The
happiness of the Duc de Nemours when Madame de Cleves tells him that she loves him is, I think, above the
happiness of Napoleon at Marengo.
Stendhal
It is as if intelligence itself isn't enough.
One needs a kind of technique or strategy.
Not personality. Not the constant unobserved observer of Krishnamurti, the Darsana. Not the inactivity of Taoism, although that
is the deepest wisdom in the long run. The
life of Napoleon convinces me of that. But there are times when a certain kind of sideways
thinking is necessary. A thinking which is essentially at right angles to everything else
in your life. Napoleon's failure
in
That is why I relish odd, startling experiences.
I even seek them out occasionally, but they usually announce THEMSELVES. The curious (or spiritually ambitious?) pursue
these events and people, and they get lost in perversion or crime because
they try to reduce experience to a formula. The satisfied always AVOID them and then bustle
about, even more noisily than before, in their closed worlds. They occur in moments or days of fatigue, sickness,
or even in times of great energy and power, but during those times one is
usually spending, not accumulating, so they are suppressed.
Learning generally occurs when one
is most receptive, and times of great energy and activity are generally creative
and not receptive. Hence these times
of activity are times of great danger for an individual if the startling and
fortuitous event can't be accommodated or even noticed. Tyrants, of course, have fallen from the state
of grace that might almost be defined as the capacity to make use of fortunate
circumstances. I think it was Stendhal
who remarked that Napoleon reached a point where he considered a man to be
stupid if he merely disagreed with him. Napoleon
himself said that Cromwell never made a mistake; he was admiring him without
irony.
It is a great strength, and necessary for
great men to love their destinies. The
danger resides in the fear of the unexpected.
When everything must “fit', then inconvenient, painful details are
suppressed or ignored. Once power is
attained, men want their destinies to be painless and beautiful. And there is no end to the procession of sycophants
who are willing to enforce the leader’s opinions....
I suspect that my concern earlier with
strategy, the concern that led me to my study of the life of Napoleon, needs
to be leavened by his philosophy: activity, preparedness (absolute) but then
Taoistic acceptance of facts, a total
lessening of the effects of the will. The
deed is NOT the will. And there Faust
is absolved. Napoleon never exercised
his will. He was close to the Legalist
Napoleon fought his battles this way,
the same way that a combination player plays chess. Life is not analogous to chess because it is
almost always the combination player who wins in life, while in chess the
great masters are conservative strategists who combine brilliance, more or
less, with solid strategy. Napoleon
said that his innovation in the realm of military strategy was that he had
none, meaning the element of surprise and what is called, in chess, spotting
combinations, dominated his strategy. He
was a wild and erratic chess player because he played chess the same way he
fought his battles. If he had more
time for chess, he would have played with the brilliance of a Paul Morphy. Yet he would still have been crushed by the
strategists like Lasker.
There is a thin line between certain
forms of seduction and Don Juanism. Obviously there is a distinction between Werther and Don Juan but it is the middle ground that is difficult.
Henry Montherlant is an example.
He admits that he WASTED most of his life chasing women.
What does he really mean? What
did he really do? He handled them,
ran after them, used them, ate them, spit them out.
But he never SUFFERED by them. Yet
one senses that he feels himself to be different from Don Juan. He is a hedonist.
This element of strategy applies here.
Don Juan is the strategist who sees woman as enemy. Werther either “conquers”
love or is defeated by the lack of love. No that doesn't work. I think the application is valid but it is a
little more subtle than that. The answer is related to Love- that word, that
concept, that raison d’être.
Stendhal described Leonardo's Last
Supper as a summing up of Leonardo's own life: “Leonardo's life work a snare
and delusion, the betrayal of friendship, mounting the cross for the “sake”
of love, mounting the cross as punishment for loving too deeply, too long,
too unabashedly, without stint, without end, limitation, lepers, beggars,
thieves.”
Is love ALWAYS a fight with vanity?
