 Blast, issue number one, edited by Wyndham Lewis. Editorial This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Number one, June 20th, 1914. Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis. Review of the Great English Vortex. Two shillings and sixpence, published quarterly. Ten shillings and sixpence, yearly subscription. London, John Lane, The Bodley Head. New York, John Lane Company. Toronto, Bell and Coburn. Copies may also be obtained from Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Rebel Art Centre, 38 Great Ormond Street, Queen Square, WC. Hours, 11am to 1pm. Candet, Five Holland Place Chambers, Church Street, Kensington. Long live the Vortex! Long live the Great Art Vortex, sprung up in the centre of this town. We stand for the reality of the present, not for the sentimental future or the sacrippant past. We want to leave nature and men alone. We do not want to make people wear futurist patches or fuss men to take to pink and sky blue trousers. We are not their wives or tailors. The only way humanity can help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously. We need the unconsciousness of humanity, their stupidity, animalism and dreams. We believe in no perfectability, except our own. Intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter and seer, not in the object or content. We do not want to change the appearance of the world because we are not naturalists, impressionists or futurists, the latest form of impressionism, and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art. We only want the world to live and to feel its crude energy flowing through us. It may be said that great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France, any really fine artist has a strong traditional vein. Blast sets out to be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach the public in no other way. Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, to the individual. The moment a man feels or realises himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless fundamental artist that exists in everybody. The man in the street and the gentlemen are equally ignored. Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people as it is usually supposed to. It means the art of the individuals. Education, art education and general education tends to destroy the creative instinct. Therefore, it is in times when education has been non-existent that art chiefly flourished, but it is nothing to do with the people. It is a mere accident that this is the most favourable time for the individual to appear, to make the rich of the community shed their education skin to destroy politeness, standardisation and academic, that is civilised vision, is the task we have set ourselves. We want to make in England not a popular art, not a revival of lost folk art, or a romantic fostering of such unactual conditions, but to make individuals wherever found. We will convert the king if possible. A vorticist king, why not? Do you think Lord George has the vortex in him? May we hope for art from Lady Mond? We are against the glorification of the people as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear, a top hat can well hold the sick stein, a cheap cap could hide the image of Catherine. Automobilism, marinettism, bores us. We don't want to go about making a hullabaloo about motorcars, any more than about knives and forks, elephants or gas pipes. Elephants are very big, motorcars go quickly. Wild gush 20 years ago about the beauty of machinery. Gissing in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was a futurist in this sense. The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the Eastseats of 1890 and the realist of 1870. The poor are detestable animals. They are only picturesque and amusing for the sentimentalist or the romantic. The rich are boars without a single exception en tant que riche. We want those simple and great people found everywhere. Blast presents an art of individuals. End of editorial. Part one of Blast issue number one, edited by Wyndham Lewis. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Readers note, this recording contains some passages recorded at high volume. In the printed text, capitalization and font size are used for emphasis. In this audio recording, this is represented by variable levels of volume. If you are using headphones, please adjust the volume so that what you are hearing now is quiet but still audible. End of readers note. Manifesto one. Blast first from politeness. England curse its climate for its sins and infections. Dismal symbol set round our bodies of effeminate lout within Victorian vampire. The London cloud sucks the town's heart. A 1,000 mile long, two kilometer deep body of water even is pushed against us from the Floridas to make us mild. Efficious mountains keep back drastic winds. So much vast machinery to produce the cure at Elton, Britannic East Seat, Wild Nature Crank, Domesticated Policeman, London Coliseum, Socialist Playwright, Daily's Musical Comedy, Gayety Chorus Girl, Tonks, Curse, the flabby sky that can manufacture no snow but can only drop the sea on us in a drizzle like a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges, Curse, the lazy air that cannot stiffen the back of the serpentine or put aquatic steel halfway down the Manchester Canal. But 10 years ago we saw distinctly both snow and ice here, make some vulgally inventive but useful person arise and restore to us the necessary blizzards. Let us once more wear the ermine of the north. We believe in the existence of this useful little chemist in our midst, too. Oh, blast France! Pig plagiarism, belly slippers, poodle temper, sad music, sentimental Gallic gush, sensationalism, fussiness, Parisian parochialism, complacent young man, so much respect for papa and his son. Oh, papa is wonderful, but all papa's are. Blast, the peritifes, perno, amé picon, bad change, the eavely seductive, hoary, salon-pitcher cocots, slouching blue porters can carry a pan-technican, stupidly rapacious people at every step, economy maniacs, we on cub for being a bad pun. Paris, claptrap heaven of amity of German professor, ubiquitous lines of silly little trees, art de triomphe, imperturbable endless prettiness, large empty cliques higher up, bad air for the individual. Blast, mecca of the American, because this is not the other side of Suez Canal, instead of an afternoon's ride from London. Three, curse with expletive of whirlwind, the Britannic Eastheat, cream of the snobbish earth, rose of Sharon, of God-prig of simian vanity, sneak and swat of the schoolroom, imbeb or burb when in bell-size, pedants, practical joker, dandy curate, blast or products of phlegmatic, cold life of Luca on. Curse, snobbery, disease of femininity, fear of ridicule, arch-vice of inactive, sleepy, play stylism, sins and plagues of this lymphatic finished, we admit in every sense finished, vegetable humanity. Four, blast the specialist, professional, good workman, groveman, one organ man, blast the amateur, seolast, art pimp, journalist, self-man, no organ man. Five, blast humour, quack English drug for stupidity and sleepiness, arch-enemy of real, conventionalizing like gunshot, freezing supple, real, in ferocious chemistry of laughter. Blast sport, humour's first cousin and accomplice, impossibility for Englishman to be grave and keep his end up psychologically, impossible for him to use humour as well and be persistently grave. Alas, necessity of a big doll's show in front of mouth, visitation of heaven on English miss, gums, canines of fixed grin, death's head symbol of anti-life. Curse, those who will hang over this manifesto with silly canines exposed. Blast, years 1837 to 1900, curse abysmal, inexcusable, middle-class, also aristocracy and proletariat. Blast, pasty shadow cast by gigantic berm, imagined as introduction of bourgeois Victorian vistas. Ring the neck of all sick inventions born in that progressive white wake. Blast, their weeping whiskers, hursuits, rhetoric of eunuch and stylist, sentimental hygienics, rusoisms, wild nature cranks, fraternising with monkeys, diabolics, raptures and roses of the erotic bookshelves culminating in purgatory aputny, chaos of enoch ardents, laughing jennies, ladies with pains, good for nothing guineviers, snobbish Barovian, running after gypsy kings and espadas, bowing the knee to wild mother nature, her feminine contours, unimaginative insult to man. Damn, all those today who have taken on that rotten menagerie and still crack their whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus