Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Chapter 2 - from 1983
There was a jangling of nerves which matched the crash of the alarm. A near wet-dream that left Howie awake in a confused state of loose-ends. It would have been depressing, and left him dull for the morning, if he had not planned to be awake by 4:00 AM. Quietly down the stairs, feeling just a little excited because no one does this sort of thug. It was an idea. A kind of revenge on the stupid world. And the excitement would last for many weeks. Up the ass of the stupid world for not knowing anything about the world at four in the morning.
To the basement, where he would pump up the tires as well as his awareness. Feeling that paradoxical lethargy that couldn't grip a pencil, but can force great strokes into a pump until the fingers, too, regain their awakened state. In his bicycling shorts. He would ride hard until the morning chill was gone. He laced up the pointy shoes that looked like ballerina slippers and stumbled out the door on his heels so as not to make noise with the metal cleats that were fixed under the balls of his feet for gripping the pedals.
It was incredibly barren at four in the morning. Not the barrenness of a late drunk, when the world has gone to sleep, but the barrenness of a still world about to arise. He usually passed only a couple of cars before reaching the country-side. The dawn would stop him dead on the side of the road. From a hilltop, with nothing but drive -- or escape -- in his stomach, he would hallucinate the rosy dawn. Ail tired from the ride and the chill, when his breathing began to calm itself and the wonderful calm of fatigue would settle into his limbs -- then the world would awaken, and he too felt renewed.
The true night-time occurred in school. He would have showered and eaten his breakfast in time to be just late for the bell. There were nightmares of falling asleep as his name was being called. There was the impossibility of telling anyone who he was. When his name was called, he usually had the right answer. That was from the desperate discipline he had evolved for taking stock of the immediate situation. The learning was painfully simple, and he had no energy to delve beyond the requirements of the moment. A quick mind developed to escape the drudgery of having to work on the solution. It was just those right answers which also made it impossible for him to identify himself. He was impossibly square. Bicycle riding in the morning is like reading Shakespeare at lunch. That was the nature of high-school.
There came to be a plan in his bicycle riding after a while. It started unwittingly, but gradually took on a scheming quality. All that aloneness that drew him out at desolate hours to empty roads along which he could never be released but would be compelled to return for the morning bell; all that aloneness might have had, were he to know, as its object something more easily found among the ranks in school. He came to have a reason for not announcing his morning rides. The consequence was that he lost his nobility. It was no longer the lack of comprehension of those around him that forced his mouth shut, but the deeper shame that they would understand all too well. It was a true loss. He could no longer relish his aloneness nor its secrets.
She (yes she) was riding a horse one morning near the top of a hill at dawn. She had turned off the road along a farm track toward a small peak. The dawn was breaking in a halo around her, which left her and the horse in a black silhouette. Nothing was recognizable.
The aura was that of a girl, however, and Howie's pace was broken as he whirred silently past. He would have been embarrassed if she'd seen him, yet she would bring him back to that spot many times. He hadn't seen her for a week, and supposed that she had only been riding that once. It was a silly thing, and it ruined the composure of his rides. The dawn was lacking in its magic. He didn't know why, but it didn't feel as simple. Now there was the confusion of a fantasy meddling with the lonely impulse of his morning drives.
On a Saturday, when it was dangerous to ride -- not physically dangerous, but psychically dangerous because others would be about on their day off -- he had stopped on the road near the spot where he had seen her. The fantasy had worn off, and something of the stark beauty of the dawn was promising to return. He must have been breathing hard not to have heard her riding over in the grass.
"Hullo."
If the sun had greeted him he wouldn't have been more startled. As it was, he had no time to be anyone other than who he was.
"Good Morning." The red of the dawn and in any case the flush of his early morning exertion would have covered any blush that was forming. When he looked in the mirror later that morning, he knew how ridiculous he must have looked in his cycling clothes. There are none more unflattering. But this had set her at ease -- like coming across the school heartthrob in his job at his father's grocery.
"I'm glad to see someone else out here to watch the sun rise. If nobody comes, it might get forgotten, don't you think?" she asked him.
He was more than a little put-off by the horse. He didn't know what to do with it. "I come out almost every morning," he said, immediately wondering that he could let that slip. "It's fantastic to be out riding when no-one else is around," he tried to recover, but fell deeper. Now for-ever his solitude was broken on those morning rides. His shyness had proven an ineffective shield. Well, then what of it?
"Do you really come out on your bicycle every day?"
"Well, lately I have been. I'm kind of in training."
How could he let that one slip? No-one could have pried it from him. It was a crazy secret that he hardly dared to admit to himself. But here in the anonymity of a chance encounter, it slipped out. A chance encounter which in reality has the only power to bare our souls.
Damn it, I can't do it. Can I call you Rick?
"Sure, Howie. But what do you mean? I was beginning to get interested. Oh, I know -- it couldn't have happened that way. You're making your own life too big. Is that it?"
Well actually, she sat behind me in class. And he told her about the bike rides. But it might have happened that way. I mean, that's the burden of this whole business. It might have, but it didn't. 0 how am I going to get the reader to trust me? How?
"Wait a minute, Howie. You're not writing this anymore. You're telling it. This is your life. Remember? That was your idea, not mine."
I'm a little mixed up. My pen fell in the bilge. That's a good sign that I ought to give up.
"I may be getting a little ahead of myself, but doesn't that go against the burden of your argument?"
I'm not sure. But I'm ahead of myself too. I haven't moved onto the boat yet.
"Whoops"
Jackie was her name, and she sat behind him in class. And she did ride horses.
"Did you really ride eighty miles before coming to school today? I can't believe it."
"Sure." He made a quick mental calculation. Yeah, it's got to be forty miles out to Gowanda and another forty back. Later he checked on a map to make sure. Well, 67 miles. Close enough.
"Wow. Don't you get tired?"
He never knew how to respond to this sort of thing. It was just what he wanted, of course, but it always left him with unclear feelings about himself. Usually, he'd begin with some self-defeating remark, but by the end of the conversation, he'd have made certain that the other person knew perfectly well the extent of his feat. Exaggeration came naturally, though without malice of intent. He was just trying very hard to get people to believe him.
"Not after the first few miles. I ride for about twenty miles before I find my rhythm. At that point I'm really dead, but if I just keep going it gets automatic. Well, by the time I get home I can barely walk, but it's a fantastic feeling."
If anyone let him, he would go on for hours talking about himself, not out of pride really, but just because he wanted someone to know. He'd get all caught up in the telling until he'd made something out of the telling even for himself -- especially for himself. Things were more real in the telling.
"The roads are deserted in the morning that early. It's incredible. I mean, you can hear everything -- the birds. That's when they get up. It's so fantastic to watch the sun come up. Really fantastic."
But, like all good listeners, she had been hearing her own story -- interpolated. It was sometimes an effort for him to let someone else tell their story. He wasn't always a good listener, or rather his personal interpolation took shape before the story was finished. But he was kept quiet by her femaleness.
"I've been out riding -- I mean horseback -- at dawn too. I go up in the woods on some dirt roads I know. It's so beautiful. You can smell the ground waking up. The smell of wet leaves, with little scurrying sounds all through them. 0 I love the little bunnies. I've seen a fox once. Lots of deer."
Howie was getting embarrassed. Bunnies? This was getting too personal. He almost crawled back. But he, too, knew the beauty of the woods, and it bothered him that the bicycle was limited to the pavement.
"I wish I could get off the road, but I've got to get into the country, and I can't drive a damn car. You can't walk in bicycle shoes, either.
"Bicycle shoes? What's wrong with sneakers?"
"They have a steel sole, so the pedal doesn't dig in. You'd get really sore feet if you wore sneakers. Besides, they have a kind of a clip on them so you can pull back on the pedal without slipping out. It's amazing how much more efficient it is to ride with bike shoes."
He would go on about the intricacies of a bicycle's construction. She was fascinated not at all by the information, and not so much by his obvious knowledge, as by the obvious involvement he had. He really wanted her to understand. Of course she didn't, and that would only frustrate him enough to try again from a different angle. He knew how a bicycle worked -- the best way to work the pedals, how to use the gears to keep a steady, eazy rhythm, how the structure was made perfect for an even distribution of stress throughout its miniscule weight. The theories of ball-bearings and tires -- where most of the friction was built up. That's why he used sewn-up, glued-on tires. Most people don't understand, so they think it's a bother. You can't tell the difference if you're coasting along slowly, but try getting up some speed down a big hill. You take right off, man. Really, there's a big difference. Really. He wanted her to understand.
And she wanted to. It was the silent obligation of his unspoken entreaties that she understood, which attracted her to Howie. He wasn't very desireable. Handsome enough, but something which he felt too, that made the girls look at other guys. He wore his aloneness like a suit of armor, and beneath it what attractions he had were not enhanced. She didn't like him in a helpless way. She just felt a kind of obligation.
Eventually, he found out where she lived. There wasn't really an invitation or anything, but his bicycle gave him a bit of freedom, and he rode out there one Saturday. He rode up to the barn, hoping to find her there before having to ask at the house. He'd brought along a pair of sneakers, and wore denim cutoffs, though they're murder on the crotch and chafe your thighs. It was early, and he wore the scarlet flush of the wind which he couldn't help feeling made him cute.
He found her there. He was trying to like the smell of manure. He knew he could, but he had grown up in a household where chemical smells were preferred, and he had to watch where he stepped no matter how nonchalant he wanted to be. She was at work on "Snoopy" with the brushes.
"Hi ."
"0 Hi, Howie. Gosh. Did you ride all the way here?"
His cheeks were already blushing from the wind. O, it was nothing. Really a pretty easy ride. He tried to pet the horse, not quite knowing what you do with horses. It was so huge. He felt crushed to be near it.
"Is this your horse?"
"Yeah. This is Snoopy. Say 'hi' Snoopy."
"How 'ya doin' Snoop?" A goofy horse-look tried to find its way onto Howie's face, but didn't quite manage. He'd ridden a horse a long time ago -- as a kid. But this one had an English saddle. He didn't quite want to get into that. "I always thought English riding looked kind of silly." I mean why not just ride the thing.?
Jackie wasn't into the kind of long explanations she'd gotten from Howie. "When I learned to ride, that's the way they taught. All serious riding is English-style. You just bounce around in a Western saddle. That's for cowboys. I don't know, it's just the way I learned. I like riding that way. It feels right."
"Well, I don't know a thing about horses. Wow, look at all this stuff. OK if I take a gander?" He liked these kinds of phrases that you might have picked up from your grandfather. Whenever he got a kick out of something, he took it on himself; certain that it would enhance his bearing with others. Anybody was an authority except him. He would act like likeable people, and didn't really notice that nobody got a kick out of the thing when he did it. It was somebody else's garment, and didn't look right on him. But it made it easier to say things.
He loved the old machinery hanging about in the barn. He'd always longed for a barn like this, where he could tinker away and build things. In his own house, there was only the basement, which he'd taken over for as long as he could remember. He always had something going on down there. Chemistry sets and go-carts and gadgets -- things whose basic principles he could exploit until he got something new. He was limited in his knowledge and materials, and so tried the impossible with what was at hand.
Now here were engines of all sorts -- wheels, wrenches, saws; even a welding outfit. "Does you father farm?"
"No, but my grandfather used to. Hey, you want to go for a walk or something?"
"Sure."
"Just a sec. I'll tell my parents."
Oh no. Now he was going to have to meet her family. He couldn't have imagined bringing her to his house. He'd be deadly embarrassed. "Is she your girlfriend, Howie? Howie's got a girl friend. Howie's got a girlfriend." Girlfriends were like drinking beer. Immature people had them. They flirted and they shifted around. It just didn't seem real to Howie. He overheard stories of weekend exploits. Once he heard someone saying with vicarious bragging, how so-and-so had come running out of the woods dangling a spent rubber, after carrying the girl away over his shoulder. He didn't like that. It was disgusting somehow. He really couldn't conceive. Sex without love. It hurt his sense of meaning deep down.
As he was waiting around the barn, he was remembering another barn. Just flits of memory that he chased away. But we'll give the details here so you know who he is. It was with the boy-scouts. They were off camping on an old farm that belonged to the friend of one of the scoutmasters. There were big fantastic cornfields that hadn't been cut, so you could play perfect versions of those innocent boy-scout army games. It was a natural maze with infinite possible patterns. Howie was a goody-goody of sorts in school, but in the boy-scouts he had a kind of rank. Probably because he'd gone camping a lot with his father, he knew more about these things and gained a natural respect from the scoutmaster that was grudgingly echoed by the rest of the kids.
Still, he had to keep that respect by making forays out of the bounds of the adults. It was a torn position. On the one hand, he had to keep the kids in control. He was usually ranked above a number of others, though he had never gotten any of the badges. He'd usually be in the position of responsibility toward someone of higher official rank. But he had an inborn sense of order, and something that could pass to the adults as obedience. A fear of getting in trouble. So he kept his charges out of trouble, while having to demonstrate a different thing to them in order to keep his authority. Different than what he demonstrated to the adults.
He would chummily overlook the boys who smoked; meekly joining in the furtiveness, even while siding with the adult morality in his own conduct. This weekend, though, there was corn-silk all over the place and lots of old corn-cobs.
Pretty soon, he had carved the handsomest of all the pipes, and was carried along by the unspoken plan that had formed, for a certain select group to meet in the barn late at night. These were those scouts who seemed always to want to pretend they weren't. They'd wear jeans beneath their uniform shirts, and not give in to the bullshit of rules. It was important to remain in that group, and Howie was getting excited about smoking his corn-cob.
They met in a corner where the hay kept out the wind. Howie tried to one-up the manner of those who'd obviously smoked before. There was much discussion about taking the smoke into your lungs the proper way, and mockery of those who were faking it. Physical abuse came easily to Howie, and he gained a point there. Others had bic pens for their mouthpieces and Howie managed to look a bit more established with his carved one. He'd found a hollow stick or reed, and was pretty good at whittling.
