Leda Aldous Huxley 6

Leda Aldous Huxley 6

MORNING SCENE

 

LIGHT through the latticed blind

Spans the dim intermediate space

With parallels of luminous dust

To gild a nuptial couch, where Goya’s mind

Conceived those agonising hands, that hair

Scattered, and half a sunlit bosom bare,

And, imminently above them, a red face

Fixed in the imbecile earnestness of lust.

 

 

 

 

VERREY’S

 

HERE, every winter’s night at eight,

Epicurus lies in state,

Two candles at his head and two

Candles at his feet. A few

Choice spirits watch beneath the vault

Of his dim chapel, where default

Of music fills the pregnant air

With subtler requiem and prayer

Than ever an organ wrought with notes

Spouted from its tubal throats.

Black Ethiopia’s Holy Child,

The Cradled Bottle, breathes its mild

Meek spirit on the ravished nose,

The palate and the tongue of those

Who piously partake with me

Of this funereal agape.

 

 

 

 

FRASCATI’S

 

BUBBLE-BREASTED swells the dome

Of this my spiritual home,

From whose nave the chandelier,

Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.

We in the round balcony sit,

Lean o’er and look into the pit

Where feed the human bears beneath,

Champing with their gilded teeth.

What negroid holiday makes free

With such priapic revelry?

What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?

What gods like wooden stalagmites?

What steam of blood or kidney pie?

What blasts of Bantu melody?

Ragtime. . . . But when the wearied Band

Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.

And there we sit in blissful calm,

Quietly sweating palm to palm.

 

 

 

 

FATIGUE

 

THE mind has lost its Aristotelian elegance of shape: there is only a

darkness where bubbles and inconsequent balloons float up to burst their

luminous cheeks and vanish.

 

A woman with a basket on her head: a Chinese lantern quite askew: the

vague bright bulging of chemists’ window bottles; and then in my ears

the distant noise of a great river of people. And phrases, phrases—

 

It is only a question of saddle-bags,

 

Stane Street and Gondibert,

 

Foals in Iceland (or was it Foals in aspic?).

 

As that small reddish devil turns away with an insolent jut of his

hindquarters, I become aware that his curling pug’s tail is an electric

bell-push. But that does not disquiet me so much as the sight of all

these polished statues twinkling with high lights and all of them

grotesque and all of them colossal.

 

 

 

 

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

 

THE machine is ready to start. The symbolic beasts grow resty,

curveting where they stand at their places in the great blue circle of

the year. The Showman’s voice rings out. “Montez, mesdames et messieurs,

montez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram. You will take the Scorpion.

Yours, madame, is the Goat. As for you there, blackguard boy, you must

be content with the Fishes. I have allotted you the Virgin,

mademoiselle.” . . . “Polisson!” “Pardon, pardon. Evidemment, c’est le

Sagittaire qu’on demande. Ohé, les dards! The rest must take what comes.

The Twins shall counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away

we go, away.”

 

Ha, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, drink in the

intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells and rings. . . .

sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every rooted star; sound

of winds and seas and all the simmering millions of life. Moving,

singing . . . so with a roar and a rush round we go and round, for ever

whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken life and speed.

 

But I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our roundabout,

and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as

he ground, and grinding eternally. And when I perceived that he was the

author of all our speed and that the music was of his making, that

everything depended on his grinding wheel, I thought I would like to get

off. But we were going too fast.

 

 

 

 

BACK STREETS

 

BACK streets, gutters of stagnating darkness where men breathe

something that is not so much air as a kind of rarefied slime. . . . I

look back down the tunnelled darkness of a drain to where, at the mouth,

a broader, windier water-way glitters with the gay speed and motion of

sunlit life. But around all is dimly rotting; and the inhabitants are

those squamous, phosphorescent creatures that darkness and decay beget.

Little men, sheathed tightly in clothes of an exaggeratedly fashionable

cheapness, hurry along the pavements, jaunty and at the same time

furtive. There is a thin layer of slime over all of them. And then there

are the eyes of the women, with their hard glitter that is only of the

surface. They see acutely, but in a glassy, superficial way, taking in

the objects round them no more than my western windows retain the

imprint of the sunset that enriches them.

 

Back streets, exhalations of a difficulty puberty, I once lived on the

fringes of them.

 

 

 

 

LAST THINGS

 

THERE have been visions, dark in the minds of men, death and

corruption dancing across the secular abyss that separates eternity from

time to where sits the ineluctable judge, waiting, waiting through the

ages, and ponders all his predestinated decrees. There will be judgment,

and each, in an agony of shame, reluctant yet compelled, will turn his

own accuser. For

 

Tunc tua gesta noxia

Secreta quoque turpia

Videbunt mille millia

Virorum circumstantia.

 

There under the unwinking gaze of all the legions of just men made

perfect, the poor prisoner will uncover each dirty secret of his heart,

will act over again each shameful scene of his life. And those eyes of

saints and angels will shine impassively down upon his beastliness, and

to him, as he looks at their steady brilliance, they will seem a million

of little blazing loopholes slotted in the walls of hell.

 

Hildebert, this was your vision as you brooded over death and judgment,

hell and heaven, in your cloister, a thousand years ago. Do you not envy

us our peace of mind who know not four ultimates, but only one? For whom

the first of the Last Things is also the last—us, whom death

annihilates with all our shame and all our folly, leaving no trace

behind.

 

 

 

 

GOTHIC

 

SHARP spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling

bells. Reckless, breakneck, head over heels down an airy spiral of

stairs run the bells. “Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree.”

 

Up again and then once more to the bottom, two steps at a time. “As full

of apples as can be.”

 

Up again and down again: centuries of climbing have not worn the crystal

smoothness of the degrees.

 

Along the bellying clouds the little boys of London Town come running,

running as best they may, seeing that at every step they sink ankle-deep

through the woolly surface into the black heart of thunder beneath.

 

The apples on the trees are swaying in the wind, rocking to the clamour

of bells. The leaves are of bright green copper, and rattle together

with a scaly sound. At the roots of the tree sit four gargoyles playing

a little serious game with dice. The hunch-backed ape has won from the

manticore that crooked French crown with a hole in it which the

manticore got from the friar with the strawberry nose; he had it in turn

as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down there,

through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the great

church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas.