RELATIONSHIPS

COLLECTIVE EMOTIONS

PERSONAL AGONIES

DESCRIPTION

This project will be an "editing of the journals" + some memory and impressions of Berkeley. The key is finding the guiding hand or meaning behind the editing of the journals. The journals still inform and take that up but only a certain amount can actually be extracted. This alchemical process is decent enough. What did those years mean to you? What elixir were you trying to find? It was a very difficult time in the life of America; post-Vietnam and post-Watergate. A population that was demoralized and angry. It cut the spirit out from democracy just as the assassinations had. Berkeley itself was a fascinating zoo. It began in utter idealism and then decayed into drug use and a kind of cold nihilism. By 1975 it was decaying rapidly. It was rather shocking. The communists had taken over city hall. The abandonment of substance was fait acompli. It was not all terrible. There was still dancing and spirit; computer fascination, solar power, environmental interest. Odd characters no writer could dream of. An interesting scene played out every single day. It told me that the worst fantasies were political fantasies. The will to political power ran through its own shadow and caused a lot of problems. There was a failure of nerve among the once bold young. There was a kind of amputation of common sense, a mutilation of the good and the blood ran thick during that time. The strange thing was to see the larger society move on and yet Berkeley stay the same as though the good times were still around the corner; that the karma was going to shift at any moment and it would be thrust back to 1966. I always cringed when I entered a party and two guys were playing folk protest songs on their guitars. The students going through the University at that time wanted nothing to do with it.

It was the end of an era, a transition, then the beginning of the Reagan years. The bursting forth of the computer revolution.

Looking back I don't think I was idealistic at that time but watching spin into that zone of meaninglessness that I always feared. Idealism had been a protection from pain. It was a very painful period of time, much more difficult than I ever thought it would be. Cults were plentiful, cynicism was tsunami like.

At any rate I want to give that effort some guidance as to what to pick and choose from the journals. That will be a hot project not a cold one.

The Quest for Eternity through 1980 The Quest for Objectivity into 1984 These can be ruling guides......

Dec. 27, 2006

I was born in Berkeley years ago and lived there as a young boy. The family moved in the early 50's and even though I moved in and out of Berkeley for a long time I didn't move and live there until 1975 or so.

My first impression when living in Berkeley was that it was a shoddy little place. The infamous riots and goings on from the 60's were gone. A few nutty radicals dotted the little side streets and their 1910 Victorian houses but everything else receded behind the privacy of private aspirations. There was something visceral about the renunciation that went on in Berkeley in those years. No one wanted to admit that they had been part of something they thought was so large but was, in reality, rather small and stupid. A huge prank fueled by dope and loud music. Be that as it may it was a strange place in 1975.

ANECDOTES

I lived briefly in a transient hotel on Shattack Avenue; the piss of which I can still smell. It was run by a frightened looking German lady who was always aware that the next guy to register at the hotel may be a parole violator hungry for some sex or money. She didn't know. She thought I was a runaway and, in a way she was certainly correct about that.

Below the hotel was an adult book store and a little pizza joint that smelled fat. Paper was always blowing up and around the streets, the noise was constant. I didn't not solicit noise, it was always there. At first I thought to myself, "ah, noise, you must have noise to make it a real city." Within several years I was trying to escape all noise and found it to be the most corrosive of modern phenomena.

Berkeley taught me early that walking is a good thing if one can put up with the exhaust of cars and trucks.

I had a car for awhile and a bicycle. The car was an old Volvo and I had driven up into the mountains with it to dry out from the divorce. When I came back I lived in it for a month or so on a pretty tree-lined street around the Claremont section. I had tried to stay in Tilden Park but the first night a Berkeley policeman woke me at 2am and chased me out. That's when I drove half asleep down the hill to the place near Claremont, parked, and did not drive the car again for a year. I slept in it for a month and then moved into the transient hotel and finally found a place in west Berkeley. I finally sold the car off after a year checking it out occasionally to make sure they hadn't towed it away. And when I sold the car neighbors did come out and look at me, look at the guy who had the Volvo that had sat there for a year collecting bird shit and dirt.

We were democrats through and through although there was a time of rising in our family. Nothing was set, nothing was fixed as in some aristocratic picture frame where a guy can gaze for decades and question what he was seeing. No, we as a group were never safe from the prevarication's of life. Ours was the lot of most Americans; heads filled with fantasies but the reality in front of us made us stomp on ourselves and anyone else we could get our hands on.

Yet, for brief moments we were gracious and noble and seemed the high of the high. Good books filled the shelves and we mixed in professional circles; famous psychologists or lawyers who had money and education.

A guy wanders into the Hideaway. "Hello beautiful," he says to the waitress, "I need a righteous breakfast." He banters with her for awhile and then asks the black guy on a stool what he's going to do the rest of the day. "I'm going to watch television." Then he admits it's not much intellectual stimulation and the guy says, "well I know what you mean because I get into my little world here and everything else just disappears." He talks on and on. "When the weather is bad I like to grow but when it's nice I begin to recede again." There is a feeling of a common mythology being created for a moment and then it dissipates. "My uncle owned this place years ago."

When one works, even in Berkeley, in work that does not work for the meaning and beauty of the self even on leaving the work there is a lingering kind of dread or fatigue with a smudge of excitement as he watches the commute traffic plunge over the off-ramp and stream up Ashby. "At least," he thinks, "they relieve the pressure through their vehicles. When a guy rides a bus it all stays pinned between the grimy windows through which glimpses here and there of scenes of the low-slung city.

In the smaller companies there are four or five manager of various levels; plant manager, foreman, etc. The gaggle of salesmen with their chalkboard all lit up with sales triumphs. It is something dominant, confident, and undistinguished. They are like descriptions of iron-werkes or mills in histories of technology; a craftsman walks through and makes his notes, especially of those who run the cotton-pickin' places. In his useless thinking, in the cavern of the warehouse, with Mozart or Saint-Saens playing in the background he thought of the difference between individuals and persons who were simply isolated from everything good. The isolatos could be easily manipulated but an individual could never be manipulated because they had encountered somewhere in themselves, in their experience, what can possible impinge from the outside. The only real danger for the individual was to stop along the way, turn his new knowledge back toward what he had emerged from (with a vengeance). This had proven fatal and evil in most cases.

In the executive office: Family pictures on the paneled wall; wife, children, Executive Magazine, Four photographs of a hunting expedition (truck driving on sand dunes), a worthless painting of some scant-talented naturalist of the 18th century.

"I feel at my best when I am in a park, on a week-end, with my daughter. The park is not large on a crisp Autumn Saturday. There are many people in the park. It is shaded in by the hillside with great oaks growing to add to the shade. There is a path that leads up the hillside and plunges into a wooded world all to its own. The children play; of every race, size, shape, and age. Some are aloof, testing out the equipment, shy with their parents around. Some make an effort to play together some simple game. The parents are around. One woman is suckling a baby. A couple are on the grass watching their child, wondering perhaps about the child. The parents are young. They too are of various hues and shapes. They have accepted themselves more or less.

Taking in each planet as they occur. Watching them orbit one and all at once. The sun and gravitational pull of the sun; to the outermost planet. And then all the systems outside, all complete in their own orbits.

"So," he says, "let's walk down from the butt-end of Oakland, across the city line to Berkeley, down Telegraph and into the campus. There will be a hundred different sights and feelings that will tumble from the buildings and passer-bys! And at that desolate corner of Telegraph and Alcatraz with its dissolute traffic intersecting at that point along with its regular and transients moving along the street, shuffling along or darting across the avenues with dogs wandering, children playing on concrete steps all with the ambience of an old movie not believing its a town or section of a city. We shall meet an elderly red-faced gentleman with a paper tucked under his arm, an old hankerchiefed peasant-looking woman pulling her shopping cart behind her, roller skating children, folks going in and out of the various businesses, sulking bums (one is a fast moving slick haired black dressed middle-aged buy who has a limp and a cane and who goes from phone booth to phone booth looking for dimes), past Ashby with its more traffic, more people, newer offices and buildings, better dressed people until we will reach that area from Dwight onward with lurking transients in doorways and people on mats talking to themselves or making derisive gestures to people going by; Shakespeare Book Co., the shops on the dirty street, peddlers, street artists, bubbles, depression, pain, attempts joy, dogs, students, foreigners, probably Iranians, Africans passing through each other all the way to Sather Gate and the collective moving crowds flowing through the campus." So, we did.

In the city the senses read bad things; in nature they are delighted.

"Television," he was telling me in the donut shop, "seems more real because it imitates memory, imitates the past and as the old poet Williams said, the past always seems more real than the life being lived."

Half the day spend chiding myself on every trivial ridiculous hook one could find. Half the day spent in reviving out of this stupor. A few moments of light and good work.

"Oh horrible night of inscrutable bits of chewed up opinions and garbage." Everything wrong! Wrong path taken! Horrible feelings emitted by the acquaintances and strangers. "Death has taken so many." The smiling life deniers, who can tell them the true relationship is with the truth, with that in the world round with beauty and meaning, not the relationship with vanity and the crude facts that have become little petty gods."

"So, you see, I go to get some quiet and buy a paper and sit in the breakfast place down the street, you know, the one the fat Korean woman owns always looking serious and scared. Well, I go in and get the breakfast and read a story about frightening people who say frightening things. Then I hear this voice, a small, beaten up looking guy with yellow teeth, laughing. "I is Custer! I is Custer!" And he's pointing and raving around in this breakfast place. Stops at one table, bends his face down into the face of the guy at the table and tells him that he's been robbed. Robbed, "even of my shoes man!" He holds up one shoeless foot, then the other. "Black boy did it- one of my own. That's right. Black boy!"

A Query: "In West Oakland?"

"That's right!"

He goes on and on, I go back reading the paper. There's a kind of tension in the air, he's acting rather crazy. He comes over and asks me for a smoke. "A Marlboro Man," he says to me. "I want a Marlboro." He bends down and sticks his face into my face and says something about me being a cowboy, leaves, goes over and yaps away, leaping this way and that in front of the counter. A guy at a table tells him to cut it out. There are words and one of the guys stands up. "Sit down white boy!" The odd fellow says. They keep calling the white man Frank. Frank is poised ready to fight this man until the owner has a phone in her hand and says she's going to call the cops if there's any fighting. It was a good breakfast. And when I left I saw the poor man on the otherside of the street gesticulating, pointing, leaping, turning in front of a few cops.