They had entered the whole new world of playing at adults, with the extra excitement of being forbidden. It was a time when adulthood had a hightened reality, and they felt the power more surely than the adults they mimicked. But little giggles escaped now and then from those who couldn't quite look serious with their pipes. It was exciting, and the corn silk managed to stimulate the right sensations.
Someone had brought along a flashlight, and sure enough, some magazines. One kid habitually snuck Playboys from his father, and had the same air when commenting on the tits that the seasoned smokers had with their pipes. This time, another kid had one-upped him with a tits and pussy magazine, however. Howie was aghast. Could things like that really exist? He thought about the picture taking -- the photographers. Someone was saying they put make-up on the tits. "Yeah, I'd like to have that job." "Man. I'd let a girl piss on my face just to see what it looks like. No really, I would." That kid got edged out a little for his comment.
Howie was reeling. He remembered when a friend of his had come home with the glorious discovery of condoms. He was a couple years younger than Howie. "Rubbers! just like you wear on your feet, only you wear them on your dick." Now this kid wasn't always reliable. Kind of an habitual liar, and Howie couldn't and wouldn't believe him. "I'm not kidding;" his friend laughed out in a tone that was meant to convince. "I've seen ‘em. Kids at school use them for water balloons. They're great for that. One kid stole some from the drug store. They look like doctor's gloves." Howie tried to picture these rubbers, but he really couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that factories made these things. That lines of decent little old ladies inspected them on an assembly line. It was too much of a joke, and too awful.
Howie had grown up in a Protestant family and in a Protestant world, and there wasn't much talk of sex. It crept in stealthily, but never, in his world, enough to upset the intense personalness of the thing. He'd never seen his parents in any sort of sexual contact. A perfunctory kiss was all. When they told him about sex, he'd laughed at the terminology and hoped it could be accomplished in one's sleep. It was too personal.
He still didn't really believe that rubbers could exist until someone produced one in that barn that midnight. It was wrapped up like medicine in foil. He managed to inspect it rather closely without betraying his innocence, just to determine its substance. Whether it was real. Despite his disgust at the girlie pictures, he was fascinated and was getting quite hard in his pants. He knew from the times they'd been skinny-dipping that he was rather more developed than the others. It was a running joke that he was bigger and harrier than the scoutmaster. He was bitten by a touch of pride. Somebody had to try on that condom.
God, it was enormous! They were really shocked, and impressed. It was all they could do to contain their uproarious laughter at the sight. No question about it. He'd won the prize. The others were hardly out of puberty, and this really was a shock. Howie was really "in" now and was getting carried away by the momentum. He never knew how much he craved belonging, and how much he prevented it by his out-of-place obsession with meaning. Now, in this dark, cold barn he was getting sucked into the frivolities that he'd always scorned. But it was more real. It wasn't frivolous, and it didn't confuse anything -- or ruin anything.
Sure, it confused Howie when he later learned to masturbate, and would pull off to high heaven, all the while angry that he couldn't preserve it for when it meant something. That night in the barn, he was the leader. He'd had wet dreams, and would wake in wonder. It was unspeakably glorious, but he couldn't manage to repeat the dream in his waking life. Now he was in the center of a circle and someone had heard about masturbation. He said that he heard that some people take a soapy washcloth over the toilet. The kid with the playboys. His father must have told him. Again Howie was aghast. What profanity, and how squalid! Mysteries undone with so little ceremony.
But there he was. He wanted to collect it and take it home to look at under his microscope. He had the grin of collusion on his face as they all watched to see what would happen. Jerk, jerk; harder and harder. Nothing would happen. There was a lot of hope and a slight bit of desperation as the thing went on for a ridiculous period of time. Others were trying too. His cock was hard. It was kept hard by the undesirable profanity of the photos, and by its hardness. It felt good. There was a time when Howie was probably only three or so that he remembered an ejaculation of pee made against the bathroom door because it felt good. The mystery. But nothing would happen, and he began not to believe. It had become a soreness. There must be some trick he didn't know -- somethng he wasn't doing right. It was enough of a mystery to everybody else that he didn't lose face.
These thoughts were flitting somewhere beyond the reach of Howie's conscious thoughts as he waited for Jackie to come back out. He didn't want them anywhere near his conscious thoughts.
"Well hello," bellowed Jackie' s father from the porch. "Come on in for a minute."
"Hi, Mr. Berger, great barn you've got."
"Yeah, it's nice to have a barn. I like to fiddle around there. So, you rode your bicycle all this way. That's quite a ride from town."
"Howie and I are going to take a walk, OK Daddy?"
"Sure. Be back for lunch. Would you like to stay, Howie?"
He gave a quick look to Jackie, grateful for their exit, and saw that it was OK. "Yeah, thanks."
"Jan'll be back in a little while. We'll just have some soup or something. You'd better take a jacket, honey."
"It's not too cold. Well, see you in a bit."
To the basement, where he would pump up the tires as well as his awareness. Feeling that paradoxical lethargy that couldn't grip a pencil, but can force great strokes into a pump until the fingers, too, regain their awakened state. In his bicycling shorts. He would ride hard until the morning chill was gone. He laced up the pointy shoes that looked like ballerina slippers and stumbled out the door on his heels so as not to make noise with the metal cleats that were fixed under the balls of his feet for gripping the pedals.
It was incredibly barren at four in the morning. Not the barrenness of a late drunk, when the world has gone to sleep, but the barrenness of a still world about to arise. He usually passed only a couple of cars before reaching the country-side. The dawn would stop him dead on the side of the road. From a hilltop, with nothing but drive -- or escape -- in his stomach, he would hallucinate the rosy dawn. Ail tired from the ride and the chill, when his breathing began to calm itself and the wonderful calm of fatigue would settle into his limbs -- then the world would awaken, and he too felt renewed.
The true night-time occurred in school. He would have showered and eaten his breakfast in time to be just late for the bell. There were nightmares of falling asleep as his name was being called. There was the impossibility of telling anyone who he was. When his name was called, he usually had the right answer. That was from the desperate discipline he had evolved for taking stock of the immediate situation. The learning was painfully simple, and he had no energy to delve beyond the requirements of the moment. A quick mind developed to escape the drudgery of having to work on the solution. It was just those right answers which also made it impossible for him to identify himself. He was impossibly square. Bicycle riding in the morning is like reading Shakespeare at lunch. That was the nature of high-school.
There came to be a plan in his bicycle riding after a while. It started unwittingly, but gradually took on a scheming quality. All that aloneness that drew him out at desolate hours to empty roads along which he could never be released but would be compelled to return for the morning bell; all that aloneness might have had, were he to know, as its object something more easily found among the ranks in school. He came to have a reason for not announcing his morning rides. The consequence was that he lost his nobility. It was no longer the lack of comprehension of those around him that forced his mouth shut, but the deeper shame that they would understand all too well. It was a true loss. He could no longer relish his aloneness nor its secrets.
She (yes she) was riding a horse one morning near the top of a hill at dawn. She had turned off the road along a farm track toward a small peak. The dawn was breaking in a halo around her, which left her and the horse in a black silhouette. Nothing was recognizable.
The aura was that of a girl, however, and Howie's pace was broken as he whirred silently past. He would have been embarrassed if she'd seen him, yet she would bring him back to that spot many times. He hadn't seen her for a week, and supposed that she had only been riding that once. It was a silly thing, and it ruined the composure of his rides. The dawn was lacking in its magic. He didn't know why, but it didn't feel as simple. Now there was the confusion of a fantasy meddling with the lonely impulse of his morning drives.
On a Saturday, when it was dangerous to ride -- not physically dangerous, but psychically dangerous because others would be about on their day off -- he had stopped on the road near the spot where he had seen her. The fantasy had worn off, and something of the stark beauty of the dawn was promising to return. He must have been breathing hard not to have heard her riding over in the grass.
"Hullo."
If the sun had greeted him he wouldn't have been more startled. As it was, he had no time to be anyone other than who he was.
"Good Morning." The red of the dawn and in any case the flush of his early morning exertion would have covered any blush that was forming. When he looked in the mirror later that morning, he knew how ridiculous he must have looked in his cycling clothes. There are none more unflattering. But this had set her at ease -- like coming across the school heartthrob in his job at his father's grocery.
"I'm glad to see someone else out here to watch the sun rise. If nobody comes, it might get forgotten, don't you think?" she asked him.
He was more than a little put-off by the horse. He didn't know what to do with it. "I come out almost every morning," he said, immediately wondering that he could let that slip. "It's fantastic to be out riding when no-one else is around," he tried to recover, but fell deeper. Now for-ever his solitude was broken on those morning rides. His shyness had proven an ineffective shield. Well, then what of it?
"Do you really come out on your bicycle every day?"
"Well, lately I have been. I'm kind of in training."
How could he let that one slip? No-one could have pried it from him. It was a crazy secret that he hardly dared to admit to himself. But here in the anonymity of a chance encounter, it slipped out. A chance encounter which in reality has the only power to bare our souls.
Damn it, I can't do it. Can I call you Rick?
"Sure, Howie. But what do you mean? I was beginning to get interested. Oh, I know -- it couldn't have happened that way. You're making your own life too big. Is that it?"
Well actually, she sat behind me in class. And he told her about the bike rides. But it might have happened that way. I mean, that's the burden of this whole business. It might have, but it didn't. 0 how am I going to get the reader to trust me? How?
"Wait a minute, Howie. You're not writing this anymore. You're telling it. This is your life. Remember? That was your idea, not mine."
I'm a little mixed up. My pen fell in the bilge. That's a good sign that I ought to give up.
"I may be getting a little ahead of myself, but doesn't that go against the burden of your argument?"
I'm not sure. But I'm ahead of myself too. I haven't moved onto the boat yet.
"Whoops"
Jackie was her name, and she sat behind him in class. And she did ride horses.
"Did you really ride eighty miles before coming to school today? I can't believe it."
"Sure." He made a quick mental calculation. Yeah, it's got to be forty miles out to Gowanda and another forty back. Later he checked on a map to make sure. Well, 67 miles. Close enough.
"Wow. Don't you get tired?"
He never knew how to respond to this sort of thing. It was just what he wanted, of course, but it always left him with unclear feelings about himself. Usually, he'd begin with some self-defeating remark, but by the end of the conversation, he'd have made certain that the other person knew perfectly well the extent of his feat. Exaggeration came naturally, though without malice of intent. He was just trying very hard to get people to believe him.
"Not after the first few miles. I ride for about twenty miles before I find my rhythm. At that point I'm really dead, but if I just keep going it gets automatic. Well, by the time I get home I can barely walk, but it's a fantastic feeling."
If anyone let him, he would go on for hours talking about himself, not out of pride really, but just because he wanted someone to know. He'd get all caught up in the telling until he'd made something out of the telling even for himself -- especially for himself. Things were more real in the telling.
"The roads are deserted in the morning that early. It's incredible. I mean, you can hear everything -- the birds. That's when they get up. It's so fantastic to watch the sun come up. Really fantastic."
But, like all good listeners, she had been hearing her own story -- interpolated. It was sometimes an effort for him to let someone else tell their story. He wasn't always a good listener, or rather his personal interpolation took shape before the story was finished. But he was kept quiet by her femaleness.
"I've been out riding -- I mean horseback -- at dawn too. I go up in the woods on some dirt roads I know. It's so beautiful. You can smell the ground waking up. The smell of wet leaves, with little scurrying sounds all through them. 0 I love the little bunnies. I've seen a fox once. Lots of deer."
Howie was getting embarrassed. Bunnies? This was getting too personal. He almost crawled back. But he, too, knew the beauty of the woods, and it bothered him that the bicycle was limited to the pavement.
"I wish I could get off the road, but I've got to get into the country, and I can't drive a damn car. You can't walk in bicycle shoes, either.
"Bicycle shoes? What's wrong with sneakers?"
"They have a steel sole, so the pedal doesn't dig in. You'd get really sore feet if you wore sneakers. Besides, they have a kind of a clip on them so you can pull back on the pedal without slipping out. It's amazing how much more efficient it is to ride with bike shoes."
He would go on about the intricacies of a bicycle's construction. She was fascinated not at all by the information, and not so much by his obvious knowledge, as by the obvious involvement he had. He really wanted her to understand. Of course she didn't, and that would only frustrate him enough to try again from a different angle. He knew how a bicycle worked -- the best way to work the pedals, how to use the gears to keep a steady, eazy rhythm, how the structure was made perfect for an even distribution of stress throughout its miniscule weight. The theories of ball-bearings and tires -- where most of the friction was built up. That's why he used sewn-up, glued-on tires. Most people don't understand, so they think it's a bother. You can't tell the difference if you're coasting along slowly, but try getting up some speed down a big hill. You take right off, man. Really, there's a big difference. Really. He wanted her to understand.
And she wanted to. It was the silent obligation of his unspoken entreaties that she understood, which attracted her to Howie. He wasn't very desireable. Handsome enough, but something which he felt too, that made the girls look at other guys. He wore his aloneness like a suit of armor, and beneath it what attractions he had were not enhanced. She didn't like him in a helpless way. She just felt a kind of obligation.
Eventually, he found out where she lived. There wasn't really an invitation or anything, but his bicycle gave him a bit of freedom, and he rode out there one Saturday. He rode up to the barn, hoping to find her there before having to ask at the house. He'd brought along a pair of sneakers, and wore denim cutoffs, though they're murder on the crotch and chafe your thighs. It was early, and he wore the scarlet flush of the wind which he couldn't help feeling made him cute.
