"True education is a matter of the heart, and that is good enough for me."
- Toulouse Lautrec.
Let us shuffle off into the ether, or sit side by side unspeaking. I can wrestle no more with melody or word, for they are too smothering and obnoxious for this; they are too much like wire and wood; they are too much something organic and tangible. What amplitude I often glimpse in the extremities of thought; what space I see, when, like a shipwrecked man, I glance out beyond the ambit! Yet seated here as biotic nets of ear and nail, there is no leeway; there is not a keyhole; there is only the symmetry of line, and the fury of logical angles, and the tempestuous flaring of colour, so that we cannot see each other and murmur, 'Death!'
Death the idea is among you and I, but we weary of such notions like children ill of play; death the bestial face, death the angel, death the reprieve. I have sketched and painted death in the folds of dancers' skin; you have written of it shyly and embedded it in songs. It is the knowable death; the personified death; but it is not death, and it is not what is truly between us now, seated here, with the light coming in. Death is not even red, it is not even white, and it is not even what I think you recall momentarily, wincing as you do, and imagining finespun features and refined hands and the delicate scent of privacy. Death is not that; I know it is not; and yet, I do not know what death is, and I fear it, as do you.
The afternoon is warm yet bright; winter is shrugging off, it seems, and hastening into warmth. What could be more composed than the yellow of light in my studio; what more sedate and ordinary than that? Life beyond is tuned low and unexceptional, fretted as always with artists and cafes and girls. It seems dirty to you, I understand; monochrome and twisted and sick, and not electric, not dazzling, not palpitating happily as you thought it was. But what has changed? Nothing, to the accordion player, and little else to the skulkers, the painters and the dead; nothing to those outside, who go on unsteadily as before, tripping over life as if mistakenly. It is only to you, and perhaps to me, and some three or four others who will care momentarily, who will pause for a moment, who will cock their heads and venture on.
You know I will be leaving soon, but you say nothing, and so we sit in my studio unspeaking. Your eyes are uncharacteristically lusterless; your expression qualmish and grey. You are like the stripped pelt of some beast, or the cortex of an organ; you are cadaverous, you are motionless; and, being negligible in this way, you do not warrant so many comparisons; it is I who over compensate and name you; it is I, the ugly gnome, who boosts you, and it is I, failing and clumsy, who cannot look at you now, and murmur 'Death!', and save you.
But I, you imagine, am always lumbering in the aftermath of inebriation, and cannot be taken seriously; I think now only as a ghost must think, whirling disembodied round the room; mourning my limbs and lamenting my state, and weeping at what I cannot touch and rescue; Lautrec is posthumous, he is dead already, he is beyond the scope of resurrection; confine him, banish him; incarcerate the shrimp! Is that what you think? No; I do not believe so.
Though I have built around myself a caravan of drinkers and shows and witticisms, I am isolated. Though I have been shackled to company for months, I am solitary. How I always love to penetrate to the heart of a thing; to betray its honesty, beyond tiresome monikers and names! And yet now the fog is too fierce; the procession of strange days too violent and confused; and alone we sit together, two outcast germs side by side and unattached.
I came to my studio and found you as you are; neither welcoming nor warm, but honest in your wreckage. Your innocence is now of another kind; it is not the incorruption of twinkling boyhood, but the honed inculpability and bizarre freedom of the human being. It is the innocence of drunkards and liars; it is the innocence that is truth, and the truth that is life itself. Ah, but how things grow garbled in my head!
Soon I will be on the sea, away from Paris and the moaning streets. I will be sharp and witty and sarcastic and clean; I will be an exclusion, an anomaly to strangers, but also I will be connected to both you and to the world. And while I breathe the keen air, you will sit among bottles and fag ends and the words that stack up and up about you, and together we may live - edging shakily along the brink - or die.
Now I stand up and fall into the rhythm of my body, webbing my dissatisfied heart and sinews together. You rise with me.
"I'll--I'll walk with you," you offer solemnly, and very softly; not looking at me directly, but rather behind, above, to the side, out the window; you gaze on the lint, the packed belongings, the sky outside; but not at me, as if wary of that murmur.
"Ah, you will simply slow me down!" I joke feebly, and ironically, chuckling as I do. "They breed us tough in Toulouse, eh? How could anyone keep up!"
But this is too obviously derogatory; too blatantly satirical and almost bitter to be humourous, and interjected into too sober a moment. You smile awkwardly, sensing this somehow fully; your features fatigued and unfixed; your look vaulted and incalculable; and as your lips inch upwards, I note a glimmer of weakness in your crevices; a flinch that evinces our terror; a flicker of actuality, or something else. And for a moment I am frozen; for a moment I am steadfast; and I think we are going to look at each other and murmur 'Death!', and that the world then will expand indefinitely and immortalise us all; that what is dark and black and gnawing will emerge in pools of reality; that what is genuinely red-headed and white-skinned will egress from the dusk and return to fold us close; and so I look at you in fear, and awe, and trembling anticipation. And you, Christian, blink and look away.
disclaimer - Moulin Rouge! isn't mine, you see, so you can have it and I won't mind. But that Baz Luhrmann chap might.
a/n - I'm not sure where this came from or if it is even coherent. But I do love Toulouse. Yes. Ahem.