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must return.
    He leaps, and disappears in the Nile.
    ‘No!’ said Klein. ‘Oannes should stay and Antony should go! Poxy old Saint Antony. What did
he
ever teach that was any use to anyone?’ He looked again at Oannes hovering in the black. Was Oannes looking back at him? Were his eyes open or closed? So dim, his face! Klein thought of Oannes dying on a bed of mud, his pools filled in, his blackness gone, and shook his head. ‘But,’ he said, ‘but! Oannes didn’t die; his original self, his old self, his powerful self, moved into the head of Odilon Redon and compelled him to create a
noir
for him to live in. Oannes lives! Perhaps he will yet harden my matter, regulate my form, teach me to fish, to sow, to write. Perhaps he will teach me the history of the gods. Or something else. Are there pinks in the black? Greens and greys?’

8

Fear, Guilt, Violent Fantasies?
    ‘Well,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘it’s now two weeks since you did the Bender and the Rorschach tests. Looking back on that session, how do you feel about it?’
    ‘I still see Lucifer soaring high above me in pink and grey and green.’
    Mrs Lichtheim consulted her notes.
‘Days of Wrath,’
she said. ‘You said you almost heard that music while looking at the fallen angel far above you. Are you wrathful? Is there anger in you?’
    ‘Of course there is.’
    ‘Why of course?’
    ‘I don’t like being invisible, I don’t like being pushed off the pavement.’
    ‘You’re talking about now, but this anger in you, I think it goes further back than that; and it seems to me that you have to exert very strong control to keep it from bursting out.’
    ‘Well, you know, in seventy-two years a lot of resentments accumulate: the whole world changes, and every change I’ve seen has been for the worse. The only exception is residential parking in our street but I haven’t got a car.’
    ‘How do you feel about your mother?’
    ‘Why do you ask that?’
    ‘Because in you there seems to be fear of women, as well as anger and guilt.’
    ‘I think all men are afraid of women.’
    ‘But we’re talking about you.’
    ‘All right, I’m afraid of women. But I already know that and I’d like us to start dealing with the present problem.’ He was beginning to resent being steered by Mrs Lichtheim.
    ‘I think your fear of women is part of the present problem,’ she said. ‘Your inner voice is the superego; sometimes it keeps you from saying what you really think. Now it shuts down, maybe it’s tired of concealment; maybe now you are forced to hear yourself say what you really want to say. I think there are violent feelings in you, maybe violent fantasies.’ Again she looked at his folder. ‘You’re an art historian. Are you working on something now?’
    ‘I’m always working on something; I’m doing a study of the nudes of Gustav Klimt.’
    ‘Naked women.’
    ‘You can’t be nude without being naked.’
    ‘What’s the title of your study?’
    ‘Naked Mysteries: the Nudes of Gustav Klimt.’
    ‘Are naked women a mystery to you?’
    ‘They’re even a mystery to themselves; that’s why the Greeks celebrated those mysteries at Eleusis.’
    ‘Do you believe that work is the way to understand a mystery?’
    ‘Play won’t do it.’
    ‘Do you ever not work, just do nothing?’
    ‘When I knock off for the day around midnight I put my feet up and watch a video.’
    ‘You remember the first Rorshach blot, the motorcyclewith a man on either side but nobody in the driver’s seat? It didn’t fall over because its forward speed maintained its equilibrium.’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘Do you think you’ll fall over if you stop working for a week or a month?’
    ‘Why should I stop?’
    ‘Just for the pleasure of being without producing anything.’
    ‘I picked the wrong parents for that.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘Jewish immigrants from Russia, hot for self-improvement and offspring achievement. I drew well from the age of five so they laid it