Innumerable bodies in clothes mell along the veins of our city. Here are joints, in a side-vein, where money is paid to see bodies removing clothes, and then not shaking invis- ible quims. This cannot be transferred to beetles. Cats do not understand. Micro-organisms are too busy spreading as always into tracts for living. The booted Black Guards and the Pigs off duty keep to their seats, not even handling their tucked away cocks. The play proceeds.
I have been on the beaches of the filthy Thames, and have found a brown domino, a three and a two, of mutton bone, stuck in grey slime between the pebbles.
A bald crone sells smoked fish in Brewer Street. It might be the phloem of a soft tree she slices from the back of a sturgeon. Bright herrings know nothing of their posthumous existence here rolled up in glazed shallow bowls of immense circumference.
Words at the head of my dictionary. I look for a spelling. I am intrigued on the way, and have found out the pomelo, which is “a variety of the shaddock”; and just before that the polatouche, which is “a Siberian flying squirrel.”
On my way I know a Paradise. In this Paradise there are no primeval parents, and no formal hunters. Above it the sky is poured coolly into position from five pallid towers of suavely insubstantial concrete. Intersecting railway lines enclose a triangle: this is my inaccessible Paradise. It contains rank shrubs, long grasses; and beasts which are not hunted, and protestant old Cranach painting them. And me, over Cranach’s shoulder watching them.
Ahasuerus is to be observed climbing mountains: the lower ramps incline gently from Charing Cross Road and St. James’s Square and the Yard at Harvard. Ahasuerus climbs slowly, he sees no one but a reflection of himself, he sees occasionally a Glory around the shadow of his head on mist below him. He has read Coleridge. He looks up to the next hold for his pudgy hand. He climbs, yet vertigo and the chance of falling are his pleasures. He has cut his beard short, vertical sunshine blisters his neck below his ginger hair. He has climbed out of sight.
On my way, the pathos of a literary party. I wait for my companion, to go up in the wheezy lift. In New York it might be a pert lift. I wait and I observe The First Cabinet of Mr. Gladstone. The party is promoted by a newspaper.
The elderly recognize each other and talk of when they were young. The young are timid. The literary editor hands a cheque equivalent to the salary earned in a month by a police inspector or by a whore in a week to a she novelist who has written the five millionth novel since the first novel was written in English. What he says, what she says, no- body hears. What she has written, few at the party will read. The elderly talk of when they were young, the young are timid. Most in the room do not know each other’s identity; or their own.
The pathos of a literary party. It is given, by his publisher, to honour the poet in the corner; standing in his coffin in the corner, protruding his head into the noisy room. This cadaver protrudes further into the noise a strong jaw, pitted and green. The jaw moves, but if this cadaver speaks I hear nothing. Are his poems good? Are we privileged? Is this an occasion which will be recorded in memoirs, or a journal? Did you write that review of my father’s poems? Has this corpse a son who will be a publisher and will ask such a surly question in Boston, or Chicago?
Once, before all such were sent under cover, it was possible to see in every doorway along Brewer Street the blond aureoles of prostitutes shining in evening sunlight. It was as if angels by an early master stood in sunshine in diminish- ing perspective along a forest avenue in Savernake, obscene mushrooms pure among the leaves.
The acids of naming and of time which loosen structure and corrupt the surface, permit the grasp of the affections. They do not attack these blocks of offices, number by number, which are blocks and do not rise to a tower looped by the unlikely rosiness of the morning or the more orange and comforting red of the evening. A tight arse (which did emerge from a womb) superintends the transfer of money in bags from hands I saw briefly in the opening of a security car, as if they were the hands of a Lazarus who declined to rise. A drawer in the basement is full of the dried skins of the polatouche, which is “the flying squirrel of Siberia”, and this drawer is labelled in Cyrillic characters.
Here I note on my way eidetic visions in colours stood up in front of a poet. And here the nature of the incidence of cholera was observed from the loose dead, who had drawn from a single pump.
Along all of the squalid street under breaking buildings green avocadoes glitter in boxes. Polished fruits of bald heads of old salesmen, brown cocoanut heads of the whisk- ered. Fog at the cross-streets changes from red to green.
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