I worked tonight for seven and a half hours in utter silence and boredom. Then a fellow asked me about a movie on Gurgief; had I seen it? Did I know what the name of it was? I thought awhile. Yes. The Meetings of Remarkable Men. Ah, yes, that was it. So we discussed Gurgief. I know very little about him, Gurgief that is, but I'm explaining the little I knew about his system of "rays and the 7 spheres." Some ridiculous thing and the discussion get into what is "real," are these things actual realities? It became tense. I think he is a student at U.C. Berkeley in computers. What I tried to say was that the description of E=MC squared is not the thing itself; that is is a description of processes and that, likewise, Gurgief's rays and spheres were descriptions of processes that may or may not be real depending on whether you believed his system. Hands through up, end of argument. "Well," he says, "it's completely hypothetical then; you either believe it or you don't, yes." I answered that one must pay two thousand dollars to find out. "Pay for enlightenment," he said in disgust. "Yes, I answered."

Watch out for women who keep you pinned down with a constant image of you that is less than the truth.

...took them along the paved, lit roads of the ten thousand thing/and held our arms to the open wind;/the sea rapidly a memory/held in the palm like a burnished coin.

Downtown Berkeley: 9:30am Thursday. "An echoing silence echoing the passing traffic. Individuals bent and struggling along the sidewalk. Travelers asleep on benches with radios in their ears. Confusion in the eyes of the most expressively dressed; stoicism through hell. Depressed by personal problems that create neither self-absorption or shame; simply let the weight of it. Little pleasures in the window. Thoughts on escaping to Oregon or, at least, one major move. Half-complete manuscripts in the home of my mother's sister. Successful cousin in town. Wayward artist makes million from stamp. Phone call to see if there is any work at the last tomb I entered.

Ah, you damn factories, railroads, jets, ships, fast-food restaurants, houses, apartments mobile homes, cars, service stations, general stores, busses, glass buildings, trucks, street lights, avenues, freeways! Be gone! Vanish from my sight! Everyday I get up, eat something, go to work, eat, leave and watch them either try to screw someone other or make a million dollars during the day. In the case of bureaucrats, making sure things move as roughly as possible.

Buildings! Phalluses stuffed with bindu but the seed is sterile.

"It isn't dear friend, science against religion; that argument is a dead one. It is the creative power of human beings against the management/organization of modern states."

The Hospital was a looming concrete non-profit that survived off of pregnant women and recovering drug and alcohol addicts. There were, hidden as it were, fascinating conversations in the bowels of the Hospital or, as the employees called it, the Hotel. In the business office of the Hotel were pound fundamentalists like James who called himself a preacher of the Baptist Church and claimed he had great powers of his own including speed reading, mind reading and other powers conferred on him by his faith in the Holy Spirit. He speaks of Jesus and claimed that Jesus, before he taught, collected the apostles around him to protect Him from what James called, "the interference."

The young woman is more gentle in her religion. She hears voices in the back of her mind, conscience, which is God telling her what to do as a 7th Day Adventist. The woman, Tanya, has just read the Iliad and asked the man beside her. "Have you read the Iliad?" "Yes." She showed the man a translation she was reading for her class on the Greek World. She is very disparaging about the gods. She is fascinated about the oral story telling aspects of the Iliad, amazed at how one could hold all that information in their head at one time. She says she once went to plays but not too often now. One play, Caesar and Cleopatra, had impressed her because it was humorous.

The man in the Hotel started thinking about the Greeks. Despite the apparent foolishness of their gods, they certainly had several advantages the present world lacked. Their gods were not ideals but patterns one could extend if a guy had the courage too; even though his fate would, eventually, defeat him. "Perhaps," he mused, at his desk late at night listening to the whir of the copy-machine, "there was more freedom under such patterns."

Several days later he heard himself say down the bright-lit street roaring with cars, "push through form the shared complain of the world and the shared joy of the world."

At the Hospital he renewed his interest in women. The attractive and sweet Tanya. They loved to talk to each other about anything. Anne, too, the bright runaway he felt close to but something held him back. And then the Parisian entered the picture and he fell apart and agreed to show her all around San Francisco. He studied French in a two-day session to say something to her. He wanted to know something about her but not pry as he sometimes foolishly did. And yet, he thought, I am not a stone. I'm attracted to her yet her boyfriend is coming from France next week. Ignorance of passion teaches best what it is!

A new woman. Before the shy, awkward young man who doesn't know what this woman wants, not knowing the secrets she contains; living in a state of exquisite psychology.

After the divorce, a chain of disastrous women: little conversations in little cafes in lost little curls of smoke. New York woman. Pregnant, six months. Boyfriend is thinking of leaving her. Ah, the beautiful philosophy student who didn't want to talk about philosophy or Heraclitus or any of them. Ah, the one with the butterfly tattoo. The useless excursions with women. Nil. They were reminders of the state of my writing; they were in correspondence somehow. The expressive eyes of the woman, how she would attempt to coax information out of me, always a bit alienated as though she knew she would never quite be accepted the way she wanted to be and her imagination working furiously to ether cover up this fact or to figure out why this was so. And I would know this and make a remark of some kind which they probably took the wrong way. Yes, how one sees women is how one sees the work. This is why I've sometimes been harsh on women I've known and the same time feel rejected by them.

STUDIES

The old wise guy kept telling me, "Separate what is mainly political from what is mainly artistic in your own efforts." That got me thinking about history and what, if anything, it contained. Well, the whole of history is revealed. It can jump up and snag you in listless days because an act that is committed in the present day that we think is so great always has a complement act in some previous time and when a man sees that; that is, nothing can occur without its past and future being known at the same moment that the act occurs. It's left to clever people to go around and discover common connections, even call them laws. Apostatized as laws and they become grains in the belly of men and start to replicate themselves until life is a farce. Tragedies happen but only against a larger circle or domain of farce. The want to go forward, to discover, to make way the the future chokes in the absurd.

"Oh, the boy has challenged all his assumptions," the wise guy would taunt me. He knew what I was thinking and knew I thought I was a pretty clever guy.

We were not born there but pulled ourselves up like a guy who is asked to climb up a knotted rope and touch an i-beam in a gym filled with sweat and young women. "come on, don't be a day late, dollar shot," the coach shouted.

We were expected to fight for survival and if we lost, ah well, that was life and nature. What did we know?

This was in many way contradicted by the wonderful idiocy Berkeley was at the time. It rationally fashioned a pyramid as the model for the larger culture and then abruptly turned up side down with a laughing gesture like a clooege prank by drunken students.

My first impression of the place was as a kid when my dad took my brothers and I too the great old stadium to watch the University play football games. What an adventure! Always the long, deliberate walk from the car to the vast arches of the stadium, the fraternities partying along Piedmont Avenue, crowds of people, frat boys throwing footballs in the autumn morning, black boys selling programs, beautiful coeds everywhere, quiet' there was little conversation as we headed for the stadium and the anticipation of games.

And when the crowds gathered even a little boy knew an event was happening. It was the sense of an event taking place that brought up the sense of something important going on .

In the same streets I had seen the riots. Those too, events of high intention but always destined, like the football team, to lose and be decimated by the cops; the superior team in this case.

Beautiful, lovely town full of reds and old rich people.

When I came there to live the riots were over and little attention was paid to the sports scene. A vast depression swept through the city, a deflation as though a rubber band has snapped and shriveled to nothing.

Bums were the heroes and pissed all over everything. The only energy came from a clot of nerds who were into computers and such, They kept raving about the future and, in retrospect, one can see they were right but at the time one dismissed them as stoned out nerds wanting to destroy the reality they had to deal with for something much more accommodating.

So, it was 1975 and I was wondering the streets like a lost, stray dog as the times passed; the only times for youth, when out was free and in charge, that brief moment when youth around the world is connected and knows it will succeed to power and remake everything in its image.

It was a dirty city and didn't seem to mind. Paper flurries were an o-going thing. Garbage was heaped in piles. Old clothes were put in boxes and deposited in one of the many parks. Old, dried pizza's were spattered on the sidewalks. Dog shit was everywhere. It was one of those periods of time when it was hip to be barbaric. To be civilized was not looked upon kindly. It was seen as a mask for slave owners and killers of other people in wars no one benefited from.

Perhaps the secret to Berkeley was that it believed that "madness was the 13th Muse." There were more than a few Andre Breton's in Berkeley, certainly Artuad's. They were not idealists. The idealists, suprisingly, existed in that technical/nerd community that had the grand idea of putting computing power in small, accessible boxes. This group was infamous for their naivete. And yet they brought something Berkeley was void of which was practical sense.

Berkeley was like a body with the lower parts down in the flats, the belly and chest in the student area and the head up in the hills. Assuming the head was the stabilizing aspect of the body at least people stayed around in the hills. In the hills and down below in the flats people took root. In the middle their was constant movement in and out of streets, cars, apartments, and houses.

Berkeley was infected with that kind of European intellectual flavor that is so suave in its nihilism. A brain that thinks is as apt to try and revenge itself on the world as a person who is abused. And if no one thinks and one group thinks then what is a young person to do?

There were excellent questions raised at that time and when questions appear, when cracks open up from the way in which one has always viewed the world, when the establishment is no longer the fount of authority, then all kinds of things come rushing into play. That moment is a crucial one as the writer wrestles with these questions, more questions, all questions, no questions just the putrid universe and its odd creatures. It was no mystery why science fiction was the genre of choice in those days.

Berkeley always denied the massification of the larger world. That was its essential charm. Every individual would count in Berkeley. A kind of perfect democracy would exist. And at times it approached that point. It had a very salutary effect on people who were used to "just living" and not worrying about these things. Not worrying about how the world takes for granted the integrity of self and democracy. On either side of this were cults and political ideology. It was, in some sense, a testing ground for the American soul.

There was not a part of Berkeley that I did not know fairly well. I lived in the Rockridge area, west Berkeley, up on Oxford Street, on Telegraph Avenue. I loved College Avenue, Solano, and Shattuck. Parts of Telegraph still retained the aura it had in the 60's but by the time I moved there it had decayed quite a bit.

In fact, when I first moved to Berkeley my first note in my journal read, "this place is a burnt out refugee camp."

