Almost Insentient, Almost Divine Read online

  “I left it behind in Paris, when we ran. I saw it only in dreams, in nightmares, in Marseille.” He paused, puffed on his cigar. “And Loplop saw it off, chased it out of my head.”

  Duchamp nodded. “I hoped Rrose would be my protector, but she wasn’t up to the job. You really did have a lucky escape, my friend.” He drew pensively on his cigar, roiled the smoke in his mouth, let it spill from his lips.

  “I’m beginning to realize that,” Ernst said, smiling.

  *

  While on military service at the barracks in Laval, in January 1895, Alfred Jarry received a strange envelope in the post, with no return address, no indication as to who had sent it. Bored almost sane, desperate for any distraction, he did not falter, but tore it open right off. Inside he found only a single photographic print. He stared at the image a while, then painstakingly tore it into even square fragments that he put, one by one, into his mouth, slowly chewed to pulp, then swallowed.

  *

  In early November 1810, Heinrich von Kleist woke, sweat slick, heart hammering, to near darkness, just a faint glimmer in the hearth. He’d had an awful dream. He got out of bed, wrapped a blanket about his shoulders, picked up the tallow candle in its holder from the chest by his bedside, and crossed to the fireplace. After raking over the ashes, he went down on haunches and blew enough life into the smouldering embers to light the candle’s wick. Then, after adding a couple of logs to the grate, he went over to his desk, got some paper out of a drawer, opened his bottle of ink, and picked up his quill. Sitting there, staring into the candle’s flame, he mused on what had happened to him, years earlier, in the spring of 1804, in Königsberg.

  Von Kleist, newly arrived in the city, spent an afternoon wandering about, trudging across its many bridges. It was drizzling, but he had nothing else to do, his lodgings not quite ready. But as afternoon gave way to evening, and the rain grew heavier, he thought he’d duck into a tavern. Besides, he needed a beer to cheer himself up. He was convinced he saw Kant’s high pale brow and piercing stare everywhere; he knew the philosopher had been buried some weeks previously but thought he’d, ever fastidious, hold to his routines even in death. And Kant, or rather Kant’s writings, made von Kleist despondent.

  The tavern was a dingy place with low ceilings and walls panelled in dark wood. There was a fug in the air; logs reeked in the large fireplace in the centre of the place, the chimney wasn’t drawing well, and smoke spilled into the room. Von Kleist ordered a stein of foaming beer, then found a nook to sit in.

  He was on his third mug when someone sat down opposite him. Looking up he saw an odd-looking man, unkempt, with a weak chin, a thin slash of a mouth, and bushy whiskers. This stranger peered at von Kleist a moment, then smiled and raised his beer. “Prost,” he said. “To the master thinker, most famous son of this city.”

  He took a big gulp and then, with the back of his hand, wiped froth from his upper lip. Von Kleist joined him in the toast, though half-heartedly, and also drank.

  The two men got to talking. In fact, von Kleist quickly warmed to the fellow. Despite his odd cast, he was a good conversationalist, quick witted and amusing, and shared von Kleist’s rather solemn, some might say morbid, turn of mind. His name, it emerged, was Hoffman. He was a native of Königsberg, though he’d been away from the place for some years, and was this time only passing through, heading for a new posting in Warsaw.

  Sat in their nook, swigging beer, von Kleist and Hoffman pondered Kant’s last words, wondered just what the thinker had thought was so good about the world at the moment he’d left it, talked about beer, the belligerence of Napoleon, and whether the King might elect for Prussia to join the nations against France should the Corsican maniac continue his warmongering.

  Then Hoffman asked von Kleist if he’d seen, on his walk that afternoon, the puppet theatre in the square in front of the cathedral. Von Kleist said he hadn’t.

  “You should go and watch a show. Their movements are so lifelike.”

  “I will. It sounds a good entertainment.”

  Hoffman nodded, took another pull at his beer. “Do you think marionettes might have a hidden life?” he asked, squinting at von Kleist. “That they might dance even when no one is watching, for their own pleasure?”

