by Claire Burch
"What's a summer vacation in Hell?"
"It's the place where the fires happen I guess. It's like Harry Hope's saloon in 'The Iceman Cometh'. It's like 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'. It's like 'The Long Voyage Home."
Babe dreamt about going from how she was with them after their summer vacation in Hell. You know. Some other place. She dreamt she fell asleep for a really long time and someone came and gave her a fairy tale kiss to wake her up.
"Is kiss spelled with a k or a c?"
lt's spelled with both. I don't dream in the day. Well, a little maybe, but I try not to. Jose Quintero was from Panama and Eugene O'Neill was from everywhere. so he took him along on that trip I guess. But I figured we could start again and move to a different place and the kids go to a different school.
One time I dreamt we ran all the way from the Queens Midtown tunnel out to Montauk Point. It looked a lot like where Eugene O'Neill had written some of those plays. The dunes and all. We ran along the beach and kept rolling down for a couple of thousand hours until you came along."
"But about Eugene O'Neill?"
"Oh he was just a writer I thought about while all that was happening. You know. How you think about things until it starts to get better."
She thought she couldn't endure it. She knew she couldn't endure it. But the years passed.
When James first met Babe, she was living in a medium crummy apartment that she'd fixed up with a bunch of beautiful fumiture from the house she had to sell.
'Yes. Monday is always like this."
"Babe, when did all this happen?"
"My husband died ahout ten years ago. Rachel was seven and Sara was nine and Joan was sixteen. '606' was how a friend got out of the army. It was during World War Two and he was drafted. He wanted to go back to college and translate more of Catullus so he just kept saying '606' in answer to everything until they let him out of the army."
"Yes but what has that to do with my question?"
"What has anything to do with anything?"
"Yes, but what happened after he died?"
"Oh, we were not in very good shape for a while. After a couple of years we moved to the city. We live with-"
"I know Babe. That's the present problem."
'What should I do?"
"One two button my shoe."
"Please be serious. Sid does love us and wants to be a father figure to the girls, only it isn't working very well."
"It isn't working at all. If it were working we wouldn't be wanting to be together so much."
"That's true and I'll do something about it. I just need time." (Time is the first and most significant illusion.)
"It's past joking about. You have to make up your mind."
"Would you like a slice of harvest spice cake, James. I'll make up my mind soon.''
This is not the way to begin. The way to begin is to remember that it was begun awfully long ago and we are in the follow through period. Trodding weary roads with wooden bowls hanging from our waists, coming upon inns and coal bins and cities and travelers like ourselves also having left their homes to dwell in infinite mansions of passions of light and leaves, sleeping in trees if all else is taken, resisting common sense to the last of their wits. Walking in circles as they have abandoned linear logic. Finally taking their old banjos down from the closet of closed minds and worthless finds handed precariously and inspected in secrecy. While in the green meadow the fireflies burned and James thought: I surrender once again all that I own to that which I must remember come September.
THE PURPOSE OF BREAKING TOTEM TABOOS by Sara's Dentist
Dentist: Do you mean the purpose of breaking totem taboos as an anthropological comment.
Look kid, between you and me, I know what's going down with your mother and you got my sympathy.
Sara: Ouch!
Dentist: How does your father feel about all this?
Sara: He's not my real father. My real father died. Sid's just this guy she brought in to be a father figure, she figured we still needed some kind of father figure. But it wasn't working, even before she met James. Ouch!
Dentist (sympathetically): A bit more novocaine?
Sara: Maybe you should give Mother a shot of it. In her you know where.
Man my mama leads such an active sex life I don't know how she ever made it in the PTA. Every once in a while she gets these spiritual urges to keep it down and sublimates for a while with some heavy art trip she lays on herself. But between times--well how would you like to have a mother who still falls in love?
Dentist: That is hard for me to answer since I, peridontal specialist that I am, product of the lull attention and energy from infancy to present by my varicose veined Momma. one hand raised dauntless to the skies bearing a tureen of chicken soup, am perhaps no better off than you, poor sweetie. Sometimes after an especially long session with my water drill I feel oddly unloved.
Sara: As an artist I have a similar problem.
Dentist: I thought you were a dental patient.
Sara: I am an artist first, a dental patient last. As an artist I know nothing, nor want to. noting how time consuming it is to know anything, and as a dental patient I feel connected up in some deeply ritualistic and mystical way with those others, who together through history form the Om of the human condition.
Dentist: I'd like to extract something.
Sara: Okay, but you extract my tooth, since your experience in these matters has given you the ability. Afterwards (doing the best I can considering that I am young and untrained) I will extract your eye. Sara and the dentist practice mutual extraction.
James knew it was the twenty second, a Tuesday evening just after dinner to be exact but not exactly exact because for some dinner is at a later time or an earlier time and, indeed, for some dinner is not even in the evening. The calling of the evening meal dinner is derived, he was told by his mother who seems to have introduced the expression into his family, from the vocabulary of the relatively young American aristocracy who were accustomed to "dine late." He knew it was the twenty second because four days ago it was his birthday.
He was at another new beginning, having changed the place which he called home from a crowded wooded village near an industrial center to a deserted village by the ocean surrounded by farms. He hoped to live here in relative isolation for most of the winter, although he was frequently warned that it gets very cold.
He had brought sweaters. His car got a flat tire the day before. He was a bit surprised and momentarily discomforted by this, but he was able to integrate this streak of bad Karma as a just compensation for repeated pleasures and also used it to entice repeated sympathies and slight favors. The car is a pressing concern and will require attention again tomorrow.
The star that was twinkling in his window has moved and he does not know if its displacement has occured because of a cloud or because of the natural rotation of this planetary orb on which he appeared.
The kitchen where he sat was dirty by his own hand. Dinner was excellent. He was not in the habit of eating. He found it awkward and time consuming and difficult to remember. He would rather fast or drink coffee. However, he had introduced a temporary practice of eating shortly after he rose and at sundown, to thereby help him appreciate more greatly the limits of art.
In idle moments he rearranged furniture and created the patterns which continually impinged his formerly naive and delightful appreciation of the material universe. The room loomed large about him, a cheerful expanse and indulgence in the summer sun, but a hinderance to that momentary and fleeting illusion of security which is necessary to relax amidst the humbling chains of clanking trucks and railroads and the roar of airplanes. He was an exponent of a technology of electricity and rubber which would soon settle on this crude substructure of steel and concrete and bless them with a hum and a whirr instead of a thud and a wrench.
The refrigerator by his side sighs in appreciation and echoes the rippling bass drone of the ocean.
James' Dream:
When they finally found the wrench the young and inexperienced mechanic had dropped, some seventy thousand dollars worth of machinery lay useless. The field of illusion lay unmoved in the sultry winter sun and the boy from Alabama wondered what in the world had possessed him to not merely drop but actually throw the large and bulky tool into the gaping maw of the printing press whose servant and even disciple he had been and indeed still was in spite of his recent aggressive and extraverted attitude of interference." He woke up.
He has always appreciated the way the few actually rich people he had known always had more than enough of everything and more than enough saved too in case they ran out. Of course they ate more and tended to buy a lot of other things and experienced a subjective state about the same as poor people who got to enjoy the same things as the rich folks by periodically and frequently visiting the movies where their reception of the primitive participation mystique gave them the actual material experience without having to pay taxes.
Tuesday is always like this, Babe thought.
"Well you'd better leave that fellow you're staying with or I won't be around much longer. Too much of a tangle."
"Please don't be impractical."
"I have to be impractlcal. We have to do something about this."
"Yes. Well I'm not usually given to breaking totem taboos but I am now, though it's not exactly the heaviest thing. There are parts of the world where what's happening would not be shocking at all. Sid would be able to take care of us."
"You sound worried, Babe."
She closed her eyes and thought-none of those things really happened to me none of those things happened to me. Alice in Wonderland would understand but sometimes I lose the rope and slide into a funny broken word Alice. It couldn't have happened really could it Alice?
ANTHROPOLOGlCAL NOTES ON THE BIRTH OF SARA
Did you want me Ma? Was I a wanted child.
I wanted you so bad that when your original daddy put it in I opened fearless for the first time and received that baby fish which started you as though it were a ship about to pick me up from the sea of despond where I had floated aimless for months singing fragments of songs and wringing my hands like Ophelia, not sure if I should sink, drift, or swim.
Didn't you have a baby before me.
Yes-
You must have been in lousy shape then. How come you opened so for me?
Sexual pleasure, Sara, is that act of love plus desperation undertaken to drive out thoughts of death. It was a saving move, that need to send energy from aching bloodshot brain to another part of the body. Rescued by the sudden journey of your surprised father as he burst into me with an abandon he had never allowed himself before, I howled in pleasure and knew him in that way for the first time. Really. After many years. Which makes it probable that the seat of the soul is in the genitals, since the only other time he allowed himself such abandon was once several years later when your sister Rachel was conceived.
How did you feel when you found out you were pregnant?
Frightened. Happy. Actually feeling happy. Life was like a novel waiting to be written but the typewriter ribbon worn out, in some closed store Sunday of existence.
How did Joanne feel?
Ask her.
Babe remembers: At age six lurking in hallways when sent out to play in the fresh air. I filled notebooks with designs, then words when I learned some, traipsing every other day to the public library, reading with a flashlight when my parents thought I was asleep, filling empty milk bottles with sun sparkling rainbows made from dissolving multi-colored candystore crepe paper in water, lining them up on the creaky porch of that Breakaway Beach summer bungalow where the Spanish cave dwellers urge to describe on the walls what was happening in the world around, first came to me.
So what's that got to do with me? Or Joanne?
Baruch atoi adenoi elohanu melach-have a cup of sassafras tea and a bagel. Some things are too complicated to answer.
Here you go again, talking about everything else when you're supposed to be describing my birth. Does it ever occur to you that maybe I was so "good" because you and Daddy were so tangled in trying to cope with Joanne's "problems" that I figured out how to survive myself. So I didn't compete in that way.
(Looking at her fifteen year old daughter): Remember the last time I subjected us to "family therapy" three years ago? We all came to one session a half hour after a dentist had given me novocaine for some minor filling. It was wearing off and my jaw had that funny numbness. A visiting social noting down "objective" observations, both for her thesis and to supplement the agency's notes, recorded that as I answered questions about my family, I had a "false smile."
Okay Ma. okay, you haven't been on this kick in a long time. Let's get off psychiatry and get back to my birth. I mean sometimes I do get a bit jealous of the attention everyone else got. I mean, it's a big deal to me when you hem my skirt. It's the sort of thing always associated with motllers and well like it really amazed me when you started to do it a few weeks ago. By the way, you didn't finish.
I figure that a girl who's old enough to fall in love in Paris and find her way back on the Metro and decide to be a vegetarian is old enough to finish, once I cut the skirt and show her the basting stitch and the hem stitch. Besides, I hate sewing but I do love you.
So what happened when I was born?
Medical records show you to have sprung from the foam of the sea and your name was explained as meaning "the foamrisen." According to the nurses' chart, after you were pulled in from the water you were wafted to Cyprus. Both islands were ever after sacred to you and called Cytherea or the Cyprian as often as their proper names. One of the Homeric Hymns, calling you "Beautiful Golden Goddess" says of you--"The broth of the West Wind hammocked you over the sea. Wow said Zeus when he saw violet crowned Cytherea." We shortened it to Sara.
