When I find myself in a homogeneous phase of my life, I like to have a caption for it. Guilty Repose is what I came up with for my caesura in Gaborone, which softens it: I went slightly decadent.
On the cheap and hosepipe are relics of how Briticized my speech became. I have either a talent or a weakness for mimicry, depending on how you look at it. I knew I was sounding half British. It didn’t bother me. It related to my being able to pick up languages easily, which I can, and which was one reason I’d thought anthropology was such a natural for me. I blend in, if I want to. A core fantasy of mine from before high school was that members of the most puzzling cultures were going to divulge secrets to me out of hardly noticing my intrusion, or thinking I was almost one of them.
Was something saying I should kill myself posthaste if the truth was that I was going to be mediocre? This was a thought with real pain behind it. To my wreck of a mother mediocre was a superlative—an imputation I resisted with all my might once I realized it involved me. I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original—this later—by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.
I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them. So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.
He must have been mid-fifties. I found him attractive. I don’t despise people for fighting old age tooth and nail, which he was. I like the impulse more in men than I do in women, though, which I should probably explore sometime.
The whole thing was very much like synchronized swimming. We wanted something from each other but we kept going elegantly side by side, not saying what we wanted.
There was a feel almost of paradise about being absorbed so completely in a project of personal alleviation. This may be a strictly female view. And it is not the same as saying it wouldn’t be boring as a lifetime repetitive vocation. One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see, how else? Most men.
It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted.
She definitely looked rich, which made me not sisterly toward her. I have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich, which is part of me. Not that I’m a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I’d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism. I feel toward marxists the way you feel toward Greek Orthodox people when New Year’s Eve comes and they get to go to this fantasy mass with basso priests droning, candles flaring, gold leaf all over. If only you could believe it. Also my temperament is marxist in that analytically looking for the cui bono or materialist explanation is nearly always correct in retrospect. Also I love marxist academics because it turns them into such absolute bloodhounds when it comes to critiquing actually existing capitalism. But as for the dungheap states these bouquets of humane thought have turned into as they decomposed, no thank you and again no thank you.
A talent I have is being able to step into a roomful of people and fairly instantly classify the majority who are just walking around in intake mode and the handful who are bent on something.
He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware. Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as faceism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.
The celerity with which people recognize something is spilt milk is a main measure of their rationality.
Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone—I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial—who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover that someone, however smart, is—he has neglected to mention—a Thomist or in Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting. What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you.
One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.
There was nothing interesting about Gary, or rather an index of his blankness was that the most interesting thing about him was that he was lactose intolerant.
Sometimes in the most unimaginably remote spots in Africa you find a bemused lakhoa staying for years, unable to leave, gripped by the particular genius loci.
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.
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.
A truth about me is that when I visit a house where there are letters or other interesting-looking private papers lying around, I may have a quick look. I’m not convinced of my uniqueness in this tendency, although my excuse for it is anthropology. I would never do anything with information I got from my quick snoops, which are really quite disinterested. Anyone who could see into my heart would exculpate me and realize I was doing it pursuant to my consuming interest in the mystery of the world.
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.
We had various climactic arguments. I made some headway with him with my notion that, along with getting food and keeping warm, male competition for females and female reproductive power as a commodity is at the root of the hideous hypertrophied structures that keep renewing themselves and reappearing unstoppably in human affairs. Survival of the species is served by the best males getting to reproduce the most, tout court, was my point. So we are placed in the position of hating and trying to undo the results of something obviously imposed on us from the depths of our beings and, sub specie aeternitatis, a good thing. This is my definition of original sin. I am convinced that everything we really hate in society derives ultimately from this.
Can’t anything be innate? he wanted to know, objecting to my probing into his childhood yet again. Does everything have to be an exfoliation from the minutiae of our miserable childhoods? I happen to love silence, he said. Why do we have to be swamped in narrative? Our lives are consumed in narrative. We daydream and it’s narrative. We fall asleep and dream and more narrative! Every human being we encounter has a story to tell us. So what did I think was so wrong with the pursuit of some occasional surcease of narrative?
