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May 31 the dragonflies were out, a lot of them around the house all day for the first time this spring. Since Faith and I had arrived the 24th the weather had been wonderful, first cold and cloudy, then cold and clear, now beautiful and hot and clear. A vegetable garden was ploughed and when I looked up from where I sat at my typewriter I saw it out my window.
What did I have so far? I played Tape 1A.
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.... Oh consciousness.... Consciousness needs to feel itself. Time and space. Its life is all it knows--experience.
There was a sexual crack in my voice as I said time and space, and my breathing, which from the beginning of the tape--now run some twenty minutes--had been even, was become ragged.
Consciousness feeling consciousness? It did that night. Or, if you prefer, drugged, I fantasized that it--I--did. I imagined that, machine-like, automatically, we search for truth. We don't, most of us, think of it this way. And who finds it? We approximate. We form theories that depend on ignorance of--or ignoring--whatever data won't fit and, sure as we may be, we can never know that what has been found is (or even that it isn't!) indeed the truth.
. . . Consciousness needs to feel itself. Time and space [needs to feel itself]. Its life is all it knows, [its own] experience. Ohhhhh knowwwww.
High-voiced, I sang This, then, low-voiced, space, the words separated by a breath. Words without feeling passed through my mind and were forgotten; other words, the ones I felt, accumulated till I spoke. My exhalations were more intense now than my in-breaths. After I exhaled I inhaled immediately. After inhaling my breathing would pause, and I would feel.
This space,
I must describe it.
I couldn't tell what I'd next said next, so listened a second and then a third time. Was it And get this truth? I listened three more times to the 4-syllabled phrase. And get this down? I was satisfied with neither guess, then accepted the former and listened further.
And this is love;
And this is truth.
It must inform my heart for me;
It must inform my heart
And my whole being.[/color]
I had, May 21, recording, felt good beyond words, empowered, whole, blessed. May 28 to 31, Love Note begun at last, I did again, in a new way.
_____
June 1 I doodled: An egg is an egg, a sperm a sperm. There are three million (or is it six hundred million, as in May 2006 I read in Wikipedia it sometimes is?) sperm cells in an average human male ejaculation and, at birth, a quarter million eggs in an average human female--which means that each of us is the coming in of a 750,000,000,000-to-1 (150,000,000,000,000-to-1?) shot (even after it is stipulated our mother and father, this f*ck, will conceive). Each of us is indeed unique. The work on Tape 1 had me energized and writing, but I wrote not what I thought I should and hoped I would but only what I could.
I stayed at the typewriter for two hours, then gave up and went out on the road. On this side of the little hill past Ciceros', for the second time in my life and first time here, I saw a cuckoo. Black-billed Cuckoo is one species, Yellow-billed another; I tentatively concluded the one I saw a black-billed, not because its lower mandible was black--the yellow-billed's lower mandible is yellow--but because its wings were uniformly tan with no rufous tint to them.
By June 5th I'd not returned to transcribing and writing about transcribing Tape 1A. I'd leave what I wrote June 1 to 5 a part of Love Note till August 14, 1996, when I cut all but a few paragraphs. August 31, 1996 I cut the rest except the few sentences, amended and edited, that are in italic above.
June 6th I was back on-topic, intent on communicating the elation I'd felt May 28th at having apparently begun Love Note. I was not a writer sure of his technique and purpose. Intermittently I’d felt as though I were, but my confidence had never been long-lived, and while I had often felt (more than) good as I was writing first and other early draft, I’d learned that feeling good about it did not at all mean it in fact was any good. So? May 21 I had lain before my mirror naked, high on coke and marijuana, legs spread, feeling emotionally and physically, genitally, more than fine. I’d known--as ironically as usual--that what I was feeling was good, was love, was truth, and noticed that if I accepted the love and enlightenment I felt as real then my life wasn't going so dismally as my recently scribbled wish to die implied. On the other hand, so far in June I'd averaged maybe five hours a night of restless sleep, still had no lover other than myself, wasn't writing well, and wasn't even reading much.
With relief I hit Play, my focus again on Tape 1A:
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 [and] my whole being;
Inform 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. . .--
and the word fell apart, sexually tumbled into an "uh" "uh" "oh" of orgasm, sung, the oh higher than the uh and uh. I wanted my approval, needed it.
_____
Friday night June 10 I went to bed a bit past midnight, leaving Angus and Hettie and Joe and Dee and Steve in the living room. I'd known Steve, an unambitious, good-natured, good-hearted man, as long as I had Angus. Two generations earlier his family had lived in this house, and in 1895 one of his great uncles had been born in the kitchen. From my bedroom I could hear snatches of the living-room conversation.
"Last year he knew how to party. I guess he's getting old."
"Oh Joe," Dee said, protective of me. "You want some Steve?"
Steve: "He said help yourself."
Joe: "We're bad. We're really bad."
Angus: "Me too."
Hettie: "Well, okay."
I liked hearing them, though I could only rarely understand what anyone but Joe, who spoke the loudest, was saying. I lay with my back to my closed door, my left leg crossed over my right and raised on two extra pillows Faith had left with me. My bedroom light was on and I was hard and had my penis pushed back through my legs. I imagined one of my four or all of them--(Would I have called through the door, knowing Steve not there? Probably not, but I'd have imagined doing so as, him there, I didn't. Instead, briefly, I imagined being in love with him; or he with me; or us in love, Steve having a secret openness to men; or me his first man, as he, except technically, would be mine.)--coming in and me reading aloud the poem I was writing, my left hand behind me and holding my hard-on between my legs because with him or her or them I could. I imagined the poem would speak for me, let the scene be. As I wrote I touched my penis now and again; I wanted to be hard, in case the door did open.
Love fantasy
Sex is so innocent
Sex is innocence
Nothing so guilty
Nothing so wrong
Nothing so simple
Or right
As sex imbued with love
My loves' voices in the living room
Me here naked and imagining
Ways
###
"Love Fantasy", which I came to call "Ways," was followed on the next page by more doggerel, during the writing of which Steve left. Now only my four remained, each of whom, all of whom, I'd welcome. I began
I want to tell you something
and ended
Has poetry made speaking possible?
My light was still on when they left. I was on my back, my hand at the base of my erection. As they'd passed through the kitchen I'd looked right, towards my windows, in case one of them opened the door to offer me a final line. None did. I heard the front door open and close and looked left, away from the windows they were about to pass, through which I knew I might briefly be seen by anyone who looked while walking down the front ramp.
______
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, 28 May 2006 - 06:46 PM.
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