On the personal side
Yet more personal (this replaces two chapters entitled "Personal Memoir and Yet More Personal" which both got frozen on freewebs- whereas you could not scroll down or edit- the two had three photos which i can only describe here- for there seems to be no way to upload them)
The previous prose has to do with the public life- but- the personal bears mentioning: The death of Louise- my ex wife- hammered this home to me. I got to thinking one morning- 2/18/09- : The Kingdom of God is within You
.and, Everywhere we are making a living but no where are we living. I have the feeling there is a door- like that closet into Narnia. Time to get started going thru! (Of course- Wilder has explored all of this in his play "Our Town"). In that play (and in The Bridge at San Luis Rey) he has appealed to us all, but isn't it interesting that the more negative, more sort of "flashy" authors get the limelight. The history of literature is as biased as is the other histories- some one should do a history of literature in the spirit of Howard Zinn- include Che Guevara's noteboook of favorite poems, for example.
It's 2009 one morning, I had forgotten to put my partial in- the thing about this statement was, as I sat down to write about this period- I felt the need to observe a protective ritual. How could I perform well without putting in my partial? I went thru my days with these rituals. I was confined in them. They HAD helped me in that I now had enough money to retire. But I had been a scairdy cat all my life. I had not made a move without referring to my little tics- obsessively, compulsively.
At 67, I felt the need to explore, to break out- once more, the suspicion that I was looking in the wrong places- no, I havent even been looking. Once there was a time, when- w Esalen, Arica, Wellspring at Dayspring- all the goofy mvts., our generation had sought- Louise, even, had introduced me- and now she was gone. I saw Louise the teacher. After her death, she had come to me in a dream and said Think of all we accomplished. But what did she mean?
The greatest sages- to me, Thoreau, Blake- Robert Bly, even, had tried to break out. I needed to get back there and start the real journey (I think women would have to be involved tho- not just men).. Work was not everything. Feeling
expression-I have been sleeping- all this time- man, woman kind-and we must be careful with judgments- are obviously still sleeping. They are in their thinking brains- which is fine in that they are trying to change the world. But they are not seeing, or touching, or feeling. That old word- "feeling".
I went back to the passages I had in my diary on those heady days
at about the time I went to work for OAR from 9-5- the time when Louise and I were breaking up- the time before I became my own person more speedily.
The transition between the public and the personal: Dorothy Day quoted by John Dear: The measure of your discipleship is the amount of trouble you are in for justice and peace. Of course- as a public figure- I had poured blood on draft files- but that didn't mean I was a person in my own right!
Would I say F ck discipleship? then? No. The road to personhood is a "long and winding road"- as Paul McCartney sings it. How much that song meant to me in prison- that and "Mother Mary come to me- there will be an answer- let it be" "Long and winding road"- wafting through the dormitory at the West St. prison in Manhatten.
Louise had grown while I was in prison ('70-71). While prison hadn't hurt me, it hadn't helped. She would not have minded supporting me had I been my own person. But I was unhappy and to put up with that, my nonpersonhood, my being, yes, "out of touch" with my feelings, my repressed anger, my lack of support for her mentally and materially, she wanted better. I needed to be on my own! I had gone from my family into Mt. Hermon, then Oberlin, then the new family with Phil as father, then with Louise as mother, then into prison; I had never become myself. We must replace our family with ourself as resource, we can't keep living in the "house of incest". We must leave that nest of horrors (usually), the American family. And try to replace it with a better family. Louise got tired of being my momee. Looking back on it, having the respect for her that I do, I was fortunate that she put up with me as long as she did.
The counselors Louise recommended that I see weren't able to budge me from my unhappiness. I wasn't making progress in my therapies. She felt that the Catholic left movement and following prison had scarred me: in the blood pouring I was supposed to be doing something for humanity but I was getting hassles for not being radical enough, then in prison I adopted a macho stance just to survive. Louise saw it as, to a degree, a lot of competitive men dueling with each other for prominence, regardless of their commitment to "peace". The male dominated movement had done little to build lasting support systems (although I believe that Phil tried to do so later on as he founded Jonah House, a commune with families and children as well as resisters).
At least we had given birth to a marvelous son (although he wouldnt remain marvelous all his life - he became schizophrenic in 1994). He was the final monument to our relationship after we separated, (and he became the only way in which the relationship continued, e.g. for purposes of parenting).
Louise had helped me to strike a better than average blow for peace. If she had carved out her own life while I was away at prison, now it was my turn. I return to the days when we broke up-1977.
POSSIBLE MOTTO
Two colors approaching,
On the edge of the mirror
Where it bevels and slants
And the light plays in spectrum....
If I move slightly, watching,
Orange and green come up
Rolling and diving, my old friends:
Begin again always.
I had written rather boastfully, realizing that risks must be taken to establish oneself in the world. Now I would have to live those words so reminiscent of Rilke's, "You must change your life" boast. None of us begins again always. We have different tolerances for risk and most seek automatic pilot (at least that was my tendency). We seek that poker hand so good we never have to play another card, (Leonard Cohen's line).
In all my years of expensive education, there been no courses in such important subjects as risk taking or the break‑up of marriage, loss of love 101. One had to seek out such information on one's own, or go to elders/experts as one could find them. It was hard for our generation, as for so many generations before to respect our elders; they hadn't taught us anything! They were too busy just trying to survive with the cards society had dealt, they were too busy following orders, they were too busy trying to find their own perfect poker hand. It wasn't that they sadistically or purposefully overlooked telling us about life's basics to see how we would screw it up. It was more a sin of omission.
There were times when I scornfully thought that the only things my father ever taught me were how to drive and that you should lay down some tissue on a strange toilet seat (or was that mom?) (say, in some filthy gas station john). But alot of pop had rubbed off on me indirectly, no doubt. His interest in the movies (Howard Carter, Tut and archaeology and in photography- slides of the Holy Land that qualified him for his Fellow of the National Geographic), his showmanship and sense of humor as opposed to Moms?)
We had said not to trust any one over 30; how ridiculous. Every generation has its good men and women, Dave Dellinger, Phil and Dan were examples in theirs.
It was hard to let go of Louise; once, I actually hid in a closet in her apartment (my old nest) jumped out and attacked a lover (was this the worst moment in my life) or I slept in the vacant apartment downstairs for a couple of nights, like so many other abusive, obsessive American men, some even stalking their ex-wives or lovers and killing them because they can't let go (if I can't have you, nobody can) (like O.J. Simpson). I think this might has been the nadir of my life, the blood pouring possibly the high point? This occurrence brought the lie to my peace movement activities and would have to my reputation were it broadcasted, I was a violent, hypocrite. When you think of a life- you see the arc of it as it is proclaimed in its history- on its tombstone so to speak. David Eberhardt- peace protestor...but no- David Eberhardt- male so insecure that he has to attack a guy as if he were taking his property- i.e. Louise. My separation from Louise was really my freedom- freedom to become a responsible, self supporting male- able to support myself on my own- able to have another arc- that of career criminal justice worker. I had not the taste for Phil and Tom's more Catholic Worker existences- In a couple of years I would start my own franchise of a national company- O.A.R. O, it was related to the civil rights and peace movement. But am I getting ahead of myself? What was the date when this attack occurred? It happened before I started O.A.R.. I had yet to go to work w George Mische in D.C. Life has a way of ambushing you and pointing you in new directions...and my lust for various women- drew me in a different direction than that of the pure prophet- my (Mr. Hermonite, perhaps?) need/desire? for respectability drew me into the job market- my need to support myself! There was another arc to my life- that of poet- but that paid even less than peace activist! Still, I was curious enough to want to experience all parts of life- not just the peace movement or poet side- hell, there was a side of me that enjoyed being the "Director" (of O.A.R.- the Administrator (in my City, then State job). There was a part of me that would grow to enjoy getting paid and being able to collect, travel, help my schizophrenic son! When I later read Robb's maristerial biography of Rimbaud- I though of this. Rimbaud associated his fabulous poetry with his juvenile, acting out life with Verlaine- and he deemed it "disgusting"- tried to make a living in Africa- all the while maintaining his explorative side by wild adventures there.
I knew how these horrible, possessive men felt. I had to use all the tricks I was learning in my therapy and sensitivity sessions to learn how to let go. Often, it was running that worked best for me:
ANOTHER POEM WITH VIOLENCE IN IT:
She stands at ready to the side,
She holds a knife who was my bride,
Wonders, so this is what men do to men?
I push him to the floor
Who was so "heavy into" fu king her before.
I heard them cumming all the way up the stairs,
I planned to be there, waited at the door.
I like the pain, I want some more.
"Shift scene, cross cut", I'm running in the woods again.
It's autumn or spring, o isn't it always?
The sky all gorn, the trees bleed purple.
The falling leaves or budlets asking, who...who...who (read tapering off)...
The stupid, bullship thunder clouds black-blue...blue...blue...
I would have to get to that place the country rock group, the Eagles sang about, "I get that peaceful easy feeling that you'll never let me down, 'cause I'm already standing on the ground." I knew where the place was, I'd been there. It was a a sunny wooden bridge up in the redwoods behind Santa Cruz, sun dappling the slats, it was aside stream coming into the Salmon River in Idaho and the sand bar that junction creates, tons of quiet seeping down into the canyon along with the silver that seeps out from its seems into the streams.
Finally, after much back and forth I left, reassuring myself that we wouldn't be apart long. Luckily, my movement activities had provided a bit of a network to use for help. I moved into a quasi commune of friends. Then, I moved to Washington, D.C. where George Mische, ex prison mate and member of the Catonsville Nine offered me a job at the National Coordinating Committee for Justice under Law, editing NCCJL Reports. I met Brian Willson who took me on as an organizer and editor of the newsletter "Jericho" at the Unitarian Service Committee sponsored National Moratorium on Prison Construction.
I no longer smirked and gloated at the coupleless folk around me or those (so many) whose marriages hadn't worked out. When I got to D.C. I joined Parents Without Partners and started frantically dating. There were moments of terrible pain that spring in the Adams Morgan section of Washington where I was living with George Mische of the Catonsville 9- who had been kind enough to give me a job-, moments when I remembered happier times. The worst part was waking up; sometimes, for a moment, the brain turned on slowly and the fresh, hot pain took a moment to click in. One longed for sleep, for any narcotic. Spring bursting out around me just made me all the sadder. I'd just have to work through it. Luckily, I was able to. I could understand the others who cannot.
Louise left the door open for return (maybe just to be nice) which gave me something to shoot for. There were weekends when I returned to Baltimore and stayed in the old apartment with Chris and Louise, comforting enough for me but not very good for my need to break free. There's a passage in Joan Baez' bio describing an early break she made which gave me a twinge of recognition. I didn't identify with her, but with the guy she left!
Encounter Movement
The various sensitivity/ encounter events I attended in the next few years, along with a men's consciousness raising group helped me find my feet. With all my inward growth and searching, I was doing much less radical action. But I was doing more, through my Washington jobs, in the society which I had previously spurned. Though I now did less in terms of heroic struggle against the government, I was at least making my own path, not just following Louise's or Phil's.
