STRAIGHT
DIARY 524 9/11/69
ALLAN
The book "Gestalt Psychology" is good to read because the boredom that results from it drives me to type what it is I feel I want to type.
And I want to type about Allan, stemming from the thought that I had, "Well, if I'm so happy, why do I feel like crying?" when I told him I wouldn't go to bed with him again.
Why would I feel terrible about the situation, because for the tenth or so time someone came toward me (I could better say advanced toward me) proffering love, and I backed away from it, hastily, precipitously, as soon as I detected it coming toward me. This happened with Ralph, with Jim Coan, with Jim Maher, with Jean-Jacques, with Bill, with Eddie (though he, in his wisdom, backed away before I realized I was "in danger"), with Joe, with Leslie, with Charles, and it would probably happen with Al if he'd been around longer. When didn't it happen, that I backed away? (Also backed away from Walt Swan, and I could never recapture that feeling the second time, though I tried, just as I couldn't recapture it with JJ) (Also backed away from Avi, though that tended to be rather neurotic on his part). I didn't back away from Nye Wilden, nor from the forgotten name who looked like James Dean, nor from Carl Spring, nor, most recently, from Jim Schwarz, and would have like to continue with them (And of course I backed away from any number of girls starting with Sheila through Joan and Madge and Cissy and Cyndy --- so that's 18 I backed away from, if you count Allan, and there might be a few more that I forgot at this point, though a quick check of my book would show them. Some few of us didn't back away, leaving a rather strange relationship, like Warren and John Connolly (though ultimately they left me, I guess)), so that's four I wanted more from.
It reminded me so strongly of the second session in Canada, when I came to the bitter realization that I had won, won the battle with LSD which might have been trying to help me, and I felt completely isolated and loveless, and the worst thing of all was that it had been a battle, and only because I had won was I so lonely. And if I also fought a battle with those 18 and won, do I have a cause for kicking myself if I end up alone and unloved when I'm old and need it more than I do now?
But it was impossible to ignore the signals, and I'd received other signals which I'd found out about recently: that Bill, Avi's friend, had been looking forward to meeting me and was depressed and rebuffed because I started sending and receiving signals with Allan, and then Joe told me that I had, in truth, felt signals coming from Evan (though I tend to exaggerate them since I'd never really been tempted to taste that particular brew). Then when Avi repeated to me what Allan had already in effect told me, that Allan was looking for the "love of his life" and wouldn't even go to bed with anyone unless it was headed in that direction (which is silly, if you put the question to me). That put me off. Then there was the "hyper" quality of Allan himself, talking incessantly, laughing overly at my jokes, and so eager to attend to what I said he would constantly finish words and sentences, CONSTANTLY, enough that I could see how annoying I would be if I continued doing that, but to his extent, which is more than mine ever was. Then there was the inordinate desire on his part to entertain, either by adapting an accent or telling jokes or dropping names or telling of his LSD experiences. If he had done these things more casually, it would have made a great difference, but he so forced these elements in the relationship that I felt staggered by a load of impositions on me, FOR me. Each topic that came up, his cooking for instance, was carried through exhaustively to the end so that we couldn't possibly have anything new come up in broaching the topic once more. He kept wanting to be close to me, to touch me, and this after we'd seen each other a total of five or six hours, gone to bed once, and eaten a meal together. There, gleaming out of his eyes was the epilove he'd so strongly desired!
There were physical things which annoyed me, too, as when I emptied an ashtray with a half-pack of Cigarillo butts in it, and he smoked constantly during the ballet performance, though dare I ask him WHY it was that he had cancer at one point? Then he didn't shave around certain bumps on his lips, and that cause the terrible burn I got the size of a dime on my chin, with smaller abrasions even above the lips and all over the chin. Then he was overweight and amorphous in bed, though his flesh-covered beebees of nipples were interesting, and his fluted cock was a never-ending source of amazement in its power of growth and stiffness. But he came once when I jerked him off and insisted on coming a second time in my ass, which didn't please me, and when I wiped myself on the toilet the next day, there were spots of blood which came from a sore rim of flesh on the uppermost part of my anus. He didn't seem at all interested in my cock, even in fondling it when I fondled his. He didn't go down on me even for an instant, though there was one strange occurrence.
At the beginning of the evening he lifted his knees sideways and swung over on top of me as if he were simultaneously sitting on my lap and laying in my bed, and I remained hard while he, with a few deft twists of his wrist and my cock, caused me to enter him before my startled awareness jolted me into going down. But there I was, for a few moments, thrusting back and forth, rather enjoying the sensations of the flesh on all sides of my head, probing into his soft interior with my own cock. I debated telling him about this premiere happening, but I didn't think he'd take it the right way (what would that be? Well, the wrong way would be for him to laugh, sympathize, or insist that I try it again).
In the midst of sex there were the strangest feelings: there I was, with a second pair of arms in the form of my legs around his neck, while he alternately lay and say and pounded his hard cock into my ass, while I tried desperately to keep my hairs out of the way. The entry was painful until we both reached around with fingers dripping with saliva to lave the rod and the sheath, and when he grew harder, I fear at the point of coming, he would ram home even more forcefully and I would grunt with pain. In our efforts we were both bathed in sweat, and the sheets had soaked up all they could and were actually moisture-wet to the touch. Arms would slip off backs and shoulders, and I could taste myself and him in my mouth when we kissed. Then as he thrust above me, sweating more in his mounting tension, his wet hair flipped in my face and the drops from their ends dripped directly into my eyes, causing them to sting and close, and whatever I could bring to bear to wipe them with, my shoulder, my wrist, my hand, were just as covered with sweat, and so the only thing I could do was turn my head to the side and wince strongly so that the liquids could roll down my cheeks, mixed with the tears from my pain. To keep the sensations down I would even hold my breath, counting again and again to one hundred, though I'd stop with a groan about 15 or 20, for each of his lunges into me. Then the kisses abrading the area on my chin, making it painful doubly when the salt-serums soaked into it, and then it began seeping fluids, so that I touched it continually, feeling the loose skin, to see if it had begun to bleed.
Joe's comment about his being rather quiet and not very good looking, and not having a very good body, undoubtedly influenced me, too, though I would like to minimize that, but the fact that I remember it and think about it indicates that it might have had more than passing influence.
So I sat in Allan's apartment after we'd been through dinner and listened to Streisand in "Pins and Needles" and parts of Judy Collins and Fantasticks and Man of La Mancha and Zorba, and been out to the dance performance and I'd accepted his offer to come back "for coffee" and settled for a banana liquor which was very good. My arm was on the sofa back, and he snuggled into it, beating on my knee and thigh whenever he wanted to make a point about how quickly he moved into the apartment, how the dressers had just come, and how durable the bookcases were that he'd moved from country to country on his travels, and how his 2000-page book was coming, and I wondered how to say what, and whether it should be said at all.
"You look pensive," he said after we'd talked about relationships in the past and how people usually had negative relationships, that is, relationships in which there was no feeling of love, and I replied that my trouble was with the positive relationships. I took his remark about pensiveness at face value and struggled to say something, and finally, to be speedy, said "I don't know how to say what I want to."
"Just say it," he said, grinning his thin-lipped grin that spread apart the tiny holes in his chin where unshaved hairs jutted blackly in the white skin.
For a moment my brain didn't function, and into that moment's end came my words "I won't be going to bed with you tonight," and then fearing I hadn't said enough, hadn't made myself perfectly clear, I added, "or any other night." I looked at him and his smile was fixed on his face, his eyes gone blank. "That's why I couldn't think of how to say it. It's such a terrible thing to say."
"Oh," he said, adapting one of his accents, "it's not so terrible," but he continued to smile, and I thought of one of the phrases from Gestalt psychology, "You say you hate me, but you're smiling, you don't LOOK like you hate me." Allan didn't look like he hated me, either. "I have to admit I don't like it," he said, as if reading my mind, turning serious, "but there's nothing I can do about it, is there." There was no question mark in his voice.