One of the secrets of Berkeley: the young, on the street or in the campus, martyr themselves to the sins of the fathers or society. In fact, one could say with extreme truth that much of Berkeley is a fight against the fathers. The pyramid is flipped and the kids rule. It is no different than tribes of pre-Columbia who ritually assist the young to dis the old and all they hold sacred. It creates new vitality. But it also creates the shame that makes the kids, eventually, just like the fathers. And it does a third thing. It shows the kids, after awhile, exactly why the fathers did what they did.

The radicalism that had marked Berkeley in the 60's and early 70's had petered out to a few crazed gangs like the ones who had shot and killed the Superintendent of schools and kidnapped Patty Hearst. Or the People's Temple. By this time anything with "Peoples" in it rang rather hollow but anyway. The radicals had all gone back to school or lived sullen lives down in the flats. When they got together they would drink and laugh loudly. They were still alive they reasoned and proved to themselves they were better than anyone else. Or, at least, smarter than anyone else.

There was an unmistakable aura of craziness in Berkeley. It was not simply an empty putative thing. It was a real atmosphere, a charged atmosphere you would not get in a large city. And I had felt this aura three distinct times. In the mid-60's as a teen-ager and sensing great momentous things happening and feeling that Berkeley was the center of the universe. So clean, ideal, and perfect! And then when I moved there in the mid-70's a terrible disillusionment that made everything sickly and driven down. It was the feeling of being driven down which was so startling and it was pervasive.

The local determines the problems that the self takes on. In Berkeley at that time were cosmic, macro, personal, social problems that had an amazing structure to them. Some of the problems were dictated and formed out of ideology, some of them were formed out of great idealism after reading Ghandi or Thoreau. The ideologists tried to make cynicism into a hip thing so that people, wanting more in life than what the establishment gave, would turn to the ideological solution. On the other hand there was great "going inward," in the mid-70's. The cults were just the tip of the iceberg. Great restlessness took over the city. Jung and mythology came into vogue.

Doom certainly played a role. That goes without saying. At that time there were all kinds of doom scenarios, some of them quite bizarre. This was the infamous 70's period of time. And at that time a cold war did rage and it looked probably some type of nuclear war was going to be fought among nations. It threw everything off-kilter. And what the mushroom cloud did was not necessarily destroy anything but history. After that, there was no continuity with history except for inspired thought or spirit. The models of greatness and beauty. Everything was returned to an eternal present. Environmental concerns were coming in. Resource depletion was reported on. This scenario always came popping up: extraction from earth, constant transformation of rescues into products, products supporting larger and larger populations, increased populations demanding more and more resources. This scenario did as much as anything in making me cut down the need for goods. I felt it was a very positive thing to do because I combined it with the needs of the writer, the needs of the father and refused to get caught up in the massive consumption pressure of the time. "Ah, they do not know yet we are doomed at this pace." All throughout my 20's I was aware of all this. It alarmed me but I also knew that our minds are tricksters. Most importantly I countered the doom with attempting to understand these things. I did study the cold war and war in general; geo politics trying to find "an answer" for the nuclear problem. Where was the future with the nuclear dilemma there? And if there is no future, where does that lead us?

This had an enormous impact that was only mollified in my mid-late 30's. The earth and life seemed much more solid at that time.

When I think about it that was my initiation into the present day world. Taking on these problems and fears took me out of my college days and put me at the center of something exciting. I did follow a great many leads and learned a good deal of stuff. Much of it has slithered away but my memory of all that time is very strong.

At that time I felt that novels were not going to solve any problem. The novel became nearly a frivolous item. And I think I switched to poetry and philosophy precisely because the novel failed to address my concerns.

This time is eventually eclipsed by something lighter and more hopeful. The counter acts to this sort of doom is beauty and wisdom.

There is without question something stimulating about contemplating the death of the planet. It is one side of a huge mythology.

It's not shocking to me either that during this time or a bit later in my early 30's I absolutely connected with history, with the historic imagination, with great sprites, with common spirits, with the acts, with the existential history that can be a powerful thing.

Berkeley, of course, was very amenable to all of this. It had its on-edge doom characters but it also had great knowledge resources. It had a very active environmental community. I can remember a spate of time when people were thinking about the future, future space colonies and so on and I was interested in that. Berkeley of course blamed everyone. I took it more as an alarming fact and tried to track it all down. Blame seems to cut off the sources of enlightenment or, at least, constricts the ability to find out and keep curious.

There's no question I strengthened my relation to Christ and God, all great spirits as a matter of fact. It was so harrowing to lose the past, the total past that I went and found all that was valuable and brought it into myself. It was like the old story of the future where they burn books so a small community of people starts to memorize favorite books and carry them around in their heads.

The pettiness in religion and politics was distressing to say the least. The pattern of human nature seemed to lead directly to conflict at a time when conflict implicated the future of the world. Pettiness became an enemy and I'm sure I alienated more than a few people.

Looking back I can see why this period of time had to end!

There were many, many other things going on during these years but that was like the white elephant in the room. No matter where I went I either saw it or smelled it.

I came to realize that inspiration is the key to the creative life. What inspires, helps build. If it doesn't inspire it is of no help. And what was so fantastic about Berkeley is that every resource, every example was present somewhere in that beautiful city. It didn't matter whether it was poetry, painting, music, architecture, sculptor it was there, it was present in things and in books; in the people.

Berkeley was like a woman who you believe holds the secret to life. You practically worship her. And then you realize, no, she just wants something from you, even as innocuous a thing as live through you. There is a panic of realization. And then you step away and watch her as she lives out every odd, bad thing you perceived was there in her moment of mystery.

A provincial woman, then, who could not see the forest for the tress and yet had great inner beauty still lodged in her, somewhere in the folds of her hills and bad streets and run-down Victorians.

Berkeley was certainly one thing when I arrived and another when I left, about 10 years later. the post-60's period hit it hard. It went through a funky, pc period of time where the bums pissed in city hall and no one seemed to matter.

Berkeley is not an underground culture it is a series of them. There is a political underground, a counter culture sort of underground, a cultic underground, perhaps many more have sprouted up in the last 25 years.

Intelligent women with absolutely non-receptive souls. Manipulators therefore but who later would feel , if not sorry, resigned to the fact they couldn't manipulate anyone. I met them in every point of the city.

Berkeley, if nothing else, was vision. I saw the computer revolution, Internet, and solar power all in Berkeley. it was a fantastic manufacturer of vision and, on the negative end, fantasy. I discovered the difference between imagination and fantasy in Berkeley. that imagination was substance, it was something that had legs and could walk around the real people but that fantasy was something that belonged to boys rather than men. And for all of that reality counted. Reality was a big luscious thing filled with boats in the Marina and angry women, paper flying along the wonderful avenues, people pretending to be someone they were not and so on. It was the charm and aspect that one adapted to.

It nearly burnt down twice. Reagan sent old helicopters over it to bomb it and chase out the young rebels. it is full of boring smart people who say the same things and have the same outlook on everything imaginable. But, it is promise and quirky stuff here and there.

I discovered that the communists and socialists drink good wine and come from wealthy families. Their idealism is some kind of disguised hatred for the privilege they were born into and it destroyed more than a few. Well, what is a world without a few drunken, idealistic communists? Those, in other words, who have never grown up because their mothers paid them off not to enter the real world. This was plenty afoot in Berkeley.

They drank good wines and lived in houses that looked out over the whole bay area as though they were pro counselors in Rome and the Empire was at their feet. But they had nothing to do but prostelize on behalf of the poor and left-out; people they never associated with and whose lives had more meaning and fiber than their own. Yet, as the communist knows, money counts. Money is able to produce any sort of life the imagination conjures up.

There had been the generations of students. Activists and party types, that was the size of it. The scholarly types were usually ashamed of their passions and kept them hidden behind either activism or parties. It was always amazing to me how the smart guys denounced everything that was smart for things that were purely dumb. That happened quite a bit.

Coeds gazing out on the concrete, iron balcony toward the bay and islands in the bay, smoking, heads going nuts, zigging and zagging trying to physically remove themselves from the very spot where they smoked and gazed, petrified of where they had ended up and wanting to get out; either through a career or a man. They were undecided by it all.

The students were, generally, arrogant and full of themselves. Life was their oyster. They were going to cook in its pulp and come out smelling like a rose. Nothing seemed to bother the students; they laughed uproariously at any suggestion that life was not what it appeared to be; a vast moveable feast of good liquor, dope, sex, a kind of nutty world performing in front of them for their amusement.

Bookstores, restaurants, clubs, and apartments. These seemed to be the venues for myself. I also enjoyed buying chicken and pork bows at the Chinese stand on Shattuck Avenue by the BART station. Food became a major component of Berkeley. I lived a few blocks from Chez Panisse and frequented more than few of the excellent restaurants that Berkeley seemed to thrive on in the 70's and early 80's. That and coffee shops. There was Peet's and one up along College Avenue I used to go to quite a bit.

It was a town of books and resources. I loved the feeling of reading book when many thought, even in Berkeley, that reading was passe. I always questioned this: Do you mean that thought and knowledge are passe? Those who downgraded reading usually went into money and wanted money more than anything and didn't relent until they had it. I read and researched all the bookstores and libraries of Berkeley because I was curious and I was angry at the state of the world, which, to a mind, seemed easy to figure out. The more complicated it got the more I read to try and figure it out.

I read anything that struck me as interesting, studious, or forbidden. It was a great joy. Many days and nights I spent at the university libraries reading on one, two, three levels of the building, going outside to smoke occasionally, sometimes the only person in the library. The books I read became a part of me, no question about it. I owe a lot to those days.

I was terrified often of the split between nihilistic types and stone frightened types. I didn't think anything generous would appear between these clashing rocks. The nihilist types were smart but empty; intelligent but superstitious and wanted nothing to do with the real world. They would destroy the real world given half the chance. The frightened types didn't recognize the historical changes going on, didn't move in the pathway of historic reality, couldn't control the vast fear of change and distance that permeated the culture at that time.

I realized at that time it is more provident to surrender to knowledge and curiosity than it is to movies or a novel. That escapism was the great drug of the age and I didn't want it and didn't want to produce it. "Give me a knowledge of society and my experience in it and then I will write through what I know and experience." That was the real source of epic poetry. It was not escape and blathering entertainment for 500 pages but a blasting voice through the world the poet knew. That is the thing. That is the only thing in the long run.