He found her there. He was trying to like the smell of manure. He knew he could, but he had grown up in a household where chemical smells were preferred, and he had to watch where he stepped no matter how nonchalant he wanted to be. She was at work on "Snoopy" with the brushes.
"Hi ."
"0 Hi, Howie. Gosh. Did you ride all the way here?"
His cheeks were already blushing from the wind. O, it was nothing. Really a pretty easy ride. He tried to pet the horse, not quite knowing what you do with horses. It was so huge. He felt crushed to be near it.
"Is this your horse?"
"Yeah. This is Snoopy. Say 'hi' Snoopy."
"How 'ya doin' Snoop?" A goofy horse-look tried to find its way onto Howie's face, but didn't quite manage. He'd ridden a horse a long time ago -- as a kid. But this one had an English saddle. He didn't quite want to get into that. "I always thought English riding looked kind of silly." I mean why not just ride the thing.?
Jackie wasn't into the kind of long explanations she'd gotten from Howie. "When I learned to ride, that's the way they taught. All serious riding is English-style. You just bounce around in a Western saddle. That's for cowboys. I don't know, it's just the way I learned. I like riding that way. It feels right."
"Well, I don't know a thing about horses. Wow, look at all this stuff. OK if I take a gander?" He liked these kinds of phrases that you might have picked up from your grandfather. Whenever he got a kick out of something, he took it on himself; certain that it would enhance his bearing with others. Anybody was an authority except him. He would act like likeable people, and didn't really notice that nobody got a kick out of the thing when he did it. It was somebody else's garment, and didn't look right on him. But it made it easier to say things.
He loved the old machinery hanging about in the barn. He'd always longed for a barn like this, where he could tinker away and build things. In his own house, there was only the basement, which he'd taken over for as long as he could remember. He always had something going on down there. Chemistry sets and go-carts and gadgets -- things whose basic principles he could exploit until he got something new. He was limited in his knowledge and materials, and so tried the impossible with what was at hand.
Now here were engines of all sorts -- wheels, wrenches, saws; even a welding outfit. "Does you father farm?"
"No, but my grandfather used to. Hey, you want to go for a walk or something?"
"Sure."
"Just a sec. I'll tell my parents."
Oh no. Now he was going to have to meet her family. He couldn't have imagined bringing her to his house. He'd be deadly embarrassed. "Is she your girlfriend, Howie? Howie's got a girl friend. Howie's got a girlfriend." Girlfriends were like drinking beer. Immature people had them. They flirted and they shifted around. It just didn't seem real to Howie. He overheard stories of weekend exploits. Once he heard someone saying with vicarious bragging, how so-and-so had come running out of the woods dangling a spent rubber, after carrying the girl away over his shoulder. He didn't like that. It was disgusting somehow. He really couldn't conceive. Sex without love. It hurt his sense of meaning deep down.
As he was waiting around the barn, he was remembering another barn. Just flits of memory that he chased away. But we'll give the details here so you know who he is. It was with the boy-scouts. They were off camping on an old farm that belonged to the friend of one of the scoutmasters. There were big fantastic cornfields that hadn't been cut, so you could play perfect versions of those innocent boy-scout army games. It was a natural maze with infinite possible patterns. Howie was a goody-goody of sorts in school, but in the boy-scouts he had a kind of rank. Probably because he'd gone camping a lot with his father, he knew more about these things and gained a natural respect from the scoutmaster that was grudgingly echoed by the rest of the kids.
Still, he had to keep that respect by making forays out of the bounds of the adults. It was a torn position. On the one hand, he had to keep the kids in control. He was usually ranked above a number of others, though he had never gotten any of the badges. He'd usually be in the position of responsibility toward someone of higher official rank. But he had an inborn sense of order, and something that could pass to the adults as obedience. A fear of getting in trouble. So he kept his charges out of trouble, while having to demonstrate a different thing to them in order to keep his authority. Different than what he demonstrated to the adults.
He would chummily overlook the boys who smoked; meekly joining in the furtiveness, even while siding with the adult morality in his own conduct. This weekend, though, there was corn-silk all over the place and lots of old corn-cobs.
Pretty soon, he had carved the handsomest of all the pipes, and was carried along by the unspoken plan that had formed, for a certain select group to meet in the barn late at night. These were those scouts who seemed always to want to pretend they weren't. They'd wear jeans beneath their uniform shirts, and not give in to the bullshit of rules. It was important to remain in that group, and Howie was getting excited about smoking his corn-cob.
They met in a corner where the hay kept out the wind. Howie tried to one-up the manner of those who'd obviously smoked before. There was much discussion about taking the smoke into your lungs the proper way, and mockery of those who were faking it. Physical abuse came easily to Howie, and he gained a point there. Others had bic pens for their mouthpieces and Howie managed to look a bit more established with his carved one. He'd found a hollow stick or reed, and was pretty good at whittling.
They had entered the whole new world of playing at adults, with the extra excitement of being forbidden. It was a time when adulthood had a hightened reality, and they felt the power more surely than the adults they mimicked. But little giggles escaped now and then from those who couldn't quite look serious with their pipes. It was exciting, and the corn silk managed to stimulate the right sensations.
Someone had brought along a flashlight, and sure enough, some magazines. One kid habitually snuck Playboys from his father, and had the same air when commenting on the tits that the seasoned smokers had with their pipes. This time, another kid had one-upped him with a tits and pussy magazine, however. Howie was aghast. Could things like that really exist? He thought about the picture taking -- the photographers. Someone was saying they put make-up on the tits. "Yeah, I'd like to have that job." "Man. I'd let a girl piss on my face just to see what it looks like. No really, I would." That kid got edged out a little for his comment.
Howie was reeling. He remembered when a friend of his had come home with the glorious discovery of condoms. He was a couple years younger than Howie. "Rubbers! just like you wear on your feet, only you wear them on your dick." Now this kid wasn't always reliable. Kind of an habitual liar, and Howie couldn't and wouldn't believe him. "I'm not kidding;" his friend laughed out in a tone that was meant to convince. "I've seen ‘em. Kids at school use them for water balloons. They're great for that. One kid stole some from the drug store. They look like doctor's gloves." Howie tried to picture these rubbers, but he really couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe that factories made these things. That lines of decent little old ladies inspected them on an assembly line. It was too much of a joke, and too awful.
Howie had grown up in a Protestant family and in a Protestant world, and there wasn't much talk of sex. It crept in stealthily, but never, in his world, enough to upset the intense personalness of the thing. He'd never seen his parents in any sort of sexual contact. A perfunctory kiss was all. When they told him about sex, he'd laughed at the terminology and hoped it could be accomplished in one's sleep. It was too personal.
He still didn't really believe that rubbers could exist until someone produced one in that barn that midnight. It was wrapped up like medicine in foil. He managed to inspect it rather closely without betraying his innocence, just to determine its substance. Whether it was real. Despite his disgust at the girlie pictures, he was fascinated and was getting quite hard in his pants. He knew from the times they'd been skinny-dipping that he was rather more developed than the others. It was a running joke that he was bigger and harrier than the scoutmaster. He was bitten by a touch of pride. Somebody had to try on that condom.
God, it was enormous! They were really shocked, and impressed. It was all they could do to contain their uproarious laughter at the sight. No question about it. He'd won the prize. The others were hardly out of puberty, and this really was a shock. Howie was really "in" now and was getting carried away by the momentum. He never knew how much he craved belonging, and how much he prevented it by his out-of-place obsession with meaning. Now, in this dark, cold barn he was getting sucked into the frivolities that he'd always scorned. But it was more real. It wasn't frivolous, and it didn't confuse anything -- or ruin anything.
Sure, it confused Howie when he later learned to masturbate, and would pull off to high heaven, all the while angry that he couldn't preserve it for when it meant something. That night in the barn, he was the leader. He'd had wet dreams, and would wake in wonder. It was unspeakably glorious, but he couldn't manage to repeat the dream in his waking life. Now he was in the center of a circle and someone had heard about masturbation. He said that he heard that some people take a soapy washcloth over the toilet. The kid with the playboys. His father must have told him. Again Howie was aghast. What profanity, and how squalid! Mysteries undone with so little ceremony.
But there he was. He wanted to collect it and take it home to look at under his microscope. He had the grin of collusion on his face as they all watched to see what would happen. Jerk, jerk; harder and harder. Nothing would happen. There was a lot of hope and a slight bit of desperation as the thing went on for a ridiculous period of time. Others were trying too. His cock was hard. It was kept hard by the undesirable profanity of the photos, and by its hardness. It felt good. There was a time when Howie was probably only three or so that he remembered an ejaculation of pee made against the bathroom door because it felt good. The mystery. But nothing would happen, and he began not to believe. It had become a soreness. There must be some trick he didn't know -- somethng he wasn't doing right. It was enough of a mystery to everybody else that he didn't lose face.
These thoughts were flitting somewhere beyond the reach of Howie's conscious thoughts as he waited for Jackie to come back out. He didn't want them anywhere near his conscious thoughts.
"Well hello," bellowed Jackie' s father from the porch. "Come on in for a minute."
"Hi, Mr. Berger, great barn you've got."
"Yeah, it's nice to have a barn. I like to fiddle around there. So, you rode your bicycle all this way. That's quite a ride from town."
"Howie and I are going to take a walk, OK Daddy?"
"Sure. Be back for lunch. Would you like to stay, Howie?"
He gave a quick look to Jackie, grateful for their exit, and saw that it was OK. "Yeah, thanks."
"Jan'll be back in a little while. We'll just have some soup or something. You'd better take a jacket, honey."
"It's not too cold. Well, see you in a bit."
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Let's try this . . .
So, crazy people confuse, say, metaphor with reality. Dangerous people have no sense of irony, and wouldn't know a metaphor from Jesus.
I watch and wait with a mixture of excitement and dread at Tian-an men redux either picking up some steam or getting repeatedly squashed in Tibet. The state there clearly going far beyond the pale in happying (Haigism) their people. No longer hearing God, they raise their knife on the pure knowledge of what's good for the people. As apparently, they were able to turn the tide following the previous debacle by promises (and delivery) of Western style Disney life. Now the people in China proper are the government, and I'm sure they're plenty irritated by those complainers in Tibet. Fascism by any other name!
But not being Christian, I don't think the Chinese can be accused of either lack of irony or misconstruction of metaphor, a figure of speech they don't promote quite so much. Instead, as I recall, there is a kind of spiraling equation of this with that, neither of which quite gets at what one is trying to say, but both of which together scintillate the brain and feel like, say, truth. The loss then today in modern China being just that there's no that anymore. Only this. So, they have to turn off the cars to fool the western guests at the olympics, and sweep out the unseemly in promotion of the phenomenal success of their economy.
And here we are, irony-less, self righteous in our complaint that they can't seem to swallow the filth we export them in pursuit of our superior, well, Disney-life. So, I complained about Dershowitz, not getting the Christian import of the Abraham-Isaac story. Is this because the Jewish point of view has him justified, and for Christians, he's simply screwed because that's God's prerogative??
Well, I'd hate to give the Bushies any credit if their grand world strategy bears fruit in the collapse of Chinese unitarity. NOOOOoooooo!!!!!!!
See, the thing is we just need a good bus driver, so the rest of us can get back to what we do well, instead of backseat driving. Is it television that fools us into thinking that we can, Bush-Putin style, look into peoples' eyes to find trust? When they act, whether driving, banking, pricing, marketing, drugging, as anything but our neighbors. Anything but neighborly. And so no-one trusts anyone, not can or should they, and the Jesus style trustworthy trusters are annoying and the equivalent of pesky smelly. Patsies. (And why is it that rich and comfortable types are, to a person, cynical, as in "it will never get any better". Are they that unhappy? That happy? Where's the irony?
I think Barak Obama is a good busdriver. Anyhow, I'm on his bus, and not much nuancing the details of what he "stands" for, knowing full well that this "standing" for, in our degenerate usages, is code for manipulating literal truths, and labelling the scintillations of metaphor as, well, crazy.
Crazily, toward June 4 plus 20 (19???).
I watch and wait with a mixture of excitement and dread at Tian-an men redux either picking up some steam or getting repeatedly squashed in Tibet. The state there clearly going far beyond the pale in happying (Haigism) their people. No longer hearing God, they raise their knife on the pure knowledge of what's good for the people. As apparently, they were able to turn the tide following the previous debacle by promises (and delivery) of Western style Disney life. Now the people in China proper are the government, and I'm sure they're plenty irritated by those complainers in Tibet. Fascism by any other name!
But not being Christian, I don't think the Chinese can be accused of either lack of irony or misconstruction of metaphor, a figure of speech they don't promote quite so much. Instead, as I recall, there is a kind of spiraling equation of this with that, neither of which quite gets at what one is trying to say, but both of which together scintillate the brain and feel like, say, truth. The loss then today in modern China being just that there's no that anymore. Only this. So, they have to turn off the cars to fool the western guests at the olympics, and sweep out the unseemly in promotion of the phenomenal success of their economy.
And here we are, irony-less, self righteous in our complaint that they can't seem to swallow the filth we export them in pursuit of our superior, well, Disney-life. So, I complained about Dershowitz, not getting the Christian import of the Abraham-Isaac story. Is this because the Jewish point of view has him justified, and for Christians, he's simply screwed because that's God's prerogative??
Well, I'd hate to give the Bushies any credit if their grand world strategy bears fruit in the collapse of Chinese unitarity. NOOOOoooooo!!!!!!!
See, the thing is we just need a good bus driver, so the rest of us can get back to what we do well, instead of backseat driving. Is it television that fools us into thinking that we can, Bush-Putin style, look into peoples' eyes to find trust? When they act, whether driving, banking, pricing, marketing, drugging, as anything but our neighbors. Anything but neighborly. And so no-one trusts anyone, not can or should they, and the Jesus style trustworthy trusters are annoying and the equivalent of pesky smelly. Patsies. (And why is it that rich and comfortable types are, to a person, cynical, as in "it will never get any better". Are they that unhappy? That happy? Where's the irony?
