“The integrity of intimacy is different from kindredness or less,” he noted that day. “Yet, kindredness and less deserve to be felt and understood as well as heartfulness can. So,
heartfulness of intimacy is a reserve that sustains understanding, empathy, identification, the interpsychal potentials of individuation, and possible richness of interpersonal life.”

On confession, having lived so long. On, go you.

Autobiographical self understanding is entwined with conditions of stance and narrativity that have become integral to my daily life.

If I confess how (as if I could) in the early 1990s, non-sexual friendship with a developmental psychologist, a woman, 25 years my senior (which I couldn’t tell Janna) eclipsed my romantic engagement with Janna’s desire to marry me—which reminds me of
a very sexual affair I had with “my” professor of philosophical psychology in grad school, when I was 23 and she 45, which eclipsed my ex-wife’s desire that we remarry, I don’t know what effect that would have on your view of my laying in your lap, saying “I just want to talk and talk—” rather than endeavoring to remove your clothes (especially as you surrendered yourself to me more than once that night before and after you had to call your fiancé at 9 pm sharp). But I know this: I wanted you so bad, I had to be proud of myself the next day in the office. I later confessed to you I’d never forget your royal poise beside me on the bed, about how sexual freedom should live apart from entanglements of romance. Yeah, girl, and I love such conversation for its own sake, which I should have—and did—take to be your intent, since you said (earlier on the phone, on your way over) “no sex”; and I respected that.
I guess that phonal point was to place the contrary idea in my little head. Sorry, I
missed the message that I was supposed to overtake you, ravish you, and let you feel
no responsibility for being taken. I’ll also never forget our IM-ing about sexual control games. I won! (Then, I blew it with “Home and Garden.”)

I say that—all true—just to dramatize that conditions of stance and narrativity can get quite labyrinthine. What’s an appropriate order of narration, when lived time is Proustean even for we who lack the narrative compression to express It All? (Proust found elations of solitude in a room whose windows had been covered with cork boards so he wouldn’t be bothered by differences of night and day. He’d tape emendations to his pages like little strings of narrative spaghetti that his caretaker would transcribe into new versions of his pages. A computer word processor would have been orgasmic for him—after the challenge of comprehending this thing.)

Free play of mind is easily all irrelevant to friendships that must be based on “us” really. So, the older I am, the more that my so-called “self/[inter]personal” difference can be a surreal feature of laughing along with whatever happens, like you on your knees at my desk chair, leaning back against my arms holding you, as if you lived to make me happy, which I was indeed. [It was not a presexual scene, folks. It was, like, father-daughter.]

Much of fiction and autobiography—dramatic narrative of any kind (historiography, biography)—has to be involved with setting up for the reader what intimates may understand in letters with no detail.

“But they didn’t know she was his daughter.” “He didn’t know, but she did.” “They both knew.” “They weren’t related, of course. Why do you ask? She would not let him relate to her like a daughter.” “He knew his regret that he never had a daughter, and he would not let it all confuse his true love for her.” “They were both closet playwrights. One night she said ‘What if—’....” What if the Adamic folktale was so numinous it might have been received from a god? “What if archetypes get so boring, that we should stop talking about it and go to bed—or to an empty train car near midnight?”

[Cut!: back to preciousness....]

“The height of this is how auras of inwordness are integral to ‘the’ poem (be it prose or verse).” “You mean you wish you could be more subtle, so you theorize it, instead of learning how to live?” “No—No!”

“Discovering” Duino Elegies when I was 25 permanently disabled me.

No, I was disabled by my ex-wife getting an apartment with my best friend at the time, BP, who was lesbian. Actually, BP Came Out with me: We drove to Greenwich Village, spring 1970 (stayed at The Chelsea) because she couldn’t find a kindred in Lexington. Then, back in Lexington, we got apartments across from each other. My ex-wife returned (all this would make a very long story), and—and I moved to Berkeley, 1975. I wrote a 50 page entwinement of myself in Duino Elegies, then mailed it to them. They didn’t reply. They’ve been “married” 36 years.

Not that I had profound understanding of the poems, but the event symbolized numinous inspiration (despite them) wrought into my little soul that desperately wanted to express
a surreality of It All.

Even now, the event of that—Duino Elegies itself—stands for my wanting primordial change in my life.

How precious.

Next: section 4 of “intimacies.”