The Sixteenth MinuteSelections from the 83rd Journal of Kimble James Greenwood Our political scene is more volatile and given to sudden switches and memory lapses bordering on soap-opera-type amnesia (epidemic, total and terminal) than any other I know of. We are fickle and we are insatiable in our appetite for new news, new issues, new biases, new clichés that we incorporate and believe to be our own original and immutable opinions—until in the next moment we forget them. It's not just (as another cliché, lifted from Andy Warhol, has it) that individuals all seem to get their 15 minutes of celebrity in this country; everything gets only 15 minutes. And no one can say what the 16th minute will bring.
March 20, 1991 Have I lost the notion of a personal journal, a personal self? Perhaps. It is for certain that I have been dispossessed by school—long accustomed to suspend my fighting it; instead, making do, "getting the job done" as the soldiers in the field said again and again. An unpleasant task. A discipline. What is my self then, or my concept of self, if not something wholly responsible for itself? Which means someone wholly free, uncompromised, expressive of inner prompts rather than external pressures. But is this not a purity, an unrealism, an adolescence? The self is in conjunction with the non-self, the world. Out of the dynamic, the mix, both world and self are augmented, grown, changed, modified. I have come to see purity as a disease, you know. An enemy.Yet here I am saying I need a place where the self can be more pure, more internal, less compromised or watered down by others and their "irrelevancies". The publishing of the journal, the journal self, is also an exposure of a potentially dangerous kind. Dangerous in that it takes my life-long fantasy of writing or being for others and literalizes it, makes of it a fact. The fantasy was one thing. To have it actualized is an other thing entirely. The beauty of a journal is the potentiality therein for creating, or working towards, a personal aesthetic. A relevancy, an intimacy, that need concern no one but the self. Narcissism is odious only to the outside perceiver. To the self, in love with the self, seeking to please the self only, it is life-blood, it is integrity, it is home. The only enemy of the narcissist is self-boredom, implosion, being stuck. Perhaps in the same way a couple, a married couple, so appropriate each other that boredom ensues, passion dries up, the hardened crust of 'the known' precludes the green stir, atrophies the vital risk, freezes change and growth. The journal, my journal, was always a refuge, was it not? A place to talk unfettered by any consideration save my own needs, my own needs to hear my own voice, my own needs to create my own voice. In the exterior world I am stopped, stopped by the lack of resonance, interest, love, values, attention, respect of others. Stopped by the stammer in voice and energy. Stopped by the aesthetics I fail to satisfy in the eyes of others. But alone—here—in the journal—all limits are only my own, and my own imagination's. Functionally, at the moment, there is no one I need to consider but myself; no standards relevant but my own. The beauty of the journal, if not its integrity, was the eschewal of the considerations of other. Look at the odds. One self. Five billion living others. Doesn't the self deserve a place to implode, to revel, to roll around in its own dung and so saturate itself in its own stink, a stink it knows as perfume? Isn't the glory of the journal its abject personal-ness, its secret-keeping, its sheer subjectivity? And is that glory besmirched, ruined, made self-conscious the moment the journal writer considers the eyes of others? Sure it is illusion, a fantasy, that we can ever eschew the eyes of others. From the moment we are born we are given identity, consciousness, being-ness from the attention and consideration of others. "Look at me, look at me," the self cries over and over. "Love me, love me," the self wishes over and over, looking outward, longing for the love, validation, respect and regard of others. Can someone ever escape such longing? There are those who seem to, yes. The hermits. The eccentrics. The insane. They usually repulse us—repulse us because they have no interest, no regard for 'us'; their subjectivities preclude us. We fear them and hate them. Their inward eye negates us. One of the reasons I gave Nancy for "breaking up" with her was that I felt a dearth of self; school had dispossesed my self. Without a self, or without the extent or depth of self I am accustomed to, I felt I had no integrity. Without integrity I felt it immoral, or potentially immoral, to relate with an other—or relate on the level Nancy was seeking relation. And yet, here I am beginning an other relationship with Kathleen. I have to wonder at this. Sure—oh yes—I begin the relationship by eschewing the notion of relationship. Let's have an errancy, a wandering, I say, echoing her words, not a relationship. Semantic guards at the gate. But the oppression of old forms, of human forms, of male/female forms, pressures us into acquiescence. Those are the pressures, precisely, I am intent on fighting, questioning, side-stepping.
