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December 18, 1987 I seriously thought of writing no more. If I gave up writing, and cocaine too, what might I be doing in a year or two or five? I'd been taking notes for more than twenty years but almost never looked at them, and my unfinished work seemed less an extraordinary archive of raw material than proof I was no writer. (My relatively finished novel, The Healing, and Instead of Shooting Reagan, a collection of poems I'd published using a vanity press, I lumped with the rest and disdainfully ignored.) Should I not try something new--copy-editing or a rare-book store? Wasn't my failure a sign I should tack?
Two days later my mother called and, before I picked up, the answering machine clicked on; our conversation was recorded.
"My writing's pretty well bogged down," I lamented. "I'm not even working on anything."
"It goes like that," Florence said; "but you know, Arthur, you've got everything you need to be a novelist. I don't know anyone who better knows what a novelist needs to know. You care about people, you're widely read, and you're wise, too."
After I hung up I listened to the tape and, to my surprise, decided that on the first Monday of the new year (January 4) I'd begin to write daily or, if not daily, at least two hours a day five days a week. If I couldn’t work on my book of feeling I would, I thought, go back to Dream Reams, the dream and day-to-day journal, now some three thousand pages long, on which I’d worked every day for the past three years. I had discontinued it in October hoping that idleness would breed dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction aid the gestation of my book about my nights.
"My God," I said aloud. "I've made a New Year's resolution."
_____
The day after Florence's call I was at work in my mind on a vast political novel about means and ends and reasons for anger and hatred. What the victim needs, needs as opposed to wants, I thought, is not victory or vengeance or a turn as top dog but an end to his or her victimization. The process by which oppressors become the oppressed and the oppressed oppressors is briefly emotionally gratifying but is no more than war, is only war. I wrote nothing.
That night I had Faith put me to bed early. Again I remained covered as she angled the mirror at my genitals and refrained from asking her to prop me on pillows or spread my legs; again after she left I struggled to get the pillows as I wanted them and then put the blue sheepskin on top of them; and again as I struggled I knew I wouldn't have been wrong to have had her help more. It really was difficult for me to get the pillows properly behind me so that when I lay back I could see my balls and penis clearly. Yes, being uncovered and having her help place the pillows would be more physically intimate than just having her position the mirror at the foot of my bed, which, yes, would enhance my pleasure, but no, my request for her further assistance would not be merely a ruse to attain the intimacy that I desired. I shook my head in wonder at my tortuous scrupulosity.
I thought about my not-writing. It had occurred to me that writing my book about feeling would be unhealthy for me to whatever extent it legitimized my coke use in my own eyes, but so long as I was doing coke anyway, I accepted that to begin was my most pressing need. I used the trapeze to get into position to write and turned to the fifth section of my current notebook, where I was writing notes I might use on or after January 4:
12/21. Andrea Oct. 3, 6. (Andrea was an early name for Jane.)
Estelle calls
Comes
Exposure
Sorry
Sorry
Guilt
Abuse
Love
(I would buy my first computer, a MacIntosh Plus, at the end of March 1989. The font I would originally use for the body of this book was Geneva, that for excerpts from my notebook New York. Using different fonts and styles was simple with a computer--I retired my IBM Selectric the day I brought home my Mac. In May and June 1998, I changed what had been New York to Mistral. The New York, I thought, looked too much like Geneva, whereas the Mistral was like handwriting--though not my handwriting. In 2006, when I first posted LOVE NOTE online, I used the default font throughout; notebook excerpts were in green.)
By December 21 I'd been back from Jamesville nearly three months but had sgurded only once since the night Estelle had briefly joined me. I was glad I had almost no sgurd habit. Mightn't I, I wondered, by having sex with myself, with cocaine, release sexual energy which, unreleased and allowed to build, would perhaps bring me to a lover and a truer love? Perhaps, but tonight I was happy to be where I was and doing what I was doing. I smoked another hit, did a line, pushed my left leg away from my right, and lay back slowly, carefully, to feel. (As she was setting me up eighteen months from now--the set-ups by then overtly sexual--, Faith’s friend Kay would say to me, "I admire what you do. A woman would have gone on not feeling." I didn't think I was doing as I was because I was a man but I was grateful for her reassurance--and noticed my penis stiffen in response to it.)
I lay, legs open. Who? Tonight? Now? I imagined Lee come into my room and, glad she was with me, closed my eyes. Minutes passed. Waves rippled outward from the center between my legs. I did not for a time think of Lee's dislike of cocaine use, but as the waves ebbed her distrust of the drug asserted itself; I tried to refocus but her concern continued to intrude and distract me. She was studying biofeedback at her job. Might she be able to teach me to use feedback machinery to find this state in which I felt?
I pulled myself up onto my arm and wrote in my notebook, did another line and had another hit of pot; lay back again and felt. I paused again, wrote again: Wave. Wave. Wave. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Know. I lay back, felt, mused, felt, mused; pulled up to write.
For all our flaws, I am who I am, you are who you are. Precisely, you are who you are. Neither you nor I can will away our foolishness, which comes with body. Whether, before you took a body--came to exist in and more or less as a body--, you knew and were nothing, more-than-nothing, or all (tathata tathata, as I imagine), you were as and what you were. You, are you still as you were before you were you? If, as I imagine, at least partly yes, may you not instinctively wish to know yourself as you were before incarnating and becoming subject to time? And may you not use a substance or fast to feel your mystic self itself, tathata tathata, that than which there is no other, if that is what you were? Again, I imagine yes. But take care. The addict who heeds the body's murmured "Again, again, again" tends to discover not the quintessence of being but proof of his or her own wasted nature. May the fool find nothing else? Was the magician never fool?