Besides one to one therapy, if you had the money, there were numerous self-exploration/ sensitivity groups my generation used for help. Louise introduced me to the human potential movement, which had come into its own in the early seventies. It was all about feelings, "getting in touch with your feelings" was the buzz phrase of the time. She left me because I was not in touch; it was an oft heard criticism of males in general at the time. It was valid. Many of us were turning out no different from our fathers (and mothers of the previous generation); what feelings we had when young we soon learned not to use and they disappeared from view. Mine had gone under at Mt. Hermon. Strong feelings I had, about Louise, about the blood pouring, tended to remain beneath the surface, unexpressed, not owned, not "dealt with". It's as if they'd handed out masks as you began Mt. Hermon, or, to survive, you yourself created them. That's how it was a "prep" school, it prepared you to succeed in the coming adult, male ruled world, a world of glittering, idiotic falsity and theater. As late as 2009 I could not escape the feeling that adult American- and other men- were basically dishonest, violent beings.
Luckily, I had a new mentor pointing out new directions. I approached the encounter movement from the peace movement, from endless meetings designed to achieve peace, meetings that were not necessarily peaceful, meetings that were as goal oriented as any at the Pentagon. My experience with MATC and other encounter groups suggested a connection between the two movements, they should be natural allies. Each had something the other lacked. The encounter movement could improve the impersonality of the peace movement and the peace movement could bring politics to the vague sensitivity movement.
For example, one might begin a meeting by saying, "I feel lousy today; my girl friend just left me" for example instead of holding such revelations back like we always did. Of course, while B��s bombed Vietnamese to death who the hell cared if your girl left you? And some radicals pointed out to me that history is full of great men (and women, no doubt) whose feelings were repressed! I might reply, how much more might they have accomplished had they been "in touch with their feelings"? the John Brown? the Lenin? The work of great men and women had probably been undermined by persons who needed more personal calm, self confidence, the peace that sensitivity session soul-baring might have given them.
Some said that the encounter movement was an insult to the peace movement. The peace movement had as its purpose a better world. The encounter movement was, to an extent, in a phrase my father had liked to use, so much navel gazing. Persons who needed to work at factories all day just to survive or who lived in third world countries and spent all day looking for food couldn't really afford to join encounter movements or suffer immobilizing depression. How could we luxuriate in self expression when we needed to get on with the no nonsense business of changing the world? But my generation was not trapped like these workers. We did have the time to work on our interior lives!
Many of the encounter movement people wanted to free themselves up for more meaningful, activist work, not just self improvement. Some were trying to bring more caring and "sensitivity" to the other movements. Who wanted to win the revolution merely to be ruled by a new group of insensitives?
I had been brought up to bury my feelings. Freeing them might be yet another freedom movement. Or did it might mean we would still have a screwed up world, more robbers, rapists and murderers "expressing their feelings". My first choice of vocation, poet, was not necessarily the liberating path. There were plenty of examples of unliberated poets. There might be a Shelly or a Ginsberg here and there (and how free were they?). Poets had reputations as wild and free beings, but most poets are "parlor guests in the mansions of the rich" to use Breyten Breytenbach's phrase. Writing was not necessarily one of freedom's tools. Writing could be a way of distancing! Writing could be creative and still not tell the truth or be "in touch". Radical writing did not pay enough to be a vocation; it tended to get the author in trouble.
My customary pose was at first remove from my feelings, outside, distant, aloof from my feelings commenting on them (a helpful pose to assume at times). The encounterists tried to put you "in touch" with the buried feelings.
Being "in touch" with feelings was one thing, acting on them another. You could argue that to act on feelings is to act on foolish impulse. Sometimes, especially after therapy sessions where numerous people criticized me for being too "thoughty", I would become a defender of thoughtfulness and reflection: "the unexamined life is not worth living". To act on feelings may throw out rational thought. Much of the encounter movement, let's face it, was whining and moaning and blaming the past for problems rather than taking responsibility and doing. Still, the best encounterists were not against doing or using your brain. They were trying to correct a wrong direction we'd used too often, to vitalize atrophied feeling and emotion. One massage therapist showed my head to be literally disconnected from the rest of me. I lived on top of my shoulders. He massaged the neck where it joined the shoulders. That, or a chiropractic "adjustment" to the spot helped me feel different.
Louise and I both participated in one encounter session "trust exercise" where the partners closed their eyes and fell over backwards towards their intimate other (trusting that the other would catch them before they crashed to the floor- this excercise- in 2009-later turned into an advertisment for GEICO Insurance). I remember how unhesitatingly Louise fell back into my arms, as unsure of myself as we both knew me to be; her trust in me was inspiring. Her support helped carry me through. People help each other: Louise helped me, the one on one therapists helped, group work helped.
These groups would let me know (sometimes rather brutally) how I was "coming across". Honesty was authorized in these sessions and I could reveal my problems in a caring setting and obtain helpful "interventions" from the group leader and other group members.
I soon realized that I "came across" as a repressed, angry and judgmental person, with lots to hide and much to improve. "What does it mean for you to show anger here," some one was asking me; "you're so polite but what are you really feeling? You use words as a defense, you leap in first so that you can be quiet later, generalize for others, the friendly helper fearing your own emotions. Own them, claim the anger; hostility is just a layer over hurt; be more honest, get the fear, the vulnerability out in the open."
In one session everyone seemed focused in on me. I could feel the back of my neck burn, my hair raise, my eyes squint, feel the anger rising. I grabbed a nearby apple, thinking this is the place where this will be allowed. I got up and stomped around, crushing the apple to a pulp (some times they would have you punch pillows, or beat mattresses or scream or pummel each other with soft bats). One of the group's younger members actually cried at the force of my emotions. Another yelled, "Hey, you just destroyed my lunch!"
To create an atmosphere of caring, you might be led in "blind milling" at the beginning of a session, closing your eyes and wandering about caressing others, hugging them. The groups needed thoughtful and focused leaders or they could get out of hand. "I sense you have a lot of pain over that memory of your father" might be said, allowing the participant to go on gently. If such caring were not shown, strong (or loud) members of the group would jump in with endless analysis or questioning and hectoring which did nothing to soothe the person spoken to.
Often good suggestions for change came my way. "Well, what are you going to do about that?", the leader trying to coax me into some plan of action. But just spitting the deep hurt out and getting some hugs was cathartic. And hearing others reveal problems far more hideous than mine gave me a lot of courage to continue.
Get in touch w your feelings
I investigated several groups in the seventies, ARICA, QUEST, NATIONAL TRAINING LABS, EST. At the ARICA Center in Georgetown, a staff member Sybyl told me of her many travels to places of mystery, Delphi, Macchu Piccu and of her introduction to the founder, Oscar Ichazo in Chile. She described the ൰ day training in scientific mysticism" and ARICA's goal of "burning away the ego completely rather not merely readjusting it to make it less obnoxious." ARICA used techniques from all the schools, yogi, bioenergetics, gestalt; she felt they were on the fast track in the consciousness raising sweepstakes. To my political friends, these were mystical assholes.
The slick Arica brochure given me at their posh Georgetown mansion center contrasted unfavorably with my nearby peace movement friends at the Community for Creative Non‑violence (CCNV), nearby but in a more run down part of town. At that time CCNV was a soup kitchen and used clothing center but in the eighties expanded into one of the largest homeless shelters in the country).
Sibyl told me that "the contradictions in western culture have reached such massive proportions that we must either change or die (the Indian koyanatsii described in Ed Abbey- put to music in a film by Phillip Glass?); our aim is not to detach people from the world but to train them to change it, to slow down and love the earth before it is too late." I think various hucksters have been saying this for the last 2,000 years, doomsdayers. As far as I knew ARICA had done little for the poor of the world. But the CCNV emphasized service to the poor and confrontational politics. Theirs was the Catholic Worker model. Phil Berrigan came out of prison to form just such a community, Jonah House, in Baltimore. I doubt if he ever attended classes in massage or martial arts or Rolfing or Tai Chi or gestalt. He continued the work along paths already travelled by Dorothy Day and other Catholic thinkers before her; to me this remained the politically and morally correct path, fun as it was to work on my feelings.
Just that Phil's path was just so damned difficult! I worried, if I only lived once, shouldn't I develop my potential, find the real me? Maybe I had powerful talents. Maybe I was special, like Mom said (like all moms say). Maybe I could attain bliss or ecstasy or satori going down some other path than Phil's. Maybe I should do what Joseph Campbell advised, "follow my own bliss". I didn't want to go through life living a lie, blindly following Phil. I wanted an ordinary life, I wanted to follow Dave. Every now and then, say, having an orgasm or playing or listening to Rachmaninov, or going outside to look at the night sky stars, or having a piece of Leonidas chocolates. These were guaranteed ways to reach a sublime spot.
The act of pouring blood on draft files was a different order of the sublime. The civil rights and peace movements had proven that there are times in history when people will band together and fight and accomplish change, that's all. That realization and the idealism behind it would have to be the draw‑in. There would be pain and death and bad feelings and sacrifice in history to come that didn't necessarily lead to the sublimity of the moment or bliss, but these movements caused change!
One of the founders of the California encounter groups, Esalen, William Schutz, gave a talk at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. He claimed much power for the self, so much as to suggest that he had caused his own baldness. "Instead of saying 'I can't', try "I won't", he suggested. Unfortunately, if not joined to group radical political commitment and action, Schutz's encounter movement was so much crap! The starving man doesn't care whether the person feeding him is self‑possessed or not? If all we wanted to do was express ourselves, we would never be able to change the world. As difficult as Phil's style was, at least he had never given up his concern for the world. There were people who kept going to encounter groups all their life without a thought for or a risk on behalf of their fellows. Some in my generation had tried both new personal paths and new political paths. Many, like generations before and to come, tried neither. They were young people who merely hated the world of their elders, then grew up to fill their elders' shoes.
After about a year (I was now working for the Unitarians' Moratorium on Prison Construction) Louise and I reconciled and we actually gave it another try. I joyously scrapped my Parents Without Partners membership card. I returned to Baltimore and started commuting to D.C., returning each night to Louise and Chris. She was willing to reconsider.
But Louise and me were not to be. One of my therapists pointed out that mine was a pretty feeble existence, divided between twin bosses: Brian at the Moratorium in D.C. and Louise on the home front in Baltimore. Louise had blossomed into her own career while I was in prison. She started her management training career with two volumes of workshops entitled A Woman's Journey.
I must say we parted well, all in all, and that I have never had a bone to pick with her. I had picked well after all. She was a powerful person and I was lucky to have been with her.
After stints with George Mische's National Coordinating Committee for Justice under Law and Brian Willson's National Moratorium on Prison Construction- a Unitarian Universalist Service Committee project), I had (and thanks to Brian and George) found/made a new job in Baltimore, founding an office of Offender Aid and Restoration (O.A.R.) (in '77) and that, along with all the therapies, made it easier to leave Louise and Chris and move 23 blocks up the hill from Mt. Vernon to Charles Village. Between O.A.R. and a men's consciousness raising group I had joined, I was finding a new mate: myself! I began to realize that I was enough of a partner for myself. The right woman would arise in time if that was what I needed.
