The Invader

I dreamed an old woman said she had been assigned to live in my apartment. It was a social services department and if I didn’t like it, and I didn’t, I could argue with them. She said it wasn’t very clean here (well, it isn’t) and she put things away where I couldn’t find them. I screamed at her and she screamed right back, and neither of us could sleep. She tried to open a coffee bar in one of the rooms (how did I get more rooms here?) and when the department social workers came to check up on her, they ignored my protests about the whole situation and reproached me for my “attitude.” My aunt tried to help out, but experience as she is with bureaucracies, she didn’t get anywhere.

One time I took some of the old woman’s milk for my coffee. It was easier than going out and buying more, and besides, who knew what she’d do while I was out? She might change the locks. I was sure she was just waiting to change the locks. The second time I borrowed milk, she noticed. She didn’t say anything, but she began to use my sugar. I was furious but I couldn’t very well object.

She got the papers of my writings all mixed up. She threw out trash that wasn’t ready to be thrown out yet. She objected to my leaving the windows open. Her friends came to visit and I couldn’t walk around naked any more.

One day I came home and she had died. I was delighted, but the department soon sent an old man to replace her. He accused me of having sex with strange men in my room. (Well, I was.) He also said I was a communist. I told him he was a fascist.

He screamed louder and more insistently than the old woman had, and he was much filthier. He used my toothbrush. I threw his pills in the toilet, hoping he’d have a coronary. He stank. I refused to wear clothes on hot days. He said he couldn’t have friends over. I said, “Good.” He was late with the rent check and the landlord threatened to throw me out. There was nothing I could do. He was here to stay.

He was Old Age.

Where were YOU the day Stravinsky died?

During my junior year in college – the one I did not spend merely torn between lusting not too successfully after women and wondering why I felt odd, unconscionable, never to be discussed or admitted things about men – make up your mind, Yohalem! – oh, my mind was made up; my mind was certain; I knew what I wanted - to want; it was just that my genitals did not always agree – I spent a lot of time smoking dope.

One of my dorm buds was Ken, loud, anarchic, thoughtful, ruminating behind a zany basso laugh copped from Howlin’ Wolf and honed with cheap cigarettes, also fond (so were we all) of concealing unsatisfied lust behind druggy philosophizing. He picked datura blossoms in New Jersey and we attempted that one day: unsatisfying. (Lakmé killed herself in Act III with this? I don’t think so.) Marijuana was better.

We were sitting one night in his room with some very effective weed, and he opened the little upper closet over his main closet (so were all rooms in Furnald Hall equipped), swung the door out, suspended a clear plastic cable from the catch, a heavy fishing weight from the cable. I stared and it spun and spun, a weight on a line. Sort of like the pendulum at the U.N. that, if you stare at it long enough, they say (whoever bothered to do this?), will change the direction of its arc in accordance with the spin of the planet – or the influence of the moon – or of the sun – or the Will of God – or some such principle. (A little green spaceman on Uranus eying us by scope, firing a gravity gun here and there, giggling insanely as we jump like electroshocked ants, drooling masticated matter from the corners of his mouth.)

And this fishing weight, this pendulum, Ken took between his fingers, making sure with his eyes that mine were fastened, fascinated, upon it (was it magic? Would it turn into a feathered bird? And sing and fly away?), and he let it go – and, you will hardly believe me – it swung! To and fro, side to side, on and on … slowly less and less (ah, friction! Trapped in eternal conflict with supernal Inertia! I feel a metaphorical Renaissance statue coming on – or a story by Italo Calvino, one of my great heroes at the time – Cosmicomics – they have just been reissued, by the way).

So back and forth and back and forth the dead weight ran on its all-but-invisible (occasionally sparkling in the shadows of an ill-lit snot-green Columbia dorm room) cable, coming ever so slowly to supreme, divine, rest. The earth, with barely an effort, held it fast then, a line from the center of the world to the lock on the little closet door above my head. The miracle of it all. Hit the bong again, bro. Saw a T-shirt the other day: “Bro-hemian Rhapsody.” That’s where we are.

His eyes on my eyes (spinning, whirling, whorling away I have no doubt), Ken lifted the cable again, drew it back, and let it go, grace of the arc, swoop and then up, symmetry and ration, all right with the world, music of the spheres (okay, arcs) (okay, maybe we do need some tunes, bro, actually…), and then, sublimely, all at rest, like Sophocles, the perfection of the knots unraveled and woven anew. The world without might go hang. Inside we had satori – and Jethro Tull – and another bowl.

Could the world be more perfect? I gazed, mesmerized. Rude Ken, for the moment gentle, looked kindly down upon me. He took the weighted cable in his wizardly hand, stared, all a-grin, into my eyes, and drew it this time, for a variation, back – towards himself – to let it fall east-west instead of north-south. A variation! An old thing made new! A wonder of the aeon! I smiled too, and waited for this marvel.

He let the cable go.

The dangling weight paused in the middle of the air.

Across the way, I awaited its coming (like a new Messiah, or at the least a new, improved, upgraded brand of Messiah).

It did not move.

It hung, frozen, in the air.

