Read Online The Revolt of Aphrodite by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online

the spectrum of language itself, punctuated and valued, to yield at last the vatic tissue which owes little to ordinary looms. Now I know that everything is remediable, that finally somehow somewhere memory is fully recoverable. These thoughts then bursting on the surface of the mind in little bubbles of pure consciousness would provide red meat for the Lion—Abel’s raw aliment.
    Life is an image (Koepgen) of which everything is the reflection. All objects are slowly changing into each other—dead man to dead tree, to dead rock, to vine, to marl, to tan sand, to water, cloud, air, fire … a movement, not of dissolution but of fulfilment. (To fulfil is to fill full.)
    Chemical reincarnations by the terms of which we all become spare parts of one another—excuse the biblical echo. Abel roars and roars. Our modern oracle like the ancient is this steel animal: bronze bull, steel lion. His diagnosis is as follows: “This young man should read Empedocles again. Complexity, which is sometimes necessary,is not always beautiful; simplicity is. Yes, but after the last question has been asked and answered there will always remain something enigmatic about a work of art or of nature. You cannot drain la dive bouteille however much you try.”
    The object of Abel’s operation you see was never the manufacture of a factitious literature, no; but a way of remodelling sensation in order to place one in a position of “self-seizing”. Such words then become merely a novel form of heartbeat as they do for the poet. In “real” life. Has not Koepgen always called his poems “my little prayer-siphons”? Gradually I find my blundering way back through the stale curtains….
    Caradoc was there, musing over a drink, and looking somewhat gibbous after his exertions; Fatma had produced a manicure set and was touching up his square fingernails. He indicated a siphon and said: “Drink, boy, until you detonate the idea within you.” He was I thought a trifle detonated himself already. Inconsequential ideas trailed through his mind. He stroked the golliwog and extolled her “great bubbles of plenty”. Ugh! He enjoined her to give us a tune on her zither, and then without waiting for accompaniment sang softly, wearily:
    Ah take me back once more to find
    That pure oasis of neurosis called
    The Common Mind
    To foster and to further if I can
    The universal udderhood of man.
    Obscure associations led him to speak of Sipple. “Sipple was a clown once, a professional clown. Aye! I have seen him at Olympia come on with boots like soap-dishes and a nose like a lingam. His trousers furled like a sail and the whole man was held together by a celluloid dickey which rolled up like a blind and knocked him down. His greatest moment was when the second clown set fire to his privates with a torch. Talk about Latimer’s ordeal: you should have heard the ladies screech. But his proclivities were not those of the refined. His habits were rebarbative. There was a scandal and he had to retire. Now he lives in honourable retirement in Athens—don’t ask me on what. Even the firm can’t tell me that.”
    He broke off and gave a surprised roar, for in the furthest alcove in the room a figure which had been lying completely buried in cushions suddenly sat up and gave a yellow yawn. It was a dramatic enough entry on cue to satisfy Sipple’s sense of theatre—for it was he. His pale lugubrious face was creased with sleep; his small bloodshot eyes, full of a kind of street-arab meanness, travelled round the room in dazed fashion. Only when he saw Caradoc advance upon him with outstretched arms did a vague smile wander into his countenance . “So you got here” he piped, without much relish, hitching his tubular trousers on to sagging braces, and laughed chick chick. His face was alive with little twitches, tics and grimaces—as if it did not know into what expression to settle. No, it was as if he needed to stretch out the sleep-creased skin. He submitted