Moise and the World of Reason Read Free Page B

the statement but me. Her voice was a whisper, and so I took the liberty of repeating it for her at the top of my lungs.
    â€œMoise says that things have become untenable in her world!”
    And that was the way the announcement had to proceed. Moise would whisper a sentence and I would shout it. As for the reaction of the guests, or audience, most of them paid no attention but continued their own talk in pairs and groups.
    Now Moise was explaining.
    â€œYou see, my world is not your world at all. It would be an observation of insufferable banality for me to observe that each of us is the sole occupant of his own world. And so I don’t know your world and you don’t know my world. Of course it appears to me, it appears quite evident to me, that your world is relatively a world that contains some reason.”
    At this point she paused for breath and I became aware that Charlie was standing before me with a furious scowl on his face.
    â€œListen, prick,” he shouted, “there isn’t a mother in here that’s interested in this shit!”
    Moise heard him and delivered a slap to the face and a kick to the shin and he moved away, shouting, “Fuck off!”
    As he turned in the flickering candlelight, I noticed his ass in profile and exclaimed with astonishment to myself this histrionic thing: “What is life but a memory of asses and cunts you’ve been into?”
    (That isn’t at all true, you know, it was just an hysterical expletive of the libido.)
    The announcement is continuing as before.
    â€œI think I lived in something more like your world once, I mean a world of reason, but things became more and more untenable and I began to leave the room of that world and to retire into this one. I don’t know how long ago.”
    At this point most of the guests had begun to listen to the announcement but their facial expressions were curious beyond my failing power of description. I can only say there was nothing appropriate in their expressions with the single exception of the expression on the face of an actress named Invicta. Her face was attentive and comprehending: the faces of all the others were— I don’t know how to describe it. It was rather like they were in one of those bars in the Village where they show old silent comedies of the Keystone era.
    Moise was now mentioning things of a less abstract nature, relevant to her estrangement from the world of reason. She was saying, “My zinc white is exhausted and I have no more blue. I squeezed out my last bit of blue onto my last bit of canvas this last afternoon in my world. Also my black. Gone, too. My cup of turpentine could be mistaken for a cup of gumbo. My linseed oil, gone, gone, and as for my brushes, well, I can paint with my fingers but sometimes I think of my brushes as I remember—
please, are you listening to me?
You look at me so strangely that I can’t tell— I think of my dear canvas as of a gentleman who provided me with whatever means I had to continue subsistence. Gone, gone, too, eighty-seven at Bellevue.”
    She paused, clutching my shoulder in a paroxysm of emotion.

    â€œTo have possessed a patron who was a pauper has been the presence of God in my life, but now, oh, now— lived on security, died in charity, where is the poem God now? And the hope of new white, new blue, new black, or one more stretch of canvas?”
    I had now stopped repeating her whispers: there was no more breath in me, now, and nothing but, I am ashamed to admit this, but homesickness for the bed in the section of loft and Charlie’s fever to warm me.
    Much as I do love Moise, when someone you love departs altogether from the world of reason, dubitable as that world may be, you know, you are subject to such distractions from her condition, his condition, whatever, that you
    â€œMoise, please stop now, they’re all turning away and the Actress Invicta has collapsed to the