THROWBACK
“THROWBACK” AND “BABBITT BRIGHTON” ARE TITLES, SINCE MERGED, OF ANOTHER BOOK THAT NEVER GOT OFF THE GROUND.
DIARY 10175
10/29/75
THROWBACK
"How are you feeling this morning?" asked Therapist Martin.
"OK, I guess," said Babbitt, and he lifted the corners of his mouth in a grin he knew wasn't convincing.
"Where are you today?"
Babbitt's heart pounded in his throat. THAT question. That question, in one form or another, every single day. There was no place to hide from that question.
"Where AM I?" Anything for time---time to think, time to figure it all out and come up with the right answer---the answer that would give him a day of peace in his room, that would insulate him from more treatment.
"Yes, Babbitt, where are you today?" Therapist Martin was always so patient that Babbitt sometimes wanted to scream and lunge at him and kick him and pummel him until he lost his accursed patience.
It's stopped going so well, but that's the start of "THROWBACK" about Babbitt Brighton who lives in the FUTURE, when they have advanced to the stage of Tell-Manhattan. He can be SENT to the past (the current present) to try and help work out his problems, but he "actually" (it's not going to make much difference by the end of the book) was born into his current body some indefinite time in the future---a year like 435 A.B., where A.B. turns out to be After Babbitt, a forebear of Babbitt's who succeeds in liberating the middle class from its "normalcy" and opens the mind and body to permanently expanded consciousness---as we might say "After Werner." Someone very like Jack Rosenburg could change his name to Babbitt Brighton (with the Sinclair Lewis "Babbitt" in mind AND the historical Babbitt that Lewis seems to have patterned him on AND Babbitt's Metal, which acts as a good frictionless surface for bearings, as MY Babbitt should act as an easy way for people of the PRESENT to see how they can become people of the FUTURE, easing the friction between the "human" beings of today and the HUMANS of tomorrow) and start SUCH a psychological revolution that the world is totally changed enough to get the WORLD to "deify" him as the new era---and of course that would make him a kind of "god," and Babbitt (the original) would SO have changed the world that people INDEED believed in themselves as god, which would make the new civilization possible which is being described: as Christ was ONE quantum jump for humanity, so Babbitt is ANOTHER, and the fact that he's OF THE LINE OF BABBITT makes him even MORE suspect he's crazy. Other thoughts swept through my mind: the kelia and prokelia seemed (from Tell) to be connected to the idea of AURAS, and the REGULAR aura has been so well accepted that it's old stuff, but there's an OUTER aura that shows not only the feelings and "whereness" of the person, but extends to the person they're with to show the SPECIFIC feelings about that person---a great new mode of communication. The floors of the mental institution are organized like the levels of the brain: the lowest in the forest, catering to animals, higher in the treetops, catering to higher animals; higher above the trees, catering to 1975 functions; higher above that, catering to O A.B. functions, and even higher, new functions that have been potentialized after Babbitt. This should be left non-explicit but clear. Babbitt goes from level to level, advances, then can't take the input: in fact, that's how he GOT crazy: too much input and his mind couldn't take it, and he has to recreate what it was, and it ends up rather like all these group therapy processes: everyone sitting around trying to tell him to DO something, and finally he DOES come out to see that they're ALL archetypes, eternally present, and that blows his mind AGAIN AND AGAIN until he GETS it for good. Also, with someone making old films into COLOR, they can reactivate old films so that you can also see the AURAS of the actors, and certain actors have GREAT auras (not related to their acting abilities) and become new fads. Also, they've found ways to take chips from da Vinci's paintings, for example, or Michaelangelo's sculptures, and EACH ATOM holds a hologram of the area the atom could "see" at the time of its usage, so that the events in the studio can be "extracted" from the atoms, giving pictures of the studios (and of course pictures of the artist, model, and civilization at that time) that can be recorded for all to see: so each ATOM becomes one of est's "records" as a multi-sensory record of NOW, for IT. Of course, the COMPONENTS of the atoms are that which record, holographically, the events, and "Indra's net" can be pulled in: each atom is each silvered ball that reflects every other silver ball around, which means EVERYTHING.
So this is the framework for all KINDS of ideas, physical and mental and psychological, put into the future AND the present, with the new Messiah of Babbitt Brighton foreshadowed by Werner Erhard and Stewart Emery and Bob Zolnerzak and personified into the future by the character that I've been trying to place. Oz is around too, playing it cool, trying not to rock the boat, playing acts throughout in trying to be appropriate, acting as the "echt-mother/lover" for Babbitt, the woman who "knows all but can't talk for fear of what the knowledge will do to the person," the original earth mother---and the person that Babbitt can relate with to give the suspense and drama to the book---will he make it, recognize himself and Ozymiranda, accept the two of them as lovers through eternity. So it's the quest, the eternal lovers, the finding of oneself---EVERYTHING rolled into one: the magnum opus and something that will act as a receptacle for almost all the ideas that I've been working with: the first successful science-fiction novel to take advantage of est and Actualizations and Mind Dynamics and ESP and lots of other things. And it has the characters necessary, the suspense and "will it work out?" that a novel needs, and should let almost everybody identify with almost everybody: the Therapist as authority figure and guru, the Nurse as friend and facilitator---and still give the opportunity for present-acting nonsense and humor and pathos. WHAT A FABULOUS FRAMEWORK!
DIARY 10178
11/7/75
THROWBACK 4
Ideas while meditating this morning: the "burning gaze" that BB hates is caused by a willful combination of eye muscles, glandular secretions, and mental activity that permits the viewer to go into the "truth mode," during which the viewer can tell precisely the emotions displayed, hidden, or even unconscious in the viewee. Skillful criminals have developed defenses for this, but BB is unaware of the skill, let alone the defenses, but his feeling of "heat" from the "burning gaze" is a receptivity to increased rate of vibration of the air between the two in a spectrum that even 580 ABers are not aware of, and his "throwback state" is a dormant or pupal state because he, like his ancestor, is preparing his body, mind, and "inner-dweller" for ANOTHER quantum leap of progress: so the book will have PRESENT as the savage, OBB [Original Babbitt Brighton] as the pivot between savage and "civilized" who live until 580AB, and TBB [This Babbitt Brighton] as ANOTHER pivot between the "civilized" and the "quasi-Gods" that he is the first example of! So ALL the powers that I can think of that man WILL have will be present in 580AB, fully developed and usable; the powers that I can only DREAM of will be indicated by his developing powers after his "cure"---though HE is actually curing the WORLD, rather than the other way around. When THEY wake him up to the state THEY are in, HE can then wake them up to the NEXT state, to give an idea of the CONTINUOUS evolution toward Omega Man.
Also, simile of disease being formed in the body: the body is a pan balance: inner capabilities and potentialities and workings are represented by ONE arm of the balance, weighing a certain amount; outer influences and environment and teachings are represented by the OTHER arm of the balance, increasing in weight and being counterbalanced by the inner arm. IN ADDITION, there's a "weighing mechanism" in the CENTRAL SUPPORT, and the SUM of the two produces changes in that AND changes in the body that are represented as disease: so ALL diseases have TWO contributing factors, so all MEDICINE is wrong today, and all PSYCHOTHERAPY is wrong today, because EACH fails to rely enough on inputs from the OTHER. Though, of course, different diseases result from different PROPORTIONS of influences from either end. And Babbitt finds out that the BALANCE ITSELF IS BEING VARIABLY ACCELERATED AND DECELERATED, a change that even 580ABers don't realize (and that I didn't, until I typed this page!).
DIARY 10207
11/8/75
THROWBACK 5
More meditation revelations:
1. CURRENT BB makes a continuum of ideas by writing a novel on index cards with circular reinforcements on one of, say, 50 positions for, say, sex/ scene/ conversation/ philosophy/ science/ character/ plot/ technical detail/ etc; all novel aspects. This is continued into the FUTURE (where there are no PUBLISHED books, but essentially you construct your OWN from TV printouts of whatever pages, chapters, or sections you want to save for IMMEDIATE reference and collation with OTHER pages) where encyclopedias have been rewritten in a continuum (as if each subject were written on 50 differently colored papers so that for history, say, you'd just read the mauve pages, and for sex only the crimson pages) that can be read TOTALLY chronologically, or can be selected along 50 dimensions of indexing to isolate subject, time, level of generality, etc. You can reference any of these like turning through an enormous multi-flexigram, print out what you want, and save it.
2. I think I can also page through all the pages I've written (but this should be AFTER I catch up with my writing schedule---in other words, only when I have the TIME) and seeing which of THOSE pages could be selected out for inclusion in the novel.
3. Point of view came up for thought: decided against first person, but left it in the third person with a narrator who's omniscient when it comes to the thoughts, feelings, doubts, fears, and dreams of BB himself---but it seems so much BETTER to me now that characterization, point of view, opinions, descriptions should be conveyed through CONVERSATION, and setting and personal descriptions seem, now, somehow, better with NO adverbs (SAY how when where why and how rather than saying "wearily" or "anxiously") and with OBJECTIVE adjectives (red, curving, low-lying) rather than SUBJECTIVE adjectives (beautiful, incredible, fantastic, thrilling). All these things just seem so much CLEARER now, and should make revision of OLD stuff easy!
4. Maybe at first he thinks he IS in 1970, and discovers he's in 550AB and thinks he's crazy for REVERSE reasons?
DIARY 10210
11/8/75
THROWBACK 6
FIGHTING laziness---and good grass and a FABULOUS come---and fighting the urge to write SLOPPY in order not to be LEGIBLE by my mother when I drop dead from a combination of circumstances (since it hasn't happened yet, it means that I DIDN'T die from "over-coming" just a few marvelous minutes ago---and I DO have the feeling I AM going on---old "skin of the onion, layers and peels") and she wants to READ this---I set down to write, sliding under the warm covers to get away from the coolness of the room at---have to reach for it---uh---DO with grunting pants and pulling the blanket more over my shoulder---1:15 am; I want to RECORD how many times I have to go back and see which parentheses or dash I'm closing or outside of) the fantasy I had while I was coming:
1) That Babbitt Brighton (the AB Brighton) got his PIVOTHOOD by generating the universe's STRONGEST sensation of ALL time by a COMBINATION of:
a) extreme genital titillation
b) no food
c) total mental one-pointed absorption
d) and MOTHER dashing through the door, SCREAMING out of her lungs, HOLLERING my name to cause more TERMINAL GUILT: and think of the fantasies of her going down on my spurting dying dick and getting a TERRIBLE complex---the ULTIMATE #1 of ALL TIMES!