as though London were a provincial town. We whisper in your ear a great secret, London is not a provincial town. We will allow wonder zoos, but we do not want the gloomy Victorian Circus in Piccadilly Circus. It is Piccadilly Circus, not meant for menageries, trundling out of sixties, Dickensian clowns, Corelli lady riders, troops of performing gypsies who complain besides that one six a night does not pay fair back to clap them. Blast, the post office, Frank Brangwen, Robertson Nickel, Reverend Pennyfeather Bells, Galloway Kyle, cluster of grapes, Bishop of London and all his posterity, Gullsworthy, Dean Ing, Crotche, Matthews, Reverend Mayor, Seymour Hicks, Lionel Cust, CB Frye, Berkson, Abdul Bahal, Hortrey, Edward Elger, Sardly, Philson Young, Marie Carelli, Geddes, Cud liver oil, St. Lo Straitje, Lyceum Club, Brabindranath Tagore, Lord Glen Connor of Glen, Feiniger, Norman Angel, Adman, Mr. and Mrs. Deema, Beacham, Pills, Opera, Thomas, Ella, A.C. Benson, Sydney Webb, British Academy, Mrs. Chapel, Countess of Warwick, George Edwards, Willie Ferraro, Captain Cook, R.J. Campbell, Clan Thessiger, Martin Harvey, William Archer, George Grosssmith, R.H. Benson, Annie Besant, Chenille, Clan Mainle, Father Vaughn, Joseph Holbrook, Clan Straitje, Won, Bless England, Bless England, for its ships, which switch back on blue, green and red seas, all around the pink earth ball. Big bets on each. Bless all seafarers. They exchange not one land for another, but one element for another. The moor against the less abstract. Bless the vast planetary abstraction of the ocean. Bless the Arabs of the Atlantic. This island must be contrasted with the bleak waves. Bless all ports. Ports, restless machines of, scooped out basins, heavy insect dredgers, monotonous cranes, stations, lighthouses, blazing through the frosty starlight, cutting the storm like a cake, speaks of infant boats, side by side, heavy chaos of wharves, steep walls of factories, womanly town. Bless these machines that work the little boats across the clean liquid space in beelines. Bless the great ports. Hull, Liverpool, London, Newcastle-on-Tine, Bristol, Glasgow. Bless England, industrial island machine, pyramidal workshop, its apex at Shetland, discharging itself on the sea. Bless cold, magnanimous, delicate, gauche, fanciful, stupid Englishman. Two, bless the hairdresser. He attacks mother nature for a small fee. Hourly, he plows heads for six months, scours chins and lips for threepence. He makes systematic mercenary war on this wildness. He trims aimless and retrograde growth into clean arched shapes and angular plots. Bless this Hessian or Silesian expert correcting the grotesque and acronyms of our physique. Three, bless English humour. It is the great barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild mountain railway from idea to idea with the ancient fare of life. Bless Swift for his solemn bleak wisdom of laughter. Shakespeare for his bitter northern rhetoric of humour. Bless all English eyes that grow crow's feet with their fancy and energy. Bless this hysterical wall built around the ego. Bless the solitude of laughter. Bless the separating, young, gregarious British grin. Four, bless France for its bushels of vitality to the square inch home of manners. The best, the worst and interesting mixtures. Masterly pornography, great enemy of progress. Combativeness, great human skeptics. Depths of elegance, female qualities, females. Ballads of its prehistoric Apache. Superb hardness and hard yes of its voyo type, rebellious adolescent. Modesty and humanity of many there. Great flood of life pouring out of wound of 1797. Also bitter a stream from 1870. Staying power like a cat. Bless, Bridget, Burwolf, Bearline, Cranmer Bing, Frida Graham, The Pope, Maria de Tomasso, Captain Kemp, Munro, Gabby, Jenkins, R.B. Cunningham Graham, Nazi's brother, Barker, John and Granville, Mrs. Will Finimore, Madam Strindberg, Carson, Salvation Army, Lord Howard de Walden, Captain Craig, Charlotte Corde, Cromwell, Mrs. Duval, Mary Robertson, Lily Lenton, Frank Rutter, Castor Oil, James Joyce, Leveridge, Lydia Yavosca, Brebanderry Carlisle, Jenny, Monsieur Lacombs de Gaboulis, Smithers, Dick Burge, 33 Church Street, Sevier, Goethe Miller, Norman Wallace, Miss Fowler, Sir Joseph Lyons, Martin Wolfe, Watt, Mrs. Hepburn, Alfrey, Tommy, Captain Kendall, Younger Hearn, Wilfred Walter, Kate Lechmere, Henry Neubolt, Lady Aberconway, Frank Harris, Hamel, Gilbert Canan, Sir James Matthew Barry, Mrs. Belock Lownes, W.L. George, Rainer, George Roby, George Mozart, Harry Weldon, Shalyapin, George Hurst, Graham White, Hux, Salmott, Shirley Kellogg, Bansman Rice, Petty Officer Curran, Applegarth, Conody, Colin Bell, Louis Hind, LaFrance, Hubert, Commercial Process Company. End of part one. Part two of Blast, issue number one, edited by Wyndham Lewis. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Manifesto, two. One, one, beyond action and reaction, we would establish ourselves. Two, we start from opposite statements of a chosen world, set up a violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes. Three, we discharge ourselves on both sides. Four, we fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the same cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours. Five, mercenaries were always the best troops. Six, we are primitive mercenaries in the modern world. Seven, our cause is no man's. Eight, we set humour at humour's throat, stir up civil war among peaceful apes. Nine, we only want humour if it has thoughts like tragedy. Ten, we only want tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like hands on its belly and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb. Two, one, we hear from America and the continent all sorts of disagreeable things about England, the unmusical, anti-artistic and philosophic country. Two, we quite agree. Three, luxury, sport, the famous English humour, the thrilling ascendancy and iday fix of class, producing the most intense snobbery in the world, heavy stagnant pools of Saxon blood, incapable of anything but the song of a frog in home counties. These phenomena give England a peculiar distinction in the wrong sense among the nations. Four, this is why England produces such good artists from time to time. Five, this is also the reason why a movement towards art and imagination could burst up here from this lump of compressed life with more force than anywhere else. Six, to believe that it is necessary for or conducive to art to improve life for instance, make architecture, dress, ornament, in better taste, is absurd. Seven, the art instinct is permanently primitive. Eight, in a chaos of imperfection, discord, et cetera, it finds the same stimulus as in nature. Nine, the artist of the modern movement is a savage, in no sense an advanced, perfected, democratic, futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti's limited imagination. This enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as nature did more technically primitive man. Ten, as the steps and the rigors of the Russian winter when the peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut produces that extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with the Slav. So England is just now the most favorable country for the appearance of a great art. Three, one, we have made it quite clear that there is nothing chauvinistic or picturesquely patriotic about our contentions. Two, but there is violent boredom with that feeble Europeanism, a basement of the miserable intellectual before anything coming from Paris, cosmopolitan sentimentality which prevails in so many quarters. Three, just as we believe that an art must be organic with its time, so we insist that what is actual and vital for the South is ineffectual and unactual in the North. Four, fairies have disappeared from Ireland despite foolish attempts to revive them and the bullring languishes in Spain. Five, but mysticism on the one hand, gladiatorial instincts, blood and asceticism on the other will be always actual and the springs of creation for these two peoples. Six, the English character is based on the sea. Seven, the particular qualities and characteristics that the sea always engenders in men are those that are among the many diagnostics of our race, the most fundamentally English. Eight, that unexpected universality as well found in the completest English artists is due to this. Four, one, we assert that the art for these climates then must be a northern flower. Two, and we have implied what we believe should