"I kept getting these signals from you," I started, going on to say about the signals I'd verified as being correctly received from Bill and Evan, and then somewhat later even threw in the last set of signals from Leslie and John and Al and Charles and JJ, just to show him --- what, what a whore I was?
"Wow, you're really irresistible," he laughed, still pained, and I didn't know how to reply to that. It seemed to be the case, and to me at that moment it seemed like the worst possible fate.
"That's one of the reasons time is such a fetish with me," I said miserably --- like a miser? --- "I really wish I had the time to fall in love with everyone in the world."
He went on with the thought that if I kept turning everyone off, I would never be able to return anyone's love, but I told him about the two most recent cases of wanting to live with someone, Carl and Jim, sort of tell him and myself that there were cases in which I wasn't irresistible, and maybe setting up a hierarchy of fatalism in the relationships with people. If people found me irresistible and I was attracted to Carl and Jim, it would form a sort of pyramid of clinging, clawing people, leading to some impossible summit personality whom no one could resist, to whom the whole world, directly or indirectly, was clamoring for love. Who could that be, Christ, perhaps, or some other enormously magnetic person? Krishnamurti, maybe?
He seemed to feel obliged to say he was disappointed, but that he wasn't going to let it stop him from trying to find someone he really wanted to establish a relationship with, and we ended up the evening rather positively when I told him I still wanted to see some of his writing so that I could critique it, and he could get on with his "publish or perish" business. When I left we kissed, though it wasn't with nearly the feeling, naturally, we'd had before. I felt torn up inside, really saddened about the whole thing, though I was only doing what I really felt I should do.
I tried telling myself that what I was feeling was the empathic feeling of what ALLAN was too stiff to let out. I felt like crying but was holding it back because ALLAN really felt like crying but was holding it back. I wanted to write about it that evening but felt too terrible to do it, but lay in bed debating whether I wanted actually to cry about it. My eyes felt full of tears but I couldn't really see myself sobbing aloud in my solitary bed. It seemed to go along so terribly well with my ideas of having a movie camera on me all the time, but where did that idea lead except to the thought that I considered ANY emotions without an audience as "acting," and that anytime I wanted to react to something I had to have someone around as someone to react TO, rather than reacting to myself. But crying when alone seemed so much like self pity, and what I was feeling wasn't self pity but pity for Allan and pity FOR myself if and when I find myself in the position HE finds himself in.
Chuck's words kept floating back, "You love the person you feel is superior to you, and when you begin to feel superior to him, your love stops." It's such a terrible thought I hate thinking about it, but it seems to be true in my case, where I keep pushing people aside as being "not good enough" and keep looking for that perfect person who is pleasant to look at, sexy to hold, intellectual enough to share all my interests, and rich enough to buy and enjoy that which I guy and enjoy --- which is another way of saying someone just like myself --- will I ever find it, and what would I do, finally, if I did? Go toward it or run away again?
DIARY 628 11/69
CATCHING UP (BILL'S)
Idea that pastor telling children not to steal may furnish FIRST inkling to them what it may BE to steal.
Poignence of Bill's telling me I haven't shaved, hoping to keep me clean to find me attractive, and then when I DO, he's too shy to say anything, so nothing happens, though we both want it.
His toes and feet smelled strongly, rather like mercurochrome.
Jules must say "Why are you telling me this?" five or six times.
Bill's inimitable habits make themselves apparent soon enough, as when he sits listening to me talk and cleaning his teeth with dental floss, picking and chucking between his teeth with wet plunks of waxed thread. Then there are his slurps and lip smacks when he eats and drinks with his exaggerated grunts of pleasure. I guess I could be happier with his antics if I really thought he was SINCERE with his appreciation, but his boisterous "unnnhs" of pleasure are too self-consciously showy to be quite believable. Then there's his anal syringe with which he gives himself his ablutions --- no one sees them, but there is the syringe, bloated, pointed and suggestive. Then at his place he comes into full bloom: running the tap water to get hot into a pan that he pours through a funnel into a large container which he uses to fill the trays sitting on the radiators. There's a vacuum cleaner sitting in the bathtub which he uses to suck the whiskers out of his electric razor. Because he hates "wasting five gallons of water for some harmless waste," he urinates into a bottle at the kitchen sink, then pours it down, rinsed by about one gallon of water. Breakfast is a bowl and a third of soybean soup; lunch, when he goes to school, might be a head of lettuce, a jar of peanut butter, or an apple pie. Dinner is a glass of tiger's milk, which takes him ten minutes to prepare and ten seconds to drink down with ferocious avidity, determined to drink it all in one breath, inhaling and exhaling strongly to do it, belching loudly after it's down. Then he talks of his eating sprees: he ate a whole Spanish melon at a sitting, devoured an enormous pie-sized plate of baklava until he literally felt ill, would buy cherry pies from the supermarket until he couldn't stand them and eat 24 baba au rums in a delirious evening. Not only was the food unique, but the way of ingestion was amazing. Entire cookies would vanish into his gaping mouth, pushing out his thin cheeks, and then he'd pour milk into his mouth, audibly bubbling it back and forth to soak the cookie until it dissolved, leaving his mouth full of a mush that he would swallow in two enormous gulps. Hard-boiled eggs would be eaten with possibly three bites, steaks would go down in three huge pieces, everything liquid had to be taken in one breath. Possibly his eyes were the worst part since they would stare fixedly at me, as if defying me to find fault or fun with his ways of doing things. Now, in the shower, there were incredible animal sounds and snuffles and gasps as he showered and dried himself, snuffling in his nose in a roar, flopping his clothes about until he was ready for bed. His breaths were deeper and louder than anyone else's, and took on more variations depending on his activities. His bridge would come in and out with a slurp, his hair was never combed, he was forever adjusting his cock into the sitting or standing or study position, and there he was across from me practicing yoga, the smell of his last fart fresh and unexcused in the air for all to sense. His speech was usually too loud and too precise, and he always appeared to be rebuking anyone he spoke to, as if HIS voice was the one of ultimate authority.
Again repeated: traveling is strange. You allocate three days of your life to see a section of the world, and it depends on the season and the weather, how much time and money you have to spend there, and the chance streets you turn down and the people you meet. Of course this is true of where you choose to live, but that's the point, you have to live in a place to even give it a fair chance to make an impression (just as you really have to live with a person, even for a few weeks, to get the proper flavor of the entire personality). Looking over the Restiguche River to the Shick Shock Mountain, misted in fog, my breath visible, tiny taps of fog drop out, wetting my glasses, my face, my hair, my clothes. I think of all this, and of the reluctant traveler Bill with me, and hope the clouds roll away and the fog clears for another scenery day today, at least as bright as the somewhat dim yesterday.
More things come up: he stands at the sink and stoops over, elbows on the counters, head lower than his elbows, guzzling melons into the drain, slurping and slopping with his lips and nose and chin, dripping into the sink and leaving ravaged rinds. Then he uses dental floss while driving, and unpacks by bending without bending his knees, forming a ludicrous jackknife in the center of the floor. To relax a neck cramped from driving, he'd drop his head behind until the highest point on his body would be a toss-up between his adam's apple and the point of his chin, and rock slowly back and forth, and this can take place either while on the road or in any elegant restaurant, regardless of who may look at him.
