Traveling the Mobius Strip
Childhood and Adolescence
The Parable of the Sea Wall
“Something by someone close to me has been done to me and so well and so insidiously and so powerfully, systematically, slyly and cunningly and incremently, over eons of psychic time, that it has taken more than half my life to become “aware” of it.”
The Parable of the Sea Wall
“…Without words we headed home. My mother (The great She!) walked behind me, strap in hand, never used, her Roman fasces, her emblematic authority, her sign. She followed me across the breadth of the project back to729 Langham Court, barefoot son in the lead, Indian file, Mother with strap in hand, shadowing behind like some ascending thunderhead.”
Down to a Sunless Sea
“…fed by a grandmother who constantly praised his hazel eyes, long eyelashes, his good looks…she would gather him up upon her lap, feel and jostle his testicles – for fun, in front of the family, who went along complacently. He could not have been more than 5 or 6.”
Uncle Seymour
“What was even more damaging was that he did not come after me as I went under the ocean – that was unforgivable! He abandoned me to my own devices. I thought I would drown. So obtuse was he to me that I managed to get out of the water forever damaged. I still don’t swim. He, in effect, shocked and impacted upon my children to be, for I could not teach them to swim or partake in water sports. He had driven a stake into my sense of the species.”
Herbie
“’…and stop whacking off in your shorts like a horny bastard…get a girl.’ At the doorway, he stopped, as if he had a little more to say, and then, ‘You’re a shit.’”
Echo
“It is as if I endured a loss that was not unbearable but my very first. I had to bear it alone for no one else knew. I didn’t know, or realize until much later in life, how much that separation meant to me. It was the first in life, and so, it was the most ineffable—as if, David, an internal plane skywrote on my innermost tissue for all of my time on earth. As a child I took in; I swallowed the world, David. I observed, and I did not give much out.”
The Middle Ages
Young Man
“And he went into the world snagged on the fang of a job.”
For a While, Here, in this Moment
“I don’t imagine anymore. What is that, anyway?”
Autumn
From On the Holocaust, a talk on a Day of Remembrance
“I dread the Golem within.”
The lament of the species is its moral sloth.”
The i Tetralogy
“I am rectum.”
From Gunther’s Lament in The i Tetralogy
“Good Americans are much like good Germans: as long as I take care of my lawn, bag the cuttings neatly for garbage pickup, and replace the siding every decade or so and gladly hand out Halloween korn like Gabby Hayes, I’m one of the good guys.”
From Gunther’s Lament in The i Tetralogy
“You are unwilling to look inward, after all, you are Americans, human decals to the world, with little real substance – your only contribution is marketing!”
From the Raison d’Etre in The i Tetralogy
“I have come to believe that all I have to give is my being, and writing is my idiosyncratic body scent. Hunt for my spoor, if you will.”
Raison d’Etre
“I have no need for an omniscient power. In my world, everything is up for grabs. My mind will not be silenced by mere convention – or conditioning, as I have devoted a large measure of my life to freeing myself of the idols of the mind.”
Raison d’Etre
“I am there, I am not there. I act, I am acted upon. I am unaware in all this, most times.
I hurt so much I hurt not, and I feel pain so much I feel not.”
Raison d’Etre
“I reach out and with my hand touch your heart, wish you Godspeed in your journey home. It is all too much, too much to bear – but bear it we must; it is part of human suffering – and human strength.”
Shuffling the leaves for sign
Delayed Children and Delayed Openings
“I see the child that with the proper encouragement might have been the artist, the musician or the actor. I see the pip that grew into no tree, but only a rooting sprig. I see the unrelatable sadness of a will that might have soared. And, in a twist of fate, I became a scribbler, a writer of signs and symbols, runes. How odd. After all, to record is a surrogate living.
Krishnamurti
“Do you not sense that your life, at moments, is driven by an engine and combustible not of your own making?”
Krishnamurti
“Imagine mankind as a midnight croaking in an indifferent universe.”
Krishnamurti
“To sit on the cusp of ambiguity, to entertain doubt, to question without need of answer is to create an internal awareness.”
What Is
“A notion of mine is terrifying in its consequences. I may be ‘living’ an unlived life.”
Fears
“To be secure is not the issue. To know who you are is always the issue.”
An Essay on Finding One’s Self as a Therapist
“We never tell people what we deeply want. We cannot do that. It is not known to us.”
A coda before dying
Reading Rank: A Response
“So few of us ever realize in relationship a profound understanding and revelatory joy just in our existence. The very originality of our existence needs to be affirmed. Tell me I am of worth since I was born, anyone, you mister, let my bones rattle off a deeply moving ceremony of being valued above all things, and I shall use my stay on earth not only as a sojourn but a commitment to life and a commitment to others. Give me this indigenously rooted feeling and I can face my death in the words Kazantzakis so eloquently wrote: ‘Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!’”
Raison d’Etre
I see no meaning in all this but oddly enough, like i, I am grateful, in a way, for the agony. It makes me aware. It is good that it all ends. I felt—and suffered. That’s enough for one lifetime.
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