Perhaps the worst part of our break up was the uncertainty, the not knowing which would haunt me the rest of my life; why had she left me, why were we not compatible. I had got fairly good answers by asking L, but I would never feel 100% certain I knew. I would never marry again, and if asked, I always said I'd concluded that marriage was an invention of clergy and lawyers and that I thought it was worth trying once. Once only.
(Actual things that happened that might be nice to mention? the fire set at the bottom of our stairs when L and C were able to escape to a friend's apt. nxt door- what was my role- can't even remember; the suicide of the brain surgeon whose office was beneath our apt.; my waiting outside the door to our apt and attacking L and a lover; my sleeping in a vacant apt. beneath L's- AFTER we had split).
The men's consciousness raising group was particularly good for sharing and advice; such groups copied the women's movement and were precursors of the men's movement which sprouted up in the late eighties.
New Relationships
For the next several years, I stopped being politically active. I found and kept a paying job! Basically, I created the job by founding a Baltimore chapter of the nationaly group which I knew about from DC- Offender Aid and Restoration (O.A.R.).
I wrote several horror poems, poems steeped in a kind of gothic atmosphere of loss and pain, poems by which I slowly exorcised the memory of Louise. The real horror of domestic violence was happening all around. Slowly I began to write more cheerful poems. Failing in several new relationships made it all the easier to cut less good relationships loose quickly and better identify the good ones. I was gaining the skills to search out a truer mate, far more enjoyable than pursuing correct political action. It was so much more natural to pursue women, the benefit to humankind was obvious. There was beauty in the longing for women, there was beauty in the consummation of the longing.
My first post Louise love "Roo" and I drifted apart. I can hardly remember why? Roo had restored my confidence now that Louise was gone. Yes, some one else would love me, I could attract another. Roo was a symbol for many grand lovers to come.
Jane stood behind or informed many poems of this period; we basked in happiness. She was a sensual farmers daughter who liked to tell dirty jokes and would put her feet up on the dash board of my car. Unfortunately there were portents of danger ahead for our relationship, had I known where to look. My new lovers were taking me down a different path. If the sixties were days of rage where I seemed to be following my anger more than any other emotion, it was lust I followed in the seventies. Lust was my bliss, in the sense that the sage anthropologist and writer about myth, Joseph Campbell urged us to "follow your bliss". My anger had sprung from a high energy of righteousness. Lust represented freedom. Unfortunately, lust, like anger, could lead to a kind of prison.
What is it about twins? Jane WAS one. She had that extra power and charisma.
Being single and "on the prowl" for a female companion was exciting. I didn't have to worry about loyalty to this one or that, so I thought. Unfettered pursuit of the desirable was possible. Unlike fantasies of wealth or power, fantasies of a wonderful lover came true! I could almost eat my cake, and have it too, possessing more than one lover at once! But this proved difficult. I wanted to play around, but also wanted the stability of a single relationship. Several lovers knocked me unforgettably for a loop and it was a great time for infatuations; after awhile I looked for something more.
One day, while loving Jane, I leaned on a pillar next to the escalator at Baltimore's new "Harbor Place" mall thinking, someone loves me and I love them back. Behind me the Kite Loft, displayed kites of every shape and neon color up to the glass skylights which backlit the kites until they fairly glowed. I was exultant, buzzed on wine and borrowed a magic marker from a pizza counter cashier to pen, "When I think of freedom it gives me goosebumps". The freedom issue was becoming a bone of contention between me and my new love. Jane wanted an exclusive relationship although I wanted to continue dating others from time to time. How could any other lover threaten the deep relationship we have, I asked, or, if someone better comes along, someone who meets our needs more completely, well, wouldn't we have the right to move on to that new happiness?
"How would you feel if I went out with some one else?" she asked. "I'd be pissed and hurt," I boldly responded, but "there can be no double standard." I thought the main point was freedom. There can be no guarantees. Who knows where we'll be six months from now? We're orphans, explorers, nomads, children of the wind; I would boast we must be free and dwell in the moment. But what if loyalty to the one was more important than many relationships?
In the light of what happened next, it seems that I wanted Jane more than I knew. I continued the playing around. I guess I had a ways to go to burn it out of my system. Then too, if I'd loved Jane more, maybe I'd have been more loyal, kept her closer. But at the rate we were going I should have known we were heading for trouble; I was leaving the door open for her, pushing her toward it, pushing me towards a bad fall.
Most women want a monogamous relationship, my remarried X, Louise, told me over dinner some weeks later, (and she was an assertive liberationist). But we men ... in our heart of hearts, the ideal situation for us would be a harem?!
It was a Sunday afternoon and Jane and I had been together since Friday night. Things were wearing thin, conversation palled. I wondered, do we really share interests or are we just infatuated with each other's looks. Jane had wonderful platinum colored hair. As we drive to pick up my son at a friend's, I said, "Look, if you can't hack my dating other women, we might as well just can it." She responded, "Oh, we'd be apart from each other a little and then you'll come crying back to me....but I might not be there for you".
"I have to have my own space," I insisted (I remember that's what Louise told me when we were breaking up). I felt quite nonchalant as Jane walked out the door.
"Don't go away mad" I call after her, then add, casually, "Ah, go away mad".
I would never see Jane again. I spent the next weekend fu ing other women. On Friday I met x at "Liberated Singles" (for persons separated, divorced, widowed, never married and other assorted unattached lechers) (the group met every Friday night at the downtown Unitarian church parish hall- have I mentioned the guy w the jumper cables?). y whom I also met on Friday called me the next day and I spent Saturday night with her. I was enjoying the rake's progress- downward to perdition (although not in London).
I finally got through to Jane Monday evening, she said ominously, "Guess what Dave," (she may have relished this), "I've met someone else." I started to complain. "Dave, there's nothing you can do to change my mind. You snooze, you lose." Jane always did have a sense of humor. It dawned on me, slowly that actually we might just be finished.
The slowly awakening realization took me by surprise. It plunged me into one of my most savage loss attacks. I panicked. I couldn't sleep. I felt a tightness in my chest. Knowing my father's history of heart attacks, I checked in at a nearby emergency room. They did not take heart attacks lightly; they admitted me.
Had I reported to Dad's old doctor and undergone some tests, I'd probably found out that I was suffering from a tightening of chest muscles due to stress or merely heartburn. In hindsight it seems I'd overreacted. Did I need the emergency room for the melodrama? the opera of it all? Whom was I trying to impress? Some future biographer as with Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane? (Had they played to the gallery of the future?) Jane? Myself? I should have taken some tranquilizers and sleeping pills and time off, maybe taken a trip down to the ocean.
If Jane hadn't upset me enough, my trip to intensive care surely made things worse. That evening in intensive care as I tried, futilely, to doze off a nurse rushed in; " your monitor is showing an irregularity; as a precaution we're going to give you a lydocane drip!" Now I was truly terrified. It occurred to me that I could almost have willed myself dead. Maybe I really loved Jane?. Now I could never have her. I went through all the sad might‑have ‑beens, the usual anger and sadness. How am I going to learn from this? I wondered, in the sense that they say, you're supposed to learn something what hurts you a la Hemingway. Learning this way was ridiculous, who needed it?
I tried to roll over and go to sleep but a series of emergency beeps sounded! 0 no, I thought, this is it, then, this is death! the normal EKG hills and valleys become a steady flat line. "It's nothing really," the nurse came in, consoling; "your arm movement twisted the wires". The drug sank in slowly and I felt as if a vulture loosed his claws from my chest. A female face appeared in the lydocane induced wash of colors sweeping through my brain, it was leonine, Louise's, no, Jane's features.
I awoke the first morning in intensive care early, relieved to find the heart monitor "tinking" faithfully ahead. The morning star was clearly visible outside my window. Best not laugh off the power of love, I thought. I had been too blase about my attachment to Jane. Breaking up with her hit me with more of a blam than breaking up with Louise. It had happened much more suddenly. The hospital released me after two days.
I would have to do something about my blood pressure, I made fresh promises to reduce, drink less caffeine, less booze, mellow out and be less a type‑A personality. As with my other losses, I got to go through Mel Krantzler's six stages of grieving once again, bouncing back and forth like a pinball between disbelief, anger, grief, until finally came the letting go.
Time to ride out the storm again, like a tree holds on in a hurricane (hopefully a palm). These had been the worst episodes of my youth and here I was, at 40, a youth no longer. But I was young enough to have the energy these "attacks" required! Difficulty sleeping was the worst part, my mind obsessively exploring every little burrow of might‑have‑been, with incessant what‑ifs tossed in. Why was my brain so adept at this kind of torture? Was this particular to me? It seemed my chemistry changed, mouth dry, cottony, with a metallic taste. I would blame anything and anyone but myself (Jane, fate) although I sensed I had everything to do with my situation. At the time (early 80's- few knew that this was actually a disease (O.C.D.)or that there were drugs to treat it!!)
We need techniques to solve such torments. Some turn to drink, no doubt as in the Jimmy Buffet song: "Wasting away in Margaritaville, lookin' for my lost shaker of salt. Some people say there's a woman to blame but I know... it's my own damn fault!" By now I'd learned a few tricks, though, to "pleasure myself" for example, doing all the things I enjoyed doing, the running, getting hugs (and drugs) where I could find them, plunging into my work, taking time off from work. A kindly doctor down at the jail prescribed some dolmane. Jim, my partner at work, helped me laugh with his analyses, "You never liked her anyway, let her go back to the suburbs where she belongs," or "you'd already left her, you're just mad because she slammed the door" or "you wound up to give her an uppercut and hit yourself square in the jaw". He called me a "true love sap" and dared me to anticipate the next ridiculous "splat" I would make in the next relationship.
This was a period of much poetry for me- my lovers inspired it! There was June, Jane, Jean (inspired by Jane), A Black Hole (inspired by Meredith), Ode to a Female Orgasm (inspired by Katy), Hollywood Cemetery (inspired vy Suzanne), etc. etc. etc.
I wrote June, Jane, Jean (in Blue Running Lights) after Jane and I split up, cognizant that the split up occurred because we were playing power games. Jane had left me cruelly, in a sense, but everything was going to work out. Many have died in great battles; life goes on, even the life of one who has lost, or has been sadly affected by the battle.
Work at O.A.R. was the best therapy. If I couldn't be happy, at least I could be making money. I attended a conference for O.A.R. during these days which was held at a retreat center outside of Richmond, an old estate that had a beautiful view of and long lawns down to the James River. I took a break from the proceedings and strolled down to the Kenawha canal which parallels the river. At that a lock dammed the canal, separating an upper from a lower level. Train tracks ran alongside. The black rushing water seemed hypnotic. As if to amplify the roar of the water, a train approached, huge, unstoppable. In the thunderous din, a flash of red caught my eye, a cardinal, blazed up out of nearby pines, excruciatingly red, then disappeared.
Maybe this was my totem bird. I interpreted this numinous, epiphany to mean, everything is going to be all right! I had come to accept what had happened, I was able to cheer myself up from within; I could find comfort aplenty in new women and singing and memory. At the conference I had also seen a wonderful poster done by Lenore Fini for a Metropolitan Opera production of "Tristan und Iseult" which seemed somehow to sum up my difficulties, allowing me closure. These riches alone would be enough to comfort, along, of course, with Vergil's tears. "Sunt lacrimae rerum..."