be the specific nature of the art destined to grow up in this country and the models of whose flu decorate the pages of this magazine. Three, it is not a question of the characterless material climate around us but that's so the complication of the jungle, dramatic, tropic growth, the vastness of American trees would not be for us. Four, but our industries and the will that determined face to face with its needs, the direction of the modern world has reared up steel trees where the green ones were lacking has exploded in useful growth and found wilder intricacies than those of nature. Five, one, we bring clearly forward the following points before further defining the character of this necessary native art. Two, at the freest and most vigorous period of England's history, her literature, then chief art was in many ways identical with that of France. Three, Chaucer was very much cousin of Vion as an artist. Four, Shakespeare and Montaigne formed one literature. Five, but Shakespeare reflected in his imagination a mysticism, madness and delicacy peculiar to the North and brought equal quantities of comic and tragic together. Six, humour is a phenomenon caused by sudden pouring of culture into Barbary. Seven, it is intelligence electrified by flood of naivety. Eight, it is chaos invading concept and bursting it like nitrogen. Nine, it is the individual masquerading as humanity like a child in clothes too big for him. Ten, tragic humour is the birthright of the North. Eleven, any great Northern art will partake of this insidious and volcanic chaos. Twelve, no great English art need be ashamed to share some glory with France. Tomorrow it's maybe with Germany where the Elizabethans did before it. Thirteen, but it will never be French any more than Shakespeare was, the most Catholic and subtle Englishman. Six, one, the modern world is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius, its appearance and its spirit. Two, machinery, trains, steamships, all that distinguishes externally our time came far more from here than anywhere else. Three, in dress, manners, mechanical inventions, life that is, England has influenced Europe in the same way that France has in art. Four, but busy with this life effort, she has been the last to become conscious of the art that is an organism of this new order and will of man. Five, machinery is the greatest earth medium. Incidentally, it sweeps away the doctrines of a narrow and pedantic realism at one stroke. Six, by mechanical inventiveness too, just as Englishmen have spread themselves all over the earth, they have brought all the hemispheres about them in their original island. Seven, it cannot be said that the complication of the jungle, dramatic tropic growths, the vastness of American trees is not for us. Eight, for in the forms of machinery, factories, new and vast buildings, bridges and works, we have all that naturally around us. Seven, one, once this consciousness towards the new possibilities of expression in present life has come, however, it will be more the legitimate property of Englishmen than of any other people in Europe. Two, it should also, as it is by origin theirs, inspire them more forcibly and directly. Three, they are the inventors of this bareness and hardness and should be the great enemies of romance. Four, the romance peoples will always be at bottom its defenders. Five, the Latins are its present, for instance, in their discovery of sport, their futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, et cetera, the most romantic and sentimental moderns to be found. Six, it is only the second-rate people in France or Italy who are thorough revolutionaries. Seven, in England on the other hand, there is no vulgarity in revolts. Eight, for rather, there is no revolt, it is the normal state. Nine, so often rebels of the North and the South are diametrically opposed species. Ten, the nearest thing in England to a great traditional French artist is a great revolutionary English one, signatures for manifesto. R. Aldington, Arbuthnot, L. Atkinson, Gaudier Brechke, J. Dismore, C. Hamilton, E. Pound, W. Roberts, H. Sanders, E. Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis. End of Part Two. Part Three of Blast Issue Number One, edited by Wyndham Lewis. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Poems by Ezra Pound. Salutation the Third Let us deride the smugness of the times. G'for, so much the gagged reviewers. It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals. These were they who objected to newness. Here are their tombstones. They supported the gag in the ring. A little black box contains them. So shall you be also. You slut-bellied obstructionist. You sworn foe to free speech and good letters. You fungus. You continuous gangrene. Come, let us on with the new deal. Let us be done with Jews and jobbery. Let us spit upon those who fawn on the Jews for their money. Let us out to the pastures. Perhaps I will die at thirty. Perhaps you will have the pleasure of defiling my paupers grave. I wish you joy. I proffer you all my assistance. It has been your habit for long to do away with true poets. You either drive them mad or else you blink at their suicides. Or else you can don their drugs and talk of insanity and genius. But I will not go mad to please you. I will not flatter you with an early death. Oh no, I will stick it out. I will feel your hate wriggling about my feet. And I will laugh at you and mock you. And I will offer you consolations in irony. Oh fools, detestors of beauty. I have seen many who go about with supplications. Afraid to say how they hate you. Here is the taste of my boots. Caress it. Lick off the blacking. Monumentum, aere, etc. You say that I take a good deal upon myself. That I strut in the robes of assumption. In a few years no one will remember the buffalo. No one will remember the trivial parts of me. The comic detail will not be present. As for you, you will lie in the earth. And it is doubtful if even your manure will be rich enough to keep grass over your grave. Come, my cantilations. Come, my cantilations. Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done with them. Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind. Let me be free of pavements. Let me be free of the printers. Let come, beautiful people, wearing raw silk of good colour. Let come, the graceful speakers. Let come, the ready of wit. Let come, the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting. We speak of burnished lakes, and of dry air, as clear as metal. Before sleep. One, the lateral vibrations caress me. They leap and caress me. They work pathetically in my favour. They seek my financial good. She of the spear stands present. The gods of the underworld attend me. O annuis, to these are they of thy company. With a pathetic solicitude they attend me, undulent. Their realm is the lateral courses. Two, light, I am up to follow thee, palace, up and out of their caresses. You were gone up as rocket, bending your passages from right to left, and from left to right, in the flat projection of a spiral. The gods of drugged sleep attend me, wishing me well. I am up to follow thee, palace. His vision of a certain lady, post-mortem. A brown fat babe, sitting in the lotus. And you were glad and laughing, with a laughter not of this world. It is good to splash in the water, and laughter is the end of all things. Epitaphs. Fuyi. Fuyi loved the green hills and the white clouds. Alas, he died of drink. Lipo. And Lipo also died drunk. He tried to embrace a moon in the Yellow River. Footnote. Fuyi was born in 554 AD, and died in 639. This is his epitaph, very much as he wrote it. Fratres minores. With minds still hovering above their testicles. Certain poets here and in France, still sigh over established a natural fact long since fully discussed by Ovid. They howl, they complain in delicate and exhausted meters that the twitching of three abdominal nerves is incapable of producing a lasting nirvana. Women before a shop. The gugaws of false amber and false turquoise attract them. Like to nature, these are glutinous yellows. La. Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth. Crushed strawberries. Come, let us feast our eyes. The new cake of soap. Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun, like the cheek of a Chesterton. Meditatio. When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs, I am compelled to admit that man is the superior animal. When I consider the curious habits of man, I confess my friend, I am puzzled. Pastoral. The greenest growth of Maytime, A.C.S. The young lady opposite has such beautiful hands, that I sit enchanted while she combs her hair in decollete. I have no shame whatever in watching the performance. The bareness of her delicate hands and fingers does not in the least embarrass me. But God forbid that I should gain further acquaintance, for her laughter frightens even the street-hawker, and the alley-cat dies of a migraine. End of Part 3. Part 4 of Blast, Issue Number 1, edited by Wyndham Lewis. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Enemy of the Stars. A play by Wyndham Lewis. Synopsis in program. Advertisement. The scene. Some bleak circus, uncovered, carefully chosen, vivid night. It is packed with posterity, silent and expectant. Posterity is silent, like the dead and more pathetic. Characters. Two heathen clowns. Gravebooth animals. Cynical athletes. Dress. Enormous youngsters bursting everywhere through heavy tight clothes, laboured in by dull explosive muscles, full of fiery dust and sinewy energetic air, not sap. Black cloth cut somewhere, nowadays, on the upper Baltic. Very well acted by you and me. Enemy of the Stars. One is in immense collapse of chronic philosophy. Yet he bulges all over. Complex fruit with simple fire of life. Great mask. Fenoustic and veridic. Type of feminine beauty called Manish. First he is alone. A human bull rushes into the circus. This super is no more important than lounging star overhead. He is not even a star. He rushes off into the earth. Characters and properties both emerge from gangway into ground at one side. Then again the protagonist remains neglected, as though his two actors had forgotten him, carousing in their professional cavern. Second character. A pawling caman. Black bourgeois aspirations. Undermining blatant virtuosity of self. His criminal instinct of intemperate, bilious heart, put at service of unknown humanity, our king, to express its violent, royal aversion to protagonist. Statue mirage of liberty in the great desert. Mask of discontent, anxious to explode, restrained by qualms of vanity and professional coyness. Eyes grown venturesome in native temperatures of pole, indulgent and familiar, blessing with white knights. Type of characters taken from broad faces, where Europe grows arctic, intense, human and universal. Yet you and me, why not from the English metropolis? Listen, it is our honeymoon. We go abroad for first scene of our drama. Such a strange thing as our coming together requires a strange place for initial stages of our intimate ceremonious acquaintance. There are two scenes. Stage arrangements. Red of stained copper predominant color. Overturned cases and other impedimenta have been covered throughout arena with old sail canvas. Huts of second scene is suggested by characters taking up their position at opening of shaft, leading down into mimes quarters. A gust such as is met in the corridors of the tube, makes their clothes shiver or flap and blares up their voices. Masks fitted with trumpets of antique theater, with effect of two children blowing at each other with tin trumpets. Audience looks down into scene, as though it were a hut rolled half on its back, door upwards, characters giddily mounting in its opening. The play. Argole. Investments of red universe. Each force attempts to shake him. Central as stone, poised magnets of subtle vast selfish things. He lies like human strata of infernal biologists. Walks like wary shifting of bodies in distant equipoise. Sits like a god built by an architectural stream fecunded by mad blasts of sunlight. The first stars appear and Argole comes out of the hut. This is his cue. The stars are his cast. He's rather late and snips into its place a test button. A noise falls on the cream of posterity assembled in silent banks. One hears the nax song of the thirtieth centuries. They strain to see him, a gladiator who has come to fight a ghost. Humanity, the great sport of future mankind. He is the prime athlete exponent of this sport in its palmy days. Posterity slowly sinks into the hypnotic trance of art, and the arena is transformed into the necessary scene. The red walls of the universe now shut them in with this condemned protagonist. They breathe in close atmosphere of terror and necessity till the execution is over. The red walls recede, the universe satisfied. The box office receipts have been enormous. The action opens. The yard. The earth has burst, a granite flower, and disclosed the scene. A wheelwright's yard. Full of dry white volcanic light. Full of emblems of one trade. Stacks of pine, iron, wheels stranded. Rough Eden of one soul, to whom another man, and not Eve, would be mated. A canal at one side, the night pouring into it, like blood from a butcher's pail. Rouge mask in aluminium river. Sunset grimace through the night. A leaden gob, slipped at zenith, first drop of violent night, spreads cataclysmically in harsh water of evening. Caustic wreckage stain. Three trees above canal, sentimental, black and conventional in number. Drive leaf flocks with jeering cry. Or they slightly bend their joints. Impassable acrobats, step rapidly forward, faintly incline their heads. Across the mud, in pod of the canal, their shadows are gorky toy crocodiles, soared up and down by infant giants. Gullywog of Arabian symmetry, several tons. Argel drags them in blank, nervous hatred. The super. Argel crosses yard to the banks of the canal, sits down. Argel, I am here. His voice raucous and disfigured with a guitar of lies in the fetid, bankrupt atmosphere of life swamp. Clear and splendid among truths balsamic hills, shepherding his agile thoughts. Argel! It was like a child's voice hunting its mother. A note of primitive distress edged the thick bellow. The figure rushed without running. Argel healed over to the left. A boot battered his right hand ribs. These were the least damaged. It was their turn. Upper lip shot down half covering chin, his body reached methodically. At each blow in muscular spasm he made the pain pass out. Rolled and jumped, crouched and flung his grovelling, enceladus weight against it, like swimmer with wave. The boot and heavy shadow above it went. The self-centred and elemental shadow, with whistling noise peculiar to it, passed softly and sickly into a doorway's brown light. The second attack, pain left by first shadow, lashing him, was worse. He lost consciousness. The night. His eyes woke first, shaken by rough moonbeams. A white, crude volume of brutal light blazed over him. Immense bleak electric advertisement of God. It's crushed with wild emptiness of street. The ice-field of the sky swept and crashed silently, blowing wild organism into the hard, splendid clouds. Some will cast its glare as well over him. The canal ran in one direction, his blood weakly in the opposite. The star shone madly in the archaic blank wilderness of the universe, machines of prey. Mastodons placid in electric atmosphere, white rivers of power. They stood in eternal black sunlight. Tigers are beautiful, imperfect brutes. Throats iron eternities, drinking heavy radiance. Limbs towers of blatant light. The stars poised, immensely distant, with their metal sides. Pantheistic machines. The father, the more violent and vivid, nature. Weakness crushed out of creation. Hard weakness, a flea-size, pinched to death in a second. Could it get so far? He rose before this cliff of cadaverous beaming force, imprisoned in a messed socket of existence. Will energy survive? Will violence reach earth like violent civilisation, smashing or hardening all? In his mind a chip of distant hardness, tugged at dullly like a tooth, made him ache from top to toe. But the violences of all things had left him so far intact. Hamp. One. Hamp comes out of hut, coughing like a goat, rolling a cigarette. He goes to where Argel is lying. He stirs him with his foot, roughly. Argel strains and stretches elegantly, face over shoulder, like a woman. Come, you fool, and have supper. Hamp walks back to hut, leaving him. Argel lies, hands clasped around his knees. This new kick has put him into a childish lethargy. He gets to his feet soon, and walks to hut. He puts his hand on Hamp's shoulder, who has been watching him, and kisses him on the cheek. Hamp shakes him off with fury, and passes inside hut. Bastard violence of his half-disciple, metisse of an Apache of the icy steppe, sleek citizen, and his own dumbfounding soul. Fungi of sullen violet thoughts. Investing primitive vegetation. Hot words drummed on his ear every evening. Abuse, question. Groping hands strummed, toppling by zantine