Flowers for the Tomb of Hafiz II

I put all to the test...I find woman more bitter than death; she is a snare, her heart a net, her arms are chains. He who is pleasing to God eludes her, but the sinner is her captive.

When I feel this loss, this "heart break," my system slows down until it resembles depression, yet isn't. It is a lowering of vitality brought on by the crushing of one's vital center. What is usually guarded has been exposed and then crushed. The intellect can easily analyze it. The experience seems trivial to the intellect. It is practical. If there were a need for true economy, real "naturalness," then the intellect would, and does, offer the solution of masturbation.

Man-ape, Don Juan disguised as husband, priapus/Croessus, pimp, stockbroker, "Moneybags himself (!)," are woman's gods. The heart of nature seems to be dead, civilization finished, the ape has returned to live in the glass walled beehive leaving the libraries and coffeehouses, the parks and beaches and flophouses to its creators.

Love, friendship, heroism, those "peers of antiquity," are embers in the campfires of the men and women who are close to the earth, who scorn Mammon.

However the lost battles of the heart can be crushing in their inner weight and momentum even if outwardly they seem of no consequence: we know that the Don would laugh contemptuously, would arrange some phony marriage, or more accurately, would allow his lady to fabricate some cunt-inspired arrangement that she could call marriage, then after a few days or months he would be off, leaving her a few hundred thousand dollars. He might even pay her regular visits so that she could pretend to her relatives and children that she is married.

The feeling I have is that moods are physiological. But my thought is that they aren't. Thought and feeling still at war. It seems so trivial once it is in black and white. Philosophy itself seems trivial: we are all animals, death is the end, our lives are a dream provoked by our bodily sensations and impulses and shaped by the dreams of our friends and relatives and the books we read. Thought simplifies. Art, the dream, symbolize, but life itself remains irreducible, ITSELF. Intuitively we grasp it. We accept it or live it.

Every man remembers his mother as the source of love, as do women themselves. Through identification, it is THEY, mother/daughter who dispense and distribute love, choose lovers, reject lovers.

If a woman seduces an adolescent boy he is considered lucky! But if a man seduces a girl he can be put in prison for 20 years. And conversely, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," yet when a woman scorns a man's advances, she will even add that he is sexually HARASSING her! How can such a double standard still exist?

Yet: Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tristan and Isolde...

Others when casting dice have struck fortune; my grief-stricken heart it was that cast for more grief.

I feel that she is in complete control, that she is playing with me and assumes that I have no real power at all. Yet she is foreign, doesn't understand me or US, and oddly enough, it is clear that she would do well to have me as a friend and lover. So her behavior is odd, self-destructive, irrational.

It isn't until I'm almost 40 that I am able to see that she MUST love me, that I can DEDUCE that she loves me. But I still feel out of control: I have done everything to seduce HER, yet I have obtained nothing.

And I see a ravishing girl in the restaurant, with black curly hair like Soheila's, and with the same white skin, but she is an American. She has an ugly little mulatto girl child of about 5 and a horribly ugly black husband who sits mutely with the rest of the ballet crowd. They listen to her talk. OF COURSE they all royally ignore the little girl.

So I am depressed. Upset. Even devastated. Not because I can't have Soheila. Why is it assumed that I really WANT her? I've told her repeatedly that even if she says "yes," I might retreat. I've told her repeatedly about Judy and Andy. She had the audacity to tell me that even though she has changed and that she is going out now, she wouldn't go out with ME after the way I acted! I shot back that I wouldn't necessarily go out with her either.

Yet I was nice to her. My instinct is to take revenge. She was mean to me the last time I saw her, yet I was polite, even friendly, and made no attempt to break through her wall of distance. She said and did things that were absolutely gratuitously hostile. She stabbed me with a knife and I can't forget that it was then that my mother fell and broke her arm, went into shock, and felt that she was dying.

It might be amusing to take revenge on this Iranian vixen, whore, this "virtuous" temptress. But I still see an angel!! Why? HOW?

I assume SHE feels this great womanly need to be in control, a need to stop this impossible relationship, to staunch this wound before we bleed to death!!

But I know what absurd messes women make of their lives. Make THEMSELVES. Because they don't allow themselves to be carried away by love. There is always something that isn't quite right. Then they go to the other extreme and marry the "black man." Because they think they can control him. His "love" is merely subjugation to them.

The women in my life. They were in control. They left me when THEY were ready. Whether they left me because they hated me, loved me, felt it was impossible for us, it was always THEY who left me.