DAY 1: Leave late and later, finally at 12:30, New Brunswick time, and across a bit of Maine to Woodstock, where the inspector doesn't check under the seats to find the grapes, and we're over to Canada and up to York's, where we have steak with sides of lobster for $8.64 and a dollar and a quarter tip, looking out over the colorful hills across the St. John River. Up the winding road past Maine-like terrain to Plaster Rock, where we take off down the Renous Road into the Game Refuge. But there is no game around and no one near to hunt, and it might be that the gravel road is there by the state to "help" the trucks bring out the logs and gravel and rock from the center of the province, the areas to the side of the road being shamefully torn and stripped of rock and trees, so much so that after 20 miles I suggest we go back, though it has gotten nicer and some views of the hills are fabulous, and we turn back into the cloudy dusk and drive north on the easy road, getting to Route 17 at sunset, enjoying the views over the river to Maine, and I drive for a bit till dark, and we continue to Atholville and Campbellton at 10, where we eat at 40 Winks, chicken fried rice and fish and chips, pretty good, for a bit less than $6, and up the hill to find the motel a rather expensive $14 ($15.12 with the 8% tax), but the room is nice despite the guy-gal party next door, and I have to switch head to foot in bed to get away from the falling cold air from the window, and we're into darkness after I write a bit as Bill showers at 11 pm.
Day 2. I get up at 8:30, figuring 9 1/2 hours sleep enough, and shower and shave and out at 9 and Bill's just up, and I'm out to look across the Restigouche at the fog and rain and moon on page 3 about the weather. Across the bridge at 9;30 after missing the turnoff, and right at other side we find the coffee shop and have bacon and fried eggs and ham and scrambled eggs for $1 each, and we're to get gas and a map of the province and then we're east through spectacular fields and hills for an hour past Mount Saint Joseph, then things get flat and drearier until we're almost on a barren plain dropping in a cliff to the ocean just before Perce. We stop at one point to stretch and rock and driftwood gaze, and the next stop is a tinkle stop for Bill at Perce, and I gaze out at lovely rock, the destination of my whole trip. Down to follow signs to Auberge du Gargantua up a foggy hill to find they only serve their $4 to $15 (for two) meals from 6-9 pm, and we're down in first to get out to the mountain at the point, climb up and stare down at the tide and the small sand strip, now underwater, that connects the ship-shaped rock to the mainland, the top of Bonaventure Island lost in fog. Look for restaurant at 2:30, and stop at Biard's for lousy pork and fishy salmon but good blueberry upside down pudding and sugar cake for dessert, and I'm across to buy six postcards of Perce, and we're uphill past spectacular last view at 3:30, and it slowly begins clearing up as we pass the great hills and deep bays on the way to Gaspe. Loveliest section here, so far, and Gaspe Bay is pretty, and we stop in city for a frozen wafer into a softener for soft ice cream, and get besieged by kids selling sentimental centennial chocolate bars, as we'd been plagued by kids hawking wooden ship models from the roads just as I was talking of Morocco. Enormous spit before Gaspe Cape, so we miss it, and then westward along rolling coast of St. Lawrence, and again enormously colorful hills in the pink sunset, and darkness falls as we're along ledge under cliffs and riverside. At 7:30 stop at La Flamme in Mont-Louis for good hotel meal of omelet and ham and bananas and cream for $2 and $2.18, and leave $4.75, and out to drive past more dark towns to St. Anne des Monts and see a motel "Beau Rivage" finally and in at 9:30, and Bill showers and I watch TV on gypsies and finally I finish writing at 10:40, he's finished exercising, and I shut TV off and we get to sleep to get up early tomorrow for the last day, and with the $12.96 for tonight, I'm down to 30¢ in Canadian from the $64 I started with just YESTERDAY.
Everyone speaks of trauma: the birth trauma, the original sin trauma, the trauma of first love, that trauma of learning that you, the unique, the sacred, the ideal, the hidden god for which the world has been waiting, YOU, the special, the somehow-center of the universe, in fact the CREATOR of the universe, you, GOD, must die. The king must die, the God must die, YOU MUST DIE. Yes, these are trauma, but there is another, the trauma of emptiness that comes to each child, that HIS PARENTS DID NOT LOVE HIM, did not fully appreciate him for the god that he actually IS. If the child is an orphan or a foundling, he has PROOF of his parents' lack of love by the FACT that they left him, either by death or by choice. This may not be logical, but the feel of truth is not to be swayed by mere logic.
All subsequent search for love (maybe the child who is CONVINCED that his parents love him never grows up, lives always in the parental nest, and is only "released" when he, subsequent to their death, realizes that this nest itself was a PERVERSION of love, and not real) is derived from this loss of love trauma. [Maybe it isn't God that's dead, but LOVE that's impossible --- though it DOES seem it's been around --- the wife who dies 15 minutes after the husband dies, the husband that suicides after the wife dies]. EVERYONE searches for this love which was taken away when they MATURED enough to find that their parents WERE NOT GODS, were MERELY HUMAN (and then they might easier realize that from HUMAN parents can only come HUMAN children, so they lose another basis for thinking of themselves as gods), and thus were not capable of loving him as god, any more than a finite cup is capable of holding an infinite ocean.
Super-maturity may come much later, after many searches for love, in the realization that the parents, that EVERYONE, is god, and need only love THEMSELVES to love everyone else, alive and dead, who are all love themselves, namely, GOD. But that is Enlightenment. How FEW absolutes there are --- in fact ONE.
Now I've come across the "tape-recorder mode." Babies stare wide-eyed at everything in their field of vision. They respond to any motion, any color, any noise. They see and hear and feel in an undifferentiated manner --- every stimulus input is as important as any other stimulus. Only through learning and filtering do some stimuli become more important than others. Unimportant stimuli are filtered out until, for example, the ticking of a watch which takes place at a constant level may continue to be unheard even in a concert where the orchestra becomes more silent than the ticking watch itself. If the person concentrates on the concert, he doesn't hear the watch; if his concentration is interrupted or disturbed, he may become aware of the watch ticking, and even vaguely marvel that he hadn't heard it before. But it had been filtered out: the sound vibrations were there, but they were not being attended to; they were being filtered out. The "tape recorder mode" name comes from the common experience of being at a party and successfully listening to a conversation even though other conversations are going on nearby. Music may be playing, glasses may be tinkling, etc. If a tape recorder were turned on to capture the conversation, the microphone cannot filter; it records every sound vibration as it exists. If then this recording is played back, the human filtering system will operate to focus attention on the recording well enough (the traffic noise outside will "vanish" to let the ear concentrate on the recording) but the listener will be amazed to hear that the conversation as recorded may sometimes even be overpowered by the surrounding noise, and it now takes a DIFFERENT level of concentration, maybe involving several playings of the recording to "get the gist," or "hear that garbled sentence," or "WHAT was that word?" to understand the conversation. If the same conversation, with the same noise levels, were attended in person, however, there would be no difficulty filtering out sounds which may actually be louder than the conversation attended to.
I can detect this "tape recorder mode" in my approaches to "oneness" through LSD or pot or fatigue. A part of this is an "opening out" or "increased two-dimensionality" of sounds. Again, when we hear, we hear most sounds from in front. Peripheral sounds, though maybe louder than front sounds, are easier to filter out. Even a crash of cocktail glasses can go relatively unheard if the whispered conversation is captivating enough for the filter system to disregard extraneous sounds. All that is important comes from the front; if someone joins the conversation, we turn toward them, to "frontalize" the sound from them. But it would be as if "new set of ears" would be unfolded which don't HAVE these filters; I hear things AS THEY ARE, PRE-FILTER. So first the sounds "open out" to all space. That heat-caused crack from the wall is over THERE, the tinkle of ice in a glass is back THERE, the laugh is up THERE. As the filters go, as the input becomes omni-directional rather than "in front," the "tape recorder effect" comes in and the crack is truly LOUDER than the laugh, though the filter would ordinarily have eliminated it.
It may even be that I AMPLIFY these peripheral sounds merely by the action of paying attention to them. Thus "the room" has sounds in it, but EVERY room has sounds in it, thus EVERY room can become "the room" if the "tape recorder effect" is working.
