Yeah, men in sensory withdrawal often felt like “another body was slobbed across them.”
Well, it sure was.
So take a good look at what is sprawled through you. Does it have your best interests in mind?
“Fuck no.”
(Use them and lose them.)
December 23, 1996
(A boat in lake.) I was afraid it would turn over at high speed. Dreams less and less interesting.
December 24, 1996
With two boys. Jumped off cliff to show how one could float down. First jump-off-cliff dream in some time. Things are hotting up in L.O.D. No-breakfast dreams a few days ago.
So: How To Discover Past Lives.
Well, write one. Sure, I could write a batch, but easy:
Paris 1830 or so—Charles Baudelaire. Everything clear and sharp, the smell, the cats, the opium feel I know so well. I too had syphilis.
The horror. Je m’y connais—I know the sickness. It has come back.
The restaurants, cafés, the food, music—“jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres”—Verlaine, Rimbaud, they run into each other—Paris—pissoir.
“Simon, aimes-tu le bruit des pas, sur les feuilles mortes?”
And this from a pissoir wall:
“J’aime ces types vicieux, qu’ici montrent la bite.”
“I like the vicious types who show the cock here.”
Me too.
Back to Paris. So many pharmacie—
“Codethyline Houdé?”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
Verlaine: “an old faun in terra-cotta, foreseeing no doubt an unfortunate sequence (une suite mauvaise) to these hours that pass to the sound of tambourines.”
I was never a King. An advisor—a Machiavelli—yes, but not the Prince.
I always had contempt for them. They are stupid.
Scribe, Priest, advisor, artist, yes.
Back deep are horrors that I cannot yet face. So we start with the easy ones like Paris.
Et puis? Well, Soldiers of Fortune in 1920—and earlier—doesn’t hold water. Just film.
No smells, food, feeling. No gun really jumps in my hand. So where the—
December 26, 1996
The touchstone is a feeling of lyric joy.
A scene in a dream, intricate and large building, colors, water, two men talking. I find it in Conrad, in the banal reflections of Almayer on the unhealthy conditions on the east bank of the river.
I am there. The muddy river flows by—often the joy lasts only for a few seconds—
When people blather about “happiness,” like some permanent medium you can accrete around yourself and never want for anything again. The archetype swindler’s line.
“Greeve,” in The Heart of the Matter, lists three types can be happy:
(1) The Unaware. Don’t see. Won’t see—some insulated with $$$.
(2) The Coarse. Hard, evil, like Bugsy Siegel—looks pretty well satisfied with himself, and a horrid sight it is, the ugliness bursting through—
“Bugsy!”
Two 30-30s in swelled head. What a sorry hero type to emulate.
Go in any Chicago bar. The clerks, the other loutish jerks, all trying to look like mobsters. Show me what they want to be, and I will tell you who they are: wretched failures at wretched jobs. Always, of course, “unfairly treated” by superiors.
Especially postal workers. Just yesterday another disgruntled mail carrier killed the supervisor—two shots in the head—
(all Postal Supervisors [should be] armed at all times)
Saturday, December 28, 1997.
Vague dreams.
Well, tried some exercises to uncover past lives. A few nibbles—a voice, a bit petulant and put-upon says:
“Well, I’ve been instructed to show you this.”
And showed me very little.
The old Senseney house at Walton and Pershing. It was Mrs. Senseney who said of me:
“Stay away from it. It is a walking corpse.”
Well, it isn’t every corpse can walk. Hers can’t.
And this walker can still talk.
(Hers can’t, and this corpse can still walk.)
Oh well, not much light. I hope—about lives past or future or present to be found in this tawdry, snobbish, cruel—
How she could toy with a climbing Jewess:
“Oh, Mrs. Senseney, I had such fun at the Wallace party.”
“You were very fortunate, weren’t you.”
The dining room was always cold and dank. The bedroom where she slept, and crept and leapt on some poor Jewess—the stink of it was pure Death. That is, it had no stink at all.
Don’t know how I have such a clear picture of this room—and a blue kimono and blue coverlet, on untidy bed.
These are gloomy glimpses. Bits of vivid and, fortunately, vanishing details. The St. Louis bourgeois ….
“Well, I had a fine dinner, enjoyed it”—(after three stiff whiskeys)—“but I can’t help feeling a twinge of conscience when I think of all the millions of people don’t have enough to eat.” (Discreet belch)
Dr. Senseney was a terrible doctor. Nearly killed me on a tonsil operation, flushed with an uneventful removal of adenoids, which I kept in alcohol in a jar next to a 6-inch centipede from under a rock in New Mexico, Valley Ranch, and my horse was named Grant. A Strawberry Roan. And the band played on. And I came near bleeding to death from his bungling hands.
“I did all I could,” says he, and that was certainly no lie.
But I come of good stock and can survive the ineptitude of a socialite puff[ed]-shirt croaker (a sort of bladder with a face on it).
Cut his throat with my Scout knife and dragged him around the block behind my Red Bug three times.
“He molested me!” I sobbed.
And that was no lie, with his story about bringing a French fairy back to his digs. It was raining and cold:
“Then I knocked him into the gutter and slammed the door.”
Yes, he sure was molesting me.
“Why if any son of mine, or any friend of mine, turned that way, I’d kill him with my own hands.”
At this point I was molested, so I couldn’t contain myself, kicked him in his nuts, and was on him with the shiv and all he could do was let out a squawk like a stricken turkey.
What all day? And so much negative Karma.
December 29?—30?, 1996
I was locked out of my apartment. The janitor with a pass key was Cabell Hardy on the 3rd floor.
(Found his letter today and immediately answered. Should have done before, but I did not register. The dream nudged me—gracias Allah.)
A little restaurant with one waitress. Somehow my gun was checked with her, and there were these two cops there (like Mexico). One had a harelip and looked like Big Al in the Beat Hotel (nostalgia hits me—the Beaux