Chapter 48 sand waves in your lips

Chapter 48 sand waves in your lips


“Come with me, Serena.”

Serena and Djuna went up to her studio, where they could still hear

the drumming.

As if to silence it, Djuna placed a record in her phonograph.

“Serena…” But no words came as one of Beethoven’s Quartets

began to tell Serena, as Djuna could not, of what they both knew

for absolute certainty: the continuity of existence and of the chain of

summits, of elevations by which such continuity is reached. By

elevation the consciousness reached a perpetual movement,

transcending death, and in the same manner attained the continuity

of love by seizing upon its impersonal essence, which was a

summation of all the alchemies producing life and birth, a child, a

work of art, a work of science, a heroic act, an act of love. The

identity or the human couple was not eternal but interchangeable, to

protect this exchange of spirits, transmissions of character, all the

fecundations of new selves being born, and faithfulness only to the

continuity, the extensions and expansions of love achieving their

crystallizations into high moments and summits equal to the high

moments and summits of art or religion.

Serena slid to the floor and sat there with her head against the

phonograph, with her wide skirt floating for one instant like an

expiring parachute; and then deflating completely and dying in the

dust.

The tears on Serena’s face were not round and separate like

ordinary tears, but seemed to have fallen like a water veil, as if she

had sunk to the bottom of the sea by the weight and dissolutions of

the music. There was a complete dissolution of the eyes, features,

as if she were losing her essence.

The lie detector held out his hands as if to rescue her, in a light

gesture, as if this were a graceful dance of sorrow rather than the

sorrow itself, and said: “In homeopathy there is a remedy called

pulsatile for those who weep at music.”

Chapter 25-

Outside of this room, this bed, there was a black precipice. She had escaped danger for a day, that was all. Other dangers awaited her  tomorrow. At night too she puzzled over the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for

wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.

Why should she have had such a need of kindness? Was she a cripple? What if instead she had married aan of violence or a man of cruelty?

At the mere word “cruelty” her heart started to beat feverishly. The

enormity of the dangers she had averted was so great she did not

even dare picture them. She had desired and obtained kindness.

And now that she had found it she risked its loss every day, every

hour, on other quests!

Alan slept so peacefully. Even in sleep he maintained a serenity of

gesture. The firm design of his nose, mouth and chin, the angular

lines of the body, all sculptured from some material of rectitude that

would not slacken. In moments of desire even, he did not have the

wildness of the eyes, disordered hair of others. He would never

grow almost delirious with pleasure or utter sounds not quite human,

from the jungle of man’s earlier animalism.

Was it this quietism that inspired her trust? He told no lies. What he

felt and thought he could tell Sabina. At the thought of confession,

of confiding in him, she was almost asleep when out of the darkness

the image of Alan appeared vividly and he was sobbing, sobbing

desperately as he had at his father’s death. This image awakened

her with horror, with compassion, and again her feeling was: I must

always be on guard, to protect his happiness, always on guard to

protect my guardian angel…

In the darkness she relived entirely the eight days spent in

Provincetown.

She had walked into the dunes in quest of O’Neill’s house, and had

lost her way. The sand dunes were so white in the sun, so

immaculate, that she felt like the first inhabitant at the top of a

glacier.

The sea churned at the base as if struggling to drag back the sand

into its depths, carrying a little away each time only to replace it at

high tide in the form of geological designs, a static sea of crystallized

sand waves.There she stopped and took off her bathing suit to lie in the sun.
Drifts of sand were lifted by the wind and deposited over her skin
like muslin. She wondered whether if she stayed there long enough
it would cover her, and would she disappear in a natural tomb.
Immobility always brought this image to her, the image of death, and
it was this which impelled her to rise and seek activity. Repose, to
her, resembled death.
her, resembled death.
But here in this moment of warmth and light with her face towards
the sky, the sea coiling and uncoiling violently at her feet, she did not
fear the image of death. She lay still watching the wind forming sand
drawings and felt a momentary suspense from anxiety and fever.
Happiness had been defined once as the absence of fever. Then
what was it she possessed which was the opposite of fever?
She was grateful that, hypnotized by the sun’s reassuring splendor
and the sea’s incurable restlessness, her own nerves did not coil and
spring within her to destroy this moment of repose.
It was at this moment that she heard a song. It was not a casual
song anyone might sing walking along the beach. It was a powerful,
developed voice with a firm core of gravity, accustomed to vast
halls and a large public. Neither the sand nor wind nor sea nor
space could attenuate it. It was flung out with assurance, in defiane
of them all, a vital hymn of strength equal to the elements.
The man who appeared had a body which was a full match to his
voice, a perfect case for this instrument. He had a strong neck, a
large head with high brow, wide shoulders and long legs. A full
strong box for the vocal cords, good for resonance, thought Sabina,
who had not moved, hoping he would walk by without seeing her
and without interrupting this song from Tristan and Isolde.
As the song continued she found herself in the Black Forest of the
German fairy tales which she had read so avidly in her childhood.
Giant trees, castles, horsemen, all out of proportion in a child’s
eyes.