The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemasby Rosemary TonksI have lived it, and lived it,My nervous, luxury civilisation,My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.…Their idea of literature is hopeless.Make them drink their own poetry!Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and heGets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in hereAnd digs himself into the sofa.He stays there up to two hours in the hole − and talks− Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everythingIt’s…damnably depressing.(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burningIn the little dish…And when he calls out: ‘Ha!’Madness − you no longer possess your own furniture.)On my bad days (and I’m being brokenAt this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and heBecomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw…I grow coarser; and more modern (I, who am driven madBy my ideas; who go nowhere;Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)All right. I admit everything, everything!Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s illAt the last minute; and they fly inA new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help herWith her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!He wants to help her with her arias!No, I…go to the cinema,I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the streetIs like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemasWhere the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,The screen is spread out like a thundercloud − that bangsAnd splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,And in the silence, drips and crackles − taciturn, luxurious.…The drugged and battered PhilistinesAre all around you in the auditorium…And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,He wants to make me think his thoughtsAnd they will be enormous, dull − (just the sortTo keep away from).…when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smokingAnd he wants to face the international situation…Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!− All this sitting about in cafés to calm downSimply wears me out. And their idea of literature!The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.I have lived it, and I know too much.My café-nerves are breaking meWith black, exhausting information.
Sunday, January 8, 2023
The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment