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            "Love," [Plato] says, "is a desire for generation and birth in beauty."  "What naivete!" say the lady experts on love, while drinking their cocktails in all the Ritz hotels of the world.

                                                Jose Ortega y Gasset

            This seems like an idiotic, juvenile diary.  I feel like I have become obsessed with woman.  It feels base, ignoble, unmanly.  I feel like it is a betrayal of Judy.  It is a throwing away of reality, a pursuit of a phantom, a Beatrice.   It is as if I'm a mad incarnation of Don Quixote, inspired this time by Dante, Stendhal, Goethe.  Stendhal's quote from The Pirate haunts me: "That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an honest manes case."  Therefore I am consumed by a need to throw myself into the dust in front of beauty?  When this unreachable beauty flees from me like a mirage....  It is a formula for despair, for the production of a Machiavelli or a Don Juan.            

I feel like I can't even get close to the inspiration that I started with, that I have no energy.  Could it be the cortisone for my frozen shoulder?  This morning I could hardly get out of bed.  It could be that the final bit of cortisone was used by my body and my adrenal glands are lazy.  But I still feel that it is mental, that physical problems amplify the underlying mental problem but don't produce anything essential themselves.   

            I am ashamed of myself for falling in love with something unattainable.  Yet shame seems to be the wrong emotion.  I feel desperate because something elemental, necessary, has eluded me.  It is that simple thing.  Not something large, like riches or fame or some form of knowledge or prestige.  But something small and obvious like a child, my own family.  But what a terrible burden to put on Judy and Andy, AND Soheila.  No woman is capable of following me into my Christ- like self- abandon, my Quixotic idiocy.  She said she didn't have an ego!  What a surprise!  What an egoistical thing to say!  How monstrously egotistical to say, "I don’t have an ego."    

            For her I am just a dream.  She remembers a few details, but essentially, only whether our encounter was good or bad - - if she remembers at all.  And for me she is - - a symbol?  Was Jung right?  Is she something as simple as the image of my feminine self, my anima?  Alone, inviolate, pure, virginal, untouchable, some Brunhilda or Isolde?  But like Quixote, I only see the beams from my own eyes?   

            She has always lied to me.  Lying is her essence:  "Your class is from 12 to 1?"  Then she avoids me.    

            I can't have passion in my life.  Always friendship.  Is friendship less than love?  Of course not.  It is essential.  Life without friendship is animalistic.   

            Love doesn't exist in America.  Woman, who is responsible, has mixed it all together with power and hypocrisy, and Don Juan is her only lover.  That is, her love is impossible.  He is a dream that can't exist, but wills his own existence through duplicity, by playing with her imagination.  Heloise and Abelard are as rare as Don Juan's women are common.  1003 in Spain alone!   

            My problem is, I am too attractive!  Like Stendhal's Lamiel, I should wear anti- makeup!!  No!!!  Just the opposite is true.  We men have to overcome a kind of UNCONSCIOUS "natural" aversion that women have developed for us.  They don’t even know it, but they are lovers of themselves at bottom.  They perpetuate the myth that beauty is essentially feminine: men are funny looking, even ugly, with skinny, hairy legs!  This narcissism is never talked about, but how obvious it is.  Many feminists even argue that women are bisexual by nature.  I've even heard that once a woman enters prison she AUTOMATICALLY becomes a lesbian.  I don’t believe that, but unless women learn to love men early, they are pulled in the direction of their mothers and sisters, and finally into their mirrors.  It is the root cause of the hostility between the sexes.  Boys and girls have mothers.  Woman, mother, is the center.  Boys must flee into the masculine world, the magical world of things, machines, balls, rules, games, war, business, art, music, literature....  Anything but the womb, home, hearth, lap, food, sustenance, the land, nature, love, sex, warmth, comfort.... All woman's domain.   

            Yet the sexes are fatally, deeply drawn together. If they don’t make the connection at the proper depth they make a shallow, even if necessary connection.  It is like water that isn't pure.  It can cause sickness while sustaining life.  It produces hypocrites and adulterers.  Because happy, connected lovers may slip into sexual adventures but they must remain mere curiosities, events that don't even come near the deeper levels of existence.  They aren't really hypocrites and adulterers!  ... Well, I don’t really believe that.  What is the meaning of Othello? or Tristan and Isolde?   

