Love Note. Part 2.
Chapter 8: May 25-June 17, 1988.

i

Joe Cicero bought new batteries and had them in my chair by the time Faith had me up at 11; I was on Cottage Hill Road by noon. Before I was back I'd seen Turkey Vulture, Indigo Bunting, American Redstart, Robin, Great Blue Heron, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, European Starling, Common Grackle, Redwing, Chipping Sparrow, Bobolink, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Barn Swallow, Tree Swallow, Mallard, Phoebe, and Song Sparrow. I'd heard but not seen Yellowthroat, Gray Catbird, Crow, Black-capped Chickadee, and probably Cardinal. Had I really heard a cardinal? I doubted it because I had never seen one here and had come to think there were none; on the other hand, I'd only once tried to use binoculars and so missed a lot, and the song had seemed right. (In 2000 I would find a pair of binoculars I could use effectively and since--it's May 2006--have birded avidly. Cardinal are common on Cottage Hill Road.)

Seeing the bobolink a few hundred feet from the house gave me particular pleasure. I'd wondered why I never saw them in the area and now assumed they passed through in May, before I usually arrived. (I was wrong; they breed locally.) The only other time I'd seen Bobolink I'd been thirteen or fourteen, had cried out "Stop! I think I see a bobolink!" Florence had stopped and she, I, and my brothers David and Clarence had piled out of the car and spent fifteen minutes watching several of the white-patched meadow birds flitting above the grass, then settling out of sight.

At one o'clock Storris arrived. In 1971, the year after we Wurtsers had appeared, Storris and his wife had bought and moved on to land three miles from us, and a few years later they had acquired their first exotic animal, a lion, which as a cub lived with them in their trailer and slept in their bed. They named her Alice Catherine, her nickname Alley Cat, and in the next few years built a small, well-kept, and moderately profitable zoo around her. Storris and I had been playing chess with one another since 1976 and our games, as important as they were to him, had in years past probably been more important to me. I had had too little to do, though I'd pretended otherwise, and we'd played three, four, and sometimes five times a week. This year, I intended (hoped) to be busier; I knew I would enjoy the chess regardless.

On the road the next day (May 26) I saw several birds I hadn’t on day one: Yellow Warbler, Pileated Woodpecker, Kingbird, Crow. I'd seen my first pileated woodpecker, a black and white crow-sized bird with a crimson crest (Woody Woodpecker is a pileated), in Fredon, N. J., where my parents had bought an inactive 14-acre farm when I was ten. The woodpecker had been so far away it had looked small, but David and I had each been certain what it was as soon as we'd seen it. One fall day I'd seen five in Jamesville in Angus' backyard. I'd seen fewer than a dozen in my life. I also heard Wood Pewee--if that was what was saying pee-o-wee. (It was.)

My third day back, a Friday, I added Brown-headed Cowbird and Great Crested Flycatcher to the list I was keeping in my notebook. I’d not noticed the birdlife here in such detail before and not kept a birdlist here or anywhere since breaking my neck in 1963. Had I ever before seen a crested flycatcher in Jamesville? In Fredon they had been abundant, and I'd seen them regularly in Godwin, too. Was listing the names of the birds I was seeing a warming-up exercise for Love Note?

That night I sgurded with my friends and, when they left, had Faith set me up. At first the absence of the mirror was distracting, but I soon discovered an intimacy I liked in the unmirrored darkness. In Tucson I had been alone in my house at night. I wasn't in Jamesville, and had thought that I wouldn't tape, but, speaking low, I found the presence of others upstairs no bar as I made what I assumed was Tape 1B. Would I ever transcribe 1A, which I'd made May 21? I listened to it before taping 1B; it was not easy to understand but seemed potentially useful.

In Love Note Part 1 I didn't introduce Brian or Ellen Patterson, who, with Ellen's two young daughters, had been Wurts Farm's only permanent residents since fall 1986. Brian I had met for the first time when I'd arrived with Colleen in 1987. Ellen, who was Dee's younger sister and six years older and half a head taller than Brian, I knew because she had lived here in 1980, when she had met and married the Wurtser who was to be her girls' genetic father. Dee and I were intimates; Ellen and I had never been more than friendly acquaintances. When Brian's mother had first seen the farm, a few days after Brian, Ellen, and the girls moved in, she'd cried. A half a dozen windows were broken, shingles were loose, and almost the only paint not peeling on the outside of the house depicted a long-stemmed red rose in a foot-wide circle on the west side. "You're bringing him here?" Mrs. Patterson had said to Ellen. "Do you hate him?" Brian, who was in his early twenties, had the house relatively tight by Thanksgiving and, at Christmas, he and Ellen were married in the living room. The summer of 1987 Ellen, like Colleen, had never sgurded with us, and Brian had only done a few lines. Neither, though, voiced objections to our cocaine use, trusting us to conceal what we were doing from Ellen's kids as we did from their cousins. (Marijuana was often smoked in front of but never, I think, shared with the children.)