15 years later in 1995, I returned to this magical place, Roslyn. The view from the estate now included a the Willy Bridge, apparently an extension of the Powhite expressway. I walked down the canal once again. And once again there was a cardinal to greet me. Everything was going to be all right. The message bore repeating. Of course, that didn't stop me from worrying!
More Relationships
I entered a period when my life seemed to take two tracks, the track of work (with O.A.R.) and the more personal track of relationships with my son and women. Roo and Jane had been the opening salvos in this post Louise engagement with the other sex, a charming "run" to use a Broadway metaphor, a show with fabulous characters, potential mates and one night stands whom I would remember all my life, a way of life that I would miss when I later became more or less hitched to the one (the toucan or snow goose lady we'll call her since these are animals who mate for life).
'I would lie back in my mind, fantasizing the possible lovers to come as in, Her father owned black angus (shouldn't that be black angi?),tons of them and great acres of melon fields and blocks of pear trees (anjou, I believe, although they might have been bartletts). Her father's farm or ranch was in the western provinces of Canada, somewhere near the Kluane Range and the Mackenzie River. Her first name was Genvieve, I liked to throw a little french in and her hair was dark. When I first met her she was driving a tractor out of the barn. She got off and strode to meet me. This dream woman ala Lauren Bacall (I never did like them wimpy) would fu k in a phone booth if you wanted to and give you a blow job anywhere. She was direct and forthright like the freckles on the Brazillian Blue Amaryllis, blazingly brazen as Morpho or Javanese Raja Brooke Birdwing butterfies (pace Nabakov). It was nice how these dream women always did what you asked them. Unfortunately, this image matched rather too closely the recently departed Jane whose father was a pig farmer out in Illinois.
Real women were shy and reclusive, like ther genitals, like fish or deer that you could only catch by sneaking up on or stumbling upon accidentally or waiting for them to come to you with more incredible patience than any of us had. Surely they tired of being the hunted as we tired of being huntsmen. But society had arranged it this way and there weren't enough protestors to change matters.
I had a child by one and had been in love with others, it was still hard to figure them out. It seemed with L, as well as some lovers that came after L that we were so in love with love, so sold on the myths of love that we would fall for persons who seemed glamorous or just to be with someone regardless, we didn't care who they really were! I didn't think much about the difference between infatuation and love or friendship until the pain of a breakup reached out to bite me in the face. For all my love of women and relations with them, I still hadn't spent much time analyzing what I wanted from them. I could say I liked assertive, strong women, that was about it. I liked women with long noses, and, for awhile, big breasts. Later I fell in love with asses. I think the hardest pleasurable thing I ever gave up was other women. At about 55 years old I finally focused in on one.
Men and women certainly didn't speak to each other about our desires, it was all kept very mystical I don't know why. Men had "locker room talk", we could get inside each other's heads. With women, the fabulous creatures, just sitting along beside them, or f k them, wasn't that enough? Talking about love, about relationships, that had always been left to the poets.
Pursuing each other was interesting and fun, with all the subtlety of games like poker, bridge or scrabble and more!. But for all my delightful obsessions with unpredictable women, there gnawed at me the certain animal of myself and I became more and more delighted to pursue myself as well as the "girls". They tugged at me, I tugged at me. Since it became increasingly apparent that I would not be able to love another until I loved myself and that it took time and effort to discover myself in order to love it, I realized that just going on dates with women, just having affairs with them would not be that productive. Throughout all the relationships the self screamed to "out". Try as I might to live my life through others, I had my own life to lead! Choosing Jane, choosing Fran was choosing more failure, it was merely choosing another Louise, choosing a mother whose only logical move would be to leave me, her child. I had hoped they could rescue me, but only I could rescue me. Louise and Jane tapped their lust, their anger quickly, they were the ones to move on, not me, I wanted to stay, I had yet to move! It was fun nonetheless, and from another angle these were beautiful, attractive women, and I wanted sex!!
A part of me, the obsessive compulsive side- blinking reptile, immobile upon its slab of rock, could not yet believe that Louise and now Jane were gone When I reflected on their capacities to give (like all women) and how I used them up, speeding so merrily along, never respecting, never suspecting... But why be so hard on myself. They sped merrily along as well. We all DO have our own lives to lead.
Since Jane left I had reduced, my blood pressure was back to normal due to whatever, the yoga, the passage of time, the dolmanes a kindly Dr. down at the jail had given me. I felt confident enough to leave and be left again. New loves could not be far off, who said love had to last forever..except in the songs..how boring.
But I missed Jane, I missed her hair:
Thought of J's hair
Sometimes interrupts...
Des Moines, Moline,
Des Plains, Prairie de Chiens,
Warm music Dvorak
Composed in America...
I know blue eyes and ash blonde hair are gone!
But have you seen the green with brown?
That would be Fran, very beautiful, yet very stiff. She was direct in a way, yet awkward. She is tight between the legs and when we fu k, her response is to weep. Fran is not so together as was Jane, a pang of grief sweeps across me, I am reminded of Jane and all she meant and that I cannot have her! Jane was strong like Louise, isn't that what I really want? Fran is loving but so naive; I shudder (perhaps a premonition of another separation I shall have to endure). I have doubts; Jane was so spanking new, so self confident, not like Fran. Jane was so bright, so different from me, so brutal. And what about Louise? How could I have lost her? The obsessive always reviews all his or her losses, not just the latest.
The lost love theme was not always so painful. It had its faintly pleasurable, addictive side. I always associated it with Brahms' first piano concerto, the lyric theme in the first movement: da, dee da, dee dee da, dee da, etc. It was Brahms that said, "Life robs us of more than death does," on the face of it a rather asinine statement, but I knew what he meant. The Germans had a word for it, "weltschmerz".
I visited Fran's parents who lived a few miles down river from mine, in the colors of Maryland's deciduous forest winter, the silver steel and mirror colors of beech and other tree trunks, browns, blues and grays. It was an old Maryland farm, perched on a ridge with huge trees and a long driveway. Adjoining was a barn and a mysterious, octagonal tower with a winding stair. F and I climbed to the top and I was shocked to discover upon gazing out that I could make out in the distance the very apartment complex where Jane lived, part of a condominium suburb that had advanced this far into Baltimore country (Cockeysville, Md.).
Fran briefly seemed possibly a deeper pool than J and even L. I grasped at the happiness she afforded and dared not think of dating others. Ah no, I was too tender from J's slap for that.
One comical evening, Fran and I were having dinner together at her place (in an apartment complex not far from Jane's). I had gotten fairly "buzzed" (the word for it at the time) on booze listening to an outdoor concert by St Vitus Dance, the Wanktones, and (appropriately) the Alcoholics. Now, like some bear, I dizzily rang Fran's bell. Soon after consuming her carefully prepared meal, for the second night in a row I fell asleep early. I was to awake from my daze in a different world, one without Fran. Now and the night before she had reached a decision that I was ignoring her too much, that the relationship was too big a strain for her. Now she glared at me balefully and proceeded to berate me with a long list of dislikes: I had arrived early, I was high, I had shorts on, I went to sleep, I was egotistic, I felt she should come over to my "rathole" on Calvert St. any old time I wanted and yet I put down her apartment decor, her friends, her family, her cleaning. I didn't pay enough attention to her when we were out and I was a sex maniac. The previous night I had asked her for sex, she had started, then gone into her bedroom without finishing, in a huff, into her separate bed. She had even taken the fan (it was a very hot night and her room was cooler than the living room couch to begin with).
Fran proceeded to tell me that sex is over between us. "You've got to let me down easy, I'm going 'thump'", I protest. "Couldn't you have given me some warning?" "I did", says Fran, "but you weren't listening". Panic time; I'm reminded of Jane. I cry, I tell Fran I'm scared and she says she isn't the sort to turn anyone else so I can stay but I tell her it would be horrifying to stay in the absence of her love and I leave. She hopes I won't do something "funny" out on the highway.
Am I blinding myself to the incompatibilities when it came to these beauties? Luckily, the aftermath with Fran proved less damaging than Jane. O yes, the loss welled up, but not like before.
We had tried hadn't we? Out of loneliness we kept jamming square pegs into round holes. Call us jammers, but mock not! Our yearning moves the stars, Dante said. None of this was all that complicated from a certain angle. These were beautiful women and I wanted sex!
All the while I was getting stronger in my alone self. Once again I found myself down at Harbor Place next to the Kite Loft. Overhead hung one of their most spectacular kites, a sperm shaped long, long tail in rainbow colors attached to a head bearing the silhouette of Charlie Chaplin looking wry. Two mimes dressed as Raggedy Ann dolls went by on the escalator, fire engine red hair frizzing out wide from their heads like the strings of a mop. I felt powerful enough to bend spoons; if I walked under bells they'd start ringing! The best dance partner I can have will be myself, the best relationship. But it is difficult to be honest, to find the "true" self. Put it this way, self understanding is a pursuit worthy enough. It isn't necessary to pursue others in order to pursue the self. In what context will the self be learned? I must follow my instincts. I think I will learn it in the contexts of music and poetry, of radical politics, of serving others (the context that pays). The context does not have to be women.
One person I was dating and constantly bothering for sex told me "there's some one I think you should meet". She introduced me to a bona fide "swinger", a lady who belonged to a group of people who practiced "free love", getting together at parties where you were free to make it with whomever whenever. Only "swinging" couples could attend. Once the partner swapping began, you could go to a bedroom with anyone you wanted, at least that's how I fantasized it. This party was held at a largish home with a swimming pool in a Washington suburb near Laurel, Md.. Luckily, I saw upon entering that a high wooden fence surrounded the place. It would keep nosy neighbors from peering in. At first everyone was in the pool, but at one point one of the women asked would anyone like to join her and several guys went with her into the house. Shortly thereafter one of the guys appeared at a large window upstairs gazing dreamily out, a very satisfied look on his face. Had all the guys made it with the one woman? Was this guy getting a blow job ? I never found out. I stuck with my partner and had a good time with her in the pool (it was dusk, everybody else had gone inside). When we went in, the others were helping themselves to a table bountifully laden, turkey, ham etc. The couples were middle class, some were government employees. Most of the women were nude or shirtless. The men generally had shorts on. All were friendly, the scene might have been a playboy's dream: free, abundant and, at that time safe sex. And yet...I was there with my partner. It seemed exciting enough to get it on with her and, in the group setting there was no one else that particularly grabbed my attention. There was an understated sexism in the lack of dress for the women and I got the feeling that it was up to the men to initiate. The fear of rejection, my satisfaction with my own date, all turned me off to making any overtures to others and my date and I left early. I probably feared turning my date over to other men. The idea of organizing such a private matter as sex was off putting. It required too great an adjustment, flitting to someone other than one's partner, although maybe you could get used to it.
We heard that a group orgy took place later in the living room, like the scenes in porno films (remember, all this was pre AIDs). I had finally made it to the sexual paradise only to feel shy and sufficiently satisfied. In general I was more turned on by one on one situations with people whom I liked and I knew liked me, or by the fantasy situations I (we all) created in my head.