The bathtub wasn’t reticulated to the water system. Water had to be brought in in canisters and emptied into the donkey boiler—essentially an oildrum set over a stone firebox—for heating. Here was exactly the peculiar amalgam of amenity and discomfort that I was picking up as a suppressed motif. You could have your own bathtub, but it would have to be somewhat of an ordeal to make use of it. It’s an unfair simile, but what I thought of in scanning his accommodations was the signs you see protesters carrying in demonstrations in movies where the supposedly homemade lettering is so obviously the art director’s version of what an enraged untrained hand would produce. This thought was unfair but I had it.
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.
There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of timing. Hence, gaffes. Hence the actually existing world.
When I said morale among the men was a question, he was dismissive. All he would say was Men are only happy in prison or in the army. I am at a point where I suspect him of producing a few too many of these morsels and tidbits re the perfidies of the male race because he’s under the impression I’ll get off on them. So I’m being rather cum grano salis on these throwaway lines, for a change. How would you know men are happy in prison? I asked, and got I know men are happy in prison and the army because of what they fail to do when they get out. Most of them fail to avoid going back to prison. Second, they fail to say anything negative enough about what they’ve experienced to keep their affines and the young from risking going there. And you know men are happy in the army because when they get out they do nothing to keep younger men from joining up, and in fact they themselves join the American Legion to keep their memories of war and killing as fresh as possible and have circle jerks where they call anybody who’s for peace commies, and a deep calm drenches the male soul when it feels the persona it inhabits being firmly screwed into a socket in some iron hierarchy or other, best of all a hierarchy legitimately about killing.
Then came the embrace. There are ways to embrace a woman that are standard and there are ways that are perfect. This was the latter. If you’re as tall as I am you begin to notice that men about your height always try to arrange for the first embrace-kiss sequence to take place while both of you are seated, so that they can subtly slide you down and deliver the coup de grace of the embrace, the declaratory kiss, from above, with your head bent back, and your throat exposed so you’re like an animal signaling submission to a larger member of the species. The nice thing with Nelson was that no kiss followed. The embrace was not just the scaffolding for the great declaratory kiss. The best standing-up embrace is like that one, slightly off center so that you have his leg and not his actual téméraire up against you, one hand on the base of your spine, and you are brought in against him but not mashingly. His cheek is at your ear but not occluding your actual ear canal. His breath is in your hair. Then you want to feel him sinking against you, slightly, suggesting relief and repose: the embrace from something, not simply stage one in a campaign of possession.
You get very used to ululating being the normal expression of high spirits and best wishes in Africa. In fact after you adjust to ululating as the norm, it makes applause seem strange and less delicate. Denoon agreed. Once during rest and recreation he had been privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz playing sonatas in London, and it had been sublime. And then the applause had begun and he had experienced the bashing together of hands as a way of expressing appreciation as being animalistic, crude.
I happen not to be one of the many women who find thunderstorms sexually arousing. My associations with thunder, or more specifically long sequences of thunder, are, for some reason, with experiences in which you are helpless, the involuntary in general, and throwing up in particular. I’ve always been more or less phobic about vomiting: having to vomit, feeling it coming on, being in the grip of something wherein you’re a bystander at some animal internal event, some overriding need of the systems that constitute you and that aren’t your mind. Thunder is obviously a metaphor for something happening that no one can stop, which a good number of women I’ve talked to admit they find erotic, the idea of being overwhelmed, as by passion, notwithstanding how counterrevolutionary they know that whole thing is. But so are we made, some of us.
I love someone who takes a serious tutelary attitude toward me, so long as he’s not doing it just to turn out another member of his cult. It has to be ecumenical. The idea of having someone want to improve me and fill me up with new ideas rather than punish me for my lacunae is tonic. I see myself as quite perfectible. It always surprised me how few pygmalious, polymathic men had ever been interested in sprucing me up, given that I’m so interested and available, and that, as everyone notices first about me, I remember everything.
People act more deliberately by candlelight. Your gestures are slower. I felt like an illustration, at times.
Mirrors are bad. Africa is nothing if not matte, and that returns you to yourself, unexpectedly.
My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural.
