MISCELLANEOUS
The sun came in the window, waking me at 6:40, so I got almost eight hours sleep, counting the hour gained during the night. Shaved and showered and got out without waking Joe, and wandered around the house. Robert was there, and we joined Mary, who hadn't slept much, and we strolled the upper statuary garden and the greenhouse, then over to the King House, where Mary and I admired the reddening maple against the blue sky, and the lacework of a bare-limbed tree stark against the horizon. Back to breakfast, and we ate with Steve and the Susans, and I excused myself to talk around and Steve, bless his loveliness, joined me. We walked around the roads and he told me about his Messiah-complex. Doris came upon us and ventured to say that I wasn't so much against society last night as against myself, and I reminded her that Steve had made that very same suggestion then, and that there was some truth to it. After she left, Steve asked if I knew the meaning of yenta, and I assured him that I did. He talked about the fear of coming to more of these, since anytime he saw such sorrow he wanted to help them as much as he could. But since in many cases, he could be NO help, it just served to tear him apart for no good reason. Again he seemed to be wanting to help me, yet holding me at arm's length. We talked of many things in our wanders around the house, came back to the cottage, and he left me to talk to George, and I spoke with Barbara and Paul for a bit, but they were talking with Bruce about football when Art came out and silently joined the group, so I went into the house after saying "Good morning" to Art. I went to the conference room, but there was no one there, so I went to my room to shit, dreaming of Steve unable to sleep, reading until three, and walking about the grounds from three until five. How I wished I could have joined him! Looking back, how I wished I would have had at least the nerve to TELL him I wished I could have joined him.
This session began with the rules of the "I---now" game, wherein each person describes how they feel RIGHT NOW. "You see, it's impossible to rehearse for this," said Judy, "because you have to say how you feel WHEN you speak, not BEFORE you speak." I went rather quickly at first, but Ed came in for a bit of attention as "You still have your clamp on" accused Judy, as Ed didn't open up enough. Then the circle got to Art, who had trouble talking, got into more trouble, started describing the constriction in his throat, and said he wanted to face Judy. She quickly got her chair in front of him, and reached out for him. Reluctantly put his hands in hers, his voice got more and more constricted, and his face reddened with emotion. George rounded the outside of the circle to stand behind him, and Judy told him to breathe in and out through his open mouth. The first breath was silent, but each succeeding breath drew in more air and let it out more loudly. A "Huhn" started sounding in each exhale, his chest puffed in and out, and the sound became a long groan. As the groans became more painful, George put one hammy hand on his chest and one on his back, as if pressing down on the constriction. Art moved back and forth almost as if ready to vomit, and the "Huh's" got louder and louder until finally they were voiced fully, then rose in volume until they were throaty shouts, given openly with tears running down his face, then after two or three at maximum volume, they began to become filled with tears, and they turned into sobs from the stomach that shook the whole body. I began to cry, Steve next to me was crying, Joe said afterwards that he was being torn apart, and the looks of loving concern on Judy's and George's faces were something to remember. There were words connected with the crying, but mostly private, inconsequential words of comfort given by Judy to Art. Rather quickly, he came out of it, a transition whose speed George remarked on, but Art HAD been through some sort of catharsis, the group had gone out to him and had loved him for it. Then Ben dirtied the air by trying to duplicate the sincere emotions that Art had shouted out, but the shouts and strains were affected, the crying eyes were tearless, and finally George said, "Ben come off it," and Ben raced from the room, and I was frankly surprised when I saw him back in the room in a few minutes. Mary began weeping again, partially phony, partially real. Sue and Susan amused the group by reporting that they felt rather good: they didn't feel like giving such a show as either Art or Ben had given. Everyone assured them that it was perfectly satisfactory to feel good. They finally looked at me and I rather meticulously began: "There's a stuffiness in my head now as I think of Art. Now I feel the wet handkerchief in my hand. Now there's a pressure in my stomach. Now I'm breathing deeper and it's going away." "That's it, keep it in the 'now.'" Even now I thought I detected a sarcastic note in George's voice. "I'm talking about what I feel now." "That's right, go on with it." "I feel my ankles in my shoes, I feel myself shifting in my chair, now I move my hands as I talk." "You've succeeded in staying in the now very well." "That's one of my skills, being flexible enough to adapt to any set of rules," I shot back, thinking again he was baiting me. "I'm complementing you on that flexibility. Can you accept that compliment?" "Yes, I'm sorry, I thought I was doing something wrong." "Can you appreciate your flexibility?" "Yes, though sometimes it's my enemy, because I can fit into any box anyone happens to describe to me." "There's nothing wrong with that. That's good." "Thank you." And I felt that I was through, the cycle of crying not coming to me when I was there with the group waiting for me. JoAnn had a particularly affecting cry as she described her sadness that her mother had trained her to be firm against pain, and now she found that her son was very ill with a sickness that might quickly result in his death. Everyone felt good towards her. A few others came to insights, and the last was Larry, who felt constricted because so many of his coworkers from Syracuse were in the group. He wanted to work, it seemed, but he said that even if he had two hours he couldn't get anywhere. I interpreted this as a sign of a very deep problem that a few minutes wouldn't help; Steve saw it as a comment that he wouldn't be able to talk about himself in front of his friends anyway. Then it was 11:45, we had lunch at 12 and had to get out of our rooms. Joe was there, agreeing that he couldn't unroll his feelings before his friends, either, "I have to work with them every day." He remarked about his good feelings to many in the group, and how he had doubted he could ever feel close to anyone but his wife before this, but that now he felt he could be close to far more people than before. I packed and we got out to dinner, again splitting up at different tables, and I got Carl and Doris and Lois and Ben, sort of the semi-lowest somehow, and we had a rather strained lunch. I still didn't realize Lois and Ben were married, it took Steve to tell me that in the car riding back. And I wasn't interested in Carl or Doris's statements. Back down at 12:45 for the final go-around, this time repeating any lasting resentments, or saying anything they wished to anyone else in the group, or saying what they thought of the weekend. Gene made a kindly remark about how he felt I was unfinished, and he wished he could do something for me. Bruce absolutely floored everyone by requesting permission to get up and confront everyone and touch as well as say his reactions and farewell. He was marvelously affecting with Barbara and JoAnn, and as for me, he looked down from his commanding height, his green eyes calm behind his glasses, face smoothly impassive, and said "Bob, you represented something I'd sometimes feared in myself, and I'm very happy you were in the group. I wasn't sure if I liked you at first, but I found that you were a nice PERSON, and I'm glad we could talk together." I also remained impassive, hoping that my eyes would show the admiration I felt for him. He reached his two arms down and I reached my two arms up, and as if that was all we could trust each other to do, we remained like that, faces a foot apart, hands clasping each other around the biceps, I feeling his strength, hoping that he felt in me something that he could like, and then the arms slid apart, lingering only a second with a hand-grasp, and he was on to the next person. Howard brought up the idea of the tremendous feeling of love generated by the group, and I started by saying I agreed with him, and thought the group was marvelous. "But I want to thank some few people particularly: Art, thanks for letter yourself go for the group, for a few seconds, Estelle, I hope YOU get your chance soon." "Bob, I'd like to say how much I like you." "Thank you, Estelle." "Sue, thanks for being a great partner; Steve" and I paused a short space, "thank you; Ben, try harder." This, as was shown later, was rather stupid, since he was probably trying too hard as it was. "Mary, you too; Ed, TRY," I said, hoping to imply that he wasn't even trying. "Gene, I hope I'm not as badly off as you fear I might be; Judy, not only are you perceptive and understanding, as the others have mentioned, but you're a living breathing doll." She smiled appreciatively. "George, thank you very much." Again, I hope my expression meant it, and he waved me back a deprecatory wave of the hand. Then it was 2:20, and George said creativity "was living---those who live the most can create the most." And the meeting was over. I re-saw Bruce, hoping vaguely for a warmer embrace, but I reached out and grabbed his arm and he grabbed mine, as if we were holding each other off, and I told him how great I thought his farewells were, and he was glad I liked them. Gene and I grabbed each other's wrists rather embarrassedly; Lois and I embraced again and again, and I made some stupid remark about "It feels good" when her body was pressed against mine, and she was so happy I could have just finished fucking her. I listlessly embraced a listless Mary, said thank you again to Sue, and Steve and I again shook hands feelingly, and I could still feel his hand and arm on my back as I cried for someone in the group. God, how I liked him! Barbara and I exchanged the cliché that we would have liked to have talked to each other more, and Ed and I said we saw similarities in us, and we wished us luck. Nick and I shook hands on the way out the door, and I warned him not to let all the affirmations of his great marriage go to his head. It was probably a stupid thing to say. On the porch I passed JoAnn and added my small bit to all the affirmations she got from the group for her small opening up. She said the standard truth about liking me as a person, and we shook hands. Joe and I shook hands and said something about being good roommates and parted.
