Whether it is the aloofness of corporate prestige, or the power of the monarch, or the subtlety of the religious leader, all great people seek the same thing – to be godlike. And what is this magnificent quality? It is unaffectedness. God is beyond the concern of human affairs and thereby is not subject to that natural limit that characterizes humanity: reaction. God’s greatness extends beyond all events, for god is the cause of all this; thus, God does not react (for every aspect of being is God’s act). Humans, however, ignorant of cause, suffer powerlessness and reaction to the world; they are subject to it. The man who strives for success, for acclaim and achievement, worth, value, and power, is undoubtedly pursuing immortality – freedom from his subjection to the world; thus, the godlike one perseveres unaffected.

Whether one perseveres through trying physical conditions or the onslaufght of many thousand warriors, or the mental aggravations of a household is irrelevant: the mark of the great being is the ability to remain cool. The modern bureaucrat has attempted to institutionalize the godlike position once held by the monarch with strict adherence to rule, and sense of moral untouchability, whereby his actions, as they are guided by the absolute rule of logos, are immutable. One who approaches the bureaucrat soon finds himself awed and belittled by his cold, efficient character; however, even when this style of hegemony is replaced by the compassion of the religious leader, no change in the fundamental motivations has occurred. The religious leader, though deeply and personally concerned with the well-being of the individual, in a fluid and sensitive way, remains fixed in his authority by virtue of his unaffectedness.

Having transcended the mortal taxation of emotions and mental faculties, the religious leader is fully present and receptive to those before him. Though his stance is ostensibly the opposite of the bureaucrat, his position is a function of the distance from those very issues that he purports to address in (for) others. Though he sees weakness and pain, thought he speaks of anger and fear, though he questions dogma and doubt, he is impaired by none. For if he were, he would be, just like the bureaucrat, not the one informing us about the Truth, but a fellow sufferer under the rules that he explicates. Just as the bureaucrat soon falls from power when one is empowered by sufficient knowledge of the system, so too is the need of the religious leader obfuscated by a depth of self-knowledge. Thus, though the monarch is needed in a political sense, his seat of power is, similarly, found in his detachment from the immediacy of rashness.

The monarch maintains, in the most fundamental sense of the term, control. The monarch is consistent and resolute. All of the deliberations and insecurities that plague the mortal, that plague the suppiiants, are not found in the god – for then of what use would he be? His usefulness, his purpose, is to reassure the frightened mortal with unwavering clarity, and unchallenged duty. Thus, the religious leader, far from maudlin, is so far steeped in his compassion, tat the mortal matters seem but like a dream to him. His very wisdom is found in his unaffectedness, for this trait evidences a transcendence, a succession, whereby he has already solved these matters; he is above them, and can thus provide wise counsel upon them.

The wisdom that men seek is the eye of God; it is insight into the greatness of the plan, and the meaning of their place. Today, we have supplanted the more general esoteria with rote New Agisms, such as ‘what is my plan;’ however the individual emphasis aside, modern ventures toward immortality, success and happiness have not altered from their ancient predecessors. The modern man, though, with the advent of atheism, has found new realms in which to claim godlike authority. The stern, lean, and undaunted businessman presents just as much a noble visage as was previously reserved only for the most stoic of stalwart knight.

What one finds transcending all of these specific characters of greatness is the denial of the human element. Some sort of mystical enlightenment is communicated by the detachment, the utter calmness with which these men are able to address the gravest of life’s situations. Certainly, ten and twenty other modern mythic images float into one’s consciousness (i.e. the cowboy, pioneer, fighter pilot, etc.) when this quality is finally isolated, for all modern notions of the hero are held within this conception. We seek God through this character, even though he be a military official, or the CEO of a law firm; for his is evidence of Providence, of Will and Power on Earth. Derived straight from the simultaneously influential forces of the Protestant Predestination and Providence and its requisite accompaniment of dutiful denial, and the imminent isolation of the individual of Enlightenment, this conception of man as closest to God when disinterested in those very things in which he is devotedly engaged pervades the modern conception of success.

