If
one seek love and go towards it directly as one may in
the midst of the perplexities of modern life, one is perhaps insane.
Sherwood
Anderson
The
new style in music quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from
these it issues a greater force... goes on to attack laws and constitutions,
displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything, both
in public and in private.
Plato
Pour retrouver
la ferveur il
faut faire les gestes de la
ferveur. Allez à la messe,
faites des signes
de croix, prenez de l’eau bénite. Parce qu’à force d’imiter
l’extérieur de la ferveur peut être cette
imitation entrera à l’intérier de vous même.
Jacqueline
Pascal
I
thought that I wanted to be Don Juan.
The truth is, that along with almost everyone
else, I had merely lost the courage to love.
There had been plenty of relationships, and there were even sensitive
girls who had fallen in love with me.
But when I fell in love, my love always transformed itself into a plague
of pestilence and disasters. I was
either in love with a beautiful fool or had a relationship with an intellectual
woman whom I thought I didn’t love because she wasn’t beautiful, and they all
gave me either moral, aesthetic, intellectual or
emotional indigestion. And so I was sick
of them. Like most Americans, since the
time of William James at least, I tried to cure my sickness by pretending not
to be sick. And so I became a disciple
of Wilhelm Reich.
At
about
Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to Earth, is 250,000
times farther from us than the Sun. A
space ship traveling at 100,000 miles per hour would take almost 20,000 years
to reach it. A black hole is about two
miles across and has more than twice the mass of our sun. “Gilles de Rais
himself described how he loved to visit a dungeon where children were suspended
from hooks.” It sucks anything near it
into itself without possibility of escape.
“He would pretend to be horrified and would immediately cut the child
down and put it on his lap.” If matter
is sucked into the ring of singularity then it disappears forever from our
universe to be reborn into another one.
“He would dry his tears and tell him that he would soon be reunited with
his mother.” If it misses the
singularity and swerves off into a wormhole then it reemerges into our own
universe through a quasar, in a another place and
time. “As soon as he gained the child’s
confidence he would slit its throat, violating the pulsating, dying body.” White holes, or Quasars, exist at the edges
of the universe. They are several sizes
larger than our solar system and contain the amount of energy of an entire
galaxy of 150 billion stars. It wasn’t
until 1935 that the existence of other galaxies was proved. Only ten years later,
My
reverie was broken by a shrieking female voice coming from the house next
door: “Don’t you ever do that
again.” There was an ominous silence and
then, slightly less hysterically, “If you ever do that again, you’ll be sorry
that you were ever born.” It sounded like
Tilly’s voice.
Then a whimpering, muffled female voice responded, “All right, I won’t
ever do it again.”
I
thought possibly that the voice had a foreign accent, but I wasn’t sure. I stood there in the darkness waiting but
they were silent. Afraid that I might be
discovered there and thought to be a Peeping Tom, I went back to my room, very
quietly.
The
marijuana was already strained and cleaned of stems and seeds. I used to put one pinch in my pipe, take one
hit and hold it in my lungs as long as possible. It took effect in almost exactly five
minutes. Then I would take another
hit. The high lasted for about an hour
and then I was about half as high for an hour after that. If I wanted to stay high I would take another
hit at the end of the hour. I had it
down to a science, but sometimes I would have a bummer, or a terrible anxiety
attack that was like a waking nightmare.
Marijuana always has the effect of dilating time and two or three
minutes can seem like fifteen. And so
they were agonizing experiences and I felt like I could be drawn into the
vortex of madness, that I might forget that I was awake and find myself flying
out of a window or staring down the point of a kitchen knife. And then, like the Prophets of old, wailing
and gnashing my teeth before a vengeful God, I would swear that if I got
through the experience I would never smoke marijuana again. And I would usually abstain for a few weeks.
I
never smoked marijuana for pleasure.
Smoking it was a magical and mystical rite: it brought feelings and
insights that I couldn’t have without it.
That night, I discovered the sexual imagery of Mick Jagger’s
Satanic Majesty’s Request and composed the following material for possible
inclusion in the Playboy article:
Gomper
By
the lake with lily flowers,
while away the evening hours.
(Jagger’s alone, by a lake)
To
an fro she’s gently gliding,
on the glassy lake she’s riding.
She swims to the side,
the sun sees her dried.
(She thinks she’s alone)
The birds hover high,
I
stifle a cry.