I checked the schedule to see that there was a 2:28 train, and it was just 2:28, and a 4:28 train, so I decided to take pride and dash it, and asked Sue if she had room in her car. She said we would be six, that we would wait an hour for Estelle to see the grounds, and that Steve had a car. I found him in the process of giving Sue a ride, and we three were in one car and Sue and Art and Estelle and Mary were in another. Art and I shook hands (I'd forgotten that in HIS remarks, he said how he wasn't going to say anything to me, but that my remark about him obligated him. He'd liked me at first, he said, and implied that he didn't like me afterwards, and then decided he didn't have to say anything to me), and Sue and Steve and I went out toward his car, a great new Buick with a radio too big for the dashboard. The ride back was rapid, filled with odd conversation about how Steve wanted to start a T-group for his synagogue, how I should see the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue on CPW and the 70's, and other nonsenses. We got to my place at four, and we shook hands one last time as Sue and I embraced before she descended into the subway, and I elevatored to my room, feeling very headachy and exhausted. Don and Merv came over at 6, but I chased them out at 8 so I could go to BED. Woke at 6:30: 10½hrs!
DIARY 7241
November 9-10, 1965
AUREON ENCOUNTER I
Get to the train just on time, and on looking around, find that Estelle isn't in the train, so I figure she's gotten a ride up with Streitfeld. The day is cloudy and overcast, but the trees have fully turned on the slopes of the Palisades, and there are patches of vivid red among the dun, dark green, and dirty orange leafed trees. Again the anticipatory nervousness hits me about 10 minutes south of Irvington, and the train stops and I walk back to be greeted by Estelle, who gets on at Riverdale, and introduced to Joe, who's a fuzzy-haired, brown eyed fellow who seems more than a little drawn to me.
On the platform are the assorted mingling of people waiting for the non-scheduled, despite Estelle's pleas to the contrary, transportation to Tarrytown House, There's Estelle and Joe and Harriet, a mousy little girl with protruding eyes and teeth and small beauty, and a group of three who seem to know all about each other: indeed they turn out to be three of the leaders, John, plump and self-contented looking with his bulky sweater and pipe, Debbie, engaged to John, vivacious in a plain way with her stringy, middle-parted hair, and Penny, buxom and attention-getting in her miniskirt and dark blue stockings on maxi-legs. The last is Miki, a gamin-type with a skull cap of black hair and large dark eyes staring out of a gaunt concentration-camp face.
After the cold fuss of waiting for taxis and signing in, it turns out that I'm staying in the King House, the large white house that Mary and I stumbled across early the last Sunday morning. Joe's there, too, as is a large, pleasant-looking, reassuring fellow whose name is Jim. We walk across the leaf-strewn paths together, and they pump me about the last weekend, worried about what is in front of them. Joe's upstairs, and Jim's down the hall from me. Put things away and prepare to go back to the tennis house. Jim's door is partly opened, so I knock and get invited in, and he's putting things away, says he requested being alone in a room, and in a few moments we're over to the tennis house.
There are many people in the basement assembly room, and I settle next to Joe, Jim next to me, and Miki comes over and we chat about her, mainly, her job with Phoenix House, where she's been six weeks as the assistant to the director of re-entry, and she has the highest praise for the three-night-a-week encounter groups that take place in each of the three houses in the Upper West 80's. "One guy's on the hot seat, and someone else is just ripping into him, tearing him apart, and the inquisitor seems so solid and sure. But in a few minutes HE'S in the hot seat and, God, he's all hollow."
When she goes off for coffee, Joe and I chat, and he's just quit HIS job recently in order to be a professional photographer, and I tell him my story and we're struck with the similarities in our positions. His interest in me still seems real and intense, but there's nothing about him to attract me, so I'm happy when Hal Streitfeld calls the room to attention.
He's a very unprepossessing person and speaker, looking soft and uncomfortable in his red velvet pullover which is too short for his body, and shapeless gray trousers under shapeless gray hair over a shapeless gray face with glasses on.
"Aureon was founded in January, 1967, when a group of us decided that we could emulate Esalen in the East." He described his professional studies, and went on to say that he'd been through classical analysis, but hadn't benefited much from it. "I wanted something more, so I looked into the Gestalt theories of Perls, but was sad to find that as solid as these people were professionally, they were pretty messed up in their personal lives, Perls and Schutz and the others. Then I was associated with Alexander Lowen, and got something out of his theories of bio-energetics. But still I wanted something different, so I went to the classic Reichean approach, which is just about what they use at Esalen---the body-approach. There were modifications to the Reichean group, which was affected by the techniques of Synanon groups. But then there'd been work in encounter groups for a long time: at National Training Laboratories, Schutz at Esalen, TRW Systems. I'd been to them all during six weeks at the Coast, along with nude workshops and whatever else they had to offer. I wasn't satisfied with any of them, and then ideas began popping in this group of Kaz's that we were all in. There was a theory of types developed by Sonja and Lynn, which we've grown to call the Tackett-Carl Theory of Types. What you do is put yourself into a type, but I'll let someone else describe that to you."
There was chaos for awhile as the group of eight leaders talked among themselves at the front of the room, then Sonja spoke up.
"I guess I'm elected. Lynn and I began to notice things about each other, and we began to formulate ideas about what made us what we were. As time went on and we told others in the group about our ideas, they seemed to work, they seemed to be right, so we worked on it further and came up with our ideas. This will be the first group that will use these ideas, so in a sense all you are sitting in on history. We call the two types Control and Withdrawn. The control types run Western society: they're articulate, reasonable, very structured, are noted for a lack of emotion, and they operate under a fear/anger dichotomy. The Withdrawn type is not structured, is nonverbal, can be typified as being "warm and soft," and they're governed by a love/pain dichotomy." Sonja was obviously the control type, her mannish looks in short severe haircut, only the bare minimum of makeup made her eyes look hard and calculating, and she spoke directly and emotionlessly.
Lynn sat next to her, expressions flashing across her face differently from one minute to the next. She fidgeted in her chair and looked around the room, smiling and frowning as the impulse took her. She chimed in enthusiastically: "It's said that the control type build the world, while the withdrawn type ENJOY it." The audience laughed.
"The control type usually thinks of the self," continued Sonja, "while the withdrawn type senses their oneness with all life. So the control type is a solid type, hard and unmoving, whereas the withdrawn type can't be pinned down, is just a gaseous sort of entity. That's why control types fear death, because it means the death of the self, but withdrawn types are everyone else, so they're not so concerned about death---they'll keep right on going even after they die. The control group sort of operates out of their mind, while the withdrawn group is more or less operating out of its emotions, out of sex.
"Everyone is the same type as their mother." Here a flurry of whispers rocked across the room. "And most married couples are opposites, so you tend to be LIKE your mother, whether you're a man or a woman, but you all tend to marry your fathers. The goal of this sort of therapy is to get in touch with the opposite side of your character. Trouble results from the separateness of these two halves: our task is to integrate these two halves, to put the personality back together. Children are intact, complete, but somewhere along the way the two people get separated out, and that causes conflict and pain."
There was more discussion from the members of the group, and the point was made that the types REVERSE when people get to bed. It seemed fairly clear to me that I was control, and my mother was certainly control and my father withdrawn, and I seemed to be more like the withdrawn type in bed, so it all fit. During the discussion, it seemed to go on too long, so I suggested that people shouldn't be too worried about making the wrong decision, because the other members of the group could easily detect an interloper and these would be "thrown out of the group."
At this Miki crowed at me and announced that I was definitely a control type, as if I didn't know. By then it was 12:15 and time for lunch, so Miki and I chatted off to the lunchroom, and joined Shirley and Lynn, who seemed to be lesbian lovers, who were a pair, obviously. We talked about how easy it was to absorb their theory of types, and how interesting the groups promised to be.
Back at the assembly room, we divided into the four groups depending on Male or Female, Control or Withdrawn, and surprisingly the groups ended up split evenly, despite the fact that "Withdrawn" seemed a negatively loaded word, but possibly "Control" was an equally negative word for the withdrawns.
Then we counted down for which of the four sets of leaders we would join, and I figured that 2 were the two girls, but goofed and found it was Debbie and John. I fussed and fretted, though Miki and I were happy to find each other in the same group, but I quickly brainwashed her into wanting the girls' group, since the girls had originated the theory. Consequently, when Hal asked if anyone was unhappy with his group, three in John's group raised their hands, and I seemed to catch a disappointed look in John's face as my hand went up. But I hastened to assure everyone it wasn't against the group I was in, I was only FOR another group more. Finally with a bit of shuffling I got into Lynn and Sonja's group, while Miki stayed in John's. We later agreed it was pretty good that we stayed separate, since we were such like characters.
Off we went to T3, which was a too-small room with 17 chairs packed against the walls in a tight circle, and only one window for ventilation, though we did have a bathroom. We sat around and did nothing but chat for a couple minutes until the two girls came in, and they seemed too terrified to take command of the group, but finally we started giving self-introductions, first names only, until someone wanted to know why only first names.
"With a last name like Zolnerzak, what good is hearing the last name?" I chimed in, and everyone got a good laugh about that.
There was another awkward silence, and the girls brought up the topic of being a peer-group, so everyone could say just as much as anyone else. Then they decided to try one of their devices, and asked for a volunteer. Everyone retreated into his seat, and they wanted to know "Volunteer for what?" Norma was the one who asked this question, and they coyly said, "Volunteer and you'll find out."
