THE JAIL
497
Stevens, the town lawyer and the county amateur Cincinnatus, was
wont to say, if you would peruse in unbroken-ay, overlapping–
continuity the history of a community, look not in the church reg–
isters and the courthouse records, but beneath the successive layers
of calsomine and creosote and whitewash on the walls of the jail,
since only in that forcible carceration does man find the idleness
in which to compose, in the gross and simple terms of his gross and
simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of
his gross and simple heart); invisible and impacted, not only be–
neath the annual inside creosote-and-whitewash of bullpen and
cell, but on the blind outside walls too, first the' simple mud-chinked
log ones and then the symmetric brick, not only the scrawled illiter–
ate and repetitive unimaginative doggerel and the perspectiveless
almost prehistoric sexual picture-writing, but the images, the pano–
rama not only of the town of its days and years until a century
and better had been accomplished, filled not only with its muta–
tion and change from a halting-place: to a community: to a set–
tlement: to a village: to a town, but with the shapes and motions,
the gestures of passion and hope and travail and endurance, of the
men and women and children in their successive overlapping gen–
erations long after the subjects which had reflected the images were
vanished and replaced and again replaced, as when you stand say
alone in a dim and empty room and believe, hypnotised beneath
the vast weight of man's incredible and enduring
Was,
that perhaps
by turning your head aside you will see from the corner of your
eye the turn of a moving limb--a gleam of crinoline, a laced wrist,
perhaps even a Cavalier plume--who knows? provided there is
will enough, perhaps even the face itself three hundred years after
it was dust-the eyes, two jellied tears filled with arrogance and
pride and satiety and knowledge of anguish and foreknowledge of
death, saying no to death across twelve generations, asking still
the old same unanswerable question three centuries after that which
reflected them had learned that the answer didn't matter, or-better
still-had forgotten the asking of it-in the shadowy fathomless
dreamlike depths of an old mirror which
has
looked at too much
too long;
But not in shadow, not this one,
this
mirror, these logs: squatting