organ of his mind. Producing monotonous black fugue. Harsh Bayadaire shepherdess of Pamir, with her Chinese beauty. Living on from month to month in utmost tent with wastrel. Lean as mandrake root, red and precocious. With heavy black odour of vast manchurian garden. Deserts and the disreputable muddy gold. Squandered by the unknown sun of the Amur. His mind unlocked free to this violent hand. It was his mind's one cold flirtation. Then cold love. Excelling in beauty. Marked out for Hindu fate of sovereign prostitution. But clear of the world, with furious vow not to return. The deep female strain succumbed to this ragged spirit of crude manhood. Masculine with blunt willfulness and hideous stupidity of the feckoned horde of men. Fallic wand-like cataract incessantly poured into God. This pip of icy spray struck him on the mouth. He tasted it with new pleasure before spitting it out. Acrid. To be spat back among men. The young men foresaw the event. They ate their supper at the door of the hut. An hour passed in wandering, spacious silence. Was it bad tonight? A fierce and railing question often repeated. Argel lay silent. His hands a thick shell fitting back of head. His face grey, vegetable cave. Can't check kill him in the name of God. A man has his hands little else. Moten speck. The universe illimitable. Hamp jibed. It is true he is a speck. But all men are. To you he is immense. They sat, two grubby shadows. Unvaccinated as yet by the moon's lymph. Sickened by the immense vague infections of night. That is absurd. I've explained to you. Here I get routine. The will of the universe manifested with directness and persistence. Figures of persecution are accidents or adventures for some. Prick the thin near hearts like a pea and the bubble puffs out. That would not be of the faintest use in my case. Two small black flames wavering as their tongs moved. Drumming out thought with low earth drafts and hard sudden winds. Dropped like slapping birds from climaxes in the clouds. No morris lens would have dragged them from the key of vastness. They must be severe midgets. Brain specks of the vertiginous seismic vertebrae. Slowly living lines of landscape. Self, sacred act of violence is like murder on my face and hands. The stain won't come out. It is the one piece of property all communities have agreed it is illegal to possess. The sweetest tempered person once he discovers you are that sort of criminal changes any opinion of you and is on his guard. When mankind cannot overcome a personality it has an immemorial way out of the difficulty. It becomes it. It imitates and assimilates that ego until it is no longer one. This is success. Between personality and mankind it is always a question of dog and cat. They are diametrically opposed species. Self is the ancient race. The rest are the new one. Self is the race that lost. But mankind still suspects egotistic plots and hunts pretenders. My uncle is very little of a relation. It would be foolish to kill him. He is an échantillon. Acid advertisement slipped in letterbox. Spaces, storerooms dense with frivolous originals. I'm used to him as well. Argel's voice had no modulations of argument. Weak now it handled words numbly like tired compositor. His body was quite strong again and vivacious. Words acted on it as rain on a plant. It's got a stormy neat brilliance in this soft shower. One flame balanced giddily erect while other larger ones swerved and sang with speech coldly before it. They lay in a pool of bleak brown shadow, disturbed once by a rat's plunging head. It seemed to rattle along, yet slide on oiled plains. Argel shifted his legs mechanically. It was a hutch with low loft where they slept. Beyond the canal, brute lands, shuttered with stony clouds, lay in heavy angles of sand. They were squirted in by twenty ragged streams, legions of quails hopped parasitically in the miniature cliffs. Argel's uncle was a wheelwright on the edge of town. Two hundred miles to north, the arctic circle swept. Sinister tramps, its wind came wandering down the high road, fatigued and chill, doors shut against them. First of all, lily pollen of an ideal, unread badge of your predatory category. Scrape this off and you lose your appetite, obviously, but I don't want in any case to eat Smith because he is tough and distasteful to me. I am too vain to do harm, too superb ever to lift a finger when harmed. A man eats his mutton chop, forgetting it is his neighbour. Drinks every evening blood of the Christs and gossips of glory. Existence, loud feeble sunset, blaring like lumpish savage clown, alive with rigid tinsel before a misty door. Announcing events, tricks and a thousand follies to penniless herds, their eyes red with stupidity. To leave violently slow, monotonous life is to take header into the boiling starry cold, for with me some guilty fire of friction unspent in solitairiness will reach the stars. Hell of those heavens uncovered, whirling pit every evening, you cling to any object, dig your nails in earth, not to drop into it. The night plunged gleaming nervous arms down into the wood to wrenches up by the roots, restless and rhythmical beyond the staring red-rimmed doorway, giddy and expanding in drunken walls its heavy drastic light shifted. Argel could see only ponderous arabesques of red cloud whose lines did not stop at door's frame pressed on into shadows within the hut in tyrannous continuity as a cloud drove eastward out of this frame its weight passed with spiritual menace into the hut, a thunderous atmosphere thickened above their heads. Argel, paler, tossed clumsily and swiftly from side to side as though asleep. He got nearer the door, the clouds had room to waste themselves. The land continued in dull form, one percent animal, these immense bird amoebas. Nerves made the earth pulse up against his side and reverberate. He dragged hot palms along the ground caressing its explosive harshness. All merely exterior attack. His face calmed seismograph of eruptions in heaven. Head of black, eagerly carved, Herculean venus of iron tribe, hyper-barbarus and acetic, lofty tents sonorous with October rains swarming from vast bright dull-like Asiatic lakes. Faces following stars in blue rivers till sea-struck, thundering engine of red water. Pink-idle brotherhood of little stars, passed over by rough cloud of sea. Cataclysm of premature decadence. Extermination of the resounding somber summer tents in a decade. Furious mass of images left, no human. Immense production of barren muscular girl idols. Wood verdigre, copper, dull paints, flowers. Hundred idols to a man, and a race swamped in hurricane of art, falling on big narrow souls of its artists. Head heavy and bird-like, waited to strike, living on his body, ungainly red Atlantic wave. To have read all the books of the town-argle, and to come back here to take up this life again. Coaxing, genuine, stupifaction, reproach, a trap. Argle once more preceded him through his soul, unbenevolent. Doors opened on noisy blankness, coming through from calm, reeling, noon loudness beyond. Garrett's waking like faces, a shout down a passage to show its depth, horizon as well. Voice coming back with suddenness of expert pugilistics. Perpetual inspector of himself. I must live like a tree where I grow, an inch to the left or right would be too much. In the town I felt unrighteous in escaping blows, home anger, destiny of here. Selfishness, flouting of destiny, to step so much as an inch out of the bullseye of your birth, when it is obviously a bullseye. A visionary tree, not migratory, visions from within. A man with headache lies in deliberate lead and in animation. He isolates his body, floods it with phlegm, sucks numbness up to his brain. A soul, wettest dough, doughist lead, a bullet, to drop down, eternity like a plummet. Accumulating myself day after day, dense concentration of a pig life. Nothing spent, stored rather in strong stagnation, till rid at last of evaporation and likeness characteristic of men. So burst death's membrane through, slog beyond, not float in appalling distances. Energy has been fixed on me from nowhere, heavy and astonished, resigned, or is it for remote sin? I will use it anyway as prisoner his bowl or sheet for escape, not as means of idle humiliation. One night death left his card. I was not familiar with the name he chose, but the black edge was deep. I flung it back, a thousand awakenings of violence. Next day I had my knife up my sleeve as my uncle came at me, ready for what you recommend. But a superstition, habit is there, curbing him