LOVE NOTE Chapter 5: January 4-March 5, 1988. Parts i & ii.

i

January 4 to February 4 I wrote nearly every day. Usually it was for less than two hours, but on days I did some coke and smoked some pot it averaged between four and five. Most days I did neither drug. Most days that I used pot, I used coke. Every day I did coke, I used the mirror. I worked mostly on Dream Reams but also forced myself to go on jotting notes for My Play, the working title for my book of feeling. I read a lot too, and now and then copied a sentence or two into my notebook. February 5 to March 3 Dream Reams received less attention; I kept on reading a lot and changed my unwritten book's working title to As He Lay Feeling.
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ii

January 4 I was reading Hawthorne's Septimius Felton. "Nothing is surer, however," Hawthorne's narrator writes [p. 271 in Volume 11, Collected Works], "than that, if we suffer ourselves to be drawn into too close proximity with people, if we over-estimate the degree of our proper tendency towards them, or theirs towards us, reaction is sure to follow."

I watched for a sense I was indulging a too-close, cocaine-induced proximity to Faith. I no longer had her cover me on the nights she put up my mirror, but neither did I yet have her spread my legs and position me as I wished. She was, after all, used to my nakedness, washed me daily and did my bowel routine, but I knew that these nights were different, and also knew that even were she to be uncomfortable she might not say so.

Too, did I not on my fantasy nights grossly over-estimate the degree of my proper tendency toward my friends, who, contrary to my fantasies, were not my lovers? Wouldn't actually to confide more often than not be to over-confide? Straight, not feeling the love, not sexually aroused, my blithe drugged assumption I should speak seemed more or less delusional, and even at the tail-end of a long night of love I frequently couldn't think what it was I'd known scant hours earlier that I could say to Lee or Jane or Hettie or Dee.
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Jessie was in her mid-twenties, square-shouldered, brown-eyed, an animal in a forest in which machines ran on pavement instead of deer on trails. I'd had a crush on her five years earlier and we'd made love perhaps half a dozen times, none in a year or so. She was rarely interested in physical intimacy with a man, but I’d at times imagined her accepting my Love-Note love; as usual, at other times I'd been glad I’d never offered it to her. When I had seen her this afternoon she'd brought up her sex life and had asked about mine, as she often did, and I had answered briefly before, thinking of my play, I'd said that I liked to shield her some from my sexuality. Her acerb reply had been that she could take care of herself, from which I had inferred that she'd rather I be less thoughtful and more frank. Six hours later I was in front of the mirror thinking of her when she called me on the phone. At first I concealed that her voice had let me, in my dry fashion, ejaculate, but when she asked what I was doing I tried to tell her.

"Uh, I'm lying naked in front of a mirror, and,"--words didn't come easily. I wanted her with me, now, and inarticulately invited her, but, in the same sentence, tried to convey that I would of course understand should she decline; decline she did, incuriously, and when I hung up, the feeling was gone from my penis. Once again I had found what I wished to say unsayable.

I talked to Jessie a week later and brought up her call. Had I hurt or offended her by my unsolicited and sudden sexually explicit invitation? If so, I wanted to apologize. She told me not to worry, and we talked of other matters. I never did ask how what I had said had made her feel.
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My feeling nights were not only sexual but also recreationally philosophical: What a good idea time and mortality might seem if neither one existed. In eternity everything is and remains possible, even inevitable. With time and death what might have happened mostly doesn't, joins the impossible in never-never land, swells it huge yet leaves it merely nothing, what was and is and will be everything.
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In Wild Oats and Fireweed by Ursula K. Le Guin I read "For Bill Stafford:" "'What do you do when you can't write?' [Le Guin said] 'I lower my standards,' he said, with the sweetest smile." [First edition, P. 59.]
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I read The Ink Truck, William Kennedy's first book. Rosenthal and Irma are in a car together, and he is resisting hitting on her. "'Well, goddamn it,' she said, suddenly angered, 'Carry it beyond. Don't just sit there sending out feelers that make sense only inside your head. Find out what's in my head, why don't you. Establish my reality.'" [Penguin Edition, The Ink Truck, p. 74.] I thought of my reticence with Faith. Later in The Ink Truck I came upon Yeats' poem entitled "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing." It resonated.
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Between January 4 and January 7 I wrote three story ideas in my notebook: 1. Once upon a time there was an inspired man who had no imagination--a comedy about a writer who has to write about himself. 2. A man fantasizes about an unknown woman he has seen, then seeks more and more to see, follows her, waits outside of buildings she is in. He wants to meet her, but as his beneficent stalking intensifies he doesn't; then he does, but. . . , or doesn't, and . . . . 3. See DR 4/29-30/?, p. 3. A father could protect his children from wrong choices if they would but obey; obedience solves everything. But even obedience is a choice once Eve has bitten the apple; she may no longer honestly pretend it isn't.
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On waking January 9 I quickly wrote:

In dream last night I ran.
It felt good to be on my feet and using my legs.
I noticed I was running and was glad,
Was very glad,
Would run, I thought, and run and run.