Of what repercussion is this theoretical stance upon the human population. For those who have achieved this magnificent disposition, perhaps there are none, save their loss of their humanity. For the great numbers of others, the vast majority of people participating in the great human endeavor, the intensity and vitality of their lives are lost. And though loss is an obscure word, for one never loses themselves, what is lost is actually just what is buried, or better confused. A vast tumult accompanies the modern condition, and the sensitive fabric of human consciousness is twisted and spun, turned and sundered. Envisioned as a fabric, one can see the gentle threads and deeply woven textures that compose this tapestry; even more so, one can see the violence that occurs when the cords of the tapestry are pulled from their bindings, and the fabric is attacked and torn; threads are matted into yarn, and the simplicity of woven designs are pulled into bundles of disassociated string. Such is the case with modern attainment of success. For one cannot care for, nor act with passion towards his work, save for the imminent recognition of his elevation in the general hierarchy of of control; nay, but this outburst must be immediately checked, lest he find himself complacent and joyful, and thus mortal. The trials and joys, the work itself, is is not for its own sake, but rather to the ultimate end of disinterest. Even those that find such momentary reprieve in a well-done job, or a move into greater power, know that this step was made possible by the intense and committed power of disinterest that they have momentarily allowed to lapse. Thus a sort of internal check comes upon them, reminding them that, more than any accomplishment, the power of control and distance is their ultimate arrival.

The bundles of yarn, twisted with string, tearing the delicate signs and pathways themselves become internally knotted; the only guidance through this chaos is the promise of ultimate deliverance from it – ultimately denying it. Thinking that this perseverance will set them free from their internal quagmire, they find themselves engaged in an eternal wrestling match; for, the be complacent and comfortable, to wallow in the fruit of his suffering, demonstrates success, and thus communicates their Providence to themselves and the world. Yet, once compelled to return to duty again, their eye is on the ultimate prize, the godlike stature. Thus, they suffer strange bouts of gluttony and purging, attempting to justify their god-quest. Their gluttony never fully satisfies them, for it is but a pale taste of the true power of unaffectedness; eventually, he returns to his road because, finally, there is nothing else. His perseverance has become his way and more importantly, it has become him; for his is his quest.

Thus, though some may choose to look more carefully at the swings of appetite and the distortions in accomplishment and enjoyment, the issue at hand with this man is his path. His way, his work, is himself, and is the depth of his ultimate fulfillment; implicit in this road is his dream, his belief in the mortal afterlife of unaffectedness.

Humanity struggles to deny its work, and t subject the intimacy of craft to simple and obvious modes of self-torture, whereby work is opposed to play and finally, the antithesis of joy; and how simple these mortal games by, for they change not the course of man, but further twist him round in his own spindle. Oh, irony, great goddess of fate, bear witness to this call! For humanity has founded its goal in its supercession of humanity, and thus uses square blocks to make circles. The modes of work are themselves the human endeavor; they are the path, the choice, and the creation of their ends. But, oh how simple it is to divorce them, and to forget the true goal, the god quest, inherent in the chosen path. Short-sightedness and fear have wrought beautiful weavings into pieces of string. String, mind you, without meaning or sense, and that must be forced into molds and ends, that “good” may come of them.

Then, mankind, release the spindle from its bind and know that the thread is your essence, and the patterns, your will; they are not to be molded into things, but to be lived through, and, in the end, answered to. The detachment is the hallmark of production; the disinterest that signifies wisdom, they are illusions, visions of humanity’s own fear of itself. How could man but see the greatness of the unaffected ones, save for his own desire to be unaffected? And what struggle, what merit is this goal, save to reduce his humanity to a pastime? Can you not see what is lost, all that is forgotten in the subtle twists of disinterest, to arrive beyond the care; and we know not what impels us, save for the authority that these men seem to command.

However, their authority is your aspiration, and your aspiration is your forgetfulness. Do not live life to avoid life, but instead, allow for your work to be itself, to be its ends, and to realize the goals that then may emerge. Ah, but this is nonsense to those who cannot even yet see that their very selves are bound up in this search for immortality. Thus, I end that these laws, these games, these rules, though they may land you into the authority after which you sought, will not bring the freedom that they promised; for as I said, the path is implicated with its end and molds you to its purpose. Only in the very mortality of the act of care will you find your long-for reprieve; for it is within the heart of the enemy, the care that binds men to their suffering, that the truth of suffering is known and a final peaceful acceptance realized: we must bear our world and, if we can, bear it lovingly.