The singles scene in Baltimore during the 70's was enjoyable. We would meet on Friday nights downtown at the Unitarian Church parish hall or sometimes out in Columbia, Md. The sessions would begin with chatting and mingling, then we would break into groups to discuss such questions as "Spending the Holidays Alone" or "Does the Man or Woman Make the First Move?" It seemed that the attractive women got most of the attention. I made friends and had several relationships. These meetings attracted some zany characters; one night a man walked around carrying a pair of the jumper cables you would use to recharge a dead battery. Rumor had it that he had recently graduated from one of the local mental hospitals. Maybe he thought the wires would help him get a charge/hot shot from a woman.
Katie was another lover who sometimes went to singles. She really liked to , and was a refreshing contrast to more puritan types.
In the meanwhile, Katy had a crystal by her living room window which I'd wind up and watch spin. My sunny blonde princess lay in the next room asleep. It was summer. I want to cum, but I guess I'll have to masterbate, what with K asleep. Or maybe a blow job and then breakfast. But she does not get up. The bottom of her crystal is blue as if water collected there. Are you in the mood for fu king, or not?, I ask her. Her hair as I said the color of sunshine. What is it with K's sleep rhythm? Get up, wench? Another half hour, she relents.
I was reminded of Joachim's motto "Frie aber einsam", free but lonely, which Brahms changed into "Frie aber froh", free but happy. That's what I was feeling these days with my various lovers.
It amused me to think of it in another transformation into "Frei aber langsam", i.e. free but slow in the sense of retarded, although the Germans may have another word for intellectual impairment.
K's crystal slows down spilling rainbow patterns all over a rug that her cat loves to chase. It is a pear shaped crystal, shaped like a tear. It has been cut into a myriad of trapezoidal panes. It slows to a stop and through I can see the leaves outside cut into kaleidoscopic panes of color: greens, blues, oranges even pinks and violets. "Come on, su k me, make me cum", I rehearse my lines, winding the crystal up all the tighter and giving it a mighty spin. Like the relationship itself.
At last, we go. My mind runs to landscapes when I cum, I think of the Green River coming down through Sandgate, Vermont where my Uncle used to live, it's constant shussing sound. I think of flocks of lorikeets flying by and the enormous din of their chattering high up in the Costa Rican mountains at Monte Verde. The fine half rain/ half mist there so like Hawaii's. Rainbows through that mist. Or I think of the rainbows cast by that crystal I bought at Lahaina on Maui at about 8:15 in the mornings when the sun hits it. When I c it feels like I'm going under water, there's something physical that happens that gives this feeling, for me, anyway; when I . It tickles my eyes, the backs of my ankles. The desire to cum builds between cummings. If I cum and then cum again quite soon I have to reach deep down inside for the next one. Certain fantasies boost the happening. Then, even greater tension is released.
"How do I love you, let me count the ways", I think of K. I love the way your tubes are tied!
At the Wednesday night square dancing, a great place to meet, we do a Virginia reel, this a dance I can remember doing as a child back in North Carolina on rare occasions. R looms up in the dance, with the fabulous tits and long nose jewish women can have. Amidst the swirling members of the dance however. loneliness wells up and conquers me, jealousy as I see R dancing with others. Some one may snatch her away in a minute (before I get a change to dance with her again). Ah, the whole thing's too much botheration, I leave at intermission to go jogging in the dark. Better to commune with self and get a good night's sleep.
"If you think the search for the other is bad, lonely, degrading and fruitless", quips Jim at work, "just wait 'til you find some one!" I guess I was going through a period I'd missed in puberty these days. My penus, Rodney, led me around in those days. I was like two persons, me and Rod. It was a very juvenile phase. But fun!
+ Loch Raven Resevoir
Jogging always helped me sink back into myself when I needed to. I came across one or two beautiful days around this period, days off from work, and I used the time to run long on the trails through the woods around two of Baltimore's great reservoirs-Loch Raven and Prettyboy- hard among the ravens and gulls, sometimes up to the great dams, the one at Prettyboy with a magnificent spill and flume way and overflow tunnel.
There were plenty of beautiful things to discover besides women, things that wouldn't move away, for example, the way the Prettyboy dam loomed awesomely up out of the woods when you approached it from the south or the luminous green moss near the paths in the woods up above the Loch Raven dam; my yummy new shoes, NIKE "Daybreaks" a chamois color with the NIKE wedge in neon orange.found a shampoo containing "softest water, coconut oil, cherry bark, sage, rosemary, burdock root, myrrh, thyme, marsh mallow leaves, maidenhair nettle, yarrow, peach leaves, chamomile, lavender flowers and red clover blossoms" supposedly. Who were they kidding? Or there was my non-alcoholic beer, Birrell, from Switzerland in bright silver cans. I told a natural foods store saleslady how happy I was to learn that the only way to give up one's indispensable vices was to find substitutes. She assented, adding that this had been an ancient teaching of the "esoterics" whoever they were. The way of prayer and self negation, the way of monks.
They tell you that with relationships, you never know what you've got 'til it's gone (which seemed somewhat true for Louise and Jane) but, I discovered:
You never have anything
Anyway and anything
Has its own choice,
Its own freedom and
It goes the
Same way that
It's coming
YOU HAVE THAT!
What you have's
In the Balkans where
Dance steps change
Just a little from
Village to
Village: here the
Men hold
Their hands thus
And there thus and
You get to
Keep having
All this and it don't go
No where
And you know it.
My obsessive and painful memories of lost loves had been replaced by a peaceful, quiet and deep pool where I looked now and again just for singing, i.e. inspiration; my losses had become memories for poetry, as a matter of fact they had become a strong inspiration for poetry. The similarity of my experiences to the Eurydice myth was too striking, how I seemed haunted by looking back:
The stone wove you back in....
The stone streams backwards from you...
You fell back into
The marble
But you weren't gone.
The marble's all around us,
Not just in those quarries
At St. Johnsbury...
I loved you.
Why have you gone?
"I haven't gone.
You looked back
And I fell into the stone
But it's OK,
You had to look.
No one is punished
For looking.
Keep on looking; look yet harder":
The marble
Changes into
Trees
And stone porticos
Into leaves.
In the summer even
Stone turns into
Water.
I am of it
And of tears.
Thus am I always
With you..
Whenever even one of you,
Gathers in my
Name, you just
Gather,
You just name me...
I'll be there.
The wind blows us all
Back into the stone;
No one goes on ahead,
No one falls backwards.
Together we ride
At the head
Of the stone,
A ship's prow.
I had been to see the big Rodin exhibit at the National Gallery in 19 ? . Naturally, the most powerful piece, for me, was the marble Orpheus standing behind Eurydice. They reminded me of a ship's prow, a figurehead, a motto for me, symbol of all the women I had known and lost, more than that, a symbol of time itself slipping by, slipping through our finge Nowadays it could as easily be a woman who goes first and looks back and gets screwed by the gods.
Shalom
I attended a classier "sensitivity session", a "Shalom Experience" at Wellspring in Germantown, Md., a good recommendation from Louise. The format was "mat work" in which the facilitator worked with different members of the group in turn. Each would spill out his or her current problems, then "act" out the problem so to speak, in a caring environment. If one needed to grieve, he or she could weep in the arms of the leader, if anger or rage were involved (it always was), the member could wrestle with the mattress or pillow or beat them with plastic bats. The leader might wrap the member in a mattress and enlist the group to" the member and let the member push his or her way out or push against the group. These exercises allowed us to ventilate powerful emotions. When a member finished his or her work, others could offer comments, but usually remained physically connected and caring by messaging him or her or all lifting him or her by gathering around and picking him or her up or by a laying on of hands (everything is going to be all right). At the end of the session, each of us wrote down his/her impressions and shared that with the others, e.g. : "My breath is now coming from my belly and not my chest", one woman wrote. "There is a flowing and integration of feelings and mind, spirit and body. There will always be more-- it will never be completely done and it really doesn't matter. look out world, I'm ready to jump in and make a fool of myself. Burp. Oops. Ladies don't burp. Or vomit. Or shit. Fuck life. Crying. Boo hoo hoo. Me me me! Sex. Love life. Being I. Yelling. Shit, piss, laughing. Ha! Ha! Ha! God loves me just the way I am!" -D W, 12/5/'82.
This summed it up well, although some had perhaps descended rather than uprisen. Me with all my new found freedom...my job, my relationships? well, I still didn't reveal much of myself or go very deep. I could only penetrate as far as I allowed myself to be penetrated, the old armor question. This group was more supportive than others I'd been in. I was ready for it, but I seemed more in a celebratory than self lacerating mood at this point in my life. The word that grew bright for me those days was "accept". So I was a bottled up person, well then enjoy the cool, fine greenness of the bottle. Anxious, skittish, competitive, high strung, that's me!, so what?
These sensitivity sessions were jazzed up, experiential versions of more academic approaches to self understanding like the Myers Briggs personality inventory on which I (what was left out here?). Another interesting approach of the period had the moniker of "colors".
Realizing my nature was one thing, doing something to change it, if necessary, quite another. Where this nature interfered, drug me down, for example, gave me a sort of heart attack or made me a nervous wreck, I needed to work on changing my behavior, trying for more release, more relaxation, always searching a new journey or new path to new journey. I had the feeling that to grow I would have to take some risks, not always something I wanted to do. Have a job while I'm in one of my workaday suits (that armor). Try to break into some new freedoms, break the taboos. Wasn't mine the fire sign, the sign of the opaline, crystal warriors; them riding towards me; wasn't I the guy who always began again? I had a gift for that as well as the bottled upness, didn't I? Why else had I poured blood?, if not to find out something about myself? But then I had a very lazy side as well. Our generation, or me in it, was rather driven, after Mt. Hermon, then all the movements. When was I going to sit back and smell the roses? The more I thought about it, the more the answer seemed to be "in retirement"! By then I'd probably be too tired to smell the roses.
I realized that the verbal, talk therapies were sometimes like trying to fight fire with kerosene or trying to get out of brambles with a throw net. You need the "experiential", you need touch! You need some one to stand beside you. Not long after Louise left, I joined a message class. One day the masseur worked to relax my upper back and to "open up" my heart. He told me to watch my dreams. I think he had found a place where I stored anger and grief, although surely it's the brain? That night I dreamt that a german shepherd had come to drag me and my son down to hell. I had to kill the dog but stabbing it wasn't enough; I tried to cut the head off. Even then, I could see the dog was still following me! its paw prints only appeared loping after me in the mud of the underground, like those homonid footprints in the old lava field in Africa; it wasn't dead! As the dream ended the dog dragged me and Chris (with absurd travelling bags) down through a crack in the earth. Who was this devil dog? My fear of the masseur's bisexuality?, fear of loss of control? the devil? my general attitude of panic or "the worst is going to happen"? Perhaps, it occurred to me, the dog was me
.we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Massage therapy helped me towards self understanding as much as the other therapies had, the group, one to one Freudian, behavior modification, etc. The yoga class taught centering. The teacher claimed a lot for it, probably more than warranted, but she must have asked us if there were problems we needed to deal with in our exercises, for I remember asking her, over dramatically, if she could fix a broken heart? She definitely helped. Yoga and massage (the Trager method with old friend Bob Clark) would enter my life meaningfully again in 2008,9.