mathematically, that of not killing me. I should know an ounce of effort more. He loads my plate even. He must have palpable reasons for my being alive. A superb urchin watching some centre of angry commotion in the street. His companion kept his puffed, slit eyes, generously cruel, fixed on him. God and fate, constant protagonists, one equivalent to police. His simple sensationalism was always focused on, but God was really his champion. He longed to see God fall on Argel and wipe the earth with him. He egged God on, then egged on Argel. His soft rigid face grinned with intensity of attention, propped contemplatively on hand. Port, prowler, surf of the capital, serving its Tongan gate within the grasp and aroma of the white Matimen Sea. Abstract instinct of sullen seafarer, dry salted in slow acrid airs. Arian flood, not stopped by shore, dying in dirty warmth of harbour boulevards. His soul like ocean town, lent on by two skies. Lower opaque one washes it with noisy clouds, or lies giddily flush with street crevices, wedges of black air, flooding it with red emptiness of dead light. It sends ships between its unchanging slight rock of houses periodically, slowly to spacious centre. Nineteen big ships, like nineteen nomad souls, for its amphibious sluggish body locked there. Two, what is destiny? Why yours to stay here, more than to live in the town or cross to America? My dear Ham, your geography is so up to date. Geography doesn't interest me, America is geography. I've explained to you what the town is like. Offences against the discipline of the universe are registered by a sort of conscience prior to the kicks. Blows rain on me. Mine is not a popular post. It is my destiny, right enough, an extremely unpleasant one. It is not the destiny of a man like you to live buried in this cursed hole. Our soul is wild, with primitiveness of its own. Its wilderness is anywhere, in a shop, sailing, reading psalms. Its greatest good are destiny. Anything I possess is drunk up here on the world's brink by big stars, and return to me in the shape of thought heavy as a meteorite. The stone of the stars will do for my seal and emblem. I practice with it monotonous putting that I may hit death when he comes. Your thought is buried in yourself. A thought weighs less in a million brains than in one. No one is conjurer enough to prevent spilling. Rather, the bastard form infects the original. Famous men are those who have exchanged themselves against a thousand idiots. When you hear a famous man has died penniless and diseased, you say, well served. Part of life's arrangement is that the few best become these cheap scarecrows. Processing conditions of life without any exception is a grotesque degradation and sueur of the original solitude of the soul. There is no help for it since each gesture and word partakes of it, and the child has already covered himself with maya. Anything but yourself is dirt. Anybody that is. I do not feel clean enough to die, or to make it worthwhile killing myself. A laugh packed with hatred, not hoping to carry, snapped like a fiddle cord. Sour grapes, that's what it's all about, and you let yourself be kicked to death here out of spite. While you talk to me, I should like to know. Answer me that. Disrespect or mocking is followed in spiritualistic seances, with offended silence on part of the spooks. Such silence, not discernedly offended, now followed. The pseudo rustic master, cavernously, hemicycally real, but anomalous shamness on him in these circumstances. Poudre de Ri, on face of night's sleeping effigy, lay back indifferent, his feet lying, two heavy closed books before the disciple. Argel was a large open book, full of truths and insults. He opened his jaws wide once more in egotistic self-castigation. The doctoring is often fowler than disease. Men have a loathsome deformity called self. Affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows, social excrescence. Their being is regulated by exigencies of this affliction. Only one operation can cure it, the suicide's knife. Or an immense snuffling or taciturn parasite become necessary to victim like abortive poodle, all nerves, vice and dissatisfaction. I have smashed it against me, but it still writhes, turbulent mess. I have shrunk it in its frosty climates, but it has filtered filth inward through me, dispersed till my deepest solitude is impure. Maya stirred up desperately, without success in subsequent hygiene. This focused disciple's physical repulsion, nausea of humility added, perfect tyrannic contempt, but choking respect, curiosity, consciousness of defeat, these two extremes clashed furiously. The contempt claimed its security and triumph, the other sentiments baffled it. His hatred of Argel for perpetually producing this second sentiment grew. This would have been faint without physical repulsion to fascinate him, make him murderous and sick. He was strong and insolent with consciousness stuffed in him in anonymous form of vastness of humanity, full of rage at gigantic insolence and superiority, combined with utter uncleanness and despicableness, all back to physical parallel of his master. The more Argel made him realise his congenital fertility and cheapness, the more a contemptible matter appeared accumulated in the image of his master, sunken mirror. The price of this sharp vision of mastery was contamination. Too many things inhabited together in this spirit for cleanliness or health is one soul too narrow and abode for genius. To have humanity inside you, to keep a DOS house, at least impossible to organise on such a scale. People are right who would disperse these impure monopolies, that everyone gets his little bit, intellectual ballam rather than bedlam. Three. In sluggish but resolute progress towards the city and centre, on part of young man was to be found cause of Argel's ascendancy in first place. Argel had returned some months only from the great city of their world. He showed Hamp picture postcards, he described the character of each scene, then he had begun describing more closely. At length, systematically, he lived again there for his questioner, exhausted the capital, put it completely in his hands. The young man had got there without going there, but instead of satisfying him, this developed a wild desire to start off at once. Then Argel said, Wait a moment, he whispered something in his ear. Is that true? I am more. He supplemented his description with a whole life of comment and disillusion. The young man now felt that he had left the city, his life was being lived for him, but he forgot this, and fought for his first city, then he began taking a pleasure in destruction. He had got under Argel's touch. But when he came to look squarely at his new possession, which he had exchanged for his city, he found its wild, incredibly sad, hateful stuff. Somehow, however, the city had settled down in Argel, he must seek it there, and rescue it from that tyrannica boat. He could not now start off without taking this unreal image city with him. He sat down to invest it, Argel its walls. Poor. Argel had fallen, his Thebaid had been his Waterloo. He now sat up slowly. Why do I speak to you? It is not to you but myself. I think it is a physical matter, simply to use one's mouth. My thoughts to walk abroad are not always be stuffed up in my head, ideas to banjo this resounding body. You seem such a contemptible sort of fellow that there was some hope for you, or to be clear there was nothing to hope from your vile character. That is better than little painful some things. I am amazed to find that you are like me. I talk to you for an hour and get more disgusted with myself. I find I wanted to make a naive yapping poodle parasite of you. I shall always be a prostitute. I wanted to make you myself, you understand? Every man who wants to make another himself is seeking a companion for his detached ailment of a self. You are an unclean little beast, crept gloomily out of my ego. You are the world brother, with its family objections to me. Go back to our mother and spit in her face for me. I wish to see you no more here. Leave at once. Here is money. Take train at once. Berlin is the place for your pestilential little carcass. Get out. Here. Go. Amazement had stretched the disciples face back like a mouth. Then slowly it contracted, the eyes growing smaller, chin more prominent, old and clenched like a fist. Argel's voice rang coldly in the hut, a bell beaten by words. Only the words, not tune of bell, had grown harder. At last they beat virulently. When he had finished, silence