For everyone? Are the passions always in a struggle with the
practical? Is that the true message
of Christianity, the Cross, and of the two Spaniards, Don Quixote and Don
Juan? The one, a
total idealist and the other a total realist?
But what is realistic about fucking?! Nothing! Man can't even masturbate without illusion.
Even Don Juan is a great idealist.
Oh you Women! Fall down on your knees and love your Christs, your Juans, don't crucify
them.
For women, love is weakness. Don Juan is a powerful man, and that is why
he has 1003 women in
Women are to love what men are to war.
Women are capable of every sin and virtue on their battlefield, yet
they rarely fall in love because they regard love as a weakness.
Victory for them is to BE loved, not to love.
But for them, love is everything, while for us,
it is merely a rest from the battlefield of the world.
The passions of men are centered in the struggles of existence. For
woman, love IS the world, and in her world she alone is capable of the greatest
horrors. What man could approach Messalina,
or any common whore, in venery, in venality?
The Marquis de Sade, Don Juan?! Hardly.
No wonder that Don Juan is a hero among
men and Werther is a tragic figure. Even STENDHAL
is a tragic figure. Are there any heroes
among men who loved women? No! Only
the seducers are heroes. Casanova,
Don Juan, Mick Jagger, even John Kennedy.
They are the rich and powerful! Victor
Hugo had a different “lover” every night for an entire year!
What is it, this lying and hypocrisy,
this feminine arena called love? In
It could be that Christianity is essentially
Love and nothing more. Nietzsche's
criticism is still valid, but love grows from Christianity, as the lotus grows
from the mud. Loving with honor and
dignity, with courage and strength, even foolishly, man reaches what is great.
Courage is empty without love, without the other.
Strength is meaningless without one supported, aided.
So is dignity without the respect and love of others. Love is a pivot, unique to us and our Civilization.
I have a horror of philosophical systems,
and a weakness for continual climbing, for leaving thoughts behind, disorganized,
almost in shambles. I “inherited” the
weakness from Nietzsche, Henry Miller, Krishnamurti,
Alain, Confucius” analects, the sayings of Laotzu, Emerson's essays...
The list could be extended almost indefinitely. They have all contributed to my style.
I think I could profit from a rigorous
form. I would like to cull thoughts
from my notebooks and represent them in very concise, aphoristic, and poetic
form.
Napoleon said, “Destiny must be fulfilled, that is
my chief doctrine.” We moderns don't have Destinies, we have to discover and
create them.
But that is what I have occupied myself
with all of my life: the discovery and creation of a Destiny, a destiny that
is not “worldly”, in action, but in thought and in the smaller circle of individual
action. Hence my mentors have been
Confucius, Laotzu, Santayana, Nietzsche, Stendhal
and even Napoleon!
Napoleon is a disciple of Confucius
and Laotzu as I am. His synthesis resembles that
of Han Fei Tzu.
Men climb mountains, race motorcycles,
play football, scribble and joust at windmills. Women chase the few that make it to the top.
And how those few are deluged, submerged.
Elvis Presley, Joe Namath, Mohammed Ali... all crucified on the cross of woman's
greed and lust for power.
Maybe writing on schedule is an impossibility. I
imagine that the bulk of Valéry's divagations are
worthless. It seems that “massive works”
are rarely read: Lenin's collected works in 30 or 40 volumes, Voltaire, Alain....
It isn't that people don't have time to read them, they simply aren't
interested. Yet the few still find their gold mines among
those works. It is staggering to realize
that only a handful of men on earth profit from any one of these great men.
Yet to avoid dilettantism it is necessary to go to the bottom of things,
to live with an author for years, sometimes for a lifetime.
Apropos my own production, it is an
outpouring without a backward glance. I
have attempted once or twice to piece together and rewrite earlier writings,
but I've only sent articles and stories to five or ten places. I am basically repelled by the mass media.
I don't want my writings to be read by everybody, or maybe ANYBODY(?!)
sometimes, it seems, not even by myself!
