but it now throbbed, tensed, urged into emptiness, into nothingness . . . the images remained images, abstractions; the emotions dissolved in their own echo; the juices produced shot back and operated as poisons: the nourishing juices of abstraction—

what remained was an impatience that snorted, stamped, reared like a stallion: a powerless desire to realize myself, to redeem myself in some way from this existence in a vacuum; from this life in abstractness, which my brain mass reflected for me before immediate life.

What the hell had happened anyway? I had once again mislaid, lost, destroyed a note—in any case, done away with it. Who cares? What was it anyhow? Some hot air about art.

Art. When I hear the word, I first see Gaia before me: Gaia in a flowery hat. Whenever a conversation spirals up into cultural heights, I see Gaia before me with that hat: a giant chocolate doll with a peony cake on its head. Gaia, the powerful, the splendid-bodied: a dark height of six feet, seventy-seven kilograms live weight, one hundred fifty-four pounds of mahogany-brown, vanilla-scented mulatto flesh, shimmering corn-gold at the curve tips and darkening to brownish violet in the shadowy spheres, corseted, ruffled, bowed, and ribboned into a gigantic sofa doll: chubby little hands raised delicately with crooked pinkies, as though wielding a small, invisible baton to accompany her precocious, amazingly knowledgeable, extraordinarily suave and sophisticated sentences . . . The whole thing superdimensional, however; gigantic: Gaia, the chocolate caryatid, bearing upon her head the dusty, disheveled, magnificent patchwork array of blossoms, the blossoms of Refined Culture . . .

And because her skin was earth-brown covered with corn-gold and not anemically colorless; because the mystery of a different race flashed in her enameled eyes, in the glittering rows of her teeth, in the mirroring patent-leather of her hair, denouncing every word of her cultural blabber, giving it a wild, unused naturalness, a red originality of the blood, which still surged under paw strokes and predatory shrieks, close to the earth, which craved to drink it up—because, of all these things, she was barbarously beautiful, cannibalistically ornamental. . .

Yes! She could afford to chitchat about art. It suited her, the misunderstanding that makes the holy effort of banning chaos appear to us as an intellectual competitive sport. It complemented her resplendent exoticism, made it poetic: palm-filled atolls fanning on the blue sea, sugarcane plantations rustling under aromatic breezes, sails billowing: the word “culture” regained its literal meaning: became colonial . . . A Negro in a leopard-skin loincloth is a savage, but a Negro wearing a tuxedo dickey and starched cuffs becomes a poetic picture-book Negro: becomes art—while a lymphatic paleface prattling on about art, a watery-eyed mealworm-skull, who attaches to it reflections on the philosophy of culture—why, these are mere particles in the vomit that this mortally ill white race keeps throwing up—

And I have bathed in this vomit: have taken it for dragon’s blood that makes the skin invulnerable—alas, a linden leaf dropped between Siegfried’s shoulder blades (from the arbre par-dessus le toit, perhaps, who knows?) from somewhere out there in the golden blueness that filled the fog yesterday and is now so brightly illuminating the shadows in the air shaft . . .