THE DEAD
WRITERS
-407
say a cursed generation for it will not affirm. 0 hills hear thy pro–
phets Flint and Calder: gray
is
the color of my true prophecy,
dimmed the eye; the elevator soars to the marble hall and the end
of life is the office.
And Flint
will
never come. A certain closeness of relation to
your experience, Flint-no, I want to say this, let me-a certain
closeness, that
is
what they will want out of you later and so they'll
come back to you. A certain closeness of the ideal to the detail, a
special friction in the irony. No, in all honesty let us see ourselves:
when the fact
is
contrary to the ideal, we held-I following you–
we held the ideal so close that the fact simmered in the sun, was not
itself. I nearly following you.
I want to say-in a parenthesis-that I chose to set this down
because I thought it would help me to realize what I actually know
of these two days. But as I call it up every detail rather sprays out into
non-objectivity. I doubt all of it, and know none of it; even what I
want most to
be
certain of disappears. A shadow world ...
It
was that kind of world we came out into a few hours later. More
trucks, noise coming in closer. We got out in a terrible racket, but our
own stuff was making it.
\
We formed squads and took off, through a grove. I had the tripod-
I had the tripod was Crane's way, not good enough finally for
Flint. In every detail, the privated form, the opposite implied. There
is no incident without the contradiction and the contradiction-it
is inunutable-is worth supplying. One must cross from the general
principle to the observable facts on the wire of logic, but one must
come hack: thought racing from side to side at light's pace: neither
the fact nor the soul alone but the confluence. Flint and Calder,
scholiast skeptics: yes, of course; yes, of course.
And yet in the fullness, in the totality, in the fair land of Ness,
the ideal and the real are one. Flint said, Flint said. Hence Crane
is
not whole.
Or does a time occur when the whole
is
fact alone-the time
of Crane and the time of Oliver Allen the student? And in such
time,
in
any moment, this moment, when the word
is
disembodied
and I Calder discover my being in words only-in such time, is Calder
truly with but the shadow of a lie? Or can he simply not drink with
Flint. There is a difference.
