Letter to Lydia (continued)

…”I hope you don’t think that this kind of pre-occupation indicates I am ‘making my bed’ or anything like that. No, I realize I wouldn’t be here in the first place if I hadn’t failed somehow to acquire a perfect connoiserurship for being dead: one has to starve oneself in order to enjoy the feast. My appetite grows, but is as yet imperfect. I’m not sure, however, that I want to be around when the eschaton, which is just now starting to simmer, reaches a rolling boil. But, you never know. After all, they thought it was going to happen in the Middle Ages, and instead – the Renaissance!

I don’t want to forget to tell you, so I’ll slip it in here, that I have (indeed, already had) every intention of following the little discipline you prescribed – with a great deal more relish than I do my situps.

For the rest, I’ll just include a few of my recent aphorisms:

In the envelope that contained the prior two letters, one to Leon, the other to Leon’s wife, Lydia, there’s one other letter that appears to be from this time period that I will transcribe today:

“Dear Lydia,

Thanks very much for your letter. And for the little buffet of the pig’s-bladder it administered (?): this time I promise not even to apologize for my apologies – though I admit the reductio ad infinitum is not without a certain temptation for me. I could eventually apologize my way to such a distance from whatever it was I imagined to be my original offense that I might even experience something like exculpation. Actually, all I was apologizing for was the crime of being born, and yet I realize how inane and exasperating it is to do so to another convict like yourself. [so interesting that that Bob addresses the mother of his late best-friend and future life partner, Kathleen in this way and in this tone]. Guilt, like misery, loves company. How irritating (as if there were some taint of hypocrisy behind it) when Plotinus expresses his shame at having a body. Just another of those fellows who wants to have his cake and eat it to – that is to say, enjoy simultaneously the pleasures of being dead and being alive.

Here is the third and final installment from the letter I’ve been transcriping from Bob to Lydia, Kathleen’s mother, from that period in the 1970s when Bob was a shut-in.

I could be more plain. But I observe the alchemist’s cautious motto: obscurum per obscurius. Well, not really, I don’t mean to swathe my head in a turban and give mirror-practiced knowing looks into my transparent bowling ball, with which I knock over pinheads. I don’t mean to encoil myself in Sybilline obscurities, or out-enigmatise old Heraclitus. No, I think of it as a kind of antic caper, such as is suggested by the wonderful title of that old Irish folksong, “Float Aimless in Motley.” A tune as near to the true Irish heart as “Run Silent O Moyle.”

On closer phenomenological investigation of myself, the truth of the old adage gets clearer and clearer: ‘The made are merely the outvoted.’ Parmenides, the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher knew this when he asserted that the world was constructed by Nomos, or Convention, and not out of Physis, or what we now call physical Reality. (This was the beginning of the one-sidedness that led to philosophical Idealism.) The world is not discovered already in form, but its shape is hammered into it by Demiurges, or Worldsmiths. Blake depicts Newton as a naked Demiurge plying his calipers at the bottom of the sea. Thought and matter are shaped by the same movement. Our very perceptions no less than our conduct and ideals pass through the template of inherited metaphysics, which were originally thoughts arising in a private brain. Believe noone who tells you that is is all explained, that Science has all knowledge, even potentially under control. A false step may have been made as early as Aristotle. The ‘categories’ caused things to obtrude with so much definition from the flux of Being, in which consciousness and object were originally indiscriminate, that object acquired the full status of being, and consciousness vaporized, became invisible to itself, though it had once known itself quite palpably in the emerging out of concealment of Physis, of nature…

That was just one small segment of an unending scroll of speculation that continually unrolls in my brain and interferes with my getting a commonsensical foothold in everyday life. I am in much need of a butler to follow me about and buffet me with the pig’s bladders! Noesis and Noema he’s
concerned about and can’t tell his asshole from a boiled turnip!

This is an excerpt from a letter to Lydia, Kathleen’s mother, from the same period (1970s). It begins:

“You are wrong to feel abashed about your earlier letter or apologize for it as silly. I should be the one abashed for having assumed that pseudo-schoolmasterly tone in my reply. But you understand, I’m sure, that I was just sneaking a currish dig at the Quakers — with whom I too would morally stand up and be counted if it came to that [a curious thought, if it came to that], but who sometimes seem to have relaxed their minds out of the complacency of having once and for all settled the distinction between right and wrong. Oops, there I go again, lecturing, hammering home my periods with my fist on the lecturn. You have reminded me that I ought to be more discriminate in my selection of tone, in the strike of my posture. The debating club style I used in some of my recent brawlsome letters with Leon must have seemed a little preposterous because so stagey, so unlike the way I might speak if I were actually present. It is as if I were substituting some actor for myself. It is a funny problem one comes up against trying to devise a plausible style. It’s like the problem of animating a golem [Jewish Folklore. a figure artificially constructed in the form of a human being and endowed with life.] After all, the ordinary pace of one’s mind is at first quite different from the laborious concreteness of forming deliberate, indelible sentences. At first, the pattern of the mind’s movement and its self-expression is so remote from that obtaining in the normal stream of experience that there is no personality yet existent to give the style or pattern of oneself to the written word. That is why people often sound either too artificial or too primitive in their letter-styles. I fall among those who seem to artificial, too affectated. Affectation works in combination with parody, but when someone seems like he’s asking you to take him seriously and then strikes some attitude worthy of Roscius [a Roman actor], this gives you your suspicions. Leon hits the nail on the head when he uses words like ‘pedantic’ and ‘orotund’ in describing my tendencies. ‘That toney effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible…’ and other whoppers of such ilk as gave Taylor his fame [???]. Believe me, I’ve been tryin’ to ease up on the wind pressure, but it’s no easy matter. My style has something of the aftermath of a Mexican dinner with every variety of bean paste. I’ve ried to furl in the Ciceronian scrollwork and unmask my manner; but one gets carried away, you know. It’s like when I was sampling those hats from the hatchest as the tottish version of myself [I once heard Bob say that Lydia's earliest memory of Bob, then her son Paul's playmate, was sitting by himself in a kindergarten type environment, while all the other kids were busy with sports or each other, trying on hats!] — all these things knit into an overarching pattern. Trying out readymade hats when I should be in pursuit of my own authenticity, be my soul’s own skullcap. So please forgive my silly posturings…”