October 7, 1995

*****************************************************************************

The Edgar Allen Poe House in Philadelphia, admired in the author’s day for its lovely rose garden, but now an egregious derelict thrusting its oddly halved shape into a vacuum of dirt lots and merely functional buildings, boasts a kitchen doorknob said by the old lady who receives toursits to possess the talismanic property of enhancing the skill of young writers who rub it. This sort of supernatural effect falls in the category of what Frazer called ‘contagious magic,’ that is, magical efficacy proceeding from the residue of a person’s soul attaching to objects he has frequently used or handled. It may not occur to the aspiring rubber of the doorknob, but if indeed a real soul-contagion results from his act, it should by no means be supposed that is an unmixed blessing. It would be unreasonable to assume that, beyond conveying certain properties of Poe’s genius, the knob also filtered out his morbidity, derangement and dipsomania. The circumspect will realize that for all its sleeve-polished exterior, here one risks biting into a decidedly wormy apple.

I mention the Poe doorknob as a model instance of the kind of phenomenon which I myself recently experienced to my peril. Liam and Mary O’Finnegan, close friends of mine for many years now, had the Irish luck some months ago to snag a position as caretakers in an old turretted mansion: free rent and light duties in a place the likes of which is infrequently visited even in the fantasies of opium. The place possesses, at least to my perception, no two rooms occupying the same level, and everywhere there are twisting steps, sudden semi-circular balconies, windows opening upon lower stories by way of shafts of coordinated mirrors, closets harboring little electrical elevators, fireplaces cut into brick chimney-tubes that rise directly through the center of the room, corners obscured by molded stucco, gargoyles and artificial stalactites, weird, unsymmetrical furniture — in short, a profusion of almost traumatically unpredictable detail. The creator of this dream habitat was the German surrealist poet-architect Wolfgang Schaumhauser, about who memory a cloud of suspicion still hangs because of the fact that he expatriated himself from Nazi Germany rather late and also is rumored to have enjoyed, during the 30s, the intimacy and admiration of the notorious Carl Hakenbauer, second among architects favored by Hitler only to Albert Speer himself.  It has been argued by some that Shaumhauser’s sudden disaffection from the Nazi movement, manifesting itself int he spontaneous escape and treachery of April, 1942, stemmed not from qualms of conscience but from an egotism resentful of the preferred position of his more conservative colleagues – Kitschkuppler, as he afterwards disdainfully referred to Speer and Hakenbauer. Somehow, Schaumhuaser wrangled a monstrous sum of money from the Allies in exchange for certain military secrets to which he had been made privy, and it was with this that he financed the masterpiece of his career, the home he occupied with unabrogated reclusiveness until his strange death in 1962.

There was an odd, perhaps even conspiratorial excitement about the way Liam and Mary welcomed me into the poured concrete delirium which was now their home. I was sped through a dizzying tour of the place, conducted with a kind of perfunctory haste, as if this were an unavoidable formality preceding some genuine enjoyment that for the time being was to be kept secret from me. Finally we ended up in the dining room, a cave-like affair pocked with little craters all around the walls, which served as cubbyholes to bizarre objets d’art, not the least strange of which was, according to the report of my hosts, an actual Amazonian shrunken head, impaled on one of those little spikes used for paid restaurant checks. As if it had been my birthday, or some other occasion warranting my personal celebration, I was invited, almost ceremoniously, to occupy a huge chair at the head (if such a designation has any meaning in this instance) of an amoeba-shaped oakwood table. This chair distinguished itself from the others surrounding the table by its free form, yet still throne-like in appearance; and it was, in fact, studded with what passed, at least from the standpoint of my lack of expertise, for precious stones. One’s ego found this article of furniture more comfortable than one’s body, but inasmuch as Mary and Liam kept plying me with wine, eager questioning and admiration, I felt as nicely situated as a seed in its husk. Why was so much attention being paid to me, as if I were some sort of visiting celebrity? Moreoever, why was I surpassing myself, to a degree quite extroardinary in my experience? Usually sluggish in conversation, I dominated the dinner table on this occasion with no less resourcefulness than an Oscar Wilde, and what was even more uncanny, my memory seemed to be entirely free of blank spots: even the German that I had unrewardingly studied years before was as fresh in my mind as if I had been a native, and I effortlessly salted my conversation with quips from Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. It took me completely by surprise when Liam suddenly got up from his chair and invited me to switch places with him.

…”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:

I never particularly wanted to be a doctor, lawyer or Indian chief. But shaman – now that has a certain attraction for me. The requirement of sanctity, however, proves not only to be impossible for me, but (devil that I am) even a little distasteful. I guess I’ll have to settle for ‘artist.’

