More notes:
A work gains coherence through its own definition almost independent of me yet unquestionably me also me.
Initially puzzling, a dozen or so pages in: “Binghamton, after Stroudsburg, before Day-town again.”
Was this in Dad’s car to pick up my goods? I have no idea what model he owned at that point. Or had I bought the green VW Bug?
A year and a half here, and after June, I will know no one save the Wormans (who want to leave, too).
With Celeste, again, the tenderness of breaking up: why not me and why Smarty in 3½ years?
“You’re not critical enough.” (Huh?) “You’re too intolerant.” (What’s the difference?)
“Critical is when you know somebody can do better but isn’t trying. Intolerance is when you don’t like the person for something he’s doing.”
Later, she said she doesn’t like the side of her I bring out as much as the person she is with Smarty, that she could never tear all my clothes off and rape me. (Which was explained the next morning.)
Where he asks her to help dissect – to skin a human cadaver chest – I’d be selfish.
She yells, to my surprise, “Cat! Shut the fuck up!”
Visiting Tom S. and Bill, some tender talk. Bill tells me that when he left the Gurdjieff group, he suffered for five months but now he’s Bill, only more so. When Polly and Ajax and he were reading our yoga newsletter, they were confounded, amazed. Tom uttered, “This is Hodson!”
With D-Man and Helene and a strange rapport over Friday night dinner, I thought of the night on Brown Road. Turns out that apart from him and me, everyone was a water sign. The quiet mysterious smiling and watery eyes.
Celeste says my eyes have changed. “They used to be flowerchild eyes, soft and gentle. But now they’re hard, mature.”
Something is missing, we’re backing away and less affectionate.
She hates to swim, except in the ocean, and dislikes movies. How could we ever make it together?
Sleeping with her, I dreamed I was holding Nikki. Awoke, and her back looked like Nikki’s. Here I was, with a newly departing partner.
Later, in a letter: “I can picture you playing with your children someday. I think you’d like the chance of being one again, and you’d share your toys.”
That’s what she wrote telling me she would not be my wife nor mother of my children.
And now, paleo-writing?
Work on finding that “Montana Lady.” (So I already had a desire to relocate to the Northwest.)
Driving home, with sadness and satisfaction. The strange paradoxes of this life.
Each fantasy prevents seeing the other as a person, as someone to respond realistically to.
Mad River University. (For Wright State?)
A two-part collection: OBJECTS and OBJECTIVES. Both fragments.
D for Demons or Dreams.
Loading an antique steamer trunk full of books, like lowering a corpse in a coffin and closing the lid.
When we were building the stone fence at the ashram, we accidentally buried the irises beneath the wall. Had to tear rock away and replant the bulbs. The next spring, the only ones to bloom were yellow.
Iris? Greek for rainbow.
~*~
Met Zilch for a drink, spent four hours together. When he gave Richardson my ashram address, Richie-boy was impressed that I had the balls to up and do it … pull up roots … Zilch was impressed by the stonework, gardening, and bread baking: “Shit, you do it all.”
And then I turned 25. “A half or a third of my life expended or lost now and what have I got to show for it? A pile of sorrows, a chest of empty expectations, no place to call home, no wife or mistress to rest my head. This freedom! … It’s time to stop getting it all together and do it! Before the hour is gone.”
Other entries on rediscovering my corner of Ohio. Yet when home, she’s “no longer virginal.” No idea who, though.
~*~
From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 