There are a similar set of filters for the eyes, and the "increased vision of LSD" is merely the disabling of the learned visual filters. The same is true of the "food tastes GREAT" syndrome of pot, or the "you feel GOOD" sensation from going to bed when you're very tired. These things are always TRUE, but they've been taught to be FILTERED OUT.
From Bill's Akashic readings: Dr. John makes SIMPLE I vs. WE mistakes that humans would not. Maybe a typist punctuates wrong because she's stupid, but I vs. WE is easy to discern?? You can't use the excuse, "Well, the MEDIUM is getting only thoughts, so SHE has to translate into earth language, because "Dr. John always says that this translation to earth language is HIS job." If he "goofs" in translating, can't he as well "goof" in READING?
So DR. JOHN uses "earthlings" and "geared into" and such other modernisms (not to mention English) though he last lived 2300 YEARS ago).
Families, sponsor souls, still existing excarnate (sometimes called discarnate, bad) personalities, "you can read Akashic records," many pieces to the soul seem SOLELY invented to get you to give them more money, for without money they can't give readings.
"Ways of reading" came into being since they probably started by saying they have to have the person to read the AURA, but then they "branched out" into Akashic readings because it's so convenient by MAIL.
Since they have such a great thing on NAMES, I'll bet they DO keep cross-references of names and refer back and forth as cliques of friends would tend to send in for readings. And they'd better keep them STRAIGHT in their written records, so it won't appear the AKASHIC records are botched.
The "to be continued" is TOO PATENTLY at a "What comes next?" point to be REAL.
The "villain personality" may not ASK for a reading, but he may certainly be "asked about," and thus SHOULD turn out!
SOULMATE??
If Bill ran to Tibet, THEY lose a customer.
Trip back, short notes between Maine and Boston: ponds frozen, trees have scattered leaves below Mattawamkeag, bus stops mid-street in Lincoln and hay truck passes US, FIRS turning yellow!, fox shaking himself at stream, watching bus roll by, bridges all with west railings built up with wood, I guess to serve as wind shelters for pedestrians during the hard blustery winters.
DIARY 736 12/25/69
CHRISTMAS, 1969
Sometimes what happens in one day would fill a book. To bed at 3 am after watching 2 1/2 hours of a 3 1/3 hour showing of "Ziegfeld Follies," catching the "Pretty Girl" and "Hello, Flo" (Happy to see you're married and happy) scenes.
Actually wake at 8:30, but 5 1/2 hours sleep doesn't feel like enough, so I doze back, wake at 9:30, still don't feel like moving, and finally get out of bed at 11, figuring 8 hours should be enough. Have breakfast and telephone Joe to see if he still wants me to come over for a new portrait, and he does, asking me to bring a loaf of bread. I walk up, and it feels warmer than the previous evening when it was 18°, but find it's only 21°, which is still pretty cold. He's hungry so he makes an omelet, which I have half of, and we talk about Bruce and Don from last night, and then we're down to the portrait.
He doesn't know where to pose me; I suggest a wicker chair, he brings in the bedroom chair and says try this. I try sitting at the window, but he doesn't like it and directs me into the corner of the sofa. I slump back, saying I don't like that sort of terribly relaxed position, and then I ask if I can take off my shoes and get up on the sofa. Get into a seated position and he asks, "Do you want to read?" And I say "Yes," and choose Virginia Woolf's "Room of One's Own." His first sketch makes the figure too small, so he erases it all with turpentine, then starts again.
I'm into the book about how terribly inhibiting it is to be a woman: they can't have money of their own, they never become writers or artists or composers, they're considered inferior. Unlike her other books, she continuously interrupts ideas with action that interrupted her thinking about the ideas, with ideas like "To think well, love well, and sleep well, it is necessary to eat well," and does such unladylike things as smoke cigarettes, drink and enjoy wine with lunch, and have a number of after-dinner drinks while gloating about her inheritance. Then the doorbell goes and it's Cynthia, who's come to discover she bought cake but left it at the baker's. She telephones the baker's, asks them to hold it for her, then calls her father to pick up the cake and her and take them both to her next destination. Joe accuses her of something dreadful about Mike, and after she leaves tells me that she's the only one at the place who knows Joe's gay, and she probably told her lover, Ed, and Mike, who was living with Ed and his wife, heard about it and was ribbing Joe about it.
He's back to the portrait and I'm back to the book, but it's getting darker though it's only 2:30, and I'm getting tired, so he's finished with the painting for the day. I like the preliminary sketch, then he calls Ben Weber to go over and get my record signed, but the line is busy, so he calls his cousin and they talk for half an hour.
By then Ben's off the phone, and though he's not delighted to have company because his apartment's a mess and he's drunk out of his mind, he's willing to accept Joe's and my presence. It's now just after 3 and we're looking to see the Chaplin films on 13 until 4:30, and Gillels and Rostropovich presented by Sol Hurok at 4:30. Dressed and out, and it's clouding over with preparations to snow, and it's cold and windy. A bus comes immediately and we grin at a stripe-bleached blond being too loud with her escort, and being looked at superciliously by the younger and far more attractive of a couple of married gay guys, who also look at us with a far less supercilious gaze.
We ride up to 102nd and walk toward the old-time building on CPW, and the lobby is all cracked yellowing marble, a rickety tree with token swatches of angel hair around patched bulb wires, and up the furrowed steps to the elevator which takes us up to the ninth floor.
The apartments are numbered starting with 90, and we walk down the hall to 99 before Joe stops and rings the bell. Instantly there's a barrage of barks from inside; Joe's eyes roll up and he says "That's Patty." A second dog to add to my list after Little, Bruce's round-ribbed poodle.
Little colored kids pass us in the hall bound for the stairwell, and the door across the way, plastered with Xmas greetings, resounds with children inside, and still Patty barks and barks and barks away inside. Joe begins to look exasperated and calls, "C'mon, Ben, open the door."
"You think he might not answer?" I asked, almost hoping that might be true.
"It's happened before," growled Joe, rapping harder, saying, "Ben, we know you're in there, open this door!"
The barks recede into the apartment, grow frantic, rush back to the door, and the click of nails and the pad of feet can be heard rushing back and forth to the door. There's a muffled voice from inside, and then a veritable scream: "Shut up you God damned dog, SHUT UP." Certainly, Ben is inside.
The barks continue, both Joe and I look at the door, not wanting to exchange glances at this particular time. "I'll KILL you, you bastard," comes in a sobbing scream from inside, and Joe lowers his head and whispers "Yeah, he's drunk."
In a moment of relative silence there's a shuffle inside the door and the metallic sound of a Segal lock being unbolted, and the door opens about five inches. I expect a smell to waft out, but there's no noticeable change in the atmosphere of the hallway. No bit of person appears in the small opening from my point of view, but Joe looks in and says laconically, "Hello, Ben."
Then Joe pushed the door wider, there's a scuffle of dog feet on the floor, and I round the door jamb to see a small figure in a loose-threaded powder blue chenille bathrobe, pink bald head fringed with a wild border very much like the angel hair on the tree downstairs, back to me, screaming at a gray and black dog with is racing around in the apartment. "Goddam it, Pookie, there's be a dead dog around here if you don't stop that, so STOP IT."
The pink bald head reddens with the intensity of the shout, the bathrobe trembles from the back, and he stands rather dizzily in the center of the floor as Joe pushes past. The dog leaps upon him, front paws clawing at his lapels, and Joe manhandles his away, shouting "Down!" and he races around in a tight circle and jumps back up where he was.