My father once told me I that I didn’t understand the value of money. If I had known myself better at the time, I could have retorted, ‘No, but I sure as hell understand my disinclination for work.’ I do, however, find in myself, a certain leaning toward effortful activity which is entirely pure of practical consequence — like, for example, metaphysics and juggling.

Would Pythagorus have reconsidered his worship of Number if he were alive today? Our pre-occupation with statistics, money, every variety of banausic calculation, of course that prodigiously ravenous child of calculation called Technology – this is hardly what one would have observed in the colony of saints he founded in southern Italy. (”For what is the use of reckoning the treasures that are not mine?” Yoka Daishi) [in handwriting]

‘If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to someone asking, I do not know.’ St. Augustine on the subject of time. This concise utternance proves that there is no such thing as ‘progress’ in the matter of understanding Reality.

Materialism is anti-concrete. When Dr. Johnson kicked the famous stone and cried, ‘I refute it thus!’ far from refuting it, he corroborated Berkeley’s assertion of the immateriality of things, but he and everybody else failed to get the point. He imagined that the impact (if not the pain!) that his toe felt verified an abstraction.

The behaviorist is like the blind man who refuses to believe that anybody has switched on the lights.

I wonder whose idea it was to kill God and not do anything about the devil.
The work ethic on closer examination proves to be nothing but the subjugation of life which concrete to money which is abstract.

Now, in a lighter vein, a couple of palindromes:

Set a cave canem and menace vacates (I learned on TV the other day that the ampersand is a legitimate palindromic crutch)

This one requires a brief preface: it is the newspaper headline following a competition in the local zoo to determine which type of ungulate is mostr active sexually. Gnus erased, oxes draw award, sex odes are sung.

Love,

Bob

“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. By the way, I loved the little poem you sent along [missing along with Lydia's letters]. What an elegant rendering of the condition of being spiritually displaced [could be one of a hundred thousand poems!] Verruckt, as the Germans would say: the word means both displaced and crazy. (Oh, incidentally, Freund does mean friend in German.) Speaking of Germans, I saw Kubler-Ross on TV last night. Much that she said confirmed for me what Yeats says int he chapter of A Vision called ‘The Judgment of the Dead.’ [Those who didn't know him might picture a man reminded of something he once read, pouring over volumes of Yeats or, nowadays, googling the bard, but that wasn't what Bob did. He spoke conversationally just like this, quoting Shakespeare, Yeats, Joyce, Heidegger, Plotinus -- people I never heard of before or since, citing a line or paragraph from memory that was perfectly appropriate for whatever point was being made, which is to say, his memory was encyclopedic]. Particularly the idea of dreaming back or digestive recapitulation of one’s life experiences in the light of the spirit. This is undoubtably what is anticipated by the acute memory for seemingly trivial details, drawn from the whole span of a life, experienced by the dead or dying [is it me reaching or is that what I was just praising Bob for doing all the time?]

May I confide to you my creed? Image-making precedes fact. Images are not generated by matter; on the contrary, matter, which is arrived at by abstract analysis, is a concept derived from the play of images, whose wellspring is the Unfathomable, called by some, God. It is perhaps unfortunate, but we have no good cause to expect to be rid of images when we are rid of our physical husks. [yikes] All that will happen is that Causality and Accident will be replaced by Meaning – as is provisionally and imperfectly the case when we dream. That we happen not to remember anythign from before we were born proves nothing but our forgetfulness, which after all is a merciful ingredient in a universe that goes on forever! Swedenborg, if I’m not mistaken, says somewhere that angels were once men, but that they have been granted the privilege of forgetting this odious circumstance, and thus they seem in their own eyes to have been angels from the beginning of Eternity.

[I have to stop. Sometimes the ideas are just too full, or maybe it's Bob's presence, so wearily missing in the day to day, is back so strong in these words. If you're reading this, and having a reaction of any kind, drop me a line in the form of a comment. I believe Bob would like us to be in some kind of groupalogue over his ideas, even his insecurities, something the blog form seems perfect for. More of this letter tomorrow, good Lord willing and the creek don't rise, as Laurie says.]

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.”

