Dr. Caligari Loves

DIM as the reason for love is, the movie house is always dimmer. We must approach it with no resources, like love. It is like love too because there on the screen is the film and you must look at it. You must accept it because there is nothing else to do. It is possible to leave the theatre but few ever do, for it is they who sought out the film in the first place, and it is they who must now rely upon it. It, ‘of course, depends upon nothing. The theatre itself is small and simple with a red exit sign glowing on the right. The advertisements for the week are printed in hand by the management. The descent is steep and the communicants jog down awkwardly, their feet moving too fast, their hips bouncing. There are no tickets. One simply pays one’s fee. The theory of the camera and the reason for the movie house are simple and working together they may even bring joy. We may watch THE BEWITCHED INN and SOAP BUBBLES and TILLIE’S PUNCTURED ROMANCE but still the process is threatening, for we have become what we were not before. The camera is not a frivolous instrument. It is true that some of the newer models, which only take slides or stills, are of plastic and pastel, in Plum, Leaf Green, Nut, Egg White, but this only underlines the fundamental hysteria of our time. As we destroy more and more of nature, we absorb her colors and give them to machines....You kiss my mouth in the silent movie house. You are a beautiful man. In your youth this might have been painful to you, but it is of no importance now for you have mannerized it by a method of disdain and demand. We demand little, however, of this town that we have taken briefly as our own. It is high in the mountains and seems quite static. Toylike. There is a large lake twenty miles to the north, Swiss and lunatic with white sailboats tacking on the black water, but we have no desire to travel there. We walk everyplace, and do not go far.

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ROAN COLT PROPERTY OF ROCKBURN STUD HALF-BROTHER TO FOUR WINNERS INCLUDING STRAWBERRY DRIVE (35 WINS $556,401 CHAMPION HANDICAP MARE) OUT OF WINNING SISTER TO WINNER WOODRUFF HALFSISTER TO TWO WINNERS SECOND DAM WINNING HALF-SISTER TO F B EYE ETC THIRD DAM BLOODROOT

The horses have genealogy finer than our own. They did not spring from pit ponies bringing cold pasties to the miners in the barbarous cliffs of Wales. Nor from a North Dakota paint going out each snowy spring for the lambs. It shall never be· said of you, my love, as it was told of the darling boy jockey of Rome (who riding all the best in a single year won the Gran Premio di Milano, the Coppa d’Oro di Milano, and the Criterium Nazionale) that your ancestor and thus your name was placed in Purgatory by Dante. That boy was dainty as a small heron. He wore blue and black silks and was the proudest, lightest “fantino” of them all. But no one boy can be as proud as these horses here with their perfect lineage, their lines and legs pauseless as honey. In August. In this racing town. For three nights the yearlings are auctioned off. In the second year of their life they race. They are shod with aluminum which weighs almost nothing and they have small calm dogs with them at all times in the traveling vans and grooms living in their stalls. The grooms sing to them as they curry them down and they play at night on their harmonicas. They put pictures on the walls, photographs and crucifixes. But as sweet as they are to their horses, they are bitter among themselves. The only murder the town has had for years was in the summer when one groom stabbed another. When the most beautiful horses die–many years after the flats, after years of stud–they have their pictures in the newspaper and a small obituary. They die of vessels breaking in their legs. And old age.

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Conrad says that the problem is not how to be cured but how to live. What can I offer you but no cure? So few of us ever stop living for longing, and in the end beds are for dying on. We die from what we fear the most. Sooner or later we’ll have an inkling of what to expect …a first sly murmur of recall as the brake on the faithful Buick is depressed, as we strap on the free tank of sports shop air, as the sun eclipses and the wrist bends back. You shall not die snagged on my showy ribs or by the sea or soon enough. We all outlive the proper moment. Our timing is askew …. in the garden here the leaves lie black across the stone faces of the statues in the same way that your lashes close my eyes. You are from a fable, a miraculous shaggy-headed beast sleeping on my heart. The hotel is part of the fable too, all lie and consequence, with turnings and mirrors and hidden stairs. The sinks are marble, the rugs antique. But it is difficult to get ice at night or an egg in the morning. They have put oilcloth over all the tables for they are too poor to buy cheap things. The very existence of this estate is more than they can afford. The walls are painted in many shades of white, the brass has blackened, the leather cracked, but lights burn until dawn, there are fresh roses in the dining room each day. Above our bed there is a panel of buttons–for the maid, for the kitchen, for the stable. We push them all but no one answers. Why should they? The wires were cut years ago. The cook is in the laundry, wrapping her finger up. The driver is dead, the dairyman and salad girl, the butler and the boy. All gone. The sons of their daughters eat slices of pizza in a roadhouse on the lake. We lie quiet as trees in each other’s arms, for we do not really want to call them back. We do not want anyone, ever. We must learn to take our pleasures sadly like the Puritans.