Mrs. Right had yet to arrive.
My poetry helped me get dates; once I went out with an aspiring poet who didn't seem very talented but at least liked my stuff. We f ked a couple of times and she was beautiful and I had high hopes. My overtures were not especially returned. She told me it takes awhile to get to know a person. But I said I trust my intuition (not mentioning how often that had been wrong!) We drifted apart.
She gave a reading of her poems and prose that I attended. I was shocked to hear her mentioning me in a poem, it went something like: "I asked him how he liked the Ginsberg reading./ He said, the idea of some one c ming in my mouth or/ sticking his d k up my ass/ really turns me off./ And yet that's what he was trying to do to me all the time."
Never tried to f k her in the ass.
In all the dating scene, moments of failure far outweighed the ecstatic ones. I sometimes had to sober up to the fact that I might be going out with some one just for the sex, nothing deeper. One friend asked me why I didn't allow her to get closer and I callously told her that I was looking someone who looked like an airline stewardess, i.e. not her. Our relationship pretty much ended with that remark, but she was able to get some revenge later. My horniness had built enough a head of steam to blind me to the futility of asking her out again, hoping I would be able to seduce her as before, it was always a good idea to check out the likelihood of sex in advance over the phone. We went to an Indian restaurant. She informed me she would not be able to stay out late. I was still not getting the message. The meal was torturous: the place was the size of a railroad car. After a long wait you ate jammed next to another party's table's, them breathing down your neck as well as the long queue of persons waiting to eat standing over you and leering for you to leave so that they could eat. My portion was undistinguished and small. Halfway through, she announced that she had turned celibate, describing the meal as the kind of closure necessary for the end of a relationship. "That's not exactly what I had in mind", I stammered.
You don't look like an airline pilot, either", she said finally.
I tired of pursuing women just because they were beautiful, or would let me fu k them or cum in their mou ths. Casual sex, fun as it was, had its down side. What room for honesty? play? how could I hide the fact that a partner only "grabbed" me so much? If I didn't really like the way a person looked, I couldn't necessarily tell her, it would be too hurtful and she wouldn't sleep with me. Maybe it was better to have a relationship that worked on many levels beside the sexual one. Sure the sexual chemistry came first but then I wanted all the same old things my parents had stressed: mutuality, shared interests, compatibility, respect, blah-blah-blah! Without these virtues in a relationship, I might become a bitter, lonely old man!
Of course, finding some one "mutual" meant I had to give up getting exactly what I wanted sexually, since inevitably the mutual one would want it her way. Compromises would have to be made. I would have to give up power, a big turn on (for males?). Given the urgency of the sexual motive and drive, this was going to be a hard compromise. Anyway, I came to realize that being alone was less desirable than sharing, and there was a romance to growing old along with another that was beautiful, sort of like cool silver moonlight when it falls on the Blue Ridge Parkway. In the Hitchcock movie, "Vertigo" is the line, "One is a wanderer, two together are always going someplace." What was the novel on which "Vertigo" was based?
A Party on 41st Street
I went to a bohemian party that kind of summed up my late 70's, the living through of puberty I still needed to do. It was in a beautiful stone house on 41st street across from "the Rotunda", a house that, because it would soon be turned into offices, was in considerable disrepair inside. But the party givers, mostly artists, lived there, for the time being. The rooms had tv/video screens in them all linked to two sources, one showing the poetry reading that was proceeding on the first floor, the other broadcasting two experimental, bizarre films. One of the films purported to show a man undergoing dental work with no pain killer. An officious dentist explained that he was being calmed by some new method, music or hypnosis. The film opened with a pedantic explanation of this "latest" technique, but most of the film showed how the technique did not work, with the unfortunate patient screaming in drooling agony. The dentistry proceeded as he screamed as if everything was going OK. Another film consisted of a naked woman squatting over a man's face, him awaiting the slow drips of juice from her c nt. Both films were done very tediously, almost in slow motion.
This seemed like "the end of an era"- but it was just- the beginning of another chapter. One could moralize about it all one wanted- crying out against the permissivness of our generation- hell- these were just bohemian artists- having fun.
Coda- most of my life my identity had been defined in terms of sex. I supposed it detracted me from purer things- but there it was. I enjoyed it.
Death of Louise (She falls back into the stone? no- She who was the prow of the ship? no- the metaphors pile sickeningly on!)
ded, to Louise:
"Last night when we were young
Love was a star
A song unsung
Life was so new
So real so right
Ages ago last night
Today the world is old
You flew away and time grew cold
Where is that star
That shone so bright
Ages ago last night
To think that spring had depended
On merely this a look, a kiss
To think that something so splendid
Could slip away in one little daybreak
So now let's reminisce and recollect the sighs and the kisses
The arms that clung
When we were young last night "
Arlen/Harburg
4/23/9- strong presence of Louise in dream this am- sadness
sadness at her passing- I am at a wedding- HER wedding- to some one else- I am only one of the guest/onlookers
She is slipping away- she has gone away
What really matters in the end? Yr. life passes before yr. eyes- bright mornings in Vermont- thats all I remember
1/23/9- a commemorative service for Louise Eberhardt-Pierick at the Kittamaqundi Community Center in Columbia, Md.- in the old carriage house to the Gaither mansion- one of the oldest extant structures in Columbia. When Louise started work for the Columbia Cooperative Ministry here in the early 60s, Columbia- the next America consisted of a few buildings around Wilde Lake. Now it is a sprawling suburb.
I try to imagine it in the 1800's- with fields to the lake- with the slaves singing merrily (just kidding).
50 + people fill the room- many alumnae from the Womens Center which Louise started and ran here from the late 60s through the 70s. This was a service unlike any funerals I had been to. Louises quiet power and influence on various people with whom she had worked was expressed by speaker after speaker. Son Chris spoke very movingly- and very briefly. Husband Dave could barely get a sentence out. I, who had been forbidden to speak- had plenty to say, but realized it was just as well that I didnt. The best thing I could have said would have been directed at son, Chris- how his mom lived on in the heartfelt expressions from the others present. I think Louise was a special person- others obviously did also. I had been right to rue the day we parted. Not that it wasnt for the best. She was a natural born leader- and yet- a rarity- she was not a loud leader. She did it just by her demeanor. Person after person spoke about how she had changed their life. And yet, one friend stated- she was close to no one. (We knew she was close to Dave and Chris). But
he said- everybody was close to her. She had genuinely influenced persons. O how she had influenced me- by leaving me- telling me in so many words to find myself so I could respect myself and stop living on her/offher/through her!?!
Most funerals I go to, persons repete cliches and nostrums- this was different because L was different. I know you didn't meet her and if you had, you might not have sensed her power at first. But it probably wouldn't have taken long- for I can tell you are a perceptive, spiritual person. Louise had a strange sort of genius- just by being she could blow you away- she wa s the opposite of a politician- she never broadcast. She led by example.
How many people like that do you meet in a day?!?!
I needed to write an obit- if only for myself- for it would be up to Dave to OK anything like that- she had kept my name only for professional reasons. She was an executive woman. She was a strong woman, a force. She had been a pioneer in the Womens Liberation movement- working on Liberation an early magazine of feminism based in Baltimore. She was a natural leader- although completely soft spoken and modest- which made her all the more a leader. She had become a Management Consultant with her own business- Hart Consulting- (tax consultant Liz Harper has and interesting story of the birth of this name) and had written several books on gender issues and sexual harassment- books used in teaching, manuals of authority. She was ultra competent- although never threatening to a true man! Ill never forget one exercise we did in one of the Sensitivity Sessions she took me to (and which also changed my life)- a trust exercise- in which the one falls backwards into the arms of a partner- with complete trust.
I met her through the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and she had already a job working at the new city of Columbia for the Interfaith Ministry. She had studied Urban Planning and knew what she wanted to do- professionally, when I hadnt a clue! I owed everything to her- being the little infant who had lived off of her and Father Phil Berrigan- even though I might have appeared to be a heroic anti-war hero. She was that powerful. Louise- us getting married by Father B the night before the blood pouring, L. supporting me in my depression after the Catonsville 9, standing beside me in the prison visiting room; giving a statement in New York at the rally after we were arrested- appearing with Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys
ah, the sixties.
Her death got me to thinking how little we treasure our relationships and yet, of course, I had treasured ours maybe a bit too much. I obsessed over our parting- in a dangerous way- and yet, then again- it gave me much writing and a couple of poems. (There would be other partings) One I wrote after her surgery:
Charm for a Loved One- Silver Still Shining
Note- poet Emily Dickinson referred to herself as a kangaroo among the beauty
To my ex wife following her surgery- of course L never had a fluffy animal nor would she have wanted one- I guess I just threw it in to capture a more sentimental crowd? But I have no problem with them- my sister had put a fluffy little animal beside my mom as whe lay dying and it really stuck w me- I can't even remember what kind of animal it was. It's like saying- we possess something- something loves us- something lie4s beside us- something really is attracted to us.
The Ketef Hinnom silver amulet,
Probably a charm,
From 4 to 500 BC
Unrolled, it still shines!
A first- first discovered
Written down words from the Bible
Way back in the burial
Chamber, back under more recent stuff
Broken, looted- some sort of scroll:
But still, once unrolled, the old benediction
Across all the years
Keeps coming and coming:
May the Lord bless and keep you,
With your fluffly animal,
Beside the ticking IV.
May the Lord cause his/her face to shine upon you
Since its so shiny.
Scroll rolled up- cigarette size
Grant you peace/comfort.
Scroll finally unrolled.
Your animal a kangaroo.
A kangaroo but not Emilys
kangaroo among the beauty-
No- this one in the horror:
The horror of operations,
ICUs, visiting rooms
And give you peace.
(read in Aramaic first if possible)
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord cause her/his face to shine upon you.
May the Lord lift up his/her countenance upon you!
And give you peace!!
She has been immortalized in art- I dont mean mine- (I had written many poems about her) but Im sure several of Dave Peiricks (her second husband) art works. In a sense, although she had died abruptly- she had a powerfully full life.
How people become dear to us- how much they mean to us and we may never realize it. And yet it is, after all, everything- in a sense. O yes, events have a cause- I realized my memorial to her would be helping Chris- who needed a lot. It would be making more of the things that count- realizing the things beneath the surface, realizing that wisdom old age blessedly and most importantly brings to us. And leadership. What an example she was! These would be the things to write and speak about. What else mattered?
A few days later a second, angrier poem came to me:
Everyones death is perfect- the way
Death wisked you away/ It took my breath away!
You didnt have to suffer/linger- undergo chemo, long days
Knowing end is coming, heavy goodbyes spread all ways
I know it surprised you as you gulped for air to stay
Alive- you did not have the time to say:
This is a good thing (like when ice booms and cracks, fills up the bay
At Turkey Cove, bottom of winter, nothing gets in the way
Of cold advancing- buoys unbobbing, even fog horn has no say
Because- no fog- although the Point Light beams its reassuring way
but
It will not beam for you, blessedly, not one more day.