2) The STORY that the "future" BB writes about the people who have finally attained immortality and the guy who'd ALWAYS wanted it JUST gets it, and has to start investigating a series of mysterious deaths in which people are found RADIANT in TERMINAL ECSTASY, their cocks in their hands or their fingers in their cunts---DEAD from over-sensations, and HE'S last to do it and is the ONLY person LEFT down on EARTH.
3) and the COMBINATION of the personas of 1) and 2) are UNITED with the concept of God and the mirroring of Indra's net, and THAT PYRAMID of emotions and feelings produces the GENESIS POINT OF ALL. And BB goes through his "true and false" memories of WHAT happened that there's no DEFINITE feeling of which way DID do it---that "truth" is supplanted by the "truth" which is part of an underlying "truth" which is revealed to contain another "truth" and the psychiatrists find another "truth" and he dreams another "truth" and there's no END of levels that circle back on each other in total flux.
DIARY 10232
11/9/75
THROWBACK 7
0 A.B. = 1975 A.D.
BB [Be like James Gould Cozzens and always refer to Babbitt Brighton as he referred always to Arthur Winner in "By Love Possessed." It also solves the problem of a nickname for "Babbitt." Also, I should READ "Babbitt" to see what I AM using as a name!] felt himself to be at the peak of his powers.
In his efforts to be a Renaissance man, BB had read, studied, tried to experience everything. He'd been to all the mind-expanding, consciousness-raising, ego-supporting, self-actualizing gurus of the time, absorbing, assimilating, incorporating what he found best of their theories into his own growing awareness.
His laboratory was his body. Honed through the same eclecticism to which he'd subjected his mind, he was stronger, more flexible, more durable than the majority of his contemporaries. Never ill, his mind ruled his body like a benevolent despot, demanding and receiving total service in his pursuit of experience.
BB was not tall, as if his body had realized that centering took place in bones and muscles and blood vessels as well as in psychological matters. His body was the coiled spring, latent with power, able to reach out to extremes when his mind demanded, but it was more like a machined tool that the hand of his will protected from the corroding passage of time. In his 40s, BB had the body of a teenage swimmer, lithe yet enduring, small yet powerful, trim yet potent.
He was potent sexually, also. BB never knew how many children he had engendered: when he left the women who had become clinging when he wanted to be free, he had no idea whether their fetuses were brought to term or aborted. That was their business. He wanted children; if the women he screwed didn't want them, then it was their business to prevent conception. If they didn't, thinking to use their pregnancy as a tether for BB's attention, they found to their sorrow that what he told them was true: "I'll screw you if you like to screw. I'll give you my seed because I'm proud of it and want to use it to produce as many children as possible---semen banks thank me for my copious contributions. If you don't want children, see to it that you don't. I don't care what you do so long as you don't inhibit my pleasure.
"I think conception is important to the future child. A child conceived in ecstasy will flourish through that ecstasy. Frankly, if I feel that you cease to enjoy what I'm giving you, I'll withdraw."
He never bothered to keep track of how many women he turned off instantly. Nor did he concern himself with their reactions when he withdrew. Depending on his feelings, which changed from second to second, he might or might not try again with a woman who had, in his opinion, slipped from ecstasy before the orgasm. It wasn't important to him. With the new sexual freedom, he seldom lacked partners. And he wasn't interested in weaklings, in those who retained feelings of inadequacy when he was doing all in his power to support their adequacy. After all, he was fucking them, wasn't he?
Then too, his reputation had spread. He was a fabulous fuck, said the women of the city. To wrest his eroticism from his smooth body, women would phone even if they knew he was out: perhaps they'd gone to bed and he'd withdrawn---that made him even hornier for the next encounter.
He'd married twice. His first wife, Loretta, was killed in the plane accident from which he'd walked away unbroken. Since the accident was not his fault, he had no guilt over her death, only sadness that his children were raised without their mother. His second wife, Fran, was so enwrapped in her love for BB and their two sons and three daughters that she seldom felt the need for society away from her own family. She was always there when he wanted her.
But not during her first pregnancy. Research to that time had not found ways to prevent premature labor being induced by orgasm in all cases. Then, too, her large abdomen prevented the tongue contact BB had grown to enjoy at the point of his orgasm, and Fran's swollen face had lost the sexual beauty of the nymphet to gain the mature beauty of motherhood.
BB was so fiercely in love with Fran that he couldn't think of another woman in a sexual way, but he was not yet guilt-free (that's the last to go) about masturbating, and goes into his room to do it without her knowing.
Using techniques he'd perfected while he was in college, manual manipulations and physical postures that he hadn't had to use for years, he found that the changes his body had been through---let's try it from the point of view of THE ORIGINAL BABBITT BRIGHTON'S JOURNAL.
Though it was hard for me to make the decision that the happenings of the last two hours were more important to me than watching the birth of my Fran's first child, the strength of that decision should indicate the force of the revelation I've had---a revelation that I couldn't even share with Fran at his point. But I fear that if I don't write it down, get it out of my mind to leave room for the dizzying impressions that I'm now receiving, it'll be somehow lost, though always remembered. In the same way, I suppose, the architect may dimly remember the triumph of the sandcastle, though it's vastly overshadowed by the completion of the hospital that he's just directed.
I can't resist remarking that the glow from my hands on the typewriter keyboard makes it difficult to read what I'm typing---but it's clearer to me now more than ever before that man trains himself to see and not see what is appropriate at the time. I must quiet my confused mind.
I began masturbating with a strange sense of guilt---sadness may be more exact, since Fran wasn't sharing in my delight with my body, and I knew how much she loved to watch the tonus and sex-flush increase in my body and face as I neared orgasm.
DIARY 10235
11/9/75
THROWBACK 10, NOTES
Could TBB read OBB's Journal???---Yes, and EDITORS can choose MORE journal or less! Again, meditation produces a number of things to keep track of. First, 7-9 should be continued so that his ECSTASY of orgasm is interrupted at its HEIGHT by Fran coming to the door (and OPENING the door on the BACK of which is the MIRROR!) with contractions, and when SHE sees what he's doing, she's so emotionally jolted that her membranes rupture and she falls to the floor in a scream. He's gone up from level to level in the sheer PHYSICAL plane of existence, knowing that he's getting higher than he ever has before from the combination of 1) abstinence from sex, 2) drinks at dinner, 3) concern for his wife, 4) reawakened interest in his own cock, and then adding TO that the shock of her SEEING him jerking off, SUPERADDING the shock of seeing her fall to the floor causes him to be jolted into awareness of her prokelia (aura), and THAT vision jolts him so much, added to the OTHERS, that suddenly he sees the KELIA (super-aura), reaching out toward HIM, and THIS contributes to his state of mind so that HER contribution (combined of joy at the coming of the child, shock at seeing him, pleasure with the sight of him enjoying himself) to the "air" of the ROOM, and he catapults into TOTAL awareness of his seed uniting in her to form the child that's about to be born, reaching back through the seeds of parents and forbearers who produced them, continuing back to unity with all life in the world, then all matter in the world, then all matter in the universe, and then coming back to HERE-NOW, with building realizations (outside time, of course) of THAT WHICH IS, until his mind is TOTALLY blown as he finished off his orgasm and races to pick her off the floor. He then USES his abilities to see the kelia to BENEVOLENTLY MANIPULATE people into loving him, first, and then into anything he wants them to do---and he learns how to manipulate them at a distance, so that it's a CONSCIOUS enlightenment of the world that he manages to bring off, giving MORE power to him, enabling him to climb on THEIR supportive shoulders to even GREATER power and accomplishment, so that it becomes OBVIOUS that he's a turning point in history, making the change to A.B. somewhat more believable. Maybe even he looks AHEAD to see TBB and the fact that HE'S a turning point, so that when TBB looks BACK, he's even MORE thrown out of whack to see HIMSELF as playing a part, adding to his paranoia and fear of his own powers after he's gotten the FIRST jolt of self-realization.
DIARY 10258
11/15/75
THROWBACK 11, NOTES
Bob Rosinek suggests that, since OBB got POWERS when he's found masturbating by his wife, TBB LOSES his powers when he's found masturbating by his mother, and that sort of fits---sort of mirror-reflecting-mirror theme, one going UPWARD, the other going DOWNWARD. But then I have an even STRONGER desire to add a MESSIAH COMPLEX into that, since that's what I keep laboring under, and say that OBB got his powers because he didn't know what there was to win, he just did his development FOR ITS OWN SAKE, he wasn't TRYING to get anywhere, and he got everywhere. TBB, on the other hand, KNEW that his predecessor was so great, and was TRYING to take it the next step, and it was the TRYING that doomed it to failure, or even took his powers AWAY from him---sort of the opposite in the way that in ONE case the seeker FINDS, and in the other case the seeker LOSES, though in the end he wins, when he can give up the battle completely. I want him to WANT (TBB) to be enlightened to the next step; he WANTS to change the world as his g-g-grandfather did, and this isn't the way to do it. It's only when he ends up doing what HE wants to do for HIMSELF that he gets the whole thing thrown in on top of it. This is what I'm hoping the novel will do---and that should be clear to the reader, too.
Then, with the natural childbirth film, it's obvious that the baby's not going to be born RIGHT away, but the breaking of the waters can be associated with some sort of hemorrhage that makes it look like blood to him, and THAT can associate the threat of her LOSING the baby with him, and he flashes on the DEATH of the baby with his EMISSION of semen, making it AT THE SAME TIME an action of pleasure and release and BIRTH, and at the same time one of KILLING the sperm, since these billions of wriggling cells are obviously NONE of them going to cause the production of a SINGLE child, and he gets a flash that THESE deaths are just about as meaningful as ALL the deaths that have EVER taken place by everyone over the face of the earth---and maybe I can even do some research to find out HOW closely equivalent the numbers of two items might actually BE.
DIARY 10267
11/18/75
THROWBACK 12, NOTES
Notes written AFTER starting Heidegger's "Discourse on Thinking" on 11/11 and BEFORE the words recorded on tape (see DIARY 10249), that I'd forgotten to transcribe earlier: PHILOSOPHY STRUGGLES TOWARD WHAT'S ALREADY THERE! Add to "Throwback": TBB has to do a series of EXERCISES striving to "cure" him:
1) Constant repetition of TRUTH: You're all there IS, Om mani padme hum, God is within, God IS love, etc!! There's nothing to GET, GET it? You got nothing? You GOT it! You GOD it! Tat Tvam Asi---LOOK AT THAT MISPRINT!!!!!) [And I practically bliss-out wreathed in smiles AT THIS MOMENT in typing!!]
2) Constant SEX, with OZ [OZYMIRANDA---mira, mira, Mir (Peace), AND, (est), OZ; omit ZY from OZYM and get OM; I, RAN, DA (Father)_. AD N AR I MY ZO (backwards and split up): To n ar(e) [am] I MY "zo" (suchness): which is "To any number am I my suchness," and when I re-read this AGAIN, I'm struck by the "beauty" of "To any number am I my suchness" before I read its derivation!] in the tantric fuckee pose, BESEECHING BB TO COME (yes) OUT (orgasm, gay, suchness, husbandness).