Contractions five minutes apart. Daddy drives me to hospital. You're born in the lobby four minutes after our arrival.
Jolly efficient nurse's aide keeps saying "Just hold in a minute dearie. We'll be all set up for you here in no time."
Laughing intern gets off the elevator just in time to deliver you, delighted that I had shaved pubic area myself a few days before. Sprinkled with gentle rain, bladder and uterus emptying at same moment. Sara, darling baby girl.
Such a happy October as the world had never seen before nor since. In the morning I had waded into the shallow inlet and there waters broke.
Grab your coat and get your hat. Leave your worries on the doorstep. Just direct your feet To the sunny side of the street. Can't you hear a pitter pat? You know that happy tune is your step.
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street.
I used to walk in the shade
With my blues on parade
but l'm not afraid
This Rover crossed over.
If I never have a cent
I'll be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street.
Exact moment of birth was concealed from visitors in the main Iobby by a screen. You were the dream in my coffee, the sky in my pie-. In addition a severe hurricane heading north from Key West, and about to rock all boats on the Eastern seaboard, blew off harmlessly to Block Island. Thus you brought, as your birth- day gift to the Universe, calm ocean and a lowering of rolling waves.
Your musical first sound, more like a kitten's meow than a baby's cry, was a melodic construct that beat a Beethoven late quartet hands down. My need for you was equaled by your urgent need to be born, made so plain by your precipitous entrance into Iife.
Ropes of past pain that had spun themselves into one so strong an acrobat could walk on it, frayed, snapped, and fell to the floor. Little Botticellis lined up and did a Busby Berkeley tap dance. Grandma told me (They had wheeled you upstairs almost im- mediately) that you had light brown hair and profound large grey green eyes like Daddy's, and that you weighed almost nine pounds and your cheeks were pink and round and your fingers were like Iittle fresh cookies and that you were perfect with one head, two sea shell ears, and a long slender body (twenty-one and a half inches).
Wandering from key to key I serenaded you loudly from the ele- vator as they wheeled me upstairs to rest.
Sleep baby sleep. Thy father guards the sheep. Thy mother shakes the dreamland tree and from it falls sweet dreams for thee.
Sleep baby, sleep. Sleep baby sleep.
Time. coffee. memory of sweetness.
Sara (smiles reluctantly): I guess I was a wanted child.
Later Babe has another dream-
Strutting about a bit after resting from the birth which had occured a few minutes after conception, Babe allowed herself a minute of pleasure in honor of having created the unknown soldier.
Although she herself had been made from so flimsy a fragment as one of Adam's ribs her use of existance was this: She and James standing there blind in that abandoned quick oil town they call Eden waiting for the Basset Hound Bus to pulse them along to the next whistle-top gig.
Suddenly she gave birth to everybody.
Sara, who had been watching, asked, "But doesn't that make you God? Doesn't that make you God, Ma? Isn't somebody who gave birth to everyman kind of a God Ma,"
"Kind of a God is different from God himself Kiddo," she answered. Right after answering Sara she wakes up.
It's funny how being in different places can make us feel differently. James is outside and what with all the sun and the crisp cool air and his warm sweater and the sound of the sea and his pipe in his mouth, is quite happy and is indeed almost approaching a minor euphoria as the sudden sitting still with no magazine near by or nothing suddenly brings the colors of history to the fringes of his consciousness.
Am I really Babe or a metaphor? If I am a metaphor, how come I'm hungry for dinner.
During this time my children wish I would get my reality situation together. l can't decide which fellow to live with. The apartment is getting messier and messier and I am giving the family TV dinners.
Rachel: Do you feel that breaking a taboo in one's fantasy life has repercussions in the real world?
Babe: While working for the underground Communists I was put in jail. Your stepfather Sid Arthur got a young ACLU attorney to defend me and the resultant political trilogy trial became a cause celebre. After a conference I fell in love with James. As soon as I was acquitted he picked up his banjo from Judge's chambers and we ran away to Haight Street and opened a Spiritual Bookshop.
Rachel: Ma, stop joking-should fantasy be censored at all, or judged as pathological or deviant at all by shrinks?
Babe: Give my regards to Broadway. Remember me to Herald Square. Tell all the folks at 42nd Street that I will soon be there.
Rachel (with compassion): Mommy, why did Shakespeare focus so on taboos and what draws you so consistently to this theme?
Babe (looking at her daughter, taking a step towards her uncertainly): See darling, like all of us, Shakespeare had to choose between the sun and the moon as his partner at the prom. He chose the sun as he could talk hypnotically, and had really long hair.
Rachel: Are you coming back Ma? To just hang around with us and iron our dresses like you used to?
Babe : Lamb, I want to. Truly. I'll be back tomorrow.
I'll leave the phone number. If there's an emergency you can call and I'll be home in an hour and forty-five minutes. Rachel: Ma,we miss you.
Babe: l'm finding it hard to answer, lamb. I keep looking at you, you're my baby, and time is a long truck, rolling down the road. Once, holding you on rolling belly, a moment after you began, no strangers, but trucking along that bed of memory, a cavity in left bicuspid begins to hurt so bad. By that benign and following love-filled rasberry tart of yesterday therefore I missed, by my wandering, a silver braced laugh, ice cubed along hello words. That of such lost minute just before harvest, the dreams of who we all were, as we floated without roles in that cloud place, will return unclaimed like lost subway baggage at the round house. And of my choice, even for those eager audiences of any kind of back stoop music such as James and I play at those dulcimer whistle stops, I can only say-well, I did what I could. 606 is my witness.
Rachel (untouched): Guess I'll go watch television.
During this time, (Babe trying to decide whether to continue with the reasonably nice used aluminum siding salesman she begins living with) starts to feel weird . His voice would drone on and on endlessly. One morning he says, "It is true that I sell aluminum siding during the day, but that leaves my head clear to work on the biogenetic problem of our time, how to tun antiserotinin, manufactured to excess by schizofriendlies and at present simply excreted in urine and therefore wasted, into Gold. By gold I mean a metaphor, for in fact I want only to convert it, through polarization and containerization of the diesel combustion refract measures."
Babe answers, "It's nice to see you old dear. I tried-you know how I tried to be regular. Lead a "regular" life. For those parts, on Mondays where the family does get through to California, does pick those Grapes of Wrath and then gets driven off of the land and banished to a work camp giving each other each other's last slice of bread so that all of us (familied in that understanding that comes of hearing each other's morning flushings and nose blowings) are together still (in some fashion).''
In the morning she finds a poem Rachel wrote. It's so sad it makes her cry. This is it."
Only when you meditate, go into your own head, will you find the unique creation. You must be ready to travel, alone then you will go mad and it is only when you go mad that you are true to yourself. The ones who are open are the glimmer people. Dangerous Deja vu is when someone goes into the mass unconscious, but you must be open. Be open. A story written by myself at age seven begins, "Once there was a little scallop shell who wandered off and got lost-he started asking starfish and mermaids where the sea was but received no answer. So finally he asked a fellow scallop shell and said, 'Where is the sea.' and the fellow scallop shell replied 'You're in the sea!!' He swam off and so did the other scallop shell." This is not the end of my story. No beginning, no end and no middle. Just melancholy. I am home and sick.
Rachel: "Hello. Good morning. Glad you were able to get here, Babe." Spinning softly silk sands of time strewn about desert. Fig trees, fruit dried in the sun, sun dried sand cracked like the face of time itself, beyond youth and age within web of marching feet across once more desert conquest screams again shatter where the prophets took shelter during their lonely vigils.
Spiders dance around insect struggling death, calm, patient, spinning again and again, moving from top to bottom, moving from bottom to top, then to the side, always just out of reach of buzzing wings and contracting abdomen whose slightest touch would mean instant death. And yet the spider still spins and as the hours go by the buzzing becomes less and less where once I thought it was my alarm clock left on now all I hear are the shudderings of silvery web in setting sunlight.
A husk of corn, a corn cob pipe with smoke rising merrily from its bowl calling back days of Indian ancestors who roamed where now he strode beside his Indian bride from the ten lost tribes of Israel. His lover and he set forth from their mountain castle with two horses and a mule.
The road they ride is strewn with pebbles and small boulders, making passage unsure.
Once that which is known is understood, there builds a desire to understand that which is not even known. It is not a circle that they are on any longer, but a spiral, a rainbow balloon.
"Babe, I know you are troubled about leaving your children those times but I hope you will visit again. I'm troubled too. Meanwhile-smiles leading to syrupy delights dripping from forgotten members, stillness broken by regrets of the past, stillness seared by insect hum buzzing instinct reflex flashing lights above tall trees and blowing sirens through the balmy breeze of forest pond.
Forgotten smiles and delights, but kind and cruel as memory and future flight stop and was sitting at home alone.
"Your timing scares me."
"Why should it scare you, Babe? I just don't have the time or the heart for complicated situations."
"So I have to make up my mind quickly? It's not that easy to do things quickly.
"Sometimes I worry about that we'll be going in opposite directions."
"I always worry about it. It's like some little half dream that you have when you've slept too long, way after the alarm rang. You see it like a scene in a movie, boxcars going in opposite directions."
She knew how many times she'd dreamt it and told him about it.
"This scene remains to be screened in the Scream place." Babe says.
Inching along a wooden track she sees people framed in the doorway of a boxcar, the kind of World War II boxcar that used to say six hundred and six men or twelve horses. The boxcar is part of a train that is going to a concentration camp and the people are fixed in a freeze frame, waving to those outside as they pass.
On the other side people in a boxcar are going to a concentration camp in the opposite direction. Their faces are opened in a silent howl, hands clenched. The expression is as fixed as the mass shrug of acceptance is fixed in the travellers going the other way.
Between each encounter a melody is repeated, the survivors becoming fewer and fewer until only a mother and daughter remain to face each other from opposing trains as they pass. Locked-one in reality space, one in relativistic space, they can never meet or communicate through the same gate. The long day's sadness into night timing is such that as soon as one goes into a different space in a last desperate attempt to communicate, the other moves into the opposite space.
So that the human horse race is forever locked in the profound grief and pity of its own communication, alienation, annihilation, conversation until the moment of death when, in horror at never really having broken through, we rend our clothes and weep that we realized too late that if less of self had been offered in sacrifice, more would have been received. Oh that we could have been schizofriendlier to those other voices, other boxcars. And is it now too late?
No exit. No smoking. Don't deface the faces.
THE PURPOSE OF BREAKINC TOTEM TABOOS by SID ARTHUR
Sid: Do you mean the purpose of breaking totem taboos as an anthropological comment or the purpose of this book which was written by two people?
Babe: What are two people?
Sid: Four clusters of electrons possessing negative and positive polarities which are capable of individuation in response.
Babe: What is negative and what is positive?
Sid: Negative is an idiomatic expression to describe those projections of the Shadow or Wolfenstep (a pop dance of the Dark Ages) which exists in all of us, out towards other people. As to the meaning of positive, it escapes me, as I am unfortunately, like you my dear, a product of our Pop culture.
Babe (sharply): Speak for yourself. I'm an Artist, and therefore impervious to knowledge of any kind.
Sid: I thought you said you were a woman, a mother, and an artist.