If (sorry for the imagery interrupt), youd had the time to think, youd say:
"I love you, life good/ life fast- now
Go away!
Go away long days of suffering
out! Out!! Away!!!
No coming back, not longing to stay
And yet the frost does patterns in your honor.
Since you cant say it, I will- DEATH SUCKS!
The tide continues under the ice- even if you dont.
I could stay bitter, angry, mordant- but I wont.
Addendum:
But wait a minute- I hear the wind could help you
In your grief? Wind says goodbyes this way- you might learn
Fast moving- like French word arrache or
English- susurrus- especially wind/rain combos- wind/rain on panes?
These sounds might tell you where shes gone! You should try!
Let Hall Mark cards your tears to dry
here was a smarmy photo of a sunset- a sort of hall mark cards number- all in reds and yellows
cant seem to upload
why does free webs make it so difficult? I try to upload a very nice photo of Louise- it appears to be uploaded, I publish- I go back to find a photo of Rachmaninoff? or Phil Berrigan?
botticelli maiden and close up- One of the hours
Louise Yolton Eberhardt Pierick- a powerful woman!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
here was a photo of Louise- a polaroid in black and white that i had taken at 1118 st. paul street
on 12/1/09- my son Chris tells me abt prescient dream he had on the day L died- it was snowing, he says- but slowly- everything was slowed up- then- he saw a foot slowly pushing down a pedal- which he takes to b the pedal of the ambulance!!
Oh the brain works in mysterious ways, doesn't it?
Looking back on our relationship- did I ever know how to please her? Did I really care? How I must have seemed to her?- spooky, disloyal, periods of depression- and how she seemed to me- opaque, inpenetrable- did she ever say "I love you"?- I know I loved her (like a puppy)...our love was greatest in the first few years....but I could tell she loved the child we had together- and her last words to me: "Take care of Chris"!!!!!!!!!! She was an amazing person. There are certain people who do not (and do not need to ) declare themselves the way I do. I never knew exactly why Louise left me but have a pretty good idea. Nor do I really need to know.
Finally Finding Ms. Right or, similars attract!
Didn't you know I'd stand beside you for the dance
And you would come halfway to meet me?
Afterward on the ride home
Sun in the tulip poplar cuplets,
Warm must of summer,
Bottom lands we rode buckboards
Through, hymnals we sang from,
Long grace of summer pouring down
Over us like a meal, like gravy...
Gravy of home in the dance halls ...
dream w L in it (11/17/'09) Me, Louise, Chris in a 3 story brownstone like 3004 N Calvert St.- but- it's kind of abandoned- no furniture- I HATE THE SURREALISTS!!!! end of +
re my relationship w Louise: "Men who love women- they never give up on any of them."
Portrait of Cathy:
Cath (also called May and Sylvie) was 7 or 8 years younger than me. She was the sunniest person I had ever met. In many photos she would have her head thrown back in a laugh- as if tossed smilingly by the wind. She was not the type to become depressed. Mad, o yes, but not depressed. In that sense we were opposites. She liked to talk (what woman doesnt), and we were opposite in other ways, I suppose. She was perfect for me- and besides she was beautiful and had a wonderful figure. When she would say we were "lucky" to have each other I would say we were skilled. We had met though mutual friend Leah Heyn- who introduced us outside of Eddies' Supermarket on St. Paul Street back in 1983. We played some piano four hand and I quickly made clear my sexual designs- as I was wont to do in those days. Cathy was extremely smart but I always felt a chemical buzz of attraction towards her-not just admiration at her smartness- and I think that's important for a long lasting relationship. She had eyes of chestnut, the color of tea- limpid brown, a brown that is unlike any other color although the french word for chestnut- maron" does come to mind. They were a bit like the bottoms of certain streams where leaves had fallen- they were a bit like wet tea leaves that you see at the bottom of a tea ball, etc. etc. They were tremendous. She was a political radical- a militant and I admired that. In fact- C's extremism- like Jonah House's, like Phil Berrigan's, but Marxist...what else is there in life? Goldwater was right to say "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"..just that he had chosen the right wing extremism- which is wrong!!!
I called Cath my "snow goose woman": snow geese mate for life (toucans also, I believe). She was selling a radical paper outside of the grocery store. My friend knew we might mesh, K had a harpsichord and I also liked to play. We had crossed paths once in the seventies when Cathy had interviewed for a job with O.A.R. and once at an anti draft rally at the Stony Run Friends meeting that was actually held in the early eighties (I believe they had just reinstituted the draft). As I had dreamed of meeting Louise before I met her, associating Stony Run with Cathy, just made our final get together all the more poetic, for me. Norman Morrison who immolated himself at the Pentagon had been an executive with Stony Run and Cathy and I met in the fall, all those flaming oranges and reds out the meeting house window, him dead, us still alive. Cathy was a Trotskyist revolutionary, just my type! Like Louise, she had a long nose, and wonderful arched brows besides. To me, she had a European look. I thought of her as a cross between Gustav Mahler and Stan Laurel!!!
With, Cathy I wrote less and less, does the happy man have no tales to tell? I felt myself rising into a happiness like that of my childhood before the dreaded lager/ concentration camp of private school or the happiness with Louise before the blood pouring.
The thing about our relationship- I could make her laugh- just like I did my mom.
As Count Volonsky said of Natasha: "She makes me believe in the possibility of happiness. That's why I could weep" (for happiness/gladness, I guess).
But, or course, I would hold nothing against any one who wanted to be all alone all their life!
here was a photo of Cath at the Nubble Lighthouse, Me
Cathy at Nubble Light- Cape Neddick, Maine, my dear friend David Newman, Hermon class of '58 living in viewing distance- if I had to pick a place in the US where I could live all my life? this would be it!!!! Of course, if I could have my pick of the world? Jim Thompson's house on the klong- in Bangkok- (see the book)-(this was the most beautiful house in the world!)
as to personal relationships- reunions-my 50th at Mt. Hermon had been especially moving-I wrote a long poem to the class mates there-then came "Manny" Caminis' 70th birthday party on 4/24/2010:
originally to Anne Oliver , also class of '62, Oberlin College: it was exciting to see you and the others last night- a rare thing: ..to hear you talk about Dave (her husband had died) w Karen (my best friend's divorced wife) was very moving- I know from the death of Louise (my ex with whom I had good relations) one simply moves on- what other choice does one have...but- I am agnostic....I hope there's a God....I just can't say, can't know- it sure would b nice to see our old friends- sort of a reunion-
Come to think of it- such reunions remind me of my parents- I sort of rebel against everything- and I am glad to have such a get together as a sort of practice run for 2012...in a way I can see meeting one on one - but with a large group of people you used to know- it's almost overwhelming...but in the end- it's now...and one is glad to see old friends and one realises that we are grown up now! We are actually like our parents and do not need to be ashamed- just that I am a beatnik in my mind- so much to complain about with the older generations- they just sat around on their asses and were never honest- in a way- did nothing to change the world.
Brings to mind a statement by Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction, which I just love- "We don't talk about the weather." We shouldn't just talk about the weather- but reunions are a different thing.
Oberlin?- after 4 years of boys only at prep school- I fell into the paradise of Oberlin- a co-ed college- it really didn't mean much to me then but as I got older I realised a lot had rubbed off: to be surrounded by women- to have young women friends- Karen, Sue, Carol, Anne. to have friends who were good on the keyboard..I dated sporadically- dried humped Sue in the basement of the dining hall-as I had w my cousin by the Green River in Sandgate, Vermont- even while at the horrible all boys prep school- (Mt Hermon (which we called "Hermee's Hump")..the things that rubbed off on me at Oberlin as I realised there was a whole 'nother way- the "beatnik/protestor" way- maoists and blue grass pickers and Joan Baez back in the kitchen with a flower in her hair was literally true! and then she was known only as a folk singer!!! She had been invited to Oberlin because of her voice, not her politics! young girls w sparkling eyes- femaliens- life is full of promise, always!
re: "Speaking of Faith" (radio every Sunday with Crista Tippett) program on John o Donahooey
Sunday, November 28, 2010 1:18 PM- the older I get...the more curmudgeonly! e.g.the program, "Speaking of Faith"- which is on American Public Radio every Sunday is a pet peeve and I write them the following after a show featuring the Irish spiritual thinker John Donohoe::
-specious bs, turgid bs "You wish to understand and be understood without masks and pretension"- irish calvinism-o donahooey works w corporations- as ireland goes under? did he ever work w the pentagon? impossible to attain stuff turns people off to spirituality and religion- actually slanders the living Christ.
I tried to paste something here and a bunch of stuff disappeared- i have to get a better site- let me go try and find what it was-
This is where my chronological diary continues- after chapt. entitled "Offender Aid and Restoration": (where is photo of retirement party?)
a saying in Italian: "Dolce va niente"- to do nothing is sweet (phrasing approximate). And so it has been since Oct. 29, 2010- as described at the end of the Chapt. entitled Offender Aid and Restoration. My supervisor suggested I might regret it- no way- exercising, writing, practicing the piano, ...by the time I finish these- it's noon! + I'm taking up diving.I am certified as an "Open water diver" and get in 6 dives at Cozumel before bad weather closes the harbor (I don't think I'll do it again- for, despite the beauty, 50+ feet down- my mask leaked, my ears hurt, and I never did get my weight and bouyancy/neutrality correct- will stick w snorkeling!). Every day is a holiday in paradise! One must be careful to avoid becoming like, as Mick Jagger- the Rolling Stone, well puts in it a recent N Y Times article, "like an aging football star, sitting in the pub endlessly recounting that one glorious game when he made the decisive goal"!
artists to emulate as of 12/18/10? Georges Brassens, Don van Vliet
This will be the spot where I can continue my diary- the more important things- re growing old- much time in old age spent- looking for things lost the day before; sorting through things one should have thrown out anyway...I find you tube helpful in that- with the postings by Wm Hughes on demonstrations I should have gone to- like the Iraq Vets Against the War in DC on 12/16/10- I come to the realization that it is not me to be giving the sort of speeches Meda Benjamin of Code Pink can give- I cannot be that sort of leader- better to concentrate on the writing- poetry and prose and publishing and getting across that way- a quieter and gentler way. I remember when, after the blood pouring- I went down to Fort Bragg and addressed Viet. GIs-all I can remember about it is how over weight I was!
There is no one good book on old age- like Spock wrote for parenting- yet to be written- I quip wryly to my broker that old age is a time to spend your money before your descendants get to it. At about 67 I noticed body changing- more stiffness, less flexibility, can't run as fast, hemmorhoids a constant which it is a joy to scratch, note huge plus of good sleep, take exedrin pm if I really want to sleep, take diovan for blood pressure but then have to go to bathroom about twice a night, indomethicin helps w gout which attacks all my joints, etc. etc. (we seniors call it Vitamin I).
4/19/'11- 70th birthday a watershed in many ways- pain so severe it is as if it came to live w me like a person! First gout to left knee- goes away when I stop drinking. Then for 3 weeks- sciatica and pain all day and especially horrible at night in right leg. By the 19th, I am able to sleep without twisting in the wind and have resumed my exercise regime. I have lost 10 lbs. for it was too painful to eat. Mom had back problems- must take preventive measures!