3) Incessant reading where ALL BOOKS SAY THE SAME THING.
4) Sensory deprivation where the mind wanders from thought to thought.
5) READS "Throwback"!! (in a dream? In a fantasy?)
He SEES his aura and is MORE convinced he's crazy; cuts it off; talks to no one about it; finally READS about sharing himself, and he does so, and Oz welcomes him with tears; she "develops" aura and he has enlightenment and then throws a FIT and knocks himself unconscious and regresses to a BABY for awhile---his mind just can't stand the confront! INCREDIBLE TRIPS!!
DIARY 10282
11/19/75
THROWBACK 13, APHORISMS
BIBLE:
God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3, 14) I AM WHO AM: HE WHO IS
Our days upon earth are as a shadow (1 Chronicles 29, 15)
For our time is as the passing of a shadow (Wisdom 2, 5)
When I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom (Job 19, 27)
Seeing the root of the matter is found in me (King James Version: Job 19, 28)
Deep calleth on deep (Psalms 41,8) Deep calleth unto deep (KJV: Psalms 42/43, 7)
For men to search their own glory is not glory (KJV: Proverbs 25, 27)
As it is not good for a man to eat much honey, so he that is a searcher of majesty shall be overwhelmed by glory (Proverbs 25, 27)
All the rivers run unto the sea, yet the sea doth not overflow: unto the place from whence the rivers come, they return, to flow again (Ecclesiastes 1, 7)
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full (KJV: Ecclesiastes 1, 7)
There is no new thing under the sun (KJV: Ecclesiastes 1, 9)
Nothing under the sun is new (Ecclesiastes 1, 10)
Much learning doth make thee mad (Acts 26, 24)
And we shall be changed (1 Corinthians 15, 52)
He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it (Matthew 10, 39)
For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it; for he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall save it (Luke 9, 24)
Whosoever shall seek to save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose it, shall preserve it (Luke 17, 33)
For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel, shall save it (Mark 8, 35)
He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto life eternal (John 12, 25)
For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it (Matthew 16, 25)
OTHER:
God is within, and your genius is within (Epictetus: Discourses, Ch 14. Bartlett: 63b)
As above, so below (Gurdjieff: Views from the Real World, 14: Emerald Tablets)
Teachings of G: p. 78: Emerald Table of Hermes Trismagistus
Know thyself (Plutarch [Bartlett: 60a] via Plato, Socrates, Delphic oracle)
Teachings of G. p. 78 "originating in Egypt"
Tat Tvan Asi---Thou Art That (Chandogya Upanishad)
God is Love
Polish the Mirror (Hindu: Patanjali?) (Sanskrit first entry: Ashvaghosh: "The Awakening of Faith." "One's mind should become like a mirror, reflecting things, but not judging them or retaining them."
A rose is a rose is a rose (Gertrude Stein: Sacred Emily)
Be Here Now (Baba Ram Dass from?)
DIARY 10286
11/20/75
THROWBACK 15, NOTES
1. Since the form of address will have reduced to M. Mary and M. John, pronounced "Em," maybe "Em" could be the new PRONOUN, too, as in "Everyone must hang hir coat so that em is unencumbered."
2. "Nun's Story" brings up that old "You must be perfect; then I'm PROUD of being perfect; then the more I try the worse I get; then I despair; then I think it's going well; then I realize I'm getting nowhere; then I despair; then I realize it'll NEVER get anywhere; then it goes well; then I realize I can't predict anything; then I realize I've NEVER left my mind; then I REALLY despair; then ... etc.
3. BB REACTS to the bombardment of aphorisms as I did to many of the processes in est: by creeping into a corner and trying as much as possible to remove himself from it, feeling wretched and left out and permanently stuck wherever he's stuck. And then the doctors fall over themselves with apologies for not seeing that it wouldn't do any good for him, loving him so much, wanting so much to cure him, realizing that THEY have to be reborn before THEY have anyone reborn under them, and HE causes a crisis in the hospital, causing them to question their OWN techniques, and for awhile he begins to get a misdirected Messiah complex that HE'S going to be named head of the hospital, since he's been through it---and it occurs to me that I'd better see and read "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" but then I just called Arnie (and talked about an hour) and found that MY ideas are not connected to THAT.
4. A Sensie ad: "Headache? Take Allocure, or see your local persuasion." In the line of "Grand Canyon? Call Grand Canyon Travel Packages, or see your local travel agent."
DIARY 10307
11/26/75
THROWBACK 16, NOTES
From P. 15: of "The Homosexual Matrix": The cerebral cortex is the most recently evolved and the highest developed part of the brain. It amounts to less than a fourth of the brain in lower mammals but accounts for more than 70 percent of the brain in monkeys and apes, while in man it is expanded to over 90 percent of the brain mass and is much more organized, too. Upon this structure depend all the higher psychological capacities of man---thought, memory, imagination, and the organization of experience. In its gradual development the cerebral cortex has taken over the management of most voluntary behavior, including sexual behavior. Conversely, with each improvement in the brain, there has been a progressive relaxation of specific physiologic control over sexuality.
P. 20n: Both sexes focus-in when highly aroused. And a person of either sex becomes "ensemble-conscious" when---and only to the extent that---he or she stands apart from it. (BUT IT'S PROBABLY THE OPPOSITE IN NIRVANA!) It NARROWS to a point and then EXPANDS to a pan-orgasm, to cosmic orgasm.
P. 83n: how anything a boy's mother can possibly do to him can physically bring him to puberty early and generally give him a larger-than-average penis size.
P. 94: There are males who are able to respond equally well to both sexes by using virtually no value system at all. They tend not to become invested in the personal aspects of any of their partners. For them, male-female differences in body shape and in personality are of minimal importance; their own sexual performance and a partner's readiness to cooperate are what count. (Sexually, they are exporters, not importers.) NEW MEN!
P. 106: A vicarious participation in a partner's reactions is part of the enjoyment of sex---and since a person's awareness of everything external is at a minimum during his own climax, simultaneous orgasm blinds both partners to each other at precisely the wrong moment. [This will CHANGE in future!]
P. 115: If protozoa---are forced to accept partners too similar ... a very small portion of their body fluids will be exchanged ... only a few generations by fission before they must again conjugate ... ideally resistant ... combination of their extreme craving and of being faced with the ideal partner results in their over-exchanging their body fluids. Each loses too much of itself, and they both die.
DIARY 10309
11/29/75
THROWBACK 17, WRITTEN NOTES FROM 11/26
FORGOT: Playgrounds can take 2, 3, or 4 projections of films, one for background, one for a cock (on or off a body), and one for the streams of orgasm. These can be SUPERIMPOSED with VARIABLE timings (stretches, contractions that always keep a record of extremes [and of course this is a MASTER file which is UPDATED with corrections, but a copy of the MASTER is kept for comparison purposes---but films are only MODULES: computer can say "let's review river valleys" and there might be ONE river valley that NO one likes and it can be thrown OUT], darker, lighter, bigger, littler) and each PLAY-RESULT is kept and amalgamated, and computer knows DIRECTIONS: "Make cock larger" and computer knows WHICH atoms came from "cock" film, and which to INCREASE VOLUME of, and even knows "fatter/thinner" to modify GROSS errors. So the viewers can be CREATIVE (with four films) or can RATE the CREATED films. "Taste-setters" can be chosen to set up "raunchy/elegant/cruddy/etc" standards. AND then you drop HINTS that Babbitt Brighton THINKS of himself as being created by a "molecular spinner." Person becomes COMPLETELY computer-FOLLOWED, so that a SURROGATE PERSON could be created---or the molecular spinner could put the SURROGATE'S neural firings into YOUR brain so that "you" live through the surrogate's "life." And then the BOOK describes the structure of the BOOK REFERENCING itself WITHIN itself, so that the CONNECTIVITY of an idea would be VERY complex---saying "Watch out, you may be caught here FOREVER." Babbitt Brighton thinks HE'S constructed by one of these machines---or his thoughts are PRODUCED by them---unless, that is, he PRODUCES them HIMSELF, which he does, because he's god and he's created everything!
Tape order: "Scotch" sides 1 and 2 (Bill's 5 and 6 still there, to be MY 3 and 4)
Then THESE notes
Then "Gray Reel" side 5, which is labeled
side 6, which is TO BE labeled
and side 7, which was recorded to #545 by 9:50 am Thursday.
CHECK "Tape to Bill" DIARY 10325-10359
DIARY 10367
12/5/75
THROWBACK 18, TB GOES CRAZY
He gets up to the APEX of jerking off, and HE'S the one, at about 18, on which I load all the masturbation details that I have, describing DOZENS of experiments that he REPEATS from OB, and he gets into an S/M orientation in which he flips his ass over his face and makes the yoni the highest part of his body and sets up something like Poe's Pendulum to swing down, and he gives himself the task of getting TO the point of masturbation-orgasm and then having THIS DEVICE brush against the bottom of his cock with a feather or a felt surface, and he THINKS of it as a RAZOR which cuts into the straining flesh, as a silver knife would lance a boil, and the semen would spurt out WITH the blood in an INCREDIBLE ex-halation of fluids under tremendous pressure, and the physical sensations he generates are so intense that his mind is OPEN to whatever happens, and his mother comes into the room and his body and brain RETREAT so fully that the wide-open conduit of his brain is literally COLLAPSED in his head, and he loses the powers that he'd had to that point, his panic is increased because he can no longer see his mother's aura, and he's convinced that he was crazy BEFORE, or that it was all a dream and should all be FORGOTTEN, OR ALL THESE THINGS AT ONCE, in a huge swirl of impressions and fears, and he rolls himself into a ball, feeling the untended semen dribbling over his face like tears, and he literally senses that he's WEEPING AWAY HIS POWERS AND HIS LIFE, that it's all leaving him, that he's sad to see them leave, and yet happy because he can't stand to think what he's revealed before his mother, and maybe SHE drops dead of a HEART ATTACK, the fringes of which ALSO throw his "fragile psychic bark" into violent overthrow, adding to HIS overwhelm (and making a parallel with the feeling to LIFE in OB's case that GIVES him the power). At ONE level he blanks out totally, at ANOTHER blanks out so that he must be taken care of, and at ANOTHER level retreats to infancy, allowing only the most basic sensory input, knowing that he mustn't hurt anyone, frighten anyone, disappoint anyone, yet he's left with an AWFUL guilt feeling, thinking (repressed) that HE'S killed his mother, the giver of life---and maybe his father kills HIMSELF, which TB takes ON himself via "the sins of the father are the sins of the son" and TB has this EXTRAORDINARY psychic burden which is gradually revealed (onion layer at a time) through the book.
