Jack Saturday

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 21

Q: Much of your writing has had to do with the role of pleasure in people's lives -- often embodied by rock, drugs, sex. American culture has always been conflicted about pleasure -- glorifying it while preaching and passing laws against it. This has been one of the main undercurrents in the so-called culture wars. After a decade of denial, where do you see the "problem" of pleasure today?

A: Americans take for granted a level of sexual freedom, and a degree of choice in personal style and conduct and expression, that didn't exist before the '60s. The variety of food, fashion, pop-music genres, cable TV programs, the mixing and matching of cultures -- all of this is a gain in pleasure. Yet there is a strong strain of joylessness and anti-eroticism in the culture, of continual exhortation to duty, sacrifice, corporate efficiency, order, control, and putting one's nose to the grindstone. Today it does seem that our pleasures are embedded in a framework of repression. I've always thought that a taste of pleasure, however compromised, leads to the desire for more and rebellion against the obstacles to having it; but I don't see that happening right now.
Ellen Willis

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

One Fine Day

Decided to take my outdoor reading and writing hour or two yesterday to a certain nook on the pebble beach of Ross bay, a little interior corner where a large driftwood log angles in to a basalt outcrop—good view of the bay south and east, and in distance the morning joggers can be seen behind the cement wall.

The beach was mine for the entire time— I had the deed and the keys to it-- mine and one gull patiently perched on a driftwood root nearby presumably hoping for food. Other gulls and crows around. As I walked my bicycle in there, I saw that someone had left a few items on the big log: a very small stick, a little round piece of red plastic, a twist of some fuzzy material, two nondescript little gray stones which may have had some extraordinary color or pattern when wet. I had picked up a little discarded combination belt-clip/flashlight, which I left among the modest treasures.

I sensed a female spirit in the bricolage, but could be wrong: an alchemical act, against the backdrop of grandeur there to the south, and the beach of rocks and pebbles by the millions curving off up and down-coast: these little items selected, taken up from the mass/crowd and gently left there in a constellation—an alchemical/soul act retreiving the “ejectus in viam,” the little thing lost in the multitude, tossed aside. Jung explained that this is the Self, ”the smallest of the small,” that is given no value in our world.

I stopped to consider a constellation of the Self in this modest unsigned presentation in the grand unpretentious gallery between sea and graveyard on a little flat part of a great gypsy salt-whitened sea-traveling tree-trunk. She or he, I added my blessing to their soul.

Then I went to California to listen to Chuck Dederich giving verbal haircuts to young junkies in the early 1960s, as the gulls cried and sea lapped, swelled voluptuously up and then down surface-jutting rocks. Cultivating solar serenity. I was down there after midnight a few nights ago when the moon-path was mine, cultivating lunar serenity. And between, constantly cultivating earthian serenity. I don’t want to douse this bonfire within me, but find a vessel for it, perhaps a solar panel.

On the way back through the graveyard, saw a deer there for the first time since I've lived in this city. An adult doe. She was alerted to me as I stopped to chat, but was obviously unafraid, cropping some new grass. Observed that her rump was higher than her shoulders, that her ears were much larger than I would have thought if asked to draw a deer from memory. Like the big-eared face of the kangaroo. I’d say I was seven metres from her. I spoke quietly, watched her ears twist around like we used to adjust rabbit ears on Jurassic TVs, changing with the changes in my voice. I told her what I wanted, and asked what she wanted. I might have expected her to laugh at that point, a human asking what he could do for her—in this dry summer she has come from devastated habitat in search of water and forage—she must have walked city streets and sidewalks to get into the cemetery.

There were areas of perfume in the air along the streets of Fairfield. Autumn peeks over the hills at us, the plants exude their gifts, triggering half-memories “from the beginningless past” (Buddha said memory is perfuming). St. Charles St. is worth a special outing to experience this time of year, I don’t know what kind of trees they are but it is the most fragrant street in Victoria just now. There must be an olfactory G-spot that brings forth the otherworldly cache of ancient memory such smells evoke but as yet do not fully deliver. Free aroma therapy! I suspect that the deer and all the dogs along the beaches, whatever their pedigree have that G-spot on all the time. I suspect the experience is full aliveness, or what Lévy-Brühl called participation mystique.

Wending as usual slowly back from my afternoon hour or two at the old stone-wall on a great field in the Lansdowne campus, Camosun College, the one graced by a tremendous giant oak like something Jack might find up in the country of the Giant, I concluded that the time of my daily cupped handful of blackberries from a low bush there is soon to end for the year. The berries are particularly ripe. Students, of course, don’t pick them because they are free—of what value is anything you don’t pay for in a fancy store, in an expensive package, or in a restaurant? Shit, it’s like popcorn you make yourself to take to a movie—not real popcorn, from the concession stand, at $50 a kernel. Blackberries come in constellations, each berry a constellation of small berries (called drupulets), and the full berries arranged in clusters. Constellations you can eat, soon behind the horizon like last night’s setting moon.

Towards evening, following links June Bender sent over, I listened to an audio piece online, Deepak Chopra talking about a certain meditation retreat he took in North India, near the end of which birds would come to the meditators and perch on them without fear. On Gambier island in 1987 near the end of a ten-day Vipassana retreat I tried on the recommendation of my friend Lucy Wimbush, a squirrel ran right up to visit on my knee as I sat with a plate of food.

Lucy died a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know where she is now, or if “location” is something you transcend. I have compassion for Doug and their two wonderful kids—who I haven’t seen for a few years—for them it is a long time not to have her. For myself, over 50, it’s like, hey—see you soon, Lucy—even if it’s 40 years.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

For My CBC And Other Union Friends

To keep the majority in a continual state of inner anxiety works because people are made too busy securing or competing for their own survival to co-operate in mounting an effective response.
John McMurtry Phd, FRSC

Saturday, August 20, 2005

A Tribute

I want to report one of the most beautiful discoveries I have stumbled across on the Internet since The Discourses Of Rumi. The "Blog Of Henry David Thoreau." I have spent wonderful evenings this summer savoring "Greg's" archives, reminded first of what W.B. Yeats said about the works of William Blake: "it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces.” -- and secondly of a poem by Robert Frost, which ends,

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.


.......................


Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The bud swells imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. All her operations seem separately for the time, the single object for which all things tarry. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed? Let him consume never so many eons, so that he go about the meanest task well, though it be but the paring of his nails. If the setting sun seems to hurry him to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever. The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step, while others never relax the muscles of the leg till the accumulated fatigue obliges them to stop short. As the wise is not anxious that time wait for him, neither does he wait for it.
Thoreau's Journal: 17-Sep-1839

A Marvelous Adventure


Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

Annie Dillard




I had a marvelous summer adventure at the little rocky beach at the sea butt of Lansdowne (where it empties into and draws from Beach Drive). A small sign in the wild lot straight across Beach reads “beach access”—from there, a lane of commons between houses of the rich, straight through the fieldy lot and down a little hidden bush-tunneled winding path I walked my Bike #1. Out into the open in the glorious sun on the sheltered east side of this island.

Enwaffled in brown-gold seaweed scrolled in real salt water below the green-kelp line, green kelp completely covering the strip up to what I deduced was the high-tide line. The tops of some of that green kelp drying then to white since tide out on that lovingly warm high summer day. My recently departed parents' 2-masted Death sloop at anchor out there in direct close-middle distance. Beyond, humble happy arms of Gulf islands, and then the mainland. Above, perfect coolant, relaxed carefree summer cirrus. Blue sky day.

I basked shirtless. The right grip-shift on #1 bicycle (“King”), fixed (replaced) at last by an honest Christ at the shop on Quadra very close to and across the street from the Roxy theatre. King again after a stint with the consul, a sturdy and altogether admirable mountain bike I got for $50 at a yard sale around October 2002.

At first, geese pressed their precious brown and white presence into reflections in the tidal pool viewing screen [inner], necks curly and curved as the gold-brown seaweed of their Sargasso pond (inlet sheltered by a large rock island across 77% of its entrance harbor). There they S-curved their beauty among thick abundance.

For some reason I had clued out that geese were waterfowl, so it was fun to be outside conventional packaging.

But in the alturning (?) of things, next appeared a blue heron, on a serious but of course invested-with-the-hardwired-luxury-of-its-powerful-aerodynamics, flight south.

I turned from something else, perhaps pouring from my luxurious stainless steel .99 litre thermos the day’s first mug of fresh coffee ground from whole beans in my electric grinder just before brewing the litre drip-style through an unbleached brown cone. And a beautiful little blue tin cup I found that I had used for paint in some forgotten Jurassic of the last 20 creative years—which (cup and years both) I exercised assertive volition to clean up, scrubbing with cloth, dish liquid and fingernails (in the case of the years, digitalizing) until it (they) looked clean. With a smaller container, how many more cups of coffee I can have!

