"But now,
my son, listen to me, attend to what I say: do not let your heart entice you
into her ways, do not stray down her paths; she has wounded and laid low so
many, and the strongest have all been her victims.
Her house is the way to hell, and leads down to the halls of death."
Proverbs
When I said, "no! in JANUARY,"
then I burrowed into her eyes as if to say, "what is wrong with you woman?"
THEN I showed my pain and annoyance.
She felt it and stammered, "no, I mean
Well, the Englishwoman will make her
suffer. I gave her a friendly look mixed
with hurt. I let her see who and what
I am. A look is everything. She will NOT forget. She will hate the Iranian bitch. God how those animals deserve it.
Leila has gone back to
Yet I am NOT unhappy, depressed.
I am really relieved. I am depressed about the craziness of my love
life, my incapacity to stir passion, to invoke it with my own.
Leila's passion was too much for me.
I turned my back on her, and when I looked back again it was too late.
She wouldn't meet my eyes. I betrayed
her for a woman that they all know is a fool.
When I learned that she had returned to
The Gods are bitterly harsh. Life is so unanswerably confused and difficult.
I CAN'T allow myself to love Soheila now, because even if she said yes, it would
be disastrous. I would be loving a monster!
How can it be that I allowed my heart
to go towards a woman who is so much a PEASANT. It was the French conversation class. It is Courant's fault! HE loved her.
HE, out of his North African Moslem heart, HE loved her. And I caught the passion as a kind of disease,
even as a kind of self-indulgence. Isn't
Nietzsche right -- the degree of the fantasy reflects the degree
of self-dissatisfaction.
I just observe myself. I observe myself with amazement. 38 years old. Almost 40! And THIS! True Stendhalian. This was such a valuable lesson!! It has taken me so long to learn. I needed the foreign culture so that I COULD
make this kind or error. I couldn't make
an error like this with an American woman.
Could it be that women misunderstand
passion because they are too close to it? Because
it is their "domain," and as Appolinaire said "even the ugliest have made SOME lover
suffer?"
Many women don't feel or REQUIRE passion,
yet they don't know it. The difference
between friendship and passion isn't understood by them. They have friendship and animal sex, but not
passion. Byron's friend Hobhouse said,
"we are friends. I love him more than anyone else in existence, and I think
he loves me in the same degree." He
was obviously referring to the love of friendship. I make no judgement concerning
the question of latent homosexuality, but it seems clear to me that love is
being used to define a great friendship. It is not NECESSARILY sexual. Most women think of this as "passion love"
because they have only a rudimentary notion of what friendship is. They simply haven't had the thousands of years
of experience that men have had in armies, religious orders, governments, etc.
Byron's woman biographer used this quote to "prove" his latent
homosexuality but it only proves HER latent homosexuality because it tells me
that she couldn't have a friendship as strong as theirs without sexualizing
it. She doesn't even have imagination
enough to think of the lifelong relationships of brothers and sisters as proof
that such relationships are common.
Passion-love is a kind of animal
fury that can reach the heights of ecstasy and the depths of agony, and in the
best people is mixed with all of the sweetest attainments of Western Civilization
-- as exemplified in music, poetry, literature, painting.
But it isn't superior to that measured love called friendship, and ideally
it contains it, or possibly evolves into it.
But it is more organic, more of a choice of the deepest parts of us,
the choice for a certain kind of human being.
It is a kind of reordering of the elements of our being where there is
a moving of our center to the center of the loved one, and a deep revitalization
of all existence. It is an experience that is denied to all but
the few. I have come close to it, and
had it at times when I hardly knew it. But
clearly, I am not chosen by the Gods for this, which is one of their greatest
gifts. Even Wotan gave one of his eyes
for it.
It could be that I thought Soheila
was safe, easy. I don't know.
I should see without self-deception that I have a kind of hunger
for a fresh young face and body.... and that isn't easy to face squarely in
myself. I had better face it
I could try for a real SEDUCTION: I
could wait and pick up the pieces next year, possibly, but then I would despise
her, use her and throw her out. Do I
need THAT? Obviously not.
A few more details and one major occurrence,
recorded one day and one night after the event. The young idiot was wearing a wedding band,
and was dark but not Middle Eastern. Probably
a mixture of Italian, Mexican, etc. She used him to emphasize that she wasn't responding
to me, as if she was deliberately trying to hurt me, humiliate me.
Major point: this searing, difficult
encounter, this nadir of the relationship took place at about a quarter to one.