DIARY 10368
12/5/75
THROWBACK 19, MAKING SANE OF TB
[These last TWO pages come from ECSTATIC MORNING of DIARY 10365.] Ozy has been doing everything she can, and finally "submits herself totally to him" in a Yab-Yum Tantric exercise in which she finally dares to open herself to him as HAVING all the powers that she does, but which she's been holding back so that she won't frighten him away. But as SHE gets carried toward her orgasm [how interesting it'll be doing research on WOMAN'S feelings as she gets into orgasm, maybe with Betty and Norma and Joan?] she EXULTS in her being so tremendously that TB begins to see flickers of her AURA, and that turns him on more, which turns her on more, and he can begin to read her MIND, and this turn them both on more, and she PERMITS herself to read HIS mind, and he can FEEL it, and their sense of union increases drastically as their genitals become ENGORGED with blood, yet some of the thoughts he begins picking up from her are the "You're in there, I know you can do it," and he begins to question "What?" and she responds, and he begins to come out in a way THAT WOULD BE FOLLOWABLE BY ANY COUPLE WHO HAD THE CURIOSITY TO TRY IT. And NOW I get the flash of the ENDING of the book, that TB and Ozy have gone out into the world and turned a lot of people on to THEIR way of having sex, and DOZENS of people come together into an "earth holy place" and have sex in a VERY stylized, ritualized way that involves both gay and straight sex, both alone, in pairs, in larger numbers, with somehow all of them RELATED, and the one set of people ADD to the other sets of peoples' experiences, and the vibrations in the ROOM get so incredible that they VANISH, leaving a vacuum behind which is filled with a CLAP, and the people who are left KNOW what they were doing, but don't know whether they were KILLED, whether they all went into NIRVANA, whether they were transported into a state of ANTI-MATTER universe, whether they stepped ASIDE or FORWARD or BACKWARD or ELSEWHEN in time, but they know that they were experiencing an INCREASED level of feeling, so the IMPLICATION is that they advanced to some SUPER-FUTURE state, leaving behind the SENSE that all is SUPER WELL with them, and that others should try it and FOLLOW THEM TO INFINITY. And the book LITERALLY ends with some MGM sunrise with everyone being BLINDED with awareness of the PROGRESSIVELY SPECTACULAR possibilities for the human race. They reach "CRITICAL EMOTIONALITY" and COM-INTEGRATE!/COME-INTEGRATE/CUM-integrate!!
DIARY 10369
12/5/75
THROWBACK 20, THE MIND AS---
No, it's not the New Yorker cartoon book but the GREEN one at HOME that has the cartoons by the 20s fellow who set up ELABORATE mechanisms to do some SIMPLE thing, like shooting a cannon to make a dog run to spin a fan to kick a foot to scratch a head, but I CAN'T think of his NAME Rube GOLDBERG (11/25/77)---but anyway, the mind TODAY works like THAT: VERY much energy in for VERY little out. The FUTURE "blown" mind will have REMOVED all that mechanistic inefficiency and permit the SAME energy that blows INTO the conduit to be blown OUT of the conduit, with the UNDERSTANDING that it will work, and create, and fix, and it DOES. The mind is a TEETER-TOTTER which can be moved EASILY (for the purposes of the book) from one orientation to another, just as easily BACK as FORWARD, though when TB goes crazy, the conduit literally COLLAPSES. It get bigger, but collapses on itself like a partially inflated balloon that lets air escape from ANY smallest hole ANYWHERE, even though the "place" of the hole (thought) is nowhere near the "place" of inlet (thought). The mind IS the pivot that Archimedes needed on which to place the fulcrum of the physical power to LITERALLY move the world! "Being blown" is LITERALLY losing the mind, though more properly losing the MECHANISM of the mind, and THAT'S WHAT HAS TO BE DONE, so going CRAZY FORMERLY was making the person sane, but TB undergoes such a CRUSH that his MIND is crushed, and it might be hinted that if it became "contagious" that it could TOTALLY DESTROY THE MINDS OF EVERYONE ON EARTH, so he has to be kept APART from everyone, for fear he'll "contaminate by example." A therapist DOES find his mind crushed in and, not having the background (genetically) of TB, he commits suicide, so TB will ALSO have THAT idea to fight against: who's to say that suicide isn't INEVITABLE for someone like him? Also, somehow, the conduits of all minds have to be established as the SAME conduit, so that the opening of ONE somehow implies the opening of ALL, and the collapse of one, the collapse of all. Surely the PSYCHIC energy is the same, so therefore, in SOME way, the RESULTS must be the same, since A (psychic energy) + B (mind) = C (external manifestation/results) and everything only LOOKS different, but it's actually "the same" at some very basic level.
DIARY 10370
12/5/75
THROWBACK NOTES 21, POPE ON AURAS
Pope says that he sees them more INFERENTIALLY, that he can get into it or get out of it by wanting to, has some purple filters that you're to look through and then REMOVE and can see them. He agrees that most agree they see "the same thing," to the same distance, and that blue is calm, red is anger, and green is intellectuality, but then checks his "Encyclopedia of Occultism" and I recall I have one and they talk about FIVE kinds of auras which REALLY blows me away, though the KELIA is EXTERIOR to ALL five, and Pope's encyclopedia by coincidence is NOT the one that I went to. I start thumbing THROUGH it and find all KINDS of things, ways of divination, historical characters, a front section of illustrations (though the whole thing is only accurate through 1920), and says almost EVERYTHING that I would have wanted to know about auras for purpose of the book, and I can skim through for OTHER purported ESP powers and characteristics, get LOTS more exercises for things for him to TRY to do (like the Persian exercise of sitting on his heels and stopping up his body openings as described on the same page where I suddenly came across the name Professor Zollner, whom I freak out to find had done work with THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF TIME), and resist the impulse to sit down and skim through it RIGHT NOW. So although I didn't get the EXACT information from Pope, I got to the information that I already possessed about the subject, opening up even MORE things for me to do, and it's getting more and more difficult to even keep up with the DIARY these days. Pope says he doesn't KNOW of anything about anything BEYOND the aura that anyone's talked about, and he says he's sorting out his books and finding he has LOTS of things, and I'll be asking him to read some of my stuff, hopefully, and suggesting other things that I can add: I envision some chapters being so CHOCK-FULL that they approach the density of a Pynchon or Barth or Joyce. Again the idea of FOOTNOTES for the explanations of some of these things comes to mind, and I WILL include these to give a feeling of RICHNESS---have footnotes EVER been used in fiction AS IF it were some sort of dissertation in all seriousness? [BARTH uses some in "Lost in the Funhouse" and I SEEM TO REMEMBER that Barthleme might, too].
DIARY 10385
12/11/75
THROWBACK 22, NOTES
Look at the NUMBER OF LOOPS NECESSARY to produce a reasonable continuum, and I think of a card system that would file everything, until it dawns on me that EVERYTHING would have these components in common, so EVERY card would be sortable among these continua, so the only thing to do is to LIST them, and then found that some enabled other "standard" things to be "derived from" them, and the list might actually MEAN something somehow!
1. First Space continuum - 1050 cm NORTH to 1050 cm SOUTH
2. Second Space continuum - 1050 cm EAST to 1050 cm WEST
3. Third Space continuum - 1050 cm ABOVE to 1050 cm BELOW
4. Constant-Time continuum - 1050 sec PAST to 1050 sec FUTURE (This is a measure of "when it's looked at or referenced.")
5. Duration-Time continuum - 1050 sec to 1050 sec OLD ("How old" or "How long to end" either "now" or "when referenced.")
6. Weight continuum - 10-50 to 1050 gm (GRAVITY is derived from this continuum.)
7. Complexity continuum - 0 to 1050 atoms (DENSITY is derived from this.)
8. Frequency continuum - 0 to 1050 cycles/second (includes MENTAL ACTIVITY, COLOR, RADIO, AUDIBLE frequencies.)
9. Velocity continuum - 0 to 1050 cm/second
10. Charge continuum - 0 to 1050 esu (MAGNETIC properties is derived from this.)
11. Loudness continuum - 0 to 1050 decibels (is this derivable?)
12. Taste continuum - 0 to 1050 "taste units" (is this derivable?)
13. Smell continuum - 0 to 1050 "smell units" (is this derivable?)
14. ESP continuum - 0 to 1050 "new units" (may be derivable; may be many of these; supposedly the list should never be ACTUALLY completed.)
SIZE continuum is derivable from Weight, Three-Space, Duration-Time, and Complexity continua. All OTHERS should be derivable, also.
DIARY 10410
12/18/75
THROWBACK 23, NOTES
Image of ME and BB and PROGRESS as successions of DETAILINGS and PACKAGINGS:
DETAILINGS of quasars and pulsars and imphars may be reduced to PACKAGE of superstars.
DETAILINGS of sound/radio/visible/audible/cosmic waves to PACKAGE of electromagnetic spectrum.
DETAILINGS of the books and ideas I've read into the PACKAGE of my bookcase.
DETAILINGS of all sorts into PACKAGES of all sorts. And I envision myself as a sort of SAUSAGE-maker that takes in (or emits) all these details, then chews them around (or organizes them) into larger groupings, which are the bundles of thoughts or philosophies or bookcase sections that I have NOW.
All the books of figures about refraction becoming incorporated into Snell's law; all the observations about heredity being mapped into DNA, all the functions of the brain being mapped into the brain centers themselves.
All the experimentally elucidated details being incorporated into unified field theories. And I and BB and SOCIETY all work in the same KIND of way!
12/17 am meditation: the idea that OZ is a plain woman and has to win BB into loving her ESSENCE as Don tries to win MY love for HIS essence, and not be put off by his exterior. Capsulated by his "I can even look you in the EYE," and his eyes ARE lovely, but the face that he's created for himself AROUND them isn't the best. But the eyes ARE the lookings of love, and the meeting points of the essence, and this'll have to figure in the book, too.
DIARY 92000
11/22/77
THROWBACK 24
Where was there to go next?
What was there to do next?
He remembered when time seemed endless, when there was infinite space to play. Where had it gone? The cycles and repetitions had at last tired him out, and he wanted to rest. But not to rest in the changelessness of nothingness. No, that would be too easy---the coward's way out, and even as he thought it he winced at the platitude. Maybe the coward was the hero, leaping boldly into the unknown, where he just crept from day to day, worrying before things happened, feeling guilty after things happened, and feeling particularly guilty when NOTHING happened.
He had tried it all.
For days he had wrapped himself in thought, until he grew foul from lack of bathing and shaving, hungry from hastily prepared quick meals, disgusted with himself and with the act of thinking.