And there are so many women who chase pleasure without caring what color it is or what it looks like, its sexual classification, whether it is a green shoot or a dry branch. Yet they are virtuous hypocrites and full of pious platitudes and scurrilous slander when a man attempts to thwart their will to power in the realm of sex: we are called male chauvinist, sexual harasser, creep, jerk, weirdo, stalker, pig, rapist, child molester.

A man rarely shows anything but politeness and embarrassment for a woman who tries to seduce him. A young man can often be cajoled into making love to ANY woman if she is reasonably attractive. But most men won’t go to the DISGUSTING EXTREMES that women go to. They REQUIRE a certain physical attractiveness. A book of advice to women says that a man's looks are IRRELEVANT as long as he is NEAT AND CLEAN. It makes me think of a prostitute examining the genitals of a prospective customer.

There is evidence that women, on the average, are far more lascivious than men: the very large number of women who are prostitutes (officially or unofficially), the virtual universality of lesbianism in prisons, the uncountable number of groupies that harass rock stars, movie actors, athletes, and other visible men in power. Let's just say that Don Juan has a bad rap, a VERY bad rap, and be done with it.

With each amorous glance your eyes cause blood to flow but when does the drunken slayer grieve for his chance victim?

After hearing Pope's rendition of the magnificent letters of Heloise to Abelard, I am ashamed of myself. I can only see myself as small and petty for giving so much to such a woman.

It was the same -- no, only similar, with Cynthia. It IS possible to see great beauty in a plebeian soul. God how I have been forced to learn that lesson. I have looked for a kind of purity and virtue combined with, or reflected in a beautiful face. Cynthia was never so pure. But Soheila was. Or at least I thought so. I can see now that I was wrong. She said she didn't have an ego. I should have confronted her for such a monstrously egotistical statement. I've never been able to understand why I don't confront her when she says something that is so obviously self-deluded. It must be the extraordinary beauty. Rilke's angel:

I've only talked with her three times, at length, since the fateful meeting. Altogether, I have talked to her 3 times for about an hour each, once for two and a half hours, twice for about 20 minutes, and two or three times for about 5 minutes. Then there were the many brief conversations in Courant's tiny French class. She sat next to me most of the time until I imagined that she saw.... Well, it doesn't matter now. That is the extent of my "great love." Those times are ALL of the times I have ever talked to her. So there you have it. And the many meetings with our eyes. We were in love from the beginning. Who was THAT woman? SHE seemed ready to answer me.

I'm certain that she is an accomplice in "our crime." It is the Iranian culture that prevents her from loving me. The Moslem woman is forced to be a kind of beast of burden. A whore in youth, an all suffering mother in middle age, a creature created for the sexual pleasure of man, a slave.... So she is a sweet hypocrite, just barely concealing the poisonous hatred of revenge.

Well, I am tired and confused. I'm not adding anything to this. It is only a minor tragedy, a replay. Love's Labor Lost. Is it my destiny? But I love. I love Judy and Andy. But this other thing? This deep note that seems to sound unheard, that seems to draw no responsive chord from another soul. That is the pain. It is this loneliness, the unanswered ecstasy, delight, passion. This exquisite longing. The loneliness chills the soul, enters into the body and causes a slowing down, almost a paralysis. It is the economy of the prisoner in his cell, the animal hibernating. One hopes, maybe LONGS FOR spring.

So it still isn't clear why I need Beatrice. But I suppose it must be just that I need a gentle woman who will accept my love, and more important, give love in return. Darlene was unobtainable. Then Joanna. And Kathy. They were all unobtainable preadolescent loves. I quaked when they came near me. In junior high school, there was an angelic blond whom I loved to distraction. An "older woman," she was one grade above me. I loved her from a distance for two years. I never talked to her. She had gym class the same hour as I did, and every day I watched for her to come out of the gym in her blue shorts and then disappear into the exercise room. When the girls played outside, I watched her as much as I could without drawing attention to myself. Her name was Louise Chapelain. Even now it sounds beautiful. Then, it WAS beauty. I can't really convey the love I felt for this young girl. Then, one terrible day, something happened that sent shivers of delight into my soul and must have caused her a sweet and painful adolescent shame. A girl came up behind her, and while she, Louise, pretended not to notice me, the girl deftly, swiftly pulled her pants down around her knees. Louise pulled them back almost immediately but not before I saw everything, and was eternally grateful. Well, I'm enjoying this too much! But the image of that beloved young girl still lives in my memory.