It seems like film is the only living
creative medium. But that is really
false. Film is ABSOLUTELY constrained
by the masses.
I would like to create something and
not simply think and analyze.
It is almost impossible to write for
an audience without thinking about the thousands of Professors of English
(and French and German...), Professors of Creative Writing, and all of the
women writers supported by lawyers, airline pilots, doctors and dentists... They are the Writers of the world. I don't have enough technique to come in out
of the rain. I'm certain that a modern
novelist or screenwriter or playwright has to have access to polling services:
what do the people want to read today? Tomorrow?
Can you finish X in two weeks? It will
be too late if you can't.
It seems that we are at the end of
an era, and that the writer also is finished.
Gatsby has only 9 chapters and 182
pages. A quoted poem on the title page
summarizes the book. “A
gold hatted, high stepping man. I must have
you she cries.”
The male-female relationship is the
essential problem in the world today!
The black woman, the foreign woman,
seem to hold a key. She holds an explosive
power. She who is
powerless. Because at LEAST she has the power of disruption in her hands. Just as the black man has. He can cause political problems. But she can cause SOCIAL problems.
One often sees an interesting phenomenon:
a frankly older man in his fifties, vigorous, with a young black beauty.
I think of that as essentially disruptive, and I think of all revolutionary
women as SOCIAL revolutionaries: they have no political power, but they have
social power. It is the “real” Lysistrata
solution. That is, if it could be organized
then it would become political, but it never IS organized so it social.
A woman can squander her sexual power just as a man can squander his
political power in an act of rebellion. What
is comparable to a man's refusal to join the Corporation or the Military Establishment,
etc.? Can it be anything other than a refusal by woman
to play the sexual game according to the logic of conservatism and ambition?
Men harbor the illusion that they are
sexually free and at bottom sexually irresponsible. Some women believe this myth. Yet men are much more conservative about sex
than they believe themselves to be. That
is why they never marry experienced women or prostitutes. It is why they secretly long for virgins.
And that is one reason why it is so difficult for women to be rebels.
It
is in the realm of sexual morality that woman shows either the most fanatical
conservatism or the most brazen rebellion.
What male counterpart is there to Carrie Nation or Nurse Ratchet? One can only think of political monsters or
saints, or of a few exceptions like the Marquis de Sade,
or Jerry Falwell.
What moral equivalent of the prostitute is there in man considered
as a sexual being?
Yet when a woman refuses to take her
CAREER seriously, no one notices. Who
cares if your sister is a painter or writer?
The humanities have almost become woman's domain, yet most of the writers
and artists who count are men. Fred
Preterite was a painter. He died alone and in poverty in
A lesbian often reveals her sexual
preference in mid-life, after it has become clear to her that it is the power
of a family that she wanted from man, not sensuality. She then admits to herself that WOMEN are more
capable of providing her with that.
With men, it is their vanity that is
wounded when they are unable to have what they want: the beautiful woman. Homosexuals become aware early that she is reserved
for the powerful, and they discover even as children, the beauty of boys and
men.
The army of beautiful men, the actors and dancers and poets aren't attractive to women because women are attracted to power, and woman defines HERSELF by her attractiveness. Male beauty has no significance for her. Instead, she often becomes a lesbian for the sake of beauty. It is one of those simple explanations that men don't see because men make no effort to understand women. Women refuse to admit unpleasant truths about themselves because of vanity, and they refuse to think about themselves at all because thinking interferes with feeling, and feeling is their religion.
Thinking brings morality into feeling,
and women want tradition, not morality. Kazantzaki's picture
of the Mother of Christ is probably correct: a mother who suffers because
she cannot understand her son's refusal to be an ordinary man!
As Napoleon said of Alexander the Great, I say of Napoleon: the function
of great men is to serve as models. Not
to be imitated in detail but in spirit.
At 33, after the battle of Marengo,
Napoleon was made King of France. His
battles were masterpieces. Can one's
own life be anything less?