So she did. She began telling us about herself, how she had been married for 25 years, raised three children, then started working three years ago in art direction, and was now art director, but she felt uncomfortable in her job, since she didn't think she was doing a good job. This went on for a very long time, and then it got around to her husband, and Lynn decided that she hated her husband.
"Stand up in the center of the room, clench your fists, and say 'I'm angry,'" said Sonja, rather peremptorily.
"You want me to stand up and say---that?" asked Norma, nervously.
"Yep." Norma stood, looking concerned, and started to say "I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry," but however she said it, it was wrong. She was to put her feet wider apart, say it louder, say it deeper, say it more slowly, say it with more expression, say "I am angry," and however Norma chose to do it, it didn't work. Gradually I got the same feeling for her that I had for myself before during the Gestalt Therapy. I was terribly uncomfortable myself and for her, and her throat began getting sore, and she began to cough and choke, and she insisted on using a whining head-tone, and the girls didn't have enough sense to bring it down into the thorax.
The attempts kept on and on, and Norma's face grew worn and pained from the efforts at shouting. At one point she said, lowly, "Goddam you, Lou," and I suggested that THAT might be better for her to say, but they ignored my statement. At another point John came out with a statement something like mine, and Sonja, with real anger, shot back that she didn't appreciate the attempts of certain people in the group to undercut their method. They were perfectly qualified to do what they were doing, and we should all sit back and learn from it: THEY were the leaders. I was taken aback, as was John, and Norma looked unhappily around the room for some sort of help.
She really did try to perform as directed, as I had tried, but she really didn't know what to do. Finally she reported her embarrassment at being a failure and taking up so much time, and after somewhat over an hour they allowed her to regain her seat. At one point later she made a comment, but her comment was cut off by some curt reference to her inability to work, so she ended the session in a deep depression, feeling with those who were acting out their angers and hatreds, but afraid to open her mouth and say a word. "I felt that the entire group was against me," she said later.
The group had turned over to Ted, who had said that HE was angry, and we began to hear his story. He had been married for six years, but it was breaking up now, even though he didn't want it to break up. In one final argument, his wife was sleeping with another guy, and said that the other guy had given her so much pleasure: pleasure he couldn't give her because he had such a small penis! He shrank into himself as he said this, and the group unanimously branded his former wife as a bitch of the first magnitude. But he said he didn't want to lose her: he didn't have ANY friends of his own, he only knew people he met through her, so when she'd call, and they'd talk or go to dinner or go to a show, he enjoyed their company. He had liked art and such when he was a child, but decided it was too feminine to continue.
"Do you want to get at your anger?" asked Sonja.
"Yeah," he said, standing up self-consciously with his hands on his hips in such a fragile way that I guessed he might at one time, maybe now, have some doubts about his masculinity in general. His efforts were somewhat better than Norma's, leading to some sort of touching of his feeling as he kept his hands on his hips and screamed downward into the floor, as if vomiting some foulness from his mouth. His voice got more and more strident from shouting, but they egged him onward, feeling there was more to come out. Finally they detected pain, and he wept for a few minutes, then ended up saying that he felt pretty good. They made him say that around the group, and his face actually brightened up and he rather bounced around the room.
"OK, who's next?" Sonja looked shortly around the room. "How about you?"
Elinor said OK, and began to tell about her college training to be a nurse anesthetist, and how she ran away from home, with the patrols finding her in Maine and returning her home. When she finished, she again went away to Europe for 3 years, fighting in the Army in Israel, acting as a nurse, and feeling very good about it. The group oohed and aahed at her experiences, then she returned to the city to see her family, and the first week she was home her mother fell down a flight of stairs and was now bedridden. General hisses from the group. She'd leave home immediately, she said, if she weren't worried about her 19-year-old brother, who was flunking out of school, was a pot smoker, and was threatening to come to no good. The consensus of the group was that she had to lead her own life, and she didn't have to run very far away, just get out of the house, so that her brother could still get in touch with her if he needed her. She got to some kind of anger, and sat down rather pleased with herself.
Lynn looked over to Sonja and said "You look in bad shape."
"I'm very much fearful about what I heard. I keep thinking of MY mother."
"Do you want to try the hate device?"
"Yeah---ohhh, I'm so fearful."
I was rather disgusted with this: after all, we were here for OUR benefit, and we had to submit to a new theory of therapy, and now we had to listen to the troubles of one of the leaders! By this time Sonja had drawn herself up to her full five foot six and THREW an enormous shout across and downward, raising up on toes and bending over as if hit in the stomach "I HATE HER."
Again and again this screaming shout was ripped from her throat, and she stopped, gasping for breath, while Lynn gave forth the typical, "OH, oh, oh," like the mewing of a tiny, empathetic kitten. They went through a few more series of screams, they tried another device, and Sonja started crying.
"Oh, gee, oh, Sonja, Oh, look at her," whimpered Lynn. "Oh, she's so vulnerable now, oh, Sonja, oh." And she raced from her seat to embrace Sonja tightly, saying Oh, oh, oh, as she caressed her. When she went back to her seat, Sonja stood, swaying slightly, glassy eyed, and Lynn again said, "Oh, Sonja, you're SO vulnerable. Can anyone give her love? Who can give her love?"
Estelle jumped up from her seat and caressed Sonja, and Lynn kept up the rather sickening running drivel of "Oh, isn't that nice, oh, oh. Estelle, can't you just feel the love Sonya's giving out? Oh, oh, isn't that wonderful?" When Estelle sat down, Lynn again requested the love, and it almost settled into a "let's go around the room and love Sonya" bout. Some who went seemed rather reluctant to do so, though some simply felt their hearts go out to Sonya in her need, and went up to her. But Sonya, being the control type, seemed entirely too self-contained to need THIS much love from the group; she took in the embraces in a rather perfunctory manner, though there was an intensity about the Lynn-Sonya embrace that made me suspect there might possibly be more than an intense friendship over a long period of time behind the emotions in their hugs. In the same way that Lynn looked around the room for the next hugger, Sonya also began almost challenging those who hadn't given her love, and I found myself, as I became numbered among the smaller and smaller group who hadn't gone up to her, of two minds. I really didn't feel that I LOVED Sonya (thoughts come to me now: maybe because she WAS too much like me, and Steve's comment from last time: Maybe he doesn't like HIMSELF too much), but she seemed to be needing the show of love for some reason, even if it was only to show the group members what THEY could be getting if THEY opened themselves to the group as she had.
At length I decided that I would go through the motions, somewhat as a prescription might be followed, and see if the motions might produce an unexpected reaction. So during a pause I stepped up, feeling quite unself-conscious, and embraced Sonya. She soaked up whatever feelings I offered to her, and I couldn't resist whispering in her ear "I envy you for what you just did." She didn't react, but during the embrace gave off small sounds of appreciation which I could hear for each person who hugged her. But I suppose I did get some sort of good feeling from holding her in my arms. If only the feeling that I COULD follow through a prescription and get SOME sort of feeling, rather than self-disgust, out of it. When I went back to my seat, it was with a feeling of something good done for reasons that I didn't have to investigate to trust.
There was some encouragement to the holders-back in the love-feast, but Norma, particularly, stated that she didn't feel like doing it, didn't see anything to be gained from her doing it for the wrong reason: just to please Lynn and Sonya, and so she wouldn't do it. The group turned slightly frosty toward her at this point, and she said she felt not a part of the group, afterwards.
There was an almost embarrassed silence afterwards. They looked around the room to see who could use the help, and possibly asked if anyone felt they wanted to say something.
"I want to say something," said Estelle, eyes still twinkling from her crying during Sonya's recital and screaming. The group turned toward her accommodatingly, and she began to ramble on about feeling sorry for a number of the people in the group, but that her husband complained that she was never really HERSELF because she spent so much of her time crying for other people. She said she could cry for Ted and for Norma and for Sonya and for Elinor, and she felt that she didn't have anything inside herself that she could point to and call HERSELF. There were a few questions back and forth, and it was made clear that this was a typical statement from a withdrawn type, who felt at one with the world. Her mother was obviously withdrawn, her husband was an obvious control type, so the theory held up for her.
As the conversation went on, she became increasingly uncomfortable, until she started saying things about herself: SHE was holding down a difficult job, SHE felt sorry for people and wanted to help them, SHE had feelings which other people didn't have. And Lynn sympathetically pointed out that it WAS she who had these feelings, and Estelle began sobbing aloud, burying her head in her hands, shaking with tears. "That's YOU that's crying, Estelle," said Lynn, "you're crying, no one else is crying, and you're not crying for anyone else." Ed reached over to put his hand on Estelle's back, and her sobbing died slowly away, and there was a bit more talk, aimed chiefly at making her realize that SHE was a person with demands and hopes and fears, and even though she could certainly feel sorry for other people easily, she DID have a feeling of self, she DID have some contact with something inside her that she KNEW was a part of herself, and of no one else, and the circle about this time had to break for lunch.
I was feeling uneasy in the group. I'd thrown in some suggestions about handling Norma, and at one point Lynn threw her hand over to me and said "Keep quiet" in a manner which I thought was entirely too "put-down" for my taste. So when the group got up for lunch, particularly when I thought it was 11:30, and questioned why we needed two hours to get back at 1:30, and they told me it was already 12:30, I left quickly and went off to find Miki. We chattered about the groups, and went off by ourselves into a corner, taking opposite corners of the table, which I realized would discourage another duo from taking seats with us.