Feeling of review of life- death of shaman friend Bob Clark- filming myself reading my 2 poetry books- more balanced view of achievement and stupidity/arrogance of fame desire. Still great desire to get point of view across- but what is it? Validity of peace over violence!
I'm going to put my "apercu's" (is that the word) my list of insights on old age here: old age means: or, old age entails: retracing yr steps on some matter or other every day- trying to find that which you lost yesterday; healing endless ailments (and trying to prevent same) such as gout, sciatica, back problems (dave leaves plenty of room for additions here:) trying not to be too honest and gouchy; less asking of others (which is often, after all, only a statement anyway) and more listening to questions or statements by others.
Retirement: finally having the time to truly run out of patience; spending your money- your savings before your stinkin relatives get to it; having so much fun that you always have some second fun planned to be next if you come to the end of the first fun you are having.
11/6/11- as stiff as I am today- I realize that old age is just like having the flu- you feel sick all the time! One consolation- by the time we reach the end, we really don't care that much any more! but! have been enjoying it so much- exercising, practicing the piano, working on Poems from Poetry in Baltimore, traveling- Cozumel, Canada- people ask me, how is it- I respond- every day is like a party- like it used to be on weekends and holidays! Drugs I take now: diovan for blood pressure, colchris for gout, aspirin for in general (O theres one other).
I talk w my friend Marc Steiner- a radio talk show host- about being honest- how tired I get of always having to frame my thoughts into sentences and how we do not express the Joycean babble of our monkey minds- which he- as a talk show host DEFINITELY cannot do! I know that it would come across as hard to understand- biased- mean- etc. I have responded to a poem on PIB about a laundromat (sp?) as follows: This goes well w Dino's laundromat ode-did u see his? it's definitely a place for reality theatre- I go to the one down on St Paul st due to certain phobias I have abt certain items of clothing- and I can only go in if certain people are there- makes washing stuff very difficult (I have ocd) (am a proud owner of ocd). How honest can I be in these memoirs before I die
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"Trees like to rot in the forest"- the Tinklers
( how past loves inform present ones....approaching death what becomes important...how we affect others, lovers, what they take from us..the levels of sentience in all living things....wanting to possess the most valuable thing as we are taken away to dust and silence...rehearsing death, rehearsing (sp?))
At last I know how a tree feels
Aware of all my levels at night,
The dignity of earth in Spring-
Moon light on the floor, awake at three.
Awake at three I can inhabit
The sleeping earth and think deep thoughts:
I could have loved you so and did!
I know my love made a difference!
Now you are dead- the moon light shakes
Like Cocteau said- "You do not dedicate
Yourself to poetry, you sacrifice to it".
What did he mean? Who gives a shit!
I try to think now that you're gone
(And you meant the world to me and others!)
Because the night brings on its dreams:
What incubus or meaning in its black seams?
My fingers get numb more now, but as they dry
I can plum deeper in another sense:
The moon light of past loves slips by
Your passing has killed two already, but I?
I understand it- I do not need to know.
Where the dead go. Because it's Spring
The trees are in touch with their extemities, they know
What sleep means just as we know.
The levels of love moving as I love now?
That's probably most important- how...
How present loved ones tomorrow morning wake?
I pray the Lord my soul to take!
some responses to "Growing Old" came in to the site Poetry in Baltimore- note-
| | | « Reply #10 on: May 05, 2010, 09:10:41 AM » | |
a lady sent me this as a response- what do you think? who ws it that wrote this? i'd like to know!!!!!
FOR DAVE (2)
Tiny waves flowing out in concentric circles ~ from one tiny drop
Crossing the others paths
A cacophony / a symphony of life ~ eternal in the past eternal in the future.
The seasons keep turning round what is organic (and what isnt?) continues in the March of the Laws victorious reign over all things.
The rot in the forest brings forth new life.
Zylum up Flowme down ~
I can always feel the Spring stirring roun bout February ~
That insatiable urge to push up, push up
I can feel it, dave.
As we begin our downward spiral toward the Winters end
Should we feel the counterpoint urge too?
Pushing down Pushing down?
Birth into the next world paralleling birth into this one in mirror reflection?
I think maybe it is comparable but not equivalent ~ we need less sleep as we get older.
Why is this?
Also, we dream and then wake and then dream and then wake is this not dying and living again?
Which is the real world, anyway?
What we sacrifice for we become like. Thats what becomes sacred to us Sacre/Sacri.
I sacrifice for love~ always have and always will.
Faithful til death, said my loving master
A few more years to worry and wait
Toils of the road will
All seem like nothing
When we pass thru those beautiful gates.
Whatever love we have ever entertained will always live ~ forever and ever amen.
 |
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| saw | | « Reply #11 on: May 06, 2010, 12:29:57 AM » |  Quote |
a nice reflection from your lady friend, dave...I like the mirror image notion, pushing up vis s vis pushing down...as well as the past and future both being eternal......her meditation reminds me a lot of the Beatles song, The End, from Abbey Road......their philosophical coda....." and in the end / the love you take/ is equal to the love/ you make." |
moe, larry, cheese....no, Limburger ! | | |
| ChrisGeorge | | « Reply #12 on: May 06, 2010, 02:39:01 AM » | Quote |
Similarly--
"Love is the only engine of survival"
Leonard Cohen |
| | |
| T | | « Reply #13 on: May 06, 2010, 04:04:00 AM » | |
i swear that little vixen emily dickinson pursues me, inhabits me- she is always whispering to me-(i wish) -do stuff like a hymn- go on do-it do-it-she's like a little succubus/incubus from amherst-
c'mon i like hymns
c'mon- i'll let ya look at my breasts
c'mon- do a poem on a bird
c'mon-
she is skipping down a lane some where (i wish) | Little Vixen
I swear that little vixen emily dickinson pursues
me, inhabits me -- she is always whispering to me. . .
go on do-it do-it -- she's like a little
succubus/incubus from amherst
.......................Dave Eberhardt
Who's the woman in white loitering
by the dented trash cans, whistling
that insidious melody in the moonlight
or under the flickering street light?
Think you hear a feral cat howl or squeal
like a banshee? Nah, it's Emily on
the prowl, harvesting poets' souls.
She's a-coming. . . will get you yet.
Christopher T. George |
| | | | | | « Reply #1 on: May 06, 2010, 06:55:55 AM » | |
to me, exceedingly funny- i am trying to get this stuff to Billy Collins- he who wrote- "On Undressing Emily Dickinson"
i tell you being in her room in amherst was frightening- for me- a white dress upon a stand
when i think of her and her verse i get chills and tears- the chance to talk to her? i often try to imagine what whe would say- dave- you're a gardener, let's talk abt that...she might not want to have talked abt her poetry- invasion of privacy
yet, i might say- i've had over 100 years to study it
wouldn't it be funny if she said" dave, do tell?" or "dave would you like some sherry" (i think she mentions sherry in one poem)
I would say- to call a hummingbird a "route of evanescence?" whatever possessed you?
ED- dave, walk out to the garden-tell me what you see- dave- can you see the Buddha achieving satori? dave, do you know what that means? dave- how many levels of reincarnation have you burned thru?
i would bow to my mistress, i would sit by her side in the garden
Emily, I would say- let's go outside and into the garden- tell me more |
frog in bog | | | | ChrisGeorge | | « Reply #2 on: May 06, 2010, 07:08:38 AM » | |
Not so much possessed by Emily Dickinson myself, tho' I admire her genius and how she was ahead of her time in the modernity of her verse when everyone else was writing weak-water rhymy romantic stuff. Sylvia Plath is the gal who possesses me.
Chris |
| | | | | | « Reply #3 on: May 06, 2010, 08:25:02 AM » | |
well, sylvia plath also has the strong father- to me, anne sexton does much more- not just in volume of verse ( is that the right way to spell volumn?) (volunm?) (voll yoom)
but in what she had to say- plath just doesn't say much- altho in a way- by being ultra powerful, she does- but abt what? she's always hitting the one note of death and oppression
sylvia, please- join the womens liberation movement |
frog in bog | | | | | | « Reply #4 on: May 06, 2010, 09:55:17 AM » | |
but Emily?
there is a humanity to Emily- a fellow feeling, a love of juicy words and images-
i think if i met her the way she was and the way i am today?
we could communicate
i would try to tell her how much things have changed- womens lib, womens sexuality, womens poetry-
i would tell her about ts eliot and how religion came under suspicion w all the hypocrisies of the wars
she would get much more from me than me from her
and yet...
when you think of startling imagery- i would have to say
emily
when i think of a "route of evanescence" as a description for a hummingbird- i have to tell you- the future of poetry begins here- and, truthfullly, has not advanced one jot
there was a guy named wallace stevens who brot in some juicy language and hart crane- but
emily
no one has advanced upon the music in the words any better- and so- we keep trying- her reply- dave "CHILL" |
frog in bog | | | | | | « Reply #5 on: May 07, 2010, 11:41:38 PM » | |
dave, she says: let me show you my book of pressings- of the flowers i have in my garden (you can get a facsimile of this amazing book)
emily, i reply, do you know they used an Indian Pipe on the cover of the first book of your poems they published after your death?
e d do tell- o dave- you are joking with me- that's so perfect- let's go inside for some tea
e d dave, i have a dress the same ghostly color as the Indian Pipe, want me to model it for u (i think i'm straying afield here in my fantasies) (e d would NEVER/EVER say such a thing)
maybe we could sing some hymns together- that would b sexy- a s sexy as it gets
the older I become the more curmudgeonly- a pet peeve for me was the program "Speaking of Faith" on American Public Radio. I write them:
dave, she says: let me show you my book of pressings- of the flowers i have in my garden (you can get a facsimile of this amazing book) emily, i reply, do you know they used an Indian Pipe on the cover of the first book of your poems they published after your death? e d do tell- o dave- you are joking with me- that's so perfect- let's go inside for some tea e d dave, i have a dress the same ghostly color as the Indian Pipe, want me to model it for u (i think i'm straying afield here in my fantasies) (e d would NEVER/EVER say such a thing) maybe we could sing some hymns together- that would b sexy- a s sexy as it gets
dave, she says: let me show you my book of pressings- of the flowers i have in my garden (you can get a facsimile of this amazing book)
emily, i reply, do you know they used an Indian Pipe on the cover of the first book of your poems they published after your death?
e d do tell- o dave- you are joking with me- that's so perfect- let's go inside for some tea
e d dave, i have a dress the same ghostly color as the Indian Pipe, want me to model it for u (i think i'm straying afield here in my fantasies) (e d would NEVER/EVER say such a thing)
maybe we could sing some hymns together- that would b sexy- a s sexy as it gets
a favorite childhood photo (note bear upper right)- w comments; don't ya feel like squashin this whining little fauntleroy w his ruffles? : I just peed myself. TPUM (a saying we had in the family meaning: "Take pity upon me." (a con job on mom) The fu kin bear is dead- long live emperor Dave. Dave in his pen, let me out or I'm bustin the fu k outta here!" I'd cry but I think this look may capture more attention from my mom. 
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