LMIV.

Jessi was right: Thad’s eyes searched her hungrily, wanting to interpret every movement as a sign that she was urging, inviting, tempting him closer; simultaneously he held the belief that she did not know he was there at all, and thus she remained, in his mind, an impenetrable, paradoxical siren, calling to him and not caring in the slightest whether he heard.

What a beauty she was, dancing there alone! Thaddeus, inches from her from torso to toe, felt ages away; she seemed alone on the dance floor and in the universe, a dancer who needed only music and herself. And again, simultaneously, he felt impossibly close to her, as if he were the only other person in her world. And it was, indeed, her world.

He saw in her both the woman he knew to be his friend, Harlow’s friend, Jessi Mühr with her fair skin and her dark paintings, her moody ways, her hidden smiles, which she sometimes bestowed on him when she thought no one was looking, though he could not possibly be sure what they meant; and he saw in her a stranger, a woman without a past, present only here, at Baci, for herself and possibly — could it be? — for him. He had seen her dance before; he had danced with her before, but it occurred to him now that her dancing was her art as well as her painting, she was breaking free; if she was not conscious of him there next to her it was because she was exploring the recesses of the universe through the portal of dance, as he had said she could, as he had said anyone could, if they chose. Ah, yes, he saw her spirit had risen past the atmosphere: the free, dovelike spirit of this woman who had so tragically argued against it, who had fought so valiantly and yet so chaotically on the side of emotion. Now she embodied the phenomenon he had described only hours earlier, that act of transcendence that requires both absolute denial and an unconditional acceptance of the self. To him it was a sign of acquiescence, of consent; where earlier she rejected him and logic, she now succumbed, she embraced, she accepted his theory and perhaps — might it be? — him.

As if he had proven his point all over again, he felt swell within him a satisfaction that is alien to the corporal pleasure of dancing, a triumph over ill reason purely intellectual, and he basked in his own success, unable, unwilling to retreat from its glamour. Immensely pleased with his powers of coercion, he immersed himself in the fruit of his philosophy, this beautiful woman dancing in front of him, the very essence, a demonstration, of transcendence, a balm to both his senses and his intellect, his body and his mind. He watched her still, pleased that she was wholeheartedly given to this state of being; she was dancing and alive with a fullness and vitality no emotion could beget, and to think (dare he think it? He dared:) that it was he who had brought her to it, like a wild, dying horse to cold water, cold, bubbling, flowing water: and she drank thirstily, naturally; like a spirit hitherto deprived of its nectar she drank.

For a moment he indulged lucidly in the memory of their discussion, that fateful discussion, his eloquence and fury, I do not wish to block out the sky! ah! To see her so heated, so passionately indisposed to his reasoning, to his offer, yet so endearingly incapable of articulating her frustration, to see her respond with such fervor (such!) was an unprecedented event (yes, he had evoked fervor in her, and something else, yes, of course); it filled him with pride and an insatiable urge to provoke her again, his profundity, her speechlessness, like stirring a flame: would she react? He basked in that lovely, cleansing memory: Is emotion neither good nor bad, indeed? What is emotion at all, then, but misfirings of the brain, so easily swayed by hormones and chaff, mere reflections of the stars, a grotesque, distorted illusion of reality, saboteur of good rhetoric and of fascination with the fantastic? What is this good and bad of which we so cavalierly speak, so sure of ourselves, as if they are but building blocks of our understanding of things, as if we cannot understand a thing not made of them?

But nothing, of course: like weather (he had said, so achingly eloquently), like falling in love, are the passing feelings of anger and melancholy and contentedness and cold and tired. Neutrality is everything; and oh, but everything is neutral; “good” and “bad” only appear in our interpretation of the events, of our feelings, which are so faultily based on our perception, a contorted lens. What a precarious thing on which to build a life — and by thus building, brick by brick, who could hope to reach the stars? No, it is because we categorize things as good and bad, as right and wrong, we seek to contain the universe in our minds, a universe as big as infinity itself, by imposing a constructed dichotomy onto it we try to force it into the minute shell of our brains, the ocean into a snail shell (and let naught few words be said on the beauty, the fragility of a snail shell, its proportions (what numbers again?), delicate because it is brittle, brittle because delicate, not unlike our minds, why, both are perfectly suited for their respective uses, but if one tries to contain the ocean into a shell, or the universe into a mind, but of course it will shatter, lose both its and the ocean's integrity, the beauty gone, and for what? for a misguided, emotion-based hypothesis); what a distorted portrait that gives our minds to think on, and thus our brains to act on! Good, bad, true, false! How silly, an illustrious folly/ like a child, indeed, like one of us. Do we not but draw a line and insist on pushing things sweatily to one side or the other, so that they bear these simple labels of black or white, thereby forbidding things to manifest their true colors? Perhaps because our minds are stubbornly (lazily?) stuck in this wretched chiaroscuro for so long, so much longer than we can remember (Too many metaphors! Too many possibilities: but please to stick with one/). Only allowing things to exist in our own system of classification, dismissing, denying anything that does not fit — how vain! Alas (thought he), how sadly we miss out on the glorious multitudinous creation by boiling everything within it down to one projected, empty characteristic or its opposite and refusing to see it on any other terms but only by the feeling it incites in us. I claim, nay I insist, I proclaim: Nothing, but nothing, is good or bad, neither death nor life nor love nor the sky; these things are simply themselves; without a human mind to impose on it such nonsense, it continues to be as it is — how freeing to allow it to be so! If a tree falls in the forest, does it bear moral implication? Are the other trees sad? But is anything in nature sad, or content, or bothered or stirred, or good or bad?

[High on the momentum of discovery, Thad’s magnificent, preposterous mind continued jubilantly:]

But that is why bad things happen so insistently to good people, causing thinkers and believers and prayers alike to cry out in indignant consternation over the metaphysical possibility of a benevolent god; that is why good things never cease to happen to the worst of people; in this new and galvanizing model of the neutral and endlessly beautiful undistorted universe, that sentence does not make but a capillary of sense! By crossing out the words that bear no meaning, one is left with the sentiment/the statement “things happen to people and things happen to people” (or if one wants to maintain that some people are inherently or deliberately good or bad (questionable at best) then one can even get away with “things happen to good people and things happen to bad people” — it matters not a scratch), which is true, but not worth saying; for those good and bad things which we perceive as blessings and atrocities are only things we feel particularly strongly about one way or the other (from another perspective we perceive (just as surely, surely) not the opposite but something completely different altogther, no? as the sun goes down from our perspective, does the earth not rotate from another's? and are those two events, from their respective perspectives, even remotely related?); we spend copious amounts of energy pushing them to one side of the dividing line we ourselves drew (which was worth saying, but not true: does it take much energy to think of things as good or bad? Is it equivalent to carting rocks, as in that (which?) circle of Hell? Perhaps not, on second thought; it is really quite natural — ah! because we are taught to do so, we are taught to expend our energy so, so it does not seem draining, but if we were taught not to, how impossibly enervating it would be in retrospect), never realizing that if only we erased the line we could spend those untapped energies creating new entities, new ideas, wings (!)—and not by building a stair to the heavens or by shuffling around objects of illusionary weight on the earth can we be free, be light, be lifted out of the confines, the cell of emotion, that pesky, damned, trickster, one-dimensional, jail cell emotion.