  Here is a man who cannot hold his drink, thought von Kleist.

  “Yes, I’ve often thought that,” he jested. “And that the toys of infants come to life every night and live lives as dramatic and profound as those told of by Shakespeare or Goethe.”

  At that Hoffman became angry. “In your innocence, you mock. But if you had seen what I have seen, perhaps you would be less quick to sneer.”

  Von Kleist tried to mollify him. “Yes, I’m sure. I’m sorry. It was only the beer talking.”

  “You should see,” Hoffman said. “Will you accompany me?”

  Von Kleist, who was in truth tipsy, at the least, agreed to go with his new friend. That was foolhardy.

  The two men drained their steins to the dregs, then left the tavern. Hoffman led von Kleist through some narrow winding backstreets. It was raining hard, and before long von Kleist’s wool greatcoat was sodden. Hoffman capered, gurned, sang crude ditties. Von Kleist grew wary of his antic manner, and when they arrived at Hoffman’s guesthouse, wouldn’t enter with him.

  Hoffman sighed. “Don’t trust me?”

  “It’s not that,” von Kleist said. “But couldn’t you bring down whatever it is you want to show me?”

  “I suppose I could. Hold on. I’ll go fetch it.”

  Hoffman went inside, and von Kleist, against his better judgement, waited, sheltering from the rain in a doorway a little down the alley from the guest house’s entrance. Hoffman was gone only a short while. When he came out again, he held something swathed in grubby scraps of cloth.

  “What’s that?” von Kleist asked.

  “Come here and see.”

  But von Kleist sensed the thing Hoffman held was terrible, and that, should he see it unwrapped, his mind would be blasted. So he turned tail, took to his heels. He could recall fleeing down cobbled streets, between buildings leant against each other like drunks, but nothing further, nothing till he woke up in his bed in his lodgings the next day.

  But in the nightmare of early November 1810, he’d finally seen what Hoffman, tearing after him through the streets of Königsberg, had held out, swaddled in filthy rags. A horrible fetish in the form of a man. Gnarled. Grinning obscene. In the dream, Von Kleist had flown down cobbled streets, between buildings leant against each other like drunks, but Hoffman, seemingly without exertion, had kept pace with him. Then von Kleist’s hands had begun to change. His palms had swelled, his bones had cracked and warped, his fingers, stretched, and his thumb, bent back, thickened. And then he’d had a grotesque puppet, dangling and jouncing at the end of each of his arms…

  Von Kleist had sat at his desk after waking from this nightmare thinking he’d set it down, as a rite of casting out, but, in the event, he couldn’t bear to. So instead he embarked on an essay he hoped would soothe him. But it didn’t work, and over the next months, von Kleist’s wonted melancholy turned to dread and despair. And a year later, when Henriette Vogel urged a suicide pact, he welcomed her proposal.

  *

  On a bright warm day in early autumn 1458, three children of the van Aken family—twin sisters, nearly of marrying age, but still childish in their ways, and their brother, much younger, only a boy—were playing in the woods for which their home town, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, was named. Their father’s house was on the edge of the settlement, only a stone’s throw from the treeline, and their games often took them in among the beech, birch, oak, elm, and hornbeam of the fringes of the forest. But they had been warned never to leave the lighter groves, never to stray into the thickets of firs of the forest’s dark heart. On this day, though, the boy, whose name was Jheronimus, had, running from the tickling fingers of his sisters, gone in too far and become lost.

  He walked about at haphazard, h
oping he’d strike, by good fortune, a path that would lead him out of that place, but his wanderings took him deeper and deeper into the wood. The rough boles of the pines rose stark above him, till far overhead writhen boughs clotted the sky. He’d left behind the underbrush of soft mosses and delicate ferns that furled at your touch; here it was nettle and bramble, sickly and vicious plants.

  But Jheronimus wasn’t scared. He was filled with wonder at the terrible place. But he also did not want to die and knew he must find his way to the edge of the forest or starve. So he kept on, trying to walk in a straight line.