I loved and respected Laurie. Of the three, she is different. Something is different. It is, perhaps, a heightening of quality, professional quality; a heightening of sensibility—a sensibility peculiarly literary, which includes the philosophical. I trust the literary sensibility. It is, however slightly, more akin to myself than Laurie's anthropological sensibility, or Nancy's feminism sensibility. Closer to my heart, my religion, is the poet's sensibility—the poet/writer/philosopher's sensibility. Surely this is the level I trust O. as well—a certain base that constitutes our friendship. What is 'the poet'? The poet is one in love with beauty, the beauty of the earth. The poet is an explorer, a renegade, a maverick, outside the law, antinomian. I trust these impulses, and follow them—in myself, and others. Curious, however. However much I submerge myself, and want to submerge myself in the sensibility, the person, of Kathleen, the self rebels, as the self has always rebelled at intimacy. Ultimate intimacy is ultimate yea-saying to the other. Ultimate yea-saying is to take into oneself the limits, the definitions, the boundaries of the other. I rebel. There are boundaries enough in myself, boundaries enough in the society. Don't I seek continuity (Bataille)? i.e., intimacy with God—i.e., no boundaries, wholeness with everything (everything beautiful). Each person, each individual, each self (even no less my self) is ontic—an instance, example, configuration, limited definition, of the ontological. According to Bataille, only death frees us to become embraced, again, by the ontological; no, not only death, the little deaths of orgasm, erotic union approximate the same—on a continuum of efficacy.
March 25, 1991 Well, so I'm going to die. Of stomach cancer, or some such thing in the guts most likely. I immediately think: who is going to value my books? Who is going to read my books? I don't mean books I've written, or would write. I mean all these books, these authors, I've collected—whose totality represents a territory wholly idiosyncratic. Where else is there a territory like this? I am the one pulling it together; I am the common theme amongst such strange diversity. When I die, it dissipates, falls again into entropy—entropy so far as I'm concerned. Actually, the books would be taken up by others, becoming part of the territory only they could organize, but many others—not another single person exactly like myself. Let me be specific. I write this in bed, gazing over to where I've collected the books on my "immediate" reading schedule—essentially books purchased, or pulled out, over the last 14 months: There are currently 41 books leaning against the comfy chair. Here they are, from left to right: Sexual Politics - Kate Millet; About Men - Phyllis Chesler; Thy Neighbor's Wife - Gay Talese; The Politics of Reality - Marilyn Frye; Talking Back - bell hooks; Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde; Intercourse - Andrea Dworkin; Lesbian Ethics - Sarah Hoagland; Secrets- Sissela Bok; From Ritual to Romance - Jesse Weston; Right-Wing Women - Dworkin; On the Geneology of Morals - Nietzsche; The Roots of Consciousness - Arthur Koestler (borrowed from Terresa last summer); Returning Words to Flesh - Naomi Goldenburg; American Indian Myths & Legends - Erdoes & Ortiz; Feminism/Post-Modernism - Nicholson; Symbols of Transformation - C.G. Jung; Cities of the Interior - Anais Nin; My Mother/Madam Edwarda/The Dead Man - Georges Bataille; Time-binding - Alfred Korzybski; Finite and Infinite Games - Carse; Is Mormonism Christian? - Fraser; Three Philosophical Poets - Santayana; Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Ecco; The Body and the Dream - Jennifer Birkett; The Trouble with Being Born - Cioran; The Arabian Nightmare - Robert Irwin; The Sorcerer's Apprentice - Charles Johnson; Soap Bubbles - Boys; Had I A Hundred Mouths - Goyen; The Last Decade - Lionel Trilling; On Bataille (Yale French Studies); The Weary Sons of Freud - Catherine Clement; Psycho-Analysis and Feminism - Juliet Mitchell; The Essential Plotinus; The Ogre - Tournier; On the Nature of things Erotic - E. Gonzalez Crussi; Female Perversions - Louise Kaplin; History and Utopia - Cioran; The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz; Foucault Live (interviews). I am willing to bet that no one on earth—now or in the future—has this collection of books on their immediate reading schedule, or even in their entire library. Is this not, then, one definition of the individual: A collection of parts? A unique collection of parts? A unique mix? These parts constitute my