We were wrong, however, when Shirley and Lynne sat down with us, and they appeared to me to be lesbian lovers, and this seemed verified when they reported having lived together for "years" and one was control and one withdrawn, and they appeared to know each other very well indeed. The one across from me gave off such "possessive" and "We don't need YOU" radiations about her roommate and me, respectively, that I felt my initial impression was correct.
We talked about nothing in particular, about the place, about my former weekend, about my book, about Miki's job, and about the weather and New York, and the food, good again, thankfully. I went back to the room feeling even more out of it.
This session I sat next to the window, since I felt that the cold air streaming in, being the only ventilation in the room where they kept the door closed to keep down the noise to the other parts of the building, was too much for Lynn who had been sitting there before. Lynn came in rather early and sat two seats over from me, and began talking in general about anger, and I said, rather too loudly, probably in order to press the point I was making "And I sure got angry with you this morning for cutting me off." She looked at me mildly, unsmiling, and didn't continue the conversation.
After everyone was gathered, there was again a silence, and John leaped into the gap with the feelings that I had had. He said he didn't understand what was going on, and even felt that some of the techniques and devices used were against any sort of good feeling in the group. When there was no support for his point of view, I leaned forward into the group and said "I felt the same way, and I was angry with myself for not having brought it up before." Quite off the bat, Sonya launched off at John: "I've felt this whole negative attitude from you from the beginning. We've been in this business long enough to know that we're doing a good job, so we don't even need the support of the group to feel right in what we're doing. I feel you're trying to undercut (the word had a sharp, vicious edge in her voice) the group, and I don't like it."
"Maybe one of the reasons John spoke as he did, as I wanted to," I said, nervous about talking, yet forcing myself to say what I felt, "is to find if anyone ELSE in the group had the feeling that things weren't going quite right. I wasn't sure what was going on, and I wasn't sure if anyone else in the group shared my feelings. The only way to find out is to ask." I paused and looked around the room, but it was almost as if the group was unaware that I was asking for support, let alone showed an inclination to agree with me. "But now that I see that no one agrees with me, I'll keep quiet and see what happens."
John added a thing or two to the conversation, but both Lynn and Sonya again jumped on him, going as far as to say that no one was forcing him to sit there through the rest of the session, and he somewhat backed down, said that at least it was interesting enough to hold his interest, and that he would stay.
"OK, then, let's get to someone who wants to work," Lynn said this rather abruptly, and again my feeling were hurt. [This is messed up, since I described lunch AGAIN when I should have described dinner. When we broke for dinner, I was chatting with Jim about something, and he said he was interested in my showing him around the place, so we went over to the Biddle House and I took him downstairs to the bar, showing him the bowling alley and card tables and pool rooms. I didn't have any money, since I'd left everything in the room, so I asked him to stand me to a daiquiri, while he had a scotch on the rocks. We talked about his business, which as an MC turned out to be mainly connected with alcoholics, using Antabuse to turn them off alcohol with a physical displeasure if they drank while taking the pills. I told him about the LSD experience in Canada, which he expressed interest in, and then Harriet or Priscilla or someone joined us at the bar, and after talking 15 minutes with us, told us that her trouble was that she stuttered, and we both laughed long and loud at such an absurdity, after which time, as if to prove it to us, she stuttered a number of times. Then it was time (announced from the bar) to go up to dinner, and Harriet and Jim and I went up together, having been joined by Enid, a fat unpleasant woman who said that her group hated her, and that she was going to leave. As we sat down at the table, her talk made it obvious that what she wanted was every man to pay attention to her, and she wanted to be hugged. We saw someone at the other table hugging, so I told her to get to her feet, and I hugged her vast expanse with pressure and reassurance. She didn't, thankfully, turn obscene in her clutching, but she sure got quite a bit out of it, and then Jim owned up to his turn, and even Harriet hugged her, but not before Enid made quite a bit about "Not yet, I want those OTHERS to last." She tried to monopolize the conversation during dinner, and positively ignored Harriet whenever she said anything. Then Estelle joined the group, and we all ate with the typical New York conversation buzzing around the table, sometimes with cross conversations making a hash of talk in general. THEN we went downstairs to the session I'm in the process of describing]. Everyone felt somewhat logy from the quantity of food, and I expressed my impatience to Lynn for the slowness of the whole process.
"Well, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm always impressed about the amount of blame the poor mothers and fathers take in the process of therapy, but I guess I didn't have any great shakes for parents, either. One of my earliest memories was when I was about six years old, my mother came screaming into my room, to sit on my bed, holding a carving knife, shouting at my father to 'Push it in, push it in.' I just sat up in bed and cried, and maybe I feel a little bit guilty about that because I almost WANTED him to push it in, since it would end the terrible quarrels that were always whirling about my head. I couldn't do anything about them, but I always felt that maybe I COULD do something about them, but just didn't know what it was." During this recitation there were expressions of amazement and sympathy from the group, and Lynn broke in "You mean she PURPOSELY came into your room?"
"Yes, so I could be a witness, I guess."
"Oh, boy, that's great. Go on."
"Well, there was never very much love in the family, so when I graduated from college and came to New York, I was glad to get away. But then living in New York wasn't as good as it could be, because, thanks to my mother, or whatever reason, I'm a homosexual, so I always had to be very careful that my business life---with that grand company IBM which always worries so much about such things---was concerned about covering up my private life." I rambled on for some distance into things, with various reactions from Lynn and Sonya and the group, and at one point Mort, sitting beside me, butted in with something that wasn't appropriate, and I got turned off.
Lynn saw this, and said as much, strongly, to Mort. I quickly took the chance to say "Mort, I know exactly how you feel, because I felt the same way when Lynn stopped me when I thought I was right, but SHE is right, you DID turn me off just then." Mort rumbled into a silent position, and I continued.
"Your mother USED you," Lynn said, "and I'll bet you feel angry with her."
"It's funny that you put so much stress on anger," I said, maybe fighting for time, "because friends of mine have told me lately that I don't get as angry as I should under certain circumstances, so when this was directed toward the expression of anger, I felt it was going to be good."
"OK, why don't you try the device. Just stand up in the middle of the room, and shout 'I'm angry.'"
I'd watched Norma's difficulties, and felt that she just hadn't let her voice carry her away, so I determined to shout just as loudly and as full-voiced as I could. Ted seemed phony, and I remembered the hideous session my previous session when I felt entirely false, so I stepped to the center of the room determined that such terrible things weren't going to happen again. I started rather quietly, but quickly built up into a roar, my fists clenched, my stomach and diaphragm clenched with the intensity of my shouts. After the first two or three shouts, with Lynn sending up feedback such as: "Keep your head up, that's it, put your feet wider apart, that's it, bend your knees, connect with your hips, PUSH it out"
"I'M ANGRY. I'M ANGRY! I'M ANGRY!!" And at a certain point the emotion caught and I found my face contorted not so much from my intentions to appear sincere, but from the release of the anger. I stopped when I ran out of breath, and Lynn said that I had a lot more in there, and that I should keep on going. I did that, with her shouting, "Yes, yes, yes, OK, OK" after almost every one of my shouts.
I'd begun to sweat, and by the time I finished the third round of screaming, I could feel my stomach changing position: it didn't have a lump anymore, but there was a different feeling which would turn, in the following days, to a terribly sore diaphragm. This time Lynn told me that I should go around to each person in the room and shout "I'm angry." I found this not too difficult to do, but some of the people, like Roland, stared back at me in a way that made me suspect they doubted me, so I got angry at THEM and I shouted back at THEM with real anger in my voice. When I got around to Mort, he retorted: "I'M angry." This seemed to be effective, so we shouted at each other a couple of times, and when I got to Lynn, she was sitting in her chair with her Carol Burnett-quizzical-great-intensity stare on her smiling face, and it seemed to me that I was doing it right.
By the time I collapsed in the chair again, I felt about drained out, but Lynn kept on with the needle, saying, "I think I saw a little pain under all that. You're angry, but you're hurt too."
"My mother had her problems, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world for her to put up with a husband who drank and gambled and stayed away all the time. She'd always painted my father as the villain, but I began to see that there were two sides to that story." I began to soften my voice, maybe to save it from the strain from the shouting, but again she leaned forward, pain showing in her own face.
My mind wandered now, not quite sure what to say, but sure that I wanted to say something. I told them about returning from Canada and the scene with my mother, and my making her tell me she loved me. "But of course she loved me all the time."
"That's not necessarily so. From what you say, it might be YOU that did the loving, and got nothing back." I didn't particularly care for this argument. It seemed too much like Hammer's "Anything you did, or anything you want to do, is OK." It excused me of everything and put the blame entirely elsewhere. I'd always thought that what I needed for some sort of stability was some putting DOWN, not building up. Was "too close to perfect" already, and I didn't think I needed any more encouragement that I did things right. But there it was, and though I tried to argue out of it, Lynn seemed to have won the argument by directing that I say "Nobody loved me" to each person in the group.
