Free Insel by Mina Loy Page B

“the most delicate—soul,” my fascinated impression of his emergence from a goddess’ embrace, the dove that, when he had been still for a while would seem to take his place, were conceptions fully justified by the lovely equilibrium his companionship conveyed to me. It was as if for an exceeding moment I could, rising above the distortion of life, hold inexpressible communion with Insel, where his spirit had no flaw.
    Within range of the crystalline of his eyes become so brightly brittle, again I experienced the profound relief of the acute celerity rhythm that perpetually disintegrated me as I got out of watching a film in slow motion.
    Imagining aloud the explorative kick of roaming the mountainous blocks of Manhattan “forever in New York—,” Insel chanted, “we could have such a wonderful time together.” He was not speaking. He was praying.
    Idly I wondered with what he was communicating, when suddenly I felt myself sag; become so spineless, so raw—. I, a red island with its shores of suet, the most dependable substance in an aquarium-America not so very much dimmer than the Paris cars threading through it in the Rue de Sèvres.
    I did not find it extraordinary that my condition as an undiminishable steak should make me feel almost sublime, or that the man intensely leaning towards me should pray to it.
    There was another element in his unbelievable magnetism of recoil. His air of friability warning off contact lest he crumble. Not only was he preposterously emaciated, but even as his gravity seemed lightened, his body—what wasleft of it—seemed less ponderable than it should have been. Insel was made of extremely diaphanous stuff. Between the shrunken contour of his present volume his original “serial mold” was filled in with some intangible aural matter remaining in place despite his anatomical shrinkage. An aura that enveloped him with an extra external sensibility.
    To investigate, I tapped him lightly on the arm in drawing his attention—and actually in a tenuous way I did feel my hand pass through “something.” The surface of his cloth sleeve, like a stiff sieve, was letting that something through. The effect on Insel was unforeseeable—jerking his face over his shoulder, he twitched away from my fingers with the acid sneer of a wounded feline. This might be merely a reflex of physical repulsion to myself, so later I repeated the gesture, but as if my hand in its first contact had got coated with the psychic exudence it would seem there was no longer any hurt in it. He was calm under my touch.

8
    THE REVERSE OF HIS ALOOFNESS WAS A HOLLOW invitation to my intrusion. Urged to cross the frontier of his individuality, I got in the way of that faintly electric current he emitted. His magnetic pull steadily on the increase, the repulsion proportionately defined, threw me into a vibrational quandary, until as if it were imperative for me to make a connection with the emissive agency of my accidental clairvoyance, with a supernormal acumen he inspired, I located the one point of contact: the temple. Straightway I found myself possessed of an ability to form a “mental double” (for no portion of my palpable substantiality was in any way involved), a mental double of my own temple.
    This was one manifestation of how in Insel’s vicinity pieces of bodies would seem to break off as astral fractions and on occasion hang, visually suspended in the air. Quite apparently to my subconscious the bit of my skull encaving the fragile area flew off me, crashed onto his and stuck there.
    On the spur of this subvoluntary cohesion to the telepathic center—I definitely penetrated (into) his mediumistic world where illusory experience which had so far escaped as scarcely whispered pictures took on a fair degreeof resemblance to three-dimensional concretion: the sculpture of hallucination succeeding to the visionary film.
    Insel straightened as a water level, his petrified eyes drilling the image of his coma