XLII.
<She comes upon a book in one of the piles left tottering and ragged
some covered in small squares of cloth used now for years as occasional
tables. A stiff yellow card once laid between the leaves now proudly
proclaims itself marker. When she observes the card a tiny pain escapes
from her stomach and scuttles into her throat where it lingers,
throbbing>
- Master has thoughtfully left me a message <she murmurs to herself>.
<She pulls the book from between the others. They tumble to the floor in
a jumble, spines strained, pages folded over bent against each other they
lie in a random order near her feet. Her fingers insert themselves into
the pages and lever the book open where she reads the following passage
of future mourning past and present>
- I've just spent a terrifying year: my Thought has thought itself and
reached pure Concept. All that my being has suffered as a result during
that long death cannot be told, but, fortunately, I am utterly dead, and
the last pure region where my Spirit can venture is Eternity. My Spirit,
that recluse accustomed to dwelling in its own Purity, is no longer
darkened even by the reflection of Time.
Unfortunately, I've reached this point through a dreadful
sensitivity....But this was even more the case a few months ago, firstly
in my terrible struggle with that old and evil plumage, which is now,
happily, vanquished: my Master. But as that struggle had taken place on
his bony wing which, in death throes more vigorous than I would have
suspected him capable of, had carried me into the Shadows, I fell,
victorious, desperately and infinitely - until at last I saw myself again
in my Venetian mirror, such as I was when I forgot myself several months
before.
I confess, moreover, but to you alone, that the torments inflicted by my
triumph were so great, I still need to look at myself in that mirror in
order to think and that if it were not in front of this desk on which I
am writing to you now, I would become the Void once again. That will let
you know that I am now impersonal and no longer the Lynx that you knew -
but a capacity possessed by the spiritual Universe to see itself and
develop itself, through what was once me.
<She puts the book down, and looks up at her reflection in the mirror>
- Master can predict the future or I can do what sHe tells me. It's
neither here nor there <she recites to herself>. I am here and there, now
and then, image or concept, through what was once me. It is me, I
recognise an uncanny resemblance to what was once me, the one that died
its body replicated here.
<The telephone rings>
- Shall concepts answer the calling of a telephone? Let the mirror record
the event, while it simultaneously erases all trace.
<She walks to the telephone watching herself in the mirror>