LOVE NOTE Chapter 8: May 25-June 17, 1988. Part iii.

June 12th Faith had put me to bed and put the mirror in place. I'd not mentioned night-before-last's poems to anyone, including her. Was my penis hard? I thought it was but couldn't tell without moving my hand, and I knew that if I moved my hand and found it wasn't I would almost certainly lose the feeling that had made me curious. I'd better, I knew, accept what seemed to be. The feeling, strong as it seemed, was fragile.

In two days Throck, Faith's better half, was landing at New York City's Kennedy Airport at 6 A. M. and then catching a noon bus to Syracuse. I imagined seeing Throck in the mirror, his long hair flying in the breeze from my fan as he played his bass; I imagined Faith, brow furrowed with concentration, drawing Throck as he played and me as I lay feeling. Artists are lovers. I imagined the music and the feeling, the drawing and the feeling, the writing and the feeling; Faith making visible what had not been seen, Throck making it audible, me feeling it and later writing it.

I didn't know how explicitly Faith had told Throck how she helped me. She trusted each of us, and each of us knew she didn't trust men casually or easily. Imagining Throck with us as I felt excited me because I would feel it; too, if Throck accepted the love I felt, as it seemed Faith already did, then I, straight, might. I never did imagine courting Throck or being courted by him. Imagining myself in Throck's role I distrusted me in mine.

I was reading James Baldwin's No Name in the Street. He was horrified at Americans who cannot love, cannot touch: "The despair among the loveless is that they must narcotize themselves before they can touch any human being at all. They, then, fatally, touch the wrong person, not merely because they have gone blind, or have lost the sense of touch, but because they no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man." (I love you, Jimmie Baldwin. I can feel, Jimmie, I can feel! And, narcotized, know and pray my touch is love.) "When the loveless come to power, or when sexual despair comes to power, the sexuality of the object is either a threat or a fantasy." NNITS, p. 3. Coke fantasies as they appear, say, in Less Than Zero, are lovelessness and sexual despair come to power. The coke fantasy with which I am blessed--arguably cursed--is (I pray) otherwise.
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Throck arrived June 14th. Faith had missed him badly and was relieved that he had come at last.
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I was still working on Tape 1A but had begun today writing about June 10, when I had written "Ways." I had titled what I was writing "June 10, 1988." So what that today was not June 10 but June 15? I finished a draft of "June 10, 1988" and edited "May 28, 1988," when my subject had been May 21. (Love Note was a series of dated entries in its early drafts.)

I listened to and wrote what I had so far understood of Tape 1A, building momentum before I reached the lines I had not yet transcribed:

Tantra. Let it be tantra. He knew he could feel. Ecstasy. Let it be ecstasy. . . . Oh tantra. Each [of us is] spaceandtime in spaceandtime. Oh consciousness. Consciousness needs to feel itself. Time and space. Its life is all it knows--experience. Oh. Know. This space, I must describe it. And get this truth. It. The feeling it.

"And this is love. And this is truth. It must inform my heart for me. It must inform my heart, my whole being, my faith that I am trying truly, not foundering as it has come to me I seem to feel I am. I would admire me. I would admire. Unless reactively, in xxx xxx xxx defense. Life is simple."

The first, second, and fourth syllables of Life is simple were one note, and the third, emphasized, was higher.

Long before the mirror and my rediscovery of sexual sensation, years before I'd ever used cocaine, I'd sung on Cottage Hill Road and felt the rightness of the words I sang as they entered the emptiness of the forever forgotten, where the Akashics do not lie. Later at the typewriter I was unable to recreate my minstrel knowing, sung once of a summer's day in play. Still, it had been there. I'd known it. I'd known it today on Cottage Hill Road again. I'd known it the night of May 21 too, but those words I still had! They were hardly the poetry I had felt them as I said them, but they were what I needed to write Love Note. I listened ten or twelve times to the 3-syllable word that defined defense, above: "Figh der mack?" Then, accidentally, I erased it. I swore in frustration, then realized I knew that I had said "In my own self-defense:"

I would admire me. I would admire. Unless reactively, in my own self-defense.