I was aware that my face was preparing to cry through my recitations, and my voice got more and more choked, but since I felt there was nothing to be gained by muddying the conversation with tears, I held back the tears, but Lynn evidently felt that they should come, because as I repeated that phrase, it didn't so much become TRUE as it became a very sad statement whether it was true or not. I remember that I said "I'm searching desperately for someone who HAD loved me during that time," but Lynn adamantly insisted I repeat it. The emotion built in my voice until I couldn't speak anymore, my eyes filled with tears, and Lynn made some more of her small animal sounds until finally I choked with sorrow and lowered my head and sobbed aloud, feeling utterly wretched, feeling, though I didn't want to, unloved and sorry for myself for having been unloved.
Lynn continued to make the soothing noises as I stopped crying, and I could hear the sniffles and the sobs coming from the people around me, but I was so far removed from feeling objectively self-conscious that I didn't even bother to see who was crying with me. I took a bit of time to come to myself, and sort of felt myself basking in the attentions and emotions of the group, but I didn't mind the silence and I didn't mind the attention: it seems that both were wanted for that space of time. Then Lynn again said that maybe I should get back to some more anger.
By this time I was trembling, and I didn't want to, but she had come through with such effects, that I was willing to do anything she asked. I tried the anger thing again, but it sort of petered out of its own accord, and she seemed to agree that I'd reached the bottom of the anger. But I hadn't seemed to reach the bottom of the sorrow, and I mentioned that, when I said I thought I'd laid the ghost of my parent's possibly not loving me in the LSD sessions in Canada, but Lynn indicated that the pain was there, as was the anger, and both had to come out. Then when I sat down I was feeling pretty good, and a small smile was crossing my lips, and she felt that I needed some sort of encouragement, so she told me to stand and say "I did it."
I was still not questioning her directions, so I stood and said, with some feeling of joy "I DID IT!" "Good," she said, laughing, now try saying "I'm a man."
"I'm a man. I'M A MAN!" And I said it once or twice more, then looked smilingly down at her to tell her I never doubted THAT. She seemed to accept that, and redirected the "I did it."
Partly to please her, partly to please the group, partly because I actually felt pretty good, I started chuckling as I sat down in my seat, dripping with sweat. "Oh, how good you look," said Lynn, beaming. "Oh, oh, you look so open and loving and vulnerable. Who'd like to show what they think of him?"
But I guess she said this AFTER she'd showed me what SHE thought of me by jumping out of her seat with a grin and almost bringing me to the ground with a bear hug, her large teeth gleaming in the direction of my jugular vein. I squeezed her and thanked her, and then stood back and waited for the others to come up to me. Judy was one of the first ones, and I felt inundated by flesh and various appurtenances to hold that flesh in some sort of female shape. Her face was wet with tears and she murmured some silly things about how manly I was and about how good a husband I would make. This was reasonably significant to her, as it turned out, since she took pains to talk to me after the session the next day and reinforce what she had said, and she also refrained from hugging many of the others who had come to some sort of emotional climax. She seems to have come out of herself for me. Then there was Estelle, and Ted didn't seem too held up about doing it, so maybe my thoughts about his repressed homosexuality didn't hold up too well. Jim was touchingly sincere, and John held so long and with such determination that I began to suspect maybe HE would have something to say about such urgings when it was his turn.
Sonya's caress was undifferentiated from my caress of her---she seemed to apply a "cop-out caress" whenever necessary, but that certainly sounds like my dislike of her coming out---and again the feeling that she's "like" me. NO, dammit, that's not true; I think of myself as being MORE sincere than she is. She's doing it as a job, and to impress people with the goodness of their technique, while I'm doing it because I think I'll get something out of it, and that's the reason I GO to these things.
The others came and went in a blur: Barbara was teary and small and tentative, Elinor was teary and smaller and not so tentative, making some sort of remark about my masculinity. Mort was stupefying with his bulk, and Ed was sort of encompassing, with compassion. Judd came up with a good encounter, and I was rather sorry he didn't stay around the next day. Gordon and Norma didn't come up, and Rowland sat with one of the most dejected expressions on his down-turned mouth I'd ever seen.
Though I didn't know it then, my shirt was wet and wrinkled before the hugs and clasps, but now the entire shoulder and chest area was pink and lightly red from the makeup of the girls who had caressed me. I felt like framing that area of shirt as a medal of merit, a badge of recognition, as memento of the group. The breeze from the window was uncomfortably cold, so I moved to the other end of the room, to get some water, and to get out of the breeze.
Mort wanted to work next, branching off his return anger to my anger, and his session was appalling in its lack of technique. Most of the time I sat in my chair, bemused by my own experiences, but in the background I could hear Lynn and Sonya accuse Mort of doing everything wrong on purpose, and even when he sincerely tried to follow their directions: "Push from here, stand like this, shout like this, now accent this syllable, now accent that syllable," and when he seemed to do everything wrong: "I'm angry, I'm very, very angry, I'm extremely angry" and walking backward and forward in a sort of ritual dance.
Toward the end they looked at him in some sort of disgust, as if he were a laboratory animal furnished to them for experimental purposes, and the particular animal turned out to be not what they wanted or expected at all. Finally, unfinished and unhappy, he sat down, feeling justly that the group was tired with him (and with Lynn's and Sonya's handling of him), and that they should go on to someone else.
They went on to Barbara, even though they realized it was getting close to their quitting time of 10:30, and it ended that Barbara told her story in the evening, then went through her "cleansing" the next evening. She once or twice alluded to the idea that "my story will make these other stories look pallid," and in some way it did: for sheer personal ruination of a life, this was one of the more terrible.
It started when she was 18, and began feeling sick, wanting to get away from a hideous family: on the one hand her mother told her that her father was some sort of animal, a monster with disgusting sexual practices, and she'd better be on guard, or he'd be going to bed with her, too. On the other hand, her mother would describe their sexual practices with pleasure, almost masochistically telling the details of the intercourse. She feigned mental illness, and she was so skillful in that that she was committed to a mental institution for three years. During this time she went downhill, wanting (yet thankfully not getting) shock treatment, other forms of torture, and even toyed with the idea of a lobotomy. The group gasped and groaned throughout her story, and she seemed to get a pleasure out of adding whatever garish embellishments she could to make her story seem even more incredible.
She had always felt pain, and when she got out of the hospital and went into some teaching jobs, even though she did extremely well in the jobs, she was always in pain, always had headaches, always had illnesses which she had to cover up. Doctors wouldn't believe her, wouldn't prescribe medicines to her. Then she committed herself again, and there began an incredible string of aborted analyses with various doctors, some terminated because she moved to a different hospital, some terminated because the practice of the hospital was to change doctors every three months, some terminated through illness and death of a therapist. She would become attached to one and begin to make progress only to have him taken away permanently, as described, or temporarily, when her current favorite was sent to Vietnam for two years while she struggled on alone. Her life sounded totally hideous, and the group was almost horrified by this small, white-blond girl sitting in front of the group, calmly describing the flagellations she received from the world and from herself.
Sonya and I were seated on either side of Barbara, and I'm sure we were both aware of the strange peek-a-boo games we were playing by looking at each other just past the side of Barbara's face, and even through her distorting glasses, but neither Sonya nor I, being control types, admitted to any sort of feeling about this happenstance, and this seemed to make me dislike her more.
When the session was over at 10:30, I had the talk with Judy, but was so exhausted (and so frightened at the prospect of someone else dissecting my experience of the evening) that I quickly left the tennis house and went over the hill in the rain toward the King House, undressed, and was in bed at 11, wondering who and where my roommate was.
I tossed and turned and thought and was uncomfortable in bed until about 12:30, when Carl Silver came in and we chatted just a bit, and after he was asleep I managed to fall asleep. I now wonder whether there's any significance in that? Ordinarily, in ANY sort of relationship, I'm the last one to fall asleep: other encounter groups with shared room, sleeping with friends, or during sex encounters. Strange.
Up later than I'd thought, still raining dismally outside, and I got ready for the day and woke Carl, and we talked on a little bit more, but by then it was 8:15, and breakfast was supposed to start at 8:30, so I left him to his shower, packed and checked out, and went into the breakfast room, where Joe motioned me over to a table where he and Sonya-older-woman were finishing breakfast. He and I chatted a bit, then he left and I made conversation with Sonya. She was Elinor's friend, and filled me in on the fact that Elinor and Steve (call him that) were now staying in HER house, and it made the house brighter, but she wished she could get away from the "good Jewish mother" image enough to smoke pot, or maybe even start dating and get married again, as she'd been divorced for about a month. Later I talked to Elinor and was told she didn't tell the group about Steve because he wasn't part of the problem for Elinor, though he was part of the problem for Sonya, because "she's got this stud in the house, and doesn't know how to look at him." Says something interesting about both of them.
But they both appear to be extremely well off, and so whatever problems seem to have been connected to financial difficulties: moving away from home, traveling, separating bedrooms, etc, were certainly easily surmountable.
