Because of his confidence in the natural movements of the planets, a pattern all arranged beforehand by some humorous astrologer, he always showed a smiling face in this lantern slide of life in Paris, and felt no strings of bondage, of restraint, and no tightrope walking as the others did.

From the first moment when he had cut utterly the umbilical cord between himself and his mother by running away from home at the age of fourteen and never once returning, he had known this absence of spools, lassos, webs, safety nets. He had eluded them all.

Thus in the sky of the café tables rotating, the others circled around him to drink of his gaiety, hoping to catch his secret formula.

Was it because he had accepted that such an indifference to effort led men to the edge of the river, to sleep under bridges, was it because he had decided that he did not mind sleeping under bridges, drinking from the fountain, smoking cigarette butts, eating soup from the soup line of the Hospital de la Santé?

Was this his secret? To relinquish, to dispossess one's self of all wishes, to renounce, to be attached to no one, to hold no dream, to live in a state of anarchy?

Actually he never reached the last stage. He always met someone who assumed the responsibility of his existence.

But he could sense whoever unwound from the center of a spool and rewound himself back into it again at night, or the one who sought to lasso the loved one into an indissoluble spiral, or the one who flung himself from heights intent on catching the swing midway and fearful of a fatal slip into abysms.

This always incited him to grasp giant scissors and cut through all the patterns.

He began to open people before the café table as he opened bottles, not delicately, not gradually, but uncorking them, hurling direct questions at them like javelins, assaulting them with naked curiosity.

A secret, an evasion, a shrinking, drove him to repeat his thrusts like one hard of hearing: what did you say?

No secrets! No mystifications allowed! Spill open! Give yourself publicly like those fanatics who confess to the community.

He hated withdrawals, shells, veils. They aroused the barbarian in him, the violator of cities, the sacker and invader.

Dive from any place whatever!

But dive!

With large savage scissors he cut off all the moorings. Cut off responsibilities, families, shelters. He sent every one of them towards the open sea, into chaos, into poverty, into solitude, into storms.

At first they bounced safely on the buoyant mattress of his enthusiasms. Jay became gayer and gayer as his timid passengers embarked on unfamiliar and tumultuous seas.

Some felt relieved to have been violated. There was no other way to open their beings. They were glad to have been done violence to as secrets have a way of corroding their containers. Others felt ravaged like invaded countries, felt hopelessly exhibited and ashamed of this lesser aspect of themselves.