by
Norman Rush
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I was then all right for twenty minutes, until the mania came back reformulated as the proposition that if I actually got rid of my sunglasses, and only if, I would be able to see the true and fundamental color of nature. I was to understand that what we perceive as beautiful individual colors are only corruptions and distortions of the true color of reality, which is ravishing and ultimate and apprehensible only in extremely rare circumstances. This was not a question of hallucination. It was analogous to dream knowledge, but different. I knew that for some reason at some deep level I was doing this to myself. But still I was tempted to act. I said aloud things like This is about self-injury, This is about self-worth, What are we to ourselves? and other pop-psych trash. The experience was strange in every way. Was I trying to get myself to turn around and go back to Kang before it was too late, because navigating in the Kalahari without sunglasses is one thing for Bushmen who have presumably been adapting their vision to a surplus of light for millennia and another thing for a lakhoa already in a state of anxiety? On any trip like mine there’s a point of no return. So was this some ideational response to the fact, which I was already having to fight to repress, that I was over my head? Had my brilliant unconscious chosen the one thing that if discarded would virtually disable me for making the long trip to Tsau but be manageable for a quick retreat back to Kang and safety? I think what broke the grip of this mania on me was firstly just hearing my own voice, whatever it was saying, and, secondly, remembering reading about someone who had been lost in the Kalahari and survived it reporting that he had had to get past a point when he experienced the desert as an organism or totality trying to get him to become part of it, as in surrender to it. This would make my sunglasses mania an analog of the feeling people lost in the Arctic get that they would be more comfortable if they took off their caps and mittens. The mania left, also suddenly, and we went on uneventfully.
lol
This was my lowest ebb. Baph had to get up. I couldn’t carry the water cans.
I had to remobilize. Venting was no use. I need a bath, I shouted, and Never do this again, but it was pro forma.
Then I impressed on myself that if I died there, no one in his right mind would regard it as a tragedy. I would be in the category of an aerialist falling to her death. Or I would be entitled to the species of commiseration people get who show up at parties on crutches but who got injured skiing at Gstaad or some other upper-middleclass earthly paradise. It would be sad but not that sad.
lmao
I wanted to know what his father had been doing, ostensibly, in his solitude. There were two things. One was keeping up with his important reading, meaning in those days the Socialist Call, which he subscribed to, and the Militant and the Weekly People, which he brought home with him and all of which he gave Nelson in a bundle once a week to burn for him. He also got somewhere the Despatcher, a publication of the longshoremen’s union, which was then an organization terribly feared by the powers that were. In those days, Nelson said, this is how left San Francisco was: you could get the Militant and the Weekly People on newsstands the same as you got the Chronicle or the vicious Examiner. Nelson saw his father as a fan of the left, generically. His father belonged to nothing, did nothing left — either of which might have been dangerous. Nelson’s explanation for his father’s having become a passive admirer of the left had to do with his heart’s having been broken when something called the End Poverty in California Campaign had been defeated through chicanery and vile propaganda tricks orchestrated by the movie industry, this in the thirties. Also he hated Stalin for what he had done to the good part of the left. When he could finally have adult discussions about socialism with his father, it emerged that the idea of joining anything openly had been impossible because he had a wife and children. Nelson believed him. The other thing he was doing was working on charts supposed to predict when the next depression would come. This entailed heavy use of an adding machine, whose noise, I pointed out, would also serve to remind the family that serious business was taking place.
lol. tagged ironically
All I could think the first time I heard this story was If you marry you will regret it, If you fail to marry you will regret it. This was one of the few things I was able to bring to Denoon’s already topheavy intellectual armamentarium. He had somehow missed reading the great Either/Or of Kierkegaard, which is an ordeal except for the one small section whose name I forget that contains that gem. And what I was thinking, of course, was if you have a father you will regret it, If you have no father you will regret it: I was thinking of myself. This became one of Nelson’s favorite quotes, somewhat to my chagrin as to what it meant vis-à-vis being with me. But if we had I would have gotten an agreement out of him not to use it in public when I was around. He always used the aphorism in the most general or comic sense as a way of saying nothing ever works out, but still it stung me slightly. There was a period when we were in effect married, by most criteria.
Being in this place and in the hands of women ran counter to my main established refuge fantasy, wherein my father or uncle is a retired judge or captain of industry with a giant Victorian house in an area like Bucks County. He is there off and on. You can go to this house anytime and collapse there for as long as you like, no questions asked. There would be a staff. My father or uncle is powerful but also good, which is one reason the place is so safe. He has goodwill extending to him from far and near, either because his legal judgments were so wise and beloved or because of unspecified other benefactions touching everyone in that county. The food would be simple but good. There would be a farm attached to the house. My protector is very diversified economically, so that no depression would wipe him out. I could be a spinster if I wanted, live in my beautiful room, use the extensive library and the piano, or if I chose to I could moon around in my room and only come down for meals. There was no mother in this. My uncle, though, would be devoted to the memory of my mother. I once said to Denoon, after he denied he harbored any refuge fantasies whatsoever, I don’t believe you, but if this is true it’s because the thing you as a white male will carry to your grave is the feeling that you’re safe anywhere in the world, in essence, unless you have some particular physical handicap. I suppose my position was that everyone has refuge fantasies. I said Saying you have no refuge fantasies and even believing you don’t is not the same thing as really not having them in some way, shape, or form. He got mad. Was I saying he was lying? he wanted to know. Only partially, I said. Then god damn it, he said, I’ll tell you again I don’t and that I also doubt that any fully mature human being does and also that if you do, you belong to the one tenth of one percent of the female race who construct this refuge fantasy because the automatic marriage fantasy, which is the real refuge-fantasy people have until they try it, is repugnant to them somehow.