For several years in the Seventies, Bob disappeared from public life, which is to say, he stopped going outside. He lived at that time with his girlfriend, Diane, who worked and supported him and I believe he had received a small inheritance after his dad’s passing, which provided grocery and beer money; however, his agoraphobia prevented him from actually leaving his apartment on Lombard Street. This is a letter Bob wrote to Leon Carlin, Kathleen’s dad, with whom he had been friendly since childhood. It’s sweet and pained, describing directly and obliquely, his dilemma.

Dear Leon,

Thanks very much for writing. I may shun corporeal association with my fellow humans these days, but in spite of that, I even welcome association of the epistolary kind. Yours in particular, I might add. Diane was very pleased with your fair words in her behalf, and very deserving of them. She has wonderfully softened my little neurotic ordeal. This is not, however, the result of undiluted saintliness on her part — I know she wouldn’t mind my saying this because saintliness is not a quality to which she in the least aspires; it happens that retreat and isolation are as entirely in keeping with her present need at it is with mine. She, however, is the one who exerts herself to make it work, and for that, I am not only thankful to her but to the gods who organized our earliest acquaintance!

The next thing I have put myself in the position of having to say is that neither you nor Lydia [Leon's wife, Kathleen's mother] (Lydia, in particular, since she is the more inclined, I think) should worry about us. Strange to say, we are in a rather decent state financially. Diane brings in money from her part-time job, and I have been helping her with her at-home typing assignments: somehow it all adds up to provide us with more than the bare necessities. Also, I should apologize for having allowed myself to get drunk and then write letters in which I indulge in neurotic maunderings. I have vague memories of some of the histrionic sentences I was guilty of in those letters and I hope you will excuse me — sometimes I remind myself of my mother! (I don’t mean to slight my mother, but it is always bad for a man to remind himself of his mother, you know.)

I am of course flattered that you have begun to mythologize me in your imagination – my supposed ability to disassociate myself from time, and all such as that, impressions which I know I have halfway tried to foster; but you would do much better associating your fantasies of the supernatural with someone like APollonius of Tyana (I know Jesus Christ is out of the question in view of your background) rather than with a silly fool like myself. If I seem to be out of touch with my time, I am sure it is only because I have been unconscionably purblind in the observing of it. Too much metaphysics, not enough nitty-gritty observation, that’s my problem. One can be too superficial; but then one can also be too profound – I use the word ironically: pseudo-profundity can be the most superficial thing of all. I remember that Karl Jaspers said (I think he was criticizing Heidegger), that the closer you come to an intellectual formulation of reality, the farther you most likely go from authentic experience of it. Not that I have come anywhere close to an intellectual formulation of reality, but I have surely spent too much time ploughing that field.

Well, let me shunt the metaphysics aside then and just tell a simple story. Last night my perfect isolation was unexpectedly violated [friends of Bob's tell me that during this period, he often happily received visitors]. You probably know that previous to this time, Tom C (and paramour) managed to gain acceess, but Tom is so harmless a man, and I don’t mean it is a dig against him, that I can scaresely hold his visits up as anything resembling a violation of howsoever subtle a description. But last night my apartment door was vigorously pounded, I was standing there in the front room with the light on and couldn’t dream of scampering into hiding and ignoring it, and so I opened up. It was Bob Hamlet. Great of body, great of face: in fact, his cheeks wing out in a sort of sun disk from the central features. He is not what you would call obese, just round. I can remember that he was down to within ten or fifteen pounds of my own weight, and I’m not really a hulker, when we used to play handball together; but nevertheless, roiund. He is a partn er in vice, a drinking comrade, who imagines himself the victim of obscure Dionysian urges, which he at once laments and romanticizes. A man, however, of no less round an ample heart than face. He was the one who got me to the hospital when I broke my ankle last year. Not only that, an unstinting stander of drinks: I acknowledge his patronage by calling him the “Duke of Burgundy.” But last night it was difficult. He is a person to be friends with in crowded surroundings; when alone in one’s company, he tends to go on as inexhaustibly as a grandmother recollecting her childhood – always rather grave in his cups, and what he imaghines to be philosophical. He talks about his brothers, his father, his friends, his sister-in-law; and should I ever attempt in my non-aggressive way to switch the track of conversation, his voice predictably rises, and with great unconsciousness, he re-secures his hold upon the reins. And so did many an hour pass. I got very unsatisfactorily drunk.

That’s not much of a story. But perhaps it explains a little bit my recent need of isolation. I am just not much of a fighter. Consequently, I have a tendency to have very unsatisfactory social experiences. I’m a little like Tom; a nodder and a listener – but just out of cowardice and uncompetitiveness, not by choice. (Tom, incidentally, seems to be greatly improving in that regard, unless his behavior with me, one of his own kind, is not examplary.). Well, please forgive me; I can’t seem to lift myself off the psychiatrist’s couch in these letters. I hope my ramblings don’t discourage you from further correspondence, that’s all.

Bob G.