Second Thoughts

I was wakened by a polite, quiet coughing in the front room. I crawled across the Murphy bed, pushed the door open and looked out.  On the sofa sat a small, pale man.  His legs were crossed and he stared silently out, watching as boats pulled themselves slowly down the river calling to one another through the fog.  Lights entered by the same window.  They flared in dark eyes, turned to shadow, dropped onto a white shirt. His hair was a startling black, cheekbones high, face narrow as a plank.

He turned his head slowly towards me.  "What can I do to make you believe that I'm wholly sincere?" he said. It was then that I recognized him: this was Artaud.

I got out of bed, without speaking went to the desk for a pen and paper, put them before him.

"You don't know what it's like," he said.  "You come out of it and you can't find yourself.  Something is irretrievably lost."

Unthinkingly he began to draw on the paper, sketchy gray lines tumbling into patches of black scribble.  Faces of those he knew, perhaps, devil masks, plugs of matter pulled from deep within the world's core.

I nodded and moved to switch on a small electric lamp beside him.  He pulled himself up straight in the chair, alarmed.  I stepped back. Another boat came into view in the window.

"'Very little is needed to destroy a man; he needs only the conviction that his work is useless,'" I said.

Outside, a car stopped in the street opposite and its headlights went off. There was the sound of doors closing, laughter, a young man and woman. Artaud listened intently, and only when their voices vanished into the house did he turn back, to stare down at the paper on his lap. Everything he had, everything he was, strained now towards the external world that lay outside himself, I felt: strained, and fell short.

On my way back to the bedroom I turned on the radio. Softly, so neighbors would not be bothered.  Porter Waggoner was singing about "The Cold Hard Facts of Life."  My visitor turned his head towards the radio and the light from outside hung on the bones of his face, making his cheeks look cavernous, hollow, reminding me of Yeats: "and took a mess of shadows for its meat."

Anne was four days gone. Slow glide along the ridge of mountain rimming our city at six in the morning, spilling over into America. When she told me she was leaving, I quoted Cavafy. Don't hope for new worlds or new seas, I told her. The way your life is ruined here in this small corner is the way it's ruined everywhere.

As I drifted back into sleep I realized another voice had joined that of my first visitor.

"Volition," said one.

"Guilt," said the other.

Antonin Artaud and Claude Eatherly were discussing the problem of conscience.