                None of this may ever be really clear and I certainly don’t want to fall into sexual mysticism, but when the call of the "blood" isn't listened to, and instead, Middle Class, safe, EXPEDIENT alliances result, there will be unhappiness.  There will be middle class happiness.  But it is unrelated to "real" happiness, or the happiness of the poets (AND the philosophers?)              I myself have willed a middle class existence, but only for the short run. One must be practical about sheer economic existence.  But I have lived in relative poverty for most of my life.  I've given up the "fast lane" for a modest existence.  I can live on nothing but I can't live without passion.  And I am NOT talking about sex.  I could have a passionate love affair with a flower.  I want feeling, devotion, love - - mysticism in life, with PEOPLE. Delicate feelings, beauty, strong feelings.  A banishment of harshness, a banishment of self- centered feeling, of self- satisfaction, or self- deception, a flowing towards the other in tender adoration, absorption in the divine other, the Unique, Mary, Christ, the divine holy Virgin, Dulcinea, Beatrice…. 

Forty Nine 

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            A long drawn out siege is humiliating to a man, whereas, on the contrary, it is very flattering to a woman.

                                    Stendhal

            The absurdity must be fathomed.  First, I have to record certain aspects, feelings, that I chose to ignore.  Like when I told her how beautiful she was and she listened almost politely and demurely as if she were discounting it all inwardly.  There was a silence, and then I said, "your beauty won't last forever you know," as a kind of further plea for her to say yes to me.  Looking at the ground, a wave of emotion overcame her, the real emotion that she was feeling, and she said, "I know."  But I must have been infinitely disappointed.  Disappointed that she wasn't mature enough after all of this time to say "yes" in some way, not just with her eyes, but with some verbal affirmation.   

            I said, "maybe you're afraid of me."  She said NO, almost indignantly, as if THAT is something that couldn’t possibly be true, but of course it made me realize that in the Middle East it certainly would be a possibility.  Then I said, "I mean you are afraid of your feelings, that your feelings are too strong."  Then again she didn't answer.  I assume that is the way we love each other.  But it could be that it is just me and I shouldn't deceive myself about that.   

            I am disappointed that I can't see her just as a friend, but the truth is that when she said it would be impossible for us to just be friends, I made no attempt to argue with her.  Anyway, I know that she really doesn't take me seriously enough.  She forgets important details.  Each time I've talked with her, I've told her clearly that if she says "yes," I might not be able to....  I'm not really clear about what it is I won’t be able to do, but I've made it clear that I too have the capacity to place distance between us.  But a young girl's heart doesn't want to hear such things.   

            She seemed genuinely shocked when I told her that I've lived with Judy for 7 or 8 years.  So I am essentially a dream for her also.      

Fifty 

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             Most people are dull in their perceptions of people, for people are the most complicated and elusive objects in the universe.

                                                Jose Gasset y Ortega

            When I said to her, in despair, "maybe you'll be able to love the next man who comes along," her body jolted.  She looked at me as if I meant it literally, as if she had misunderstood everything, as if America really is a satanic country.  I felt like I had to reassure her, to explain what I really meant.

            Well, the conclusion is as before.  She can't accept love; the experiment was a failure.  I feel humiliated!  But why, how?  By a bunch of Iranians?  And how is that possible?  Of course it isn't.  I humiliated myself by loving the unpalatable, the ungiving.  By asking for the impossible?  I won’t stoop to ask her for anything.  I'm sure that she saw me sitting in front of the cafeteria again.  I know the look of avoidance.  Everybody does.  The real question for me is, does she love me or not.  She doesn't, she is incapable.  The Iranian woman is too brutish, too uncivilized.  Never more.  I will talk to Hossein about it, but again he will have to bring it up first.  I am angry with myself.  I feel like I have to give her one more chance, but I also believe that the human form is so distinct, the human personality is so unique, that it is always recognizable by one who loves.  Even Odysseus was recognized by his dog after so many years.  But not by the aged Penelope!  What more need I say except that I chose incorrectly.  Yet I won’t close any doors, she will.    