Ellen and Brian were un-self-consciously bourgeois and under their hegemony there was no pretense that Wurts Farm was still a commune, but I thought they took care of it and improved it as though it were their own in a fashion that honored the communal idea better than we communards had usually managed. I thought it too bad we were two households instead of one, but I also thought the Pattersons had begun to heal Wurts Farm from what I had decided would be a terminal malaise were I not to have someone move in other than Elvis, the farm's sole resident from 1984 to 1986, who had been here since 1974 or 1975. (Elvis I had asked to leave--Ellen had insisted he move out before she moved in--, and in a gesture that honored the commune's fractious history he had vacated the house but built himself an un-insulated board shack in which he lived through the winter on the hillside between the farmhouse and the Ciceros' but out of sight of each. He later claimed he would have been less comfortable in spring or summer, when mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects abound, than in the Northern New York winter, in which temperatures double-digits-below-zero Fahrenheit are inevitable, twenty below probable, and thirty below a risk.)

Last summer I had imagined Ellen with me only twice, and I was surprised when I fantasized of her after making Tape 1B i. In my imagining she cared only for making love now, guiltily, the guilt sauce, Brian betrayed; she didn't want to hear about my feeling, which aroused no awe in her, and she knew what we were doing was neither innocent nor good. She knew herself cursed and begged me to bite harder, knew me damned as she was and loved me for it.

The next morning (May 28) I felt livelier than usual on a day-after. On the road I saw a northern oriole, the bird which thirty-five years ago when I was birding was called a Baltimore oriole; I also saw a small flock of Cedar Waxwing and remembered the sunny February 1950s day in Godwin I'd first seen one, actually several, in an ice-covered white-birch tree. It was a highlight of my early birding years. Waxwings have a crest and a black mask and olive, blue, yellow, red, and white feathers. Home, I drove up the front ramp and in the front door. I'd lived here almost eighteen years, off and on, and till last year hadn't been able to get in and out by myself. Now, largely through Brian's efforts, the farm had doors I could open and close and ramped decks on which, using only a short stretch of the black-topped driveway, I could circle the house. Brian was a prodigious worker. "I like to work," he said to me the month we met. "It keeps me from thinking." I like to think, and did about what he had said, eventually concluding that to him think was synonymous with worry.

Faith was in the kitchen.

"Will you bring the recorder down to my office?" I said. "The tape in it is on side B now, so will you turn it over so I can listen to Side A that I made in Tucson?"

"Sure. Anything else?"

"That's it."

I had a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter when she brought in the recorder. Might I be (again!) about to begin Love Note? I turned on the machine. In the beginning I had sung, not spoken. I'd pitched my singing voice artificially high.

Tantra,
Let it be tantra.

The May 21 tape (Love Note's tape work is in Courier on my computer and is red online) wasn't the love-making tape to Lee which, towards its end, I'd imagined it might be, and I had to listen to it over and over, a few words at a time, to understand what I had said. Were the first words Tantra, let it be tantra? I wasn't certain. Maybe I had not begun Tantra but Here I lie. I tried to remember. I replayed the tape, replayed it again. Here I lie could not sound like Tantra. Oh? I couldn't tell which I had said. I played it again, decided it was Tantra. The tan, which I still couldn't be completely certain wasn't here, I'd pronounced to rhyme with can. Here rhymed with can? I listened again, again, again. I thought I would have pronounced tantra's first syllable to rhyme with con or Kahn. I let it go, moved on to let it be tantra, the tan now a rhyme to con.

I listened to myself say nothing for about a minute, then heard six syllables, the second accented, the three last stressed equally. I rewound and listened. Had I said He knew in thirteen weeks? The second syllable--word?--was or rhymed with knew. The first seemed to be he. And the fourth and fifth syllables, what I guessed to be the fourth word, did seem to be thirteen. My memory didn't click. I wondered whether the nonverbal sound I was hearing was my breathing, then knew it was. I listened further, remembering the beat of the still undeciphered past line as I waited a minute or so to hear the next--and realized I'd said He knew he could feel it.