We are Modern Men, and it sounds ridiculously
pompous to even suggest that we should imitate this. But we too should have our Marengo's instead
of our Soap operas. Yet I am painfully
aware of this ridiculous crowd, this ridiculing mediocrity that buys everything
and tries to destroy what it can't buy.
Marengo...the ridiculous to the sublime
is but a single step. I cannot allow
my life to be empty of this heroism, and there I understand Stendhal. Where we differ from Napoleon is that we can
be defeated in his world for the sake of nobler things, things that Napoleon
dedicated his life for: Civilization and Love for example.
Love becomes our Marengo, and woman
becomes the battlefield. Isn't it clear that we must help Woman in
her revolution of feeling, that we must be her equal, her God?
We are reentering the Age of Romanticism.
WE will be the Gods and Goddesses. With
the possibility of destroying all life on earth or of finding the cause of aging
itself, life again becomes a cause for ecstasy and tragedy, and there will be
dangers and irreparable losses. Our personal
lives will have Marengos and Moscows,
and not ingloriously, Waterloos too.
We are in a primitive time; we are
the path breakers through a forest of savage beasts. Yet it IS a time for heroism and tragedy.
I think that something as important
as this requires constant thinking, as Napoleon did when he prepared his battles.
We must draw our lines and be prepared to attack at the weakest point,
because the weakest point of a woman is her vulnerability, and that is what
she is protecting herself from. Because she wants comfort. So men take women to dinner, to shows, in short,
men entertain women. They entertain them
to seduce them.
But the question of seduction is always
a difficult one. It always uncovers the
dilemma: “Who is in fact the pursuer?” Do clothes and beauty constitute seduction?
Do planning, or thinking continually about men constitute
aggressive seduction even? In fact, are
women at bottom the great seducers, even while they consider Don Juan to be
a criminal?
Yet I must be the pursuer. And when I am forced to pursue, I always feel
that something is wrong, essentially. It
is like standing on tiptoes or straining the voice. Everything valuable should come softly, unbidden,
like the ripened fruit. If it is torn
from the tree, it ripens too fast and turns rotten without bringing forth the
sweetness that nature intended.
And yet there is a paradox even in
seduction: Napoleon didn't throw all of his troops at once at every target.
He was eternally ready. He won every battle by being totally prepared
for everything. If he lost skirmishes,
it was for the greater victory. But they
were necessary attempts! One doesn't
grasp victory until it is within arm's reach.
When it is ready to be gained, it presents itself.
But one must be ready for it. And that is the greatest difficulty. Often there is an instant when the lover realizes
that he can't ALLOW himself to love. Then
the essential ambivalence of love asserts itself and the cruelest moment of
self-inflicted pain arrives: the tormented moment of rejection of that which
he loves most on earth, the moment when reason or pain calls for an end to the
agony.
Readiness is the resolution of the
paradox of activity/inactivity. The paradox
of Taoism: by doing nothing, everything gets done. But when does this readiness for every occasion
become an obsession? Don Juan is eternally
ready, but all women are interchangeable for him. He is either in love with all women equally,
or with none. His pride tells him that
what he can't have, he doesn't want. So
his plans never become deep or elaborate. He
is inflamed by the chase, but his chase is never protracted. He is rich and powerful and his character is
almost defined as he who gets what he wants.
And he has an infallible mechanism for disdaining what he can't have.
Werther loves the one intensely, but he makes no plans either.
While Don Juan forgets the woman who doesn't yield almost at once, Werther
is prepared to wait for years. Don Juan
is in danger of becoming obsessed with woman in general, with the chase itself,
while Werther is in danger of being obsessed by the inner light
of his own ecstasy, of his own beauty that is perfectly externalized and realized
in one woman. He desperately wants her
to participate with him in the birth of and perpetuation of this intoxicating
kingdom of love. His despair is the despair
of the modern world itself: the impossibility of heroism, love, ecstasy, God.