fell like guillotine between them, severing bonds. The disciples spoke with his own voice, which he had not used for some weeks. It sounded fresh, brisk and strange to him. Half live, garish, saltfish. His mouth felt different. Is that all? Argel was relieved at sound of Hamp's voice, no longer borrowed, and felt better disposed towards him. The strain of this mock life or real life rather was tremendous on his underworld of energy and rebellious muscles. This cold outburst was not commensurate with it. It was twitch of loud bound nerve only. Bloody glib tongue cow, you think you can treat me that way? Hamp sprang out of the ground, a handful of furious movements flung himself on Argel. Once more the stars had come down. Argel used his fists. To break vows and spoil continuity of instinctive behavior, lose a prize that would only be a trophy tankered, never drunk from, is always fine. Argel would have flung away his hoarding and scraping of thought as well now, but his calm long instrument of thought was too heavy. It weighed him down, resisted his swift anarchist effort, and made him giddy. His fear of death, anti-manhood, words coming out of caverns of belief, synthesis, that is, of ideal life, appalled him with his own strength. Strike at his disciple as he had abused him, suddenly give way, incurable self, torture, heroism. The young man brought his own disgust back to him, full of disgust, therefore disgusting. He felt himself on him, what a cause of downfall. Five. The great beer-colored sky at the fuss leapt in fates of green gaiety. Its immense lines bent like whale bones, and sprang back with slight death thunder. The sky, two clouds, their two furious shadows fought. The bleak misty hospital of the horizon grew pale with fluid of anger. The trees were wiped out in a blow. The hut became a new boat inebriated with electric milky human passion poured in. It shrank and struck them, struck in its course in a stirred up, unmixed world by tree or house-side grown wave. First they hit each other, both with blows about equal in force, on face and head. Soul perched like aviator in basin of skull, more alert and smaller than on any other occasion. Mask stoic with energy, thought cleaned off slick, pure and clean with action. Bodies grown a brain, black octopi. Flushes on silk epiderm and fierce card play of fists between. Emptying of hand on soft flesh table. Arms of grey windmills, grinding anger on stone of the new heart. Messages from one to another, dropped down anywhere when nobody is looking, reaching brain by telegraph, most desolating and alarming messages possible. The attacker rushed in drunk with blows. They rolled, swift jagged, rupt into one corner of shed, large insects scuttling roughly to hiding. Stopped, astonished. Fisticuffs again, then rolled kicking air and each other, springs broken, torn from engine. Hamps punch wore itself out, soon on herculean clouds, at a mad rudder of boats on Argel. Then, like a punch ball, something vague and swift struck him on face, exhausted and white. Argel did not hit hard, like something inanimate, only striking as rebound and as attacked. He became soft, blunt, poor of nature, taken back to her bosom mechanically, slowly and idly winning. He became part of responsive landscape, his friend's active punch key of commotion. Hamp fell somewhere in the shadow, there lay. Argel stood rigid. As the nervous geometry of the world in sight relaxed and went on with its perpetual mystic invention, he threw himself down to where he had been lying before. A strong flood of thought passed up to his fatigued head and at once dazed him. Not his body only, but being was out of training for action, puffed and exhilarated. Thoughts fell on it like punches. His mind, baying mastiff, he flung off. In steep struggle he rolled into sleep. Two clear thoughts had intervened between fight and sleep. Now a dream began valuing, with its tentative symbols, preceding events. A black jacket and shirt hung on nails across window. A gas jet turned low to keep room warm through the night, shallow chilly illumination, dirty pillows black and thin in middle, worn down by rough head, but congested at each end. Bedclothes crawling over bed never made, like stagnant waves and eddies to be crept beneath. Picture above pillow of Rosa Bonneur horses trampling up wall like well-fed toffee-ish insects. Books piled on table and chair, open at some page. Two texts in finish, pipes half smoked, collars, past days knotty-faced beneath perpetual tidiness, but scraps and souvenirs of their accidents lying in heaps. His room in the city, nine feet by six, grave big enough for the six corpses that is each living man. Appalling tabernacle of self and unbelief. He was furious with this room, tore down jacket and shirt and threw the window open. The air made him giddy. He began putting things straight. The third book stalely open, which he took up to shut was the Einige and Sein Eigenkeit. Sterne, one of seven arrows in his martyr mind. Poof! He flung it out of the window. A few minutes, there was a knock at his door. It seemed a young man he had known in the town, but now saw for the first time seemingly. He had come to bring him the book, fallen into the roadway. I thought I told you to go, he said. The young man had changed into his present disciple. Obliquely though, he appeared now to be addressing Sterne. I thought I told you to go. His visitor changed a third time. A middle aged man, red crocked head and dark eyes, self-possessed, loose, free, student sailor, fingering the book. Coming to a decision, Sterne as he had imagined him. Get out, I say. Here is money. Was the money for the book? The man flung it at his head. Its cover slapped him sharply. Glib tongue, cow! Take that! A scrap ensued, physical experiences of recent fights recurring, ending in eviction of this visitor and slamming of door. These books are all parasites, poodles of the mind, chows and King Charles, eternal prostitute. The mind perverse and gorgeous. All this art life, posterity and the rest is wrong. Begin with these. He tore up his books. A pile by the door ready to sweep out. He left the room and went round to cafe to find his friends. All companions are parasite self. No single one a brother. My dealings with these men is with their parasite composite selves, not with them. The night had come on suddenly. Stars like clear rain soaked chillily into him. No one was in the street. The sickly houses oozed sad human electricity. He had wished to clean up spiritually his room, obliterate or turn into deliberate refuse, accumulations of self. Now a similar purging must be undertaken among his companions preparatory to leaving the city. But he never reached the cafe. His dream changed. He was walking down the street in his native town, where he now was, and where he knew no one but his schoolmates, workmen, clerks in export of hemp, grain and wood. The head of him he saw one of the friends of his years of study in capital. He did not question how he had got there, but caught him up. Although brusply pitched elsewhere, he went on with his plan. Sir, I wish to know you. Provisional smile on face of friend puzzled. Hello, Argel. You seem upset. I wish to make your acquaintance. But, my dear Argel, what's the matter with you? We already are very well acquainted. I am not Argel. No. The good-natured smug certitude offended him. This man would never see anyone but Argel he knew, yet he on his side saw a man directly beneath his friend, imprisoned with intolerable need of recognition. Argel, that the baffling requirements of society had made impudent parasite of his solitude, had foregathered too long with men, and borne his name too variously to be superseded. He was not sure if they had been separated surgically, in which self life would have gone out, and in which remained. This man has been masquerading as me. He repudiated Argel nevertheless. If eyes of his friends up till then could not be opened, he would sweep them along with Argel into rubbish heap. Argel was under a dishonouring pact with all of them. He repudiated it and him. So, I am Argel. Of course, but if you don't want. That is a lie. Your foolish grim proves you are lying. Good day. Walking on, he knew his friend was himself. He had divested himself of something. The other steps followed timidly and deliberately odious invitation. The sound of the footsteps gradually sent him to sleep. Next, a cafe, he alone, writing at table. He became slowly aware of his friends, seated at other end of room, watching him as it had