Berkeley taught this more than any other area I've lived in.

When young, at this time, I studied organizations; the organization of life. This was central and probably changed the direction of my writing from novel writing to poetry and philosophy. Novel writing was the study of human society for the most part. But society was only one sort of organization and had been studied to death. At any rate, science and philosophy led me to this study; a study without any final conclusion except that we, as people, are determined by the nature of organization we give our loyalty to or that subdue us one way or the other. This is why "freedom" is a reality and something to be taken utterly seriously. Without this reality in place all is predicable and predictability leads to a kind of kindly slavery. And as the world get more complex, more organized, more fierce in loyalties it becomes harder and harder for people to see their freedom, their possibilities, their own spirits.

What I learned, finally, from all this study, random as it was, profound as it was at times, is that the two greatest values to have are boundless curiosity and "learned ignorance." Christ is absolutely true: What benefit is there for a man to conquer the world and yet lose his soul? Which I take to mean, what matters if you know everything but don't have an inner core of "stuff" that allows for compassion, tolerance, pity, and the rest of it. Well, it's obvious what you have: Sick intelligent people running things.

To study something is not to kill it. And there is an art to it. As life, itself, is a kind of harsh art. This was a lesson I did not learn until the next phase of development, in the midst of family, in the LaMorinda area.

Berkeley taught me that the pursuit of power without discover of soul is a most dangerous proposition. A dangerous one.

I was never certain whether the openness in Berkeley was evidence of a dysfunctional breakdown or some new opening arising in the possibility of the new world.

Philosophers like Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, the existentialists, Maratin, the social thinkers like CW Mills, sociologists, "science thinkers; these were some of the influences on the toddler Eide. At least in expanding the nature of his naive mind. The scientists had large sway without a doubt. The ability to think on huge problems and questions was a criteria to gain credibility. The depth psychologists. The historians like Spengler, Toynbee, and others. I struggled earnestly with all this material but ran into the barrier of specialism and let it all slide into my past. This is a very strange process; a living closely and intimately with someone or something, and then it is gone, moves away and becomes memory that fades and fades.

I was always brought back to the present time; the impossible present time. That time was an immovable object. It roared along in a terribly unconscious way, an arrogant way, completely selfish and unaware of how it got to be the way it was. The people were never objects and had a great deal to teach on how to handle the objects. On how to laugh , on how to take one less seriously than they had. The people have great good and wisdom in them. They can. Sometimes a few of them do. The sick ones continue to find holes and weaknesses to strike to the core, a few healthy ones have healed the need to do so. I'm not sure what wins out on balance but it is a very odd and illuminating experience. It tests the reality of the spirit.

Berkeley was often tromping around in the middle of these objects with the color, taste, and smell of things good, bad, and ugly but tactile, real in that sense and the brain full of ideas and stories.

2560 words

"Those drowsy particular streets; which, as a whole, are depressing but up close, here and there, little fascinations."

Berkeley invariably fought everything which was solid, complete; political nature and institutional nature. In the young this brings on, eventually fear and trepidation's. Eventually the young have sentimental illusions about many things while thinking on their own sorrows.

Youth finds out that is the lower part of nature that is influenced by the kinds of fashion in thought, custom, and entertainment.

"Old, fetid world dying in its machines." So the old guys sang and I know what they mean. I felt contentions over the question of forms; forms and the idea of progress. If, in other words, there was progress in human affairs there will be aversion of that progress in artistic forms. The idea was to find the conjunction between the feeling form of the "society" and the content of the work itself. And that is thread easily to lose in the maze it all makes.

There were times I felt like the toy my young daughter got out of gum machine; it was a plastic bubble inside of which was a panting red-eyed dog or wolf.

"There is a conscience that intersects with experience to form limits within you, 'in the language and style of the day.' So he would say wearing suspenders and an old straw hat. He knew I was experiencing an acute conflict between the "old" and the "new." I didn't want the old form really or the old ideas but I always wanted to retain the old and ancient spirit that doesn't have any specific content in it. Yet, what is the mania for newness but an old barbarism? Old forms that have worked in the past are a pretty net hanging right above the innocent head.

3100 to this point.

So the Poet of His Dreams wanders around and thinks he's a wise guy: He cuts epitaphs into the trunks of old oak trees: Quickest way to Hell is to destroy Memory. Life sad, short, and tragic for all the kind and masterful rationalizations. Trust the soul, question the nation. Don't go after fame but manifest true nature. Theories are useless in explaining anything other than their own existence as theories. While it's no good to live in the past, it's no good to kowtow to nonsense. Easy explanation for any malaise is subterfuge. Who did I invite? Among them all who is it who has come to enlarge my spirit? What good is it to leave the misery of one circle and enter the misery of another?

A Puritan's sort of guilt overtakes the writer who writes primarily "on himself." But, finally, it is simply an aspect of self not yet known, struggling to be known. A voice, then, as authentic, perhaps more authentic as the priest he listened to on TV. The seed of the voice is at least as authentic he thinks and goes back to his deeds. This novel he thought. This novel, now, is a kind of novel of manners depicting a variety of levels abundant and mingling in good old American style. "Let them see who they live with!" That is one spirit in youth. Maybe it could be the story of development with idea counterpoised against idea or, at least, a spiritual opening. Ah, decides, it will be left open-ended as to whether the rose wilts or blooms. Redeemed by love, the rose blooms. Suffocated in disillusionment, the rose wilts.

There is no static in youth. There are things all around one. The present as present and nothing else; things without association, things as things; physical things like buildings, planes, roads, bridges, houses, streetlights. Things. Objects. Common things. And then they worm through necessity, imagination, or, even desire. One object is in relation to an empty, littered lot and another in relation to hills filled with trees and birds. One sees through the eye, smells through the nose. But there is more. Yet there is another inner fluid that comes up and meets the things with its imperative and the things change. They can wither and die. Or, they can live forever.

Pain and gentleness
Under the eyes of the
Wayward Girl-
lost in what all lose
prominent in her awareness
ah, where have you come from-
Where?

It is ironic that in a town full of intellectuals the intellect will suddenly appear as grinding away with no pretense to the truth. It needs a conscience which says, "ah, you are only after power, enthralled by the obligatory anti-truths and anti-life sentiments of the day."

Yet, when the intellect is conned away from itself to let in other, lesser selves to walk out in the daylight aren't they revealed horrible things? And who else to cauterize the wound but the old grinder itself. There is utter nihilism and around the corner is complete doubt; fast down the street comes slimy desires and then those small and petty conclusions the fret this way and that like a bug under a hot light.

A decent writer starts off wanting to write novels in the way that Hugo, Steinbeck, and Zola did; huge sociological tracts of criticism that writers are sometimes weaned on. They could cut their teeth on lesser things. Then comes the psychological novel where each scene is constructed as a psychological state of mind and where action and thought try to fuse.

Ideas and Reality; when one is attempting to learn a craft or art these two forces keep playing off each other.

There no doubt is a shadow to the spiritual; there is always a new soul in the crevice of the old. In old libraries or used bookstores a man can kind the Gnostics and Valentius. Everything good pops up in the long snake of history to deliver its richness; but in every age there is a dark secret closed to all generations.

"Those morning solitude's," he sung later in the afternoon, "and their strange imaginings struggle with the Devil itself until the face is washed clean." He bends on one knee, next to the cast-iron bench, "Oh simple emotion down in the depths of thee through connective tissue and laughing spirit out to the red-edged sea." He had proclaimed earlier that not even guilt could ruin the simple emotion.

Ah world, there when excitement races past old precision's and is tenuous as a fly's wing. It says, "drop your damn foolishness and get to the quick. Don't judge but retain me with the full measure of your nature!"

The city made him a storyteller because even knowledge was only participating in a good tale. Tales enter other realms where we can not participate. Vanity kills the effort. The storyteller goes out and asks simple questions: "What creative principle are the living people dependent on?" "Have you recognized yet that separation from this principle is death, the center of it life?"

"Every shitty thing has tried to knock me off some perceived pedestal. I laugh at the effort and commend the shits for trying but, eventually, it applies a few drags on things. The shits don't want to see. College, family, clowns, actresses, bosses, lovers, it doesn't matter. I just make 'em into characters. You want to hear my list of characters?" He was in an old bakery turned into a cafe and had a binder in front of him. A man had just entered the bakery and declared he was a god and they chased him out. "Well, there was the wicked, half-crazed drug dealer; a big talkin', cigar smoking contractor and his daughter addicted to something harmful; the big talking, big dreaming, little talented rock musician, the old, bitter professor "against the war,", the macho primitive working for the utility company; the jazz guitarist who works blue-collar during the day; the neurotic, suicidal woman who suffered in childhood and read Hesse novels; the left-liberal professor and his wife running an alternative newspaper; a lonely Marine in his apartment watching TV while his ex-wife throws a brick through his doors; pot smokers a plenty; loud, dark-spirited Trotskytes; the blonde, neurotic rich guy; Judge, the ganja smoker; golfing bureaucrats; bubbly, nubile innocents; parents of the middle, upper-middle class; young toughs who carry knives into bars; a young counselor training to be a minister who rides a bicycle; young Jewish writers on the make; a mother with her young children in the lonesome mountains; loud talking, smart-ass bureaucrat who drink too much; a New York exploiter of college students; lonely and rootless fellows suffering the bowels of the city; Nigerian student wanting to be "apart of the action:' astrologer healing woman; the steel-eyed stentorian librarian; a bookseller balding on top; loose women sitting in the saloons and clubs, pregnant and just in from the eastcoast; the computer company owner; Filipina nurse working full-time to support musician husband; single women in mid-20's roaming the land; an ex-Peace Corps worker desperate to find someone and build her career; the Greek girl who bragged that her boyfriend was in the Mafia; an effeminate ship steward trying to pick up middle-aged women on trains; the crazy Finn who belongs to the communist party or brags she does; a professor and his peccadilloes; a rich jewess who threatened suicide for 15 years and finally does it; a middle-aged lush who sleeps with stranger black men; kindly women lawyers, tough as balls feminist/lesbian lawyers; quiet, suspicious librarian; the ne'er-do-well relative that floats endlessly from the east coast to the west coast; the doctor and his huge stone castle in the crevice of some obscure mountain; and more, brother, and more."