Like most people nowadays, I have difficulty taking myself seriously when I’m not being scientific. It is an indoctrination of the currently entrenched priesthood of science. We think there can be no serious domain of thought outside those which exhibit the rigors, but not necessarily those rigors. There are certain assumptions – for example, the priority of the object — that prevent Science from achieving a full account of Reality, or from examining its relations to our concern, or to the concern of Being itself in strepping into the lighted clearing of itself which is man’s consciousness. We are to believe that this lighting of itself in mind is so much epiphenomenal swampgas or Northern Lights emitted b y the lifeless matter, which Science stresses as rthe most important measure of Reality. Science certainly can not demonstrate the validity of such a point of view, and yet it feels authorized by its wisdom to strangle the uncanny spiritual mystery, which is the emergence of nature in the fisheye lens of consciousness. To my way of thinking, “time” makes sense only in the context of that emergence – as a night of dreamless unconsciousness will tell you, there is no meaning to the idea of an extended time without extension of consciousness: it becomes but an analytical graphing of sequences, of purely abstract ‘befores’ and ‘afters.’

(Don’t think I’m unaware, by the way, of how highly eccentric it is of me to make of a private correspondence the occasion for such relentless performances. Let me take the occasion of this parenthesis to assure you that I am slightly more civilized than to be so naive.) )See how that parenthesis peeped in, butler-like, from what seemed a wholly different time strand? Let us proceed to the end of this parenthesis and see if the original topic is resumed.) ‘Befores’ and ‘afters’ can, you see, be scrambled by a shuffling of perspectives.

Phenomenology can be charged all too readily, I know, with evasiveness. Would anyone believe that I was struggling to make myself clear?

A touch of the wand and our balloon has settled again upon terra firma. Episotolary extravagances of this kind do not make, I realize, a very good case for my sanity. But think of them as exercises in blarny-artistry that possess occassional, unexpected islands of lucidity [I think of Joyce].

This is perhaps an all too indolent employment of the mind, but I invite you to think that I just wish to share my thoughts with you as I sit here, knitting them.

This strange buzzing speechbox coding its contented hum and sending the runes to you.

I’m approaching what the philosophers call the phenomenological object, and expressing it in the form of sentecnes which, like this one, comment on themselves. Having attainted it but fitfully, still halting and lurching amid abstractions, in the attempt to make an object of my state in words, I simply made an object of my words and let them pulse onto the page even if in the context of an empty sentence like this one. Thus it becomes almost like seeing a video image of the old blatherskate in living color; though he has nothing in particular to talk about; just a sort of muttering amid the crackles of a fire.

I hope you are managing to keep a tolerance for this breeseweavery. I was just trying what you m ight call an experiment. I wanted to see if I could, as it were, make a kind of astral body out of sentences that served not so much to conveny meaning as to be a cloak for me. I fear it has gturned out to be a cloak of invisibility, of obfuscity. Forgive me.

Be well.

Love,

Bob

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!

You probably realize how susceptible I am to the charge of having nothing to say but everything to say about it. (Das nichts, as Heidegger would call it.) The first thing I could say about it (the Nothing, that is) is that it is nothing but a byproduct of abstract thought — there is, in other words, no such thing as Nothing, but it is merely a convention of mathematical calculation; (in that it could not signify any real entity, the Greeks excluded zero like a blasphemy from their world-loving, geometry-based mathematics. If nothing else has convinced me, however, that Nothing is more than a mere nothing, it is the fact that Nothing continues to be such a fruitful object for conversation: surely so much could not be said about what was really nothing but nothing…

This is really something like hanging the clouds in nets like Italian cheeses!

(I really should cut down on this self-mocking obscurantism.)

All kidding aside, though, our modern worldpicture, in its conception of the world as pure Object, quite irrationally overlooks the significance of its emerging into the light, of its being apprehended as object. The light which is our mind, one might say, belongs to the objects which achieve differntiate realness by it, and is the light of their being as well as that of the presumed subject or observer. This, I think, is the sense in which the Eastern sages experience oneness with (an) object: I and It rediscover that they are twiggings of one stem. Noesis and Noema. Beneath them, the unfathomable, the Ancient of the Ancient Ones.

This is called Ennumerating the Strands of the Great Beard. Or, St. Anthony’s Crochet Needles.

It is also called Weaving the Wind and Torus Hibernius.

Zu den Sachen selbst! To the things themselves. The banner disappearing in a fog.

Please forgive the little lurching siezures of obscurantism!

“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…”

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.

Now borne within a tent of silken flesh,
as palanquin some holy relic bears,
that bone with which your tender sinews mesh
makes magnet toward which all my longing veers,

And so I crave to press my heart to yours,
that it might find that rib and beat thereon,
the rib which that thin gap alone remures,
whence flew my heart to search for sweetness gone.

