Free Insel by Mina Loy Page A

had dropped from his own magnetic “line” soft as a larva. He cowered against the air. Inasmuch as it concerned him, war was not only imminent—he was already ripped open by its plough of anguish. Actually, he was in a fix—for, in the “event” being a German, here he was an enemy, whereas if he could return to Germany, there he was
Kultur Bolshewik
.
    Man Ray came up and sat with us and went away. Tablesfilled and emptied. The dust grew denser and then lay down before the oncoming night.
    I once heard somebody express surprise that instead of following it onward one should not take a cut across Time to secure a moment which, stretching out in line with oneself, would last indefinitely.
    Time that evening lightly came to rest—an unburdened nomad let its three faces linger; the future and the past were with me at present: the whole of time—there was no more pursuing it, losing it, regretting it—while I sat almost shoulder to shoulder with this virtual stranger living the longest period of my life.
    It is almost impossible to recover the sequence or the veritable simultaneity of the states of consciousness one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of living in or rather of being surrounded by an arid aquarium—filled with, not water, but a dim transparency: the procreational chaotic vapor in which all things may begin to grow.
    Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half formulated concepts that drifted through his mind: glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where in the bottom of slumber an immobile oncome of elementals formed of a submarine snow, and some aflicker, like drowned diamonds blew out their rudimentary bellies—almost protruded foetal arms over all an aimless baton of inaudible orchestra—a colorless water-plant growing the stumpy battlements of a castle in a game of chess waved in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder—.
    Projected effigies of Insel and myself insorcellated flotsam—never having left any land—never to arrive at any shore—static in an unsuspected magnitude of being alive in the “light of the eye” dilated to an all enclosing halo of unanalyzable insight, where wonder is its own revelation.
    Even in the world of reality Insel’s ideation was an introvert exploration of a brilliancy beneath his skull, an ever-crescent clarity which in the form of inspiration ripens creative fruit. But in him by reason of some interference I could not define, aborted as the introduction to an idea.
    “I can see right into these people,” he asserted, indicating the crowd gathered around the Hotel. “I know exactly what they are; I know what they do.”
    And that was all.
    As if satisfied by his sense of insight, he needed not to perceive anything specifically, his mind exposed these people as brightly illuminated “whats.” A reaction he accepted for entire comprehension.
    His conceptions were like seeds fallen upon an iron girder. I noticed that I received them very much in the guise of photographic negatives so hollow and dusky they became in transmission, vaguely accentuated with inverted light—.
    Thus, as he unfolded his ardent yearning to flee to New York from a threatening war, the transparencies his presence superposed on the living scene became crowded with flimsy skyscrapers. Up from among their floating foundations swam misty negresses, their limbs spread out at inviting angles, like starfish through the mirage of windows plunging in fathomless pools their reflections.
    But this is not all that happened with him. The visions emitted by the organism of this truly congenital surrealistwere only a wasted pollen drifting off from the nuclear flower of his identity. For my first unaccountable conclusion that he was