But all my loves weren't dreams. Jane Morgan, the beautiful Jewess, was both a friend for all three years of junior high school, and the object of my deepest love. Of course I never declared my love to her. I hinted to her, but she never encouraged me to go further. She was my first real disappointment. She was the head cheerleader, and I was the best athlete! I loved her and she didn't love me. Her parents were both killed in a Nazi concentration camp. She was raised by her grandparents. I loved her very much. I would have given anything for her love.

I believe that the universe is a great machine, and "whirl is king," but I have had coincidences in my life that baffle my understanding. I was 22 years old, at State, standing in the hallway with my beautiful Kathy O'Conner, at the top of the stairs. We had made love for the first time the night before. It was my first love affair. Jane appeared. I hadn't seen her since junior high school, and I haven't seen her since that day. Her thick black hair and radiant energy and, I think, her love engulfed me. We spent twenty minutes or a half-hour telling each other the essentials of our lives, probably all the time that anyone needs. She wore a large diamond ring, was married to a lawyer, and was getting her elementary school teaching credential. I was getting a degree in mathematics and was standing next to a tall, blond beauty who obviously loved me. Kathy went to class and we talked there in the stairwell, alone. And then she moved away, forever. Like Wotan, I would have given one of my eyes for her love that day. But I knew that she would disappear from my life forever. And I suppose Kathy saw my desperation, and knew then that there was something in me that she would never touch.

When soul and heart are ash from longing for you, what use are your seductive words?

Judy. We didn't start as star-crossed lovers. It started slowly, tentatively. Then there was the jealousy: Princess ---------. I came so close to loving that woman. But there was the misunderstanding. And afterwards she allowed herself to think she loved me! But she faltered in front of that one question. Our fates hung in the balance of her answer, and she pretended to misunderstand. I couldn't know that she thought that I was guessing her true identity and that she was trying desperately to escape from the burden of her name. I, fool that I was, thought that she was rejecting me. I was declaring my love and SHE, proud, stupid woman, was ignoring ME. Princess ------------, you were so haughty, and you wounded my pride. Like a fool, I rushed out of the room. And then, maliciously, Judy revealed your name. Of course, then I thought it was impossible. But I was just a coward. If I had any wisdom at all, I would have gone back to you and asked you again. "Are you...” I wouldn't have stopped there. I would have continued. "Are you at all AVAILABLE?" Did you really think that I was asking, "Are you Princes -------?" No, you too knew. You also were a coward, a fugitive from love. And you pretended afterward that there was hope. Certainly after I ran and didn't look back. Then you lied to yourself in earnest. And I was certainly an accomplice. Like a fool, I have always refused to beg abjectly for my happiness. And then you sent those stupid messages to me, those messages that I felt so virtuous and strong ignoring. I was telling you that I can defy a Princess. I can defy riches. Can't you see that I was trying to prove to you that I was worthy of your love?

I understand Soheila and you and me. We are all cowards. And I who love you so much am the worst of all. Because I love the most, I suffer the greatest pain and guilt over our failure. I should have sacrificed anything for that love, and I didn't.

Judy and I never had that longing, the distance, the intimacy that comes from the bridging of the impossibility. But I feel that Judy loves me. Is it just that I STILL can't accept love? Soheila would be impossible. I couldn't possibly live with her. And that is MY impotence. My love is my failure, my weakness, my dissatisfaction with myself. I want to forget her, but I need her. I want Judy to be that. But it is like blindness. Only Soheila can see my need. But she runs from it and Judy can't see it.

It is a mystery. I know that Soheila is a passionate, unformed.... ANIMAL. She is too weak for me. I am ashamed. Don Juan will hurt her, will wound her. She has caused me so much pain.

Is she a hypocrite? I can hardly bear to think of her as a blond. I can hardly bear to imagine it. And then I feel like a fool. Is it possible that she is a whore? And why should I be so hurt and sad? It is only my delusion, my stupid love that hurts me so.

To see man as a bug, to be unable to take inspiration from my masters. My mother with her broken arm and her hundreds of thousands of dollars. A woman who has substituted money for love. I feel guilty for telling her that I hate her, that I can't forgive her. Am I taking revenge on her for Soheila, Doris, and for all of the self-centered, hypocritical women that I hate, the women who have damaged me? But I am ashamed for wanting revenge on an old woman. To what purpose? That she gave me life instead of nothingness? I am relieved to write off my inheritance even though I don't think she will do it. I don't want her money and it is a relief to say it.

