Swann Read Online Free PDF Page A

thanked God. Images can speak, yes, but some of us need to be directed toward the port of entry. Yet there’s never anything authoritarian about Peggy’s titles, just a nudging, helpful “Untroubled Night” or “Open Heart” or, the one I most admired yesterday, “Vision Intercepted.”
    Standing before “Vision Intercepted” with my glass of red wine in hand, I experienced that sharp electrical fusing that sometimes occurs when art meets the mind head-on. Beside me, sharing my brief flight of transcendence, were a yellow-haired woman in a rawhide jacket and my old friend Stephen Stanhope, the juggler. We didn’t speak, not even to exchange greetings, but instead continued to gaze. The moment stretched and stretched, the kind of phenomenon that happens so rarely that the experience of it must be cherished in silence and persuaded to linger as long as possible.
    And so, riding home on the bus, I gave myself over to the closed eye’s bright penetration, trying to call backthe image of Peggy O’Reggis’s circling, colliding lines and colours. A pattern or perhaps a sensual vibration began to dance across my retina and grope toward form. I summoned it, let it emerge, luxuriously let it have its way. But something kept spoiling my satisfaction, some nagging thought or worrying speck at the periphery of vision. I opened my eyes. The sun poured in the dirty windows, warming my arm. A woman with a blanket-wrapped baby on her lap sat across from me, a slender, long-necked black woman with amber eyes, clearly infatuated with her child’s beauty. With a free hand she stroked its knitted blanket. The baby made cooing sounds like a little fish and stared dreamily up into an advertisement for men’s jockey shorts. In the ad, a man with a bulging crotch was leaping over a bonfire, an expression of rapture on his daft face. He and the small baby and the baby’s mother and I seemed suddenly to form one of those random, hastily assembled families that are hatched in the small spaces of large cities and come riding atop a compendium of small pleasures. But today’s pleasures, pungent though they were, made me less willing than usual to surrender my earlier perception.
    What was it that was getting in the way? I poked part way into my subconscious, imagining a pencil in my hand. There was my usual catalogue of shame. Wasted time? Careless work? Had I forgotten to phone my mother?—no. Shopping to be done? Someone’s feelings hurt?
    Guilt has the power to extract merciless sacrifices, but it was not guilt that was interfering with my attempt to bring back the voluptuous sensation that briefly enclosed me in the Dearborn Gallery. It was something smaller and less formed, an act of neglect or loss that scuttled like an insect across my consciousness and that, because of the wine or the wooziness of the sunshine, I was unable to remember.
    Later it came to me. It was midnight of the same day. I was ready to go to bed, but first I was locking the doors, checking the windows, turning out the lights, listening to the silence and darkness that blew through the house. My thoughts were of Mary Swann, how she must also have performed night rituals, though not the same ones as mine. I tried to imagine what these rituals might be. Might she have looked out the kitchen window into the windy, starry night, trying to guess at the next day’s weather? Would she hook a screen door or perhaps set a kettle of soup or oats on the back of the woodstove? Perhaps there was a cat or dog that had to be let out, though she had never in her poems or in her notebook mentioned such a cat or dog.
    And then I remembered—Lord!—what had been begging all day to be remembered. It was Mary Swann’s notebook, which I keep on a bookshelf over my bed. I had not seen it there for several days.
8
    In a sense I invented Mary Swann and am responsible for her.
    No, too literary that. Better just say I discovered Mary Swann. Even Willard Lang admits (officially, too)