Babe: I am a mother first, an artist second, and a woman third. As a mother I have knowledge of that salvage of pillage in so fragile a satchel as to mortar and pestle those strong missiles in weak vessels known as children. As an artist I have no knowledge of anything. As a woman I have knowledge that some totem taboos are truly obsolete and others exist to be broken by the brave for the good of the poor.
Then let's break a totem taboo and as a nuclear family spend an evening tuned in, with the same kind of sensitive attention we would give a Bob Dylan concert or the interpretation of a cartoon in the New Yorker, to each other's real needs and vibrations, instead of squabbling over the exact distribution of domestic chores according to English common law.
Nuclear families don't squabble. They simply try to establish their roles.
Then let's try to establish our roles.
Joined by Sara, Sid and Babe try to establish their roles. Woof Woof takes the garbage out without even being asked, and Babe and the girls work up a not bad version of Nobody Loves You
When You're Down and Out, Rachel on guitar, Sara on banjo and Babe on kettle drum.
Everything looked like curly-cues. Spirals of elastic thickening and thinning in a colorful display against a background of imponderable darkness. The mountain tide hunger groaning grows sweeping against the base of the cliff where the lighthouse sits beaming a sliver of yellow light round about in a circle of mechanical delight for the ships at sea to see.
"Gesundheit" she says to James when she visits him. During that whole time she visits him at least once a week and usually stays for three days.
He says, "I haven't sneezed yet" and she says it is in anticipation of and in case he were to sneeze, though she does not often try to predict the future.
Usually he is not demonstrative when she arrives, shy even, and usually he does not kiss her nor indeed touch her at all until much later in the night when they are locked as one in his vast comfortable bed on the floor.
After a few weeks of such visits punctuated by outings to the Food Coop down the street where she gets eggs, onions, mushrooms, cheese, bread and brocolli, he asks if she would give Sid Arthur some kind of informal two week eviction notice as he doesn't like the idea of them being together while she is still living with another guy back in New York.
She loves the back half of the first floor of the two family house in Swisstown, Pa. where James lived, and she loves the fast Amtrak train ride and the walk through the suburban train station to the exit near the hill that leads to his house and the black children getting out of the elementary school as she arrives. And she loved him, so needing to make some kind of decision begins to swizzle further her already somewhat swizzled brain.
I keep trying to make a decision. I love being here, but the children need a father."
"Do they really?"
"I'm not sure. It's so nice here. No problems. Nothing to worry about."
"Do you have to have problems?"
"Maybe not. It's been this way since I met you. Because that was the most that I was thinking of then in connection with you. Just how nice it was to be there with you, hearing your sounds and looking at you. And then everything changed after you were in me because, then, your music was in me. So that was a relief because then I didn't need to worry about whether or not you would be around for making the music. But I found, to my alarm,that I wanted you to be in me all the time from then on. All the time since then there hasn't been a moment of that time, no matter how serious the event around me in terms of outward reality, pure spirituality, or exquisite pastoral landscape or presence of other people in me, that I didn't miss you being in me and wanted you to be in me at that moment-every moment. The presence of other people in me did not replace my wanting you to be in me, unfortunately. It's true. But I tried, thinking it would.
At the very bottom and then going several times. And if not the first time, then the second, or the third time. Reaching the water, and when reaching the water, deciding to stay there, and when deciding to stay there, and deciding what can be done from there, swimming around and finding a friend around, finding other fish around, maybe finding anything swimming around, finding a man swimming around and doing his man-thing with his man-thing in me and me swimming around and I give him time while he's swimming, doing his man-thing.
Which is why always, at the beginning of a trip, that all so human absurdum moment of emptying the bladder, and, in so doing, perceiving the simple universal helplessness of all against that larger galaxy of urinary cells enveloped in the regenerative tubules of tomorrow."
"I don't remember that at all." Babe said politely. "I can remember thinking about it. I remember going home about say five, I think. And I wanted something more of some kind. I didn't want it to end. So I think I said to you, "Should we-could we-uhm, could we, like could you play the guitar more?"-I think I said- because I really wanted that to happen. 'Or do you want to go to bed?" When you took me to your room I didn't know how to explain that all I'd meant was do you want to continue or just go to bed. It got changed after that night. It got changed because I thought to have, uhm, or to be with or to feel your body in me would be like hearing music all the time, then, in the next few days whether you were around or not. So I thought well, at least, I would go home with you having been in me and having your music in me so that I could have it then for awhile. You can never tell about such things and you can never force them either. So, uhm, I was glad that, uhm, we did that. Although, I think to begin with before it happened, I would have been happier had you said, "Oh, let's continue. You know just I'll play the guitar and we'll try to sing."
Everybody said James would probably leave her after a while because he was much younger than her. She figured they were probably right but in the meantime they would be happy and after that something else would probably happen for the kids and her anyhow. At worst she would go back to being salad man in a luncheonette as it was much easier and less confusing than waitressing and nobody had to spell it out that her "art" wouldn't exactly earn her a living.
James was the same age as her daughter who had split to Haight Street a couple of years before, but he was extremely unusual and therefore the regular rules made very little sense.
He was an adopted child and all that anybody knew about his real mother was that she had been ordered by the court to relinquish custody of hiin because the state did not consider her able to raise him properly. This opinion of the Bureau of Child Welfare had been rendered after hospital records showed him to be the first documented case of birth while tripping on Iysergic acid as his mother had decided to drop acid as soon as she was in labor.
Our dreams serve as compensation to a certain extent for the accidental absence of "nutriment" during the day. Why was last night's dream full of tenderness and tears, that of the night before amusing and gay, and the previous one adventurous and engaged in some continual obscure search? How does it come about that in this dream I enjoy indescribable beauties of music and in that one I soar and fly upwards with the delight of an eagle to the most distant heights?
Then three months later she is ready to tell Sid what has changed.
Dear Sid, though we have been together for quite a while now, something has come up that I have to talk to you about. Also, I just had this heavy dream.
Yes love. Fine. But could you tell me about it a bit later. It's not yet morning and we got to sleep awfully late.
I'm sorry Sid. I thought I was slicing an imaginary lettuce. Was I talking?
Rather loudly love. Don't worry about it. But I am still a bit sleepy.
Okay, I'll be quiet.
She is quiet for three minutes.
See you are my second chance to be with a quiet modest man. My husband was like that. You say the language of humans fails to communicate those subtleties of science which is your chief interest.
So can you be quiet for awhile, love? My teeth hurt and it's still dark outside.
I'll be quiet.
Being quiet again for three minutes.
"Look," Babe says, "I can't wait till breakfast. Can I at least tell you my vision?" Ignores his weary grunt and continues. Sid smiles worriedly and says nothing.
Babe says, "that's really strange isn't it? Also I dreamt we were all in one of those charming tumbledown Victorian houses in San Francisco. It was my kid brother's Barmitzvah and the catering place was downstairs in a kind of sprawling railroad partment. The place was rented out by a retired cop. In one apartment were some friendly law school dropouts who made candles. The bottom floor had a sign outside that read Caterer.
Still sleeping while the guests arrive for the barmitzvah. Doorbell rings. I grope my way down dressed in something dirty from the floor.
Parents with alarmed smiles ask me to run right back up and slip into something less comfortable. As I'm running back to the apartment, I pass the character next door.
Oh, something important. Just before running upstairs to dress, and wake you and the children, I see that a waiter, passing around a plate of hor d'oeuvres, accidently tips over the platter and they spill to the floor.
Unfortunate quirk of fate. They happen to be shrimp-in-batter with toothpicks. Had they been kasha knishes, or potato, it wouldn't have been tragic. Shrimp is the most expensive item on the tab my parents are picking up later. I hear low voltage conversation between my parents.
"Morris," mother says, ''tell them to deduct it from the bill."
"Oh come on. it's just an accident. It's only money."
Morris.'' mother says, "tell them to deduct it from the bill."
"Oh come on, it's just an accident," father says. "It's only money. "
I am the daughter of both.
"I'm just still trying to sleep my dear, and about to give up, go piss, and listen to the rest of your interminable dream," Sid says.
Babe is delighted.
"Oh will you Sid? You could take a nap later and all."
"I am, my dear, a patient man, but sometimes your verbalization goes too far," Sid says again.
Babe continuing to talk, oblivious.
"What happened was I simply stop for a moment to say hello to the nice neighbor and he invites me in. The door of his apartment is open and I can see one of those happy, hippy parties going on, two men, two women, and a toddler of about three.
It looks so nice that I ask if I can bring my old man, and my children. I try to get back into our apartment. Can't rouse you by loud knocking.
Climb through a window to the outside and then enter through our window. Rush of tenderness for my little family, waiting downstairs. Find myself in a sudden puddle of indecision and faint like some Victorian wisplike lady.
Sid returning from the john still grumbling mildly. "Well I must say you haven't stopped making sounds since." My dear, everyone dreams. Everyone is interested in their own dreams but nobody is interested in other people's dreams. That's why professionals get paid for listening. A simple recounting of one's dreams is hardly art or literature you know.
"I know,'' Babe says. "I'll be quiet so you can reflect on your chores for tomorrow."
"The hell with chores, The hell with everything. You know I can't even articulate let alone reflect on anything until I've had my coffee and toast with marmalade."
Babe says, "Right. I'll be quiet. What do you think we should get her for her birthday?"
Silence. Acute silence.
Sid snores peacefully, a cozy, family sound.
"That's it! Down with marriage counselors and all logical attempts to deal with family zoos as in a court of law, by the facts. and the evidence. If you want to know what to do with your life, fall awake, and try to remember your vision."
Sid waking with a start, looks patient.
"Good idea. Why don't you do that, love? I'd be glad to hear about it at breakfast.'
Babe says, "What would you like for dinner?"
"Obviously my dear your dream was an attempt to reintegrate and absolve yourself from the guilt you felt about being insensitive to me and a bit neglectful of your parents and other members of your family lately."
"Oh Sid," Babe says. "Oink. Sleeping in the same bed with you is just no fun.''
"Such small interpersonal matters are unimportant to me. We are basically together because of mutual respect and general congeniality."
Would you like an omelet for breakfast, Sid?
Thinking. Get away. No point talking.
Oh take me disappearing down the tubules of my piss
My heart too small to miss
My babies and my ovule still unnesting
My rebirth is your everyone, those suburbs on my knee
Thine children please be well
Thine planetary babies almost raised.
I did the best I could. I tried
Have given up all pride.
And hope it all ends strawberry for sleeping.
amen.
Grateful for a Dylan tune to thumb a head ride through her day, Babe pondered her fate.
An irrepressable not irresponsible sometimes ill advised but never implacable young man who was not ailing in any way but aimlessly assing along an age of ageless adams and eves and smiling a bit on the way, was how she first saw James.
It feels like lots and lots. It never feels like very little. It usually feels like a lot. And sometimes it feels like so much, like so very much, that it's more than a lot, and when it's more than a lot, that's the most that happens. And that's happened quite a few times, and always with you, and when it happens, then I think a lot is better than a small amount and more than a lot is better than a lot but best of all it's being with you just about any time in any way.