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Anagrams are enjoyed here by the aged. Cryptograms, quotacrostics, word linx. Riddles are solved. Miniatures constructed. Checkers played. Chess parchesi ping-pong horseshoes cribbage darts shuffleboard monopoly charades canasta dominoes. They fill out crosswords with a pen, with lines delicate as the cracks of a plate, thin as the strokes on their eyeballs’ white, but they prefer to decode.

GBAHKHEHIK IA PHQPODT HKEBLJBFE 
HIK: IKB NMDFB OPBLB EOI OLIKQJ FDK  
RDSB D LHEB
 

War heroes. Spies. G-Men. Priests. They can read the spots of the sun, the hairs in a horse’s mane, the drift of their English Breakfast Tea. After puzzles, they like best to pun, to play croquet, and to hear of the death of friends in Florida. They are proud that they have remained here, in the truculent North, in the brown rooming-houses of one-way streets; that they did not allow themselves to be driven to the South and there deposited, like turtles in the sun. In Ft. Pierce. In Stuart. St. Petersburg. Naples. By canals. On land sucked out by machines from the swamp. They collect ghastly stories, delight in news of hurricanes, muggings in the elevators of condominiums, destruction of the crops by freeze. Trailers bum up and blow away, blue-haired widows run amock, fish bones lodge in throats, hog cholera spreads from Georgia, grapefruit seeds hallucinate….

 A retiree died of head injuries here yesterday when he walked into a block of frozen concentrate during a tour of an orange juice factory

There has just been word that J. B. Gin,
formerly of this area, was pulled overboard
by a battling tarpon 7 miles offshore in the
Gulf of Mexico and drowned

On the lawn, the old men poke at each other’s smiles. There is. no place to drown here certainly, unless one goes to the baths or one of the shallow lakes. Unless one goes out of ohe’s way to do it.

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Landscapes are not external. We carry them within us and they are as singular and constant as our blood. I am winter beach and you are arroyo, and the sun that beats through the mountains upon us in these days will not change that. We are all wanderers with a particular geography of eye which defines us and to which we must return. Coast jungle rock glacial floe meadow run. We have been what we will become. We walk through the woods with our lunch in our pockets. Soap has lodged beneath your ring. The trout hang dreaming under their ledge of stone and nothing will tempt them, not even the softest center of the freshest Sunbeam bread. If you were a Southerner, you would spill a sack of cottonseed to bait this field of lake, but you are not a Southerner. You are rootless as a palm and even this town, this place that exists for our pleasure does not belong to us. No one would want to be buried here. The last date on the gravestones is 1944 and that, perhaps, was some poor boy, without his consent, back from the flatland, returned from the war.

Beer Bread Kleenex Fireworks
Tums & PayDays

We are traveling down through the South on slender dull 301. The poor burn pine and punkwood in their shacks and the smoke spreads with the fog from the warming swamps, making the dawn dim as the dusk of a night ago. We stop for gasoline and ice-cold Royal Crown Cola and sleep beside a broken picnic table. The South is accessible to us. It is understandable. Being so purely physical in its lovelessness. With its macabre occlusion between innocence and the hate which is like a lustful desire. But I am dreaming for we have never been any place but here, and I awake at the absence of your touch.