I should punish Soheila, not my mother. No, I should punish them both, ALL women who are like that. How can you love the good if you don't hate the bad?

Well, I've become ridiculous. I can't rise because I haven't conserved my sexual energy. It must be this easy domestic sex! I need to build my testosterone levels so that I can rise again. How Freudian! I need to transmute sexual energy into the energy to live, to CREATE. I need to feel life in my veins. To create is to fuck. What did Plato call love? The desire to fuck oneself into immortality through beauty? It probably sounds more profound in Greek.

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Her house is the way to hell, and leads down to the halls of death.

Proverbs

This seems to be creating in me the desire for many women. If I can't create passion with one woman, then I want to steal it from many. But I am living my life backwards. In my 30s I lived with a woman in her 40s and in my 40s I want to live with....

I have a kind of self-loathing. It is State. It isn't that young women are especially attractive to me. But I am surrounded by them. I hate the never ending temptation, the beautiful young faces, the hypocrisy. They are passionate yet conservative. They pretend to be virtuous but they are giving themselves to pimps, rich men, playboys.

I am livid with rage. Mathematics teacher, computer science teacher. It is dry, hard work. There is no money. Women avoid it like the plague. And me. I AM the plague. I am living with an older woman. I've just given in to easy sex. I should have let my sexual energy build. I should have fought for the woman of my desire without regard for anything else. I would have perished in the effort, but anything is preferable to this boredom. I would have ended in Vietnam if I had dropped out of college, or ended in jail for rape. Now after 20 years of thinking and reading I am ready! I feel nothing but the rage to live and will die of nothing but the rage to live. Well, this is obviously just spleen. But spleen is something.

I've never taken Don Juan any more seriously than Carmen.

Maybe I'm just depressed because I don't have my own family. My own children. I mean biologically speaking. Isn't there some profound need to reproduce yourself physically? But every time I analyze that in any depth it seems absurd.

It is partly ego. I get nothing from the world for having a woman who is 11 years older than me. But that is stupid also. I know it is really just that I need a woman like my neurotic mother, and Soheila, (the Persian woman!), is enough like her to satisfy my limbic system, while Judy doesn't resemble her at all, and therefore depresses that hoary lizard.

My sex life centers too much on fantasy. That depresses me. I seem to be attracted to the youngest of women. Women who I could hardly say three words to. My fantasies always center around the most absurd seduction scenes. The women are almost always young, and they are so excited by me that I can give them orgasms by whatever I choose to do. I am always in control. Sometimes I imagine a preadolescent or adolescent girl who is so excited by the danger and newness and forbidden aspect of sex that she feels the most intense and ecstatic sensations at whatever I choose to do to her. Or I imagine lesbian scenes where the women begin sweetly making love to each other, progressing slowing and steadily to passionate breast sucking and mutual masturbation and finally to furious cunt licking and a kind of animal abandon where each represents the consenting mother, where each gives the other permission to the most intense vibrating orgasm. They go back and forth in my imagination battling one another for domination with their tongues, until one, usually the youngest and most voluptuous, lies back and gives in to the unbearable intensity of her orgasm. Then I begin to have my orgasm while the second woman and then all three of us have the most powerful mutual orgasm.

My depression comes from thinking that I should have that kind of intense sex in my life. But my intellect tells me that it is ridiculous. So my body torments me with desire. No, my mind is the true tormenter. It is LOVE that I want. Without love I am REDUCED to this kind of sensualism.

Richard Burton said to his wife, Lee Strasberg, "I feel that without alcohol I'll bore people to death, that I was meant to be nothing but a professor of English literature boring a lot of grubby boys." Instead of countering his fear of sobriety, this excellent woman is afraid that he won’t love her if he stops drinking. I envy him.

