going through boxes of letters written and received in the past sixty years, i'm humbled, especially by letters from girlfriends. how young and confused we all seemed in 'youth'. i'm getting over viewing my own so negatively. actually, i find myself grateful for my parents. and i don't mean simply forgiving. no, very appreciative of the adventures, the lessons, and the care. true, i wanted more. i knew my father attached to my sister, my mother both the nurturer and disciplinarian, which made romantic relationships forever difficult. and the oedipus complex! good gravy, i'm finding freud right about so many things. i suspect revisionist discussions of him have more to do with being politically correct than real knowledge. yet, none of this seems to matter any more. it did sabotage the romances related in these letters. that said, being young and impatient and driven by sexual desire had more to do with it. as sappho said in my last communique: Don't prod the beach rubble if you're squeamish. and now i feel it was foolish of me to search the web for what happened to guys and gals i've had the privilege of knowing. yes, i spent yesterday on the web, searching, picking up viruses and bad cookies along the way. at the moment i'm trying to clear the computer and my head. i did find success stories: a couple of lawyers, a young actress who grew up into a very successful costumer on broadway with a huge shop. nobody should get married before thirty and my sagest advice: do everything you want to do in life before then. be a dancer, sail the world, ride a motorcycle to tierra del fuego. the rest will be a piece of cake, not undermined by unsatisfied desires. i did find two tragic deaths, and the second i'm still reeling from. their obituaries will follow. peter a tscherning i met on the island of rhodes, a classical scholar about twenty-two. the letter i have from several years later when he's back at harvard, hints at his going through a terrible trauma. i have no idea what it was. i mixed my own history up with his to created the main character in my only novel, visible, detailing the adventures in lindos, greece among the travelers. obviously his fate saddening, and a part of my own, having combined my story with his. the other far more shocking to me. i met amina agisheff on an icelandic flight from luxembourg to nyc, the cheap way to travel in those days. the plane took off. barely over the water, it had to dump its gasoline. the airline put us up for two days. amina, a fellow from seattle named randy, and i palled around, and in the end drove a dealer car to the northwest. i left them in seattle, though amina and i had become entangled. at the lookout, after several weeks, randy brought her down and drove off into the night. i realized it had become a triangle. i won't go into the rest of the story out of respect for the departed. obviously, from the article, she'd overcome a lot of wildness in her salad days to become a mother of two, and teacher, and eventually at thirty-five the victim of a serial killer. i've never experienced a death like this, even though it happened thirty years ago and seventeen after our last meeting. no, the longer you live the more you realize life is not fair.the only counter to this showed up on my daily zen calendar: Life is painful, suffering is optional.
egad, either i do it for myself, or it will be done for me. on new year's day i told my friend susan, 'i'll just leave all this writing stuff for someone else to deal with.' with a sad, wry smile, she said, 'no one will want to.' an epiphany!!! i immediately realized the truth of her mona lisa look. i've seen too many people throw out the baby with the bathwater when a relative died. to quote lenny bruce once more, 'when you die, all your precious possessions become junk.' okay, i shifted into high gear. at my storage unit i tackled the copies of manuscripts collected over the past fifty years, tossing everything scanned (and probably throwing out a few tikes), box after box, until the back of my pickup literary loaded. they didn't fill the dumpster however. so much for a life's work. boy, nose to the grindstone, i wonder what i missed? certainly the life of a mainstream person, which i was terrified of falling into. ah, you say, what a shame to lose it all. alas, i haven't. i've fifteen boxes of spiral bound notebooks, for example, everything written by hand: diaries, scrapbooks, a million one-liners, original manuscripts, etc. i've given myself til april 1st to get this all in order, a fast document scanner arriving tomorrow. have no fear, i will boil it down to the diamond dust. one reason to leave your daughter one precious teapot and not a whole house of furniture and knick-knacks. this treasured bit of history may survive, and a diligent family historian like my niece dawn bryant may come up with what she wrote on facebook this morning:
As a lover of history I think it is just SO COOL that they have found Richard III's remains under a parking lot!!! My 13th Great Grandfather, Robert "The Smythe" Pease, was born in 1485 just 125 miles from the site of this discovery - the same year King Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field and King Henry VII began the reign of the Tudors!!!
