Question: How can I live a “legendary” life?
The four of us (K, V, R and I) are on the back porch at Properzi. It’s summer. We are haloed, together and separately (not a Christian halo, but as if we each bear a kind of personal and also collective energy). Now I am sitting with K and V in the grass that sweltering day they did shrooms together while I drank directly from the bottle of Jameson. I have been here before, I think then, now. I am there, in that present, for the first time, but also there again, as myself now. A kind of wisdom, but also a kind of tragic prophecy, reaching backwards from the future. With tenderness. I want to protect them. I’m afraid for what I know and they don’t. But what is it that I know anyway? Now I’m tripping with them. The grass becomes a hallucinatory, turquoise color, or a jungle-green color, that invades the sky. I sink deep into the earth. You were a poet then, I think to myself. I am in Paris with Barry in the rain, walking through the city, discoursing with him on love, death, beauty, justice, evil, fascism, and eroticism (those seem to me to have always been the themes of our lifelong conversation). Barry: my dad’s oldest friend, another Jewish kid from Cincinnati, who died in unspeakable squalor, unspeakable misery. Barry: raconteur, alcoholic, author of a never completed book on Plato’s Republic. Barry: 75 percent blind and 85 percent deaf, or was it the other way around? I am twenty-one years old with him in Paris, and now I am twelve years-old with him, also in Paris, looking at a specific Picasso painting that disturbed him. Le lecteur. Did he see himself as a pervert? He didn’t like to think that that was the truth of his life, of the life of the mind. His debilitating, giddy fear of and fascination with sex, the fear/fascination of a chronically ill man who was dying from the time he was twenty. He died a virgin, of course. You must develop your strength. I have a vision of myself, of my body, as ferociously strong, but also protectively strong. Go to the desert, a voice commands me. Go to the desert and meet Coyote the trickster god, the horny god of the Chemehuevi.Become acquainted with him. Now it seems to make sense that I was thinking of Barry, on a drizzly afternoon in Paris, who lived in Santa Fe. In the desert, where to visit him was a kind of out-of-body experience, a journey to a sage or a shaman (or to a madman). Lie down with the dogs, the voice commands me. I see Joel’s wolfish teeth, I see Barry as dog-like, with his own little dog, Phulax, which means “guardian” in Greek. Barry needed so much protection, and he always demanded more. How else was he going to survive? I see Roxy as a kind of canine deity of the Mojave Desert. We never made it to the Salton Sea together. An uncompleted journey. There are so many incomplete journeys in life. Bravery, the voice says. Bravery beyond belief….Beyond belief. beyond…Stare down evil, it says. I see Kaitlyn. I have the impression that we fucked, that we were lovers, but it didn’t happen in this world. It happened in Buenos Aires but in another world. In Borges’ garden of forking paths. But I can taste her, I know every inch of her body. I see B in Somerville in that freezing winter when I was cheating on R and B had taken in both her younger sisters, one pregnant and the other addicted to heroin. The night we fucked for the first time. Equally oneiric as with Kaitlyn, though it presumably happened. Her body was so thin, almost skeletal. Her breasts were so small, she was the first girl I slept with who had small breasts. She gets up to go to the bathroom and she leaves the door open while she pisses. I am intensely turned on by that (I can hear the crystalline sound of her pissing clearer now than then). Now we are in the hotel room in Palo Alto when I showed up in an Uber completely shitfaced and I went down on her voraciously, like a kind of bacchanalia, for what seemed like hours. But that was all we did. We didn’t even kiss, we didn’t fuck. She didn’t touch me. A wild cunnilingus. I hear the lyric: I was a lover before this war. Which is true, I think, but also the other way around. I see now that I was a warrior before this life, so much of which has been preoccupied with the tribulations of love. Love and war…Adorn your body, as a lover and as a warrior would. I see Moses, or maybe I am Moses. The desert again, I think. Nomadism…no-manism…Follow the path, the path you’ve always been on. A terrible relief, after a lifetime of feeling that I was doing the wrong thing, derealized and derailed. After the desert, go to the mountain. And die by the sea. Or, perhaps, in the sea. Walk into it. I see myself as an old man walking to my death in the sea. At first I am in my sixties, then my seventies, then my eighties. At each apparitional age I am surprised to see myself having lived this long. For the first time, during this trip, I am envisioning myself living into old age. As not dying young, condemned, of cancer, in a car crash, etc. How strange, I think, that in thirty-five years I never imagined myself as an old man. You are on this journey alone, and at the same time, with others. What is that Tibetan word for the Buddhist “pod”?, I wonder: the small guerrilla cadre of souls you travel through lives with and always meet again. Suddenly, I feel a profound sense of recognition of the people in my life. It seems as if it could be no other way, that the people we meet along the way are not met by chance, especially when the element of chance seems most pronounced. But then I have a feeling of desolation, thinking of my grandfather. Meet again, never again, the voice says. Meet again, never again. Meet again, never again. Meet again, never again…This seems to express something about the nature of time and death, love and loss, that I can’t grasp. Now I see my grandfather boating on the Amalfi coast when he was stationed in Italy during the Second World War, how the Italian partisans almost had him and his companions shot, thinking they were spies. One of them knew a little Italian and saved their lives. Was that the story? How he’d gone to see the stigmata of Padre Pio, the last man to have received the stigmata. How he loved to tell that story, laughing at the stupid little priest in his mountain convent, at the stupid faith of the rubbish Catholics he served with. You will be both a martyr and a mocker, the voice instructs me. The word “metempsychotic” comes to me. Me tem psych osis…Met him psychosis. Is this the solution to the riddle about time? Once, and all at once. The psychosis the past produces in us that we keep returning to it, even beyond this world. I think of Joyce, who also loved that word. I wrote Ulysses once, I think. I have a vision of Hitler dancing. Hitler having dinner with…Lenin. Hitler having dinner with…Artaud. I want to keep imagining Hitler having dinner with different people but I know the trip is ending. What a silly choreography, those Nazis, I think. Evil has a funny side (and this realization seems important, to relieve me of the burden of theodicy and self-seriousness that I have always borne). Smile, I hear someone say. Say cheese.