It is the despair of man in the concrete cage of mediocrity, the gilded, yet
dreary prison of modernity with its tepid baths, its masturbatory purges of
ritual violence and sex on television....
Solitude and leisure ... are indispensable
for the process of crystallization
Stendhal
Of course, Islam also contains a core
of truth. I even imagine that the rulers
of
Soheila has
that kind of purity, but I find myself peeking around corners and almost involuntarily
looking for hypocrisy. When I noticed
that her sideburns had wisps of dyed blond hair among the black, her only comment
was “you notice everything!” (Isn't there another word for a woman's sideburns?)
She said her grades suffer whenever there is something “going on,” which
makes it seem like that could be fairly often.
When I asked her why she came to the Pascal class a couple of weeks ago,
she said it was to see a friend. I know
it was because I told her that I wanted to see her, and she said that I could. But she isn't about to admit it. I thought she was looking for her brother.
All this time, I thought he was the young, beautiful Iranian boy who
is in the class. I even tormented myself with the thought that
he might be her lover. But she said her
friend was a woman. It must be the older,
red haired Iranian woman who is also in the class. Soheila must have
known the boy I was thinking about because she volunteered that her brother
is 28, and he is about 20. It must
Why did I stop?
My tone after that meeting is distrustful.
Did she really say that her grades suffer whenever something is “going
on'? It seems incredible that I am able
to experience passion for a stranger. I almost regret everything. I regret telling her I love her. She hardly seemed moved at all, as if she knew
all along. She
How can I love a stranger, a woman
I hardly know? WHY, is a better question. Will she humiliate
me? CAN she humiliate me?
It seems as if I am asking myself whether
I can conquer a woman myself, whether my energy and love can find a woman, or
whether I am always fated to be hunted by the woman. But no matter how active a man or woman is,
he/she must recognize the will of the other.
The Taoists aren't inactive; they are seducers, wily activists. They
simply counsel a kind of intelligence over brute force.
I am a disciple of Napoleon, Stendhal.
A will is imperious if it can stand pain, privation, if it has endurance,
imagination, vision, faith in its “star.” Faith in the Universe, The
Tao.
Is it possible to synthesize the active
and passive wills? The seducer remains
after all, feminine: plotting, wily intelligence seems essentially feminine. The integration of masculinity and femininity
seems elusive. Masculine strength is
a kind of dumb endurance, and unflinching will.
Maybe integration is produced by either one going to its extreme.
My dilemma with Soheila
is that I feel love, but I don't see her enough for it to be enduring, or for
it to be filled with a feeling of reality. I
am consumed by fantasies. I go from the
feeling that she certainly loves me but is shy, to the extreme that she is a
lesbian feminist, or that she is an unworthy hypocrite. (The blond sideburns
and the statement “my grades suffer whenever something is going on.”)
I just talked to a Mexican girl and
then just after she left, the Chinese secretary, Marguerite, appeared. The Mexican was extremely controlled, unable
to feel or give love. The contrast was
so strong. Marguerite is so much more
mature. Yet she expressed that world
weary Chinese materialism: you aren't happy but it is inevitable. You work, you get money, you are unhappy, you
are still lost but it is inevitable. It
is better than being POOR and unhappy. She
invited me to go to lunch, but I declined on the strength of my love for Soheila.
I know that Marguerite has had an affair with one of the professors,
and she thinks that I am available. But
I was waiting for Soheila to pass a certain spot,
so I could confirm our meeting, and I wasn't about to leave. She didn't appear.
I want this love for Soheila to end. I want
it to come to fruition, to change. I
can't stand this feeling of indeterminacy, of longing.
Woman has captivated the aesthetic,
but inauthentically.
Therefore she is a captive of the aesthetic man! Just as the man who is born rich is dominated
by money unless he is strong enough to have made it on his own. The first “intelligent” or “enterprising” woman
who comes along always captures the so-called intelligent man. Ask any woman, or just watch a Soap opera.