(At any time of day-morning or evening or maybe later than the evening, maybe in the middle of the night, or maybe after breakfast or maybe at any other time in the afternoon or maybe at any time of the day or night and not thinking about it but dreaming about it a lot, and especially feeling it in your knees when you're doing other things-mostly in your knees when you're doing other regular things, proper things, and thinking always and the most and the most with you and the most ever in a very long time and ever being always so, because of that, to be with you is Camels and Diamond matches. )
In the meantimes James keeps his own apartment. Passage of time. Trickle, Shit, tinkle, spit. The world is round.
Babe gets the children guitar lessons and starts slicing and dicing fresh vegetables again.
So why do you stay with Sid?
Sid Arthur is a dear good man. Sid Arthur is a dear good man. Sid Arthur is a dear good man. Sid Arth...
Go forth, go forth, go forth courage my lass. Go forth, go forth. Babe think about how it will be to be alone. Sid would stay for ever. James? Well, he's only twenty-three. And then-even that faced-knowing that if and when he goes there will be the guitar and after the guitar the still unread books and after the still unread books .
So no, not for security, not for security. That not mattering anymore. there always being when it might be desired. some man.
So then to the root of it. Sid Arthur not the same kind but the opposite kind.
Love and pity. Iove and pity, Iove and pity, love and pity.
Babe continues to maintain the etceteras for awhile. Sid knowing and accepting that it will pass, he thinks to himself. He thinks and he drinks more wine and makes notes about the state of the plumbing and political problems and fixes all the electrical appliances.
She finds herself bursting into unaccountable tears six times a day and James begins to find this a bit of a drag.
Trying again, trying again, trying again, trying again. The emotional security thing, the emotional security thing. To be a woman with a Sid Arthur-to be a nuclear family with a nuclear weapon. The weapon being emotional security emotional security.
To know that always, to know that always, to know that always. To think about the future, to think about the future, to think about-
In the Eugene O'Neill play "The Iceman Cometh," Harry Hope says, "But the life has gone out of the booze, Hickey." The marriage ceremony having said-they being advanced and consciousness three and contemporary and scorning pieces of paper-do you know Sid Arthur you are brought in as replacement for the rifleman who crumpled to the floor in a psychiatric unit exactly 23 years after his war. do you Sid Arthur, father figure of the family abdicated in weariness and confusion by the father of the children-promise to stay with Babe for as long as you both shall be happy together?
I do Rabbi, I do (rabbi being the Irish actor friend upstairs and the ritual being Babe's concession to the idea that they were a nuclear family again).
But the children need a regular existence, but the children need a regular existence, but the children need a regular... Babe's thoughts run in concentric circles like an eccentric tantric.
Thus what I want the reader to notice is that the operation of the mind in dream is along similar lines to that of our waking hours-though naturally not so perfect-that is, it proceeds from underlying feeling to images and thoughts which represent the feeling, and which continually become more distinct and "real."
The tendency is, I say, for all these images evoked in our minds by feeling and to grow on us and become more and more distinct and real; and indeed in dreams we wonder sometimes at the "intense" reality of the images we see. But it is really quite the same in waking life. We are walking down the street on some errand; but presently forgetting about our proper business, the mind wanders away just as in dreamland, and we imagine ourselves talking to some friend in Australia, or at the club arguing violently with an opponent. The scene grows more and more distinct, more real to us, we become quite lost in it, till suddenly we run against the lamp-post! then of course the dream is dissipated. Something more "real" than it has arrived. But in the dreams of sleep there is no lamp-post, and so they go on gathering reality, till they seem as actual to us as the events of the outerworld. . .
We may then, I think, fairly conclude from what has been said that the same process can be witnessed both in our waking thoughts and in our dreams-namely, a continual ebullition and birth going on within us, and an erolution out of the Mind-stuff of forms which are the expression and images of underlying feeling; that these forms, at first vague and undetermined in outline, rapidly gather definition and clearness, and materiality, and press toward expression in the outer world. And we may fairly ask whether we are not here within our own minds witnessing what is really the essential process of Creation, taking place everywhere and at all times-in other persons as well as ourselves, and in the great Life which underlies and is the visible universe.
Dear Mommy.
Thank you for the check. I will send you some papers from the bank in my neighborhood. The lady in the bank gave me some slips and she told me to send them. I had my account changed to a savings account. I'm going to make a birthday card for Grandpa and send it even though it will be late. I hope you are feeling well because I know how it's like to be sick and under the weather because I felt sick yesterday and a little this morning and the days have been rainy and gray and bleak and depressing. But I will feel better as soon as I get back and have some fellowship and get lifted up by other Christians and brothers and sisters in the Lord. I have been going to church most every night and I want to get saved again and have a pure heart and a pure mind and not have any bad feelings towards anyone. So tell Grandpa his card is on the way.
I love you so so much and I miss you so so much. I can hardly wait till it gets warm and the summer gets here. Thank you for the nice letter and I hope Jesus will bless you. I pray for you every night. It is very difficult to find someone like a boyfriend, but I don't really need a boyfriend. What my pastor said is I must first find God and walk with Jesus daily and follow his commandments. Walk in the spirit and receive the Holy Spirit-the sealing promise. If you walk with the Lord, he will provide all your needs for you and He will never leave. He has everlasting, unending love for us and in Him there is life and light and we shall never walk in darkness again and He gives us eternal life everlasting.
Love in Christ, Joanne
Love and kisses
A MESSAGE FROM JOAN
Written at age nineteen
at Haight Ashbury, California.
at 7 a.m. on Pier IV
you can see me touching
the great colosso phallic
symbol
that is impregnating the
stratosphere
with its vile. toxic fumes
lt's off somewhere in
the mist near New Jersey
my mind flows against
the current
to my friends held in the
bondage of Dr. Seuss.
Marble chambers
Fort Tryon Park
once the courting grounds
of the wild beast and the
elk
II
Mommy is someone who talks
about the flowers
and the little girl sitting beside her
wants to pick them
She talks about the little mousey
that just ran in the hole in the fence
She takes me for walks
to the zoo
and buys me ice cream
and helium balloons
She takes me home about 5
and feeds me all sorts of delicacies
from Bohack and A&P
that she herself can hardly afford
for I know she loves me dearly.
She reads me stories
about the little red choo-choo and
Grimms fairy tales.
Time has past
but Mommy is the same
She is always young. Her beauty
and kindness will never fade
for it lasts forever as her love.
I'll never forget
the Brooklyn eagle,
Saturday morning oatmeal, chocolate cookies,
the cement sandbox with the little
blue pails or thirteen white kitty-cat tails.
Now-everyday-in the sunshine
you can see me Iying down with my eyes closed
waiting for Mommy.
A MESSAGE FROM RACHEL
I made some chocolate milk and went outside to look for porcupines. I would not find any though. Ah, but now my legs are gone and I must go on, enough of it. Russian dressing stings my tongue and hairy rocks make me slip. I think I'm gonna go to that green bottle, climb up the side, open the cork. jump in, close the top, sit for 27 hours, come out again, go to route 67, find a McDonald's to eat and come home and do the bills and fly away, return after 8 years pregnant, lonely, grey haired, have the baby and after sit and read Hellmann's Mayonnaise jars and go to sleep.
Perhaps it would be more in my nature to sit here and pretend all those things, maybe not even write them anymore.
Ah = Ha
Love,
Rachel
Peace is different from war. ain't it?
How?
One is quiet and one is noisy.
Not necessarily.
One is painful and one is not painful.
That is so.
One is happy and one is unhappy.
Not necessarily.
One is passive and one is active.
Not at all. The best peace is often active on every level.
One leads to death and the other to life.
Bullshit. Everything leads to death which leads to life
again in some fashion.
Obviously.
You say obviously when nothing is obvious.
Then there is no mystery.
What more mysterious revelation do you wish?
Touche.
Babe, knowing it is probably time to catch her train back, decided to buy a watch but never act on her decision.
Do you Babe promise to stay with Sid Arthur for so long as you both are happy together? I do, I do, I do, I do. Peace and a headrest, peace and a headrest, peace and a headrest...
And allow each other-as we are modern here - up to six impulsive adventures a year not to be approached or reproached with guilt with explanation with guilt...
We do, we do, we do. Do we, do we, do we, do we, do we?
Because Babe simply fell in old-fashioned nineteenth century love with James accidentally as a result of the firefly that led them to July at the Magic Mountain Motel Institute.
See it changes; it changed. Sometimes things change, they change, they change. No ones fault, they change, they change, they...
Jokes and imaginary notebooks are supposed to arise out of being hurt. While all this was happening it was true that she was much hurt. But she is a better mother again and that's the most important.
James hasn't heard from Babe for quite a while. Worried. Takes no action. Next day goes out and buys some nails, a saw and white paint, thinking and looking at the clock.
Takes him a while to learn to deal with the second, third, and fourth thoughts that start to come quickly after the first was said.
Considers the cover of an idle matchbook. Holding a pen, inscribes a square with a cross, crossing from corner to corner inside disordered room, hastily emptied closets. Continues with what he has been doing.
Babe meditating in the apartment, chanting OMs to the six notes of the pitch pipe. Trying to find her "center" after the splintered everythings of the every people. That stuff. Grocery billed into her wheat haired loving so much.
Milk and cooky time, bunny rabbits, warm penis under covers is how James thinks of his adoptive parents, being a bit proper in their raising, seeking to bring the boy to some method of adjusting his astral qualities to those which, while perhaps a bit of a mystical down, will make him capable of earning a living in today's world. Everything changes in a couple of months.
Continuing to maintain the etceteras for a while. Sid Arthur knowing and accepting. It will pass, he thinks to himself and he drinks more wine and fixes all the electrical appliances.
Babe bursting into unaccountable tears six times a day.
Sara asking, "What's for dinner Ma?"
"There was no real beginnings in the beginnings, Sara. After a while it changed a little, as everything does, but in the beginning so many Gods got into the act that nobody could straighten out that Celestial Filing Cabinet but a night court stenographer in such demand that his hourly rate was prohibitive.
Sara asking, "Should I put some water up for anything? There's noodles on the top shelf."
Sure. You could put it up. We could finish the noodles.
"See darling, if you're engaged in a historical overview, as I am, you begin to understand why linguine takes a little longer than noodles and much longer than vermicelli. At your age, filled with romantic notions, it was hard to relate lace, lust, last Mambas in Tijuana, and other philosophic problems of a permanent nature, to which hemisphere laid the golden sound wave lately."
Babe then calling Rachel to come upstairs.
"Rachel. Sara has something to say."
"It's my birthday, right?"
"Oh Sara. So it is. Sid and I have been staying up working on a series of songs for the occasion. Got so into it that we completely forgot the date. Let's go get a cake. Sid, would you pick up a cake at Sutters? Sara, what's your favorite kind of birthday cake?"
"Shit. Shit is my favorite kind of birthday cake."
"That's nice, Sara. Only not easy to find at the bakery. But it's your birthday and you can have anything you want. If you can wait a bit Sara I'm sure Woof Woof-"
Sid says it is out of the question. "I'm sorry but even on the child's birthday she can't be indulged in that fashion. Apart from the cultural aspects and the taste and odour it isn't even nourishing. After all it's made of what has already been rejected as not fit for absorption.
"That's a value judgement. Anyhow you're not my real father.