Am I dead? Are there any live coals in the ashes of my life or is it simply finished? This is my VACATION. Three months. It is more than half-finished and I am prostrate. Yet I detest going back. I hate this dry, scholarly life. I have to put myself in the ugly hurricane of computer science 1983. A meaningless, heartless existence. All I can do is ward off old age with exercise and vitamins. I am not allowed to LIVE. All I am allowed is MIDDLE CLASS life. Practical good sense. Solidity. No lyricism, no poetry, tragedy, heroism. Just practical wisdom, self-preservation. "It's impossible Jim, it won’t work!" I feel like screaming to the world that nothing important ever works, nothing truly great is ever practical. But nobody will hear that. Therefore we are all going crazy sitting in our houses, going to bookstores, coffee houses, libraries. This civilization is intolerable. This kind of life is brutal. It’s like being in a cage. It produces vitriolic rage, which has no real target and so turns to apathy. The television is the American obsession, the ugly drug, masking this vacuity, producing the masturbatory dream, providing something to come to. Because there isn't anything to come to. There isn't any passion. Passion is either craziness or it is codified by some "rolfed" automaton who bellows in rhymes to the walls of his cage, who, conscienceless, spits his soul into some approved receptacle.

And now, at the dead center of my repose, at the bottom, with the clear sight of my cold, icy winter, my midnight, in the middle of my VACATION, will I find the strength, the rage, the embers of life? Will I begin to climb? Or will I die, or fall through to unexpected depths?

The empty energy of those caught in the phony empty drama. I've tried Yoga. But Yoga seems to be nothing more than an obvious means to power by becoming crafty, by becoming the stillest of observers, by watching the most diligently for the main chance. I have gotten a great deal from Raja Yoga. But, at bottom it seems to be nothing more than a variation of the asceticism of the Middle Ages, or the doctrine of The Vanity of All Things. But the regulation of consciousness through immobilizing the posture, stilling the mind and controlling breathing can amplify the existence of man as observer. It allows clear vision even in the hurricane of existence. Driving cab at night in Oakland should qualify one on that point. It was then that I practiced Raja Yoga the most diligently. I found also that it doesn't necessarily mean that one becomes a sexual ascetic. I found that if I didn't masturbate, my sexual energy was both intense and in the control of my will. Sexual possibilities, that is, relationships with women, or I should say, women who were in great sexual need, presented themselves regularly. But I WANTED to control myself because they were all inappropriate for me. I resist Yoga now. I think it is possible that it might open an even deeper chasm. I resist becoming even wiser than I am: I resist becoming a saint. Certainly I resist the fate of Abelard! I don't want to succumb to a "lucky charm" and enter a dark cave, convinced that I am immune to the danger. All dark caves should be entered with open eyes and with courage.

I feel that I am one of the most intelligent men in America, yet oddly enough I know that isn't saying a great deal: in the 18th century I would have many peers and men and women to look up to.

But my relatively great intelligence should be used to convince the gods, who are presumably arguing my case right now, that my life should be allowed to continue, no matter what happens. If I should be led to the abduction of a virgin, the gods must still decide in my favor because I am one of the wisest, deepest men in America. I am the flower of American Civilization. I have grown out of the swamp. The gods HAVE to preserve me. If I am allowed to perish then the mud will have no purpose, it will have nothing but itself. The gods need me to dream their dreams, to suffer their exquisite tortures. They need me for their very existence. I am the light of this world of atoms; I am the pinnacle of the universe. I am the object and origin of the Great Love, of Heroism, of everything valuable. I am the humanist's dream, the young girl's ardor.

At 38. There's the rub. The cause of my agitation. Last loves and first loves are similar. My passion is equal to Soheila's because I feel instinctively that it may be my last. While she too, as young woman feels that her first love can and should be her last. And she has all the ardor of her young body and feels all the mystery of the unknown. And I, at the height of existence, have played with her feelings as if she were a great and mellow violin. But I can no longer play with her. I must have her. It must be serious. It can't be fantasy.

But I must protect my nest, and protect Judy and Andy. Judy could survive my leaving, but Andy can't. I have to protect her. I could have a short secret marriage if necessary. That is to say that, for me, love is so much more important than marriage, that I would throw marriage away for love. I would enter into it lightly, laughingly, simply to accommodate love. But of course it would mean nothing to me. I will stay married forever, or divorce at my will whether I have a piece of paper or not. To the hypocrites who marry five times, I can't even think of anything clever to say.

Maybe I am simply a Persian prince reborn into America to pay for the sin of keeping hundreds of women in the terrible bondage of the harem. And Soheila, the sweetest and most delectable of all my lovely girls, has been sent by the gods to punish me for the boy who was denied her love because of my selfish and unrelenting passion for her. Judy, my first favorite, but discarded and long forgotten because of my passion for Soheila, was also sent to me, but gray-haired, to test my vanity. If I can vanquish that last and greatest obstacle to happiness, then the gods will vouchsafe me their greatest gift....

Sixty Six

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