actually happened before his return to his uncle's house. There he was behaving as a complete stranger, with a set of men he had been on good terms with two days before. He's gone mad. Leave him alone. They advised each other. As an idiot too, he had come home, dropped idle and sullen on his relative's shoulders. Six. Suddenly, through confused struggles and vague successions of scenes, a new state of mind asserted itself. A riddle had been solved. What could this be? He was Argel once more. Was that a key to something? He was simply Argel. I am Argel. He repeated his name, like sinister word invented to launch a new soap in gigantic advertisements, toilet necessity, he to scrub the soul. He had ventured in his solitude and failed. Argel he had imagined left in the city. Suddenly he had discovered Argel who had followed him, in hamp, always adduh. Flung back to extremity of hut, hamp lay for some time recovering. Then he thought, chattel for rest of mankind, Argel had brutalised him. Both eyes were swollen pulp. Shut in, thought for him hardly possible, so cut off from visible world. Sullen indignation at Argel, acting, he who had not the right to act, violence in him was indecent, again question of taste. How loathsome heavy body, so long quiet, flinging itself about, face strained with intimate expression of acts of love. Firm grip still on him, outrage. Poudre, in races accustomed to restraint, is the most violent emotion in all its developments. Devil ridicule, heroism of vice, ideal, god of taste. Why has it not been taken for root of great northern tragedy? Argel's unwieldy sensitiveness, physical and mental, made him a monster in his own eyes, among other things. Such illusion imparted with bullet like directness to a companion, falling on suitable soil, produced similar conviction. This humility and perverse asceticism opposed to vigorous animal glorification of self. He gave men one image with one hand, and at the same time, a second, its antidotes with the other. He watched results, a little puzzled. The conflict never ended. Shiness and brutality, chief ingredients of their drama, fought side by side. Hamp had been ordered off, knocked about, now he was going. Why? Because he had been sent off like a belonging. Argel had dragged him down, had preached a certain life, and now, insolently, set an example of the opposite. Played with, deborged by a mind that could not leave passion in another alone. Where should he go? Home. Good-natured drunken mother, recriminating and savage at night. Hamp had almost felt she had no right to be violent and resentful, being weak when sober. He caught a resemblance to present experiences in tipsy life, stretching to babyhood. He saw in her face a look of Argel. How disgusting she was, his own flesh. Ah, that was the sensation. Argel similarly disgusted through this family feeling, his own flesh, though he was not any relation. Berlin and near a city was full of Argel. He was comfortable where he was. Argel had lived for him, worked, impaired his will, even wheel-making had grown difficult, whereas Argel acquitted himself of duties of trade quite easily. Whose energy did he use? Just now the blows had leapt in his muscles towards Argel, but were sickened and did not seem hard. Would he never be able again to hit, feel himself hard and distinct on somebody else? That mass-muck in the corner that he hated, was its hoarded energy, stolen or grabbed, which he could only partially use, stagnating. Argel was brittle, repulsive and formidable through this sentiment. Had this passivity been holy with charms of a saint's? Argel was glutted with others in coma of energy. He had just been feeding on him, hump. He refused to act, almost avowedly to infuriate, prorient contempt. His physical strength was obnoxious, muscles affecting as flabby fat would in another. Energetic through self-indulgence. Thick, sickly puddle of humanity lying there by door. Death, taciturn refrain of his being. Preparation for death. Tip him over into cold run in which he persistently gazed, see what happened. This sleepy desire leapt on to young man's mind, after a hundred other thoughts. Clown in the circus, springing on horses back, when the elegant riders have hopped, with obsequious dignity down gangue. 7. Bluebottle at first unnoticed, hurtling about. A snore rose quietly on the air. Drawn out, clumsy, self-centred. It's pressed inflexibly on Hamp's nerve of hatred, sending hysteria gyrating in top of diaphragm, flooding neck. It's beckoned, filthy, ogling finger. The first organ noted, a second at once was set up, stronger, startling, full of loathsome unconsciousness. It's purred a little now, quick and labial. Then virile and strident again. It rose and fell up, centre of listener's body, and along swollen nerves, peachy, clotted, tied, gurgling back in slimy shallows, snoring of a malodorous, bloody sink, emptying its water. More acutely, it plunged into his soul with bestial regularity, intolerable besmirching. Aking with disgust and fury, he lay dully, head against ground, at each fresher fence, the veins puffed faintly in his temples. All this sonority of the voice that subdued him sometimes, suddenly turned bestial in answer to his vision. How can I stand it? How can I stand it? His whole being was laid bare, battened on by this noise. His strength was drawn raspingly out of him. In a minute, he would be a flabby, yelling wreck. Like a sleek shadow passing down his face, the rigor of his discomfort changed. Sly vault-fasts of nature. Glee settled thickly on him. The snore crowed with increased loudness, glad seemingly with him, laughing that he should have at last learned to appreciate it, a rare proper world if you understand it. He got up, held by this foul sound of sleep in dream of action. Wrapped beyond all reflection, he would, martyr, relieve the world of this sound. Cut out this noise like a cancer. He swayed and groaned a little, peeping through patches of tumified flesh. Boozer collecting his senses, fumbled in pocket. His knife was not there. He stood still, wiping blood off his face. Then he stepped across shed to where fight had occurred. The snore grew again. Its sonorous recoveries had amazing and startling strength. Every time it rose, he gasped, pressing back a clap of laughter. With his eyes it was like looking through goggles. He peered round carefully and found knife and two coppers where they had slipped out of his pocket, a foot away from Argel. He opened the knife and an ocean of movements poured into his body. He stretched and strained like a toy wound up. He took deep breaths, his eyes almost closed. He opened one roughly with two fingers. The knife held stiffly at arm's length. He could hardly help plunging it in himself, the nearest flesh to him. He now saw Argel clearly, knelt down beside him. A long stout snore drove his hand back, but the next instance the hand rushed in and the knife sliced heavily the impious meat. The blood burst out after the knife. Argel rose as though on a spring, his eyes glaring down on Hamp, and with an action of the head as though he were about to sneeze. Hamp shrank back on his haunches. He overbalanced and fell on his back. He scrambled up and Argel now lay in the position in which he had been sleeping. There was something incredible in the dead figure, the blood sinking down, a moist shaft into the ground, Hamp felt friendly towards it. There was only flesh there and all our flesh is the same, something distant, terrible and eccentric, bathing in that milky snore had been struck and banished from matter. Hamp wiped his hands on a rag and rubbed at his clothes for a few minutes, then went out of the hut. The night was suddenly absurdly peaceful, trying richly to please him with gracious movements of trees and gay processions of arctic clouds. Relief of grateful universe. A rapid despair settled down on Hamp, a galloping blackness of mood. He moved quickly to outstrip it, perhaps. Near the gate of the yard he found an idle figure, it was his master. He ground his teeth almost in this man's face, with an aggressive and furious movement towards him. The face looked shy and pleased, but civil, like a mysterious domestic. Hamp walked slowly along the canal to a low stone bridge. His face was wet with tears, his heart beating weakly, a boat slowed down. A sickly flood of moonlight beats miserably on him, cutting empty shadow he could hardly drag along. He sprang from the bridge clumsily, too unhappy for instinctive science, and sank like lead, his heart a sagging weight of stagnant hatred.