he muttered. “Neurasthenia, insanity, exalted paranoia, minor conceit, trivial pose, empty fantasy--they have so many putrid labels to hide the inner rage, damn them!” They swayed together in the chair, like two babies in a trap, taking the small amount of room possible in the cramped abode. “Tomorrow we’ll look for work,” she said. “The breath-tablets that you bought to hide the scent of onions have not been able to eradicate a last melodramatic trace of their enemy. We must move our arms to ward off such meaningless intrusions.” “With an excellent verbosity you mock the concentration of your thoughts,” he said. They closed their eyes and grew still in the chair. When at last they stirred, each one looked first at the room and then at the other person, with a gradually slain disbelief. “We are not dead after all,” he cried. “The room does not fade away!” They sat without moving, while happiness and sadness sprang into combat within them. TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Unmatched opening quotation marks on page 17 have been retained from the original, as the transcriber could not ascertain exactly where the closing quotation marks, missing in the original, should be placed. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGAINST THIS AGE *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed. 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