"Oh come on Sid. it's her birthday. She reallv has been the most unselfish of children, asking for so little. Gifts usually have to be thrust upon her. I finally stopped getting her winter coats from Bloomingdale's as she always gave them away to the poor and they were too tight for the poor who always weighed more than she did."
"I'm sorry my dear. There are some taboos so abhorrent to the human spirit as to cause goosepimples on the back of the neck. No step-daughter of mine will eat shitcake."
"I think I should get my own apartment. Your're not my real father."
Rachel asks Sara what she will use for money.
"Wampum. Pickles. Toenail-parings. Tooth decay. Bent Umbrellas and Cherry Cough Drops. I've been saving them up and I'm ready to face the world on my own. You thought I was a docile adolescent with a heart of gold. Well l am, partly. But sometimes l have special needs too, needs my devoted family can't automatically refill."
"Like shitcakes," Sid says.
"Don't make fun for my single request. It's not easy for me to get to my real feelings when all of you are so into self expression. It's true that I can sublimate by working in clay but that doesn't always completely lend themselves to family living. Instead I continue in my role of no trouble to nobody, going to the Laundremat more than my share when I have little interest in any worldly possessions, let alone sheets, pillowcases, towels."
Sid leaves the table, expressing his pain by passive resistance, that mild and gentle expression reminding Babe of some old battlescar which made her want to whisper; I feel your pain as whiplash.
"Please, Sid. Let's not get into some silly quarrel. l know l haven't exactly been much fun to live with lately, but there's been a kind of conflict that I'd like to explain."
"Babe, there's nothing to explain. l left you and the kids in London to try to find myself in Paris. I didn't find myself anywhere. With your history of people splitting on you and the kids, you figured that I wouldn't come back. So you found yourself a new boyfriend. What next?"
"Sid, uncomfortable for all of us. The last few months."
"A very mild and non descriptive way to put it. My teeth hurt."
"Your teeth always hurt, Sid."
"Don't everybody's teeth always hurt?''
"No Sid. Mine only hurt sometimes and-"
Sid looks at his watch. Reminds her that a shipment of porcelain bidets and basins is arriving at 10 a.m. and that he will be tied up with invoices and realities on their arrival.
"I know Sid. But this will only take a minute. I promise to straighten everything out this week. Please understand. I have to do this."
"Yes Babe. I don't ask about your other-ah-friendship. l accept. Do l bother you any more in bed? What happened was my fault and I'll just put up with it until it passes."
"Please Sid. Please understand. You have to find another apartment. It's not going to pass."
It hurt to hurt him. Like hitting a guy who hasn't even taken off his glasses. On the other hand she and Rachel and Sara could walk around in underwear and send out for pizzas if there was no man around for awhile.
What can be done about the metaphorical death of an aluminum siding salesman in which Sid Arthur reflects on his rise and decline and experiences the most profound pain.
"What did I do wrong?" Sid Arthur thinks. "She seemed happy. She made me a garland of-I tried only to please. She seemed happy. She made me a garland of-Before her there were concerts and paintings and parties and always to check out the bar on the corner. The bar on the corner. She promised to lend me a fantasy of fun days to tie up my bonny black tie. Before her I traveled the wide world outside her, my gas tank refueling. Perplexed I went walking. My friend was the radio my time was Newtonian, my bonny was nowhere. I had everything most people have, job and blood relatives, Schubert string quartets, imported beer. Death crackled my loins early. End of the world near.
And then was with Babe-old blues and green pastures-My very own ready made family, dancing gestures. Jesus! Almost two years.
"Man, meet my wife and daughters." I said to the head waiter. He'd seat us and ask after my mother If I came back for lunch.
.I think therefore I am, I think therefore I am, I think before I am-
I am a man of regular habits, Babe became one of my habits. All right before, what will be after?
What does she? What is it? What does she want of-Nothing I can buy get, nothing to buy get.
Needing nothing. Less than most women. Nothing. Less than most women.
I am a man of regular habits. I proceed by logic. I camlot believe otherwise.
Prove it! She could not prove it. To draw pictures of it don't prove-songs about it don't prove-
You can prove a car. It weighs seven and a half ounces, is nine inches long and two miles wide. Ignites via a propulsable diesel disposal engine and is capable of being evaluated at auto graveyard auction at nine gold doubloons. That is how she would put it. What do you make of that?
I owe my rent again. It is the time of the month when certain things seem to creep into consciousness.
Borsch, borsch, always cabbage borsch, all the time cabbage borsch, these days. No imagination. She does that same thing day in and day out. Quiche and cabbage borsch. quiche and cabbage borsch.
Potatoes and all if she's lucky.
Nothing if she's lucky. But she's never really unlucky. Somehow, inescapably, she manages to inescapably escape all the time. Sometimes by a hair, sometimes by a hand, sometimes by a finger. sometimes by a nail clipping. But always, over the edge, always escaping a little bit, just enough, maybe, just enough. Maybe not even enough to ever make it really enough. But if not enough, then what else? Careful, lest you destroy the question by the answer.
. "You're late this morning," Babe says in one of those Robert Altman flashbacks." I know," Sid answers." I am searching for my cufflinks. You know, the silver and gold ones, representative of the sun and the moon, gladness and melancholy. joy and sorrow, man and women."
So why do you stay with Sid? He is not the children's real father.
Sid Arthur is a dear good man, king Sid Arthur is a dear good man, Sid Arthur is a dear good man
Go forth go forth go forth courage my lass go forth go forth
To be alone. Sid would stay forever. James is only twenty three.
And knowing that if and when he goes Sid will still be there. And after the still unread books the next thing.
So no not for security no not for security no more mattering no more that mattering no more there always being when it when it might be desired a man some man a man some man always there would be some man who would want-
So then to the root of it Sid knowing they being also not the same kind but the opposite kind.
Love and pity love and pity love and pity love and pity love and pity-~
The joke is on Babe this time. Two days after she gets up enough courage to explain to poor Sid that he will have to find another place because the way she is feeling about her boyfriend can't be contained in some neat rational "arrangement". James splits with her best friend Ida. His note is in the morning mail and is only a couple of sentences. Feelings for Babe haven't changed, etcetera etcetera. But all that nuclear family insecurity. (Trying to give Sid another real chance on account of the kids). Hard to take.
"But Ida is my best friend," Babe says to the dog who stops at every other fire hydrant.
The dog doesn't answer and she stops talking out loud.
Intergalaxial timing again. Timing always off. Sweetness. Tasting of pineapples again.
She is convinced that Ida wants an adventure with James mainly for his chord progressions.
Maybe he wants to show her that other people would want him also.
She and the dog walking in the gutter. Sidewalk is obstructed by grocery boxes, both going in and coming out of the supermarket.
Not exactly my first loss, Babe thinks, remembering a few years before. Daydreaming again, careful there. Oh to be in England now that Spring is here. Not to mention the Warsaw ghetto, victims of Auschwitz, dinosaurs that died during the last Ice Age. That memory must be dealt with sometime, but I'm not ready.
Tells everyone she knows, and roots herself to the piano until the notes of three octaves correspond with the notes she hears in her head. A day after that writes a musical comedy and it gets produced. Fall asleep from life and dream awake. Sail on Columbus, sail on. Time after time. Director asks Babe to revise the script since its meaning is too profound for the average audience. Babe takes a walk to find another dialogue and Iyric barrel. Lugs it home and puts one page into the second barrel of everything that had been in the first barrel. Director says it now makes sense.
ANTHROPOLTERGIST PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS
Thinking about splitting then from Babe because of his need for some kind of sultan image, some need of other places, other voices, other aspects of the female, other sounds. other visions, distances, further retreats, further fancies, splitting from Babe, afraid that she is not perhaps all women, afraid that he would be missing part of all women. if he was not with at least one other woman. ten, thirty, preferably 330, 660, no, maybe just turning around and lighting a cigarette, and Ida walks by and she has a different kind of body from Babe, and he Iooks at that and thinks, well now, how would that feel, what would that feel like? And so James thinks of simply leaving Babe in the middle of a sentence in the courtyard. Great for night loving and day hug. But he needs a light for his cigarette, and turns his head thinking some passerby will have a match, and as Ida passes he thinks maybe Babe isn't Everywoman.
Ida is doing the usual. Just walking, just going around the block, just going down to West Street, just going to jump off the dock, just going to kill herself. Left her apartment a few minutes before. Says, "Unless you get it on with me. I'm going to jump off the dock." James doesn't know whether or not she's kidding. Upon waking he feels the ground shaking and remembers Babe his lady baking a banana cream pie. which was his favorite kind . James sighs as he sees Babe's best friend who he had picked up the night before, asleep on the pillow beside him. She had said her name was lda. She is a fair one at that with golden halr and a furrowed smile just like the one his lady has. Was it bad that he had had her and the other too on the same day (evening sun shown on the wharf where the water lapped against the pilings).
Back where he had left her, Babe watches the silhouette of silver glistening light float proudly out to sea. Dreams, dreams to fall awake and be alive.
Lying naked and confused beside Ida, James remembers a portentous conversation he'd had with Babe in his first dream.
"Beautiful," she had said as she saw his head Iying in repose concomitant on a doze. His smoke wafts in the gentle breeze from his nostrils.
"James," she'd said, "please use your head or we'll both wind up dead leaves.
"I must be off to sail to see what there is behind the beguiling of the sperm whales spout that rises up off the coast of Greenland."
"Why?" She'd asked, frightened at his talk of leaving for a bit,though she knew he was just going to take the BMT to Brooklyn.
"Something feels strange," he says.
Yes clearly that moment of sexual completion with lda is different from how it had been with Babe or any other female he had been with.
Sleepy time with milk and cookies, warm bunny rabbit toy, warm penis under cover as he huddles and curls under expectant licks of sheets, is like his fantasy come true with her. And so he says it aloud to Ida as they lay curled under the covers.
James still unaware that she has given her body without desire only to hold him to later learn his complicated blues progressions for hours that afternoon. IDA WANTS TO BE A STAR IDA WANTS TO BE A STAR
IDA WANTS TO BE JANIS JOPLIN BILLIE HOLIDAY ODETTA MET A FELLA WHADDYE TELLA. WOW. WITH A VOICE LIKE THAT YOU COULD BE A STAR!
What did you say? Ida had asked, and sat bolt upright.
Sleepy time with milk and cookies, warm bunny...
When does Ida realize that James is the long lost son she had given away for adoption in early childhood?
what what wot what woe wo hath oh hath woe hath no no no no no no no no oh woe no no no cant be it cant be it cant be no- me oh my- go hail rain mother of sleet hail bury full of grungy and the shabby motelroom last of the tyrones groans roan stallion why why why me why me why
a thickly horrorsmile settling across her face almost to the ears a bracelet which she had torn in terror from James ankle and asks- why me?
"See I'm a singer - right?" says lda
"Come on, mother.
"I'm sorry. I was just goin to junp off the bridge when I met you."
That's enough mother.
I look at you, what happened?
Easy there, mother.
And but then you aint just a man a bloody man, Ida thought with her heart (brain dont think brain dont pine doctor gonna fix you up some other time) no bloody regular plain ordinary male man no not no god damn regular man my son my son my son my son jesus mary mother of heavy not too heavy no I will not think of it I will not think no think kid hand me the guitar no not even music no justification not even that, no!
