Angelica's Grotto Read Online Free Page B

women, possibly princesses, dancing and changing, as they danced, into deer with antlers.
    He described two magicians at the end of a party, maybe a child’s birthday party, magically making fireworks before everyone went home.
    ‘Now,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘I will need to show you the cards again and ask you what you see and where you see it so I can make notes. This is part of the usual procedure.’ She had monochrome copies of the cards, and on these she circled and labelled the various parts of each blot according to his description. She was very painstaking about this, questioning him closely so that she was absolutely certain about what he saw and where in the blot he saw it.
    ‘This one, the transcendental one,’ he said when they came to it again, ‘I didn’t say it before but when I saw it I thought of Lucifer, the fallen angel. But even though he’s fallen he appears to be going up, way up, far away above me. Almost I hear music, looking at this one – the
Dies Irae
theme.’
    ‘Would you spell that, please,’ said Mrs Lichtheim.
    Klein spelled it.
‘Days of Wrath,’
he said.
    When Mrs Lichtheim had completed her notes she asked Klein to pick out the cards he liked the most and those he liked the least. He liked Lucifer and the two genies and the two dancing princesses best; he liked the bat and the bottomprint and the shark’s jaw least.
    ‘I’ll evaluate these and you’ll be hearing from us about your next appointment,’ said Mrs Lichtheim.
    Klein thanked her and walked home, still seeing Lucifer in pinks and greys and greens.

7

Fingers And Fins And Wings
    With Lucifer still soaring in his mind, Klein found himself cruising his bookshelves. He saw his hand go up and return with one of his own titles,
Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon.
He turned to No. 14 of the third series of lithographs illustrating Flaubert’s
The Temptation of Saint Antony:
Oannes with his serpentine body, human face, and pharaonic headdress, hovering in a blackness.
    He took the French edition of Flaubert from the shelves, turned to the Oannes page, and read his translation that was inserted there:
    Then appears a singular being, having the head of a man on the body of a fish. He advances upright in the air by beating the sand with his tail; and this patriarchal figure with little arms makes Antony laugh.
    ‘Redon’s Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘is not laughable; he is of the darkness, he is between the times of one thing and another.’ He read on:
    OANNES
    In a plaintive voice:
    Respect me! I have been here from the very beginning. I have lived in the unformed world where hermaphrodite beasts were sleeping under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of the dark waters – when fingers and fins and wings were mingled, and eyes without heads were floating like molluscs, among bulls with human faces and serpents with the paws of dogs.
    ‘Yes,’ said Klein: ‘a world of undifferentiated matter where nothing has found its final form and function and doesn’t know whether to swim or fly or walk. That’s how it is with me.’ He read on:
    Over this muddle of beings, Omoroca, bent like a hoop, extended her woman’s body. But Belus cut her clean in two, made the earth with one half, the sky with the other, and the two equal worlds contemplate each other.
    ‘Is there a sky in me?’ said Klein, seeing Lucifer high, high above him in pinks, in greens, in greys. ‘Is there an earth?’ He read on:
    I, the first consciousness of chaos, I have risen from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms, and I have taught humans fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods.
    ‘“Fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods,”’ Klein repeated, and read on:
    Since then I have lived in the pools that remain from the deluge. But the desert encroaches on them, the windfills them with sand, the sun dries them up; and I am dying on my bed of mud, looking at the stars through the water. I