But Mr. or Mrs. Heron (I forgo using “Ms.” Because the “r” looks so much like a standing bird with outstretched beak), up til now I projected “he” was here for a performance. What a feed! I watched for perhaps 30 or 40 minutes, after filling in a long period of attention elsewhere. Come on—let us all go to this summer show. I watched from an ancient niche in the wide wild basalt balcony.

So the heron. In. A. Slow. Meticulous. Walk. Around. The pond. Roughly clockwise, precise as a minute-hand slant, lifting feet slowly, slowly lowering them, must have successfully snatched from a bay inches deep maybe 40 or more gulpdowns—none of which I was able to discern to identify, or none of which I ascertained, though one required quite a few jerks of the head, the thing apparently flapping, out old (or young, who knows? Old in story) Heron’s beak. Mechanistic, spare, scissorlike, parabolic, elongating.

The heron’s attention seems complete, precise, a geometric study, curves and purity of Dreamtime alert motionlessness, as if its models were geometries, line-drawings of ovals, crossbows, ranging from left to right and at a considerable catchment, considering the height of the upstretched head on a neck obscene at full stretch: it stuck its neck out, for me to toss over it rings of free creative thought.

Well over half an hour, this single pond-hunt and feast. Tossin’ ‘em back. The geese, obviously neither hungry nor energetic for activity, rest on the harbor entrance rock island. They leave Heron the entire pond to herself. Deference? Concensus? Would this always be the case?

A naturalist’s climax approached. The Heron in its slo-mo raptor angle-act, crop full I assume, cake-walked out of the water up onto a narrow green-slime outcrop. There in a minute it flashed its wings open as if it were about to depart, but then seemed to change its mind. Then it spread both wings, did a single flap, like a flasher, and emitted a formal high croak. Closed its wings, then bowed slightly. I guessed, from my small file of heron memories, that the croak would signal liftoff—but no. The head honcho of the geese—the heron was facing them from closeby across the harbor gap-- himself immediately stood, did a single wingspread flap-response, exactly the same gesture back to the heron--then immediately stepped forward and, with head low, walked down to the water. In tight procession, each other goose rose, shook itself, and walked, bowed, down to the water—one after the other. Then, one by one but close upon each other, entered the water and proceeded to paddle across the inlet mouth out of sight—no wings in use except for that one single semaphoric signal in all this—walking and paddling transport though free-range, freelance crows flew obviously close to the heron a few minutes before it stepped up to the greenslime jut.

Across the strait, a line of beachfront houses, some hammering and banging from over there, as per municipal-industrial law—there must be banging, a chainsaw, an airplane or a lawnmower at all times everywhere. Nowhere must the silence of a summer day with the punctuation of natural sounds ever be permitted to enter human consciousness.

Ten minutes after issuing the orders and the geese moving on, the heron still perches and grooms. A crow or two, and one gull gracefully angling in does a little taunting dance this side of the watchful heron, out in the open stage of surreal nature here with its audience of one, Mr. Man, nowhere near the Careful Watcher old Heron modeled, but nonetheless a stalker who had made his catch, and these words are the flapping of the tail.

Finally Man rose to its feet and stepped down to a rock to stand in full commanding view of the little sea-pond: that act alone sent the heron launching, swishing its big wings, exiting low over the water. A little while back I had told it, quietly, to go but it didn’t obey that verbal command. A physical gesture was obviously required. Standing there wasn’t intended as such a gesture, but was taken as one. Man didn’t even need to flap his miserable excuses for wings, though I was high on freedom and thought, and offer no more excuses. The airborne heron swung off north upcoast-- then a minute later returned, flying higher, maybe ten or fifteen feet up, followed by, or following, a mate—two blue herons passed southward. Four, including their reflections in the pond, and God knows how many in the reflections of the human. I was still standing there when one of them returned, flying low, outside the island—to check if I was still there.

Meanwhile a gull had crossed the very centre of the now liberated pond, and returned to stand on the shore and throw up its wings with a little cheer. I really do feel they are the Outdoors cheerleaders in this town bordered on three sides by the sea, a town where you can get drunk on oxygen.