            I really want to finish this, but it has taken on a slightly obsessive quality.  And how can it not be slightly obsessive?  After giving something importance like this, and watching it crumble into nothingness, "he waxes desperate with imagination and doth bend his eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air doth hold discourse."  I know that it will do little good to shake her from my imagination, because I have already done that.  It just seems like my life can't go on without some final almost formal closing of this episode.  It has sucked so much of my energy and thought.  It has become a kind of wound.  For example, I find myself speculating about whether she is a lesbian or not, even though I was so easily convinced that she isn't.  It feels like a kind of problem solving, or like a wound trying to expel something foreign so that it can knit itself and heal.  Again, I find myself speculating about her avoidance of me.   

            She walked by me as I was sitting on the bench in front of the cafeteria.  I saw her about fifty feet in front of me, and I'm certain that our eyes met.  She and another Iranian woman, who I assume was her sister, walked towards me, hidden behind a group of students.  Then when she came into view, about 15 feet from me, she refused to look at me, turned left, and began walking towards the bookstore.  A few minutes later they appeared on the little dirt path that serves as a short cut down to the main path.  Soheila looked so pleased with herself, so happy and unconcerned, that I felt humiliated and I knew that I wouldn't be able to stand it if she walked by me again without saying anything.  So I got up and walked in a stupid pirouette with my back to them, pretending to look at something, obviously avoiding her.   

            What it amounts to is that I feel cowardly with respect to myself: I am not certain that I am not simply playing with my imagination.  There was a kind of ugliness about her that shook me.  It was a feeling of seeing something that has been covered with diamonds before, now suddenly appear quite nakedly in its original form.  It was even a little disgusting.  She has suddenly put on weight again, and she has washed that stupid white blouse that she always wears: it was a brilliant white instead of that terrible gray that it has always been.  I found myself wondering why I loved her, a woman of so little spirit and intelligence.   

            When I was waiting for that poor student who is supposed to take a make- up exam, the one whose mother is dying of cancer, and who hadn't shown up yet, Ali walked by, looked at me, didn't recognize me at first, then gave me a big smile, a smile that is a kind of knowing smile between men, a smile that means, "we know what you are after."  I know that she has talked about this to all of them, after solemnly promising that she wouldn’t.  I even saw Vida Behnaz sitting at the table with the Iranians.  Vida, who told me she always avoids socializing with Iranians.  Zohreh has American friends now.  It is to her eternal credit that she has abandoned that stupid and fearful band of exiles.     

            I think I celebrated Judy's 50th birthday by falling in love with Soheila, which might have a fateful significance.  She and Andrea are currently working on the Wheaties jingle, obsessively, almost hysterically laughing, and assuring me that they are going to win the grand prize.  That might be a PROOF that my love has declined into an obsession.  Even THEY have been affected by it.  I am wondering if I am moving towards some stupid love affair of the body.  A body affair?    

            Waiting in line at a cafe, I found myself pleasantly looking down the front of a young Berkeley coed's blouse to what I imagined to be the disapproving look of the male "server".  It is interesting that we don't have a word for him.  He isn't a clerk or salesman.  He is a kind of servant, and we don't admit to having servants in America.  America is essentially hypocritical-Puritan, yet decadent.  The women are cold, unsexual, out of control.  They hate men for the most part.  If it weren't for brothers, how many women would be totally lost, and how many men along with them?  If a few fathers didn't see clear to really love their daughters and a few mothers their sons?  The sickness of the woman contaminates her son.  She, who can't love her husband/provider, makes her son into her lover.  It becomes a kind of fatal necessity.  But it drives the son away from women because it isn't love, but her need, a need that he can't possibly fulfill, a need that produces a kind of panic in him, a panic that he suppresses by treating woman as an animal, as an object for his sexual pleasure, something that he can control.  And then the circle is repeated with his wife and his son, or daughter.  All of the niggers of the world, and I am not referring to color, all of the pimps, the do nothings, are fucking these women and holding them in slavery.  They don't have marriages; they are in bondage.  I am left with a middle- aged woman and her daughter who have escaped such a man.  And they would say it is my choice, my fault, and that it is my mother who has killed my capacity to love.  And in my blood I believe them.  That is why my love ends in disaster, because I don't believe in its necessity or even its possibility, certainly not in its legitimacy.  I am a motherless child tossed out into the sea.