In rebellion, he would act: throw himself into sex, into reading, into mindless data manipulation and thing-processing. Plays and movies and books and ballet and painting and friends and eating and cooking and writing and all the pseudo-psychic self-improvement businesses he could find out about. Until it all palled. Why go to a ballet when an old one would be sinkingly familiar and a new one would in all probability be less than satisfying? Why try a new woman or a new man if he didn't care for himself enough to want to give anything of himself to a growing relationship? His friends he shunned: he was changing again, hitting himself around and pushing his life into strange shapes, wondering what would become of it. Yet the thought continued to grow that no matter HOW much HE thought his life had changed, people's opinions of him would always be the same.
"He always thinks of himself; he's always chasing after some new strange way to thinking, of acting, and yet he always comes out more or less himself. Oh, maybe he's more concerned with other's comfort for a bit, or talks less about himself for awhile, but the old personality comes to the top like scum, not easily gotten rid of. For awhile he came out of himself and devoted himself to the care of his fellow man: working with orphans, with criminals and falsely accused who thought of themselves as criminals and let themselves be persecuted in halfway houses, donating his time to recordkeeping when the people disgusted him, fundraising though his skills with the rich did nothing but antagonize him. Then, in a few months, he would look at himself and judge that he wasn't changing, that his old personality was coming back, and then he'd withdraw again, try another tack again, put up a fresh sail and cruise a new ocean, unhasp a fresh knife and cut into another part of the jungle, heft a new lance and strike out after a fresh bull. Then the new field would be conquered: the background settled, the books of history read, the forefront investigated through seminars and symposia and travels and meetings and writing himself, and then it would be exhausted. I could hear him:
"I'm not learning anything NEW. There seems no place to GO from here. What GOOD is this that I'm doing; no one appreciates it, and those who do only envy me because they think I'm free, doing what I want---if they only knew how unfree I was they wouldn't fawn over my accomplishments and wish they had the time to duplicate my efforts. But my energies are not endless: each new task is shouldered with a sigh of regret that the last one didn't work. And if the three or seven tasks before that didn't give the satisfaction I wanted, why should this new one? When I was poor I wanted to be rich; when I was rich, I was so self-conscious of my difference from other people that I knew I had to change and become poor again. Anyway, I could never convince myself that it was right for someone else to wash my socks, clean my dishes (preparing my food was fine, but it had to be on a personal basis, not on a hired-hand basis), scrub my bathtub. It felt good to have the old furniture around, the mismatched clothes, the favorite chairs, the scratched records. I never liked to shop, so I never got the urge to keep up with anything. Quite the opposite: when I had to buy something new I usually searched until I could find something as like the old as I could. Then would come the urges: the book collecting, the record collecting, the recording of my own trip-tapes, until narcotics palled. Even booze lost its charm when I found I didn't care for the wines I could afford and couldn't afford to see if my tastes were more expensive. After a point, I couldn't compare anything with anyone who had any importance to me. You can't know how sad it is to work yourself to the point where you can only converse with a specialist, only to find that specialists are so specialized they're not able to talk about anything. How sad to be with a computer expert who knows something about the stock market and loves climbing mountains only to find that he cares not one spit for psychic surgery and S cells in water jugs? Why talk to people into extra-sensory perception when they have no slightest understanding of the neuroendocrinology of the brain? Doctors are entertaining until it turns out they usually don't enjoy their food, and where is the opera lover who can get turned on to modern dance? These may all sound frivolous, but when the job occupies an hour a day, maintenance of a lifestyle takes another hour or two, that leaves the whole rest of the day to ruminate, to explore, to learn---only the fields of learning seem to be limited. There's no use learning about the newest flavors of quarks until they come up with a consolidated theory of matter: it would be as futile as memorizing all the tables of refraction and reflection for all the materials before Snell's law was discovered. It's interesting to KNOW about Snell's law, but not about the barrels of data that it replaced. The Prophets say that the millennium is coming: it's come and passed twice now; wouldn't people get tired of hearing the same warnings through the 50th and 60th generations? Man is evolving, but he isn't evolving fast enough for my tastes. There are only so many good authors in the world: after you've read everything by Huxley and Woolf and Nabokov and whoever your favorite pets are, everyone else seems quite stale in fiction. Biographies are simply rehashes of some person's decisions about another person's decisions, usually based on wishful thinking or on yet ANOTHER person's decisions. I think it's more interesting to stare at individual roses. At least there's more a chance of a surprise there. Isn't it amazing how difficult it is to find a PERFECT specimen of anything in nature: all leaves are a bit asymmetrical, with small imperfections here and there, at least through a microscope. A diamond is beautifully flawless, but how long can you stare into its fire? Just as a fire is beautifully flawed, but after a number of languorous nights even that becomes boring.
Boring! That's the word that comes up just about as much as jaded did before. Jaded at least implied so much experience with something that there seemed to be a REASON for discomfort. Boredom takes over when there isn't even the drive to get into something in enough detail to be bored by it. Get an interest in people, you say? But you do and you do and you do, and they're all the same: interested and willing to cater to you at the beginning during the courtship, uninteresting and unwilling when the relationship has skimmed off the cream and dips into the thinner milk. I get so tired of filling in all the background, wading through the endless admiration, and then they get to know me, become aware of my ceaseless endeavors in whatever direction, and start poking fun, or holes, or sticks at me to react in a particular way.
This applies even to the positive side: how many times have I said "This is completely new; I haven't felt like this before; this is a turning point of my life!" And then life continued. All life's turning points tend to even out when looked at from far enough ahead on the road. Not that life resolves to the "So what?" widely touted by the hedonists. Life DOES matter, or else it wouldn't be worth being attacked with such ferocity as I'm doing now. Only the ferocity weakens as time goes on.
How MANY things I've attacked: computers and writing and reading and collecting and entertainment absorption and travel and self-improvement jags. Theosophy and est and Actualism and meditation and biofeedback and astrology and tarot and biorhythm and self-hypnosis and auto-suggestion and health foods and exercises. All threw their results into the melting pot of my obsessions and became amalgamated into the varicolored marble of my being. Past lives have been regurgitated and assimilated. Breakthrough after breakthrough: seeing auras, reading minds, psychic surgery, healing, ministering. At first I was the skeptic, doubting everything; then when I became the believer, the intensity of the skepticism turned me off, even knowing how difficult I had been to accept it. But I did accept it, did turn around, but remained the same person. I wasn't annoyed by my fellow human beings but I didn't want anything to do with them because they weren't up to my purported caliber. I tried to attack my snobbism and came away with a greater feeling than ever that I WAS superior to 99% of the people with whom I came in contact.
Most of all, it pushed my face into the knowledge that Death is a benefit. As ___ in "I Will Fear No Evil" I'd lived long enough to know that there was nothing new for me, so the only thing left was to leave this body and its wealth of too-explicit memories. I learned to live from moment to moment only to find that each moment was dimmer and less interesting than the moment before. One can only sit and toothlessly smile at a sunset for so long, then the sun must set or one freezes into a grimace. How boring the rush of the sea would be if it weren't for the tides pulling the shoreline in and out, changing, ever-changing the patterns of wave-crash and fall. All beauty seems to have the awful function of becoming a stale experience in time: new lands settle into backgrounds, loved faces become the same old thing, loved bodies grow, frankly, boring.
Even the old saw that a person never grows tired of masturbation palled. When all the tricks of quickness, delay, stricture, multiples, indulgences, abstinences, and combinations thereof, have been tired, one even tires of the same old routine of the orgasm, which seems to lessen intensity as the years pass, or else to skirt so close to the borders of pain and physical tissue damage that the mind shies away from the extremity.
First I wanted to write it all down. Then I put it all together and found I was duplicating, repeating myself. Tried to think of new ways of saying things, but the words were finite, and it began to seem that their combinations were finite, had been exhausted. Just as the 32 positions of the androgyne and the 69 positions of heterosexual intercourse, or double those, if you believe certain authors, are quickly gone through and exhausted, so the body is quickly gone through and exhausted. The days pass more quickly, there seems to be less time, even though there seems to be less to do. Time will win out.
Obsessions no longer hold their thrill: losing the booklist got me out of the habit of collecting books, as Madge's leaving her stamp collection behind got her out of the habit of collecting stamps. The length of time it took to gain a GOOD friend became so long in comparison to the length of time they REMAINED a good friend that the training was not worth the performance. Then crept in the difference between talking about something and doing something. I could SAY that food wasn't as interesting, but sit me down at a table with an incredible new dish, and my palate would sit up and I'd become cheerful despite my brain's determination that I be gloomy.
I could talk about it endlessly, but it wasn't the same as doing it. I could do it endlessly, but I felt that I had to talk about it for a bit. At some magical times, they seemed to balance each other: the drive to do would be succeeded by the drive to write until the drive to do took over and drove for awhile, until being superceded by the drive to write. Enough was happening to write about, writing about it took long enough to whet the appetite for more action. The mirror-reflection came true again: looking at something long enough from ONE point of view compelled it to turn and attain its obverse: writing it down is good ONLY for writing it down, not for DOING it, as DOING it is not writing it down. Without the one, the other palls, and the cycles seemed to continue, until the next layer of the onion was reached, to be pulled away with appropriate spate of tears.
DIARY 8898
9/7/74
BABBIT BRIGHTON
Babbit Brighton wasn't your ordinary richest-man-in-the-world. Launched out of obscurity by the rockets of his innovations, his fortune, his reputation, and his appalling insanity sprang from his innovations. Bright-On, the Spray for Sixty-Nine Surfaces, made walls of plaster, paint, wood, or metal glow with private and public colors in every country of the world except Bhutan. Bright-On glowed in the dark and in the light, and lent instant glitter to buildings, sidewalks, airplanes, bodies, discothèques, and IBM offices. Totally water soluble, totally biodegradable, totally innocent, Bright-On swirled in the gutters in every capital city except Thimpu, which was pretty colorful anyway.
Bright-On was followed by Bride-On, the instant aphrodisiac which could only be removed by Bride-Off, and the perfume and body lotion industries fought to keep their share of the Scent and Savor business. Right-On became the new line of non-Caucasian cosmetics; Bright-In a chain of after-midnight Grand Guignol parlors that jolted the jaded of the jet set; and Grid-On totaled Teflon.
Since this is not a puff piece for Brighton's gleaming commercial children, let it suffice to convey the fact that Babbit Brighton had more money than he could spend. Because he was puritanically opposed to giving it away---his sole hang-up---his main occupations were the monthly meetings of the Brightening Committee for his multinational corporation, Extension Limited, and his endeavors to fruitfully fritter away an income in excess of a million dollars a day. This wasn't easy: if he had an off day, cash tended to pile up in corners and clutter the halls.