"Sometimes my brain feels like an elephant wandering off toward the high grass of the plains, full of muddy water in its belly. It paused at times to trumpet at some fleeing Mastodon or Tigress. Isn't the bloated feeling symptom of shadows trying to fill themselves? Great danger in wrapping oneself in shadows disguised as artificial light."

A woman always embodies something; what is it now? Perhaps it is the personality of history itself; the contradiction between power and responsibility. A woman as an ideal type would be difficult when the whole mind is concerned with exposure.

"Let me tell you about conversations I've had: There were all those talks with R----, existential talks without an ounce of grace in them; then the kind couple who engaged me in talk about child-rearing and jobs no one liked having; there was the good guy M---- full of bluster and ego when filled up with good drink, swaggering, blustering kind of conversations; or MS and her conversations of the inner self, artistic talk; with D it was history and experience, practical matters of one sort or another; cocky banter with my brothers; that guy I worked with out in construction, B, who talked with me for hours about work, life, and society as we worked on the house; crazy H monologues on why he carried a knife with him into the city and how he'd eaten the aborted fetus of a doe in the woods; convicts I worked with out on the Straights demolishing a company town; the guy who smoked a pipe in the warehouse and Klaus, the German shipping clerk; the fine, neurotic women of the hospital, how I loved their sweet conversations, talking out dreams with my friend by the fence when we were kids; tales of Gummy the wonder pisser flying over the city of drunks to old Pat the Irish warrior; I used to tell my buddies that my dad had won the war, single-handed, and they quizzed him about it next time they had a chance; oh an endless diarrhea of conversations with the good, bad, and the ugly."

The Job is the cowards Army; responsibility is transferred from brute authority to financial-economic authority to produce a very facile freedom that everyone struggles to maintain. "My relations with those working here are not bad by any means. I've known these people for years; they've crossed my eyes and imprinted themselves on my sensibility for so long all I can do now is breathe with them. There is something to be said for learning through new experiences, pride notwithstanding. The only thing I don't stand for is the horrible pressure to re-make myself in the image of a slave. These people are so nice, accommodating, ineffectual, rather bumbling like myself and yet exert a force by their presence that is difficult to shake. One smells not fear but with fear I suppose."

My relations with co-workers is always poor. I've known these people for years; they've crossed my eyes and imprinted themselves on me, somewhere, for so long that all I can do is breathe with them. There is something to learn everywhere, under all circumstances, pride notwithstanding. One wishes they could dismiss folk as in the old days but it is not au couture these days. Yes, my pride is bruised. I will not relent to the horrible pressure to re-make myself in the image of a slave. A nice, accommodating, ineffectual, rather rumbling slave.

Christ and Buddha: They took the whole epoch to which they were born, freed the forms which had petrified into dogma and knocked humanity to another level. They took the tribal man and found his individuality. Is that fizzling in confusion these days?

Exercise/of the mind/beatified by the imagination; To end each diamond/a new world in each diamond

The great spirits exist to prevent the man from conjuring too many limitations, too quickly. To convince himself, ah, past this point I cannot go even as my head is ramming the wall with alacrity. Origins is a slithering word if there ever was one. Against this word the myth of mind veers from solitude to make itself an elixir of hope. "Origins of what?" the old guy asks.

"The heart, the mind, the beasts, the man, the forms scottering down the dust of road, open and closed, sprouted and paved; eye to the circulation through abodes with weary voices, burning incense, materials woven on walls of scent and sound," I respond to the old man.

"Animals have collected here to drink while the dust rages. Origins of what? Yellow boweled, hallow-eyes, thumbent progenitor wildly inquisitive among the running streams; here is the lava flow burning fires to the shore; of danced to the rounded skull of He who made us and She who sustainth and of They who buryeth under stones of sad impunity."

Today I gathered a satchel of faces; a long, skeletal face, "pale unto death," sunken as one from the dead with long, lanky hair, dark peerful glasses; sitting with his body rocking back and forth in strict, taut rhythm to some invisible exigency. Confused, dark Chicano man. Beautiful black woman with hair braided thinly and wrapped with turquoise beads. Scabbed, forlorn face of one not at all impressed by it all.

For So Long:

he said to me, "For so long I was driven by a restless vanity that reached its dutiful conclusion in apocalyptic visions. For so long I have been hiding; roaming the fields and boroughs of the imagination. The people suspect the worst but then they should be ashamed of themselves and when I think on it they have sold their shame to the most absurd temptations so the back of my hand to them."

"For so long oppressed by a kind of telepathy! For so long unable to understand myself buried under the thoughts of others! I have only recently understood the way voices organize themselves. For so long believing I was relating to the world when I was actually relating to my self-consciousness, to my "impositions."

Language is a strip eternally moving through the body and soul. What the poet does is heighten its appearance. A language formed out of the spirit. A kind of false pride with try and manipulate itself to spirit through the manipulation of sentences. First, the spirit and its experiences through life. Then language that comes brave and beautiful form the heart.

The difference between "ornate" and "hard, common language" that the poets of a previous generation struggled over, William Carlos Williams and so on. A man who says chair and think they have said a great deal are either laughed at or provide the greatest opportunity to succeed.

Reach the truth through the shortest distance.

Here. This place. Living in this particular place, this part of the country, this astounding vitality that breaks here, always signaling for a new man or new woman to arise although it is a place where men and women become disembodied before anyone else. All myths have a grain of salt in them. The people live horizontally the expectation. They dream in other words and even if the dreams are vulgar they are dreams and the fact the dreams are innate gives impetus to the more profound and real dream one finds in the ancient world or at the tail end of some golden age. Slowly but surely the dreams take on the character of tribal dreams of vanquished nations. Two world lower on each other, plus the Spanish. The mansion of the Emperor turned into hacienda spreads. Catholic missions. The Spanish is old, noble Spain and god-dark Aztec. Two dark bloods.

Ancient dreams! Representations you have, here, in this place. The dreams of youth sadly flag in the mind. The dreams of manhood gain strength.

The Stuttering Utterances of a Cosmological View:

I love reading about the stars but I love looking up at them even more. And if it were a choice between the two I would choose the second without regret.

The first fact is motion. After this fact the other facts are merely pleasurable. First, the motion of the mind in its first act of discovery. Next fact is the motion of the Earth in rotation and in orbit around the sun. This fact leads to a pleasurable sense when contemplating the facts that exist on the surface of the planet. Next fact: The motion of all the planets, the sun, the galaxy, the universe itself as a whole in and for itself, expanding, all these motions simultaneous and in concert and with mystery on mystery. Next fact: Distance followed by the treasure of discrimination. The universe takes on the form of a cube with the eye in the center, able to carry in it depth and the relation that creates depth.

One imagines the Earth, then, suspended and suspended not on or by anything substantial but a play of forces. For the sake of perception one imagines the light years below the ground one is standing on, the light years above and to the sides and the fact that science and probing make things tenuous.

There is a strange and liberating feeling to construct the universe from the "big bang," to the expansion. And finally, isn't it true that religions are society and static while science is individual and therefore progressive and adventuresome?

Playfulness exists to fend off a society that doesn't want the mind to get too far out of hand; so it doesn't divulge too much. And the rest is a sorry tale!

Look how the women compete! It is a hard thing to watch.

In America only the well-made thing is wise. It can be a giant, rolling an inflated ball around in an enormous filed grinning madly and childishly at all the intracies crushed below. And then it sulks and goes mad another way. Wisdom can retract the claws of the animal; the politics in things.

We don't give up on America. It is just something "in you," and you either find out what it is "in you" or else surrender the beauty of it to the sighing thugs. Or else throw ones loyalty in the direction of a rather heinous sort of authroitative state.

We won't call it soul. A discarded word thrown around by nineteen year old singers. It is a mysterious word. What is important are the visions and dreams generated spontaneiously within the whats-its-name. It is not a room where items enter identified by desire. What-it-is doesn't like sentimentality and is explicit. In speaking ambiguously about this-thing we defer to its infinite variety. But here is a problem. What-it-is has a long history, it has attained an identity now in service to a will in love with techique and power. The identity sports with that-thing. Ah, the intellect see's its own death and forms images of itself where it can! The other-thing understands eternity and so forms images of past and future!

Men are nuts in this way too: They look down a narrow tunnel when viewing the accomplisments of their ancestors. They repeat mistakes until something rears up out of control like a scientific monster. And once the monster is out there is re-awakened within human beings the "choice that wasn't made." Evil pursues.

Even a young man has participated in a few archetypal situations!

• a medieval hermit
• a father in suffering joy
• a man concerned for the well-being of all ife he sees
• a lover broken by his love
• a stranger in the middle of a group
• a man of appetite
• a man of ideological swagger
• a man rejected by the world
• a man rejected by the devil
• a dreamer who brings all things into the plasma of his dream
• a scientist manipuating objects under a method
• a man in prayer
• a man in nature
• a man in fear
• a man of the Earth

Societies, like people, dream and become disillusioned; refashion dream from some obscure opportunity and move toward this opportunity with vengence. Where opportunity does not yet exist, the dreamers step forward.

The young man began to notice that two predominant types rose up out of things. There was the social person who surrendered to convention and opinion and the pyschological person who abstracted everything in himself to protest the conventional, to gain a kind of supercilious personal identity. It may be necessary, he thought. But that base was a common one for both types. The desire for power or, even, the desire for immortality. The conventional type surrendered to objects of convention believing them to extend into the future where his or her personality re-enacts itself through the convention. The pyschological person surrendered to advance thought believing the same thing. And further believes that a kind of equiibirum in the present is a kind of immortality.

"I want to be free of all this," he said. "My first loyalty is to my creative spirit and that finds its fullest expression in making lnaguage speak out the powers, pains, and joys of having a spirit. It works in conjunction with an ineffable opening spirit that best goes unnamed." "Certainly my greatest desire is to compress and compel expereince toward a healthy future by opening up knots of obstrcution that keeps the streams of nature damned up, concealed, and riddled with demons of every sort."

"Oh these frustrated humna beings! Here in late 20th century with all its expansive techniques and its vairety not able to consumate even one desire to bring life up to its ripe and profound richenss!"

"With study we bathe in pools with shadows and glint of sunshine through the leaves, over the water."

Youth discovers in the nick of time it is cursed with a double-nature swimming off in opposite directions and if he isn't careful will simply obey the desires of other people.