Fifty One  

                                                                        Judges 14, verse 3

(Cafe Med)

            It all sounds so hopelessly Romanesque and absurd when viewed in the light of day.  The world is so all absorbing, so full of hungry eyes.   

            The Cafe Med is the lees and dregs of the Berkeley success machine.  It is the underside of pragmatism and success.  It is a kind of sideshow.  An American hurly- burly. It stinks of the corpses of poets, philosophers, musicians, writers.   

            Why do I love Soheila?  I think it is clear.  She is tender, she loves me, but she also doesn't love me.  She needs me but I have to convince her.  And I am certain that it can't be done just as I am certain that a machine can't talk and dance.  So I am forced to continue, hopelessly.  Most people would see what I am doing as Romantic, and would pretend to themselves that it is what they want also, but in fact they want no part of passion.  Passion isn't for the middle class, and almost all Americans think of themselves as middle class.   

(Lake Merritt) 

            It seems like the lower class is the most.... The EASIEST to be with.  Bohemia is decadence.  It is middle class pusillanimity.  Even if a lower class man thinks you are a fool and loser, he knows he isn't far behind and isn't at all sure that he IS behind.   

            I have never been able to write in the Park.   

            Children enjoy the body for its own sake.  That's why there is such a fear of child molesters.  Children uncomplicate everything.  They live sub specie aeternatus.  Under the care of God who is their father and their mother.   

            I am tempted to make Soheila suffer by taking a young girlfriend.  Nothing real, but just to make her jealous.  But I don't like being at the Stage without a reason.  It doesn't feel right.  I could write there.  I could take my briefcase and base myself in the library.  Maybe all I need is a social life.  Sex itself hardly seems to be the issue.   

            I am confused.  It seems now, that the only problem is that I am hanging on to the problem.  Also, that I can't really think or write unless I am alone.  And haven't I discovered that before?  I KNOW it.  Question: is there some BETTER place to write, some REALLY secluded place?  Answer: only at home in some safe hole or other can my thoughts soar.  Alternately, I become more social, more average out here, less complicated.  It is the reason that Soheila scares me, worries me.  My passion for her isn't social, it can't stand to be with other people, it can't even think about marriage.  It was Ortega who said that love is a kind of literary genre and that it is essentially outside of society, although I can't find the passage.  Marriage is only an economic institution for the protection of children and for the continuation of the race.  Maybe the passage is from Elie Faure's Napoleon.    

            It is difficult to write in public because the act of creation or discovery, or invention, is often enough an ecstatic or depressing or startling event.  It seems to be bad taste to experience those things in public!  That is the fault of society.  Genius isn't allowed to exist in the ordinary world.  It looks pretentious, Romanesque, naive.  For the common man, everything except common sense is foolishness.   

            I have a fear of too much reading.  Is it inspired by that sad genius Don Quixote?  But all of the newspaper reading and television/radio consumption is really the same thing.  Yet the fear persists.  It is a fear of living too much in the imagination.  And it is our common fate: the average household watches over eight hours of television per day!   

            Soheila as imagination, as a focal point for the imagination.  It isn't the Jungian anima.  That assumes too much.  I don't want to deny that form of instinct, but Stendhal's process of crystallization seems better.  It is the product of imagination, and imagination is the flower of civilization.  It is the creative process itself, the essence of what is truly human.  It recreates the truth, and that is the power of fiction.   

            But Don Quixote has lost the details of his own life.  Even his horse is invisible to him.  He thinks it is a shining steed when it is really a broken down nag.  How many intellectuals have cars that remind one of Rosanante!   And even today, the pretty woman is invariably seated in some gilded chariot, while she mocks the idealistic fools.   

