Adventures In Immediate Irreality Read Online Free PDF Page A

depths.
    But I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Having reached the
water, I would run past the husk pile at the same speed and continue downstream to a
hollow in the bank. The hollow formed a small cave, a cool, shaded grotto like a
room carved out in the rock. I would go in and fall to the ground, drenched in
sweat, dead tired, and trembling from head to toe.
    Having recovered a bit, I would enjoy the grotto’s familiar and
enormously pleasant decor. There was a spring bubbling forth from the rock, running
along the ground, and forming a pool of perfectly limpid water in the middle of the
pebbles. I would never tire of leaning over the pool and gazing at the delightful
lace of green moss on the bottom, the worms caught on slivers of wood, the scraps of
rusty old ooze-covered metal, the myriad animate and inanimate objects in the
fantastically beautiful water.
    Outside those two cursed places, the town sank into a
uniform and banal mass of houses easily interchangeable and trees exasperatingly
immobile, of dogs, vacant lots, and dust.
    In closed rooms, however, crises took place with greater ease and frequency. I could
not tolerate being alone in a strange room. When forced to do so, I would, within a
very few minutes, fall into a sweet but terrible swoon. The room itself prepared the
way: a warm, welcoming sense of intimacy would filter down from the walls and spread
over all the furniture, every object. All at once the room was sublime and I felt
happy there. Yet that was nothing but a ruse on the part of the crisis: a subtle,
perverse little trick it played. After this moment of bliss things went topsy-turvy
and confusion reigned. I would peer around me wide-eyed, but things had lost their
usual meaning: they were awash with their new existence. It was as if someone had
removed the fine, transparent paper they had been wrapped in till then, and suddenly
they looked new beyond words. They seemed destined to be put to new, superior,
fantastic uses beyond my power to divine.
    But there was more: the objects were seized by a veritable frenzy of freedom, and the
independence they declared of one another went far beyond simple isolation to
exultation, ecstasy. Their enthusiasm for living in a new light encompassed me as
well: I felt powerful bonds linking me to them, invisible networks making me every
bit as much of an object, a part of the room, as they were, the way an organ grafted
onto a living organism goes through subtle physical metamorphoses until it becomes
one with the body once foreign to it.
    Once during a crisis the sun sent a small cascade of rays onto the wall like a golden
artificial lake dappled with glittering waves. I also saw the corner of a bookcase
of large, leather-bound volumes behind glass. And in the end these true-to-life
details, perceived from the distance of my swoon, stupefied and stunned me like a
last gulp of chloroform. It was what was most humdrum and familiar in the objects
that disturbed me most. The habit of being seen so many times must have worn out
their thin skins, and they sometimes looked flayed and bloody to me—and alive,
ineffably alive.
    The climax of the crisis would occur when I began floating above the world, a
condition at once pleasant and painful. At the first sound of footsteps the room
reverted to its original state: things fell back into place, and I noted an ever so
slight, all but imperceptible reduction in its exaltation, which gave me to believe
that the certitudes I lived by were separated from the world of incertitudes by only
the flimsiest of membranes.
    I would awake in my old familiar room, bathed in sweat, exhausted, and fully aware of
the futility of the things surrounding me but observing new details in them, as we
sometimes discover a novel feature in something we have used every day for years.
The room retained a vague memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of sulfur after
an explosion. Gazing at the bound books behind the bookshelf glass, I