Ida looks at him in terror and pulls away, her bladder emptying involuntarily, for the first time. No God dear God ohm shiva shiver the men lie under the earth they urinate and defecate in their helmets.
I loved-I love-I don't love bloody men but I love I loved my son I SWEAR I LOVED MY LITTLE SON I LOVED THAT HE WAS MY SUNSHINE MY LITTLE- James pats her shoulder gently "Dont cry dont cry. Look it aint murder, they say in Kentucky. The mountaineers-look nobody has cancer, don't cry, don't-
I'll pull out my eyes", he thinks. "I'll pull out my eyes. Don't cry." Awkwardly pulling on his dungarees and shirt, he picks up his guitar and backpack. "I'll send you half of my unemployment checks, don't cry. I won't put out my eyes."
Minstrel Show question asked by Dr. Stigmata Freud.
Is this incidence of absurd coincidence and jezebel decibil a metaphor or factual event? A dream? a delusion? An illusion? Maybe a TV scene of the future?
It is ours to know and you to find out.
Walking back to the seventh Avenue IRT. James asking hinself it he would have gone off with Ida if he hadn't seen her about to jump off the dock. Do things cause things? Do things not cause things but just follow each other. Birth and death. Dessert and coffee.
He buys a small bunch of daisies for Babe at Sheridan Square, then leaves them on the stomach of a sleeping wino in front of 55 Morton Street. Maybe better to have put a dollar in his pocket but then again maybe not. He can't go right back to Babe, his feet just won't point in that direction. Exile, like all the old Greek stories talk about.
Keeps turning a rubberband in his pocket until finally he stops, takes it out and ties it into three knots. Drops it crossing on the way to the Lion's Head, where after his one Irish coffee, he knows he will have to wander, or go away, for awhile. Like all heroes, from Tyrone Power Jr. in a movie to Jamie Tyrone in a Eugene O'Neill play.
James had to go away. He didn't know if he was going away for a little while or for good.
"Man-or rather his brain box-is finite, but at the same time infinite. The brain box is finite with respect to the number of claims it can contain at the same time, but it is infinite in the things it may desire. Claims and perceptions surge in and out of the brain box like the tides of an ocean moving up and down a passive beach. "
Jules Henry
Okay. Presenting the only documented case on record of the birth of a child after his mother has ingested Iysergic acid. It can he verified by consulting the hospital records at St Vincent's in New York during the seventies. Throughout James' birth and during the labor which preceded it, Ida was tripping.
"Let me just start at the beginning. I hadn't taken any drugs throughout the pregnancy. Nothing Not even grass. So I was relatively in a pure state. I had watched my food most of the time. How I ended up taking the acid, was I was Iying in bed with S. and he said, do you want to trip? and I said no, and I lay there for a while..."
"Was that close to your due day?"
"Yes, I was already overdue five davs."
"You never paid attention to the book that says in the last six weeks of your pregnancy you're not supposed to have sex?"
"I never paid attention. So I was in bed and we started discussing what it would be like to have my baby on acid. And I thought it would probably be a very beautiful thing to do. We talked about it, and I decided that evening that I would take the acid the next morning. So I took the tab (they said 500 mikes) when I got up that morning and about two hours later, I started getting very trippy. So then I looked at this guy who I was staying with, and I said to him, I'm going to have my baby now. And he said, "Oh sure, just go into the bedroom and have it." And I said okay. So I got up and walked into the bedroom, and I got into the squat position on the bed, and decided I was going to have the baby right there. But then when he realized that I really was in labor, he decided that I should go to the hospital, and that I shouldn't have it on the bed. So we got into a taxi, and we went there."
"Which hospital?"
"St Vincent's in the West Village.In New York. We walked in and told the lady at the desk that I was going to have a baby any minute. She started filling out forms, so I said, "you don't understand, see I'm going to have my baby right now." Because in my mind at that time, I could deliver whenever I wanted to. It was at my discretion whether I wanted to be in labor twenty hours, or five minutes. I could have dropped him there. She started telling me to be patient, that it was my first, that I had a long time to wait, and I kept trying to tell her, "listen. I don't." Everything was so sterile, and so antiseptic and so far away from anything real. I would have rather dug a hole in the dirt or something, because it would have been closer to me. The whole hospital trip just sort of alienated me. They finally got me upstairs in the labor room, and I wanted S. with me, the guy who I was with. And they wouldn't let him come in. So finally I told them I was tripping. They didn't know, at that time, too much about acid, so first they didn't believe me. So then I didn't say anything else, I just started saying that I wanted S. to be there. And they brought S. in finally. I was uncomfortable in the beginning, because during the labor, there was a Puerto Rican lady in the bed next to me, and she kept screaming, "Oh mother, oh mother, God help me," and I was in a place where I was just into my breathing and trying to keep things in perspective, or at least come down to this reality, every once in a while. To remember that I was in fact in a hospital, and that I was about to give birth. But I kept leaving this reality. There was no pain. There was a lot of pressure, but there really was no pain. Then I felt this enormous amount of pressure, and sat upright in the bed.I wanted to get in this squatting position, but the nurse came in and saw what I was doing and told me I had to lie down, and lay still. So I told her that the baby came, because I could feel the head, already. And she said,"No, you have plenty of time, relax." And I said, no, that I didn't have plenty of time, that the head was already there, and I pulled the sheet back, and then she went out into the halL and got the table, and put me on the table, and took me into the delivery room. They took me into the delivery room, and laid me on the table, and I remember how unreal it all seemed, because it was all so sterile and so strange. The doctor came in and he took my legs and he put them up on these silver things, and I remember thinking that was really obnoxious, because in reality I just wanted to squat, and that's the position I kept trying to get in. But they wouldn't let me get in that position. I didn't have any pain, cause I really wasn't here at all, I was in another place, and I kept trying to take my legs off the stirrups, because that was really obnoxious. I thought it was a terrible position. I thought it was very uncomfortable. It changed my breathing too. And my breathing was the thing that stopped the pain sort of. And then I felt this enormous kind of pressure, and I could see in the mirror, my little boy being born. I was peaking at that point. I remember. I knew he was a boy before he was born. I flashed on that. I also flashed on my Iying on the table giving birth. But it really wasn't me. It was this physical vehicle that I had, that had this other human being inside, and it really was not me giving birth, but it was my body going through the thing. I was somewhere else watching it all happen. Freaky part was the sterility of the whole thing, and the awkwardness of the position that they put me in. The idea of having my legs up freaked me out. I didn't like that. Because I kept squatting down, and they wouldn't let me squat. I thought it was really unnatural... to have your legs up like that. That's what l kept thinking. After the baby was born, they put him on my stomach, the doctor hit my stomach and the afterbirth came. He asked me if I wanted to see it, and I said yes. I had this overwhelming desire that I wanted to eat it. I really wanted to eat it. I wanted to taste it. And he wouldn't let me of course, because when I went to touch it, they all freaked out, because they had no idea of where I was at. At first they really refused to believe that I was tripping on acid. And then I slept. I didn't see my baby till three days later. I slept for a full three days.
Do you remember any of the actual imagery?
Well, colors. Mainly colors. It was in the cosmos, and I was one color and inside my color there was another color. The baby was blue, and I was copper. At the moment of the actual birth, at that moment, well there's no description for that. I don't know how to describe that. It all came together, and all fused into one total thing. It was good, because-
At what point in the time did that happen?
Maybe halfway through, maybe two hours. That's when I went into heavy labor. That's when the nurse wouldn't let me squat, and she made me lie down, and I said no, you don't understand, my body says squat, and I'm going to squat, on this table. Then they started getting a little excited.
I remember clearly feeling like when they put your legs up in the air, it was like trying to take a shit with your legs in stirrups. It was so wrong, it was so utterly wrong.
Very uncomfortable, and very cold, very cold.
When did the acid wear off?
Well, I went to sleep. I remember they wheeled me out into the hall to bring me into the room, and I peaked at the moment of his birth. I got off at that moment. Eternally off. I mean such a getoff, it was unbelievable. I had turned inside out at that moment. It would be like an implosion, it wasn't like an explosion for me, he didn't come out of anywhere. After your initial orgasm, let's say, everything just went right back in, and it was all inside at that point. There was no outside at all. Everything was just inside. Oh. flowers, I kept seeing flowers, a lot of flowers.
What kind of-any particular kind?
All different kinds of flowers and they were opening up in slow motion, and like a honey type of substance sort of ran out and as they dropped in slow motion then other flowers...
Did you have any feelings of what the child was going to be?
Well, he was God. I had conceived God, the new Messiah.
Did you have any vision thing about him?
He glowed, and there were rainbows coming out of him.
You saw the baby before he was born.
Well, I knew he was a boy and right after he was born I looked at him. He glowed, a sort of golden type thing about him, and there were rainbows coming out ot his stomach, where the umbilical cord was. But of course nobody knew what was happening except me and when-before the doctor even said it's a boy, I said, it's a boy. I was conscious all the way through it, I mean really conscious to a super point, Iike you know if I was to conceive again I would do it again on acid. Because it was a verv natural thing to happen. The thing that was unnatural was all the structure and all the rules ot having a baby in this society. You have to do this. and you have to do that, so the baby is-
So all that did was show you how it might be easier and more pleasant.
Yes. in more natural, friendly surroundings, than this sterile thing. and this cold. I remember being very cold on the delivery table, super cold.
I expect even anybody's messy apartment becomes human once you get in-
Right. But it was really far away, the doctors, very objective.
and...
How Iong did this labor last in objective reality?
Four and a half hours. I kept feeling that I could do it any time and I kept saying no, I want to wait, but I could never really understand. the thing I didn't understand was why he kept waiting when I really believed I could have it any time I wanted to. I think I- after the water broke-or soon after-that's when I decided I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go to the mountains, I wanted to-
Visual imagery was no different than how it usually is?
Well it just was verv weird, and the nurses were very weird.
because they were not from my planet, they were from another space, and they were in that space that boxes up things, and puts names on things, and categorizes things and analyzes things, and does things according to what they think is the right way to do them. Which to me was completely unnatural. If there was any bummer in the trip it was certainly the doctors in the hospital, because it was so unreal. The whole idea and the whole procedure, the forceps and the whole thing, I just felt it was really unnecessary, so that part of it freaked me out, you know, but they themselves looked really rigid and roboty and mechanical.
How about auditory?
Yeah, a lot of sounds.
Were the sounds-did they sound true, or false?
No. They were not. They weren't from my space at all. There was nothing real about them. They were going through a trip that they did all the time. Went through all the motions.
There was no connection made with you in any human way. Right.
If you had had a particular doctor who was a friend. would maybe the voice have gotten through?
Oh, sure.
Were there machine sounds or other artificial sounds? Would music have helped?
Oh, sure, of course, that would have really helped.
Of course.
Wouldn't it have to have been good music?
Of course.
Good by whose standards?
My standards.
But that is paradoxical.
Isn't it though?
The last thing I remember was coming out of the room and getting into bed and S. was there and he had this white rose and he gave me the rose and he said the baby's beautiful and I said yes. He has this very low, almost mono-tone, soothing voice, and it was him. if anybody, who ended the trip. I remember him talking to me as I went out of it, you know.