            But Quixote isn't stupid enough to fall for them.  There are many exquisitely beautiful women who have crooked noses or receding chins, or who are black or foreign or are large, or tall, or are missing a finger or hand.  But, alas, they too mock him behind his back.  And even to his face, but he is too foolish to see it.   

            It is my misfortune that I was a successful child and adolescent, and so my taste in women was formed according to the vain laws of success.  It took many years and much foolishness before I stumbled across a couple of good women.  It was only blind luck that prevented me from spending my whole life chasing a fat ass, a pair of big tits and a straight nose.  May the Gods be thanked!

            I've suddenly become enamored or Byron!  No, enamored isn't the right word. I've been reading Don Juan as a kind of counterbalance.  Poor Byron.  He maintains, always, that HE was harassed by women!  That he NEVER tried to seduce them, they seduced HIM.  The power of the English imagination!  How much we owe to England, and how little I've taken.   

            I am always disappointed in women.   My younger brother and his friends were young Byrons and Errol Flynns, and they treated women like whores.  It seems glamorous from a distance, but close up, it is grubby business.  My solution was to love one.  But they've all run from me or laughed at me.   

            Why SHOULD Dulcinea agree to be Quixote's lover?  Dulcie is a stupid, sweet whore.  She is often a mystic, because mysticism most closely describes her life which is a flowing and letting things happen.  She is incapable of being constant because that requires imagination and will.  She only submits.  And the hopelessly befuddled Don Quixote can't see that he has fallen in love with a whore.  Even her kindest instincts would compel her to reject him.          

            Young women have difficulty forming a deep relationship with a man because most have had no real contact with men.  Many women have had neither a brother nor a father, and if they have fathers they are often distant or virtually absent.  She accepts the young man's inconstancy as something natural and even inevitable.  She hasn't learned to relate to a man as lover.  And who can doubt that, for the most part, it is a learning experience, and one of the most pleasant at that.  I suppose I am just a selfish man: a very disappointed and frustrated teacher.      

Chapter Menu 

            The true Don Juan, unlike Stendhal, is quite different: always removed from the woman and wrapped in his cloak of melancholy, he is, more than likely, never moved to woo any woman at all.

            Don Juan is not the man who makes love to women, but the man to whom women make love.

                                                Jose Ortega y Gasset

            I need to rediscover the world after living in my imagination for 5 months.  The world is best encountered calmly: calm allows observation.  Even in the eye of the hurricane, or ESPECIALLY in the eye of the hurricane.  The world regulates itself.  The accommodation to that fact is called giving style to the personality.  It is the ability to wait, cadence, pacing.  The ability to watch without judging.  It doesn't preclude observation in action.  It isn't thought abstracted from action, but a kind of single pointedness.  Not obstinance either.  And not mysticism.  The Legalist school of China hits the mark:  Taoism in action.  Concise, clear.  The Chinese mind never falls victim to extremes of feeling.  The poetry is measured. 

Could it be that woman is completely dominated in China HENCE the lack of emotional perturbation?  It occurs to me that woman has a place almost of dominance in the West because sensuality is given such importance here.  It is the inverse image of Puritanism.  They are both aspects of the same thing.  Great ascetics are the obverse of sensualists, they are different aspects of the same inner attitude toward the senses.   

            But if woman is given all of the beauty of form and movement, if she is given all grace and desirability, then it becomes her burden and a formula for unhappiness for all of us.  And what else is Don Juan but the outcome of that?  And the longing.  The fatal man incorporates all of it.  He is after all, the victim of woman.     

I am so suggestible that I am suddenly the Fatal Man, Satan, Byron.  It doesn't fit my character because I don't want it to.  But after this fiasco with Soheila, I feel a sort of hatred for the female, the need to take revenge.  I have neither the temperament of Don Quixote nor Don Juan.   

            I feel mad, suicidal.  I am 38 years old and almost desperate, almost suicidal.  My father died at 36.  I always thought that I too would be dead before that age, and it feels like I am.  I feel defeated by this mad lust of mine.  I am consumed by visions of women in a kind of sensual hell, a kind of lesbian, onanistic sensuality that cancels man, that denies the masculine and glorifies femininity.   