Back to the T3 room, and Barbara sort of assumed she'd start, but she didn't. Judd and Gordon, the older fellow with the Inca-knit fishing cap, didn't show up, and Sonya "regretted" that they hadn't gotten to them yesterday, though there was a tone in the back of her voice that she implied she really didn't MIND not getting to them if they couldn't stay for the full session.
Before the start of the session, Norma sat down next to me and I told her I really felt she had been with the group toward the end of the evening, when I saw her crying for Barbara and me, and she repeated her feelings of alienation from the group, saying that she wanted to come hug me, but she just couldn't do it. I told her my feeling about Sonya's hug, and encouraged her to merely make the physical motions to hug me. She vacillated for a while, then did so, and I managed to talk her into my sort of admission "Oh, yeah, I FELT something from it, and it WAS worthwhile: it's just that I WANT to do it, but I can't." I told her I knew exactly what she meant, and encouraged her to work again: that the group was angry with her because she hadn't gotten anywhere, and would be even more FOR her if she DID get somewhere.
So Norma started out the morning, going into a long discussion about her husband, the Jewish stand-up comic who was good in bed, and now, after 25 years of marriage in which she didn't like sex, she liked sex, but didn't take it from her husband. We went into this, she broke through to some sort of feeling, and the group gathered around her and gave her love.
Ed was singled out next, and he amazed the group at two different times, and by this time the group was really hanging together, first by saying that he was an ex-Catholic priest, and then by saying that the girl he was about to marry was an ex-nun. He seemed reasonable well-assured, managed to get quite angry at the hierarchy of the Church, and at his friends who could no longer be his friends because they couldn't come to his wedding, and again the group showered him with verbal approval for his strong, considered actions, and sneered at the Catholic Church for putting its best members through the most horrible somersaults because of an outmoded, rigorous, dogmatic approach to the changing ideas of God and Good.
Claire came in at this point, sort of another Norma, being very intelligent, wanting to be a professional, making good in a business, then getting married and having three kids, and having a life oriented around "the swings in the back yard." Amazing how many people there are who on the outside have absolutely everything: intelligence, charm, wit, a good marriage, riches, children, even love in the family, but they want something more, or they can't be happy with what they have, sometimes (as in the case of Norma's sexually attractive husband) pushing away exactly what they WANT with both hands---rather in the line of my book writing?). She rather charmed the group with her cute smile, and when she had gotten through to anger, there was an actual lightening of her face and posture so that the group could sincerely say that she looked GREAT. She jumped up and down a few times, saying I feel great, and it certainly looked good on her, or on anyone.
By this time it was time to break for lunch, and when I got to the table, Norma and Barbara and Ted and Claire were sitting talking enthusiastically, and Norma motioned me over as if I were the only possible person to join the group. That makes one feel good. We again had a discussion of LSD, and Barbara started coming uncomfortably close by "admitting I'd won" in an argument, saying that LSD was just like drinking, and just as harmless, clinching the case by saying "If I had a party, where I wanted some friends to listen to some new records I'd gotten and liked, I wouldn't serve drinks, I'd serve pot." She made a not-veiled remark that she'd even love to come to the party.
After lunch at 1:30, we figured we had only Jim and Barbara and Rowland and Judy to go, so it seemed to be determined that we'd get through them all. But Barbara took an ungodly amount of time, with by far the worst device: she had to get down on the floor and "move your arms and legs up and down, smoothly and rhythmically, and roll your head back and forth, then make a sound like a kid having a tantrum." There was more difficulty with the mechanics of the device than with the emotions, and more than twice she had to have the wastebasket handed over so that she could spit out some nauseous material from her upset stomach and her dizzied head. The device really didn't do too much good, and finally the breakthrough came when she stood on one side of the room and, after discarding standing straight up and looking at other people, looked at her mother perched above the bathroom door and screamed "I hate her." After what was literally hours she did come through to some feeling, and we could go on to others in the group, but in a way her breakthrough was the most compelling, since she'd been SO fouled up for SO long, and she did seem convinced when she said "I've been clear, all these years." She's sort of tied herself in to me, remarking about my anger a number of times, and Lynn referred to me once or twice. At one point Lynn directed her to ask me a rhetorical question, but I wasn't quite clear it was rhetorical until Barbara asked me, and then it was obvious I wasn't supposed to answer (like "How could I have done such a thing?") when Lynn said "Now ask Elinor, now ask Rowland," etc. At some point they expected response, as when Norma had to ask everyone "Could you love me?" and everyone would murmur they would as they hugged her, except someone like Mort, who rumbled back "If you could love ME." Encouraged by this, I tried to help her along in her anger, as Mort had helped me, by echoing "Angry!" when she began to flag during her shouts, when Lynn's echo had died out.
The volume of sound put out by both Lynn and Sonya during the weekend was incredible. Sonya's diaphragm must have had Samson's strength and Job's endurance, and she used it all weekend in a huge, throaty roar which didn't diminish from one session to another.
Then we went to Jim when it was about 4:30, and I was so sorry [[[[oh, that was after Rowland, who said he was an alcoholic, and Norma and Jim and Rowland and Sonya got into an argument, finally resolved by Sonya's insistence that Rowland's TONE made "alcoholic" a term of disgust, when Norma and Jim finally wouldn't be dissuaded that "once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." Sonya so much seemed to want to establish it wasn't true---as she would have loved to dismiss the presence of pain, calling most of it psychosomatic---but she had the tendency to call ALL of it psychosomatic, and I couldn't help remembering Larry Ball's bitter statement about arthritis in his parents' pain, and thought that Sonya would love to be able to prove THAT mental, too. But maybe she's right, wouldn't it be wonderful, as in my LSD experience, when I "knew" there was no pain or war or disease. Rowland also recounted a wonderful marriage, and a career filled with triumph as counsel for the ACLU, pleader before the Supreme Court, and he felt terribly embarrassed (embarrassment is only repressed sexuality, Sonya would say with a snort)---they had many catch phrases like that: every minor emotion was repressed major emotion, was it embarrassment which was repressed joy? "Feeling sorry for" was bullshit. Suspicious would probably be repressed hate, fear has something to do with repressed anger, etc.) when someone he'd gotten off tried to thank him. "I wanted to beat out the government, and had, and now this guy wanted to thank me." He now had a going practice, yet he tortured himself by not taking the Antabuse as he should, but expending his emotions a dozen times a day by saying he'd maybe take one only when he was forced to drink, but he was seldom forced to drink, so he seldom took them. In the end, he avoided drink, but at a tremendous cost. He managed to get very effectively angry.]]]]]]]]]] he didn't have much time.
His story lent itself to quick analysis: he was a strong, successful medical doctor who loved his wife, and loved to have sex with her, but they now had three children, which he thought was enough, and she wanted more. They'd been using contraceptive devices cheerfully when a priest told them they couldn't, but now that the encyclical had come out against them, they couldn't use them, and his wife started practicing deception and not telling him when her period were, so that the only "safe" time was just before her flow, when "she would get the premenstrual tension" (which Sonya quickly said was psychosomatic, and some other woman agreed with her), but that was one of the poorer times for sex, so they ended up having it three or four times a year, much to his dismay.
The group berated the Catholic Church and its influence again, and he got ready for anger, getting to it very quickly, squatting down to the floor in the "fullness" of his emotion, and giving me the shitting analogy for my THERAPY PARODY. He seemed pleased and relieved, and his "go around" had him saying "I'm a good man." And the group heartily agreed. He simply seemed so strong and straight and sure and handsome and pleasant and fatherly---even Sonya was sucked in by calling him and her the only two control ones in the group, which I took as a compliment---as if control types had to be some sort of superior people in every way, and he was the only one beside her in the room who merited such a badge of approval. But again this reveals much of MY mental state.
And we even got to Judy, who had been "doll-like" according to Sonya, and again I didn't like their treatment. They seemed to INSIST that she must hate someone. She described herself at 7 as going to "the compost heap" and crying at something her mother did, and for the next half hour they tried to get her angry at her mother. "I'm angry" didn't work, though she tried it until her throat was sore. "I hate her, I hate her, I hate" said jumping up and down and flailing her hands, like a seven-year-old's tantrum, didn't even get to anything, even though it went far too far. I did SO feel like shouting "Maybe it's possible that ONE child doesn't hate it's mother?" Even though they might have been Quakers, as hers were.
Finally Lynn had an inspiration (hopefully based on my question about whether she was sick when she was a child), and told her to shout "You make me sick."
"That's right. That's exactly what it is," said Judy, amazed at the rightness of the statement. So she jumped up and down and said it a number of times to the group's satisfaction. It was getting close to 7 pm now, and everyone (except Sonya and Lynn, to appearances sake) was getting tired, and we could hear the conversations outside the door of people who were waiting for someone in the room. Then Lynn connected all her problems to her cunt, and made her go around the room, twice, saying "I have a beautiful cunt," and Judy said how happy she was that she'd read "Manchild in the Promised Land" recently, or she wouldn't know that the word meant. That's the type of girl she was.
When it as all over, everyone hugged everyone, I hugged Lynn with feeling, and at one of these times she made me happy by commenting that I had a nice body, and hugged Sonya only because I felt I ought to, and she was rather cold in return---but that could get to all sorts of analysis. My ride had left, and Norma said I could go with her.
