| KL |
| love and gravity Gary |
November 28, 2020 |
In retrospect—which is always retrojective; that is, a mix of creativity and remembrance which composes a past as recollected—I left for Berkeley, late 1974, searching for “J. R. with Roses” (the caption under my reproduction of “Jacqueline with Flowers” on the cover of the 8x11 black hardbound sketchbook). The only relevance of Linda anymore is symbolic of those years “with” her—which led to using Paul Ness to make my move to Berkeley easier, because he had transferred from Cal State Northridge. So, Gary would bolt from Lexington to find the Unknown Woman, the Original Sister, the primordial complement of Gemini—and he would find her thrice: once and most of all (1975), now gone forever (2010); once and passively married to someone else (2008), because…well, Terese is alive east of the Berkeley hills in Walnut Creek; and once, still unmet (at Johns Hopkins), who replied to his praise of her literary-theoretical work by writing, in part, that she became teary eyed by his appreciation. But I’m getting ahead of things… 1974: He would bolt from Lexington—but not before a friend, Ann, caused him to become a teacher at her experimental K-6 grade school and seduced him into living with her by the Kentucky River. That’s a wild story—which was fated to end quickly because the road trip was manifest destiny, not to be confounded by a single mother needing a household helpmate. Also, friends from Gainesville had moved to Sacramento, giving Gary an easy place to stay until he found an apartment in Berkeley, affordable with shared rent. (Paul was eager to get out of his rooming house.) By the way, Paul’s 1974 plan to do that was the only reason Gary stayed in correspondence with him in Lexington. (Well, I was fascinated by Paul’s fascination with me, evidently created by Linda during her slumming in L.A.) Believe it or not, the correspondence was never about Linda. And when I did share an apartment with him for six months (Jan. through June, 1975), talk of Linda was not permitted by me. (By the way, I really did relieve Paul of his nude photos of Linda, which he never suspected I did, when he couldn’t remember where he put them, because he never knew I saw where he kept his little treasure.) Soon after we moved into the two bedroom apartment, Paul had a first date with a woman from one of his philosophy classes, whom I saw briefly when she came by. A day-or-so later, she and I accidently crossed paths, and began getting together, which Paul never knew. She didn’t do a second date with Paul. (Their only one had been non-sexual. Paul was very much the gentleman—rather boring, she felt.) Paul didn’t know why she didn’t want a second date, but he shrugged it off. Meanwhile, she—who looked like a blonde Virginia Woolf—was obsessed with her Literary studies. I found my “J. R.”! (I’ll continue to call her J.R. below because the image suits her skewed and intense Literary sensibility, which I’ll discuss some other day.) We became so involved, she wasn’t doing all of her Senior papers, which was a crisis, because she was aiming for grad school in the UC English Department. So, I did her paper on Kant, which got her an ‘A’. (Paul never knew we were acquainted, let alone that we planned to live togeither.) Soon after, I fled back to Lexington (giving no notice to Paul; I left a note for him in the middle of the night on my bedroom floor) to ship all my stuff to Berkeley. Correspond-ence between J. R. and I—Berkeley to Lexington—was passionately idyllic: “arguing” about Literary readings and conceptual things. I was high on poetic thinking. She was high on Literary Wit (a keynote of Romantic era critical sensibility). We were meant for each other—as truly as can be—she, a luminously misfit transient on her way to being a philosophical Professor of English, and me, an inspired misfit transient already halfway toward being a literary Professor of Philosophy (as soon as I engineered transfer of my Gainesville credits to UC, Davis, because there was no way that a backwater University of Florida transcript would get me into UC Berkeley). J.R. didn’t know that UC policy state wide was to not admit its former undergraduate majors into the same department for graduate work, because graduate students should expand their horizons with new mentors. So, she wasn’t accepted to UC Berkeley. But she was accepted to UCLA. Would I move to L.A.? My life was all about studying in Berkeley. Her life was all about studying in Berkeley. (She grew up in San Francisco.) She hated living in L.A. and needed me to be there with her. I couldn’t afford to move yet. I broke her heart, evidently, by deciding I wouldn’t move to L.A. soon. Besides, we could keep our relationship alive in the meantime? Months passed. Intense letters became friendly letters, as she began her new program. Letters became update notes. May of ’76, I wrote that I couldn’t move back west for many months. I didn’t get a reply. Of course, she was making a life there, very busy with studies, meeting lots of people. I moved back to Berkeley, spring of ’77, which has been permanent. Some years later, I saw her unseen in Cody’s Books, not surprising, since she would visit her parents in S.F., and Cody's was the best bookstore imaginable. Watching her browse was uncanny, as if I was invisible, watching a scene in a movie. I couldn’t bear to let her know I was there. Why should she care? It woudn’t be pleasant for either of us. I knew she was married. I knew she was an Assistant Professor at Harvard. But she looked unhappy. Some years after that, I learned that she didn’t get tenure, divorced, and moved to Wayne State U. in Detroit, where she stayed and remarried. Spring of 2010, six months after Janna’s death, I thought of J.R. and discovered that an anthology of essays honoring her mentor at UCLA, which she edited, was republished. That mentor, Joseph Riddel, was a well-known Literary-theoretical voice during the years when expertise in that was a ticket to a tenured academic career. I gradually realized that she seemed to have remained the intense, skewed sensibility I’d been in love with, 35 years earlier, as if she hadn’t aged—surely, my need for a fantasy bond. I gradually realized that longing for J.R. was part of the attraction of Terese (truly qwerky Literature student, aged 25 when I met her, the same age as J.R., when I knew her). I wrote to J.R. about her work, as if I was merely a stranger interested in her work. But at the end, I vainly signed with the affectionately silly name she sometimes called me when we were a qwerky pair in Berkeley. She didn't reply. But the faintest curiosity would have disclosed online that my intense skews of writing had been voluminous, there for anyone to notice. Did she? In retrospect, the prospect feels overwhelming, because I didn’t know, 2010, that she was mourning the death of her husband, and she didn’t know I was mourning the death of Janna. I write as if tragedy escapes me, only because I’ve had enough of it in my life to easily turn stunning uncanniness into narrative play. I can be like Maude, in screwy “Harold & Maude,” who survived the Holocaust and loves each day as if having one more calls for giving thanks. I have too much imagination, I sometimes feel: I can imagine how my playfulness figured into Janna’s “failure” to let me know her suffering. Was she close to the edge, when I sent a playful email to her that turned out to be a few days before she killed herself? Did I fail to be sensitive enough? She, the ever-competent therapist, failed to let me know? Why didn’t J.R. reply? Today, I happened across a deleted part of a blog posting, a part I archived for some future use: Standing with me virtually one night, early August, 2012, was every girl and woman I’d stupidly lost: Starry night on my evening walk. I stood on the hill overlooking the lights-sprinkled city across the bay, while I'm drawn more by the stars.Several weeks later, the day that Terese returned from maternity leave, I bolted from work, early afternoon. And never went back. Besides, I’d been planning for months to retire soon, because I could afford it easily. That deleted posting part happens to be adjacent to another archival note, from mid-April, 2016: “My Tinker Creek is…Strawberry Creek on campus.” I walk to the same spot by the creek every afternoon. Several of the squirrels remember me, and have had to be dis-habituated from fearlessly climbing up on my pants leg for almonds in my crinkly Zip-loc bag whose sound draws them. I can tell you things about squirrel intelligence that would surprise zoologists who lack the patience of a Jane Goodall. They’re like little humans trapped in a body that can’t speak, but can whip through branches between trees with speed almost too fastly zig-zagging to visually track. I realized, several days ago, that, had the dinosaurs survived, humans would have evolved anyway from the squirrel-like beings we evolved from, though hominids would have had more than alligators, crocodiles, and vultures to deal with....Perhaps the easy availability of such massive food would have accelerated brain evolution, such that we’d look like the big-headed extraterrestrials of science fiction... Too much imagination. Anyway, the archived posting and creek note are also with the following, from September, 2013: A delicate Japanese aesthetic—why else live, but to be so alive: the aesthetic heart of Terese: “You left behind all that worry about the State of the World, progressivity, etc., and withdrew into your own highlands of comprehensive comprehensibility, sharing some, regardless of whether or not anyone noticed.”And from April, 2017, archived there, too (why some things get grouped together, I forget)—which, I should say, is relative to a love of life that is neverending, but whose aging knows its fate: The river in gravity draws me from heights to depths, peaks of life to die. Yet, here we are, in the meantime standing, disentropic stars of life, sustaining, flourishing, enstancing, enframing life, a self-designing dance of chances, say: We trope, therefore It gives. |
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