  He’d been walking an age, and his legs were sore and his feet blistered, when he saw light ahead. He broke into a run. He left the trees and the sun, overhead, dazzled him; all was bright, glary.

  Then a wrack of cloud passed before the sun. Jheronimus saw he stood at the edge of a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by thick forest, a place where all life, even the stubborn rank life of fir, bramble, and witchgrass, had been blighted. A place of bare earth.

  He felt compelled then, to walk to the centre of the barren patch, and go down on his knees, dig in the mud with his hands. He dug deep. His fingers were raw and bleeding by the time they touched the thing, hard and cold, buried there.

  “I can help you find your way out of the woods,” it said to him. “But I would ask something in return.”

  The boy kept very still.

  “You will be an artist. A talented one. You must keep me by your side when you paint. You must let me guide your themes.”

  The boy took his hands from the thing, looked up. A boar watched him from the edge of the trees. They stared at each other a time, the boy stock still, the beast occasionally turning its head to one side or the other to rake the earth with a tusk. Then the boar’s hackles raised, it lowered its snout, and began its rush. Jheronimus put his hands on the thing in the hole once more. The boar’s forelegs buckled at the knees and it pitched forward, slid, furrowing the dirt. It lay a moment, its hindlegs kicking out, then its eyes dimmed and it was still.

  Jheronimus unearthed the thing, then walked off into the woods clutching it to his chest.

  *

  These, and many other things, were shown to me when I took hold of the strange fetish. After, I must have passed out, loosed my grip. When I came to, I was lying on the floor under my desk, cheek pressed into the thin carpet, chair overturned behind me, and beyond it the idol. I felt like my brain had been cudgelled to glop in its pan.

  *

  I’d received a package to my workplace, with no return address. I opened it to find, inside, something swathed in bubblewrap, a brief handwritten note, and a long printout.

  First, I tore off the bubblewrap. The thing within was strikingly ugly. Made from a petrified root whose form was a travesty of a human frame. The “torso” and “limbs” of the root were gnarled and crooked, suggestive of lewd contortions. And there was a knar at the top that had been hacked into a “head” with a face, that, though crude, was of such a vile cast I could hardly bear look at it. I instantly abhorred the fetish. I felt sullied by having touched it.

  The note was written in a neat script. “I ask of you one thing only,” it read. “Embrace the effigy. Clutch it to your chest. Jot down your impressions. Send them to my publisher, at the address below. I wish for something strange as a preface or introduction to my collection. That’s it. Read the tales if you wish. And, should you wish to follow me through to that place, THEY ARE A KEY.”

  This note was signed, “D.P. Watt”.

  The printout was a collection of stories. This collection. I was convinced my instinctual loathing for the effigy was a mantic tremble, a warning not to touch, so I decided I would not act on Watt’s instructions. I thought, though, that there could be no harm in reading his tales. So I did. And I couldn’t put the printout down, was gripped. It is a collection by turns macabre and eerie, strange and transfiguring, beautiful and brutal. A collection provoking, philosophical, and, often, harrowing. A collection so potent, it almost seems a black rite. And perhaps is.

  When I had done reading, I looked again at the fetish. And found I no longer viewed it with repugnance. In fact, it had an allure. I picked it up, embraced it as Watt had instructed. And that was when the visions swarmed me…

  *

  When I’d recovered from my blackout, I put the note, the manuscript, and the idol back in the package, took it home. There, I watched a trashy horror film, slugged whiskey straight from the bottle. I got drunk. At some point later in the evening, I was impelled to hug the fetish again.

  Another vision. Faint and confused. A stone slab stained with gore. Dark frolics. A beast with a massive head and branching antlers, a beast standing tall on spindly hind legs which bend backwards at the knee, a beast guzzling offal and gobbets of raw flesh and braying with mocking laughter. About its hooves, the effigy gracefully dances.

  And then a hole is dug in the ground, under gloomy pines, the fetish cast in, the pit filled again. And the warriors of the tribe cut the throats of their children, their elders, their wives, and their friends, then fall on their swords. And the fresh dug earth is slaked with blood.