Being deliberate with each other was mutual. I had not done the usual swan dive women do when they start a promising relationship, which is to just deliver all there is about ourselves, the entire midden of past relationships, your first sex, your hopes, your dreams, the entire midden in a backhoe. We were wary and going through a more male process, which resembles two people sitting opposite each other and taking turns putting soupçons in the scales blind justice carries around and trying to keep the pans level. He was parsimonious because he was a man. I was parsimonious because I knew I was dealing with a feminist to whom a heart-laid-bare swan dive would seem stereotypical and also because I had had a shorter and, to say the least, more restricted life. So I felt it might be intelligent to ration my res gestae a little.
There he was, on a goatskin, prone, furiously reading his Nonesuch Blake, doing something he was always haranguing the world, through harangues to me, to do—that is, stop and read during the prime part of the day, not when you’re at the end of your strength and when reading competes with television and paying your bills. In the good society you would see people reading during the heart of the day: there would be provision for it.
This account is something I now associate with another remark of Denoon’s, to which at the time I paid no attention, to the effect that when you’re really happy and doing the right thing with your life, including morally—for example not living in evasion—in that situation you should expect to have repeated trivial instances of the odd happening to you. You’ll have correct intuitions. For no reason an obscure or archaic word will come into your mind and in a week you might discover it’s exactly the word you need for a difficult passage in a piece of writing you’re doing.
Nelson had pitched himself into a phase of dawn-to-dusk heavy manual labor. He was working extending the trail grid on the high south side of the koppie. He would come in at night, wash, eat, and sleep like the dead. He felt this was therapeutic for him. He thought it might work akin to Russian sleep therapy, where when you’re artificially kept asleep for a week—through brainwave manipulation, with an IV hookup, naturally—you wake up with your melancholia in abeyance. One of his tests of a sound society was the existence of arrangements letting you switch off into periods of intense physicality when you felt the need. The aerobic exercise craze in America was something he saw as a sad substitute for this option of heavy work, and wasteful in that you produce nothing socially useful while you do it.
For me love is like this: you’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it’s breathtaking, a surprise, something you’ve done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.
It was hard getting Nelson’s attention, he was such a hive of industry of late. When I commented on it he quoted a line of Blake from a catalog to an exhibition of his pictures I remember as Now after such long slumbers I once again display my giant forms. The exhibition was a failure, as I recall, and Blake went back to engraving ads.
He looked absolutely beautiful to me at that moment, more beautiful than he ever had. This is a serious man, kept saying itself to me. Other men aren’t. What I was suddenly afraid of was that this moment was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion. I couldn’t stand the idea that this was ours. I didn’t know why I thought it was, even.
I had a retrograde gust of feeling or yearning toward being religious, so that I would be able to believe that my suffering in itself, separate from anything else I might do, metaphysically lightened the sufferings of the poor.
We gave Golepe a collective gift, a sheepskin. She was overwhelmed, genuinely. So I was overwhelmed. The sheepskin had been my idea. Real gratitude in others for something you do for them or give them is tonic. I was exhilarated.
I needed to be kept from succumbing to a certain metaphor for marriage I was recurring to too often, that is, of marriage as a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà.
I love demystified things inordinately.
Then as to his stasis and dolce far niente: Europeans will go into villages in Africa and not infrequently see people not at work at anything discernible, not doing a task or hurrying en route from one task to another. There is what to us looks like lavish standing around, alone or in silent groups, people sometimes but not always leaning against a tree or a wall in a sort of self-communing state. And then you have the ultrarural population, people on cattle posts tens and hundreds of miles from anywhere, without amusements of any kind that you can imagine other than listening to Springbok Radio or Radio Botswana if they’re lucky enough to have a radio. When you see them these are not depressed or unhappy people, or bored people, insofar as anything like that can be determined from the outside. So to the Batswana all Nelson would seem to be doing would be partaking subtly in that particular lifeway. Nothing odd about that.
Being in America is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling.
There are only two kinds of work in the world, he once said. One kind on balance adds to the work other people have to do, the other kind on balance lessens the labor of others. What am I doing, or which am I doing? Youth wants to know!