Some kids, or two kids, might have been peeking at me, the sole human in that archaic anarchic scenario—thought I heard voices, thought I heard one say something like “he’s OK” or something with that meaning. Imagined myself a magical creature in the eyes of rich kids hiding behind a hedge in summer in their child-summer lives, hunting story. I sipped my superb coffee, and turned my face their way (leeward) a couple of times, sort of acknowledging them by a smile as I did so. No idea what affect this might have on two kids hunting story—could turn them right off. But me—I took implantation in the out-tide fecund beauty that belonged to me—even the two boats moored to a wharf way above the tideline in kelp zones—how the one lists, thus holds a human emotion or emotional mix not immediately nameable as I observed—leaning in to the farlanded wharf, perhaps, for comfort? Those boats and the wharf were mine. Whoever held any “official” title to ownership was in all likelihood not even thinking about the boat—but I was the sole human in a real relationship with the actual boat in full summer sunshine right Now.

That the kelp, slime, rocks, sea, strait, headlands, sky were mine was amazing as we skim over these things, astonishing as we hit the sky!

I used to follow lonely 50-something adolescent males down into European cities, existential solitary thinkers, steppenwolfs of the lonely crowd, down the stairs of books, the stairs of text across pages. That was some years after following younger male heros into far dimensions of space-time. But that layer of literature, in fact, the very floor of literature in my house of reading is a couple of stories (sic) down now. I’ve read mostly nonfiction since 1979, commentary attending the one narrative that filled the celestial sphere, The Story Of My Life Within History.


And the summer afternoon? Here: I took it with me.


Ted Hughes: The story begins in heaven, where God is having a nightmare. The nightmare appears to God as a hand. And this hand, in his nightmare, is also a voice - so it is a voice-hand or a hand-voice. And this thing comes the moment he falls asleep. This thing arrives and grabs him round the throat, and throttles him and lifts him out of his heaven and rushes him through his universe and pushes him beyond his stars and then ploughs up the Earth with his face and throws him back into heaven.


Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 20

Nothing demeans the modern state more than the preoccupation of its citizens with the possibility that the poorest of their number may be getting something for nothing, and no other attitude does more to keep those presently powerful in power. This is what permits them to mobilize the working classes against the poor, rather than against them, and no other attitude is more universal among modern industrial societies. ...a commitment to the equality of human beings, if seriously meant, should be quite independent of any obligation to participate in the economic process.

Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The Disposal Of Liberty And Other Industrial Wastes

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 19

First: Technoprogressives demand a basic income guarantee as an indispensable complement to any general championing of disruptive technological development. This effectively eliminates poverty from social life and sustains every citizen as a stakeholder with enough freedom to contract the terms of their participation in society as they see fit. This income (together with a life-long stakeholder grant in education and retraining) would foreground the value of citizen participation in a properly technoprogressive democratic civilization, empowering citizens to contribute free creative content, to participate in new collaborative forms of media oversight and policy deliberation, in addition to voting on policy-measures and representatives for public office.
Dale Carrico
Live Long and Prosper: A Program of Technoprogressive Social Democracy

Monday, August 08, 2005

from Odysseus Au Dessus De La Melée


In that mimesis of soul-flight, passengering on a summer morning past the rush-hour pedestrians in the sunshine, past the Jurassic dumptrucks with tires higher than cars, the powershovels, the bared ranges of rocks, the wonderful deep yellow of those vehicles, and then suddenly on the curve down to Goldstream and mere majestic West coast summer Nature, and up then about a hundred feet above a coastal cedar forest baby-shit luminous yellow in the sunshine, above the hoary old wolf trees of the Pacific Northwest coast.

Then at the Gov’s mansion grounds in late May, thought of Nietzsche’s line about speaking not in words, but in lightning bolts. Did a vocal imitation, “sssssssssrrr... pkkkhhh!”--lousy picture of a kid’s imitation of a bomb. But as I made the bomb sound, right about where I aimed it suddenly saw a wet red worm crawl in the green grass. A little later or on another afternoon I watched crows and smaller birds working the field for such worms. Crows with hands behind their backs, the empty-hand proferrment of the sleight-of hander. Sleight of wing. I watched a toss of them, a small murder, stretch a curve in to a condominium of gesticulating oaks over the wall of the Mansion Grounds off Lotbiniere, where I have taken to jumping the fence to sit in a little niche of white hay with the insects to have a bit of nature. Over and in they winged old black ballet to beautifully take perches/purchase. They have never bought anything in their lives.