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In another country in another time, a portion of the heaing waters was assigned to sinful women. This was the Buli.i came, a hot spring near Viterbo, and Hell was like the Bulicame with the waters from the fountains returning to the pool, dilated flakes of fire coming with a slow falling, “as of snow on alps without a wind.” As of love you might say. As of falling into love. And done with the soundlessness of death and the moving pictures. But there are no sinful women any more and the baths in this town are for the idle and the rich. The old men of the rooming houses do not take the waters because they cannot afford the $6. And they would become frightened and aroused by the heavy beating of their hearts, by the watching of the crushed eyestalk of their sex dipping yellow between their legs. They try to keep their hands away from themselves as much as possible. They live without clocks or mirrors and do not want to recall anything. Each day there is a minor stroke or hemorrhage. Each day they retreat further to the knot of womb and casket.

Highhearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go

Yet still it is the young who are most capable of age. We are all lovers of false passports. Jennings was 29 at the time of THE LAST LAUGH. It takes a young man to play Lear and it is the girl who loves the aging man best. We attend the films daily like a ritual–von Stroheim and Garbo wrapped in coils, the projectionist as priest–and at night, as animals wake to feed, we love.

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Ginny Jones and Johnny Fierce will now attempt a sunset. They did not succeed of course but it was better than the trumpet solo. They were only in the fourth grade. Now Ginny lives in Scranton and Johnny went to war, the one I can’t recall. One morning they ordered him onto a plane that he had never seen before. It was black, and gummy, as though it had been sprayed with tar. He gathered up his maps and tools and they flew and flew, out of the night into a sun as grey as the sea they followed, and the men, as was the custom, did not know where they were going or why except that they were to photograph some land. The clouds were shiny and clear as glass and there was no movement anywhere on the ground below. No river. No tree. Just a blight of land falling with the air and the dead black wingtip of the plane between the two. They returned. When three days later they ordered him into the plane again, he refused. He was an officer and had been in hack before but now they put him in the brig. It was Nagasaki that he did not see

My sweetheart and my love,
are you why, whom?

Why, you are Johnny Fierce I Of course. The baffled pretty navigator, fresh from his daddy’s rural school. Who explained ice-cream in three minutes, Melville’s vision in two, the Trinity in one. I am so slow. I would fall asleep while drowning. The years that I have lived have taken so long and now that I have at last arrived, you are going on still. It rains so strangely here and you are afraid, not of death but of age, of rousing yourself one spring to discover, like the animal, that the bullet you did not hear has struck you.

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All things pass and nothing changes. We love through mistaken recollection. Our memories are eager and indifferent and bring us to intimacy only with ourselves. We love through imperfect recall. For I remember best the snowball striking behind my eye. The blueness of it in the dusk. The ice and pain, and wetness spreading to my cheekbone as though the eye had bubbled and run like a baking pie. I do not remember you. The sounds in my head are those voices of the Protestants as they sang on summer Wednesdays in their wooden tent, the piano’s jangling lost to the tide rising and the cries of boys as they dove. Both the faithful and the boys able to know then what they wanted most-to live without oxygen, to be without fear, with their souls graceful and moving in the dark. But your lips are soundless as they move across my face and you will be faithful only to the extent of your comparisons. You are so sleek and handsome after loving. Your smile is like the breaking of a window. Shards and slivers. Clean and hard enough to break my wrists upon. Undone. With the veins a tangle of yarn. The blood hesitates for a moment after you are slashed. It hangs a neat wedge as though it were still folded neatly before the bone, tidy in its vessel sock. Nothing happens. It is as it was before. Like the duck or wolf or bear of cartoons still running after the road has dropped away, supported by their misunderstanding.

Winnie the Pooh has syphilis
But he can’t forget the prior bliss

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Remember that everything was alive here once. All those things now jerked and jellied and pressed between two slices of bread. Pork tails are 38¢ a pound. Rabbit, 59. Brains and throats as the market demands. We chew the gristle of a sick land. Nothing exists that cannot be eaten–slaughtered skinned diced and simmered. In a little wine. With a few mushrooms. Sounding smartly and desired–reading like the menu of a grade-school. Claspers of shark deep fried on frankfurt bun. Songbird and banana jello. Flank of mutt and fortune cookie. Gonads of grouse and jelly roll. Puree of doe and pony cake. All are rim-rocked in the end. The animals, once softly ringed like trees, are struck down on the road and turn in a day to batting–their structure reduced to resembling a scrap of paper in the pocket of a washed shirt. It is August but it is turning cold and you dry my tears with your thick hair. It is August but already the men on the estates are dynamiting the dead trees for winter wood and soon the deer will be coming down from the higher grazing areas and birds will congregate along the black-top roads for warmth and small bits of gravel. We walk from the hotel to the town and we pass a violet snake, its head flattened, moving with flies, and then, to the left, beyond the guards, past the Pinkerton men, is the race track. The sound of the crowd is violent and peculiar, rising with the fearful dumbness of a wave. But I hear still the church piano. The ocean air has ruined it and it is out of tune. I hear the stones ringing in the sea and the words of the hymns beating, without malice, against the town, against the oldest operable merry-go-round in the U.S. You do not remember me. It is the Protestants who recommend the Bible. It is they who understand the hopelessness and truancy of love.