It was funny because three days later when I got up he was still there, and the rose of course had died but he was still there, and when I woke up he was the first person I saw, and then when I'd seen the baby he was even more than I'd seen when I first saw him, even more, because I had rested then and I was clear and I had come down and I knew I just wanted to get out of the hospital because at that point I said to myself, I'm never going to another hospital again, you know, unless I'm straight! But if I'm tripping or on some hallucinogenic I'm never going to a hospital again. Yes. See, the only thing I found difficult, I mean really difficult. was keeping myself centered. and taking the acid brought me to another space, which I was very comfortable in, because I had ex- perienced that space before. But the outside stuff kept bringing me down, there really was no pain. I understood completely what was happening, and it was bad because I was put in a situation where I really could not do what my natural intincts were because they wouldn't let me, because of their uptight fears, and their ster- ility, so that was the only thing that brought me down. as a matter of fact that's what kept bringing me down, the idea of someone cutting me to make more room for the child to come, supposedly for easier birth. that freaked me out a little bit, the fact that he was going to cut me to make more room when I knew that if he just let me squat, you know, that the baby would be born with no problem.
Is that a perception that would not have come to you if you weren't tripping? It's a perception that came to me just anyhow.
I don't know.
I had what is called precipitous birth, and my natural instinct was to squat. It seemed really comfortable. it felt right, it was no longer hardship.
Yeah, I think that would have been less pressure, I think it would have been much easier.
Do you remember any other imagery?
I don't think so. I remember thinking about the whole conception, of how I got pregnant, how I knew I was pregnant when it happened, also where the baby fit in the whole overall scheme of my life. I thought the lady on the bed next to me was a witch or not exactly what you would call a light power, she was more on a dark power trip. I remember one of the reasons that I had to get out of that labor room was because she was sending out all of this negativity to me, and I was trying to push all this negativity away and it was bringing me down, and when I was brought down I was confronted with the reality of the situation, and then I'd become frightened and I'd have fear, but as soon as I could go back into myself then I would go into a sort of meditation and watch my breathing, and get into what was happening, and that fear would go away until she'd start screaming and then it'd bring me down again. But she was weird this lady, very weird. I mean she screamed all the way through her labor.
Do you remember any visual images?
Mountains, lots of mountains, but that's-I always go to the mountains.
So James splits from Babe spontaneously in a sense out of a sort of respect for Sid Arthur in that he thought maybe they were a family? For such is real motivation to begin with. The man is a bloody saint. a bloody saint, I do believe.
She interpreted this as a rejection and . . .
Ah, well these are complications, of course, both Ida, who he splits with and Babe who he splits from are the same person in that they are the same persons inside in a variety of levels. James also became momentarily fearful. . . he did not want to bewitch Babe.
James has to be very careful sometimes- he realizes that sometiomes he can bewitch people to do things but he would much rather have them do it on their own. Like, uh, if bewitchment were necessary, but um' only for a brief while and then he likes it to go away, so to prevent bewitching Babe too much. He wanted that to develop on its own. So he, sort of vanished for awhile, with Ida. So, then there is a footnote to one of the Langian knots described. But she still feels that before he went off with Ida, Babe could have provided everything for him, if he made his needs clear.
Ah, but he had to go off with Ida. In his nightmare Ida turns out to be his mother, and so there's a confusion in those passages where...
Wait. This was not his dream. his delusion. his illusion. Not his reality. It was his nightmare?
We didn't say that. We didn't say anything. You only thought we said something.
Yes, yes.
He has a need to find out everything-to know everything. It's not that he has a need to prove himself with women- he knows It's not Don Juan. It's his genuine need to know everything there is to know about women for his art, it's really that. It's really for that and the good of the poor. (ha ha). He does have a conflict but were he asked to choose totally between his art and women, he would give up women. He would even do that. They also serve who only stand and piss.
Most likely, yeah. Doctor, please let Babe say what is happening.
"My fantasy was that he would meet me in town twice a month -he would be in the monastery and I would be in this nunnery. And twice a month we would meet each other, and have each other like a milkshake, and then we would each go back, content with the rest. Sublimating and sublimating. That sublimation being, in our opinion, higher than the thing it's supposed to sublimate.
To return to our question...(This has been a huge tangent and such a footnote)...So James had to...James had to sort of uh, uh, the psychological motivations while, what might have been experienced by Babe as a desertion, were not conceived by James as being such. That is, he was not deserting Babe for...
Come on, man. Let's lay the facts on the line-he goes off with a female.
Yes. yes.
He has relations with her. Yes. He then returns. Yes.
But good relations or poor relations? Ah the factor of danger! Ah the adrenalin flowing in danger. whatever new! Ah the endorphins, those natural opiates. Passion the forbidden!
Carry on colleagues. I must consult my notes.
Some notes on Babe's dreams.
On an island inside a Magic Mountain Motel Institute clinical treatment center. Abandoned by James. Hiding for a few days trying to be child again. "This therapy place in my head," she tells the woman in the apartment next door on their way to the garbage incinerator. Swallowing apricot jam and Hershey bars to stay even. Working from sunup to sundown. Falls into bed without thought. Turns attention to spiritual matters and learns how to ride a bike. Thinks of the children's father and the word kaddish comes to her every morning. Finally she learns three lines of it.
She says the words but finds that between the words "V'yis" and "be almay alhuso" there is no way that she can communicate what is happening. Words beginning to leave melodies replacing them. She can't write them down. On a pitch in her head which corresponds so inexactly to the notes of a piano or guitar that all that can be communicated is vague nod of higher or lower or somewhat higher or somewhat lower in answer to friend when she tries to pick them out for Babe on the piano.
Might or maybe, if the eye noises hadn't come back. So deatening this time as to drown out even Judy Collins singing sweet Sir Galahad on a disk that was the pupil of the iris of fierce eye. The noise actually look at her.
Babe's dreams like a fruit basket of wish fulfillment. Anyhow manages to learn to write down notes.
The day following the sixth dream after James' absence. Babe arriving at that place into which she had dreamed herself the night before.
She thinks therapy for depression, a penny for the poor. Now worried about keeping it all together. Went off with Ida.(not realizing that after his nightmare he decided he'd better just go off alone for awhile.
Yes we have no bananas. we just are bananas today.
Meanwhile Babe tries dutifully to attach the right voices to the Roget's Thesaurus of Face. Makes a lot of food for Rachel and Sara. How flimsy the net between inside river and outside ocean action . Became become. Becoming.
Finds it hard to think. Maternal olive pit caught in throat.
Off duty. perched on a stool al the restaurant where salad man.
writes imaginary letters to large corporations soliciting funds for Watts towers and other upside down causes.
Later finds self still not able to talk to family about what happened. Decides to try to learn how to sing on pitch.
How long is an Oedipal exile, thinks James' (starting to miss Babe.} So far oh fades so far oh fades so far.
As far as the eye can see and a little bit beyond that too. Even so they say (who are they?)
Reverse recapitulations of historical semantics. And other loopy big words. All explanations end in teleological opinions (Do it my way, Kid) and the success or bending. which comes only from knowing how to bend , (the willow tree before the storm or something.) Try to relax like a native though in self imposed exile. Imaginary boy eating sugar cane in the tropical sun before the fire on a wintry day in a Vermont cabin, maple syrup dripping from his tongue.
It's as hard to talk about heaven as it is to a boy. the nice things about it being so obvious, because-you want to go to it, like you want to be with the boy. And neither needs words necessarily, just the kind of wanting that makes it clear even if you and Heaven don't speak the same language.
Babe's husband Sandy who died wasn't reaily crazy you know no more than anybody else who keeps laying on himself having to sell Park Place to Marvin Gardens. But being tired, he went to heaven as innocent as his son Agon Bite of Inwit. and so,she finally figured, heaven is where they are, so it will be a bit of OK.
But don't forget that it isn't any different from that minute. I was mentioning that blew us all together one night. Just before the invention of the printing press ended the Dark Ages and brought knowledge to even those in the wilderness.
There were lots of bananas and honey. People lighting pretty candles and putting daisies in vases and just generally fixing it up so it looks nice, as in her nature.
Everything run on batteries. No need for house current.
A tree. With an apple. And a second chance to decide if you should eat it.
Self exiled, James thinks: have never loved another such have never loved another such have have never loved another such.
Sow my seeds to fill my needs to fill the mouths I have to fill.
Place them upon the window sill to get the light from the fraying sun. Now that that's done, away we run.
Sitting here on my ass smoking, watching the day pass into night and into day again.
Sitting on the beach peeling peaches, James views the pigeons like an uncle his nieces, uncertain just how all the pieces are to be divided or whether maybe not or again be placed back together.
Wasting my time though its my own god given time and my waste is only to counterbalance their haste least in a too soon and dear good time they all lose their minds and there is no one here to continue to refine the milleniums of culture which I must funnel through my sieve..
Now no longer a rookie in life's ball games, I think I'll give all you pitchers and catchers a few tips from how this here game looks from this end of the ball park. Firstly, beware of people who wave broken milk bottles under your nose. They're hard to please. We go down the dark hallways into the bright afternoon sun. Some folks are busy snoring but we're on our way down to the morning sail upon the widening wine dark sea, just you and me. To awake to a morning dew of sea salt air and sea gulls breezing by before our eyes still heavy with sleep drawing each to each and each and every one becomes a daughter or a sun. And upon the ocean waves together we behave as if and although, in spite of placement in space time continuous of both friendly and inimical consciousness but also demanding and confining and enlightening and suntanning behaving as though the world were all there to be exactly as it is.
The highway to the sun/ now my race is won/ my fighting is now done?/ I'm gonna have some fun/ putting hot dogs in buns/ Baby come/Now l've got to run/she's chasing me with a gun/you are sure a hun/Have a glass of rum/
The bark on the trees flows like a river. River run through the streets of time down your past present and future if you will hear its voices in the morning and the evening.
James takes to writing down his dreams.
Hey Babe! What you talking about? There's lots of questions I ask-about a hundred a second but they're only a lot of mexican jumping beans caught up in a broken down washing machine. Do I have to explain anything more? When someone talks too loud and long, just start singing.
Later tonight I'll sleep in the hay.
When James returns to Babe he does not leave again .Enough years to make a fairytale happy ending if anything is an ending.
James lifted his face from the song and sees her full face and then she jumps up and run to the door for a breath of air. Tattered flinty branches of winter trees. I am lonely. come and hold me. He sees her fading into a distant future. They've taken off their clothes and she doesn't know which way to go and leads him to a tree outside under the sky and stands with him naked hoping no neighbors will poke their heads outside. James's bare frame shivers and he thinks of the tree in the yard.
A mind made whole by mothers' milk of kindness.
And then there is self inside and flesh made mad and flesh under and each to each inside his reach he seizes and catches a fourfold triangle and his mouth kisses the corners of the cloth.
Then there is quiet and he asks if he can cry in her arms. She tries to go away and he holds her and asks if he can cry and be both James and a little boy. And she says yes he can. He cries awhile and then he feels the serpent and kisses the marble of the madonna's tit.
The next day he returns.
Where have you been, James?" Babe says as he floats sideways through the door.
No answer.