I'd not been running from or towards anything. It was, I thought, a dream of being, not becoming. Later in the day I read Le Guin's Buffalo Gals. I liked her argumentative mothering and insistence we look down at Mother Earth, not only up to the stars. I quoted:

Freedom, the freedom to run,
Freedom is to run.
Freedom is galloping.
What else can it be? [First edition, p. 145]
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I joined a dozen others at a local restaurant for dinner. The only one of us with whom I was unacquainted was Josephine, who was a friend of Sidney's from California and was staying with Sidney and Stephen. I guessed she was my age, in her later forties, knew she might be fifteen years older. She was generous-figured, dark-haired, well-tanned, deep-voiced, used heavy black make-up around her eyes, stood about five feet four inches, and was wearing a loose dark blouse, black-fringed lighter-colored mini-dress, and white calf-high leather boots. On her it worked; she was sexy. After dinner she came to my house with Sidney and Stephen and Jane. She turned down cocaine when I offered it but accepted a glass of wine. She deduced, I for one thought incorrectly, that Jane and I were a couple.

We were in my kitchen, the linoleum-covered floor of which was not as handsome as the rest of my home, and she was talking about a children's book she had recently written and illustrated that was about to be published. I silently compared her out-spoken confidence in her work to my tongue-tied diffidence about mine.

"I also do kitchen floors," she said.

"Do kitchen floors?"

"Not scrub them (except my own). I cover them in canvas and then paint a design or scene on it and apply a clear washable gloss."

"Elegant," I said.

I didn't want to make my already elegant house more elegant still, but before she left I had agreed that she should draw plans for and give me an estimate on doing my floor.

"If I flew in weekends could I stay here?" she asked, and I said, "Of course."
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I went to all of the University of Arizona's home basketball games at McKale Center, eight blocks from my house, and watched away games on TV. This year's team, for the first time in school history, was the top-ranked college team in the country and Lute Olson, its gifted coach, appeared repeatedly in my dreams as an authority figure. I had dreamed several times that I was on the team but couldn't learn Coach Olson's system. Though in last night’s dream I had finally mastered it, he hadn't noticed.
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January 12 I finished Hemingway's Torrents of Spring (Faulkner asked him to suppress it because it so successfully parodied Sherwood Anderson, whose best books were behind him) and began Joanne Brasil's Escape from Billy's Bar-B-Que, the first book Alice Walker and her lover/partner Robert Allen published at Wild Trees, their small press. The narrator writes: "I liked reading better than writing, but since no one would pay me to read, writing little things I was doing was good enough. I could sit alone and look at words, at least." [Pp. 112-13] I admired this woman who wasn't driven to create except as a reader creates, as I created. Would I like to read and be content? Perhaps, but I preferred struggling to write. Detached from the fruits of my action? Well, yes; I wanted to write as well as I could but if my struggle came to naught I remained me; my failure mattered no more than it would have mattered to Arjuna's best self had he fallen in the battle he didn't want to fight. Fighting was his way, writing mine. But were I more frankly attached to the struggle's outcome might it intensify my effort and its product? It might.
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I read Windy McPherson's Son, Sherwood Anderson's first book, and found it inspiringly terrible, thought I wrote as badly and knew that a few years later Anderson had written Winesburg, Ohio, a Twentieth-Century masterpiece.
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January 15 I wrote: Since reading Brasil I've been imagining a novel called The Reader about a reader who, unlike Brasil's character, wishes he were a writer but writes badly. I'm working two hours a day on DR. I again dreamed last night I was on the Arizona basketball team. Coach Olson came to me on the bench and said I should stop watching the game as a fan. "A player watches differently," he said. I began to see differently immediately, was aware how little I knew. I couldn't imagine playing ahead of either Kenny Lofton or Harvey Mason, the third and fourth guards, but Olson had told me I would tonight.

Doggedly--and with some enjoyment, some spells of interest--, dissatisfied, I wrote what I could; I also, in spite of difficult days-after, took my love as I could. I reflected that should I die doing coke, my book virtually unbegun, my death would seem only stupid; there also would be a downside were I to write it, since, written and read, it might draw others who lacked sensation to experiment with cocaine. I could warn those I might tempt, encourage them to limit their use rigorously, perhaps to the new and/or full moons, but I knew from my own recurring difficulties how much such a warning would be likely to be worth. My spinal cord had been macerated, not severed. Could I feel what I felt when using my drugs only because my cord damage had been less than total? I didn't know, had always thought my damage was total. Was there a safer drug I might be using? Who knew?
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January 28 I was up earlier than usual and on my way to McKale Center. My physiatrist, Dr. Lars, had told me that Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays persons with disabilities used the University's varsity weight room; he had suggested I join them. I'd not worked even on Dream Reams for several days and felt I needed to be doing something of which I approved. Intimidated but determined, I descended the McKale Center ramps in search of the weight room, found it, and introduced myself to the man who seemed in charge. We talked and he recommended four sets of exercises designed to strengthen my upper body. I'd hoped to work in my chair but he urged me to be put at a machine; I reluctantly acquiesced, almost immediately blacked out, and was lifted back into my chair. When I had finished my sets I told the director that I'd be late the weeks chores fell on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; he said that I could work afternoons those weeks at the disabled students' gym at First and Cherry, three blocks closer to home. I drove home pleased, confident I would continue.
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