Incidentally, he finally pushed through the revolution to allow "Unlimited" to mean the same as "Limited" from the corporate-legal point of view, and he later headed the corporation known as Extension Unlimited, somewhat more fitting for his policies, he thought.
One day Brighton was reading a physical sciences book for breakfast and noticed the following progression: m stood for mass, a basic unit of physics; mv stood for momentum, a basic concept of motion; mc2 was equivalent to energy, a basic concept in modern science---but there was no real application of mv3 or mv4 or
[is this continued somewhere, pages missing?]
DIARY 8946
9/19/74
INVOLUTED STORY
Babbitt Brighton said "There once was a man who was reading in a book. The author of a story in that book once told his class in American history that George Washington thought Plato had misquoted Socrates, as recorded by Aristotle. One of the students in the class drew a picture which was photographed in the Essex Galleries by the person whose car struck James Findlayson as he was crossing 95th and Park Avenues.
BB goes to book that says "Another of his students said 'I don't understand what John Barth meant when he said, in "The Floating Opera," that "Bellerophon told Casseopeia 'Thygestes said to Agamennmon "The wine-dark sea tosses my hyacinthyne locks for a loss."'" and that Clytemnestra was a whore.'"
"The student thought that---
And this sort of story-at-twelve removes could be more and more elaborated as John Barth did, and of course if I QUOTE one of Barth's long-requoted sections, I can easily get up to seven or eight levels within the framework of a three- or four-level complexification.
DIARY 8947
9/19/74
BABBITT BRIGHTON'S SHORT-SHORT
I'm actually terribly famous as a writer portraying the life of a writer who isn't successful. In fact, my picture of the life of an unsuccessful writer is such a SUCCESS that "the powers that be" have ordained that I may never be appraised of my actual success. My profits were used to shield me in this artificial world which was constantly and secretly being filmed to be shown in porno movies all over the world in 3-D feelies at $50 an orgasm.
But a liberating party is fighting to inform him, and we've just found out he's gotten to the end of the story entitled "Babbitt Brighton's Short-Short" in the five-hundredth issue of Galaxy Magazine.
Surprise!
DIARY 8948
9/19/74
BABBITT BRIGHTON'S FANTASY
Bob Z and Bob G start a relationship. BZ = BG. Then BG starts playing hard to get, and BZ starts pressing harder. Then BG said "I don't want to have sex with you, you are my sister." Then BZ says he doesn't like to go to bed with AB, and BG says, "There, you say AB is your sister." So BG doesn't like my body. So BG insists on it being platonic and BZ accepts it, still loving and loving and loving and caring for and sympathizing with and being with. BG eventually grows to be very fond of BZ, liking to touch him, to buy tickets to theaters for him, to even ask him to a meal. But BZ, wanting the love of BG so badly, will settle for just the companionship, and he won't risk offending BG by saying he still wants his bod, so he never asks for it again. BG thinks "Well, he asked me before when he wanted me, so now that he doesn't ask for me, he mustn't want me," and he respects the relationship so much he refuses to risk offending BZ by suggesting sex, so he grows more and more affectionate, sending BZ to jerking off in ecstasy over the thought of touching BG's body and BG is jerking himself off fantasizing that he's touching BZ's body, and BG writes an article about this, but this confuses me because I'M BZ!
DIARY 8949
9/19/74
BABBITT BRIGHTON'S NEW FORCE
Thermometers measure temperature of the air impinging on (coming toward) the sensor. The clock moves along time. You think of a person as an absorber: sights drawn into his eyes, noise sucked in by the whorls of his ears; food consumed, drinks drunk, pills swallowed, air sucked into lungs with grass smoke (it would be better if I could tape these?) and we think of [DETAILED DIAGRAMS], all forces F acting toward a point (or person) A. But a person is an emitter of an aura, so that's, a set of forces G acting away from person B. But a person then is a receiver of the forces G from others: the forces from n people, Gn, converge and meet in point A!
Actually, there is a whole class of psychic forces "emanating" from people, plants, animals, rocks, buildings, trees, etc. ALL these forces impinge through us, and we are merely beads of atoms strung through the cats' cradles of the psychic lines of force emitted from every other entity in the universe, but remember that the skein is also an emitter itself (Indra's golden balls reflecting off golden balls in his net). Each atom in the skein flashes light, energy, time forth from it in all dimensions.
DIARY 8950
9/19/74
BABBITT BRIGHTON'S INCANTATION
"Hear me, hear me; I call out for you across the spaces and through the times. I relinquish my body to your wishes. May I be a window, transmitting the light of your knowledge. If I must write, I will; if you charge me to speak, I will do that, too; whichever is easiest for you to do through me. I hear the grumble of machinery from the elevators in the garage behind me and enhear (cf. envision) then a flying saucer, flying low to get to the source of my honey-sweet emanations. Come, get to the source of my honey-sweet emanations. Come, space ghost, and shove your pillowy prick into my asshole. I empty my mind to receive your responses, urge my hand as thou wilt. I hope to mold my body to the unique position which will activate your scanning screens and draw you to me so that I may begin my apprenticeship. May my name or your name be Babbitt Brighton?
I am here, oh come for me. I prostrate myself, in as many directions as I can master, please hear my pleas... [Illegible, something like "If it's OK---somewhere, do it NOW.]
[And he salivated as the cookies came again out of the box into his mouth.] So ALL that complex collapses IN [this refers back to the new force on DIARY 8949], or the point that was me is now relinquished to the incoming energies that may be given me: the forces necessary to work through with the manifestation of itself.
5:30 am: Wake to cat yowls. Light is still on so that I can write. So I CAN fall asleep before I really want to if I get stoned enough.
DIARY 8952
9/19/74
BABBITT BRIGHTON EARNS MONEY
He makes "Fantasy Tape" cassette for the growing videotape market! He makes millions: sells 10/year to each of 36 million teenagers, a profit of $1/tape, a million dollars a day!
1) Sound frequency into color frequency for purists.
2) Oscilloscope-animation for simplest sound visualization.
3) Combination of 1) and 2) through polarized-light kaleidoscopes.
4) Animal-tale simplicity for children.
5) Feeling-emotional rendition for drug dreams.
6) Sexual-porno fantasies of lovemaking.
7) S/M scenes for selected audiences.
8) Highly artistic versions, entertainers and artists in repertory.
9) Total animation library.
10) Orchestral versions; choreographed versions; voiced versions ala Swingles.
11) Strung-out, speeded-up, gimmicked, modernized.
12) Quick skims for best chords and effects from all the above,
EACH FOR EVERY PIECE OF MUSIC, ANTIQUE AND MODERN.
DIARY 9086
11/21/74
BABBIT BRIGHTON - STONED NOTES
And Babbit Brighton INVENTED---poof---the orgasm machine, EVEN if it involved a component as complex as toasting ITALIAN bread and eating it to the recollection of MOST distant childhood. A mood you have to be stoned to enjoy. But the machine films, plays, makes sounds, shows faces and cocks and asses and arms and muscles and eyes and jets of jism, and it's TUNABLE (you can request greater or lesser sexual tension, increase or lower sounds, add tickles or porno or grass or bidi or popper to the mix) by all COMERS.
Cake---looking at sign saying "baked on date stamped on top" and I look and it's dated TODAY (never mind I bought it yesterday) and I think of it as a [no, in FACT I DID buy it "today"!] BABY I'm RAVISHING. This poor entity, barely 24 hours OLD and I'm tearing apart its wrapper and eating it. But another part of my brain says to me, "No, its atoms, the totality of its entity as it entered this mouth---STAYS THE SAME. As "cake" it was chewed between the teeth and moistened with saliva, tongue raping into it. As "cake," still yet, as those same atoms and as parts of THAT SAME ENTITY now comprise a "branch-end" that goes down into the stomach, through various valves and glands, and branches into the blood vessels and arteries and cells of the body, until it ACHIEVES MY IDENTICAL OUTLINE IN SPACE, THOUGH DIFFUSE. AND I BECOME A PIECE OF CAKE (OR MORE FRIGHTENINGLY) A PIECE OF CAKE BECOMES ME. Far better I eat an Italian loaf, maybe as many as THREE days old!
The "Orgasm machine" would include those items I've fantasized about before: read-outs on blood pressure and heartbeat and pulse rate to be computerized on graphs and charts, along with a memory of my previous saturation levels, enticement levels, orgasm powers, so that I can DEVELOP my prowess against a FIXED level of (tested and mechanized) readings, which leads to a whole NOTHER fantasy about having the orgasm ITSELF constructed, something DONE TO one, rather than DOING---and that's how Babbitt is forced to get OUT of it, he's DONE TO, and almost frightened out of six month's orgasms!
DIARY 92040
11/21/74 (retyped 6/5/78)
BABBITT BRIGHTON EXPLAINS HIS BREAKTHROUGH
"I simply felt that there had to be discrete particles smaller than the electron. The first thing I attempted to do was make a list of the weights of the so-called "elementary" particles to as great an accuracy as contemporary science knew them. That didn't help very much: if the weight of the proton is only known to an accuracy of one in a million, and there are over a billion smaller particles that comprise the proton, it won't help to know whether there are a billion of these smaller particles of size "X" or a half-billion of these particles of size 2X. Then about the time I was banging my head against my slide rule, Berkeley discovered what it called the "near-electron," which differed from electrons only by a small extent, and that put me onto the atomic isotope truck. You see, it turns out that electrons, comprised of smaller particles, have ISOTOPES in the same way that atoms have isotopes. But with a difference. Whereas the isotopes of uranium, for instance, are differentiated by the number of protons and neutrons, a very large particle, the isotopes of the electron are differentiated by SETS of basic particles: actually it's these SETS of basic particles that were the so-called Quarks and Partons of earlier theories. Well, it turned out that basic "errors" by elementary students in their measurement of "e" weren't due to timing or measuring errors, they were actually measuring the weight and charge of electron isotopes. When I did the calculations of Milliken's oil-drop experiment again, not TRYING to come up with multiples of "e" but with SUBMULTIPLES of e, EACH TIME WITH A SINGLE ELECTRON, with the Babbitt-Strainer device that assured each measurement would be done with a single electron, I could begin to GROUP my results into five major areas, the five major isotopes of the electron. The middle one is about 99.99%, the one on either side, above and below, accounts for another .009%, so that the isotopes farther away from the "norm" accounted for only .001%, so that it was the measurement of THESE that gave me the best value for twice the charge and mass of the elementary particle: which I've been so modest as to name the Brighton (pronounced differently from my name, however, not electrical, not pro, but BRIGHT!). Gentlemen, the entire universe is comprised of BRIGHTONS! How happy you can be that they weren't discovered by someone, oh, pick a name, like ZOLNERZAK!