The pink fat head over the blue bathrobe which contains Ben Weber staggers toward the unmade sofa bed covering about one-quarter of the living room floor, and he continues to shout at the dog. As Ben turns about half-profile, I see a triple-chinned face with white stubble of about four days' growth of beard, about halfway between William Frawley and Truman Capote, but volume-wise the SUMMATION of Frawley and Capote. Joe has managed to wrest Patty to a standing position on the carpet and makes a stab at introducing me to Ben, but I don't recall there being any acknowledgement beyond a weary nod, followed by a shout: "Get DOWN, damn you, DOG, DOWN!"
With a speed made surprising by the bulk enclosed by the blue bathrobe, Ben sprints and grabs Patty's collar and wrests her bodily over to the bed, falling onto it himself with a flurry of robe, showing plump legs covered with the red blotches, peeling skin and some scabby material of advanced psoriasis. "Now stay HERE, Patty, and BEHAVE, or there'll be a DEAD DOG in this apartment, you HEAR?" Joe walks across the room and seats himself in a ragged chair covered with rags, motioning me to a yellow plastic upholstered kitchen chair standing in front of a table covered withy notebooks, sheet music, records, ashtrays, a glass containing melted ice cubes, pencils, a few Christmas cards, and a rectangular box. "Sit down," Joe beckoned.
I sat down, and Ben tussled with a fresh flurry from Patty. Joe gazed out impassively at the battle, and I could do nothing but refrain from laughing, refrain from leaving, and refrain from gaining any attention by doing anything. Taking up another one-quarter of the space in the living room was a black baby grand, top covered with records and a record player, and under the piano was a square blue dish filled with dried ground meat for the dog, but the entire carpet under the piano was covered rather closely by equally divided quantities of bits of meat and balls of dust and small objects which looked like an unsavory combination of the two. Behind me I vaguely noted a chest covered with papers and books, but aside from the two chairs and the table, there was only a window in the room looking out over a darkening Central Park. An open door behind me seemed to lead into a kitchen and another room, in which I could see a bed with some sort of hospital-like addition to the foot of it, and there were chests with drawers open and lights burning.
Joe and Ben were talking about Christmas, the dog, and the snow which was supposed to come during this time, and I listened rather half-heartedly while they were talking. Then the subject turned to the commission Ben had for the opening of Juilliard in February, and Ben groggily asked "Do you want to see it?"
Joe rather defensively answered, "Sure, I want to see it."
"Can you read music?
"No, I can't read music, but I still want to see it. Can you read music?" he asked, looking toward me.
"Some," I said, hoping to remain in the background, and after a few minutes of some sort of preparation, Ben positioned his two sandaled feet under his thighs, looked down with intense concentration, reached out to gain support from the piano, and pulled himself to his feet. There was a flurry from the top of the chest behind me, and in a moment he came back with yellowing sheets of music from which tiny insects scurried as they were precipitated onto the table top. Shells of roach eggs blew lightly away, and the pages were dotted with roach excretions.
But the notations on the pages were so perfect that I actually thought for a moment the sharps and naturals were actually printed or impressed from a particularly fine hand stamp. Each note was precisely the same size and quality and thickness as each other note, except for one or two seemingly hasty additions, and the whole layout was meticulously neat except for penciled notations in the most abbreviated form. In one case "Poco alla marcia" had been scratched out and something "Esitando" had been inked in, and I asked what "Ess-it-ando" was, and when he pronounced it "Aise-eat-ando" with an almost visible aspiration before the first syllable, I realized it was "Hesitating" even as he said it. Toward the end there were notations about orchestration, invoking tubas, tam-tam, and contrabassoons and violoncellos with "cb" and "vc" and toward the end there were more questions, with a rather definite cymbal on the penultimate note, with a questioned cymbal on the last note, and then it was dated December 22, 1969.
We asked questions about the notations, and he followed our interest for a bit, then began degrading his efforts, saying we didn't know what we were talking about. "Well, that's why we're asking," Joe retorted, and he seemed to wish he hadn't brought it out at all, making some sort of remark about "Love baring all for the world to see."
He asked if we wanted to hear something, choosing Scriabin's "Divine Poem," though I didn't know it, and it was only afterward when Joe asked if I had any Scriabin, and that particular piece came to my lips first, and Ben whirled with some surprise, saying to me, "That's what it WAS." It may be that he looked at me with somewhat more respect after that.
All this while Patty was alternately batting meat out of her dish so she could eat it off the rug, cadging chocolate mints from the rectangular box on the table, quietly nuzzling Ben's fingers or licking his diseased ear, or loping around the room to the accompaniment of Ben's screams "There's going to be a DEAD DOG in this apartment if you don't watch OUT!"
During the Scriabin, Ben was moodily listening, tears welling to his reddish eyes, though the irises were clearest blue, and he murmured "Tears are better than Santa Claus" at one point. He said something else which I didn't catch. Joe leaned forward and asked "What?" and he lapsed into a sulky twisted-mouth silence of someone whose plans have gone slightly wrong.
Then during one of the sessions when he shouted Patty back to his side when he imagined she was irritating Joe, she rolled over on her back on the floor and Ben scratched her stomach, musing "THEY don't love you, they have their OWN lives," and I couldn't help extrapolating his remark to others beside Patty. He kept degrading himself, making remarks about his coming death, and Joe refused to give in to his maudlin tone, gruffly talking back about how many years he has to live, how he's too mean to die, and telling him to stop talking like that.
When the Scriabin was over he put on Masselos playing his Episodes, and Joe and he discussed the woman playing it, not well, during the up-coming Town Hall recital this Sunday, and Joe said he wasn't sure he would be able to make it. They talked more, Patty roamed about more, Ben prepared me a Campari and soda, and talked about an artist who had visited him when he broke his collarbone, coming to see him, but he moved to California, and now sent him letters, saying that the letters "must be kept to you alone," though he allowed himself to be coaxed to give the name Wesley Ware, who said he loved him, and he, in turn, loved him, though he couldn't see what was in him to be loved, turning his bland blue eyes beseechingly toward Joe. Joe answered glibly, and I was inclined to refer to Ben's "Broken-heart feeling" about something: anyone who has a heart can be loved.
Another artist came into the conversation, through a misunderstanding on Joe's part, and Joe said, "Oh, show Bob the drawings, he lives that sort of thing." Ben had to be helped to his feet this time, putting his own drink, which looked like a tumbler of pure scotch with a few ice cubes, onto the piano keyboard, and rummaged again on the chest, bringing down a portfolio entitled "Ballet Portraits," which were rather melodramatic, male-flattering, female-degrading pencil sketches of starts of the New York City Ballet, signed and dated during 1965. Then a sheaf of photographs of drawings were placed before me with the comment, "But I don't think the two go together," to which Joe replied, "Well, they're by the same person," and I looked down to see a melodramatic, male-flattering drawing of a nude muscle-builder with a prominent penis rather sinuously stretched along one leg. There were other reasonably erotic male nudes, though none pornographic, and some were so stark a technique they weren't even interesting, intermingled with sketches of older men, Ben included, one rather interesting 3/4 profile making him look like a rather incredulous Alfred Hitchcock, which Ben preferred, though he dismissed with a whine the explicit pot under the shirt-front.
There was a photo taken of him when he was 30, having not much more hair than he had now, and Ben looked down, saying it was the best photo ever taken of him. "That IS me, you can see from that why I had so many beautiful lovers." I looked up with what I hope wasn't incredulousness on my face, and he said, "You'll get older, too, don't forget that. I'm too old to do anything now, but I was once as young as you."
I couldn't think of anything to say except, "Everyone knows they have to get older," which was rather banal under the circumstances.
Joe had to wipe the photographs off while I was looking at the ballet portfolio, but he still hadn't wiped off all the bug spots, and every so often a pea-sized brown bug would hastily crawl from between the photos and hide under the papers on the table.