path—the individual path. I find them all meaningful, interesting, worthy of attention, evocative. How many other people would it take to dispense these books into hands that would value them? Not value them out of idle curiosity, or sentimental reasons (in that they belonged to Kimble), but because something in these books, or promised in them, felt necessary, important? These books—the reading of them—constitute my task. No one else has this task. This task belongs to no one else. And, of course, I'm using this set of books to stand for 1000 (at least) I have on my shelves, all of them asking to be read, cared for, understood, used. And, of course, I'm using these 1041 books to represent a pathway—a pathway of learning uniquely mine. If I go, the path goes—for the pathway is made, traveler, only by traveling on it. I would assign no one this task. That's not how it's done. The task has an inner source, comes from inner prompts, else it is spurious, else it is specious. Nor do I resent the fact that my life (here) falls into entropy once I'm dead. I find that as it is, and accept it. The world is for the living, lest we forget. I have no rights once I'm dead. No rights at all. The living may, and will, do anything and everything with the territory I've organized, colonized, cared for and created, once I'm dead. My memories and memorabilia, my images, words, money, belong to any and all who choose or will to take them, to make them their own. It is necessary for me, while living, to create fantasies of what I will to happen, wish to happen, after I die. These fantasies give me illusions that prove palliative, fantasies that comfort me while I live. But once dead, all my possessions belong to the living. What should I resent? I'm sure to have either more important things to do, or nothing at all to do. Either way, the living are welcome to it all. It gives me comfort to care for these things—these authors, these people, these words, this Art. All of the Art of my life. And gives me sadness to think of them uncared for once I die. There is something, too, about not having read most of these works. That's the rub, the shame. Perhaps I am only exacerbating my guilt, projecting my guilt, by imaging my death and leaving these books in the state that my life is leaving them in as well. An unread book is like an unlived life. To leave these books prematurely is to leave them unread. To mourn these books, unread, is perhaps a way of mourning my life, unlived.
March 27, 1991 The fates assigned me the task of listening to Robert Bly do a presentation on "The Human Shadow"—two cassette tapes, 90 minutes each. Yesterday I listened to the first tape, and found myself filled with the fantasy of sending a copy to mother. Today I listened to the second tape, and found myself filled with the fantasy of sending a copy to John and Rita. In the meanwhile, Robert Bly helps me remember, starts giving me back the knowledge, the memory, that school and the political world has taken from me. To begin with, I have come over the years to dislike Robert Bly—even to detest him. His smarmy-smugness, his cute-ish-ness, his fashionable anti-intellectualism, his patronizing paternalism, his bad poetry full of "darkness" to the point of cliché, his preciousness, etcetera. And not the least that he's so pointed to and heralded, worshipped as head of the sensitive men's movement. He's too fucking glib, smug and cozy in all he does—for my tastes. What Robert Bly reminded me of yesterday was that the shadow is not necessarily, or even safely, "evil"—whatever that is. It also holds everything we hate, everything that disgusts us, everything we feel to be 'bad'; everything repressed, shamed, humiliated, unallowed by others, our life through. His metaphor was "bag"—the shadow is a bag we carry with us, into which we put everything unallowed, everything bad, all un-social desires/acts, all extremisms, all our anger, all our inappropriate behavior. Simple enough. The bag is big. It is a weight, it is a pressure. And it grows. The problem is, we turn our backs on it. The problem is, we suppress it, and so start carrying it in the sub-conscious; you know, like a habit, a task, we no longer need to think about—even better not to think about it; let the body carry it. I'll feast my eyes, my thought, my mind, meanwhile, on sunny days, blue skies, and little baby white lambs nibbling on sweet pink candies held by Anglo-Saxon cherubic children, sweet and pure, innocent and sexless, in a primrose pasture, a greeny field. Yes—and so the body does carry it—in all sorts of ways. The bag grows. It grows so it