DIARY 9287
1/30/75
BABBIT BRIGHTON - OMNI-COMPUTER IDEA
Babbit Brighton finds an Amazon Indian legend that says "Moon is a computer/God" and he finds that it's TRUE. Omni-computer idea: starting with "how to draw ANY head at ANY combination of angles and ending with "predict the future of the earth" and "here is a person, diagnose him COMPLETELY!" to "here is a situation---look at it, record it, and predict it." To "earth is destroyed and the computer RECREATES it---computer IS the moon!? Memory is in QUARK ENERGY STATES.
DIARY 11245
8/31/76
ANOTHER BABBIT BRIGHTON PROCESS: HOW DO THEY KNOW?
ENTITY EXAMPLES OF: EXAMPLES OF:
OPPOSITES ATTRACT SUPER-ENTITY WISDOM
(How do they KNOW?) (How do they KNOW?)
Most basic particles positive attracts negative positive repels positive/
negative repels negative/
avoidance of proximity
Complex molecules levulo-compounds vs. dextero-compounds
Amoebas conjugation with DIFFERENCES Avoidance of REPETITION
Sexual entities male attracts female Avoidance of REPETITION
Bees workers kill alien workers FAST Swarm to new hive when
old is overcrowded;
drones pushed out to die; avoidance of invasion; queens kill rival queens.
Ants workers kill alien workers FAST Avoidance of INVASION
Spiders spin webs
Birds migrate
Lemmings race AWAY during
overcrowding
Rats leave sinking ship
Humans S/M; strong/weak; smart/dumb Avoidance of STAGNATION
/INCEST
"This catastrophe will happen."
ALSO lots on tape to Bill in WT vol 40, DIARY 10334-54
DIARY 5148
7/15/62
JACK AND OZZIE
A series --- as hooks on which to hang story ideas (written 7/15/62).
Traits of stories 1) fantasy, first and foremost; 2) humor, not rowdy, but quaint, satiric; 3) character study, to balance the fantasy; 4) pathos, just a touch, to balance the humor and give "a thought" to the stories; 5) places and things, description --- of the future and getting there.
Characters in stories: 1) Babbitt Brighton (11/25/77), the hero, everyone will identify with him; 2) Ozmyranda, the witch, Ozzie for short. Partly the mother, partly the villain, partly the heroine, partly the love interest; 3) Other fantasy characters --- chums of Ozzie, and inhabitants of "there." 4) Other human characters --- friends of Jack, and inhabitants of "here."
Gimmicks: 1) Ozzie can change forms. She can tell the future. "Don't you know everything, then?" "Don't be silly. I said I CAN, not that I do." "If you COULD, you WOULD." "No, stupid. When you read a book, you CAN read the last chapter first to see what's going to happen. But you don't. It's more fun that way." 2) Jack is Everyman; 3) Jack gets ONE souvenir from EACH trip. The Wall can happen to Jack, but later in series, too serious for now. VERY much later some attempts can be made to include gay people --- first "there" ---
Story #1 --- the idea of the simultaneous births. She takes him to future, talks about "freezing" women to get them to same period. Safer --- red lights on only 20 nights a week. Month is now 28 days, 13 months to year, with a New Year's Day, sometimes two. Souvenir is dust, placenta dust, so independent births are less messy. Sprinkles it over a car to park in that space, finds it's his boss's. Ends up thinking --- "Oh, Ozzie," and hearing a low chuckle in the background.
DIARY 9302
2/11/75
BABBITT BRIGHTON AND OZYMIRANDA
It comes to me that Babbitt is the practical modern-day down-to-earth materialist (that I was) and Ozy is the mystical future-day all-is-God spiritualist (that I am). Through the woof of time, their strands are twined into a single thread, connecting them through eons, and for that reason Ozy has come to "visit" Babbitt in his own time; to help him achieve independence in order that they might explore time together, fall in love, and become one in flesh as they are one in spirit. But Babbitt fights it, so that Ozy, Lysistrata-like, withholds sex until she can force some sort of reason through his head. The stories will have to start from a minimum and work toward all this (with no red herrings), so that the audience can be brought along just as Babbitt is. I liked that idea, and then came up with some sketch of the first conversation:
"ANYTHING but that."
"But it's the only thing I WANT." And Babbitt Brighton shut his eyes tight and threw back his head and howled, "It's the only thing I want."
Ozzy sat quietly, waiting.
Obviously here is the connection between Bob Grossman and myself on the sexual level; also Ozzy is practically every woman I know: Joan and Mimsey and Lisa and Lotte, while Babbitt is Bob Grossman and Joe Easter and Peter Ream and Bob Rosen and all the materialists I've ever known.
It ends with Ozzy thinking that she won't tell Babbitt Brighton that she's HIM, and that's why she won't tell him who she REALLY is, no matter HOW much he asks.
And at the bottom of the sheet, a stoned note that's FUNNY, but I don't know where it CAME from (in the mind): Gonadologists: working at the very frontier of crime at the base of the balls.
DIARY 9305
2/11/75
BABBITT BRIGHTON AND AIRPLANE CRASHES
He doesn't like to fly, writes about not liking to fly, and then wonders how many who flew PREDICTED they would crash. So he gets all the passenger lists and talks to hundreds of next-of-kin, and is surprised to find that NONE of them on the doomed planes actually FEARED flying: they went on to read, to sleep, to get drunk, to talk, but NONE of them was the type who, like Arno, "Stayed awake to keep the plane flying." Then he starts talking to some of the survivors, none of whom said they STARTED with a feeling that they would be apprehensive, but that when the plane gave a lurch, or came very close to the ground, THEN they started praying, imploring, seeking that the plane stay in the air, and he'd get a few indications that ONCE they started this train of thought, the situation of the plane started to IMPROVE, but it was going down so fast, or so close to the ground, that it was too LATE for anything to be done, but THEY did survive. Then one recalls a fatalist behind him, who REFUSED to think that the plane could be saved, and he feels the terror that THIS PERSON'S negativism would cause the plane to crash. This impression stays with Babbitt Brighton until he forms the hypothesis that ONLY WHEN A PLANE FLIES WITH PEOPLE WHO EARNESTLY DESIRE TO KEEP IT IN THE AIR, WILL IT STAY in the air. Early flights flew because the pilots WANTED them to fly. In the event that people lost interest about the "mystique" of flying, the plane went down. Slowly and ineluctable, BB is lead to the conclusions that his hypothesis is TRUE, even to the point of sending up some good friends, all of whom are TOTALLY fearless in flying, and their plane crashes, killing all of them. Then HE flies somewhere, the plane starts going down, and he IMPLORES everyone to chant the plane back into the air, and though the pilots insist that the plane would have been saved, BB retains the private thought that the THOUGHTS OF THE PASSENGERS prevent crashes, just as THOUGHTLESS passengers permit them. And in the end he publishes his findings, saying that readers should judge for themselves, but as for HIM, he'll never take a flight before AT LEAST two people on the plane confess to him that they're terrified of flying. "I wouldn't want them ALL to fall asleep on me," BB confesses at the end of the story.
DIARY 92058
11/25/77
BABBITT BRIGHTON COMING TOGETHER
OVERALL OUTLINE AND COMPONENT LIST FOR "THROWBACK"
It appears that what I now look at as "Throwback" started way in the past when I wrote "Simultaneous Births" (1-5) (DIARY 5032-5036) (FS360-364) (92043-92047) and "The Wind-Blown Web" (1-7) (DIARY 5097-5103) (FS365-371) (92048-92054) and "Jack and Ozzie" (DIARY 5148) (FS416) (92055) before I even started DATING pages; and "Babbitt Brighton and Ozymiranda" (2/11/75) (DIARY 9302) (FS583) (92056) and Airplane Crashes (2/11/75) (DIARY 9305) (FS584) (92057) and ALL of Volume 41 (Babbitt Brighton Workbook (1-2) (92031-92042) (9/7/74 to 8/31/76). That adds to the pages LABELED "Throwback" (1-23) (92001-92023) (10/29/75 to 12/18/75) and the 7 pages written 11/22/77 (92024-92030) and this page (92058), to give me a solid spectrum of the 58 pages written to date on "Throwback." There may be many OTHER short stories from FS, and certainly many components in INTERLARDINGS will be added, but Ozzie will be added as a fantasy figure in his head in the hospital during one phase of his "cure." She may portray all the whimsical, sisterly, humorous elements his quite dispassionate wife doesn't have. She'll essentially incorporate a subplot which will draw the suspense into THREE possible endings: (1) he remains a "throwback" and doesn't recover his facilities, (2) he recovers his facilities and is no longer a "throwback," and (3) he remains in his fantasies, and in the hospital, with Ozzie as his "guru" (may even have a BATTLE between Ozzie as the spirit of enjoyment, hedonism, positivism --- but in the same sense a spirit of LACK of change; versus the doctor as a spirit of development, discipline, practicality --- at best a spirit of change with relatively UNKNOWN benefits to be reaped, as opposed to the TOTALLY positive benefits preached by Ozzie both doctor AND Ozzie take BB to DIFFERENT pasts and futures! This would seem to enrich the plot line and allow for greater complexities and more incorporations of things I've written in the past, but allow me to find more things in MY life to act as parallels. And permit me to speak from FOUR points of view: the puzzled Babbitt Brighton (BB), the hedonistic Ozzie, the practical doctor (father/guru/teacher/god/authority), the wife (conservative/traditional/earth mother), and also balance the sex roles, even though it SEEMS that the two males have it over the two females, but let THAT stand, since "the father" and "the doctor" are much easier to do than an attempt at a balance that would wed "the mother" and "the doctor."
DIARY 92061
12/1/77
POSSIBLE BEGINNING
"Crazy?" The coin flicked in the air.
"Sane." The coin landed heads. "Or should heads be INsane?"
He flipped the coin into the air again, staring at it. Then he flipped it again, shouting out as quickly as he could: "Crazy-sane-crazy-sane-crazy-sane-crazy-sane." He reached and grabbed the coin from the air.
"Is this COIN telling me whether I'm crazy or sane, or PRODUCING my craziness or sanity?" He looked at the coin in the palm of his hand with interest, then with gradually growing revulsion, and then he threw it across the room.
"NO coin is going to tell me if I'm crazy or sane." But then he threw himself back on the bed and started turning his head violently back and forth on the pillow.
"Yet I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," he whimpered with an increasingly broken voice. "What can I do, what can I DO?" His body became a rigid bridge as he forced his fists into the bedding by his side. He stared across the sunlit room, his gaze brushing across the flowers glowing in the morning sunlight, and out into the trees that appeared to be looking in his windows. For another moment he held himself rigid, then he slumped, limp.