I think Barak Obama is a good busdriver. Anyhow, I'm on his bus, and not much nuancing the details of what he "stands" for, knowing full well that this "standing" for, in our degenerate usages, is code for manipulating literal truths, and labelling the scintillations of metaphor as, well, crazy.
Crazily, toward June 4 plus 20 (19???).
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Ah Eliot, we loved you well! (apologies Alan Dershowitz)
Well, I sure did, and do. I hate to quote Alan Dershowitz, that apologist for torture, but God help us if this is how we bring down our leaders. OK, I paraphrase, but you get the idea. Should it be this easy? Should we be able to pull from our quivers any among arrows of noted weaknesses whenever someone in power decides to fling one? Who gets to decide?
Anyhow, the piling on is not only unseemly, but portends the very same threat to the mythic structure of our state as does this vulnerability of genuine leaders, rendering, apparently, genuine leadership nigh on impossible! Bill Clinton anyone?
So, OK, Bill's error was to answer that question "briefs or boxers" and thus confuse rock star with politician, and no I never did love him so well. I guess noone noted the error at the time, or to be clear I didn't note who was noting because the man frankly didn't interest me, my dear. But oh for the love of God!!!!
And I think Dershowitz' error, apologist for torture or for Israel, falls into the same category: he confuses the fact that if I, say, am alone in the presence of the key to the salvation of many people, then of course I can and should do whatever it takes to get that key. This being, duh, rather more like disembowling your child to get the actual key to turn off the bomb. You don't wait for orders, nor would you act on them if they came. You either know what to do and do it, or you don't. This would be a very different matter from defining, somehow, those limited and limiting conditions where the order to torture would be acceptable.
Please!
Is this the state of our legal education (I doubt anyone thinks so)? No, I think Alan has discredited himself on Israel in just the same way the pile-on for whatever we perceive to be the latest greatest hyperbolic hypocrisy discredits any notion that we want or are ready for self-government. What'd you say Pogo? You say the pilers on are the greatest hypocrites?? Hear! Hear!!
Anyhow, the piling on is not only unseemly, but portends the very same threat to the mythic structure of our state as does this vulnerability of genuine leaders, rendering, apparently, genuine leadership nigh on impossible! Bill Clinton anyone?
So, OK, Bill's error was to answer that question "briefs or boxers" and thus confuse rock star with politician, and no I never did love him so well. I guess noone noted the error at the time, or to be clear I didn't note who was noting because the man frankly didn't interest me, my dear. But oh for the love of God!!!!
And I think Dershowitz' error, apologist for torture or for Israel, falls into the same category: he confuses the fact that if I, say, am alone in the presence of the key to the salvation of many people, then of course I can and should do whatever it takes to get that key. This being, duh, rather more like disembowling your child to get the actual key to turn off the bomb. You don't wait for orders, nor would you act on them if they came. You either know what to do and do it, or you don't. This would be a very different matter from defining, somehow, those limited and limiting conditions where the order to torture would be acceptable.
Please!
Is this the state of our legal education (I doubt anyone thinks so)? No, I think Alan has discredited himself on Israel in just the same way the pile-on for whatever we perceive to be the latest greatest hyperbolic hypocrisy discredits any notion that we want or are ready for self-government. What'd you say Pogo? You say the pilers on are the greatest hypocrites?? Hear! Hear!!
Friday, February 29, 2008
Chapter 1, unretouched, as Word Processed (no kidding) back in 1983
MIXING METAPHORS
AND CLICHES
ramblings of number 747
(read me andpass me along)
no copyright
February 3, 1983 5:47 AM
I was awakened this morning by a booming against the side of the boat. What?! Driving rain such as one encounters only once a year was all the answer I got. Go Away!
I tossed under the quilt, looking for the comfort that I had only just lost
Boom!
My God, could that -- whatever it is -- really crash through the hull? It's so miserable out there.
Gentler now. A soft bumping that taps the rhythm of waves. Probably just a chunk of ice broken free by the wind.
Now I wonder if I will be able to sleep again.
I remember something from last night. The quilt was damp from condensation on the inside of the hull, next to which it had been stored. I'd pulled it out with some sense of dismay, wondering what other areas of neglect were stored around me. I'd just showered, out of a mixed sense of intolerable sliminess of the skin and the always paired inability of my thoughts to grasp. The clouds of steam fill the cabin and find their rest along the frigid planks of the boat's hull. But I couldn't find the calm that usually comes with cleanliness.
So I decided to give in to my tiredness. I had a futile moment when I went to arrange the bedding. Silly preoccupations. I was smooth and soft, and there was the sleeping bag I was accustomed to bundling in. It was to be washed tomorrow -- today -- and I hated to immerse myself in its accumulated punguence. So there was the lighter-weight quilt, quite fresh and only slightly damp now.
It was a luxurious feeling to lie between light and clean covers, which to me betoken visits to other, more established lives. Made beds with sweet cotton sheets. Sprawling in a dry warmth which so differs from the sweaty coziness of a sleeping-bag during an over-cold night.
Should I, or shouldn't I? What will be my fate? It was warm enough for now to enjoy the clean bed, but I knew that before morning I would be cold. Good, I thought. Then I'll just have to wake up. It will break the monolithic silence of the overly sound sleeps I've been having lately. The wind was building, and light squalls were scraping over the boat with increasing frequency. It was with real luxury that I was rocked to sleep this night.
Crash!
This time the impact was definitely threatening. It carried a much greater weight than just a chunk of ice. I was summoned. It will be difficult to explain why I felt summoned. There was a moment's remembering of the decision upon turning into bed that I would wake in the night. So this was why I was to sleep in the quilt.
Alright, so now instead of resentment, I felt eager to learn what specter of destruction was getting me out of my comfort. I arose. No, not those pants. Some work pants. And the old wool sweater that seems to be made of iron yarn. The one my father wore thirty-five years ago, I remembered, and which doesn't begin to show wear. The one with my-his name embroidered inside -- varsity swimming.
No point trying to keep dry. It's a typhoon out there.
I crawled out in my bare feet. A moment's hesitation that was reduced to a pinprick of awareness that I shouldn't really want to go out there. There was no physical hesitation. Immediately I was spinning in the stormy world that I liked so much to perceive from inside the cabin.
There was no feeling of getting wet or cold. There was no possibility of even distinguishing those sensations. They were too pervasive. Water on the deck was up to my ankles. The rain was torrential; there's nothing on deck to hold a pool that deep. What is it then? I scrambled toward the bow with just enough abandon to be reminded of the need to grab hold.
A huge slab of ice had wedged itself between my hull and the behemoth in the next slip. The crash I felt was the full weight of that monster transmitted through the ice each time a wave hit. It was indeed a force that could crack my hull. The wind and waves pushed it further into the vee between the boats.
I sat on the edge of the boat and gave the slab a mighty shove with my bare feet. As though driven by a ghost, it drifted away against the gentler prodding of more natural forces.
I followed its course until I was perched on the spindly bowsprit, where I was reminded of other exhilarating times there when crashing though waves at sea. I felt no less exhilarated. And now as the cabin fire has warmed me again and I sit in dry clothes writing.
So that was why I was waked from the comfort of my sleep -- and this. I ought to have felt unlucky to have to go out into that storm. This writing, too, is a burden. But there was a moment in which by purest accident I was called to partake. A moment of soul-moving existence that otherwise I was bound -- and determined -- to sleep through. It seemed not to be an accident though, and that is the subject of more writing.
I had known that I was to be awakened, and had even prepared for it. The consternation of why the preparation --for what -- was answered in the simplest and most mundane fashion. Strange how life is to be made wonderful by such simple preparedness to meet one's fate. I can't say that there was any God to greet me at this moment of miserable epiphany, but the feeling was exactly as if there had been. That is the thing that requires some explaining.
It's calmer now. The rain has stopped. I'm warm. Only my eyes hurt from the early hour. There's a lot of work ahead, and I'm not sure I'm equal to it. I have a metaphor in my life for such times, though. I have this boat. There was a moment of dread following the excitement and disbelief that came when I realized that I actually own this boat on which I now live. I had never sailed anything more complicated than a 'sunfish'. I was far from certain of the boat's seaworthiness. There were impossible and imposing considerations of time and money. Behind the excitement was the lurking fear that I might just have done something crazy. And so now, as I scrawl, I know that it is not just to myself -- though it might principally be for myself -- and that too seems out-of-bounds. I don't know how to write.
How many authors write Accident or Fate in the same capital letters they use for God? They have all seemed aware of what I, with my peculiar style of reading, find most compelling in their writing. There is life borne through the written word. I never remember the words -- their meaning or their sound -- but I think their life stays with me. Yet these authors are no worshippers of fate. Theirs is a controlled writing. Still, I would insist that there are the muses. I can't judge whether I'll be blessed by their attentions, or whether my writing will crumble under the entropic force of too many details left uncared for. 0 gentle muse, how can I prepare for your coming?
And what a lie! What conceit! I don't set out to write literature. Belles-lettres, even. What I'm about comes perilously close to the profane realm of argument. I have something to prove, though I don't believe in proofs. If she comes, the muse will only-just grant a blessing upon a lost sheep. There will be little fiction here, and even less poetry. My only claim for indulgence is my lonely spirit, which even now can hardly believe that words are the proper release. There are other, and deeper mysteries which call forth my captured soul. They are there beyond the words, though not, perhaps, apart from them.
I had been in school, and miserable, when the lure of ships and the sea finally demanded a response. Boats, really. Or anything that could fly white sails and have some space within for repose. The embodied paradox of calm enclosure; shelter set free in the grip of the literal swells of fate. It began as might the longing of a child for love of the sexual sort that he cannot understand. It begins as a beautiful image, too distant to be anything but the subject of pleasant dreams. The body is left out and there is not yet the painful ache of adolescent longing. By then the dream is painful in its impossibility. Whole worlds are lost at each moment that desire is confounded by what is too far beyond comprehension. A kiss which once was innocent now becomes cruel for its promise of what is unknown.
And for me even the kiss was unknown; or rather the plunge was made precipitously thereafter. Like all true fallings in love, I am convinced, this one was surrounded by the mysteries of synchronous happenings. These are simply conjunctions which defy rational appeal, and in their occurrence change the main event as a presence made more real by the impossibility of its circumstances. First, there is the simple coming together of the lover and his object. Then there are the little things which make one know it is right.
The conjuring up of apparitions made real by merely speaking their Name. The start of turning a corner to find what you know not where to seek after. These are the proof of relationship, as I will set out here to prove. But they are all first led up to by tiny seeds each time we have opened our hearts. The love that is first sown as belief can bear fruit in reality when the heart remains fecund.
I was not actually miserable in school. Quite the opposite. My belief in meaning was bearing its fruit in questions answered and mysteries confirmed. I was excited by what I was learning, but it was to the point of distraction. I can rarely read poetry, for after the first poem I am distracted by beauty -- too excited. The whir of my being takes off in an impossible building of meaning such that I fear the text. How can I be competent for the task of reading, when such words as these are put to paper? It is the exhilaration that keeps me away, and such was my relationship with school.
There was a mistrust, not of what I was learning, but of the demands in return. The piles of words which are a product of universities grew nightmarish in their aspect for me. What came together in the excitement of learning was something that could sweep away that rubbish and get back to the text. I didn't want forever to be afraid of poetry, and I felt my fear to be connected to that kind of understanding -- the piling up of words. Each new clue to the unraveling of the poetry of a text -- of the world --was a catalyst-seed in the crystallization of whole encyclopaedias of meaning.
This is why -- that's why -- Ah, now I understand. But where would it all end?
It could be that my boat romance began there -- that I needed to be delivered into the sort of exhilaration that doesn't even flirt for understanding. I don't now, and I didn't then understand why I dreamt of boats. There was something familiar in it. Something to do with bicycles and motorcycles; scuba diving, mountain climbing, and other passions of my past. This seemed like one more attempt to transcend the flesh -- to get out of my skin -- and that worried me. There had been too much disappointment in the past, and I felt wary of repeating it. Yet they need not remain disappointment.
I began to make excursions to the shore; to wander around the marinas and admire the boats. That was instead of writing the papers which I knew could never come together; so full would they be of impossible longing for knowledge to prove what I had already proven to myself. If you want to stay sane, the understanding has to come after the words and not before. I was not a sane member of the university community. I already knew what I wanted to say and could scarcely bother to find the evidence. It all jumped out at me, rather, and I was overwhelmed. So I took to looking at boats.
Marinas exist in an other world, protected by ties of belonging -- in and out -- and by signs which make the visitor nervous. I've never been good at penetrating those invisible but very real social barriers. I feel ill at ease, and that is why I now sit alone in my boat. But there have been moments, we all know them, when the piercing of such barriers provided the route to an untold aliveness.
Climbing atop a monument in ever proper Austria just because the sign said verboten, and discovering the singular vista, made singular, perhaps, by its having been a breech. So in the marina, I walked past the signs and tried to be natural. I was armed with a fiction -- a lie -- that I was looking to buy a boat. Otherwise I would have scurried away at the first guarding glance of one of those who belonged.
I had less than no money and little enough experience to dare open my mouth. But my inward pretense gave me the courage to stroll. I didn't see much at first because I didn't dare to look. I didn't want to be caught off-guard. When you are a part of something, you stop noticing the things of which you are part, and I instinctively knew that I should be nonchalant.
Eventually, whether because curiosity gets the better of you, or because someone is sympathetic to your alienness, you begin to learn; and by degrees can gain admission to any other world. I know I left a trail of bewilderment with my misplaced terminology and impossible circumstances. But no-one called my bluff. I couldn't have been a good actor; if I were to see myself now I would know exactly what I was up to. And so, I guess, did everyone I encountered. It was the sincerity of my interest that gave me my education. The attempts at playing a part were too bald to be offensive. I guess.