NOTES TOWARD THE POSSIBLE PREVENTION OF PSYCHIATRIC MISINTERPRETATION
Note the tension which is negatively constellated by Babe's continued attempts to maintain a nuclear family beyond reasonable expectation. Remembering that it was not a biological family at question here. Their original father had died.
Note the underlying structure of four classic mythical structures (Agamemnon' Oedipus, The Brothers Karamazov, and the Space Ship ). Note that the fragmented pages and ruptured phrases which relate in the text to psychiatric and philosophical material do not stem from a nihilistic source but are rather a narrative technique to indicate a new conscious orientation beyond reflex referendum.
Is it perhaps language?
Yes, I am Sandy, also known as 606. first father, yes I am Sid Arthur, replacement father figure, yes I am that random number invoked by a boy during World War II in terror of losing his identity-not just his 1ife.
'Six o six take a message" was how a friend got out of the army. Whenever he was asked a question he replied "six o six take a message." So they gave him a blue discharge and he was a survivor. Babe, what does it feel like to be a sunivor?
James writes, "Finally, after all is said and done, after the battle has been lost or won, whether it has been a daughter or a son, one settles in the peace of sleep. But not to all, my friend, not to all. Babe whose sweet balm graces my head and shoulders with warm wet winds of forget is not always so kind and sometimes plagues herself with ever recurring night and day screens of dismembered memories and other parts and parcels going on in the deep bardos of consciousness.
So and why this book?, Babe thought later, not censoring her loose associations. Darling of the darlings of forever, limb locked in broken frozen frieze, moment of no exit, floating with our son and other innocents in some wheatfield of plenty. No longer eye muscle tortured in the Paris of Heaven or the London of Sancturary or the San Francisco of cloudless blue skies celebrated in pop tune and Greek ode, on tryptych and vase. To rest peaceful finally, the battle fought for no reason joyous to man, won and done to the point where rest is possible.
So precious in lumbered memory, melody of heart starts and jam pots of first lovings not flawed, please not flawed by the bumblings and indecisions and obedience to windy authority eye noise boxes of later. I sing of beginnings still now and always darl, of the not possibles and everything that matters now then and ever, until those Third Front walks across black forests and wet chilled injustices burn into planetary galaxy stew.
"I ain't got no home, I'm just a travelin round-I'm just a ramblin' worker I go from town to town, rich man got my home wherever it may be and I ain't got no horm in this world anymore."
See they ask what the event, what the conflict, what happened? I don't have the heart to tell them is the fact of it, not in story, poem, picture, snapshot of skinny boy next to that ocean so black with anger as to come pillaging in on a flood of fright faster than schooners or steamships or rocketships or nuclear etceteras.
At any rate described in litany the new journey is this: we exist, eat oatmeal, take three giant steps forward and two little steps backwards, bite into a plastic herring, clasp fingers around a glass marble, and so survive.
Toot toot tootsie goodbye. Toot toot tootsie don't cry. The choo choo train that takes me away from you, no words can tell how sad it makes me. Toot toot toosie don't cry.
Babe hopes her children will understand why she has to stop trying to continue to maintain some kind of "regular" American family. She has to ask Sid to find his own place. Again.
"Sid, please. This is the third two weeks notice. Please find your own apartment. I'm starting to have strange dreams again."
Six oh Six's. She thinks of the night before.
"Which is why beginnings for you," she says in her dream. "Always the rope ladder swinging like Tarzan's Jane to the next tree, not able to stay under the laden ouside world. Burdened middles and endings indeed always in the middle so as to not have to-well, you know how it is, I don't have to tell you."
Waking. Babe says. "So is this immortality? And who will it be spend with? Or are you all one?"
Sandy (Six oh Six), says, like to ghost of Hamlet.
"You can answer those multiple choice questions with a check mark on lined paper. As for me, unfortunately I was not a yankee doodle dandy, yankee doodle do or die, nor a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July."
Some things better silent, a forty-five degree angle of turn to a nother beginning and another trip, (not to prevail, like a Faulknerian black, but just to endure).
Locked in some winter waste of hailstorm and careening beast kingdom, bitter ends of beginnings started to be Kellogg cerealed into crunch bowls of wet boots marching across captured lands, mines exploding over and over again until the high thin zing of shrapnel caught testicle and heart and dream flopped and then quieted wildly, fishnetted into what might be called death if you're into such descriptions (I'm not).
In the dream, Babe couldn't answer.
"I'm looking over a four leafed clover that I overlooked before.
One leaf is sunshine the other is rain. Third is the roses that grow in the lane. No need explaining the one remaining, is somebody I adore. I'm looking over a four leafed clover that I overlooked be fore."
Don't hassle it little honey, it's not worth a wrinkle in your misty white brow.
Just take it like the Dealer from Olympus hands it out, trot yourself along in a jaunty tow step like you've been doing and rest on the landing because it's better there. Home is that promised space of long gentle fingered unwindings, not yoga twisted into a denial of muscle cries and sinew rantings, but an outstretched pil low so long, so silky and sweet that the moment of the wrenched breath forgotten after a hundred historied seconds of where I am now. with your son before the silence started that blew you ten years into that night walking animal kingdom is forgotten). End of sentence.
No, I am those who you were with after and will be again. Who now replace me, yet being their proud and special self.
Babe, trying to atone for listening to authority and therefore not having been as helpful to six oh six and Joan as she would have been if she'd been strong enough then to follow her simple instincts, decides that she has to spend much of the rest of her life trying to convince people that they have to change some of their thinking about what's been called "mental illness" or "optimal disturbance" for this culture.
Reason descending into chaos in order to persuade necessity.
Going through Chaos which guards the gates of Hell.
The Scylla and Charybdis of Objects and References being obstructions to Hell which is itself only an obstruction to entering the Void.
Going finally into the Void in order to return as new formed babe found in the wilderness drawing only on memory, myth, dream, and the mass unconscibus.
"Macaroni casserole in fridge. Warm in 375° oven. I'll be back later," she writes to the children.
New theory of the Relationship between Creativity and Ontogenesis. New theory concerning Totem Taboos and Exogamy
Please be patient with me during this time which may last for six hundred and six hours.
It is more than Interpersonal though less than Neanderthal. Can Rachel get milk, grapenuts, and eggs after school? Money under note.
Be back before midnight. Keep door double locked."
Love
Mom
"Heaven", Babe says to James, is being wherever you are for a minute, you know, with that mixture of sensations of objects that is your pleasure and will do no harm to another.
Is where, when you look as far as the eyes on your face can see, the past present and future are smiling back entertained, curtained, entwined and entwining, not lost to view by an unknowing electrician's error a moment before the third act curtain.
Of course its got its little flaws too you know, heaven being only human, like us, you know, and sometimes wanting to get it on with Earth.
Heaven of course being that place where you don't have to decide anything more complicated than what to make God for dinner, because it's all laid out for you. any path you make being the one that hurts nobody and still lets you have enough time to stay in the space you need to be until the answers come.
The question being, are we so locked into having to repeat, over and over that limbo time, that we again lay upon the new what was done to us in the earlier times of our life?
Yesterday I again asked Sid to please start looking through the ads in the Village Voice until he finds an apartment. He knows I mean it and is looking.
A Month Later
See I been there before
summer done and gone
and I feel like
winter's coming on.
"So, doing that, and the poor man cried when he left, with his Juliard string quartets and his expresso machine. I started to cry myself. "But it had to be," Babe said. "I tried but I wasn't in love with him."
Heaven being perhaps a one thing at a time place where as you write the check the paper doesn't fill up confusingly before your very eyes with the numbers and names of every mythematician of not only your personal past but the past (time) of the race.
Heaven possibly where as you make a communication-it comes out simple, with a verb, a noun, a simple adverb or adjective or two and a pleasing melody, even, so that the eye noise doesn't come up from the place in your head that's afraid.
See heaven isn't into giving everybody the same thing. It's not a revolution to seize the wall to wall carpeting of the rich and lay it on the poor.
Now there is that place where I don't have to live in two worlds to two sets of time anymore.
At least not everyday, where some days I could hang out with a notebook and pencil and guitar and nobody'll notice the play didn't get produced because I could no longer make the phone calls, and the book not even sent out and therefore not read, letters unanswered just waiting for bread and butter and tea, so tired and hungry and wanting to stay there awhile longer just for the fun of it.
Let us go then you and I where the babies are stretched out against the sky T.S. Eliot etherized upon a table should auld acquaintance be forgot it's a long way to Tipperary but my heart's still there.
"That sounds like poetry" James says.
"Yes, and the seasons change like they used to show it in old movies. Pages being pulled off a calendar, flowers starting to grow again, stuff like that. Shade trees turning green near the ocean and ginko trees and ailanthus putting out new shoots in eastern cities. Fires on beaches where you toast marshmallows and play guitars and nothing bad happens.
It's better now.
James says "I like living with you and the girls. Remember the Sunday we decided we's all get ourselves reborn. It was as serious as Charlie Chaplin to you. Some ritual of pouring water or something (probably last night's spaghetti). So we could all begin again."
So was Sid a kind of 606 again, or was he just attempting to be, not knowing it would be impossible, Babe thinks much later.
And did I have to do that trip again to know the best and the worst of it?
An Inquiry Into Cosmic Law
Did l he Iove you more than I love you?
Walking along a city block where the sun is shining strongly and it is late in the afternoon James felt moved by the phosphorescence and warmth and spontaneously after much mellowing burst into song on a bridge going across the river where under the water sparkled and where he'd once kissed a girl, walked with another and thought of a third. The song he sang was a gospel song uncovered in a popular songbook praising the advantages of hard and persistent work and a witness to the grace and ultimate completion of a creative force transcending the merely personal.
It was a week ago less one day that he'd returned from the house by the ocean. Now he was in Babe's apartment. Two years ago he didn't know that his lady was real. He'd not met her yet. A year ago she'd already been his lady for awhile.
The sound of different voices comes from above the stairs. The sound of different voices ring. The sound of different voices cling and are gone. James will not now read all the books that are on the shelves.
What was that? Where was that? Where am 1? Yes. Here is James. Sitting at a table in a city apartment smoking one of the few cigarettes he has allowed himself today.
Life and Death appear to live in the same place in his belly.
It's not been that long since he returned from the ocean.
As he grew older he began to see what are called problems by people. At moments the beast within his breast rages but his mind's eye smiles and lets the beast rage. The triangle glistens in the folds of sunlight and twistsover on itself to make a square. Smiles change to frowns and back to smiles with the pulse of a heart beat.
"What be this life of man?" a voice whispers in his ear and he gestures across the table in the back room to his questions, a fellow like himself, who commands his attention with a dramatic nod to the floor, and announces to him, "What be this life of man?" He looked at James and smiled and James removes his frown and smiles with him.
Babe knows everything is gettihg better. Take one giant step forward and two baby steps back. Take three baby steps forward and one giant step back. Take just keep moving until the time changes. It would be that for all of them.
Fragment of a Love Story
Because of some quirk of karma James and Babe appeared in slightly altered form. They were each supposed to be thirty-five, have met at a dance in the seventh grade, married, lived and died in 1974 as a result of a blown fuse on Venus. As it happened she was a bit excited and turned in a little early mumbling something about wanting to hug The Great Gatsby, and James forgot he was supposed to be born for awhile-it was the twenty two shades of red on Saturns outer ring that held his time.