close up - Monoskop

THI: CONTRIBUTION OF H.D. 725
Vol. II, no. 5 May 1928
EXPIATION
I was precipitated suddenly, after the sinuous run along the edge of Lake Geneva, unto
the cobbles of the formal irregularities of the Square of Saint Francis at Lausanne.
Thence, informed that the car couldn't take the little steep down-drop of the street of
Saint Francis, I was tumbled out dazed and exulted at the head of a sort of dimensional
dream-tunnel. I was precipitated between so to speak, built-up and somewhat over-done
little shops with windows and wares; oranges, boxes of leeks, lettuces on the pavement;
bright green shutters. Dazed and re-vitalized by the run, I plunged down this little
street somewhat reeling, making jig-jag to find just how those shadows cut just that
block (and that block) into perfect design of cobbled square and square little doorway
till I found myself at the entrance of a slice of a theatre, the Palace of Lausanne. I
couldn't go in, must climb the little street again like a fanatic bob-sleigh runner in
order again to run down. I so poignantly wanted to re-visualize those squares of doors
and shutters and another and another bit of detail that of necessity was lost at first that
I did illogically (I was already late) climb back. A boy rang obligingly across with a
baker's flat tray-basket and someone else urged a cat to climb off the topmost row of a
row of something that looked like the Concord grape-baskets we used to have in
Philadelphia. I ran up and down the scale, so to speak of visual emotion, of memory,
of visual sensation making that street and everyone of its little graduations a sort of
intellectual accordion from which to draw tunes, the sort of things one tries to put
down sometimes (but never quite succeeds in doing) after a particularly poignant
dream. It was of course too the sudden flood of mid-March sunlight that was
responsible for my heady intoxication and a bunch of somehow over-done (the whole
street was preposterous) bundles of daubed-in spring flowers; yellow and blue make the
grey and yellow of the street come back at one, back-fire again at one in its hectic
over-done insistence on the raw reality of beauty.
Well, it was hardly fair that after climbing up the narrowest of cinema theatre stairs,
I should find myself seated beside the 'others' who didn't have a breath left to gasp
'you're late you fool, you've been missing it' but one of them whispered like someone
before the high altar explaining to a neophyte 'it's Russian - it's Alaska'.
Someone had apparently killed someone. I had arrived when Siihne (Expiation) was
about one third over. Someone was heaving a weight of something and against an
upright ledge of mud, the rain poured and soaked and ran and gorged runnels in the
already over-soaked bit of bed earth. Bad lands, something wasted, wasteful, overdone
and done with. Rain poured over a slab of earth and I felt all my preparation of the
extravagantly contrasting out of doors gay little street, was almost an ironical intention,
someone, something 'intended' that I should grasp this, that some mind should receive
this series of uncanny and almost psychic sensations in order to transmute them
elsewhere; in order to translate them. Rains soaked across a slab of mud, runnels bored