the irony, of course, every civilization kills off the last one, and the curious root in the rubble, trying to put it all back together. more power to them: fragments are more fun. i've read we're all pattern-makers, happiest with puzzles rather than definite answers. true, last week islamic fanatics burned an ancient library in timbuktu. i can't count the times i've mourned the loss of the library at alexandria (burned by christians). yet..yet, the other day i realized i wished i'd written the fragments of sappho, more than anything. If you are squeamish Don't prod the The beach rubble. *(see note below) everybody grabs the photographs when the house catches fire. my sister not so lucky, my mother a family history fanatic, thousands of old documents and photographs lost. sad, you say. no, now dawn has to dig even deeper, coming up with remarkable facts from the past. may you do the same! more photos posted. another vision of the eclipse last spring: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/eclipsebw and these from a surviving box of pictures of a mysterious relative, esmeralda. i hope dawn eventually can piece her biography together:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/esmer **and i suddenly realized: i did write my own sapphic shreds: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/aphrodite
reading french intellectual thoughts, and having them: He couldn't accept himself, and he was fully justified. Help them when they believe they can do anything, console them when they find out they can't. If we didn't believe, would we be?
The world is always new to someone. He couldn't tell if it were a symbol, or a chimera. Only what you re-discover is new. We each cast the shadow of our nervous system on the world. Today was new. Too bad you missed it. Poetry: the nanotechnology of language. Children should be protected from finding themselves too soon. No adult can make sense of childhood. The thought there might be might be another myself out there frightens me. When they have no thoughts, they cry for new forms. Some people come to resemble their ideas. They couldn't see the truth for the psychology. The 20th century spent too much time trying to find the contents of the unconscious. Desire is the first rule. Madness? Merely an adult acting like a child. Begin again? When did you ever start? Civilizations die as easily as flies. Beware! What you learn you can't unlearn. His fate was bigger than he was. Once you lose faith in the myth of yourself, you're finished.
made a trip to a neighboring town: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/oro
i am alarmed by the end of the world coming tomorrow. not by the predicted physical destruction, rather by all the new age talk. here's an example from an address to the united nations by the president of bolivia: December 21, 2012 marks the end of non-time and the beginning of time. It is
the end of the Macha and the beginning of the Pacha. It is the end of
selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood. It is the end of
individualism and the beginning of collectivism... o boy, i can't wait. all my problems solved, no more terrible tension of being an individual. i'll think like everyone else - without knowing it. what a godsend!! the final communist paradise at last. hey, wait a minute. doesn't all positive residue of culture derive from independent thought. the psychologist c.g. jung claimed all innovation and progress arrived at by one person at a time. i guess it doesn't really matter, if we're all floating in bliss. i had a long conversation with my nephrologist (kidney doctor) several weeks ago. raised and educated in Romania under a dictatorship, she could gotten thrown in jail for telling a joke like this: what's the difference between a pessimist and an optimist? the pessimist says, "things are terrible, they couldn't get worse." and the optimist says, "o yes they can!" on the other hand, no drugs, free education, no crime (except by the state), everybody felt equal. alas, she said, with the fall, the true nature of human beings coming out and it isn't pretty. she herself, living and working here, no doubt, wouldn't really go back to experience the fruits of corruption. that said, her mother, a professor, really misses the old days. this doctor's seven year old son now has to navigate the shark-infested waters of america. a tough row to hoe, the u.s.a. you have to create and defend your own territory. with the coming happy classlessness and divine togetherness, we'll lose this frightful condition. what was born with me, a consciousness of the universe, will delightfully disappear. if the end of the world came, would we know it? we'd all live in the now, powerless to act, only respond. actually, that's not bad for a samurai swordsman who has to survive moment. certainly it won't help him carve out a future for the species. so, let's raise our glasses and toast with the dew from the land of the lotus eaters. can we really miss what we can't remember? took class photos yesterday in the meso-american history class, end of the semester projects. interesting timing: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/mexo12
i sometimes feel totally crazy (well, not just sometimes), when i see the obvious and nobody else seems to. this is one of those times. i can rate the economic health of a country by the status of its women. look at those on top: china, the u.s., europe. without oil many societies would be completely destitute. only this source of energy supports the subjugation of women, a false economy. this the tragedy of iraq, iran, and presently, egypt.