Well,
What a magical and painful encounter
it was! I am so ungrateful! And I am willing to curse my fate for offering
me such a beautiful.... stone (!) …as I involuntarily called her. I called her a gem and the poor wretch thought
I said “a Jim.” Then I explained that
a gem is a small stone and she looked hurt.
She loves me and can't admit it.
She said, when I asked her if she had
ever been in love, that she was, once, if I meant “that sparkle in the eyes”
but she said she “kept it for herself.” I
really didn't think that it was us that she was thinking of, but I wasn't sure.
I asked, “was this person that you loved beautiful?”
She thought for a moment, and looked away, and didn't answer.
It is so typical of her. SHE IS
INCAPABLE OF INTIMACY! I love her! Absurd man!
She said she really “respected” me
and wished that “the best things would happen,” that I would “get the best.”
I said I would get the best, then I said, “I tried to get you. YOU are the best, and I failed. I didn't get you.” She said “no,” then she said she didn't understand
me, and that is when I asked her if she had ever been in love.
When I asked her if “this person is
beautiful,” she was silent, but her eyes were glowing with passion. Then I called her a gem. She looked into my eyes and asked: “A Jim?”
I said, “No, a gem,” and she looked puzzled.
So I explained to her what it was and then she seemed to be hurt.
I realized that she thought I was calling her a stone, saying that she
was unable to feel love. Suddenly instead of being “a Jim,” she was a beautiful
rock, a stone.
Then she said she would “let me go”
and began to move away. Poor girl! Poor deluded spirit! My doleful, silent eyes made her repent and
then she came back to me, and we walked a little way together. I put my arm gently on her shoulder for a few
seconds and lightly brushed her hair with my hand. She made me reassure her that I would say hello
to her when I see her!
What naiveté! What a poor blighted spirit she is! As if she isn't manipulative, as if she only
“flows.” As if she didn't come to the
class to see ME! God only knows her mind,
and he doesn't exist! Adieu sweet mixture
of innocence and deadly corruption! Human
sickness, repression of sexuality, with all its ugly consequences, that is what
she is! Adieu!
The third personality that emerged,
just before my imaginary encounter this morning, my attempt at an imaginary
seduction, just before the orgasm that didn't finally come, that horsy, childish
face, was Judy's face. I only recognized
it at the point of orgasm. I involuntarily
pulled back; its innocence overwhelmed me. After the meeting I wanted to call her repressed
sexuality a sickness.
She came to see her friend that day,
waiting outside of the class that I was taking.
She purposely ran into me, that first day that I told her “I think I
have fallen in love with you.” She said
she hoped the burden of my love wouldn't be too much for her, and then she just
forgot me! She said she thought I was
joking. She said that I would laugh at
all of this later. I said no, I will
never laugh at it.
I want her inmost soul, her heart.
Barshin. What is her last name, Barsin? I just glanced at it on the envelope.
I wanted to move outside, for privacy.
She said, “are they talking too loud?”
Everything about “them” is intrigue, calculation....
Today, in class, I thought I sensed
Elaine encouraging the beautiful young Iranian boy out of a kind of feeling
of revenge against me, or just despair. The Iranian male is hardly so repressed.
I think I ought to go towards Vida
Behnaz or Donna, the black woman, if only for equilibrium.
I can't decide whether to sit and wait
for her to pass the customary spot at the customary time. I think I will. But I am struggling with pride. If she doesn't love me, if
she begins to despise me? To laugh at me? I refuse
to be manipulated. I am insulted by her
manipulations. My pride is insulted.
She asked if she could “not” answer
my question about whether she had ever been kissed. The question sounds strange in English because
it would never be asked by an American.
I told her it is always difficult for
a woman to come across to a man for the first time, to make a connection, in
any culture, even for an American woman. But
she said that she couldn't even consider something outside of marriage, that
her father won't approve of marriage to an American, and that she won’t accept
an ordinary marriage to an Iranian, a bought marriage. She said it would have to be someone who has
been exposed to the American Civilization like she has. She said there are some at State. But “Arabs are animals!” And “any woman who
would let herself be fooled by one deserves what happens
to her.”