pressures the sight, impinges on the optic nerves, you know. The autonomic nervous system intrudes on consciousness, perception—in the strangest ways. What we can't/don't see in the bag we carry, starts showing up everywhere in others, others around us: There! That's what I don't like! Those! That's what to be afraid of! I hate... Your problem is... Robert Bly reminded me of two important things: what I hate in others is precisely what I hate in myself. And the latter comes before the former. Consequently, my listed reasons of why I've disliked Robert Bly are more revelatory of what I dislike in myself, than they are of who Robert Bly is. Simple enough. And good to remember. The other thing Robert Bly reminded me of is that we keep our energy in the bag; the shadow holds our energy. To focus or concentrate the opening of the bag gives us energy, of a kind—in the way a nozzle tightens the opening where the fuel-mist, gas-mist, shoots out, intensifying the intensity and the extension of the flame. But to deny the contents of the bag, to deflect them, to bury them, to smother them over with niceness, with rules, with words...we diminish our energy in this way, we smother our energy; the energy of the escaping fumes goes into building a porcelain-thin shield over the mouth of a volcano. A fragile shield, wouldn't you say? Do we all feel better now? Then you try to tame the people around you to tread lightly. Everyone, tread lightly! It's fragile around here! Don't wake up the baby. Shhhh. So niceness rules as the social norm. "No trouble now; no trouble." How much energy I had when I finally wrote and told Eileen what I thought of her, what a judgmental fool she could be!!! Goddess, I felt good for weeks afterward—a bevy of small complaints, fogs, dullness, stupidity, unease and lethargy went away. And how much energy I had when I fortuitously discovered "active imagination" (as the Jungians call it) by writing scenarios in my journal, wild imaginative scenarios, after a repressed and awkward meeting with Kathryn and Michael in the hallway at U.C.R., and, later that Spring, when Clint and I argued a night through in the orchards below Mt. Hood! Haven't I always said I love anger for the energy it gives me? Trouble is, I've spent my life with the goal, on the path, of understanding. And as the woman says: What I understand, I can not hate. And as the man says, The sage has driven out the madman. Au revoir energie. Remember the painter in John Fowles' Ebony Tower: Can't hate, can't love. Can't love, can't paint. James Hillman was asked at a lecture why, champion of myths that he is, does he so denigrate "the myth of development", "the growing child". "It's good to hate something," he said, facile but true. And then made it less facile by explaining some of the mechanisms.
April 10, 1991 And then, curiously enough, there I was in my house, my space, with another consciousness, another soul. And the soul needed me, looked to me, wanted me for emotional (and physical) support. It was always cozening up to me, its eyes full of male hunger, seeking to suck on my neck, my earlobes, indicating its pleasure, its satisfaction, by purring. It was the day after I had gotten it. Rained all day, all night. I was sitting there and it was getting dark. I was no longer alone. No longer free. No longer able to concentrate, flow, listen to the outside, the inside, abstractions—because here, now, this being was looking to me, wanting me, engaging my attention and concern. Lo and behold I started becoming depressed. Depressed in a way I haven't been in a long, long time. That deep melancholy, sadness, implosion, silence, loneliness. That weight of being alone and silent with another person. What was triggered, what was keyed into? Ah—it was Kathy, in the attic in Denver, when she had finally arrived and had 'given herself' to me, to my life, and there I was silent beside her, as the rainstorm and darkness of Denver played itself out before us as we watched from the garret window, arm in arm, but silent, desperately silent, time and the universe reducing us to nothingness, to our pitiful paucities. It took me some time to understand that, to see the correlation, to see the patterns. But I have always sung—since that time—Nilsson's Two can be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one. I say 'lonelier' because there is the hope, the expectation, that two will prove anodyne, comforting, a salvation, joyous. Meanwhile, as I find out, O. was having three dreams, three nights in a row about me and my cat. The dreams taught her that "the cat is not intelligent enough for Kim."