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The message of the dream lecture was that there was something I had to avoid. It was a strain to formulate it. There was something I should beware, something that was not good enough.
What was not good enough was the usual form that mating takes.
I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus — the word was emphasized in some way — of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit. In the dream this seemed to me like a burning insight and I concentrated fiercely to hold on to it when I woke up: I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.
[...] Gradually I extracted the bases of his objection to movies. His mind wandered during them, he said. He only liked black and white. He only liked certain recherché classics by Carl Dreyer and a few other early masters. He was always aware of a blackish flicker: the frame speed was too slow for him. Movies were ludicrous objects because background music told you how to feel about everything. But even worse, movies were things that made you passive, somehow. They happened to you. You couldn’t make them go faster, get on with it, even to the degree that you could with actors in a play — by groaning, say. In any case, for the time spent, he would always rather be reading. He never said so, but I think he hoped Tsau would someday be above moviegoing. I treated all this as an eccentricity, but I think now it was a form of puritanism coming from god knows where. I told him I thought he liked reading because it was more like work. He said something passé like touché. He wasn’t annoyed. All this was much later. He would say only slightly facetiously that the main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading. There was irony here, because until I came and superintended some small upheavals in his use of time he was always falling behind in his beloved reading and having to put it off, falling months behind in the case of the Economist, which mounted up in a stack that was always collapsing until I got an agreement out of him that I could pull out and discard the bottom oldest few copies when the stack got too high. That was fine, but I had to show him the copies I was discarding. I would, and then and only then would he read them. [...]
<3
[...] This was not a perfect yet cheap idea working itself out. This was enlightened surplus capital coming in to lift a whole subclass of people up onto a pedestal and saying Go. What I was thinking over and over was This is all very well — but. Tsau was charity, or a species of it, which Denoon had to turn into something generically different or it was hardly worth doing. He needed more enthusiasm than I felt he was being given. I was very divided. You can only give what you can give. If you know in your heart something is in essence or origin charity you act differently toward it than if it’s utterly your own creation. On the other hand, couldn’t people see how extraordinary this could all turn out to be — in fact already was? I was in both camps at the same time. How happy should I myself be, was of course the unstated associated question. How happy should I be in Tsau? If I was holding that the average person should be more rapturous in this place, then all the eternal questions of what an average person is, what culture has to do with that, came flocking back, id est anthropology came flooding back. [...]
I realize that I may have contributed to his wanting to be silent during our walks by my too concentrated and cathected soundings re the books in his life. I was groping gingerly for his intellectual keystone, but not gingerly enough. There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is The Prophet. That wasn’t the particular danger with Denoon, but there were others. A guy who tells you the best novel ever written is Clarissa, which also happens to be the first or second novel ever written, is also not unlikely to tell you that the only music he likes to listen to is motets and that art has never really advanced over the cave paintings at Lascaux. I suppose I was on the qui vive for some variant of this reflex because Denoon had said his favorite novel was War and Peace, so I was thinking, Oh no, it’s going to be Beethoven for music and Shakespeare for plays. It isn’t that these positions are not defensible, but taking them may mean someone is not very individual. One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you’re interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it’s time to start feeling in your purse for carfare. Anyway, when I sensed the depth of Denoon’s desire for a little silence, I desisted. What I got out of this first attempt to look at his literary underpinnings was a paperback called L’Afrique Noire est Mal Partie to read and comment on.
lmao. but why can't men like the golden notebook??
Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing. Naturally it was living with Denoon that gave me this notion in its developed form as opposed to the bare inkling I got during the evening in question. I’m not talking about having a sense of humor you apply to the ups and downs of living together. I’m talking about being comedically proactive. Ultimately I was better at this than Denoon was. I don’t know why being funny for someone was such a new idea for me. It had never occurred to me in connection with any other male I had been serious about. Denoon had early on made it clear I was free to include him and his foibles as ingredients and props in my routine if I felt like it, by not objecting when I did. So he was different. Or was it just that I was dealing for the first time in my life with an actual mature male, a concept which up until then I had considered an essentially literary construct and a way of not asking the question of whether or not in fact the real world reduced to a layer cake of differing grades of hysteria, with the hysteria of the ruling sex being simply more suppressed and expressing itself in ritualized forms like preparedness or memorizing lifetime batting averages that no one associates with hysteria. I was surprised at how pleased I felt to get such deep, easy, thorough laughter out of him.
hard agree