I said I didn't believe in marriage
or any religions or Gods. But that I
believed in men and women living together as partners, sharing everything and
being together all of the time and loving each other. That is when we had to force back the tears.
She did, really: when she began to cry, I began, when she held back,
I did. I was totally sensitive to her.
We had a two-and-a-half-hour dance of passion.
She was unable to eat her apple.
She ate only a few pieces. She offered me one, which I took. I asked her about her vegetarianism. I said that the peasants of
She said she is always changing her
mind. She might be totally different
a year from now.
Yet she said she is looking forward
to returning to
She said she has revealed more to me
than to any other man, (or anybody else? or just any other American?) But she forgets and is irresponsible.
She asked me expectantly if I would
attend State's Anniversary Celebration. I'll
be there, but I wonder if she will be.
I didn't see her in her customary trajectory.
And she implored ME not to hate HER, to say hello when I see her, and
now she is avoiding me.
What REALLY is wrong: at the “chance”
meeting, the meeting that she engineered, the meeting of my first verbal declaration
of love, she looked worried and said she hoped the burden was not too great
for her to bear. She looked vulnerable
and scared. I was worried about her.
I remembered her aunt and cousin who accompanied her to school one quarter
as if they were protecting her from me. They
both gave me menacing looks. Yet at that
point our love was only in the eyes! But
when I ambushed her on the day of our next meeting, to be sure that she would
be there at
She has dissipated my love in gossip
and petty activities. The time was
originally
Of course, I think what really happened
was that my declaration of love lifted her to a height of delicious anticipation
that, miraculously, blended into the background of her existence.
My love radiated into her and strengthened her.
It was like strong wine that brings joy yet itself
is “invisible.”
But now it must be tormenting her,
because, precisely because, we won’t see each other again, and because I have
awakened the strongest instincts in her. A
woman can't remain indifferent to the passionate pleas of a man like me.
She can only give the appearance of remaining indifferent, to herself
and to others. D.H. Lawrence or Freud would express it differently.
Obviously Jung would have something to say about it!
She looked at me with passion and said,
“I am confused, I change all of the time. Next
year I might be completely different.” And in the same breath, “I question everything,
I am reading about Hitler now, and even there I have something to learn.
Hitler wasn't necessarily bad. He
was a very intelligent man who was lead astray.”
I don't think that I correspond to
Hitler in her mind. But there may be
powerful forces stirring in her, forces that are bringing about a change in
the deepest bedrock of her being.
She said, “I feel always that I am
in court explaining myself.” I didn't
tell her why. I wasn't fast enough. I was startled. It is clear: she is a Moslem. Everything must
be interpreted in light of the Koran. Yet
she claims she isn't religious. Before
Courant's class she was religious! She dressed like a nun and she was too fat.
Since she has felt the force of my passion she has moved closer to me.
The whole French conversation class was a long seduction, and a self-revelation
of each to the other. It was my passion
that made the class what it was. And
it was Courant's spirit and intelligence that allowed it to happen. She began to pay attention to clothes and she
lost weight. But she doesn't wear dresses
or lots of makeup like a certain group of the Iranian Harem.
Well, I am trying to finish and CAN'T. I am afraid of this, because I know where it is leading and I don't think she is capable of the radical freedom that I need, that I require. I need a free marriage, what I have with Judy, already. And of course I don't really understand where this passion has come from and why it is so imperious, so utterly demanding. But it is.
I suspect Soheila's
crisis will now center around the little green book that I gave her: the sayings
of the Ayatollah Khomeini. She will be
reduced to tears and the despair of love; she will curse her country. No one will know the true cause of her despair
and sorrow. They will assume it is caused
by her reaction to Khomeini.
I don't want her passion to dissipate!
But I won’t control my destiny. With
the great actors in history, Napoleon, Caesar, etc., I am impressed by how little
action or force is capable of achieving.