(She begins to masturbate)
The birds hover high,
she moans with a sigh.
To the accompaniment of the music:
Quiet masturbation.
Blood sounds. Superficial,
titillating clitoral sounds.
Drums hint heart beats. Then
flute-nature screams
out, primitive, wild, beckoning. Followed by rhythmic stroking, and the first vaginal sounds, cunt
strumming, beating, stroking, accompanied by the flute-- jungle sounds. Quiet vaginal masturbation calls the jungle
but no response, then the flute evokes the
clitoris. Back and
forth from clitoris to vagina, impatient. Coquette nature demurs. An agonizing, longing vaginal wailing
implores. Still
nothing. Vaginal finger fucking
begins again, slowly, then frantic, then steady, empty, constant. Nature flirts. Blood sounds-- a new unearthly flute sound
evokes more frantic finger fucking, then calm, rhythmic. Bacchus shows his cloven hoof for the first
time. She responds with her first real
hint of ecstasy. Suddenly she’s after
the orgasm and nothing will stop her.
She mounts to her final ecstasy but doesn’t know it. Her cunt and the jungle merge. She slows down, almost calm but on that
higher plane. Blood sounds, heart
pounding, vaginal finger fucking becomes almost melodious, and then her lonely
surprised voice breaks the calm with three calls, each stronger than the last:
ah-oh... a-oi... AHOY, like a ship passing another in
the black night. Then the waves of blood
course back slowly to calm, even heart strokes, numbness, sleep...and far off,
One Hundred Light Years From Home, as if a new universe has just been born,
after the orgasm, the new birth in loneliness:
2000 Light Years From Home
(drums, explosion, birth)
sun turning round with graceful motion
we’re setting off with soft explosion
bound for a star fiery ocean,
its so very lonely
you’re a hundred light years from home
freezing red deserts turn to dark
energy here in every part
it’s so very lonely
you’re six hundred light years from home
(she’s getting
farther away)
it’s so very lonely,
you’re a 1000 light years from home
(farther)
bell flight --- or ?
see you on alpha -- ?
safe on the green desert sand
it’s so very lonely,
you’re 2000 light years from home
(after the orgasm, she’s very far away again.)
Far
from being Don Juan, I had become a connoisseur of masturbation. Being a (William) Jamesian,
I saw no danger, but Van worried me. My
former roommate, Van Decker, was 32 years old and still a virgin. After ten years at
But
I liked him anyway, and I thought that a really good woman could turn him
around, and I wanted to help him. He was
intelligent, well built, 6 feet tall and 180 pounds, good looking, but abjectly
poor. His father paid for his rent and
tuition and sent him a huge supply of Bronson’s vitamins every month, but that
was all. He didn’t own a car and he had
only a few changes of clothes. He had
one pair of nice shoes, but had put cardboard in them instead of having them
resoled.
He
loved Wagner. He owned a small white
table radio with one small speaker and when an opera was broadcast he sat at
the kitchen table with his chin on the table and his ear pressed against the
speaker. He kept the volume so low that
the sound was barely audible to anyone else, even in the kitchen. He listened to entire Wagnerian operas this
way. I first saw him in this posture one
Sunday afternoon when I came back to the apartment from an errand. He was sitting there at the table, ear
pressed to the radio, his face contorted into a painful wince at the noise of
the front door, and his right hand raised in the air like von Karajan’s,
instructing me to I remain absolutely silent.
I stood there for a moment thinking that he was listening to an
important pronouncement from the Government: that another public figure had
been assassinated and the radio was broken so he was forced to press his ear
against the speaker to hear. After many
seconds, I ventured an inquiry. He
raised his hand again, the wince reappeared on his face and he gasped, “It’s Wagner! .....
shut up!”
He
said his greatest fear in life was growing old.
One night he went into the bathroom and brought out his Thomas Hair
Treatment equipment. He told me that he
didn’t want me to discover it myself or see him treating his hair without
knowing about it first. He said he knew
it looked ridiculously vain, but it was one of his only vanities: he didn’t
want to be bald.
He
treated his hair for an hour every night.
First he washed it with the special shampoo, then he rinsed it and towel
dried it. He then distributed little
vials of the Thomas Secret Formula all across his scalp. This took about twenty minutes. Then he wrapped his head in a steaming towel
for half an hour. The treatment center
sold him a year’s supply of the vials and shampoo for a thousand dollars a year
because, as he put it, “of my reduced financial situation.”