A nation created out of thought expects its adventuresome types to experiment; many failures and successes will follow, at the end of which comes understanding that will bring on more expereiment, further experiment will bring on more failures and success, more understanding to the end of time. The paternalistic equation says, "material growth = freedom." Only a nation filled with refugees and immigrants filled with sentimental souls would believe in it. You can detect the bitterness in their voice as you can with orphans. What other nation started with a thought? A thought conscious of itself as a thought. A thought at the end point of experience.

A young writer meets with the startling fact that there is no real rhyme or reason to making a novel; it's meaningless in the sublime sense of the word and compelled by the same kind of holy ignorance that generates life. It has a theme, perhaps, a host of character and weaves through time a consistent vision; plays with language, enlarges images which prod the emotins toward action, seeks irony, rationalizes itslef, goes through periods of nuerosis. It has all the attributes of life. It is a great song really. The only qualification about making a novel is that the writer needs to be utterly sure of what he is doing. It's important that any conflict over the form of th enovel be conscious and the writer works to resolve the conflict.

A sharp! consise effort on the emergence of sensiblity. Out of the slag into awareness to the lip of awareness of new life; not mereley a new outlook or deppended sense of value but a new life resulting from that depeening sense.

Then came the man riding by on a bike, baby on the back, man saying sadly, "why, why, why?"

After awhile one is bored of sentiments like, "there's nothing one can do," or, "you have to do it alone," or, "don't trust them," or "go away and prove yourself."

A writer is often caught up between the desire to "muscle up" and use langague in the physical way an athelte uses his body or the desire for more and more refinement until the sentence becomes a strain of music. This is resolved in the physical act itself.

Oh poet, assume you are the most powerful memeber of the society and act responsibly. Most of society is a quick vanish or a series of them. It is really a lovely and progressive thought.

He had gotten to the point where he could list down his nourishments:

• literary scenes
• natural growth
• objects
• colors
• ideas with points to them
• ideas with weight to them
• odd things that creep into conversations
• contmeplation on what one works on
• readings in the sacred books, political theory, history, and philosophy

Of course, there were the de-nourishments:

• those whose eyes are better fit to kill than to nourish
• those who have made disillusionment a personal cross without any possibility of redemption: these types turn everything into crap.
• persons who have delusions of granduer
• those whose lives announce they are in this world for one reason only; to cram theselves with as much vulgar happinenss as possible.
• any breed of animal that lumbers happily toward Hell
• over-confident people

Always have that humbleness which is all fire inside of it; fire that knows its own fate.

So one is obligated to suffer in silence in deadening occupations if for no other reason then to rub among as many heads and shoulders as is practible. A man born in a democracy is obligated to do this. He must enter the realm of work, put aside his foolish dreams. Sad business, this democracy.

So the obligation is fulfilled and he is now free to pursue his own dreams and genius demanding no other course but the one in front of him.

• worked on a walnut ranch knockingn walnuts out of trees with a stick in the hot sun. Lived in quansat hut.
• worked for the telephone company doing all kinds of dirty, physical jobs with some of the more dirtiest and physicalist individuals around. Drove green truck and worked in shavings of wood, in heat, in sweat and strange mixtures of noise.
• Worked for a leftist newspaper, contributing all kinds of articles. Went to meetings where all the writers would sit around and discuss what would go into the paper; most of the voices were middle-age leftishs and liberals who lived in the wealthy seciton of Berkeley. They have the best wine.
• Worked in a large hospital with a variety of folk; welfare mothers, collegiate women, transients, managers, doctors, nurses; dreadful job disciplined by night busywork. Heard many tales.
• Worked in a wharehouse doing various things; shipping clerk, organized wharehouse, saw wretched conditions. Only thing good about it was the stereo playing classical musci and an old Japanese woman named Suzie.
• Worked at stained-glass company pulling panes of glass out of crates and stacking them on shelves; a useless job.
• Worked with prisoners from the county jail on the site of a company town being dismantled on a point in the Carquinez Straits; worked in winter, in the mud, pulling brkcs out of the mud and salvaging them for some podunk from Sacramento; a useless, horrible job.
• Worked in an ugly factory in the factory section of Berkeley smelling like a chemical bath and hot soap; utterly humiliating occupation.
• Wrote some useless, frivolous "novels" for some strange fellow from New York; tutored students and then got sucked into a bit of easy money; horrible, humiliating, ugly expereince.

All gone, all behind me; no more, no more, no more. Can't give a lick on chorome what anyone says. Obligation fulfilled; ego ruined, success!

Individuals I can tolerate, as a matter of fact, I enjoy individuals who know themselves so completely that they can do nothing but bring out the very best in one. This is one of th ekeys to living a mortal life; seek and find those who will raise out of the ash of expereince and disillusionment the best in oneself; the best nature, best virtue, best intelligence, best heart. However ideal it may sound it si possible. And yet irony of ironies! Those who wear the cloak of responectability, the cloak of virtue, the cloak of intelligence are often filled with incredible hatred, ugliness, puerile options. Lesson: The spirit moves in relation to what it has escaped or transformed in itself.

The first poems are intimate; a rarified relationship between self and ideal. Even if sex finally exhausts itself and is disillusioning it is a tasteful act in which the one scrambles back into the light. Perhaps sex is self-contained like art and only refers to the limmts of the body. And after the perennial question, "what am I doning with this particular being?" Sometimes I think Mr. Freud wanted everyone to have contiual sexual adventure until the brain finally tired, spits out the libido and would return to contemplation or actviely pursue something without the dan interference of "those feelings." No, Mr. Freud wanted to intellectualize the omwn then they'd support their genius men and everyone would be happier!

The song is subversive in that it desires the bored man to sing with fleeing birds who sing over city avenues at mid-noon as though their song were vibrating off the metallic traffic and into their precious beaks.

A man riding inside his animal and not progressing. And he is so stunned by it his face is a perplexed fear in front of the abyss; is he free or trapped? He can't decide.

Surrealism, depth pyschology and other phenomena have effectively kicked some underpinnings out. A particular kind of classiscism has fallen and for awhile the beheamouth indisturial/sicientidiv world has floated on clouds of its own invention until......well, everyting catches up to it. And like the giant in the fairytale must chase the theif from the clouds down the preciptious slak as the Earth mother stands at the bottom chopping with her happy ax.

Comfort and relaxation in the forbidden zones opened up by pyschology and literature. Standing at the edges of the old world with sharpened clasws and a glean in the revengeless eye. An oppression is sighted. Men no longer have to be addicted to the kind of suffering where every value is destoryed by madness each and every one is put through. Mad machines dangling from the end of iron threaded fingers spun by the golden processes. There is delight in a strange premonition that they are taking a last stand and are yet at the threshold.

People distrust a language when they feel it's not really theirs. It's a borrowed syntax, vocabulary, meaning; all borrowed and stuffed between feeling like foam. And since they lack language a space or hole remins in the mind which is always ineffable. It's even a source of pride. The pride of perception! of depth! But without language all this is a flabby passion; the hole is just that.

If this "space" is filled with one's own language (contained in the spirit of each man, as any quality is) this space would vanish; it would vanish but re-appear deeper beneath the nexus of his inate language. But now he'd have the tools to "get at" the hole. Instead, they fill themsleves up with borrowed lanague and borrowed images which throws a loose net over the hole so they no longer have the disconverting feeling that it is them. Their pride and discomfot have the same source.

Christ stands before Pilate. Pilate asks for a miracle, "out of curiousity," and Christ transforms himself into a modern businessman.

They are in a room and the communication between them is done in their own language; Pilate speaks Latin and Christ, Armenian. A translator laboriously goes from one to the other. Christ uses various gestures and objects in the room to bring his point over. The fascinated Pilate is defending himself by throwing out the ideology of the Empire.

It is often like this: Once upon a time there was a man who loved a woman with as fierce a love one can imagine but this love did not satisfy a wider circle of influence. At every point along the way huge boulders were thrown between himself and his love. He was driven apaprt and forced to conquer that which had seperated him in the first place. All this time his love is changing. She is growing a bit older, a bit more expereinced. She begins to demand more. And as the lover is engaged in his distant fights and struggles he stopes by occassionally to pay his lover a visit. And when he does the same argument takes place. "Come back and forget this odd sturggle. Let's just make our lives together and forget the world and its stupidities." And the lover pauses, promises are made, dreams are constructred the ensure a bridge, however thin, between the two lovers.

Madness as the 13th Muse. I saw this. It was a quote from the old poet Novalis: "Man might discover all kinds of new possibilities if he were to begin to love sickness..." Perhaps it means that sickness is a truer anchor than anything else from which a writer can view the outline of a world. The physician of the soul.

 A man is not self-contained
           does not belong to himself
	solely;
	       as though he is the master
	of all
	       when really he is a slave
    to all;
	       and when he knows
    to the root of his soul
	       this truth that he is
    master of nothing
	       then the world begins again
		   as it was at the beginning.

 Up through
          each nerve,
	   the excitement
	   of process
	   an end that is
	   
	      beyond the
	   mortal skies.

"Learn from," he was saying, "the dust-eaters shall we say. Those are the ones who have choosen death for whatever reason. Those are the ones whose outlook is so poor, so decimated by experience that they are ready to die before death is ready for them. They are soul parasites. Everything less than a queer sort of perfection, in their minds, is the devil. Puke of the spirit dead." I listened to him as an act of friendship, an act of participation but it could get too much. I told him, in so many words, that I would rather make love to a woman than listen to him.

"A structure of evil, is a fine phrase for it. A structure of evil in the most vulnerable so that they believe their righteousness is in the perfect place all the while they are serving some dark necessity.

"In relation to memory there are two interweaving aspects. The consious mind applies some logic on the outward appearnance of an apparent memory; including it more and more in its 'scheme' whatever that may be. The 'logic' leans twoard the paranoid side. The other thread is the knot of energy in any particular memeory. Events move too quicly for th epresent. A man is outstripped." As he talked on I remebered a woman I knew while in school. I had met her playing pool and took her back to my apartment where we frolicked for the night in all kinds of youthful, delightful ways. I remember what she looked like, her voice, what she was wearing. This memory could be manipulated in my presenet memory a variety of ways. I also remember sitting on my bed feeling guilty about many things and the whole change that came over everything; the darkness, the smell of her body, how she was soliciting me to find out what was wrong while everything buzzed in my guilt-ridden mind. At that moment. No other. That too, that too.