I didn't learn until after I finished the last entry in the diary yesterday,
that my mother took a fall at the hospital almost exactly at that time and after
breaking her arm, went into shock. She
said that her vital signs were gone, and they thought that she was close to
death. When I asked her what time she fell, she said
at about a quarter to one. Is it really
possible that my pain, my cry for love, was so intense that it was felt by her
20 miles away, and sent her into a self-destructive leap into the void
for guilt over the absolute failure of her love for me, and as a response to
this latest tragedy of my heart? God
knows that even though there was nothing physical between Soheila and me, the
heart went through its paces, and the ending was brutal, ugly, Middle Eastern,
cruel, merciless, unloving, a product of the desert of the human soul. My cry of pain was inward, silent, but must
have shot out into the universe. Could
there POSSIBLY be a physical explanation? We
were in the basement of the "Tower," a 25 story building on the highest
hill of State! Or.... but how could such
a COINCIDENCE occur? I don't believe
in these kinds of things, but I can't ignore the fact. I just record it. Even if it is a coincidence, a bad joke of the
universe, I feel that I can't forgive her for it. The heartless and cruel ORIENTAL response of
the Moslem woman responding to my cry in the wilderness with her cruel Moslem
sword. Her fanatical self-centered,
self-sufficiency reducing Christian love to martyrdom, masochism, stripping
me of any need or reason to love her, and so I said anyway, as an ironical parting
and final leave taking, "it was nice to see you again."
I think this coincidence? -- I will simply record it as a piece of data -- will somehow change my feeling for Soheila at the deepest level, will signify the real parting, the organic parting, a parting that the deepest levels of my self will experience. These things are like storms or catastrophes of nature. The most massive trees are uprooted, and rivers change their course, while the grass and many seemingly insignificant things remain, endure. Even now nature obliges me by providing the living metaphor of a raging rainstorm, the first real storm of the year, the day after my fiasco.
I am less tempted, of course, to count
this storm as somehow connected to my emotional life!? But the other gives me pause. How easy it must have been for the ancients
to believe in magic. Yet we can't know
if there is a power of the mind that we haven't yet measured. One need only think of the yogi to at least
open the door to these possibilities.
Oscar Wilde's consolation(?):
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Love
is the marvel of civilization. One only
finds sensual love of the coarsest kind amongst savage or too barbaric peoples.
Stendhal
I think it has to be realized, or simply
admitted and talked about: women sell themselves for power. There can hardly be a question when you simply
look around and see all of the women who stoop to relate to men who are clearly
beneath them. They call it making a good
marriage.
Women make fools of themselves over
powerful figures: rock stars, sports heroes, movie stars, politicians, rich
men. Elvis Presley had so many women that it became
a comedy, and finally a tragedy. Mick
Jagger, John Lennon, Sammy Davis Jr., Jack Kennedy, Wilt Chamberlain are just
a few of hundreds or even thousands of such men. Why lie about it to ourselves? We talk about pornography and the degradation
of women, but miss the point entirely. Women
are also involved in this selling of themselves, this relating to men as sex
objects. It isn't simply men who demand
that of women. And it occurs at all levels
of society: female students flirting with professors, nurses with doctors, stewardesses
with pilots. A woman has the same unerring
sense for a man's power as a man has for feminine beauty.
I don't think I've ever been approached
by a woman directly except at a dance, or, obviously, by a prostitute.
And the crassness of prostitutes just underlines the problem.
It isn't just men who harass women with phrases like, 'how about some
pussy,' etc. Prostitutes say exactly
the same things. They harass men sexually
just as their male counterparts harass women.
And what is prostitution but a heavy-handed, lower class manifestation
of this same power-beauty game?
Could this be a simple manifestation
of historical inertia; that women simply continue in these roles in the same
way that we continue to read newspapers and drink coffee in the age of computers
and genetic engineering?
Puritanism lingers in
Women were the majority in the Churches then, just
as they are today. Women were the moving
force behind prohibition, just as they spearhead the drive against pornography
today. They call it the degradation of
women. But it is just the same battle
against primitive sexuality as Puritan woman has always waged. It is her will to power. Its aim is to break the instinctive sex-love
bond and replace it with the "good marriage," respectability, and
the power-beauty exchange. They
conspire with the powerful man, who plays his Romantic games, blinded to the
role that his power and money play in the recruitment of his harem. Love, unconnected to economic gain, would diminish
them both.
And Iranian women? For over two thousand years they have been torn from their families and sold into the slavery of the powerful. The Shahs and their harems were more brutal than anything we can imagine in the West. And the thousands of little Shahs in their little families are just as tyrannical as the big Shah. Why can't woman rebel? Not why didn't she rebel in the PAST, but why doesn't she rebel TODAY?
But a Proust
will sacrifice everything in order to reach imprisoned loveliness
André
Maurois
What is the Other if not a possibility
for me of passion, of unpredictability? If I wall myself off from others, how can I
experience them? If I want them to be safe, unthreatening, what will I experience?
What will WE experience? The mirror! Yet common wisdom tells us that people who
start conversations with strangers are over the edge of loneliness and need:
they are to be feared and avoided. But
as any good seducer knows, one must view the great mass of "people out
there" as a sea for fishing in, a sea with strange and exotic life forms,
a sea that always has the capacity to replenish us, that knows how to provide
just what is needed if only it can find takers worthy of its largess.