The evening wore on, and finally we made motions to go, Joe once more bringing up one of the objects of our visit: would he sign my record of Masselos playing Ben's Piano Concerto. After much thought, searching on the table for a pen, he wrote "God love and bless you forever --- Love ever, Ben Weber 12/25/69." Then he asked my name, writing Bob first, and I said it was Polish with Z's, and he said they were Persian X's, starting my name with X, "Like Xerxes," he grinned, and wrote the rest of it out.
Joe held Patty while I put my coat on, while Ben spilled his drink from the piano to the rug, and when I was retrieving the glass, I saw that the piano keyboard was possibly even dirtier than the dog-food covered rug underneath the piano, and quickly set the glass down and moved toward the door. We left with a sigh of relief, and it was 6:30. Down in the elevator to a snowy evening, powdered sugar raining from the skies in a Hollywood version of a snowstorm. We walked south, passing Park West Village.
Then I thought of John, saw that his light was on, telephoned from a booth across the street, laughing as we two squeezed into it. He was just looking in Cue for a movie to see and welcomed us up.
The greenery was lusher than ever, almost obscuring part of the spectacular view, and John was lusher than ever, though pale, and when he bent over the record changer there was an unpleasantly wide expanse of waist under the broad shoulders. We talked about Ben, movies, John's sickness, Ivan's troubles in coming to the US, our trips to Morocco, Adair's troubles with his Triumph and his new Mercedes, and Joe pleaded hunger, and we decided to go to Harbin Inn.
It was snowing harder than ever, beginning to accumulate, but the Inn was warm and crowded with Chinese families enjoying dinner, and we order pork with Peking sauce, not unlike moo shu pork, and beef curry, which was quite delicate.
Then it was 10, and we walked down to Joe's, my feet getting wetter and wetter, the snow still deepening, so when he asked me to his place for hot chocolate, I agreed.
There was no chocolate, I'd had tea, so he made coffee, and I began talking about his painting. His portrait of Cynthia, I said, treated her like an object, and he said he used her as a study of line and angles and space. I disagreed with him, stating he was dehumanizing her, and he went into an analogy with writing about a garden: the author could look at a small patch of flowers and in his VISION it could become a garden from which he could EXTRACT that which he wanted to EMPHASIZE for the reader. So a painter has a VISION of the subject which ISN'T the subject ITSELF, but only his way of looking at it.
I asked him why he didn't paint in artificial light: did it change the colors of the subject? No, since the subject really didn't matter that much, the COLOR of the subject didn't matter, but the mixing of the colors on the palette, the primary concern, aside from the vision, of the artist, was made more difficult under artificial light, which removed much of the subtlety from the paints themselves. We discussed the range of color in the palette as compared with the INTENSITY of the colors, and how he was interested in light and shadow, but with respect to COLORS, whereas Rembrandt was concerned with chiaroscuro and SOMBER tones.
Then he told me what Barnes taught: that the viewer in the museum must actually look at the painting IN THE SAME WAY AS THE ARTIST LOOKED AT THE CANVAS WHEN HE WAS CREATING THE PAINTING. In a sense each viewer had to RECREATE FOR HIMSELF that very painting, and in BEING the artist as he looked at the painting, it would become clear to him. I was forcefully reminded of Gurdjieff's statement: "If you disagree with someone, you don't understand him. If you REALLY UNDERSTOOD him, you wouldn't disagree with him." Ram Dass illustrated with, "If you WERE the woman behind you at the opera, YOU WOULD rattle your bracelet because SHE is rattling her bracelet. If you can't SEE YOURSELF rattling it, you can't see HER rattling it, so you don't, as yet, understand her."
So Joe said, "Exactly, you actually BECOME the painter, you PAINT the painting," and I finished it by saying, "You BECOME the painting, too," and defined for him "grok," which he agreed, "then you have to GROK the artist and the painting." We were dizzy with agreement, and it was 11:10 and I left for home, getting in at 11:30, found that "Anchors Aweigh" had replaced "Footlights Parade," began typing these ten pages at midnight, and now that I finish the last page it's 1:30, and I'm tired enough to go to bed.
DIARY 985 3/26/70
TALK WITH LOIS
Decide to tell her frankly why I didn't like Shyam and the place: I felt I was out of my place, that I created discord there, and she replied penetratingly that if there's discord anywhere that I am, I am causing the discord: the discord is IN ME. That's a nice statement; I'll have to look into it. But I'd tend to say that I create discord IN Shyam which I RECOGNIZE, and I create a tension in LOIS which I RECOGNIZE, and the tension in Shyam is the knowledge that we don't agree about what is important in this world, in this life, and the tension in Lois results from her recognition of this fact. Shyam doesn't appear to be happy when he's with me, I appear to be more comfortable than he, I appear to be a higher person that he: more willing to recognize the paradox existing in everything, more in tune with the "it doesn't make ANY difference" of the highest states of human consciousness. To him I make a difference (he's intimidated by my not responding to him with adoration), but to me HE doesn't (it would have been pleasant if I'd "found my guru," but the highest persons become OTHERS' gurus, and don't have gurus of their own, and part of his discomfort is his appreciation of our differences) make any difference: since I'm not taking him, I'm leaving him, and it doesn't disturb me as much as it disturbs him. Just as Ram Dass was far more agitated by our discussion (he had more to lose, he had more self-image to uphold) than I was. He seemed to have a STAKE in proving himself to be right. I thought myself right, but didn't much concern myself whether I could prove it to the satisfaction of all present or not. If they wanted to, they could have talked to me about it: which seemed a lot purer way of doing it than Ram Dass' "How can I serve you?" and "I really don't have anything to DO," which doesn't fit in with his "Hey, I'm giving a week's lecture at Bucks County, pay your money and listen to me."
Another way of expressing my disappointment with the encounter with Shyam: the knowledge that I don't make HIM complete, not does he make ME complete.
Then we adjourn to her kitchen, she slips into something more comfortable, ostentatiously showing off her legs and arms, and she warms up a roll for me, and I have milk, and she drinks something soft, and we sit and chat, and finally I take part of her note-roll of paper from the table and begin jotting down notes from the evening. It dawns on me that the strange drone of tambour (I think it's the sitar, but she rather definitely corrects me, so she may be right) encompasses ALL tones, that it plays a tune for ALL voices, since practically any kind of chant can go with it: thus it's the perfect embodiment of a "higher" instrument since it can simultaneously seem to have a high, pure, singing tone and also have a low, droning moan which embodies all the pain of all the people who have ever lived and re-lived. It's ALL voices.
We have the idea that the Indian is transcending when he's playing or chanting, but I was certainly able to detect bits of self-consciousness during Shyam's guru's chanting, and definitely during Shyam's playing and chanting: what are they thinking? What do they think of me? What will I sing next? What will I play next? My legs are stiff, I'll shift positions? Will this never end? I've got the hots for that cute kid in the first row, wish he weren't so 'holier than me'?" How much worse it must seem for them to be thinking other things --- but let's assume for a moment they DON'T think. Is that really living??
Either you think or you don't. Which is RIGHT? Who can possibly answer this question with authority? God can never appear and say THIS is the answer! The dead can never come back and reply, "I've found THIS to be an absolute truth." We simply DON'T know which is right, and I'm still drawn to Krish's thought that we can't take ANYTHING on authority. NO ONE has the right to say what someone SHOULD do. They can suggest, and the suggestion germinate in one's OWN mind and bring about change, but to say that someone SHOULD change implies that someone has authority over someone else, and that's just never absolutely true.
Let's assume for a moment there's a force about which science knows absolutely nothing, and it's this force which conveys what hasn't yet been quantified: how one person "clicks" with another, how one person "reads another's mind," how one person "sees from a distance" that something's happening. There seems to be overwhelming proof that in some rare cases things like this DO ACTUALLY EXISTENTIALLY happen, and there is no scientific quantification of these occurrences.
