close up - Monoskop

166 CLOSE UP
Vol. I, no. 4 October 1927
CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE
IV
A THOUSAND PITIES
It was the winter's strangest happiness, coming into mind with autumn's first dead
leaves and forgotten only at the budding of the new green. Its great day brought
together by magic a concourse of people to sit in wedding garments at the gate of
heaven, blithely chattering until the golden air became moonlight and a breathless
waiting for the swish of curtains gliding open upon heaven itself. Sometimes puzzling
but always heaven and its inhabitants celestial; save at those moments when one of the
blessed, turning from his blissful mystery, came down to the footlights and sang at us,
incomprehensible songs that quenched the light and brought strange sad echoes such
as we knew on earth. Heaven recovered when the celestial being went back into his
place, and was lived in until the end, incalculably far away. And after the end there was
a fresh beginning, a short scene made of swift and dreadful moments, charm and
mystery and shock, just outside heaven's closed gates. A little troop of beings,
half-earthly, born of the earlier scenes, romped close at hand in a confined space before
a fagade of earthly houses. Harlequin, lightly leaping, snaky, electric, sweetly-twirling
Columbine, lolloping Pantaloon with sad, frightened mouth. Swish-whack. Shocks
unfortellable. Bangs of exploding fleas. Ceaseless speechless movement, swift leaping,
whirling, staggering, light and heavy together making strange shapes in the diminished
light until the immortals vanished and we were down on solid earth with the largefooted
policeman, the nursemaid and the perambulator and infant, funny and dreadful on a
scene where the power of the vanished immortals still worked and brought us joyous
moments: the moment of the falling of a house-front, the squashing and the sight, a
moment later, of the squashed, flat upon the centre of the stage.
We knew that everything happening after the immortals had vanished was out of
place and if the mortals in their foolishness had been all that we saw, the scenes no
matter how short, meaning nothing, would have brought weariness. But we gazed
without weariness because we saw somewhere within the stilted speechless pasteboard
movements something of the glory that had passed. Our eyes were still full of the last
scene in heaven from which the lively celestials who came down to dance in the street
had been created, the opening of the heaven of heavens in the Transformation Scene
where everything and everyone had assembled in a single expanded shape, shimmering,
flower-like, that slowly moved in changing form and colour, stretching out attention to
the uttermost lest some lovely thing be missed. It foretold the end of beauty but was
itself endlessly beautiful, holding us to its eternity by its soundlessness. If any part of
it had broken into sound, its link with us would have been snapped, its spell broken. Of
its moving stillness and our own that it compelled was born something new, a movement