Guys in dark overalls working the furrows. Except they hopped across, threw both legs in a hop if they were in a hurry, under the wing-gear. Criss-cross farmer’s hands, catching worms who come up for... what? What’s in it for the worms to deliver themselves to the sunny feeding plate?

Geese were flying high on the migration range, and beyond them farther migrations yet in the starry mystery; chickens jump, flap across the chicken yard in the same direction as that high honking arrowhead. Hearts are urging, hurting. I think they need some information, and a backing to their longing from some authority--it would be the bardic, the artistic authority, since the others are playing games as always with ordnance, knives, pitchforks, pension funds. Not all. The time of the humanities is coming, repeats a musical refrain. Can you believe it?

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 18

We, or some of us at least, who were raised in the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant tradition of redemption through hard work and frugality even when our upward class mobility did not require it so intensely. What a pain in the ass to be around people like this, who act so self-righteous about work, self-sufficiency, and self-sacrifice, even as they enjoy enormous race and class benefits and privileges.
from
WASP Values and Political Work
ZNet Commentary
August 03, 2005
By Cynthia Peters

Monday, August 01, 2005

Solitude

Solitude


"Ah! I love solitude."
--Henry Thoreau


I digress. Come with me.

It wasn’t that I sought solitude, to begin with. I was a tumbling little chimp like the others in a little coastal fishing village, a character among characters, each kid as unique as a comic-book hero, we played War like boys do, on the great gravel schoolyard, age 6, 7, 8.

But the river of images drew me, also evoked by words in cadence—it was my mother’s fault, her refuge was books, she read to us before TV, and before we received our sentence for original sin, the “socialization” processes of public schooling, and I did not want to stop anywhere until I had found the spring of poetry, whose cadenced speech evoked such visions in a 5-year-old. It only dawned on me over a very long time that actual human beings like you and me came up with these marvels and mythologies.

I read in a work by Joseph Chilton Pearce that the spoken word fires into the brain and triggers imagery-- that is its job. He said too much TV actually destroys parts of the midbrain of little kids so that their natural imagery-production, a midbrain phenomenon, gets stunted by forced imagery from the exterior. This internal flow of imagery is the "stream of novel thought" which is always more fascinating in every way than the "stream of novel products" commercials on TV offer, but the brain-killed kids who have lost that flow of imagery will kill for Nike shoes. Makes sense. Makes senseless. Furthermore, each individual phoneme spoken in the presence of a newborn triggers a precise physical movement in the baby, revealing that spoken language has an overall kinesthetic effect. As we grow older and are taught not to move our mouths when we read, etc, that dance becomes microkinetic. If one can revive the macrokinetic aspects of speech, one becomes a bard, a shaman, a sorcerer.

At 18, my desire for a female companion usurped any meaningful relationship with solitude. A certain specific female who came and went drew me out of my past to the roads. Far away on one of them I found the companionship I sought.

And it was during the nooks and corners of solitude in those years that I started to work my clandestine relationship with the muse. Nights when my mate was at work (cocktail waitressing) brought me rare treasures of time with music or poetry, the stream of novel thought—because “solitude” to the dreamer often means depth involvement with some person not present, their own catches and captures from the river of pictures and the cadences of poetry and song, ”the dole of our wandering lips.”

Love, the treasure of plentiful sex, experiments and adventures in relationships, friends made at jobs or in musical get-togethers or on the road. The pack-bonding of one’s 20s.

It was about at the end of that decade when I took up my hatchet and chopped my way into the forest “where there was no way” (as did the knights of the Grail), and all my reading then was this pathbuilding that C.G. Jung called “individuation.” He said we “must endure the solitude that is its due.”

But by then it’s not an endurance, it’s a fierce love, as fierce as the love of freedom, and of what use is solitude without freedom?

My brief independent stretch between major relationships surprised me with its wild joy. My pathmaking, my studies, my wanderings had turned something up, that’s for sure.

Soon it was another set of social forms, another wonderful mate, another integration and interaction of stories, two galaxies interpenetrating, drawing new friends and adventures. The 20s friends were gone, away to other towns and fields. It was the job system, the hunt for income that separated us. Myself, I had crossed over the radical bridge from the ordinary life. “Do you want to go with the destiny of Tick Tock?” said Stuart Wilde. I couldn’t stand the thought.