But I did eventually get myself into a lot of trouble. Because I began to believe, myself, the part I had cast for myself. Pretending to be interested in buying a boat in order to gain admission to the museum led through a real desire to possess something like the objects displayed therein to a swindling of the soul who would sell me one. Still, they were salesmen whose souls are already so twisted by charade of truth that there could be no further harm.
I was gaining momentum. Those arcane forces -- that arcane structure -- was taking shape that would funnel me to the object of my desire.
It was against all reason. As in cases of true love where the emotion is so overwhelming that only later can one reflect on the utter impossibility of the meeting. Not because it is so unusual or even special by comparison with the myriad other events which conspire to make up the world. Just in what it entails. That this boat should have been there, at that time. No-one else wanted it. I'm afraid to say her -- and indeed, it had much to be wary of. It was not impossible simply by the occurrence, but by what it entailed.
This is difficult. I'm being led to all corners of my life, and there seems to be the necessity of drawing in those other souls who've been reflected therein. I would expose them -- or their soul as it strikes me-- and then cast myself off more completely than I already am in my floating hermitage. The telling requires it, however. 0 where is there justice? Not to tell is to leave the narrative of my own life unpeopled and dull. But to lay bare the basis of all existence -- the communion between souls that must forever remain other to those who are not friends -- that would be abominable sin. What then? I have no power for invention.
"You seem to have come to a dead-end, Mr. H****. It's about time, too. I was getting sick of that pile of involuted shit you've been writing. You tear open the sewer of your soul -- as if all it took was a series of words --and suddenly you're wallowing in it. Every fucking detail gets connected to every other little detail until it has to stop, of its own confusion."
Who are you? What are you doing here?
"Who do you think I am?"
You couldn't be the muse. Muses are gentle.
"Fat chance. They're about as far away from you as the moon.
"We've been there, you know. To the moon, I mean. That's the whole problem. You strike down your goals by achieving them. All narrative has that kind of goal. There's an end to it. It wants to comprehend something. And fiction presumes the comprehension to be accomplished by invention -- like getting to the moon. You invent a vehicle that's more real than the conveyance of one's feelings, and when you've gotten there, everyone who's been left behind is saddened, though they might not know it. The moon of poetry has been destroyed, and we are fooled into leading our lives at a remove, through the thrills of those few who actually galloped off to the moon. I mean, you read a novel and there they are, those astronauts bigger than life whose existence you can only wish for. Only Tolstoy avoided that.
"Enough! God, you go on. How are you ever going to get this under control?"
Will you help?
"I'm not your muse."
Perhaps you could pretend?
"Ah. Well, perhaps -- if you do."
Well then let's pretend. Let's imagine there's a young fellow by the name of Howie Hahn -- that's sort of Chinese for "hero" -- and that he ... Hell, that's just changing the names to protect the innocent. It'll never work. And I don't want to be a hero. That's just my point. That's what I want to prove.
"Why don't you just go ahead and prove your point then?"
I don't have the evidence, or rather the only evidence I have is my own experience. I can't just invent that. Or maybe I did invent it. Let's be honest. I'm going to invent a story and the protagonist is going to be me. I don't want anyone to fall into the trap of thinking that my whole life is here, though. I won't let slip all the dishonorable moments. And I don't want the reader to think I've gotten anywhere at the end. It might be nice if the reader has gotten somewhere, though.
"Bull Shit. If anybody reads this you will think you've gotten somewhere. And so will the reader, if he likes it. Any writer casts himself in the role of hero. People who live life don't need to read about it. And people who read about it aren't fooled by the characters in the book. Their real hero is the author."
I don't read that way.
"Yeah, I know. You identify with the characters. Living your life as though you were a character in a novel. You thought that once, didn't you? That instead of having to write out the play of life, one ought to take the message and live it. So why are you writing?
I have something to prove.
"To who? To yourself?"
Maybe so. I don't know. There's something I know -- I feel -- that I think the whole world needs to know. I decided a while ago that you can't just tell people such things. You can't prove to them the truth. So I thought I was free of words. The way to teach what you know is to live it. To be the author of your own life. But there I was, a mechanic, a carpenter, and always the words would ensnare me.
I learned something from the very real satisfaction of building things -- fixing them. But ecstasy was reserved for words. That seems to be my realm. Not beautiful, well-written words. I'm not trained for that. But words that are the only vent for a soul inadequately tied to the world by other means of expression. I don't know. Maybe I do have to prove something to myself. Just as I got myself into the boat project and had to see it through -- well, somehow I've gotten myself tangled in the net of words. I have to see it through. I can't keep turning my back with excuses that are only more words.
"You can't prove anything to people with words." That's a truism, but all I ever really do that's central to my being is talk -- words. I go around the woodlots and boat-yards as an enigma. Nothing of what I want to let out gets released because I'm just a confusion. No matter how I perfect my skills at carpentry -- my soul's not in it.
"Christ! Don't get so upset. I'll help already. We're going to have to consider this a bit more. Let me get this straight. You have something to prove, but you can't prove it by words. You might prove it by carpentry if your soul were in it. Is that right?"
I'm not sure. I guess so. There are carpenters who know what I know. They're calmer, though, because their work gives vent. I mean it connects them to the world. But, it's different. They wouldn't be able to put into words what I know. I've struggled with words -- with reason -- and so what I've got to say takes that form. Perhaps it's an interpretation -- a translation. I'm sure the world is as caught up in words as I am. Many people don't understand the work of the carpenter. They put it into words and suddenly the carpenter is alone -- because no one connects with his work.
Those carpenters who can tolerate starvation just keep on working. And so life goes on. The rest are dead...
"Stick to the topic. We're trying to figure out how you can make your connection in the world, and you keep going off trying to vent your soul or something. There's got to be some order here. There are good words and bad words; good carpentry and bad carpentry. You can't just spill your soul into your words and expect them to be good."
I wanted a muse!
"Listen! The way I see it, you're only trying to connect with people who read, right?"
But there a lot of dead carpenters out there!
"Well, start a religion, for Christ's sake. Maybe you just want to preach."
That's no fair. Alright, I'll admit there's something dead in religion. Something about God. I mean His Word. But I'm not trying to replace that.
"So you keep telling yourself. You lost a good majority of the 'dead carpenters' anyway. A lot of them believe in God -- and His Word."
No they don't. I mean they don't really. Well some might --but not the dead ones.
"Stop! I agree you don't know how to write. Poetry isn't it. And fiction seems dangerous to you. Why not an essay?"
An "Essay on the Life of R*** H****". Not too promising.
"You've got to start somewhere."
Well, you've given me a thought. I've put it all wrong. I don't know anything. I have nothing to prove. That's what I really meant before anyway. My life is here, on this page. Open it, gentle reader, I would like to talk with you. I can't think except when I'm talking, and I have to talk to somebody. By the way, you wouldn't be my reader would you?
"Not a chance."
Good.
During my childhood, I would spend my winters dreaming of the summer, when I had the whole world of Lake Erie at my back door. The water was clear then, and I loved to swim. In my winter dreams, the house would have flooded with that sweet transparent water. I could float through the rooms, and especially up and down the stairs. I didn't worry about breathing. These were day-dreams and had no true logic. At night, I would dream of flying. In the end, I would actually physically crash onto my bed. Falling, I suppose, from the paroxysm of fear that preceded the crash in my dream.
My summer dreams were concerned with skiing. A controlled falling at breathless speeds down slopes of clean white snow. The dreams were present also at the event. The reality wasn't a disappointment, I mean. At least it provided the stuff that would fuel the next season's dreams.
But there I was in the hot activity of summer, where the whole world invites you to repose -- dreaming of the exhilaration of winter. And in the cold repose of winter when the house beckons with its warmth -- dreaming of the easy drifting of summer. The dreams were confused, but the activities were in place. I was doing things all the time, and in their rush even the seasons passed too slowly.
There are other moments that come later, when I would have stopped the progress of time to expand the moment into an eternity that I might sort out who I was. Dead, empty moments of thinking. Thinking is an impossible activity, and I know now that I wasn't thinking. I was troubling. There was something unfinished hanging over my life, and each time I was beaten down by the senseless procession of events which always left me short of where I wished to be, I would be pushed flat on my ass to think -- or so it seemed to me. I was actually just troubling.
But I would have moments of clarity when the words that flitted through my mind clamored together their great sense. It made thinking seem legitimate, but it didn't get me back into the procession of time. Each time I'd solved something through thought, a book or an event -- or the event of reading a book -- would come my way and prove to me that this wasn't it. This had been "thought" of countless ages ago. Yet this conspiracy of little accidents that would both excite and depress me gradually drew me out.
Excite, because they legitimized my activity -- that is, my inactivity; my thinking. Depress, because I'd solved nothing. And finding that my thoughts had already been thought prodded an effort to control -- to find out as much as possible about what had been "thought" before, so that I could really own my own thoughts. So that I could know that my own thoughts were truly original. So that, as it seemed would happen if I didn't learn to take control, I wouldn't forever be misleading myself and rehashing old mistakes.
Recognizing my thoughts in the thoughts of others also enraged me. I was enraged at the blindness and stupidity of the world. A world that hadn't told me what it already knew, but had fed me a pack of rotten lies instead. Generally, the anger put me back on my ass.
Here was the situation; what I had been told -- what had been put my way in a controlled manner -- seemed wholly lies whenever something would come my way accidentally -- beyond control -- to prove that my own doubts about the controlled truths had been expressed before. They were therefore both legitimized and taken away from me. I knew I had a right to doubt the received truths, but I knew the revealed truths weren't original. They were very old. A kiss is a revelation only to a fool who imagines that no-one's ever felt that way before.
Yet personal revelation seemed not enough. To get a handle on the revealed truth of the world, and to know that personal truth is also original. That each new discovery is not made illegitimate because somebody's been there before. But also to find someplace, through effort and control, where you could be sure that you are the first. That you might own the territory.
But why own the territory? Why this desire to be so alone? My struggle between the ancestral truths and my own, expressed itself violently in the prepubescent nightmares I suffered for so long. When the inkling began that I would in fact eventually find myself alone in the world, my sleeping mind would warn me of the consequences of stepping beyond the ancestral territory. Simple things, like being upside down --even though everything was upside down in the dream and I wasn't falling -- would send me into a howling panic. There would be no pain in the nightmares, just an undeniable sense that nothing made sense. There was even my awareness within the dream that I could ignore the fear and relax, because my senses told me that I was alright. Nothing was hurting me, and I wasn't apparently affected by the lack of sense. But I couldn't stop the terror. A terror such as I have never experienced since.
There are only two ways to stop the terror -- the nightmare. Either you bind yourself ever more tightly to your inherited world, or you learn to be alone and swallow fear. I followed the path I was shown, but always the ground felt insecure. Terror would lurk behind me -- a breath away. The inherited world gradually became the nightmare, and I was bounding to some private world. I sleep soundly with hardly a memorable dream. But I am ever more lonely, and ever more callous. There must be a way to stand firmly without being alone. And there must be a way to be alone without stepping beyond the solid ground of the community.
It has been my restless, childhood years that have pulled me out of the swamp -- and the anger, and the terror, and the thinking -- each time. When in high school, I had fallen into the brooding which this century's early sex and late morality leads to. It was the instincts bred in childhood that saved my soul. There was a sucking power of depression that set in as each revealed truth was contradicted by the expressed truth of society. The sexual experience that was real and the morality that was also real and needed to be corrected. My mind wasn't up to the task, of course, nor could I stand ad-hoc solutions. I was too troubled by morality and by truths to just ignore them. Perhaps if I had read. But I didn't or couldn't. As I've said, fortunately there was my childhood. I would sooner brood on a long bicycle ride than in a dark corner. And this at least left me exposed.
AND CLICHES
ramblings of number 747
(read me andpass me along)
no copyright
February 3, 1983 5:47 AM
I was awakened this morning by a booming against the side of the boat. What?! Driving rain such as one encounters only once a year was all the answer I got. Go Away!
I tossed under the quilt, looking for the comfort that I had only just lost
Boom!
My God, could that -- whatever it is -- really crash through the hull? It's so miserable out there.
Gentler now. A soft bumping that taps the rhythm of waves. Probably just a chunk of ice broken free by the wind.
Now I wonder if I will be able to sleep again.
I remember something from last night. The quilt was damp from condensation on the inside of the hull, next to which it had been stored. I'd pulled it out with some sense of dismay, wondering what other areas of neglect were stored around me. I'd just showered, out of a mixed sense of intolerable sliminess of the skin and the always paired inability of my thoughts to grasp. The clouds of steam fill the cabin and find their rest along the frigid planks of the boat's hull. But I couldn't find the calm that usually comes with cleanliness.
So I decided to give in to my tiredness. I had a futile moment when I went to arrange the bedding. Silly preoccupations. I was smooth and soft, and there was the sleeping bag I was accustomed to bundling in. It was to be washed tomorrow -- today -- and I hated to immerse myself in its accumulated punguence. So there was the lighter-weight quilt, quite fresh and only slightly damp now.
It was a luxurious feeling to lie between light and clean covers, which to me betoken visits to other, more established lives. Made beds with sweet cotton sheets. Sprawling in a dry warmth which so differs from the sweaty coziness of a sleeping-bag during an over-cold night.
Should I, or shouldn't I? What will be my fate? It was warm enough for now to enjoy the clean bed, but I knew that before morning I would be cold. Good, I thought. Then I'll just have to wake up. It will break the monolithic silence of the overly sound sleeps I've been having lately. The wind was building, and light squalls were scraping over the boat with increasing frequency. It was with real luxury that I was rocked to sleep this night.