"What takes over to destroy dreams?" He was now testing me. "The dreams of religion could mean anything. And the dreams of science are already manifest. You need more an dmore dsicrimination. The mania of the world is really an abdication. Don't get tricked by people who think that th epast was some glorious temple of enligthenment. The past is a form. Admit to yourself that you have stood as a point outside a vast circle and have merely commented on the revolving activity. While this builds good perspective it has its opposite effects in that it builds resements and personal animoisties.

The guy was almost down and out. He would entertain me with his stories of roaming up and down the west coast, most of the time as a vagrant, but sometimes being gainfully employed at some job that didn't exist any longer. He confessed to me, sometimes in ways that were odd and elaborate. "Yeah, you know, I have to stop being so damn foolish! I'm too passive, not determined enough and it has cost me but good. I think over things and a dry ash appears. And I know better!

I know what I've seen man!

And no way I want to live it over again

Well, here's one that will amuse you. I was bored in school. I didn't get the education I wanted. In high school I wrote a novel and rested my hopes on that novel. I don't even know where it is. As I told you, I was bored but I was living with a woman. That was far more interesting. Not that education didn't interest me, I always read stuff; political ideas, literature, revolutionary material. And thinking, man. Always thinking wildly but earnestly and protecting it all with a kind of silence.

But why did I flow and flutter in the wind? After a time I kept the substantial part of myself hidden, working in its own way, conscious to myself but hidden from others. That part of myself that showed itself to others soon was the face of themselves; sorry, I can't describe it any other way. I became no better and no worse than themselves. It is a fine art my friend. But it also pulled me down. That face kept turning back in a taunting and leering sort of way. My good parts were all humiliated, let me tell you."

Well, I wanted to tell him that a man's whole life is his growth. Only the defeated, the damned, and the disillusioned will cut it all off and try to perfect something that he has inherited. His whole life. And not the pressure to become everything at once which leads downward.

But I didn't.

I should have done some confessing myself and told him that at one point I felt life to be so overwhlemingly in momentum, so resmembling wild nature I was familar with up in the Valley's that I felt there was nothing to do but observe it all, give it some opinion and even concoct a ritual or two as if I were a cavemen surrounded by nature. It appeared to me at that time that it showed all the symptoms of insanity as well as profit-making. Voices heard, incongruent images, valuelessness, telepathy, a real insane world. I should have confessed that to him but I didn't.

The next section is the WW---the dark night of the soul---good humor and biting stuff from the text you culled out......take some time with it. Don't try to do it all at one time.

The Dark Night of the Soul

Anything for a buck. A liquid sigh about to fall into the wasting night.

...over the skyline of the city, over the greyblue of the horizon, a single plane trvels just out of eye of the crawling humanity ducking into alleyways and buildings. It drops its load- a detonating blockbuster filled with oils, melted crayons, pigs blood, the come of a lost tribe of giants, musus from old pensioners, tears of gallant lassies waiting for their lads to return, import piss from Patagonia, liquid pulp from the Black Forest, maple drool, anything THEY could find that was running--- rich boy bodies lost in communion, rampant genius afriad of itself, dispirited souls clawing from the black machete's, bodest chasing natked shadows, shadows ski8pping along currupgated walls after naked bodies, abandoned hairy cutns searching the woods for a choice poiece, all the ublls moving south in stampede drawing their hoofs in slippery come...they and all are inside the blockbuster falling through the clouds towards the unsuspecting---who are frozen in a kind of epoleptic moment. And when it explodes the animated figures think its Fourth of July. They come out and serpentine the streets, arms thrown skyward, letting their bodies swim in the deulge. Only a few have the courage to draw on the buildings....

She imagines an oil derrick. It stands in the middle of a forlorn field- tumbleweeds, rusting metal, bone rock. The dry rod screw begins its descent into the earth, boring through the crust and adobe, the soft loam, looking for primeval bones, transmorgified by sleeping eons into the gushing brew of lust. Past the dead phantoms, past the bristling gates, geates separating the air of the known- a slippage out beyond all voyages and transports-- commerce and heraldic banners, walled cities, the clammering market, the godded mountains, altars and incesen, docks and mossy pilings, the painted temples, the child's hill, out beyond the quiet glassed conversations and bleating horns, the vapor trails, the crawling stucco, the poundings, everyday the hammering of concrete, the splitting of streets, the nausea of asphalt pouring---the billowing of souls into the haze, browing before the sweet rains, the boxers, the vultures circling--beaks red, dripping dotting the avenues, the sleeves of desperadoes turned from quietitude to a loud, pitying moan like the long far-away shots of cannon knocking against the walls of castles. She is dreaming, bathing in a sunlit room, her body glistening sweat. A bird perches on the window sill. They converse like old friends. They both laugh. Out he flies.

A hill. It's rim. People standing pondering down the hole circusmscribed by the hill. A laughing man is running around. "Jump in! Go ahead, jump! All your firends are down there! All your family! Life contineus down there! Go ahead, jump! You don't want to die...you don't want to be evaporated bvy the Torch, do you?"

A few fall forward due to his goading. The others kick around the dirt, their heads bowed. One yells across to him. "Why don't you jump? You seem to know all about it. You jump!"

"Oh, I have jumped...and now am back again, exposing myself to the great Flame that is approaching...Hurry! Jump. Do you want evaporation or do you want continuing life? Go, jump! Life continues down there in the pit...In the obscene pit. You'll all have TV;s and you'll be able to drive the freeways...and one man will say to the other, "hell, this ain't so bad." And they'll alugh together an swig down their drinks. Women are down there with their legs spread....they're in glass cages and everyone can see them beat-off with walking sticks...you can set up governments....the same as before! Dope is plenty down there....Everything will be the same but everyone will think it's different. So jump! It's either jump or fly towards the Flame!" And the remaining stragglers leap. The single man faces the Flame with open arms.

A fire blows a storm across the waving grains. The grains are wavering slowly back and forth, undulating with a cautious wind that skitters like little girls laughing from the Beast in the woods. Then the fires comes and in and in a moment, in a blink, the grains are blackened stumps, each thin stalk a dark remnant of itself. The millions are running before the deluge, up the sloping hill, clawing their way to the top. The great Flame rises up, gathers itself all at once and forms a circular mouth in the center of the yellow-blue----blowing streams of their Flame toward the bottom slope of the hill.

Woman is tied to railroad tracks. A team of writers, posing as outlaws, have just left the scene in a bursting cloud of dust and gravel.

"HiHo," says one, pointing to the perked ears of Rocinante.

The apparent leader is nattily dressed. Sequins abound. A vial of cocaine is stuck from his pocket, in front of the mongrammed hanky, silken gold.

"Behind us is our fortune....Now we roll towards our moutning glory- a bemaing, gridding gloy on the darkened cave of our compadres."

"All hail! All hail the heroes of culture!"

The leader starts spewing a foamy speech blown through his head on the tails of the wind. Our his mouth comes the jumbling, bumbling alphabet- not 24 but 24 billions- all frothing like the disease of a mad dog.

It begins raining gold and the spirited pirates reach out their hands in the mighty quest.

"Where's the ax?" the engineer asks, grump-like to the fireman. "We need to stoke the fire."

Before they can look specific, an eye catches the form of the quivering, trembling maiden, snug tight on the steel tracks.

"Need we stop?! Where's the brakeman?"

"Agone to the land of dreams, the ultimate show of shows," says one.

They franticize. A life is about to be lost under their spinning metal.

The maiden watches as her death pours down on her. She wants one more surge of feeling before the big darkness spritis her away into the diffusion. "A slab of metal...an iron arm...."

The drunken aristocrats are solemnizing their humble beginnings. "Why just yesterday," one says- his hands gilt with the reining dust, "I was a picker in a nose facotry....I dreamt of this day, my day in golden lights...It seemed impossible as the noses passed on the rubber conveyer...it seemed wild and crazy to one day be responed in a community of my talented peers. Then I quite thinking about it...I took classess...I studiend all the scripts...my head grew hollow and I became frantic...it was the last day of desperation as I recall, that I suddenly was overcome with the urge to automize my mind...out came the typer and in went the paper. I was possessed by spirits beyond the vale of the reflected sun. Now, I is beyond the scripts...And naked women lie at my feet...Haha" And the man throws the gold dust in the air.

A fading shot of the scene from the rim of the valley. The settled scripters are entertaining the beasts of prey, with their lightning fast quick-draws. The smoke of the iron horse swirls in the background....a body is fomented on the iron tracks. Feathers and arrows dot the horizon.

The alien, HVHI sits in front of his charts and calculations. He wants his connections to be of a deeper, more subtle kind....He sends out a telephathic message.

Our Jane hears him. "Yes, I will come to your observatory," she signals back, not knowing where she's headed but headed just the same.

And soon she is gliding down his telescope with nothing between her and his huge eyes but a thick glass, which she passes through without a problem. After a solemn tea, they face each other to tlak. He wants to know where she is from and why she's been floating out in space.

Her voice is tired. "I died. I was hacked up on some distant speck and when my body was devoured by alligators I spirited up....God knows how long it's been. For all I know my dear planet is dead and vanished by now....it was getting pretty boring until I picked up your message. I guess it's always been a pretty dream of mine--to fly into space and encounter other beings.....But I can tell that you are just one of them...."

The alien looks hurt. "What do you mean?"

"Well, for one thing, you have no exotic shape---no antennae from the nose or anything like that. And you're pretty colorless to boot. In fact, you remind me of my old man."

"Well," HVHI enthuses,"I'm sure somewhere in the infinite there are other forms....If it is infinite...do you think it is?....Do you think it is infinite?"

Jane draws in a deep breath. "I...I don't know. I don't think about it much...All I know is that I've been floating around till time has evaporated....And the scenery is all different... yet all the same....Do you know what I mean?"

"You mean the arrangements of the constellations change, is that it?"

"Yeah, yeah, something like that...No....now...I can't quite say it...it's on the tip of my tongue you know but I can't explain it in so many words....But it's as if each little light pulses in its own life...And that life is fully infinite. It's a spiralling down into inviisble infinte. This is the feeling I get when I pass along the blackness and see all the shimmering lights. They're all pulsing out their infinitudes, each single one of them, all profoundly different...and the only thing the same about them is their infinity...the depth...but whether the whole thing, I mean the universe is infinite." And she shruge her shoulders.