the increase of female students in the professional schools in the united states staggering. one friend's son, about to go to optometry school, says he'll wait to find the wife he wants, that institution 70% female. the rise of women in the forest service almost unbelievable, compared to what it was fifty years ago, many forest supervisors women, with almost every firefighting crew including girls.(i say girls cause they have to be young for most of these jobs, and boy, are they looking younger to me every season.) personally, i think this absolutely necessary for the kind of world we're moving into. it requires much more cooperation. i like to watch women's sports for this reason. men look like well-oiled machines by comparison. actually, i've always wondered why women need men. even procreation can be handled with a test-tube. the only answer i've come up with: men shake women up and allow them to have fun, since the males not so concerned with personal appearance. i know i've gone where angels fear to tread. hopefully, the age of political correctness is beginning to fade. the world does need to be tidied up, and i think the distaff side the one to do it. this doesn't mean my masculine input not necessary. everybody needs to learn to play by the rules of the game. a mother will commit murder to preserve her children. when she becomes an executive, she can't simply go with that psychology, women in sports what has truly liberated. i do regret i won't be around to see what happens. getting off oil must, must, must be the first goal.
as a long-time theater guy, i've been struck by the radical difference between how playing the elizabethan characters differs from the way they must be played after the puritan revolution (the culmination of the protestant reformation). shakespeare hated the new sectarians and mocked them brutally. in measure for measure he showed the underlying sexual hypocrisy. and what's important for me, everything with him lay on the table: no internal dialogue not matching the said, no wicked masturbatory thoughts sensed for satisfaction in the privacy of one's own home. yes, freud right, sex makes the difference. the protestants threw individuals back upon themselves. i'm obsessed with self-examination. well, that's where it came from. damn, i have to think about everything: who i am, what's acceptable to others, can i successfully hide my seductive maneuvers and still acquire satisfaction of my 'evil' desires? this split between inner and outer exploded the atom of thought and science, a tremendous energy released. suddenly, all answers were up for grabs. i do thank the puritans for inventing pornography. i'd explode and everybody else in the world without it. the visual splendor captures all our lo0se electrons and channels into an area where they dissipate into fantasy. and they created the big bang. why else would we conceive the universe as the result of a giant orgasm? and maybe the discovery of sexual repression limited crime in a satisfying way. i once read about the number of murders in a small community, oxford, england, during the middle ages. if washington d.c. produces more murders than any other city in the world, i think without oliver cromwell the numbers would be even more staggering. and i'm not sure we've more rapes than in the pagan world. as i said, we've the lightning-rod of pornography. in fact i've heard 80% of the traffic on the web due to it, perhaps an apocryphal tale, and yet not as devastating as richard III. so, if the world's grown lighter since the bard's time, i can give credit to electricity. without the intensity of the scarlet letter i wouldn't be able to use my e-reader in the middle of the night. and i'm eternally grateful for the excitement of political scandals gracing the pages of our newspapers, almost always a transgression against physical decency.
yes, i can think only as myself once the puritans landed on the planet. they did come from mars, of course, without our knowing it. alien extra-sensory perception did not exist before them. let's drink to the quantum leap!! if it weren't for the break-up of the perfect universe, we wouldn't all be walking around with cell-phones, attempting to communicate with each other. here's to nanotechnology and the brave light-waves, particle-beams of the future, the enlightenment leading to a different form of eternal life.
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