In the interest of simplicity let's assume there's ONE force that we don't know about: not a number of forces, one of them for ESP, one for clairvoyance, one for hypnotism, one for the aura, one for the personality, one for "mind over matter," one for "personal magnetism," one for "the third eye," one for any other supra-natural force we may suspect, but just as each element is a reflection of differences of amounts of matter, let's assume there's ONE force which conducts, transmits, quantifies all these varied effects (certainly they're varied because we don't know much about them, actually, we know about the EFFECTS of these forces, not about the CAUSES and TRANSMITTERS). Just as various physical laws had to be empirically charted and tabled and graphed before some bright person discovered, "Hey, all these things vary with the SINE of the angle, and depend on a CONSTANT OF DIFFRACTION which varies with each substance." Now, suddenly, you don't need a table for each substance, you only need the UNIFYING CONCEPT, X=K sin φ, and ONE table of one constant for EACH substance.
Now, one fact we can state with ABSOLUTE TRUTH about this assumed force is that NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO QUANTIFY IT, no one knows hoe to invoke it, no one knows how to control it: it's there, it HAS BEEN invoked, but it's been a matter of chance, or circumstance, and these chances and circumstances have proven impossible to duplicate, so nothing can be quantified, nothing yet can be learned about this force. Now, if we KNOW NOTHING about this force, how can we ARBITRARILY state that "the fingers should be pointed outward, except that the thumb and forefinger should make a circle." Maybe making a circle with the thumb and forefinger is the WORST POSSIBLE way in which to use this force. It just MAY be. So since each usage in the PAST seemed to have come about through a random juxtaposition of events (and, I agree, with a degree of OPENNESS helping), why should anyone FORCE THEMSELVES to adhere to a particular regimen when there is EVERY CHANCE that this regimen may be diametrically opposite to the one which one should use?
It's possible, too, which struck me strongly a number of times, that what WORKED for the Indian (a large mass of people who have too little to eat, no effect on their government, a person who REALLY MIGHT be better off dead) might not work for the American (a somewhat smaller mass of people who have many more comforts, who have the freedom and the training in individuality to PERHAPS be able to influence many more people, WHO MIGHT BE BETTER OFF LIVING). Maybe we should listen to our Indian gurus and then DO EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE, since in so many ways the Indians ARE the opposite of the Americans (of course, they are all humans, using what is probably ONE force, but I would like some indications which are MORE SATISFYING TO ME that more Indians (in fact, and not in fancy, or in wishful thinking, or in mental blocking, or out of sheer repetition, or out of deception) attain to a state of ABSOLUTE HAPPINESS than Americans, then I might believe that the Indian way MIGHT be better. Just as Ram Dass said, I keep seeing the old men in blankets rather than the ecstatic saint.
Back to the force: does the force come FROM us, or is it directed INTO us, or does it alternate, or combine. If it comes OUT, maybe making a circle would keep it IN, and that would be BAD (or making a circle WOULD keep it in, and that would be GOOD, since we don't know what this force IS). If it goes IN, making a circle would keep it in, and that would be good, but maybe it wouldn't, because we should actually be sending it ON.
So since we KNOW NOTHING about this force, we don't know if the force is IN ESSENCE good, or bad, or neutral depending on what we do with it, how we react to it. We don't know HOW it operates, so that any regimen ARBITRARILY chosen for operating with it might be AS BAD AS OTHERS CLAIM IT GOOD. And certainly it may vary more BY INDIVIDUAL than a slavish devotion to a regimen might justify. We just don't know. And when we don't know, it almost seems that a RANDOM REACTION would be better than a FIXED reaction. If OM is the perfectly bad word to say, and someone says OM all their life, they're never going to hit the perfectly GOOD word to say. But if anyone is open, saying any word that comes to their mind, they have a BETTER chance of hitting on the right word than someone who will say ONLY OM.
I also triumph my will over Lois' by stating that since HE (either Shyam or Ram Dass) can use his system to answer all my questions, I, in the same system, can use that very same system to refute the system AND him, as I did with Ram Dass and "Every path leads to Samadhi," and with Shyam and "You do exactly what you have to do." Any system which is sophisticated enough to answer all of each person's questions must also contain the flexibility to ALLOW another person to WRIGGLE OUT of the system.
We finish the talk by talking about people, and the idea of love and romanticism and marriage and being alone, and I come up with a wonderful aphorism which I pass on to her: "People are essential, but NO ONE person is essential." If a lover dies, find another lover. If a parent disappoints, find someone who won't. If a person is against you, it's just a misunderstanding: get INTO the person deeply enough and you will find absolutely common ground. In fact, my aphorism cold be expanded to read, "NO ONE person is essential, but EACH person COULD be a person who COULD be essential, so NO ONE person IS essential, but NO PERSON COULD NOT BE essential." THAT'S the crux that I've spoken of, that no one sees.
DIARY 1387 9/15/70
COMMUNICATIONS THAT BE
My mind is staggered and shivers glabber up and down my back: Bob talks about the pregnancy Nina had about five years ago when they were quarreling and their marriage was very rocky. Yet they found occasion to tap the tummy and the baby would respond very positively, and they felt that they had intimate communication with the forthcoming child, whom they were going to call David if it was a boy. Despite two early miscarriages, this pregnancy carried on into the last week, when the baby died: strangled by its own umbilical cord. Bob and Nina were talking last week, saying how happy they were that they had Alicia now that they knew where their marriage was, what children were, and they both were amazed to look at their feelings and KNOW that they were happy that the child had died, and Bob came to the terrible conclusion that the baby was so communicative, so responsive, that it KNEW what trouble it would cause in the family, and willingly committed suicide.
Bob also told about the charming, bouncy, sparkly four-year-old who would lead packs of dogs about the beach, who had turned into a lump of an eight-year-old, on whom her mother blamed the breakup of their marriage. Now, when she was asked how she was, she would murmur, "Oh, fine," and when asked if she were going back to school, would reply, "Yeah, I guess so." The sparkle had vanished because the horrible mother had weighed her down with the guilt about the broken marriage, which she thought the CHILD broke up --- she'd adopted the child merely because her personal fantasy saw herself as the mother of two children, and she simply adopted a number, not a personality, merely a "number two child" as part of this "perfect" family she carried around in her own mind.
Then Claude told about how Nedda, without knowing that John and I were having a relationship, detected an extremely strong rapport and working-togetherness between John and me in the classes, without anyone having said anything to anyone --- she simply KNEW it.
Bob talks about how communicative Alicia is, also, "talking" with her eyes and her cries and her gestures, and how children in general seem so intuitive of the feelings of adults, and he uses the phrase "she doesn't even know how to speak," and I immediately think of the simile: a person reads a book silently to himself at great speed, with great feeling. But then someone stupid comes into the room and says, "Read with words, aloud," and the reading must go very much slower, the levels of feeling (unless it's rehearsed) go way down, the understanding is decreased. Is THIS what parents do to children by teaching them to talk, deprive them of their built-in ESP? (Be interesting to watch "L'Enfant Sauvage" with this in mind. DO pre-literate savages possess more ESP than speaking adults??)
Marc Schmitz called, making me very happy in anticipation of seeing his beautiful self again tomorrow evening at 5, and I ask Claude if he knows anyone in the poster business, but he doesn't, knows only regular artists, as of course Joe is, and Joe would know more, too. And I think of Norma and Jeff Duncan and Betty Dodson, and Bob's too busy with final papers and their anniversary tomorrow, but I'm hoping I can do a lot for Marc, including maybe going to bed with him.