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I promise to make no mention of witches that do not exist. Your eyes are enormous. Ash. Sharp pup soft. The color of stone sea grasses pond ice a season you have not yet survived. The natural inhibiting grey of weaponry of dusk of prairie storm. No. The world is a lie and all the words working in it. Your eyes are passage. They are beautiful. Once, in England, taxes could be paid with the tongues of wolves. Tongues could also buy pardon for an outlaw. And now with our silence, I bid for you. I buy glimpses of your gangster mind. With our silence we purchase the only love we have. The town is unhappy and uncertain, for it has its season when it’s supposed to be beautiful, and this makes it rebel, grow sulky, retreat into the rents of its weedy walks. They have painted all the fire-escapes a bright orange. They run down the sides of buildings. A trickle of Pumpkinade. There are 18 flavors in the druggist’s freezer and flower boxes outside the bars. But inside, down two, underground within the murky mountain shelf are the jockeys, the crippled, and the stout, drinking from green bottles tall as tenpins. Two girdled girls, awaiting school, march to the toilet, arm in arm. Ladies. Gents. (At least not Gulls and Buoys, Studs and Fillies. At least not epicene faces on the doors.) The black singer grips the washstand, her flanks moving in and out with fear. The crystals of blood lie there like snowflakes, and the toweling runs down to the floor. The girls jog back through the barroom’s pitch and slant to the sticky foam of melted ice. One has lost an earring. The other has a ring of moles that reach from jaw to jaw. How perfect it is here. For us.

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Love is what you’re left with no matter what good intentions you have when you begin. It rains and rains here, all night, in secret, and in the morning the trees in the garden are black on the windward side and butterflies are pinned wet against the rocks. I am burning up beside you, twisting like an ash, while you are cool, tight-limbed, the flesh beneath your eyes buff like a flower. Discreetly we do not speak of the future. Would one inquire after another’s missing finger, mad mother, coon-drowned blue tick hound??? It is a pleasant walk to the movie house, beneath the dripping trees, along the road to town. A white bread truck turns down the street
DRAKES CAKES
There is a child in the theatre. He was born in this mountain town and he lives here and since he was weaned he has gained about 50 pounds here and he is not in the least knowledgeable about anything. He sits chewing on his fist. He has a big head and wears high black sneakers. He is all alone. And he is whupping Fate and Ma and the God of the Methodists by being here each day of the summer, biting his hands, his poor large warm head rolling with the swoons of the ladies on the screen. He has seen them all. THE SPIRITS and THE EVANGELIST. BARBEROUSSE and THE ZONE OF DEATH. His favorite is THE MADNESS OF DR. TUBE and he does not need to be told what is taught by the silence of the movie house. His face is white and blank. He is the little animal that died upon the ark. So gently that no one noticed. It is said that the unicorns did not hear Noah calling because they were playing in the rain.

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Open your eyes to see the dark and you will see him standing there. His head beating like a clock like a wing like a heart against your lips dry with sleep and love. His hair is damp and thinning, although on one side of his feverish child skull, covering an area the size of a matchbook, it has grown thicker and is grey. He’s maybe dressed by an angry sister, the same girl he eats chili with at the church on Sunday nights. She’s trussed him like a roast. She’s twisted his belt around him twice, cinched it fiercely, run it back and knotted it over through the orderless loops to swing between his frail legs, the fake leather separating from the real cardboard. And you…grown old with powder on your groin and sandals shined like shoes…could never touch him….Not even in your dreams, not even with those deadened stumps, those amputated limbs of dreamers. Nightmares are not tactile.… But still it is the patch of dead hair that troubles you the most. The child moves much too slowly; he walks as though he were slowly waltzing. But his eyes are very active. They never tire of looking. And you can think only of those sick dolphins upon which algae grow. Soon they cannot move, are unable to breathe, and die from the tail upward, the eyes being the last to still. And we, smelling of scotch and smoke, loving so well and so helplessly, return to the room where his soul lurks like a bullet in the chamber, tumbled there like a mop in the closet.