Crash!
This time the impact was definitely threatening. It carried a much greater weight than just a chunk of ice. I was summoned. It will be difficult to explain why I felt summoned. There was a moment's remembering of the decision upon turning into bed that I would wake in the night. So this was why I was to sleep in the quilt.
Alright, so now instead of resentment, I felt eager to learn what specter of destruction was getting me out of my comfort. I arose. No, not those pants. Some work pants. And the old wool sweater that seems to be made of iron yarn. The one my father wore thirty-five years ago, I remembered, and which doesn't begin to show wear. The one with my-his name embroidered inside -- varsity swimming.
No point trying to keep dry. It's a typhoon out there.
I crawled out in my bare feet. A moment's hesitation that was reduced to a pinprick of awareness that I shouldn't really want to go out there. There was no physical hesitation. Immediately I was spinning in the stormy world that I liked so much to perceive from inside the cabin.
There was no feeling of getting wet or cold. There was no possibility of even distinguishing those sensations. They were too pervasive. Water on the deck was up to my ankles. The rain was torrential; there's nothing on deck to hold a pool that deep. What is it then? I scrambled toward the bow with just enough abandon to be reminded of the need to grab hold.
A huge slab of ice had wedged itself between my hull and the behemoth in the next slip. The crash I felt was the full weight of that monster transmitted through the ice each time a wave hit. It was indeed a force that could crack my hull. The wind and waves pushed it further into the vee between the boats.
I sat on the edge of the boat and gave the slab a mighty shove with my bare feet. As though driven by a ghost, it drifted away against the gentler prodding of more natural forces.
I followed its course until I was perched on the spindly bowsprit, where I was reminded of other exhilarating times there when crashing though waves at sea. I felt no less exhilarated. And now as the cabin fire has warmed me again and I sit in dry clothes writing.
So that was why I was waked from the comfort of my sleep -- and this. I ought to have felt unlucky to have to go out into that storm. This writing, too, is a burden. But there was a moment in which by purest accident I was called to partake. A moment of soul-moving existence that otherwise I was bound -- and determined -- to sleep through. It seemed not to be an accident though, and that is the subject of more writing.
I had known that I was to be awakened, and had even prepared for it. The consternation of why the preparation --for what -- was answered in the simplest and most mundane fashion. Strange how life is to be made wonderful by such simple preparedness to meet one's fate. I can't say that there was any God to greet me at this moment of miserable epiphany, but the feeling was exactly as if there had been. That is the thing that requires some explaining.
It's calmer now. The rain has stopped. I'm warm. Only my eyes hurt from the early hour. There's a lot of work ahead, and I'm not sure I'm equal to it. I have a metaphor in my life for such times, though. I have this boat. There was a moment of dread following the excitement and disbelief that came when I realized that I actually own this boat on which I now live. I had never sailed anything more complicated than a 'sunfish'. I was far from certain of the boat's seaworthiness. There were impossible and imposing considerations of time and money. Behind the excitement was the lurking fear that I might just have done something crazy. And so now, as I scrawl, I know that it is not just to myself -- though it might principally be for myself -- and that too seems out-of-bounds. I don't know how to write.
How many authors write Accident or Fate in the same capital letters they use for God? They have all seemed aware of what I, with my peculiar style of reading, find most compelling in their writing. There is life borne through the written word. I never remember the words -- their meaning or their sound -- but I think their life stays with me. Yet these authors are no worshippers of fate. Theirs is a controlled writing. Still, I would insist that there are the muses. I can't judge whether I'll be blessed by their attentions, or whether my writing will crumble under the entropic force of too many details left uncared for. 0 gentle muse, how can I prepare for your coming?
And what a lie! What conceit! I don't set out to write literature. Belles-lettres, even. What I'm about comes perilously close to the profane realm of argument. I have something to prove, though I don't believe in proofs. If she comes, the muse will only-just grant a blessing upon a lost sheep. There will be little fiction here, and even less poetry. My only claim for indulgence is my lonely spirit, which even now can hardly believe that words are the proper release. There are other, and deeper mysteries which call forth my captured soul. They are there beyond the words, though not, perhaps, apart from them.
I had been in school, and miserable, when the lure of ships and the sea finally demanded a response. Boats, really. Or anything that could fly white sails and have some space within for repose. The embodied paradox of calm enclosure; shelter set free in the grip of the literal swells of fate. It began as might the longing of a child for love of the sexual sort that he cannot understand. It begins as a beautiful image, too distant to be anything but the subject of pleasant dreams. The body is left out and there is not yet the painful ache of adolescent longing. By then the dream is painful in its impossibility. Whole worlds are lost at each moment that desire is confounded by what is too far beyond comprehension. A kiss which once was innocent now becomes cruel for its promise of what is unknown.
And for me even the kiss was unknown; or rather the plunge was made precipitously thereafter. Like all true fallings in love, I am convinced, this one was surrounded by the mysteries of synchronous happenings. These are simply conjunctions which defy rational appeal, and in their occurrence change the main event as a presence made more real by the impossibility of its circumstances. First, there is the simple coming together of the lover and his object. Then there are the little things which make one know it is right.
The conjuring up of apparitions made real by merely speaking their Name. The start of turning a corner to find what you know not where to seek after. These are the proof of relationship, as I will set out here to prove. But they are all first led up to by tiny seeds each time we have opened our hearts. The love that is first sown as belief can bear fruit in reality when the heart remains fecund.
I was not actually miserable in school. Quite the opposite. My belief in meaning was bearing its fruit in questions answered and mysteries confirmed. I was excited by what I was learning, but it was to the point of distraction. I can rarely read poetry, for after the first poem I am distracted by beauty -- too excited. The whir of my being takes off in an impossible building of meaning such that I fear the text. How can I be competent for the task of reading, when such words as these are put to paper? It is the exhilaration that keeps me away, and such was my relationship with school.
There was a mistrust, not of what I was learning, but of the demands in return. The piles of words which are a product of universities grew nightmarish in their aspect for me. What came together in the excitement of learning was something that could sweep away that rubbish and get back to the text. I didn't want forever to be afraid of poetry, and I felt my fear to be connected to that kind of understanding -- the piling up of words. Each new clue to the unraveling of the poetry of a text -- of the world --was a catalyst-seed in the crystallization of whole encyclopaedias of meaning.
This is why -- that's why -- Ah, now I understand. But where would it all end?
It could be that my boat romance began there -- that I needed to be delivered into the sort of exhilaration that doesn't even flirt for understanding. I don't now, and I didn't then understand why I dreamt of boats. There was something familiar in it. Something to do with bicycles and motorcycles; scuba diving, mountain climbing, and other passions of my past. This seemed like one more attempt to transcend the flesh -- to get out of my skin -- and that worried me. There had been too much disappointment in the past, and I felt wary of repeating it. Yet they need not remain disappointment.
I began to make excursions to the shore; to wander around the marinas and admire the boats. That was instead of writing the papers which I knew could never come together; so full would they be of impossible longing for knowledge to prove what I had already proven to myself. If you want to stay sane, the understanding has to come after the words and not before. I was not a sane member of the university community. I already knew what I wanted to say and could scarcely bother to find the evidence. It all jumped out at me, rather, and I was overwhelmed. So I took to looking at boats.
Marinas exist in an other world, protected by ties of belonging -- in and out -- and by signs which make the visitor nervous. I've never been good at penetrating those invisible but very real social barriers. I feel ill at ease, and that is why I now sit alone in my boat. But there have been moments, we all know them, when the piercing of such barriers provided the route to an untold aliveness.
Climbing atop a monument in ever proper Austria just because the sign said verboten, and discovering the singular vista, made singular, perhaps, by its having been a breech. So in the marina, I walked past the signs and tried to be natural. I was armed with a fiction -- a lie -- that I was looking to buy a boat. Otherwise I would have scurried away at the first guarding glance of one of those who belonged.
I had less than no money and little enough experience to dare open my mouth. But my inward pretense gave me the courage to stroll. I didn't see much at first because I didn't dare to look. I didn't want to be caught off-guard. When you are a part of something, you stop noticing the things of which you are part, and I instinctively knew that I should be nonchalant.
Eventually, whether because curiosity gets the better of you, or because someone is sympathetic to your alienness, you begin to learn; and by degrees can gain admission to any other world. I know I left a trail of bewilderment with my misplaced terminology and impossible circumstances. But no-one called my bluff. I couldn't have been a good actor; if I were to see myself now I would know exactly what I was up to. And so, I guess, did everyone I encountered. It was the sincerity of my interest that gave me my education. The attempts at playing a part were too bald to be offensive. I guess.
But I did eventually get myself into a lot of trouble. Because I began to believe, myself, the part I had cast for myself. Pretending to be interested in buying a boat in order to gain admission to the museum led through a real desire to possess something like the objects displayed therein to a swindling of the soul who would sell me one. Still, they were salesmen whose souls are already so twisted by charade of truth that there could be no further harm.
I was gaining momentum. Those arcane forces -- that arcane structure -- was taking shape that would funnel me to the object of my desire.
It was against all reason. As in cases of true love where the emotion is so overwhelming that only later can one reflect on the utter impossibility of the meeting. Not because it is so unusual or even special by comparison with the myriad other events which conspire to make up the world. Just in what it entails. That this boat should have been there, at that time. No-one else wanted it. I'm afraid to say her -- and indeed, it had much to be wary of. It was not impossible simply by the occurrence, but by what it entailed.
This is difficult. I'm being led to all corners of my life, and there seems to be the necessity of drawing in those other souls who've been reflected therein. I would expose them -- or their soul as it strikes me-- and then cast myself off more completely than I already am in my floating hermitage. The telling requires it, however. 0 where is there justice? Not to tell is to leave the narrative of my own life unpeopled and dull. But to lay bare the basis of all existence -- the communion between souls that must forever remain other to those who are not friends -- that would be abominable sin. What then? I have no power for invention.
"You seem to have come to a dead-end, Mr. H****. It's about time, too. I was getting sick of that pile of involuted shit you've been writing. You tear open the sewer of your soul -- as if all it took was a series of words --and suddenly you're wallowing in it. Every fucking detail gets connected to every other little detail until it has to stop, of its own confusion."
Who are you? What are you doing here?
"Who do you think I am?"
You couldn't be the muse. Muses are gentle.
"Fat chance. They're about as far away from you as the moon.
"We've been there, you know. To the moon, I mean. That's the whole problem. You strike down your goals by achieving them. All narrative has that kind of goal. There's an end to it. It wants to comprehend something. And fiction presumes the comprehension to be accomplished by invention -- like getting to the moon. You invent a vehicle that's more real than the conveyance of one's feelings, and when you've gotten there, everyone who's been left behind is saddened, though they might not know it. The moon of poetry has been destroyed, and we are fooled into leading our lives at a remove, through the thrills of those few who actually galloped off to the moon. I mean, you read a novel and there they are, those astronauts bigger than life whose existence you can only wish for. Only Tolstoy avoided that.
"Enough! God, you go on. How are you ever going to get this under control?"
Will you help?
"I'm not your muse."
Perhaps you could pretend?
"Ah. Well, perhaps -- if you do."
Well then let's pretend. Let's imagine there's a young fellow by the name of Howie Hahn -- that's sort of Chinese for "hero" -- and that he ... Hell, that's just changing the names to protect the innocent. It'll never work. And I don't want to be a hero. That's just my point. That's what I want to prove.
"Why don't you just go ahead and prove your point then?"
I don't have the evidence, or rather the only evidence I have is my own experience. I can't just invent that. Or maybe I did invent it. Let's be honest. I'm going to invent a story and the protagonist is going to be me. I don't want anyone to fall into the trap of thinking that my whole life is here, though. I won't let slip all the dishonorable moments. And I don't want the reader to think I've gotten anywhere at the end. It might be nice if the reader has gotten somewhere, though.
"Bull Shit. If anybody reads this you will think you've gotten somewhere. And so will the reader, if he likes it. Any writer casts himself in the role of hero. People who live life don't need to read about it. And people who read about it aren't fooled by the characters in the book. Their real hero is the author."
I don't read that way.
"Yeah, I know. You identify with the characters. Living your life as though you were a character in a novel. You thought that once, didn't you? That instead of having to write out the play of life, one ought to take the message and live it. So why are you writing?
I have something to prove.
"To who? To yourself?"
Maybe so. I don't know. There's something I know -- I feel -- that I think the whole world needs to know. I decided a while ago that you can't just tell people such things. You can't prove to them the truth. So I thought I was free of words. The way to teach what you know is to live it. To be the author of your own life. But there I was, a mechanic, a carpenter, and always the words would ensnare me.
I learned something from the very real satisfaction of building things -- fixing them. But ecstasy was reserved for words. That seems to be my realm. Not beautiful, well-written words. I'm not trained for that. But words that are the only vent for a soul inadequately tied to the world by other means of expression. I don't know. Maybe I do have to prove something to myself. Just as I got myself into the boat project and had to see it through -- well, somehow I've gotten myself tangled in the net of words. I have to see it through. I can't keep turning my back with excuses that are only more words.
"You can't prove anything to people with words." That's a truism, but all I ever really do that's central to my being is talk -- words. I go around the woodlots and boat-yards as an enigma. Nothing of what I want to let out gets released because I'm just a confusion. No matter how I perfect my skills at carpentry -- my soul's not in it.
"Christ! Don't get so upset. I'll help already. We're going to have to consider this a bit more. Let me get this straight. You have something to prove, but you can't prove it by words. You might prove it by carpentry if your soul were in it. Is that right?"