I didn’t understand the next line, line four, or the beginning of line five, but five ended, clearly, ecstasy, the word’s second and third syllables level with one another and a step above the first. I remembered. I rewound and listened. Line four was Ecstasy, line five let it be ecstasy.

I'd written two pages since starting to listen to Tape 1A. What I'd begun, assuming I at last actually had begun, would take years to finish, but I was afraid even to pause for lunch because to stop would be to risk not starting again. The letters had begun to move and coruscate upon the page, a migraine-like low-sugar symptom with which I was familiar and that I could ignore only at my peril. I had to stop now, to eat. I turned off the typewriter, buzzed from my workroom through the living room and up the ramp to the kitchen, then into the hallway to where I could call upstairs.

"Faith?"

I had begun! Had? Might have. Had? Perhaps I had.
_____

After lunch I returned to my desk. Brian had built it for me last year, when he had built so much. I would write this summer or not at all, I thought. What did I have so far?

Tantra,
Let it be tantra.
He knew he could feel it.
Ecstasy,
Let it be ecstasy.

Between my turning the recorder on and my first word, probably Tantra, about a half a minute had passed, and before each succeeding line there was about a minute of silence until line five immediately followed four. Several minutes passed before line 6, a 4-syllable word. Or was it four 1-syllable words? The sound seemed like a double o or long u. A single syllable sung on four separate notes?

I listened, rewound the tape, and listened again. After the 4-part oo there was a pause, then an ascending ah ah wa and a descending ah ah ah wa wa that didn't sound like words. I listened again to lines 6, 7, and 8. After six there was a pause, between seven and eight none. And then line nine, Oh tantra, and three lines that I understood with relative ease.

Tantra,
Let it be tantra.
He knew he could feel it.
Ecstasy,
Let it be ecstasy.
- - - -
---
-----
Oh tantra.
Each life a context,
Each [of us is] space-and-time
In space and time.

Joe Cicero stood behind me. "You ever coming out of there?" he said.
It was seven and I'd been working for five hours since lunch.

"A few more minutes," I said.
_____

Faith put me to bed after my friends left. I had made Tape 1B i last night, May 27. Now I made 1B ii, meant to sing "Please" again and again. I had been singing it and feeling when it had occurred to me I should, could, would record; had stopped and turned on the tape but, Now no longer as it had been, had sung other syllables.

I thought tathata tathata the ultimate inclusive. (The four definitions of tathata tathata that I have read tonight--February 15, 2001--are elusive, and none defines it as I have for the past 30 years and do throughout Love Note as that-than-which-there-is-no-other. Note that in my usage the future has already happened and the past is still happening. All time is present time. Hm; or should I say Om?) Tathata tathata fully conscious was as close as I had come to conceptualizing God, and I'd also long contemplated what tathata tathata would be were it to be conceived perfectly ignorant, fated to know of itself only what it might learn, deduce, and remember in a limited span of linearly experienced time--say three score year and ten--and limited space--a body. It would, I thought, be a human being, aware exactly to the extent he or she (but it seems silly to think we must be one or the other gender to be human) has become aware. What a perverse experience this would be (is), to be the limitless-all limited, and not just limited a little! I, I thought in bed May 28, is i, the square root of minus one: imaginary, impossible, and necessary. I thought: All of us are not created equal physically but all are, each is, all space and time--the creation--created, each of us an other. It's thus that we are equal. I came. Thoughts made me come. Wasn't it my birthright to remember my orgasmic thoughts? I knew that my birthright was forgetfulness, part of the price to be pays for being, for the gift of mortality. I made notes; I recorded.

May 30 I was still making progress transcribing Tape 1A, but what laborious progress it was. I listened:

. . .
Oh tantra.
Each life a context,
Each space-and-time
In space and time,
. . . .
Oh consciousness

Was it Oh consciousness? I wasn't sure. My voice was melodious and lyrical and the highest it had yet been. I rewound, started forward again. It was Oh consciousness, followed by tuneful sensual phrases that were still unclear to me. Then, in a voice a full octave under the preceding lines and following a pause of about a minute, I heard Consciousness needs to heal itself, or maybe Consciousness needs to feel itself. Yes, to feel itself. I imagined the need to feel (and heal?) a basic drive of which the awakening being has no understanding.

Consciousness does exist, regardless of where else and how, in--as?--each of us. Each human being is or might as well be what-is conscious and mortal. Consciousness looks or might as well look through each pair of eyes from a unique perspective.
_____

To access the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.