            Woman crushes her true love, HER man, HER liberator, and then collaborates in her own rape by power and money.  Then she plays the part of the oppressed woman, struggling with her mad rages, hating US and licking the boots of her oppressors, cringing like a dog in front of her husband and brother, her father and even her sons.  She calls her hatred of us Woman's Liberation.   

            Suicide is so tempting.  This little family seems to be the only thing that holds me back.  And I am at the point of giving them more pain than I am worth.  So the Gods will probably perform their boring operation on me, they will make me sick in some way.  My defiance should be suicide.  Why should I want to come back?    But I know this is a mood. I am giving in to a tiredness, pain.  But the thought is there.  My bright angel doesn't exist, has never existed, is only my imagination, and that is deathly depressing.  It causes more pain than my body can register.  I can't physically experience that kind of pain.  It seems to enter into my molecules and alter the orbits of the electrons.  The quantum jumps have gone awry.  Without that bright angel, without Beatrice, my life seems like nothing.  But I know that I am Beatrice, I am Dulcinea, and that is just as painful.  Christ/Dulcinea, Our Lord, our example.  And those Spaniards with their nobles:  El Cid, Don Juan, Don Quixote.  The Christian land defining itself against Islam, the womanless religion.   

            I have such a beatific vision of the Middle Eastern slave- woman Soheila, that the renunciation of it brings me back to myself and the sense of my heroic destiny, but along with it, the vanity of all heroism, the futility of all striving.  Because Soheila will not love me, ever, in any form, I am brought back to some black place of despair, I become Satan, the fallen Angel, the absolutely despised, unloved.  I too then am illusion, I too am unattainable in my sultry, moody isolation, my splendid, beautiful isolation.  If Soheila can't love me then the burden shifts to my shoulders.  I have to BECOME the longing, the unapproachable, the forbidden, along with the bad, undesirable, ugly, sinful.  Hell's Angel, Mephisto, the Devil himself.

            I have certainly succeeded in blocking her from my mind.  Dulcinea, Christ, Beatrice, have taken her place.  The one last image of her, fatter than she was, lying eyes and face pretending not to see me, THAT face will live forever in my memory.  THAT face.  The other will return to ME, will BECOME me.  Soheila returns to the crowd of Middle Eastern sensualists.  Unprincipled, hypocritical, mewling, pulling sycophants.  Terrified of all authority, their defiance becomes suicidal rage, destruction of themselves and all that they love.   

            Defiance is my element: Rebellion.  Let the East wallow in its mature sensualism, its wise fatalism, let the dogs rut, let the slut grunt on her bed of pleasure and cringe before her little Shah with his absurd lust for power.  Let my passion, that prayer to beauty, that ecstasy, be taken back up into myself in blaze of fire.  Let THEM destroy themselves.    

            Riding my motorcycle with my leather jacket makes me realize the extent to which people see only images.  It is the black man's problem.  People, and I mean all of us, are so dependent on symbols to form judgements that we hardly see details.  I think it is also true that what we SEEM to be, we are often obliged to BECOME.  That is a reason for wearing disguises, so that we can be sure to fight this force that pushes us into BEING what we appear to be.  People don't disguise themselves enough, they aren't experimental enough.  I think, of course, that they disguise themselves unconsciously, but not with thought-out purpose.  For instance, there is a great deal of posing in Berkeley.  The "look" is Thoreau's bare- essentials man, but the reality is middle class comfort.  And there is a kind of scorn attached to the really individual type.  Anyone who is really different is treated with a kind of contempt.  Just as the hippie was before the "revolution" of the sixties.   

                First impressions, thus, are often entirely misleading because of semiconscious or forgotten needs that people have to appear other than they really are.  Which is almost the definition of hypocrisy, if one appends the result of having your cake and eating it too.  The symbolic representation of what we are by our dress is no trivial matter either: wearing a General's uniform if one isn't a General is a crime of the highest magnitude.  Clothes are capable of expressing the most minute differences in rank.  One only need think of the elaborate dress codes of the old European Aristocracies.   

Fifty Three