And HVHI laughs. "Yes. I have the very same feeling. I have had it since I was a little boy. My confidence wavers sometimes but when it does I just look and by god, I'm a new man."

Man playing violin in street. The woman with a pack on the bus to Calgary spoke without saying a word. Strange. The in-taking of various "speech-forces" and how it insinutates in and out of the mind, images, a variety of abstractions. It operates at all levels. And then all the crude judgements on the poor soul!

The dwarf dances well in the city. The writer fights it in the middle of street, driven now by hope, now by pain, now by a glimpse of a truth or a pardise. The dwarf is driven by pride and power is the master of the dwarfish mediocrity treating it like a thermostat.

"How trapped I felt by the powers of the lower mind! It was as though it would hold me forever in a kind of taunting hell, replete with demons and burning sulphar, tv sets, the surge of falsity and untruth that feeds the air. It has the sense of the eternal about it."

"It is the fate of one who asks questions and opens ones heart to all possibilities. There is no redemption where it's not wanted."

"But, there must be both horrors and delights."

"Horrors of blinding abstractions culled from the oepration of machines which passifies the people. The elevation of bad elements to the seat of power. The tension between huge organizations and the simple human soul. The loss of possibilities. People trapped in history. Unseen power creating destinies. Delights are elsewhere."

"Deal then youth, with a reality stronger than you."

"Women have stories to tell and long into the night she will tell you her stories."

"Terrible, cruel world," he thinks. It is followed by a complex vision of power and organization. "Perhaps," he thinks again, "if the world is suddenly conscious of its injustice it would instantly transform. No? Good, I will write down my objections to the injustice and describe them as a sicentist would describe the arrogant bug.

Among the women are hunter's of women and he hears their plangent sound.

Big, round, and hairy come the hunters of women.

But then there is the professor and he gives the impression he has compassion for all living things but turns and harms the nearest, most innocent child.

Pleasure is the central organizing principle of youth. Choas either drives them out or kills them.

"Yes the love, the love
       Love that is lost
       Love that is gained;
       Eternity won, eternity lost
       Eternity won again." 

"Old guy! Keep your hands off the devlopment of that child!"

When youth has joy, age has worry.

Horrible spirits surround genius to warn it not to go forward.

There are the lovers disintegrating. When will they stop dreaming about the other? When will they forget the soft and rolling nights of unconscious love?

"Old guy! Defend yourself."

"The young forget that I, too, was young; young until it nearly killed me, young until I was accused for it, young until no one would look me in the eye. The longer you are young the harder it is. I try to draw it out of them quickly."

And young woman, bitter after the disillusionment of youth, what do you have to say for yourself?

"I had to protect secret dreams that I will never give up. My bitterness, as you call it, is the armor I wear to protect my secrets. Everyone knows that but you..."

It is a city square dominated by two buildings. A drama is played out. A young woman wants her lover but he is too busy; he has only money and sees her as a vascular exercise. She has caught up with him in her car. She gives him tax forms and credit cards, bills from the furniture store. He laughs and drives away, sad later, but that afternoon gleeful and happy.

It is the exact moment the flatulent businessman crosses the bridge for the third time in the day. He cusses. He drives an old, souless car with boxes piled in the back, his products to sell in the city.

The people haphazardly throw things onto the highway as if protesting the lack of permanency.

Oh clear the way for a man who knows everything. He has a notepad and looks like he has some revengeful tale up his sleeve. It is a pissant parade that carries the future on its back. There is an old man in an old hotel watching a puppet show. Games that treat us like children no longer delight us.

 Games that cannot compete
                   with the traffic of the daily meanderings.

A young man is a memory of wild and riotous times had in empty, venerable buildings surrounded by poisoned air. "Oh? Time move forward please. It is a block of stone pushed by the dead until it is upon us too. We see it approach and then, later, our shoulders are on the block and we are fastened to it with those who we have despised."

Oh city to re-moralize the writer! The blessings of streets that permit a mind to wheel and deal with itself in the overcast of Sunday afternoons! The smell of bitter grass while reading 11th century poets! Looking for the wonderful modern agora's where truth is spoken or, at least, the lies are laughed at. Berkeley is a pyramid that flips itself from head to base with a furtive grin.

Dreams come easily in the city of dreams. They are mad dreams of cities that never are, perfect people unstained by the world, a world of easy relations that become like glass for fear the ease will be disturbed. Dreams written and stated on street corners. Dreams of all the emotional effluvia one is trying to escape from; that which takes down rather than lifts up. That which pummels rather than strokes. Terrible dreams of women in the past who one has wronged. Terrible dreams of parents let down or involved in secret socieities tinged in darkness. Dreams of vast snakes choking the life out of one. Dreams of endless apartments next to water where there is love-making and fights on the ledge above the water. Dreams of cats coiled up in a nautilaus of steel like a shell at the beach.

"You've said it exactly," he was telling me and not soon enough, "Ideas want to cover their shame. But, when one has worked long and hard at presenting ideas without a cover and siply letting the shame mix in with the pleasure of having a potential audience....then something happens."

"Yes, it is a sad argument. But unfortunately, in this country at any rate, ideas are merely irritants. And if you want my personal opinion it's a good idea they are an irritant. We have an old peasant heart that believes the mind tricks itself more times than it fixes itself."

"Oh but you know walking around here is like wlaking around a hatchery for newlife; it's struggling plasma emerging in all the forms that can possibly occur. Forms not yet set by circusmtances or exigency and, oddly, completely formed by circumstance and exigency! It goes both ways, there is no up and down, top and bottom; no "heirarchy of bieng." One guy is a mumbling anguished possessed idiot, another man is the stoic professor working at the Rad Lab dreaming of some increment of change that whill throw the owrld in a wholly different direction. He perceives (once his experiment is complete) how those in the community will use it. Perhaps he has no general trust of the community but then there is the govternment after all. Just about every weird fantasy is lived out, yes, it just jets from them like a fine spray."

Remember that this is part of "the education of the writer." That is the guiding principle. That should guide the selection of material and the way in which you play with it.

12,305 words

And what were you going to do? Were you going to make yourself into the perfect refelction of a perfect desire so that all the weak would be envious? It's not the man who judges; the man as a judgment is only a dying ego. And were you going to read everything and become everything?

There are teachers of light, teachers of dark. The teachers from the lower self can arrive with a vengenace. All things conspire to keep the spirit from attaining recognition of itself.

Idealism is a radical desire in itself to break from the teachers of the dark. All the idealisms propel the eyes of the spirit upward before the long grind brings them back to the surface of things. The next level of disgust is a telling thing. But what if that idealism is now on the streets and can be found?

Kierkegaard believed that true love wants to make everything equal to itself. I would think before this happened a person would have to resolve remorse and so the emotions would be swift and deep.

It is odd that only indivdiauls can have idealism. An organization or movement that is idealistic putrifies quickly and is seen as another con game where the idealism is the hook.

Neither a person or a society can talk their way out of guilt. Lift the weight of it there and it will appear over here, shifting and slinking as it goes. Who determines the nature of guilt and the nature of guiltlessness usually rules a people.

The pontificator was saying, "We are approaching a global civilization and it is very painful for many people. Disorder is converging tino an order that must be gently guided. The belief that life is coming more and more conformist is a mistaken one; life concentrates itself at times in order to burst forth in greater variety and freedom."

And what does this television reveal but the underside of the soul? It is a general sort of darkness, an idiocy that paralyzes consciousness. It is the epitome of a bureacratized social order in which the creative spirit is squeezed through molds and the form of the lowest order is aposthotized. It doesn't matter what kind of moral judgemetns, criticism, information is exchanged.

Humility should teach this: No man is complete. That when he believes he is complete he is at the edge of an abyss. And that nations and civilizations can never be complete. This is why disillusion and cynicism will alwys be hateful qualities because these attitudes are the jealosy of presumed compelteness, a kind of absolute machinery through which a person is thrown and which robs him of his hope. If this happens the soul of a nation will sink down into choas and totalitarianism. The extraordinary qualities in this country should be celebrated and shouldn't be afraid to criticise the worst qualities.

"Doom. Yeah doom. I have to wonder why it is so prominent in me. Is it a syndrome perhaps? Since the childhood it has been so. A regular virus that comes from in and comes from the out. The parents problem you know? The assassinations, right? The threat of total annhiliation at the hands of crazy men, no? All compounded by thousnads of lesser events, ideas, and feelings swirling in the air at a special time. Ah, took away my sense of self and put dread at the heart of it. I hope it's not a fetish."

Fantasia of a Young Man: "I go to Australia and get involved in sheep farming and live on or near the beach. And tell everyone I'm involved in shark hunting."

"I'd left and returned home after five years with no word from me to friends or family. I come into a party where they are all there and then start to tell them of my travels. "I snuck into Russia," says I, "a stowaway on the frieghter in Murmansk. I got off and travelled down into Moscow with a Russian I had met. I went down the Nile River where there was difficulty with the boat and we were dumped into the River. When I got to shore I went into the jungle, found a tribe and run with this tribe for a time. Went through Tibet, walking, until I came to the Chinese border, found a Chinese commune and worked on it until the officials found me out at which time I was taken to the capital city.

There are what used to be called splendid days. Splendid days! A crux day or on e that can be bitten into and hole to the future seen. I could see myself writing for a new age group or a group therapy group and getting yelled out, stripped down and out by maniacs or true believers and me thinking all the time how I could manipuate them and at the end tell them exactly what is what and leave with a smile.

I laughed them off and thought about the lingering influence of the esoterica of pyschological ideas, of one who so intently observes himself that when I am reading it is a reflection of some deep turning of the mind. It's what I want to escape the most.

But isn't it true that sometimes one escape dead into oneself? And in doing background reading for this job I read an article by Herman Hesse about psychoanalysis and the artist. "whenever the artist views himself analyitically it does not remain hidden from him that among the weaknesses for which he suffers is a mistrust of his calling; a doubt of phantasy, or his voice within him which gives assent to the bourgois attitude and education which wants to evaluate all his activity as "only" a petty fiction...." And so one lives with this. And then it is real! It out among the cars and buildings with a life of its own. This is why the first victim is conscience and how the artist verges on a dangerous break with everything. So, one knows his feelings.