But suddenly things seem so active again, things seem so connected, talking so long with the depressed Claude, telling about mutual experiences with orgies, talking about feelings, and I'm really sorry my sister's coming so quickly, because I just don't have time to pursue all these things (though I seem to be doing them anyway), and it all seems so exciting. Maybe it's only because I've finally decided to get down to work, and I subconsciously don't WANT to finish the book (like Marty subconsciously didn't want to take Jerri to the doctor's and got lost in New Jersey picking her up), so I'm latching onto these pleasant activities in order to AVOID sending those chapters off to Meredith. But that's another example of how excessive self-analysis can lead from very HAPPY thoughts to some rather depressing ones, so I'd better stop doing this (now that I'm down to the bottom of the page) before things get even MORE depressing.
DIARY 1687 1/14/71
BACKSTER IN HIS OFFICE
He opens the door for me and I give him the paper, and he has me summarize it for him, and he seems interested in it enough for me to say he can keep it for a bit, and I'll be back sometime next week to pick it up, when I can also hear the organ hooked up to a reflecting mirror from the polygraph needle which will PLAY the displacements of the plant's reactions, and he likes the idea of John's leaving one of his plants there so that he can look at a photograph of the plant at specified times around the world and he can check what the plant thinks at that time.
He's hyper about a number of things, recommending that I get "Treatise on White Magic" by Alice E. Bailey, and he says that she's the last word, even beyond Krishnamurti, for someone who's been through a number of gurus and who wants "the final words of God." We talk about Ram Dass and I say that he said I was like Fritz Perls, but I get the name confused, and use Wilhelm Reich, and he recommends that I read "Listen, Little Man," by the inventor of the Orgone Theory, and when we get onto Acid again, he shows me "LSD, Man and Society," edited by DeBold and Leaf, and says I have to get THAT.
Not satisfied with filling up my mind with reading, he gives me the names of a numerologist, Mrs. Ariel Taylor, at CI 7-6447 ($15 per 2-hour talk, 3 questions, 4 letters of alphabet each) 12th floor, room 120 in Carnegie Hall, and an astrologer, Alan Oken ($35 for map, $20 for SUBSEQUENT readings), at 163 State Street in Brooklyn Heights, at 596-1260. I tell him about the book, about my need for some part-time work, but don't ask him for a job there, and he's going the Foundation route trying to get more money, and thinks he might be succeeding by calling his stuff research into "ecology." He's onto a number of other things, smoking pot around the plants, then getting too high to observe their reactions, taking acid in the lab, and then asking me if I know where to get any, and saying how he has to hide everything on drugs when the FBI comes to have him do some work on polygraph readings. Two people call on the phone while I'm there, and I'm favorably impressed on his tapping "the energy in the air," since he's intense way up to 11 pm, eager to talk with me.
DIARY 1699 1/21/71
ALAN OKEN READING
Astrological Life Reading by Alan Oken, 6:10-7:30 pm, January 19, 1971.
The red zodiacal signs show range of influence of ZODIAC on me.
Inner symbols are of planetary influences on the day I was born.
ACD=5/4/36: This is about 35 days beyond when I was born, corresponding to my
35 years of age. This date is used in all predictions.
BLACK lines show "bad" karmic influence of planets on my life.
RED lines show "good" karmic influences.
All planets are in EAST, ABOVE horizon, so they're all positive influences.
My relationship with my MOTHER was very strong, and has GREAT influence on me.
Signs point toward sexual abnormality: homosexuality or OTHER "Karmic problem."
Possibility of SCANDAL ("But letting everyone know and not being guilty is
cool")
Neptune continually exerts vague, indefinable bad influences on me.
My mind can be both outgoing and in-dwelling, so is very powerful.
My emotions are also very strong, at times I can be violently angry.
I tend to be rigid "at the moment," but flexible enough to change to ANOTHER
rigidity at ANOTHER moment.
I have had a NUMBER of VERY violent emotional upheavals through life.
I tend to want to control, to be paternal, to exert influence on other people,
to get under their skins and control them from within.
If I DO control people this way, it can only generate "bad" karma.
I should learn to act from "my center," NOT by being "self-centered."
I have impulses to truly HELP people, but I have to fight CONTROLLING them.
I can do more than I let myself, should let OTHERS push me further (in jobs).
Shouldn't CONTROL so much, should sit back more and "go along with it."
Great tendency to work alone, or else CONTROL a partnership, or else there's
great friction and the partnership SPLITS apart.
These are only signs, DETERMINATION can change effect of ANY of them.
I'm very intuitive, reading people quickly, but I have doubts about what's true
and what's not true, so I'm afraid to ACT on my intuition.
I tend to pick up details in a room VERY quickly, "one look and I HAVE it."
I should beware of liver or kidney or blood, troubles indicated here.
Can be very paranoid, see two people talking and assume it's about ME.
I tend to change foundations a lot (I say mental, he STARTED on apartments), but
like to build up security around myself. I LIKE security.
I can be very determined and carry something through when everyone disagrees.
Have a lot of contradicting urges pulling me back and forth.
Should avoid tendencies to excess in eating and drinking (and he agreed in sex)
--- I should watch out for CONSEQUENCES of excess in old age.
I tend to be very moody, shifting gears very rapidly.
Tend to "not permit myself to be satisfied by accomplishments."
What I call thoughts are actually EMOTIONS: I'm not very THOUGHTFUL, I'm very
EMOTIONALLY responsive.
Aries tend to be over-analytic, I should spend more time "not thinking."
Homosexuality: I tend to love people WITHOUT regard to sex, but this might make
things difficult for OTHERS.
Friendships tend to hold me back from TRUE activities.
As an Aries, I'm not ABOUT to take directives or advice: I want things MY way. He didn't permit me to take notes while he was reading my chart, though he
offered me an empty cassette, but I said I had no facilities for that.
Then when he was predicting I said I was VERY uncomfortable not taking notes,
and he apologized and said I SHOULD be taking notes during the reading for
the future, so I did:
Maybe ANOTHER trip after February 8 --- an opening coming to me --- word from
publisher.
Direct yourself SPIRITUALLY during this time and the rewards will increase."
EVENTUAL success with the book, FIRST attempt will fail, and maybe second, too,
but DON'T be thwarted.
Now to first week of March --- writing not smooth, work disrupted; no FINANCIAL
trouble.
Mid-February might be news to "revise," and then they might TAKE it.
After first week of March, things get much better: including the "eventual
success."
March is the key month.
March 4 through 8 or 9, don't enter into serious CONTRACT talks, since there
will be conflict between DESIRE and RESPONSIBILITY.
Money comes in mid-March.
Whole new yearly cycle begins on June 30.
Foundations laid during July will form basis for whole next year.
June 30-July 30 --- begin NEW projects. This will set whole NEW life style: a
MOST SUCCESSFUL one.
"Separation" seen around October 1, last of October, first of November --- no
accident but maybe friend will be called back to the states early.
July 11-17: obstacles to trip (only temporary, don't let them throw me off).
"The friend might NOT be able to go" (or delay or obstacle), but it won't stop
ME from going, though I might abbreviate it.
OR I might have to take a SHORT trip before I take the LONG one.
"I feel very GOOD about this trip."
"Might not START on July 7, may be July 24 or 25."
Might have to take a detour, but certainly don't let delay or detour CANCEL the
trip.
I remembered these notes before and after my bath, and maybe others will come to mind, but I had a tendency to say Oken REPEATED what Taylor said, but in fact he DIDN'T. There seemed very little overlap in what they said, and comparing how MUCH was said, how much was CHARGED, the relative opinions of their expertise I have, I'd certainly recommend that others see Taylor (though it might just be the idea of a little old lady with access to the occult living in a tiny studio in Carnegie Hall versus a hippy-type who's married and quite openly money hungry living in a whole house in Brooklyn Heights. A bit too different in style to really COMPARE them, including the bit that SHE told me what I WANTED to hear, while HE may be telling something closer to the truth. Will be curious to see when "Lina Someone" calls me to ask about me guiding her through her LSD trip, or possibly helping me find a publisher for "Acid House," and WHAT could I do to develop the powers resident in my "powerful voice?"