I'm not sure. I guess so. There are carpenters who know what I know. They're calmer, though, because their work gives vent. I mean it connects them to the world. But, it's different. They wouldn't be able to put into words what I know. I've struggled with words -- with reason -- and so what I've got to say takes that form. Perhaps it's an interpretation -- a translation. I'm sure the world is as caught up in words as I am. Many people don't understand the work of the carpenter. They put it into words and suddenly the carpenter is alone -- because no one connects with his work.
Those carpenters who can tolerate starvation just keep on working. And so life goes on. The rest are dead...
"Stick to the topic. We're trying to figure out how you can make your connection in the world, and you keep going off trying to vent your soul or something. There's got to be some order here. There are good words and bad words; good carpentry and bad carpentry. You can't just spill your soul into your words and expect them to be good."
I wanted a muse!
"Listen! The way I see it, you're only trying to connect with people who read, right?"
But there a lot of dead carpenters out there!
"Well, start a religion, for Christ's sake. Maybe you just want to preach."
That's no fair. Alright, I'll admit there's something dead in religion. Something about God. I mean His Word. But I'm not trying to replace that.
"So you keep telling yourself. You lost a good majority of the 'dead carpenters' anyway. A lot of them believe in God -- and His Word."
No they don't. I mean they don't really. Well some might --but not the dead ones.
"Stop! I agree you don't know how to write. Poetry isn't it. And fiction seems dangerous to you. Why not an essay?"
An "Essay on the Life of R*** H****". Not too promising.
"You've got to start somewhere."
Well, you've given me a thought. I've put it all wrong. I don't know anything. I have nothing to prove. That's what I really meant before anyway. My life is here, on this page. Open it, gentle reader, I would like to talk with you. I can't think except when I'm talking, and I have to talk to somebody. By the way, you wouldn't be my reader would you?
"Not a chance."
Good.
During my childhood, I would spend my winters dreaming of the summer, when I had the whole world of Lake Erie at my back door. The water was clear then, and I loved to swim. In my winter dreams, the house would have flooded with that sweet transparent water. I could float through the rooms, and especially up and down the stairs. I didn't worry about breathing. These were day-dreams and had no true logic. At night, I would dream of flying. In the end, I would actually physically crash onto my bed. Falling, I suppose, from the paroxysm of fear that preceded the crash in my dream.
My summer dreams were concerned with skiing. A controlled falling at breathless speeds down slopes of clean white snow. The dreams were present also at the event. The reality wasn't a disappointment, I mean. At least it provided the stuff that would fuel the next season's dreams.
But there I was in the hot activity of summer, where the whole world invites you to repose -- dreaming of the exhilaration of winter. And in the cold repose of winter when the house beckons with its warmth -- dreaming of the easy drifting of summer. The dreams were confused, but the activities were in place. I was doing things all the time, and in their rush even the seasons passed too slowly.
There are other moments that come later, when I would have stopped the progress of time to expand the moment into an eternity that I might sort out who I was. Dead, empty moments of thinking. Thinking is an impossible activity, and I know now that I wasn't thinking. I was troubling. There was something unfinished hanging over my life, and each time I was beaten down by the senseless procession of events which always left me short of where I wished to be, I would be pushed flat on my ass to think -- or so it seemed to me. I was actually just troubling.
But I would have moments of clarity when the words that flitted through my mind clamored together their great sense. It made thinking seem legitimate, but it didn't get me back into the procession of time. Each time I'd solved something through thought, a book or an event -- or the event of reading a book -- would come my way and prove to me that this wasn't it. This had been "thought" of countless ages ago. Yet this conspiracy of little accidents that would both excite and depress me gradually drew me out.
Excite, because they legitimized my activity -- that is, my inactivity; my thinking. Depress, because I'd solved nothing. And finding that my thoughts had already been thought prodded an effort to control -- to find out as much as possible about what had been "thought" before, so that I could really own my own thoughts. So that I could know that my own thoughts were truly original. So that, as it seemed would happen if I didn't learn to take control, I wouldn't forever be misleading myself and rehashing old mistakes.
Recognizing my thoughts in the thoughts of others also enraged me. I was enraged at the blindness and stupidity of the world. A world that hadn't told me what it already knew, but had fed me a pack of rotten lies instead. Generally, the anger put me back on my ass.
Here was the situation; what I had been told -- what had been put my way in a controlled manner -- seemed wholly lies whenever something would come my way accidentally -- beyond control -- to prove that my own doubts about the controlled truths had been expressed before. They were therefore both legitimized and taken away from me. I knew I had a right to doubt the received truths, but I knew the revealed truths weren't original. They were very old. A kiss is a revelation only to a fool who imagines that no-one's ever felt that way before.
Yet personal revelation seemed not enough. To get a handle on the revealed truth of the world, and to know that personal truth is also original. That each new discovery is not made illegitimate because somebody's been there before. But also to find someplace, through effort and control, where you could be sure that you are the first. That you might own the territory.
But why own the territory? Why this desire to be so alone? My struggle between the ancestral truths and my own, expressed itself violently in the prepubescent nightmares I suffered for so long. When the inkling began that I would in fact eventually find myself alone in the world, my sleeping mind would warn me of the consequences of stepping beyond the ancestral territory. Simple things, like being upside down --even though everything was upside down in the dream and I wasn't falling -- would send me into a howling panic. There would be no pain in the nightmares, just an undeniable sense that nothing made sense. There was even my awareness within the dream that I could ignore the fear and relax, because my senses told me that I was alright. Nothing was hurting me, and I wasn't apparently affected by the lack of sense. But I couldn't stop the terror. A terror such as I have never experienced since.
There are only two ways to stop the terror -- the nightmare. Either you bind yourself ever more tightly to your inherited world, or you learn to be alone and swallow fear. I followed the path I was shown, but always the ground felt insecure. Terror would lurk behind me -- a breath away. The inherited world gradually became the nightmare, and I was bounding to some private world. I sleep soundly with hardly a memorable dream. But I am ever more lonely, and ever more callous. There must be a way to stand firmly without being alone. And there must be a way to be alone without stepping beyond the solid ground of the community.
It has been my restless, childhood years that have pulled me out of the swamp -- and the anger, and the terror, and the thinking -- each time. When in high school, I had fallen into the brooding which this century's early sex and late morality leads to. It was the instincts bred in childhood that saved my soul. There was a sucking power of depression that set in as each revealed truth was contradicted by the expressed truth of society. The sexual experience that was real and the morality that was also real and needed to be corrected. My mind wasn't up to the task, of course, nor could I stand ad-hoc solutions. I was too troubled by morality and by truths to just ignore them. Perhaps if I had read. But I didn't or couldn't. As I've said, fortunately there was my childhood. I would sooner brood on a long bicycle ride than in a dark corner. And this at least left me exposed.
The actual Valentine
This is what I would write to a woman who wanted me to court her (thank goodness, there aren't any) as I leave her behind to go help get out the vote for Obama (is there or should there be a let's Rock for Barack slogan in Cleveland, home of the actually really cool Rock and Roll Hall of Fame??? )
Hi (Sweetie),
I'm so sorry to do this to you, but I'm going to let exactly three people in on my life's plan: Women in my life have only meant that I have the power to break their hearts. My mother has been near death 100 times, and she is the toughest woman I've ever met. But I break her heart, regardless of what I do.
My ex-wife is a working class girl who has a real fear of poverty (last night skiing, I had a pitcher of beer with wings, with a guy from (nearby town) - (Friend) is a social retard, this guy was his neighbor - spilled my beans only to find out that he knows my ex's entire extended, and I gather notorious, family from (Nearby town) - (now that's a funny story), and therefore a real fear of me, and she literally doesn't understand me, and I scare the shit (can I say that on email) out of her. She really doesn't understand how painful it is to have a brain in the United States, nor how frustrating it might be to have no money to spend, although your car (which you can't afford) is entirely subsidized by mileage reimbursement, and you drive a 1988 VW fox when you don't get reimbursed, you pay $1000/mos for housing, and nothing for food or clothing and you can't pay your bills.
I forgive her everything, but I'm done.
I've had two abortions, and I am incredibly happy that I have two daughters who know who their Dad is. There is no regret here, only anger at the way that the so-called Christians abuse children in the name of God. (the Catholics are just serf-like zombies, who deserve what they ask for) I'm sick and tired of illiterates running what they call the Church. They don't understand metaphor. They don't understand irony. They can't read (quite literally). Dyslexics are either really rich (I ran the (Fancy) school (for dyslexic rich kids) for a month and then got paid off for the rest of the year, which I used to ride a Harley 12,000 miles around the country) or they are born again. This is no joke.
There is only one church, and it has to get over the medieval period. The sweet Marquis de Sade is the only informant I need.These people are stuck in the feudal period (but at least they can read)
Jesus is real (but not God, not immaculately conceived, and not ascendant). If Bishop (Liberal) is the best we can do (and he is) then the church holds no interest for me. Every single one of my childhood playmates and (Ivy League) classmates has sold out (the ones not in the nuthouse, plus my old girlfriend). I used to know what that means, but it's like the joke about the prostitute: would you sleep with me for $1Million? How about $100: "I'm no prostitute!!" Well, we've already established that, we're only haggling price.
These chicken shits, who received their $150,000/year educations are still like my ex-wife, afraid of poverty, and I guess there's not enough money in the world for them, or their beloved (Ivy). How much is your soul worth (not a question to you, clearly)
I thank Bush and Rummy and Cheney for giving me back my courage. I long long long for the day when I can have Alzheimers like my Dad, surrounded by love and warmth and adequacy. I see nothing sad - he's 85. I see nothing to fear (no need to purchase Drugs or iron lungs.) He gave me the courage, by selling out to his father's fear-mongering, and giving me the example of my brother (I was a bookkeeper in the law office, while my brother was being abused by my father - then I took off for parts far away, but I couldn't continue to break my mothers' heart).
Thinking in the United States is a painful experience, and you get blamed for arrogance, aloofness, and impenetrable words instead of being listened to. I actually know about this. I ran a school for these victims, and I am not so smart as half of them were when they were 10.
Even alcohol doesn't drown the pain - it's more like pouring gasoline on the fire. Damn!
We are wasting money on education just as much as bombs. We are mesmerized by pornography which depicts humans as animals. Jesus christ, don't people watch cows, horses and bears do it any more? Don't people know that our leaders, including Jesus Christ have and have always had a perpetual hardon?? (Christ was routinely depicted during the Renaissance for reasons I could care less about, but which have all been airbrushed out, with a gargarntuan hardon. I honestly don't know if it was symbolic, Amish-style honest, or pornographic, but it is a fact, which can't even make it into the New York Times, and those scholars don't interest me anyhow.)
Bill Clinton was tricked, and a victim. Of course, duh, he had a perpetual hardon. I remember running a school how many Moms wanted to f*** (can I say that?) me (honest, not a one did I do). I have been in love, and know the difference between ooohhhaahhoohhyesyesyes and making love, and they aren't any more interesting than horses doing it (although you get a bit hotter watching the horses), and there's a reason we aren't allowed to see it (even gmail scrubs me if I use "f***" in the header (maybe this won't even make it through).
The Marquis had a point, although he's really gross. Marie Antoinette was a victim too (I think that's my favorite movie of all times), but my (Ivy League) classmates are her moral equivalent. No more rounding up of Stogonoff's (what was the family name of the Russian nobility???) and shooting them, whether you're Mao or Chavez or Fidel. Bush is a very small man, not worthy of my attention. Ditto, Bill Gates. Ditto Fidel. Ditto Chavez. I like Obama OK.
So, since I'm no longer afraid of my cholesterol count, and Altzheimers looks like a vacation to me, I've given myself 200 days to live, after which I'll be in jail if my ex wants, or dead if the remnants of the Bushies want, but I'm going to blackmail the Bishop, Hillary (who needs to stay in New York, for honor's sake), (Big Boss) and a few others into solving poverty in the Rust Belt. It will cost far less than the bridge in Alaska. I have an actual plan to do it.
My good friend might (or might not) make billions on an idea I helped with, and he'll be good for at least a million to the cause (more than enough). The three people are you, (the internet genius,) and my brother in law. I can't include my family, because my mother is still alive, but I've discharged my duties, and they can tell her whatever they want. (bro) has gone back to mountain climbing and is oppressed by women in his own right. (Internet Genius) will make his millions one way or another. My sister (bornagain) will cheer me on, but she is still 10 years old, and oppressed by her father substitute (I sent you his picture).
OK, that's what happens when you sleep in cat's piss 25 years to the day after you emerged from the cocoon of your sailboat, same temperature. I am no longer cautious in my statements. I am telling lies, tall tales, stories, and half truths (just like the big boys) to make sure that at least the Southern Tier of New York will get fed instead of bombed.
I think it's a worthwhile cause. (all you have to do is read about the mothers who sent their children off to war under Honest Abe, Teddy, FDR, Woody, LBJ, Tricky Dick, Cheney, and my very own cousin now credited with winning the war on terrorism (while our college shooteres and that guy from Newfane Near Nia. Falls - Tim McVeigh??? I knew him well (NOT) and the passion for the automobile terrorize us all for real)
There are two heros in my life (not including Jesus, who can't be known because he's surrounded by bullshit). Gore Vidal, who has more moral courage than almost anyone, and my former student Kurt Schneiderman. If my kids are cared for, and there's anything left from the life insurance, I'd like Kurt to get it all. And I mean all. Well, I kind of liked William F. Buckley, who died today. He was a thinking Atilla the Hun, probably didn't drink the way I drink ( I could be wrong about that), but I caught him debating Gore Vidal, before I knew who either of them were (read Yankee in King Ivy's court), and at least he had a brain. Please read this and delete it. Or tuck it away. I have tucked my bed. Now I will sleep in it.
With actual love,
Me
Hi (Sweetie),
I'm so sorry to do this to you, but I'm going to let exactly three people in on my life's plan: Women in my life have only meant that I have the power to break their hearts. My mother has been near death 100 times, and she is the toughest woman I've ever met. But I break her heart, regardless of what I do.