"Nothing," he breathed. "There isn't anything I can do; there isn't anything anyone can do. Nothing to be done. Nothing." His voice trailed into silence.
"How many times have you been through THIS before?" The voiced was so familiar it seemed, paradoxically, to be coming from outside his head.
"Keep quiet. You're nothing but a cliché plot device from a bad movie." Yet the agonized lines left his face, and he closed his eyes in what seemed like rest as the inner dialogue continued. Behind three closed doors the monitors of his brain waves, the viewers of his prokelia configurations, the implanters of sense-images smiled slightly at their consoles. "There's no battle loss that doesn't carry some advantage to someone," murmured the Supervisor.
DIARY 92062
12/11/77
ANOTHER POSSIBLE BEGINNING
NOW!
But as soon as the moment came, reluctantly it was left behind.
He concentrated for a moment, squeezing, pausing, but the moment of orgasm was past; though the sensations were still immediate and poignant and intense, the peak has been passed, the apex was part of the past. Sadly, the moment he had struggled for was behind him and the whole of his remaining life stretched before him like a featureless plain.
This, even though he knew that he would soon again climb the hillside of stimulation, labor up the incline of increasing pleasure, dally and tease and delay near the ascent to the summit, but then the urge to the top would take over, the slope of intensifying feelings would become impossible to resist, and soon all thought of any delay, all pretense of stretching out the moment, all activity to any other ends would be forgotten in the onrush of sensations at the tip of the mountain, and he could concentrate on this moment and the next, knowing that it was not quite there yet, knowing it was yet to come, knowing it was soon to come, knowing it was still ahead --- and then, too fast to really concentrate, too swiftly to really analyze ---
NOW!
And the semen would have overflown his navel to land on his chest again, fewer drops this time because it was the second time in just a few minutes, and the fatigue would come on quicker this time, the urge to continue would diminish, the hunger for more would be temporarily dimmed, and he could lay back on his bed. Bed. Things always seemed to begin in bed. And end in bed. The morning and birth and recovery and new beginnings started in bed. The night and death and sickness and all endings finished in bed.
He debated reaching for The Film of My Life, as he ironically called it, on which he had worked again and again to mirror the maximum detail he had been able to wring from the culminating moments before orgasm. He'd hired filmmakers, medical filmmakers, to record the event of his orgasms for one frantic night. Three cameras had been set up with the latest high speed film, slipping through their whirring sprockets faster than a rewind on an ordinary projector. From the side, from the ceiling, and from between his legs the unblinking lenses had scrutinized his orgasm, recording their pictures on thousands of frames of colored film, and these he had spliced and duplicated and tailored until his stocks of raw footage had been exhausted and he was forced to delete and add footage from the film itself.
In his mind, he reviewed the details of his latest edit to see if they would serve to stir the exhausted tube of flesh lying between his legs. At a bit less than slow motion he showed himself building up from the side, then cut to the ceiling to show the increased concentration on his face, then cut to between his legs to show his testicles drawing up close in their sacs as if trying to climb back inside the body. As the moment of orgasm neared, he edited more quickly, taking a minute from the side, a minute from the ceiling, a minute from the bottom; ten seconds from each, three seconds from each, so that as the peak of intensity was reached and the first pearl appeared at the tip of his penis, there were moments of frozen action from each angle. Then the next frame showed the pearl juggling on a thin column of white from the side, not noticeably larger from the ceiling, with a small angle to the side from the bottom. Then, to preserve the impression of the fluid RIPPING through his shaft which he knew to be such a necessary component of his excitement, there were repeated segments of frames showing a column of semen rising from his cock, from all three angles, where the camera on the ceiling could begin to show the pearl moving slowly off to the right side. The repetition reminded him of the story he'd heard of the Japanese whore who'd learned to tie tiny knots in the finest silk filaments of cloth and push them so gently into the urethra while her customer was ejaculating, so that the force of the ejected semen would either push the fabric from the urethra itself, or the watchful whore would pull gently, releasing the stream of knots from the sensitive lining of flesh to heighten the sensation of the sperm rushing from the tip of the penis. How wonderful it would be, he had thought, if there were only some way that the thread could be as quickly reintroduced, so that the fabric could be rapidly pushed out, pulled in, pushed out, and pulled in again for a dizzying spate of sensations that would prolong the pleasures of the orgasm.
There were still so many avenues left to explore. He wanted to concentrate on the spasm of the bulb that started this initial ejection of sperm. He wanted to intersperse shots of his face, contorted in seeming agony, to humanize the picture of the shooting cock. And then he wanted to try an entirely new method of editing, adding totally extraneous scenes between each frame of the initial pearl. He'd thought of showing a real pearl, a true pearl of great price, on a red satin pillow, to illustrate one possible source of fascination with these permanent nacreous spheres. He wondered how it would affect a viewer to see recordings of blood pressure as they hit their maximum at the moment of orgasm. Then there was the problem of sound: recording the held, explosively released breath at the second of orgasm? The faint sound of the liquid splashing against his stomach a second later? Or should he have lubricated his cock so that the last withdrawal of his fist would leave a glistening sheath of lubricant on his penis flesh, so that the sound could pick up the sticky liquid sound just before a small pop of release when the semen parted the slit of the penis smoothed shut by the lubricant?
Other possibilities were endless. There was the notion that a dying person sees his entire life flash before his memory in the instant before death. How would this be symbolized on film, to show the passing of a life between one frame of an orgasm and the next frame of the same orgasm. Or his idea of widening the film as it was to provide a frame for a shorter film exactly like this, taking perhaps five minutes to view, so that the five minutes would seem to take place in the instant of the first orgasm, and then to open up THAT film and insert another jewel of orgasm of a ten-second duration, with another barely discernible, shot of an entirely different orgasm for a split second, or repeated a dozen times.
Then there was the possibility of superpositions of different parts of the films, slowing down one sequence of action to a constant background of orgasm, or constantly enlarging images of orgasm, and that brought to mind his sadness that he didn't follow up another of his fantasies: photographing his semen flying directly into the camera's eye to provide a white-out that could proceed any flight of fancy he would want to supply.
Time passes, time passes, and again he feels a stirring between his legs. There's still life down there! He massages, looks at his magazines, adds more lubricant, adjusts his position in bed: it definitely looks to be possible.
With one-pointed concentration he manipulates his genitals so that the elusive feelings can't disappear, moving so that the feelings increase rather than diminish. He flips on a TV cassette of a bodybuilder masturbating and lays back in pleasure to watch it. Now marvelous to be able to increase activity when there's all the time needed to play! He moves faster, then slower, then faster again, beginning to build up a light sweat on his arms and chest and face, and he feels that there will be no difficulty with this one, but what will he do with it? However, the excitement of the actual moment is so enticing that he doesn't slow when he could, doesn't delay when he should, and pounds on through, shouting in a crescendo of syllables of pleasure, and literally sweeps past the ultimate moment so that he has to pause for a second to permit the flow of semen, and it seems to him that the peak of pleasure occurs only
NOW!
DIARY 92066
12/13/77
STARMAKER PROCESS FOR BB
John C. Lilly (on a tape that Pope recorded from WNYC, on the back of the directions for the alphaphones) talked of the sequence in Stapledon's "The Starmaker" which said that it would be necessary to "unite all the minds in the world, then the minds of all the worlds in the solar system, then all the solar systems in the galaxy, then all the galaxies in the cosmos, and THEN they would be ready to meet The Starmaker or whoever would be God." But if they got unified so far, would they MEET God or would they BECOME God? BB could have a process like this, in which he went into the future with Ozzie and surveyed the steps in this process, to the extent that the mass mind would even TRY AGAIN to create beings, and find that they could DO so with the enormous concentrations of energies and advances in mentation that they would have made into the far future --- not necessarily earth-based. Of course this gets into the possibility of a HIERARCHY OF GODS, too, in that the lesser gods are surely created by the higher gods to act as surrogates for the prayers, anger, and utilization of the MORE minor races that the middle gods create, so that they could attend more fully to the more DEVELOPED races that would either be created directly OR evolve from some of the farther-behind races. It could make the intricacies of U.S. government look simple to look at an organizational chart of gods, creations, creations becoming gods, gods being demoted to creations through evildoing and self-serving, gods becoming super-gods and investigating a new level of godhood that couldn't even be explained without crashes of light and blazes of sound too great for the human mind to bear, and there would HAVE to be a future creation of BB that became TOO curious and was literally BLASTED so that survival was impossible with the concept just too great for the brain-pan to bear. Since Stapledon was ultimately disappointed by seeing the thunder of the giant's dance in "Darkness and the Light," there would have to be ALWAYS the possibility of higher evolutions and higher gods, simply to PARALLEL the realization that HIGHER could ALWAYS exist once some lower level of godhood was totally assimilated, so that there would really be NO end of the levels to which creation could aspire.
DIARY 12855
3/29/78
NOW I WANT TO GET BACK TO WRITING BABBITT BRIGHTON
Listening to Mahler's Fourth last night reminds me BOTH of the feelings of frustration with the endless romanticism that I felt during the LSD session, AND that I wanted Babbitt Brighton to make his fortune by doing what I would like to do: make a series of videotapes for the tape-deck market that would exhaust the possibilities of visualizations of each of the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Vaughan Williams, Mozart, Haydn, Rachmaninoff, and Liszt: abstract art, pornographic encounters, ballets somewhat better than the Araiz "Mahler's Fourth," muscle building, jerking off, cartoon like "Fantasia," super-romantic like Byrne-Jones, super-childlike like comic books, light shows like "2001," jazz dances like "Fifth of Beethoven," spiritual -uplift things like successful Jordan Belson, hyper-today versions that would look good on "Zoom," antiquated versions that would appeal to grandparents, concert versions as good as the Verdi "Requiem" by von Karajan, orchestral versions that would permit the viewer to play the missing trumpet or cymbals or piano or violin or even be the conductor, with the parameters on different tapes that could be melded together with the variations of rhythm, volume, coloration, emphasis, deletion that today only the conductor has the power to accomplish. These "part-masterpieces" could then be put together to form THEMSELVES, or could be linked with other pieces: like doing the "Bolero" to the dynamics of Beethoven's 7th, or orchestrating Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto in the manner of Pictures at an Exhibition or boosting Bach's Unaccompanied Violin into the regions of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band." And cartoons with the leading pop singers as idols would be another facet of "updating" the classics, which DO seem to retain their popularity no matter WHAT'S done with them, whether it be "Death in Venice" or "Sebastiane" or "Mahler's Fourth." But I want to WRITE about this and get it PUBLISHED before EITHER (1) someone else WRITES about it, or (2) some one else DOES it, which would make the writing about it look stolen, as my JOYIV letter about CHANGE looks stolen from the "Fourth Way" pages that I've just READ about change recently.