“Open” relationships, both my long ones. We managed it for ten years and eleven years, Bertrand Russell tried it and couldn’t handle it. There’s a brag. Which I state with a laugh, but the adventure is now set in the “higher weaving” of the past, and its story and stories are in my fabric, they are not gone. Nothing is lost from the dance.

Solitary wandering, the years I wrote Freedom Resumé, but home to my loving mate while she prepared her future with jobs and schooling. Her circle was young university students, we became friends, they passed on much of the great stuff they were learning in political science and other classes. Eleven years with the length of eleven years. If I was loved and affirmed in heart-love and sexual joy in my 20s, it was doubled in my 30s. One has to expand the heart to be able to pack in the treasure. One needs solitude and open air to digest it. One has to move some old griefs and sorrows to make room.

Then the Weaver knotted the ends, and once more the individual path, off main roads, up grassy slopes. Sipping from the Grail. Wow, 40s. So it actually happens. One is never going to be 40, but then one is fifty and accepts the impossible. Right, then other things that seemed impossible ain’t either, you say.

I think I was 7 years without an intimate mate then. I had had enough and varietous sex to far surpass my father’s fantasies, who confessed that he had been unable to convince my mother of the joy of sex.

This is a serious and important subject, obviously, but many men of my father’s generation went to their graves without having that great gift of life on this planet—obviously he had had sex, but not the unmatched joy of mutual free happy erotic love-- we might blame the Victorian age which thumped female sexuality almost to death with its brutal need to dump shame and guilt and the generational trauma of Calvinism, the sickest of religious sects. As for males, it also convinced them that their desire was dark, evil. Some blamed women for their power based on male desire, and so turned to dominate, calling beautiful women sluts and whores—Internet pornography reveals the West’s sick Puritanism in the ugliness of its text.

I was talking about solitude. I digress. Come with me.

Emerged again at 50 after another adventurous mating-dance of 4 years, through the death of parents and the threat of the streets, and the continual path of my arts and reading. My erotic vision had grown naturally in the backlands, so that inspiration came to touching, we found ways of touching I hadn’t known before, coming straight from inspiration. The garden grows and produces even through long periods of not tending it. Particularly through that. Give it a rest. Pursue your art. The river is full of surprises.

Solitude. What is it? I have always camped by the river of pictures, especially since I myself experienced “the spring of poetry and wisdom” and the unmatchable ecstasy of poetical/artistic inspiration. The very best sex, I found, left the mind and heart in the field of song and poetry, as if the powerful preparation and discharge carried one over the guardians of that country like the Winged Monkeys carried Dorothy and crew over the Hammer-Heads into the land of the Quadlings.

I return there. I camp there with my magic window, the “wishing window” of my monitor through which I can wander the endless labyrinths, hallways of images and thoughts. I camp there also in green nooks about my city, reading and writing in the sun seasons. There’s a “should” in our culture that says we “should” have a mate. Having a mate is the primary unit of the social being, the strong bottom rung of societies. Women get this pressure more than men.

One can grow awkward socially. One’s values are in flux. The world's values are in flux. One is not an adolescent. Popular culture is pack-bonding material. How much social reinforcement has Monty Python created since the early 1980s with their tremendous art? How many groups of youth entertaining each other with recited lines? But I have less interest in movies than before, or what the beautiful and cool people are doing. I do not wish to pay my $10 or whatever to peek at their sex scenes, or their emotional entanglements. I am inside the human drama myself, and keep a record as best I can, or perhaps not as best I can—I pay my tribute.

I am more interested in your story than the one on the screen—your drama, your tears and longings are the real stuff, that other stuff is fake, though really big.

The idea of the zipless fuck used to attract me when eros ruled. I have no interest in it now, though if some beautiful woman offered it I might be convinced—but it doesn’t take up my fantasies. I want someone who I can talk with, someone who explores with her tongue before we even kiss, if you catch my drift—who is curious about life, who has a vital and brave curiousity. Not to say we might have a powerful embrace after 3 hours of talk in which we find rapport to enshrine our chemistry. At 50, I am in no hurry to get you to bed, nor do I consider that the goal and end of our dance. How do we feel when we look at each other without any sexual desire after it has led us and completed its process?

Ah! I love solitude. Solitude with nature and culture. In my solitude my capacity for love is cooked and improved, my appreciation for all the ways of affectionate touch, my compassion.


--Jack Saturday