My ex-wife is a working class girl who has a real fear of poverty (last night skiing, I had a pitcher of beer with wings, with a guy from (nearby town) - (Friend) is a social retard, this guy was his neighbor - spilled my beans only to find out that he knows my ex's entire extended, and I gather notorious, family from (Nearby town) - (now that's a funny story), and therefore a real fear of me, and she literally doesn't understand me, and I scare the shit (can I say that on email) out of her. She really doesn't understand how painful it is to have a brain in the United States, nor how frustrating it might be to have no money to spend, although your car (which you can't afford) is entirely subsidized by mileage reimbursement, and you drive a 1988 VW fox when you don't get reimbursed, you pay $1000/mos for housing, and nothing for food or clothing and you can't pay your bills.
I forgive her everything, but I'm done.
I've had two abortions, and I am incredibly happy that I have two daughters who know who their Dad is. There is no regret here, only anger at the way that the so-called Christians abuse children in the name of God. (the Catholics are just serf-like zombies, who deserve what they ask for) I'm sick and tired of illiterates running what they call the Church. They don't understand metaphor. They don't understand irony. They can't read (quite literally). Dyslexics are either really rich (I ran the (Fancy) school (for dyslexic rich kids) for a month and then got paid off for the rest of the year, which I used to ride a Harley 12,000 miles around the country) or they are born again. This is no joke.
There is only one church, and it has to get over the medieval period. The sweet Marquis de Sade is the only informant I need.These people are stuck in the feudal period (but at least they can read)
Jesus is real (but not God, not immaculately conceived, and not ascendant). If Bishop (Liberal) is the best we can do (and he is) then the church holds no interest for me. Every single one of my childhood playmates and (Ivy League) classmates has sold out (the ones not in the nuthouse, plus my old girlfriend). I used to know what that means, but it's like the joke about the prostitute: would you sleep with me for $1Million? How about $100: "I'm no prostitute!!" Well, we've already established that, we're only haggling price.
These chicken shits, who received their $150,000/year educations are still like my ex-wife, afraid of poverty, and I guess there's not enough money in the world for them, or their beloved (Ivy). How much is your soul worth (not a question to you, clearly)
I thank Bush and Rummy and Cheney for giving me back my courage. I long long long for the day when I can have Alzheimers like my Dad, surrounded by love and warmth and adequacy. I see nothing sad - he's 85. I see nothing to fear (no need to purchase Drugs or iron lungs.) He gave me the courage, by selling out to his father's fear-mongering, and giving me the example of my brother (I was a bookkeeper in the law office, while my brother was being abused by my father - then I took off for parts far away, but I couldn't continue to break my mothers' heart).
Thinking in the United States is a painful experience, and you get blamed for arrogance, aloofness, and impenetrable words instead of being listened to. I actually know about this. I ran a school for these victims, and I am not so smart as half of them were when they were 10.
Even alcohol doesn't drown the pain - it's more like pouring gasoline on the fire. Damn!
We are wasting money on education just as much as bombs. We are mesmerized by pornography which depicts humans as animals. Jesus christ, don't people watch cows, horses and bears do it any more? Don't people know that our leaders, including Jesus Christ have and have always had a perpetual hardon?? (Christ was routinely depicted during the Renaissance for reasons I could care less about, but which have all been airbrushed out, with a gargarntuan hardon. I honestly don't know if it was symbolic, Amish-style honest, or pornographic, but it is a fact, which can't even make it into the New York Times, and those scholars don't interest me anyhow.)
Bill Clinton was tricked, and a victim. Of course, duh, he had a perpetual hardon. I remember running a school how many Moms wanted to f*** (can I say that?) me (honest, not a one did I do). I have been in love, and know the difference between ooohhhaahhoohhyesyesyes and making love, and they aren't any more interesting than horses doing it (although you get a bit hotter watching the horses), and there's a reason we aren't allowed to see it (even gmail scrubs me if I use "f***" in the header (maybe this won't even make it through).
The Marquis had a point, although he's really gross. Marie Antoinette was a victim too (I think that's my favorite movie of all times), but my (Ivy League) classmates are her moral equivalent. No more rounding up of Stogonoff's (what was the family name of the Russian nobility???) and shooting them, whether you're Mao or Chavez or Fidel. Bush is a very small man, not worthy of my attention. Ditto, Bill Gates. Ditto Fidel. Ditto Chavez. I like Obama OK.
So, since I'm no longer afraid of my cholesterol count, and Altzheimers looks like a vacation to me, I've given myself 200 days to live, after which I'll be in jail if my ex wants, or dead if the remnants of the Bushies want, but I'm going to blackmail the Bishop, Hillary (who needs to stay in New York, for honor's sake), (Big Boss) and a few others into solving poverty in the Rust Belt. It will cost far less than the bridge in Alaska. I have an actual plan to do it.
My good friend might (or might not) make billions on an idea I helped with, and he'll be good for at least a million to the cause (more than enough). The three people are you, (the internet genius,) and my brother in law. I can't include my family, because my mother is still alive, but I've discharged my duties, and they can tell her whatever they want. (bro) has gone back to mountain climbing and is oppressed by women in his own right. (Internet Genius) will make his millions one way or another. My sister (bornagain) will cheer me on, but she is still 10 years old, and oppressed by her father substitute (I sent you his picture).
OK, that's what happens when you sleep in cat's piss 25 years to the day after you emerged from the cocoon of your sailboat, same temperature. I am no longer cautious in my statements. I am telling lies, tall tales, stories, and half truths (just like the big boys) to make sure that at least the Southern Tier of New York will get fed instead of bombed.
I think it's a worthwhile cause. (all you have to do is read about the mothers who sent their children off to war under Honest Abe, Teddy, FDR, Woody, LBJ, Tricky Dick, Cheney, and my very own cousin now credited with winning the war on terrorism (while our college shooteres and that guy from Newfane Near Nia. Falls - Tim McVeigh??? I knew him well (NOT) and the passion for the automobile terrorize us all for real)
There are two heros in my life (not including Jesus, who can't be known because he's surrounded by bullshit). Gore Vidal, who has more moral courage than almost anyone, and my former student Kurt Schneiderman. If my kids are cared for, and there's anything left from the life insurance, I'd like Kurt to get it all. And I mean all. Well, I kind of liked William F. Buckley, who died today. He was a thinking Atilla the Hun, probably didn't drink the way I drink ( I could be wrong about that), but I caught him debating Gore Vidal, before I knew who either of them were (read Yankee in King Ivy's court), and at least he had a brain. Please read this and delete it. Or tuck it away. I have tucked my bed. Now I will sleep in it.
With actual love,
Me
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Well, now that I think about it . . . a Valentine
I come home from a family reunion type ski vacation to find that one cat is in the garage, having overturned some stuff, or so it seems, and another has locked herself in my bedroom going after her image in the mirror on the back of the door, thus bottling her catshit and its smell. Likely, the one in the garage followed me in, though that leaves other perhaps more troublesome possibilities for who or what scattered the stuff around.
But they weren't dead, and I should be grateful for sure. Up against the other possibilities, I got off easy, although the logistics which pile up in front of good relaxed reading time never seem to shrink.
I didn't think I'd be able to ski, so out of shape have I allowed myself to become. But I rallied, and we all had a good time. There are no really good reasons for everyone to have gotten along as well as we did. Among us; a lawyer, a housewife, a born-again (and again) without any worldly knowledge whatsoever, leaving her subject to whatever bloviations I or others professing worldly expertise, might impose, plus our hosts the young retired.
The range was from full blown, and quasi-religious, skepticism, to Bible-as-literal-truth brain freeze. I myself realized only lately into the trip that it was, rather precisely, a kind of silver anniversary for me. It was 25 years ago Valentine's Day that I emerged from a cocoon of sorts, thinking I might be about to flex my wings. I'd been living aboard a ridiculously small old wooden boat through a record-breaking cold snap in Connecticut - somehow minus 20 Fahrenheit seems actually accurate - and likely experienced some sort of cabin fever induced brain melt-down. I warmed myself by a minuscule coal stove after having been roused by icebergs pounding the hull, and proceeded to write my heart out.
Since then I've labored, dilettantishly at best, to fill out the already perfected but not quite communicable crystalizations realized by my pen.
So, here we were, a somewhat extended family plus friends, preoccupied, of course, with the pending election and the state of the world. Our collective carbon footprint was huge, having flown or four-wheeled or super-trucked in to this moutain. Still, there was some friction about the recyclables, and no real consensus about what to do either for the good of our personal lives or that of the world. There was a pretty clear consensus for Obama in the election, alongside some difficult lettings go of Hillary's outright competence and some coy silence from the super truckers.
So while I'm trying to finish up Gore Vidal's Empire series (working my way through Hollywood) which is incredibly informative toward this, and perhaps all, upcoming elections, my brother is reading Jim Kunstler on a World Made by Hand. He's the Peak Oil guy, who cries Chicken Little like about the doom pending post oil. Well, I don't think he's Chicken Little because he speaks the obvious truth, but I can't exactly divorce my actions from those of everyone else whose louder-than-words clear conclusion is that we can drive and drive forever.
I think it was by virtue of love, precisely defined, that this grouping of friends and relations had ourselves an absolutely wonderful time. There was no necessity for doing so, and certainly an alternative was to allow petty differences, frictions, and irritations to overwhelm, since there were plenty of them just below the surfaces. After all, there were married couples here, alongside, say, me, who has acquired an apparently autonomous revulsion from ever re-entering that dance of suppressed antipathy, resentment and a sexual frustration far more sharp than that of mere abstinence.
Now, exhausted, I am willing to see beyond the depredations of oil gluttony and addiction. This is surely a gift, like that love which drew my new friends and family together. We have seen through suffering and pain and even dream of death deferred, on this mind-altering high of post armageddon technological bloom. If for the moment we remain enveloped in cocoons literal and virtual, there is still the hope that we can emerge as something new and more human. For now, technology isolates, and we like it that way, cradled in leather, craving repose in only apparently moving or apparently stationary wombs with views. Video encompasses, encloses, comforts, narcotizes but also extends and could possibly liberate a still inchoate consciousness.
I crawl into bed, shocked at how clammy my sheets are after having indulged myself with the furnace where normally I wait for the wood stove before releasing my shivvers. Then I realize that I have surrendered myself to a stinking mess of cat piss. Well, it could still be worse.
But they weren't dead, and I should be grateful for sure. Up against the other possibilities, I got off easy, although the logistics which pile up in front of good relaxed reading time never seem to shrink.
I didn't think I'd be able to ski, so out of shape have I allowed myself to become. But I rallied, and we all had a good time. There are no really good reasons for everyone to have gotten along as well as we did. Among us; a lawyer, a housewife, a born-again (and again) without any worldly knowledge whatsoever, leaving her subject to whatever bloviations I or others professing worldly expertise, might impose, plus our hosts the young retired.
The range was from full blown, and quasi-religious, skepticism, to Bible-as-literal-truth brain freeze. I myself realized only lately into the trip that it was, rather precisely, a kind of silver anniversary for me. It was 25 years ago Valentine's Day that I emerged from a cocoon of sorts, thinking I might be about to flex my wings. I'd been living aboard a ridiculously small old wooden boat through a record-breaking cold snap in Connecticut - somehow minus 20 Fahrenheit seems actually accurate - and likely experienced some sort of cabin fever induced brain melt-down. I warmed myself by a minuscule coal stove after having been roused by icebergs pounding the hull, and proceeded to write my heart out.
Since then I've labored, dilettantishly at best, to fill out the already perfected but not quite communicable crystalizations realized by my pen.
So, here we were, a somewhat extended family plus friends, preoccupied, of course, with the pending election and the state of the world. Our collective carbon footprint was huge, having flown or four-wheeled or super-trucked in to this moutain. Still, there was some friction about the recyclables, and no real consensus about what to do either for the good of our personal lives or that of the world. There was a pretty clear consensus for Obama in the election, alongside some difficult lettings go of Hillary's outright competence and some coy silence from the super truckers.
So while I'm trying to finish up Gore Vidal's Empire series (working my way through Hollywood) which is incredibly informative toward this, and perhaps all, upcoming elections, my brother is reading Jim Kunstler on a World Made by Hand. He's the Peak Oil guy, who cries Chicken Little like about the doom pending post oil. Well, I don't think he's Chicken Little because he speaks the obvious truth, but I can't exactly divorce my actions from those of everyone else whose louder-than-words clear conclusion is that we can drive and drive forever.
I think it was by virtue of love, precisely defined, that this grouping of friends and relations had ourselves an absolutely wonderful time. There was no necessity for doing so, and certainly an alternative was to allow petty differences, frictions, and irritations to overwhelm, since there were plenty of them just below the surfaces. After all, there were married couples here, alongside, say, me, who has acquired an apparently autonomous revulsion from ever re-entering that dance of suppressed antipathy, resentment and a sexual frustration far more sharp than that of mere abstinence.
Now, exhausted, I am willing to see beyond the depredations of oil gluttony and addiction. This is surely a gift, like that love which drew my new friends and family together. We have seen through suffering and pain and even dream of death deferred, on this mind-altering high of post armageddon technological bloom. If for the moment we remain enveloped in cocoons literal and virtual, there is still the hope that we can emerge as something new and more human. For now, technology isolates, and we like it that way, cradled in leather, craving repose in only apparently moving or apparently stationary wombs with views. Video encompasses, encloses, comforts, narcotizes but also extends and could possibly liberate a still inchoate consciousness.
I crawl into bed, shocked at how clammy my sheets are after having indulged myself with the furnace where normally I wait for the wood stove before releasing my shivvers. Then I realize that I have surrendered myself to a stinking mess of cat piss. Well, it could still be worse.
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