  After, the fetish showed me one last thing. Something I will not set down here. Something that laid my mind waste.

  *

  I’ve followed Watt’s instructions, as you can see. This is my introduction. But I lack the courage to use his tales to open the gate, go after him, and those others, visit the places he’s been, see the things he’s seen. The accounts contained in these pages of his journeys to the heart of rapture, to the heart of horror, are enough for me. They are dread enough, ecstatic enough for all but the most frenzied of souls.

  I’ll go mad anyway, of course. Once you’ve seen what I have, have had revealed to you what I have, all paths lead to lunacy. You can resist, close your eyes to awful reality, or you can give yourselves to shadows, to black revels. And, futile, and cowardly, though it may be, for myself, I choose to resist. I’ve got rid of the fetish. I hope that, in time, I can forget all it showed me. I fear I won’t.

  SOMEWHERE

  With Gravity, Grace

  “...grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god.”

  Heinrich von Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre”

  The workshop had outgrown its original confines. It had been generous of Dorothy to have given up her dining room for Stanley’s hobby, but then she had been a wonderful, caring and understanding woman. What was more important, their social lives or his happiness? Puppets were his life, and the making of them his only real pleasure. They had few guests anyway, he was so often on the road with his little touring show, and during the few days he was at home she wanted him to be content, and able to work upon the quaint little figures that brought in their meagre, and only income.

  But that was then, Dorothy had been dead a decade now. He had watched her beautiful face age, as the possible time of children passed, but that had not worried them; it had been a joint decision. Then he had watched her eyes sink into the bruised caverns of the disease she cradled within her, fighting and nurturing it in equal measure over three long years. The undertaker had made her perfect again, smoothing away the pain and sorrow of her wrinkled, broken face. The art of cosmetics reaches its peak in the hidden world of the funeral parlour—every one of us emerging a pristine sculpture, dressed in our best for the caress of searing flame or the embrace of damp soil.

  It was the image of her in that coffin that had haunted Stanley for seven years until he had been driven to recreate her one desperate morning as the sun rose after another night without sleep. Within twenty-four hours she was made. Two-foot tall, of pine, with a simple white gown, fashioned from a nightdress he hadn’t the heart to part with. He made a small coffin, with the same purple satin lining he had chosen for the real one. No detail was lost to his memory.

  He burned t
he whole morbid affair in the garden later that week, once the guilt and eccentricity had overcome him. He felt he was finally going mad. He welcomed it. Insanity would, he hoped, erase his memory with an oblivion of estrangement.

  And in the unbearable lacuna of his despair the letter arrived.

  It read,

  Dear Mr Headingley,

  Please forgive us for contacting you in this rather formal fashion. We are all craftspeople and we should very much have preferred to have met with you in person. The growing nature of our society and the increasing administrative burdens that such a body requires prevents it however.

  We have the greatest of pleasure though in approaching you to fulfil a small commission for us. We have heard of the fine puppet figures you have produced, and of your own accomplished performances. We would be honoured if you would undertake the production of a marionette we have designed. The designs are enclosed herein. We call her “Lilith” and while her role will be brief in our little play, it is imperative that the balance and comportment of the figure appear absolutely realistic. We have therefore selected only the finest materials, their weights and properties having being particularly calculated to produce for the audience the supreme quality of life. This is achieved not through the artifice of representation and the ridiculous farce of character, but by the absence of such. Instead the suggestion of poise, the elegance of form and the true manifestation of inertia will create a being that is, in essence, all of us, and none.

  It is our greatest hope that you will find within this puppet the heights of your craft and can see in her the hope of our shared art.

  We will reward your time, skill, and knowledge, handsomely. Whereas once our little theatres were the supreme expression of poverty we are confident the day is now dawning wherein our work can be most widely appreciated, and through the expression of the play of wooden beings we might find a space, however brief, to call home again. Such is our aspiration, lofty or even foolhardy as it may be. An eternal combat with the absurd and the impossible has ever been the work of the travelling showman.