Yes—that was part of it. The cat was dependent on Kim, in the way Kathy was dependent on Kim. And Kim, true to his sex, or true to a kind, one portion of his sex, says again and again: I can not be depended upon in that way; I will not be depended upon in that way. I need strong women, for that reason; independent women for that reason. Karen was good, for that reason. O. is good, for that reason. Tessa was good, for that reason. I've put ads up to give the cat—which I've tentatively named Numinous Felicitous—away to 'a good home'. The cat found a wound, a way into my solitary strength so newly mine, claimed and cherished. Did I feel that way when K. was living here? No. She had her strength and was satisfied enough with the place to stay. She did not look to me for emotional support. S. asked me yesterday, "But is there anything in the cat you like?" Oh yes—many things. The cat is beautiful. And it has its wildness and independence. And—as I told O. yesterday—it is probably, and simply, a matter of learning to live with someone again. A long process. An incorporation. O. understood. She, too, needed to fall in love with a cat in order to contemplate living with it. She, too, needed, or looked to, a fierce intelligence in cats, an independence, a peculiar personality, a specialness.
May 12, 1991 I do not think of myself as complex, not at all. I've always thought of myself as very simple—motivated by simple motives, revolving around simple suns. Nor do I think of myself as profound. I admire profundity and seek it in all things (one of my basic motivations) but I've rarely, if ever, attained it myself. (What is profundity? Depth, resonance, substantial creative progression.) Basically I'm a pleasure seeker—a very human thing to be. It is when you start listing the pleasures, working from the general to the specific, that I become distinguished—rather, distinguishable from any given mass, from the generality of what 'human' may connote. No, Camus, Kathleen, it is not images that first opened my heart—unless you would count the images of the faces and forms of the girls, the beautiful girls I loved from the beginning.... Beauty opened my heart. Love opened my heart. Literature opened my heart. Ideas opened my heart. The Beatles—or would you say, music?—opened my heart. Loneliness opened my heart. These are the things, in other words, that gave me pleasure. Let us suspend the open heart, for the moment, and return to pleasure. And work with the generalities and the meaning. So that I could say—what? Energy gave me pleasure. Excitement gave me pleasure. Sex gave me pleasure. Nature gave me pleasure. Learning. Insight. Stimulation. Movies. Emotion. Accomplishment. Intelligence.... You see? Simple things, human things—not much different than anyone, really. One can approach it differently, from another side. And so I could define myself, in my simplicity, by the obverse, what I've feared and hated and so avoided. Boredom, probably foremost, is what I've feared, hated, avoided. How human can you get? Weakness, helplessness, depression, stupidity, lethargy, stasis, unimaginativeness, clichés, normality, mediocrity...all of these would do. Simple. All I do at all times is motivated by the tandem seeking for these things/conditions/values that bring me pleasure and avoiding these things/conditions/values that bring me displeasure. Simple. * * * But generalities are meant to be simple; oversight simplifies. It is the details, the ground level terrain, that connotes complexity. Common language preserves the notion: the forest and the trees. One gets lost amidst the trees—the greater the density, the greater the lostness. Is a jungle complex? What does complex mean—an aggregate? A mix? Something with too many variables to keep in mind? Something too convoluted to allow step-back, to offer oversight? Is complex a labyrinth—indirections bisecting and subverting direction, clear direction? Simple is as the crow flies; complex is as the ant scurries. Well—we are all heir to the labyrinth aren't we? We all have variables, details, levels, moods, contexts...all that multiplicity of direction, of lived life, of time-and-space bisecting to make the complex grid of the individual human soul. Yes—I am complex in this way, in the way we are all complex, in the way the psyche is complex—the iceberg with only its pinnacles of consciousness. The complex becomes exponential when self-meets-others. The self (alone, let us abstract) is mere aggregate, variations on a theme, but linear, circular, what have you. But when self-meets-other, when an encounter takes place, the mirrors stand face to face and multiply back and forth into a kind of infinity. I mean to say, to myself I'm simple. To myself, with myself, alone with myself, I am simple—sometimes, if not often, or is it most of the time, I am so simple as to be boring to myself. Why else do I read, or do I invite others in, if not to play the hide-and-seek with myself that kills time, as they say, that keeps the implosion and its paucity at bay? * * * I was struck by something Foucault said in his introduction to volume II of the sexuality series—and gratified that Mishilani gave it a whole class period last time—or gave the subject the class period. What was the subject? The Self, the creation of the self. I turned to Erin and said, "Ah, I understand these things for a change. Those are very meaningful and familiar themes for me." The passage in Foucault says, underscores and underlies what I'm trying to get at—or, rather, what has so been getting at me of late: As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
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