The ride back was long and frustrating, because Estelle didn't know where we were going, and Norma wasn't familiar with the way to Estelle's, but she was finally dropped off, beseeching Norma to come and visit her. Norma, admirably, didn't want to, and told her she was too busy to think of seeing her. Harriet was left off at 97th, and she seemed to want some sort of caress from me, but hell I hardly knew her, so I said goodbye and got back into the car taking deep breaths because again I felt the strange carsickness (probably from lack of food?) on the way down that I'd felt before.
We drove down the West Side Highway, talking of this and that, mainly about how similar we were, so that when she insisted I call her at Helena Rubinstein for lunch, I took her at her word, and did so later.
Got back about 9, feeling terribly tired, and I ended up going to bed at 10, feeling nauseous, but thankfully when I got into bed it went away.
I really shouldn't wait so long to finish these things, as it's now November 21st, which is eleven days away from the experience, really too long.
DIARY 9380
3/11/75
NON-FICTION WORKSHOP AT NEW SCHOOL
Audience: The first thought was to play the game "Which is the successful, which the unsuccessful writer; listener vs. lecturer." But then the first few sexy numbers showed up: the denimed fellow from "30 miles from Woodstock" who was picked up by the glassed girl who looked like Liza Minelli before she decided she was beautiful. Then the fabulous body in the pink pullover (later a student who handed my coat back to me), band of skin, and low-slung pocketless white pants; then the triangular torso in the brown sweater and brown hair who moved someone out of his seat in the first row to man his amplifiers; then the fair-faced quiet fellow who drank his coffee meditatively near me. So I could take my eyes away from the older faggots who eyed me, and the denimed fellow who stood first on one side, then on the other side of me. And the tall blond who bent to ask me "Do you know the locus of the nearest men's room?" self-conscious in his Wallachs suit and tie. There was the starlet in butterscotch velour and pink eyeglasses, the student in suede weskit and pouch, the Westchester matrons in hand-knit sweaters and neat black pants, the wide-cuffed thin-ankled Chinese looking happy in the coffee line, the debutante and the businessman, older than I would have thought for a CLASS; and the short haired woman in the Bear Mountain tee shirt and the pale blonds with too much blue eyeshadow. Blacks, false eyelashes, mustaches, and cases: tiny bedrolls and large handbags, briefcases and armbags and envelopes, including interoffice circulation envelopes with the author's precious words popping through the holes. Turtlenecks, scarves, tailored suits, everyone paid their $35 and drank their coffee and lined up for the rolls when the aluminum foil was removed from the trays at the dot of 8. I stand by the elevator observing while the elevator repairmen took over the center one for fixing, and people-watched until 8:40, when it appeared that the auditorium might lose its good seats and so I moved into the 4th row center and started writing this (now 8:57). Amazing girl to my left asked the guy in front to move one seat to the right, rubbing shoulders with the equally tweed-jacketed fellow, when SHE was surrounded by TWO empty seats, either of which SHE could have moved to and NOT been next to anyone YET. About 1/3, large proportion, wore glasses, and I thought most of the "casual" glances were, on the average, more thoughtful and intelligent than the normal encounter, and I realized that ALL these people fancied themselves qualified to read, research, and observe, and put these thoughts down on paper clearly enough for others to benefit from their words. They handed out a large folder of material (coffee and two kinds of rolls, both crumbly, available for breakfast, but I had none because I'd EATEN breakfast after I'd been jolted awake by the alarm at 7). NO one was wearing only a simple white shirt and black pants, (as I was), and these seemed to be a sufficient return for the $35, including a detailed program in yellow on the tables. 9 am and no one had mounted the podium, but the auditorium was heading toward the half-full point, still affording vacant seats scattered for bags and manuscripts. Read stuff; 9:10, someone appears on podium (Hayes Jacobs). Elaborately constructed "humorous" intro, awful to 9:20. Didn't recognize ANY of the first 6 from the breakfast. NESSEL/PEACOCK/MURRAY/JONES/WOOL Magazine articles: 8000/4000 fiction/nonfiction magazine articles SUBMITTED for each one accepted. NESSEL: (Good, lively): Editors are counter-punchers; steep oneself in experience. Knowledge needs no style / individuality needs style. NO editor has too many articles on his desk / NEEDS new. Peacock: THINK about the magazine when you write. READ several issues of it. Murray (black): need an adequate image of human nature. Magazine editors think of getting interest for their magazine. EXTEND that which you agree with / counterstate disagreements. Hemingway: Write what you SEE / Editor: Write what we WANT. Jones: Only 25% of articles NOT staff-written; MOST of remaining are commissioned. Write your OWN one-man newsletter / chain-letter. Wool (VERY slow): Not simply a personal testament or a wholly personal view. You're not writing anything but notes: no cohesion, no statement. 4-5000 words for NY Times Magazine: Half of energy should be ORGANIZING and finding what you THINK of the subject. Point of view must inform the whole piece. Organization NECESSARY unless you have a TRANSCENDENT talent. Discussion: BE challenged to MAKE your statement AGAINST resistance. SUMMARY: Know field, know market. BIGGEST TURN-OFFS: 1) No concern with theft of ideas; 2) SHORT cover letter; 3) (About 548 words); 4) MS in LATE [Assignment EVEN on speculation must be taken seriously.] Differentness is good if it ASTONISHES the editor; 5) FLAT, unfocussed story with no point of view; 6) be VERY specific in query letter: State the topic AND the point of view. [Wool is TERRIBLY wooly] "NY Times Magazine is a NEWS magazine---the ideas should make me WANT to READ them." 7) DO adhere (within 1000 words) to space limits. DO cut it down, it WON'T hurt article. 8) Most good agents won't be BOTHERED with articles! 9) MANY described in "Writer's Market." NEW YORK: VERY FEW "over transom" writers. MS uses HUNDREDS of writers, but needs inquiries. Harper's Weekly DOES come in "over the transom." Harper's took only 6-10 pieces/year from unknowns. NY TIMES magazine has NO staff, ALL on assignment. 10) To ASTONISH the Editor: be yourself; 11) TAKE your options and make your decisions as CLEAR as possible.
To 10:20. Jacobs gives AWFUL interim talk.
McKinney: "Idea shortage today. TROUBLE finding things to publish." FEW magazines read PURELY for entertainment; MUST provide a SERVICE. Inquiry letters DON'T come IN anymore!
CANTWELL/WEIL/YOUNGE/EISENBERG/JORDAN
Cantwell: Editors MUST trust their own judgment---THEY have a good idea who their readers are. Weil: Agents work 1/3 of time on magazine work ABOUT first serial rights of NOVELS. Average agent RETICENT taking on beginning article writers (average fee $1000). Agents take on published article writers who feel they can "graduate" to BOOKS. PROFESSIONAL writers are CONSTANTLY rejected by magazines. Younge: Looking for NEW ways of looking at old ideas. Eisenberg: About people; sold by INTUITION, knowledge, and caprice. Jordan: About half Nat Geog is freelance. Flier available. Searching for AMERICANA. Nat Geog: up to 8000 words, MUST have pictures with article. NEVER send a query letter on FICTION, always send the MS. If you've WRITTEN the article, SEND it, NOT a query. IF you send a query letter, send an EXAMPLE of published writing. MANY times an agent CAN'T do more than YOU can. Good QUERY letter JUST as good as an agent. NEED agents for books, however.
Multiple submissions should NOT be done. If TWO accept and you refuse ONE, you're LOST with them in the future. If you MAKE a multiple submission SAY so for very TIMELY articles---particularly for BOOKS (just first serial rights) that are coming out. BUT an editor might DISLIKE queries saying, "This is multiple." "Multiple submissions are the mark of amateurs." Always better to have a name on the envelope; otherwise it ends in unsolicited MS file and has a poorer chance. Do NOT send to someone who's LEFT 2 years ago. LMP is indispensable to selling. If it's PUBLISHED, and the magazine had first-rights only, you can REsell the article. OR you can ASK them to return the copyright BACK to you. Most major magazines will pay expenses if you ASK about it.
Query should be LONG enough (2 pages) to give an idea of YOU and your point of VIEW. There MAY be long delays in publishing the purchased article. 6-8 months NOT unusual. Mademoiselle has NO inventory---always works from CURRENT times. Query letter should express AUTHOR and SUBJECT. "How tos" are good, "How to save money" even better. Nat Geog: STRANGE places is what they WANT. Most editors do MINIMAL editing. Editors ARE aware of their magazine's advertisers. To 11:50.
Then to three cocktails and talk to New York, N.Y. Times Magazine, and Nat. Geog. Up to 4 for lunch at 12:35 (after a bloody mary, a screwdriver, and a vodka tonic) and talk to one or two people, but mainly read. Then it starts again at 2:03. OFFITT does LOTS for his New School students.
GILL/MAYER/OFFITT/KRIM/MANNES
"Hayes Jacobs wrote definitive book of writing nonfiction." (Marya rhymes with (carry a). "I started writing in the last depression."