_____
The next evening, December 22, uninspired as usual after a night sgurding, my liberal's conscience was in distress. If only, I thought, I were not living here in my elegant 4-bedroom house with its cupola above the front hall but in a single-occupancy room with a bed, a typewriter, my chair, a TV, and no more but food, pot, and medicine. If only? I wasn't altogether comfortable with my present considerable affluence, but I was even less comfortable when I heard me whining, even to myself, about my good fortune. I superstitiously (though I do not disbelieve in magic) pointed out to me that if I were to brood upon or, worse, talk about how much I missed honest poverty, I would invite it.
I was particularly vulnerable to being robbed or busted because I sometimes kept unusual quantities of cash and drugs at home, There was nothing between my yearning for the good old days and my re-entering them but my luck and will, and if I honestly didn't like my house, my privacy, my books, my wealth, and my control of my environment, I could abandon them.
I laughed, a quad with everything. I'm even healthy, I thought--no bedsores, no mysterious pain, no raging infections (the Cipro-resistant pseudomonas colony in my bladder remained asymptomatic, so was not an immediate threat). Relax, I counseled, and forgive your good luck. Trouble will come. Oh fortunate fellow to have help, health, food, shelter, love, grace, and discontent too!
I drank at least three quarts of liquid daily, two quarts of it the past year or so an herbal tea made by boiling water and pouring it over dried yerba santa, gota cola, and saw palmetto leaves. I'd never, until night before last, made or reheated the tea myself, though I suspected that many a mother with my disabilities would be her family's cook. Tonight I again put my cooled-off tea back on the stove to heat to just below boiling; I found liquid easier to drink warm to hot than at room-temperature, cool, or iced. It wasn't easy day after day to drink as much as I did, but doing so was good for both my bladder and my kidneys and was a habit I’d developed early in my rehabilitation that I’d never lost, though what I drank changed year to year. After I'd reheated the tea night-before-last I'd bunched the towel I always carried and put it between my ankles on the foam that padded the box that connected my extended leg rests and formed, in effect, a table. I'd then carefully balanced the hot teapot on the bunched towel and carried it from the stove to the TV. I'd not been burned.
I could have called Faith, who, I thought, was in her living room not forty feet away, but, again tonight, it seemed better that I serve myself. There was no end to the help I could use, and I asked for somewhat less than I might have, though rather more than was absolutely necessary. Asking for and accepting help is not an altogether straight-forward affair. As I backed from the stove, the pot tipped and scalding tea spilled over my feet. I felt no pain but knew that I was hurt. I took a minute or so to move the tipped teapot without spilling any more hot liquid on myself; I then uncovered my feet so the soaked sheet I was wearing wouldn’t hold the heat against my skin and burn me worse, and called Faith, who wasn't due to check on me for another two hours. No one answered. I knew that to minimize the damage to my delicate skin I should get help right away, but I called no one else, just ran cold water on my towel and put it across my feet.
Two hours later Faith arrived to put me to bed and I told her what I'd done. She was dismayed, had assumed I had better sense, and for the next three months she had to wrap my feet, then foot, in sterile dressings. "Feel better now?" I derisively asked myself after she'd left me alone for the night. "Still have it too good?" Having scalded my feet was better than having been busted, I mused.
_____
Christmas Eve Jane and Tanager, who was seven now, stayed at my house, and Christmas morning Jane and I made love. We no longer had the love we once had had, but we did not necessarily have only less. I had everything to give her but my future, and though I thought I couldn't, wouldn't, be able to give her that, I knew, too, that I might.
"I want so bad not to live with a man, not be with one man, dependent," Jane said. "Why can't I be more like you?"
"Jane!" I said. "You sometimes talk as though you think I've mastered love!"
"Haven't you?"
I laughed and shook my head as though she were joking, which I assumed (and hoped) she was, and the subject changed. She didn't know that my love felt blocked and inexpressible unless I snorted cocaine or that days-after, unless I snorted it again, I invariably felt more or less isolated and dissatisfied. If I didn't begin writing something, whether it was the story I wished to tell or not, and if I felt love only when alone and gooned up good, what I was doing was a waste.
_____
The next three paragraphs describing my day are not what I wrote January 4, the day I had resolved to resume writing:
I drove my chair a mile to my regular lunch spot, had my usual chef's salad and buttered whole-wheat roll, and came home knowing I'd work. It had been nearly three full months since I'd let Dream Reams slip soundlessly to sleep, and if, today, I couldn't begin my book of feeling, I'd begin rewriting the first of the eight near-reams. They all needed work and (trying to bring or) bringing into being what I'd meant to write would feel good. I loved rewriting, deleting falsehood, bridging from sense to sense, rejuxtaposing.
After I'd begun Dream Reams in September 1984 in Santa Cruz I'd written every day till mid-October 1987. Now I guessed that not having routinely written since had been a mistake, because not-writing was, for me, a dangerous and seductive habit. Healthy, I wrote. My work was probably not to be important to anyone, but my working was important to me; I felt I had to begin the book that would be Love Note soon. Before Jamesville? Must I be writing it by the time I got to Jamesville or deny myself cocaine and discontinue my passionate autoerotic affair? I'd learned from Lee, from Jane, from Marjorie, to be kind to my lover. Was I misusing my lover now?
I didn't yet begin the book of feeling. I got out Dream Ream 1 and, pen in hand, began to read and edit.
_____
To go to 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.
Edited by Coach, 16 April 2006 - 04:42 PM.
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