Restore this rung and let my heart cvlimb up
and find again sweet Eden’s mountaintop.

And so into the library he’d come
with sulphurous lip and face of platinum;
and feigning to be buried in a book,
(most certainly he did display the look
of one who had been buried quite a while!),
he’d sit there hatching vipers of dark guile.
Someone would leave alone; he’d follow after.
Then from a distance, one heard fiendish laughter,
and never more was the poor person seen.
Prince Vlad himself, before a pallid green,
would then return, looking all pink and bright.
Our boss, Ms. Brunton, said to me one night,
“I think that creepy guy is a soferatu.
We may not like it, Bob, but we’ve still go to…”
“We’ve got to what?!” I cried, “You must be kidding!”
But once Ms. Brunton speaks, it’s do her bidding!
And though I begged again, “For Pity sake,”
she handed me a mallet and a stake.
“Remember, it must go straight through the heart–
you’d better check an anatomic chart,
for if you only poke him in the gizzard,
he’ll rise up like the dread komodo lizard
and rend your fragile body limb from limb.
Now hurry up–he’s leaving–follow him!”
I hailed a cab and cried, “Follow that hearse!”
(The library I hoped, would reimburse.)
We followed them as far as Kirk and Nice,
the funeral home. And who knows what grim price
those undertakers paid to put him up,
if not their livid throats from which to sup!
I slipped in through the gate behind Vlad’s coffin.
By now they’d hauled it back and forth so often
they’d shed all watchful care and circumspection–
poor Mr. Kirk! He was of such complexion
he’d make you think a blind cave fish suntanned;
and Nice! — my God, his blood must have been canned
or frozen in cubed trays and elsewhere stored
than in the veins through which it should have poured!
In greasy black tuxedos they were crouched
beneath the heavy box in which Vlad couched;
their eyes were glassy, their expressions flat,
and each of them had on a black top hat.
I waited till they’d set the coffin down.
Then Vlad reared up and showed them his stern frown.
They offered him their throats to quench his thirst,
and seemed to view to see who’d be the first
to have the honor of his serpent’s bite.
One heard a sound, could one describe it right,
as when a milkshake’s dregs go up the straw.
For little more than dregs could poor Vlad draw
with milkshake dregs a splutter of thin air.
Old Vlad’s thin nostrils then began to flare
while all in vain he strove to wet his whistle
as if he tried to suck the juice from a thistle.
(The night was wearing on and dawn was near
and patiently I tried to tame my fear,
for once the sun rose it would be OK
since vampires can’t stand the light of day.)
With scorn the two of them he then dismissed,
and you could really tell that he was…
(as there are children here, I’ll skip that rhyme
and save it for a more convenient time)…
His nostrils flared again and caught of whiff
of something which was other than a stiff,
of something in whose veins did still reside
a substance other than formaldehyde:
in other words, poor me–type O, I think–
and certainly a far more hearty drink
thank Mr. Kirk and Mr. Nice came up with,
whose total vat you couldn’t fill a cup with.
I needed to act fast–I grabbed the take!
My hand, I must admit, began to quake–
the other hand could hardly hold the mallet,
and then Vlad sprang up from his quilted pallet!
I closed my eyes and made a lunging thrust,
and what then happened you must take on trust:
just as Ms. Brunton said, I poked his gizzard,
and sure enough, he turned into a lizard!
And I don’t mean some harmless little newt–
but one that split the seams of his black suit!
Indeed, the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
who once had made so many ladies swoon,
was to this monster but a lounging skink.
–Quick, too!–indeed, I’d scarcely time to think,
when at the window drapes I thought I saw
that which alone could stay the lizard’s jaw:
a twinkle of first light and dawn of day!
I leaped and grabbed and tore those drapes away
and suddenly the lizard seemed to shrivel
and with its tongue gave forth a paltry drivel,
and soon was nothing but a smoking mess;
but as for me, you might quickly guess,
I was not troubled by that grisly sight.
And having soon recovered from my fright,
I went back and reported to my boss.
There’s no way I could ever hope to gloss
the thing she then revealed to me. O cruel!
She’d surely made of me one classic fool!
Betrween her fangs she said, “This town, you see
just wasn’t big enough for him and me!”
So please don’t ever poke her in the gizzard
unless you want to really meet a lizard!
And when you ask her to retrieve a book,
don’t follow her into some hidden nook:
she’ll find your book, all right, –she’s a librarian
but you can bet she ain’t no vegetarian!