When women fall in love they need a
great occasion. Don Juan always provides
the occasion because he is eternally and ecstatically in love. Yet it is a circular process. It is curious that Byron said that women besieged
HIM, that he never chased THEM. It is
just as possible to see Don Juan as a creation of woman, a condition imposed
on a man by women. It explains the phenomenon
of Victor Hugo having a different woman every night for two years.
His great fame was the occasion. It was the catalyst that unleashed the torrent
of feminine sensuality, the stick figure that drew the lasciviousness and essential
aggressiveness of feminine sexuality to it.
If Don Juan didn't exist, woman would create him. He is the projection of their deepest and most repressed instinct: what man could be more aggressive and obsessive in the pursuit of a woman, more insistently and obscenely lascivious when he senses the nearness of victory, than a lesbian in pursuit of another woman?
Lack of confidence
makes a lover suspect sinister things of his beloved
Stendhal
The above is tame. Why? Because
it was written in a cafe with a young girl looking over my shoulder.
I think a great deal of modern writing is done under similar conditions.
I suspect that almost all of the women's
literature is worthless. It is either
pathological or very good. I need excellence
and truth. But it is interesting to look
at these attempts. After all, most writing
is not excellent or great. There are many noble attempts and they are always
worth SOMETHING.
Violence. I
feel a lot of violence and selfishness in women. Women are self-centered and irresponsible
children. In the realm of sex, a man
always has to harden his feelings towards woman, the bitch in heat, because
she has an absolute need to triumph in that realm. The myth that women submit to men is an odd
inversion of the truth: "Beauty all their means, power all their ends."
When a woman has her child, if she
is able financially, she dispenses with man altogether. Women will create a scarcity of sex and then
demand from men that they value it above everything else. They MUST DOMINATE SEXUALLY at all costs.
The male orgasm must always come first because power over him is infinitely
preferable to sexual satisfaction.
Woman has no morality in sex because
Christianity has always considered sex an evil in itself, useful only for procreation.
Woman has been seen as either evil temptress or Madonna.
Satan is a man with a cloven hoof. There
are no rules for something that is inherently evil.
Rape is equated with murder, child molesters are monsters worthy of castration:
extremists and women who are not afraid to voice their deepest feelings always
offer castration as the punishment of preference for men they consider to be
sexual psychopaths.
Homosexuality is their secretly preferred
sexual expression because they can never forget their earliest and deepest love,
their mothers. Woman's body is the desired
object, and it is used as a weapon in the war of the sexes.
It doesn't occur to women that men are often far more beautiful than
they are. Men are seen as simply more
animalistic. They are hairy and coarse,
their skinny legs and thinning hair are ridiculed as ugliness itself, they are
said to have no capacity to express feelings.
Woman's sexual feelings are projected in mass towards pseudo-masculine
images of themselves as feminized Rock stars, while the male body builder, the
obviously exaggerated image of ideal masculine beauty, the man that one might
expect to be the masculine counterpart of the Playbunny, is ridiculed and disdained
with open, unashamed contempt.
Amour
Fati Nietzsche I feel myself to be little different
from when I was in my 20's with regard to women. That is, I feel the same callousness, the same
haughty indifference and air of self-sufficiency, the same essential
lack of interest. I find myself looking
at women who are unattractive and finding them desirable. They are desirable because they are scarce.
In my age of mastery, I feel confident in my powers, my attractiveness,
yet I feel myself blocked by essential female narcissism.
There is another Middle Eastern type
sitting at the table across from me who can hardly look at me. She is glued to her newspaper, she can't look
up, can't look at me. At the same table
a young man is reading a book. They
haven't said a word. Are they friends,
married (?), strangers? A 45 year old man talks about his fishing trip
to an uninterested, unattractive, overly made-up 35 year old woman who
is wearing 4 or 5 rings including a garish wedding ring. He is wearing a wedding band. He is better looking but 10 years older. He seems silly, masturbatory, without passion.
So does she. There are four lone men here also.
Very typical. The 45-year-old says, "you get better mileage on your motor home than I do on my sports
car." Are they married to each
other? And who cares. I am obsessed by the feminine soul, their capacity
for worship, their capacity for passion, for suffering at the hands of the
man they love. When women run towards men, isn't this
their pathology? When they run from
the passion they inspire towards a passion they would like to inspire, isn't
that the beginning of tragedy? But isn't passion always ridiculous?
Isn't passion that which overlooks defects that are obvious to everyone
else? I am amazed at the segregation of the
sexes. And the number
of lone men. They outnumber even male pairs by 3 to 1. And the women, usually in
pairs but also alone, often. They
walk alone, jog alone, eat alone. That is why I am left with the feeling that
one must I am almost ashamed to BE