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Villainous but he loves. He loves the boy. The child shudders and chews more intently upon his hands. He is watching THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and since he is young and sick and not sophisticated, he is frightened. The Dr. is old and certainly odd. The somnambulist has eyes like wells. The child has seen THE OUTLAW AND HIS WIFE and has died in the snow. He has seen THE THREE PASSIONS and been brutalized, and watched METROPOLIS and been changed forever. But now he is being loved and corrupted. His mother had warned him…. You are not allowed to bring cookies into the bathroom because God would not approve. You must not read comic books or fairy tales or see the moving pictures. You must not go to the county fair where the earless rabbit lives in a pen, the featherless goose, the ponies only five inches high, the rats big as tom cats scourge of the East; where the five-legged cow is milked, the chinless baby sings, the dancing donkey loves the hen. God has no mercy on the damned. It is the Devil who is master of malformed animals. You will not go to the county fair, for there is nothing more dangerous than memory or magic. You kiss my lips in the movie house. The child whines and plucks at the air. Outside, in the sun, he folds up a thin flap of gum into squares and places it between his teeth. He shuffles the cards, arranges them on a window ledge. It is Days In The Life Of Bobby Kennedy Bubble Gum. They are printed in color, a packet of five in a series of fifty. The victim is in all of us.

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Ecchhh you softly say and smile for he is a creepy bastard. A wreck in a spotted cape, listing past the shocked through cubistic rooms, his face deep and pale like a spoon of wobbly water. Mouth a black pursed socket deep enough to plant bulbs in. Leering like everyone’s sophomore professor, jawless as a lamprey, the ashes tumbling yellow down his tie, smell of marsh fog and river about his clothes, telling you in a midwest noon with a moon hanging still rimdim in the sky

Think of me at midnight and I…I will think of you you with all your life before you, unobsessed, with all you need to know in books and no reason to be kind.…But Caligari! The least necessary of our worst imaginings, a German with a nice sense of the dread. A wet hole in the center of his smile, he fusses with that lovely boy, pressing a spoon back and across his lobotomized lips. He packs in the curious with his promise of the awful…with his weird and tidy cabinet of the sleeping. The carnival seekers turn down a stair, are gone long moments and reappear, down one level, the distance of a yard, nowhere, in our sight and lobbed fast noplace. There is a piano by the screen but the woman who once played it in her retirement has since retired. She attends the track on foggy dawns to watch the horses exercise. You can see her at the rail, eating dry cereal from a small paper box that she has torn open with a broad pink nail. Caligari wakens the somnambulist. You want him to do the same for you please.

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Simply put, everything is alike. The pianist is THE WOMAN FROM NOWHERE and she has returned to the scene of her love to see her story re-enacted by another woman. It is all the same…The baths and the mountain and the bright green grass of the track, the strips of cloth fluttering from the croquet wickets, the horses trembling in the walking rings, their magnificent legs soaked with mud. The last night that we have always demanded with our loving has come, and we are left with scorn and longing, a bitten lip, a fine snapshot. The horses will gallop forever here, their manes snapping against the jockeys’ eyes. The lakes will freeze and the child will die, with the preacher by his bed, with the mother in the kitchen, holding the sister close, with the college girls on the other side of town taking rubbings off the tombs. Already the first frost has come and for days the maid has been sweeping away the bodies of flies which have dropped from behind the shades of the high windows and which bobble in mad, useless circles in her dustpan. The room will be closed when we leave for they cannot heat the upper floors of the hotel in winter. The mirrors will be turned to the walls…You are old you are old and have nowhere to go except away from here. I do not even watch you leave and your absence on the first day is easily understood….But oh come back! I was waiting all the while…in the dress my father bought me, white but simple for the dance.