I would admire myself, yes, but only if what I was doing was admirable and undeluded. If I were destroying my chance of ever writing anything worthwhile by fantasizing I was doing what was best to get it written, I hoped I'd stop. I played the next seconds of 1A:

. . .
Life is simple.
My great sin. . . --

Sin? I doubted my ears. Had I actually said sin? It knew it was unlikely. To sin is to disobey God and I did not think in terms of obedience and disobedience, though was certainly influenced by both the Bhagavad Gita and Sermon on the Mount. If I had said sin, it would inevitably have distracted me. The tape counter had read 182 when I said whatever I had said and was at 200 when, no more words having come, the trapeze chains chimed as I lifted myself off my back and shifted my head on the pillow. At 206 a burble of words, sexually elicited, spilt from me:

But the rational knows

--a pause and then, sung without hurry, with wonder and relief--

Itself is what it has found,
Arationally
Experiences all.

No,

Experiences awe.

Yes:

But the rational knows itself is what it has found, arationally experiences awe.

I sang awe on four separate and ascending notes, then, except for my breathing, was silent almost half a minute before a purely sexual gasp, another ten seconds of silence, and a second gasp. More time passed before I begged,

See me, Lee!

I was with Lee, who had known me beautiful and was seeing me so now, her seeing palpable to me.

As I'd finished making the May 21 tape I'd imagined it not as it was but as erotic, the words understandable; imagined sending it to Lee, with or without an explanation; imagined her lying naked listening to it, her fingers between her legs, feeling my feeling and her own and knowing it love. The tape continued. There were softer gasps and then, higher, sounds, not words, that were for Lee as she lay listening, raw sounds, made in the throat and felt in the groin, meant not to be heard as words but felt. More than a minute had then passed, me lying in my room alone on my blue sheet, before:

Please take my sexual surrender;
I know your heart;
I know that you are here
On these nights, this night,
As I feel.

I hummed a high note, then a lower one, and the tape ended, the machine audibly snapping off.
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In bed the next night, June 16, as my hand seemed to be taken into my body I thought of Julia. I wondered if I might write to her, describe what I was feeling and tell her I had now begun what I'd been trying to write when I had met her. Tell her, too, I'd liked her. Tell her--I felt the burst of coming--the truth.
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I wrote at my typewriter, put down my peg, and stretched. It was June 17 and I'd done what I’d set out to do May 28, written about May 21; done what I'd been unable to do all the time I'd been in Tucson, written relatively successfully about what I was secretly feeling and thinking. Hettie was on the back deck with a beer. I drove out of my office into the big living room. She heard my chair and turned from the railing, faced me through the sliding screen door.

"Coming out?" she said.

"I am," I said.

Angus was in the kitchen.

"Want one?" he called to me, holding up a beer.

"A little one," I said.

Hettie opened the sliding screen door. It was ripped at the bottom and off its track, had never been quite right. I’d bought it used when I had had new windows put in last summer. Joe had seen it advertised and after he'd mentioned it I'd been reluctant to appear spend-thrift by buying new unnecessarily. "If you want, I'll get it," Joe had said, irked by my indecision. "If you don't, just say so." I'd bought it.

Angus and I joined Hettie.

"The bluebird's there," Hettie said, pointing.

"How did the writing go today?" Angus asked. "You were at it a long time."

I was generally unresponsive to queries about my writing because I rarely knew what to say. I was pedantically ambivalent, which I thought stupid but knew characteristic. It was almost never going well, or at least no where near well enough for me ever to be anything but grudgingly less displeased. It was what I did. It was the paternal centerpiece of my personal civilization, as my acceptance and love of being, my compassion for the others and for myself as one of them, another of the castaways into the flesh, was its maternal.

"Good. It's really going good. I actually seem to have begun something!"

"A book?"

"It's a novel. I know how it begins and have an idea about its first three sections." The first was the summer of 1987; the second, making and transcribing Tape 1; the third, the time between.

The bluebird had been sitting at one of the purple-martin-house holes. Now it flew to its right, to a half-grown elm tree. The present backyard had been field when I first came here in 1970, the elm in which the bluebird sat a sapling. The big elms had been dying then of blight. I wanted to plant trees along the road and by the house, trees that took years to grow and might still stand two hundred years from now, testimony some in these sorry times had believed in a future and the possibility of serving it.
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