Mannes: Long-winded rambler. Need "arrogance---you know something BETTER than everyone else." Krim: always honest in writing. Meyer: you can't get a good interview unless you speak the language the person speaks: the buzzwords in the field. Gill: all writers must be arrogant: closet exhibitionists. "But will it sell?" Publishers MUST be conscious of sales. Mannes equates the "well, uh, you know" school with PYNCHEON! Mayer is a very PEDANTIC, methodic, unemotional writer. Mayer: "The skill of an editor is to make you dissatisfied with your own writing" and then want to CHANGE it. "Author's Guild" is a good organization: Offitt. STUPID questions from floor; GOOD questions from Offitt. Mayer: You SHOULD be arrogant enough to think (on being rejected) that if you'd done it BETTER, it would have been accepted. Pam Birmingham (Stephen Birmingham's wife) SCREAMS at audience that "It's GLORIOUS to write." Must SHED other writers' styles.
Over at 3:45. Judy Donnelly, Hastings House, 689-5400, WANTS Children's and young adult's nonfiction. Gertrude Stein: "There are two ways of thinking about commas and semicolons."
KNOWLTON/GIEGER/AUERBACK/WIEL/OKRENT
The secret of selling: write VERY well. EG: "I'm Elaine Geiger." SA: "That's right." Knowlton: By the time you identify a hot subject, it's DEAD. Geiger: Crossword puzzles and reference books are HOT. Black, women, exorcism are DEAD. Bermuda Triangle is STILL hot. Fiction is now with a STORY, not experimentalism. IF you have an agent, you sell HARD COVER rights to the publisher (they keep 50% of income) AND softcover rights, book club rights. AGENT retains movies, magazine, and foreign rights. If NO agent, publisher acts as agent for second serial rights, and gets same as agent would get. IF a mass market paperback would get LOTS of money, no REASON for hardcover publisher to KEEP 50%, SO authors would like softcover rights and publishing. Publishers like to work with agents BETTER than with authors. AGENTS can get more money. To get an AGENT: Describe background, previous things published, and current projects and send a letter. Society of Author's Representatives set up in 1929, will send a list of members free. To protect authors, anti-Meredith. No member CHARGES. Self-publicity on a book is USUALLY a disaster. No real taboos on first-person (but they IMMEDIATELY said autobiographical). Recession has cut out most of the LITTLE books.
"Do-It-Yourself Publishing Handbook" is VERY good, about 1/3 the price of the Vanity Presses. Agents will NOT AT ALL handle short stories.
You become eligible for the Author's Guild when you sign a contract for a book. Author's Guild ($35/year) works for new contracts and new copyright laws. To 5 pm.
Stand around outside, fantasizing asking NAL editor-in-chief Gieger about the possibility of a softcover LSD book at this time, but she passes, smiles, and I don't have the heart to bother her. She leaves after shaking hands with Hayes Jacobs, and leaves while everyone sips the last of the coffee and kills the last of the rolls. I leave about 5:15 after calling Bob.
DIARY 13527
10/15/78
LONG SEARCH: JUDAISM
Elie Wiesel seemed to summarize the Jewish "whine": "I know what the victims were about, but I don't know anything about the killers." But it seems to me that you don't HAVE one without the other. "The eyes of the old were full of pity: you have to live in the world that I'm being killed out of; the children seemed to know more: they took it to the grave with them, but they knew the meaning of life." So in BOTH cases they ACCEPTED their deaths, which is the same as WORKING WITH their killers, which is the same as BEING their killers. Wondering why Roosevelt or France or Russia didn't say anything about the Jews begs the question of why the JEWS didn't save THEMSELVES. CAN a few thousands kill a few millions unless the few millions WANTED to die? To prove they were chosen, to prove the strength of their position on their religion, to "become immortal," as Wiesel said the children became? One person said the religion was a fellowship of WORDS: the words of God in the Torah, debated endlessly verbally in the Yeshivas, which made the men so argumentative, written in the texts of the Talmud, spoken with the 7 wraps of the leather around the arm to show they're powerless against the 7 days of God's creation, putting "one God" on their forehead to show that their brains can't know God's ways, putting a hat on their heads to remind them that they're walking under God's sky, on God's earth, getting "an additional soul" during the Sabbath to separate themselves even MORE---maybe THAT'S it: they're ALWAYS Jews, they consider themselves SEPARATE, so how could one be MORE separate from the earth than to DIE!! THE ULTIMATE SEPARATION! "All of the killers were Christian, some of the victims weren't Jewish, but ALL JEWS WERE VICTIMS (even, implying, the LIVING)" is just LOUSY: to be Jewish is to be a victim---he didn't even HEAR the question: "Why would they not do it?" about people who didn't defend Jews was taken to ask "Why wouldn't the GERMANS kill the JEWS?" They LISTEN from their own "specialness/ chosenness." They say in JEST "Choose someone else," but they say they can NEVER stop being Jewish. They adjudge God "Guilty" in a trial in Auschwitz, then say "Let's pray." TO WHOM?? Then, the last words, "Our mystical tradition is about silence, but we don't talk about it." They argue in the Ashmedei string quartet with Beethoven's Opus 135 in F, and end with David Small's work for Peter Frank and the Video Lab, through Teledesign, Limited, and come up with NICE computerized landscapes.
DIARY 13630
11/16/78
ZEN ON "THE LONG SEARCH"
Somehow all the points made seem so CLEAR: "Who or what is the Buddha?" The answers can by "You" (of course, everyone is), "Me" (same reason), "Nothing" (since EVERYTHING is Buddha, in the est sense if there's only ONE thing, it's at the SAME time everything-nothing), "the empty circle" (Buddha doesn't CONTAIN anything, since there's nothing beside itself that could be contained in it, and the circle is the unending constancy of curvature that equates with the universe formed of the action of geometry on perfectly empty space), and various actions such as presenting a flower or smacking someone (a flower and a smack, by their immediacy, are TAKEN to be "more" real than Buddha, but to "he who knows" Buddha (and this reminds me of "The New Match Game" in which Buddha was spelled Budah and Budda, but not correctly at all), Buddha IS the flower or the smack or the smacker or the smackee. What the moderator said in a spirit of paradox, mysticism, or puzzlement was presented so deliberately that my mind cold make the supple turns necessary to see that these answers were all aspects of the same thing: Buddha. So the dog of course has a Buddha nature, "your face before you were born" was of the same substance, since there must have been a Buddha before there were people wise enough to give the name of Buddha to the Buddha, and then he didn't bother to explain the possible confusion with the historical person Gautama Buddha, though this might be a GOOD way to approach it: the man BECAME ONE WITH the basic substance of the universe WITH his enlightenment, so that process BY DEFINITION unifies. But I also realized that, as I sat in the chair and watched television, that I was realizing it in a BRAIN-MIND way, and I was FAR MORE merely sitting in a chair than I was LIVING the fact of my Buddha-hood---again reinforcing the knowledge that KNOWING doesn't mean much (which is ironic, since I've put in so much time IN the knowing) but the DOING that's important. Again, the constant DOING of Actualism is encouraging (though I DO so little this past week in the sessions that I fear I might be falling behind, except that OTHERS are in the same boat and THEY aren't being left behind), now that I'm about to go into Second Advanced.
DIARY 13685
12/14/78
PENULTIMATE "LONG SEARCH"
He's gotten to San Francisco and talked with Jacob Needleman, philosopher at San Francisco State, seen people helping themselves at Briarpatch, and talked with Geoffrey Chew (after an unimpressive Fridjoff Capra) who said that scientists KNOW they're not dealing with absolute truth, but they THINK they are. Next step in physics: to EXPLICITLY admit the infinitely APPROXIMATE nature of science. Needleman, his current guru (which a detour to a CUTE and VERY natural mediationer and biofeedbacker who's currently into "Tibetan" meditation), who says there's the NEGATIVE which has to REJECT the frozen dogma of BOTH science and religion, and the POSITIVE, which is the SEARCH. "The Long Search" is no "The Big Answer," says the host, and they end up summarizing that MAN IS MOST ALIVE WHEN HE QUESTS, which is something that makes "Lord of the Rings" and "Babbitt Brighton" and all the others so exciting and enduring. "Religion is, in essence, SEARCH. Make it a DEEPER, not a LONGER, search" is about the climax of the program. THIS feels very much like my feeling about indexing (tried on DIARY 13683): now that I've AGAIN conquered a field (as I did nuclear physics in school, teaching in the physics lab, Columbia by dropping out, programming at IBM by being offered the managerial position, travel by having traveled, love affairs by being in them), I feel that it doesn't LEAD me anywhere, doesn't CHALLENGE me any more, and I have to ELABORATE on it by being late, training new people, thinking about computerizing it, wondering about leaving it. INDEXING is not "the big answer" not is Actualism NOW "the big answer" when it comes to religion, but it keeps on supplying data for the QUEST, which makes it so interesting, and people are becoming more interesting in my life than SCHEDULES because people are more entertaining, more challenging, more apt to make mistakes than effortless-perfection that my schedules can attain if I'm left to my OWN devices, so I am playing the God-game of being bored and making things ROUGH FOR MYSELF by failing, and challenging a new set of rules, and encountering unknown circumstances, and, like I told Susan, "I'll be perfect in a little while if I don't go crazy first," and it's MOVING all the time which is so INTERESTING. When it STOPS moving, you gotta KICK it!