Gravity, rationality, inertia, the fourth force I forget what you call it – charisma? Animal magnetism? Zapitude? – stood still.

The pendulum was going nowhere, and would continue to go nowhere, while I, crosslegged on the carpet, struggled to keep my balance on the celestial dancefloor. The laws of the universe suspended! How could this be?

And then – and only then – sobering slightly, desperately, because elsewise I was going to choke and go under – my eyes sought the cable and followed it upwards to the fulcrum lock. When Ken pulled the taut cord to him, the open door above had moved too. It would have swung north to south, but it would not go east to west. When he let it go, apparently on the arc, in fact it was plumb, straight down from the handle. I was properly – utterly – magically – manically – gulled.

My shock – my wonder – my mortification – my ecstasy – were almost whelmed in his gusty, hideous, gorgeous, wolflike laugh. I did not know whether to be tickled or annoyed, cold sober or more stoned. It was a wonder and a revelation: the laws of the universe may not accord with your perceptions. Pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

All this came back to me this morning – God knows why – as something of a metaphor. The story, as one tells it. As Ken told it. While the teller speaks (or writes), while we allow ourselves to fall under the spell, we are not in our world (much less the real world, allowing for the sake of argument that there might be one beyond our individual perceptions); we are in the storyteller’s world, and for the sake of learning his or her secret, succumb without objection to this or that jiggle with our own notion of the real, allow the house of cards to be constructed before our dazzled eye and dwell in furnished splendor therein until the teller or some other external force huffs it down.

Thus if the teller says: You are in a shop, buying an egg, and the woman at the counter is a sheep – you will believe it. And if you walk towards the egg on the shelf where the sheep has set it, and the walk goes on for quite some yards, even over a stream, you will believe that. And if the egg when you reach it is as tall as you are, wears a waistcoat, and debates you on the meaning of words, you will believe that. Because you are in the story, and it’s a good story, and Lewis Carroll has told it awfully well. But mostly because you know – your mind (even unstoned) is trained to believe – that the effect, which is delicious, derives from this total surrender.

And the teller surrenders to – you hold the power to respond or not – to make him a conjuror or a fraud, based on his success, which you supply. One can tell tales in solitude, but it’s not the same. Yet every writer, to some extent, must work in solitude – and try the magic later.

So when the teller tells his tales, true or untrue, his magic quotient rises (and his self-satisfaction) the more as we believe, and our doubts are concealed so that he might remain a shaman. For he himself comes (I think) to believe the tales invented, or borrowed from other sources, embellished, ornamented, recast (as reality is always recast) as tales for telling, sagas, ballads, chronicles (not mere annals) before the listener who maintained (as perhaps he did not realize) the shaman's magic by pretending to enchantment – a mutual thrill.

Did he believe his own stories? I forgot to ask. It was enough for me that the pendulum continued to swing in the proper direction, or that if it stood still, he had a credible (if unscientific) explanation.

Oh yes, and Ken?

Ken dropped out. “My condolences,” I said, not knowing what to say. “I’m not sure those are in order,” he replied. Nor, in retrospect, am I.

But he still hung around Furnald Hall, and over Easter Vacation took off for Mexico with a freshman named John, in search of sights and booze and women (probably no dice) and weed – the Kerouac road trip we were all (thirty years too late) aspiring to. Their money was stolen in a bad weed deal, and they had to phone John’s wealthy parents for more to get home. They resolved to drive all night, top speed, and the highways of Mexico are not well lit. They hurtled around a mountain where some idiot had parked an unmarked, unlit van, engine trouble or out of gas or hiding from the federales, who knows now? a comedy of errors, except they both died instantly.

I learned about all this when I came upon a little group of John’s friends, sitting in the third floor hall, ominously quiet, loudly silent, oppressively mourning. Nobody spoke. My first thought (happily not aloud) was: They’re as devastated as I am by the news! I’d just read in the Times that Igor Stravinsky was dead.

Executive Suite - Stanwyck as Queen Bess

Watched Executive Suite, Robert Wise’s 1954 boardroom opus, which Oliver Stone on a commentary track (in which he mostly obsesses about American politics and his own films – I’ve only seen one of them, Wall Street, perhaps the most appropriate here – and misses several salient details of the movie, such as that Barbara Stanwyck feels suicidal when she looks out the window of the eponymous room in part because her father, the company’s founder, did commit suicide that way. (Explicitly mentioned in the dialogue.)

What Stone gets right is the rarity of a major picture with no music track, with so much clever dialogue that you don’t even notice this, with the dialogue explicating the many characters so well and concisely – so that you feel you know who each one is, down to the last contract walk-on player (the secretaries of the executives – all the execs are white males, of course, and all the secretaries white females, and at least one is sleeping with her boss). Stone marvels at the tight, clear, dialogue, the excellence of the leads acting with or against each other, and the climax like a western – but indoors – with William Holden challenging Fredric March at high noon.

Also, which also struck me, that the movie’s message, that factory work means more, has to mean more, than the dividends paid to investors (exactly the path that led us into the present global fiasco, bad news for us all even though I admit I’m enjoying reports that Dubai is turning into a ghost town as its money-grubbing immigrants flee the threat of debtors’ prison and the man-made isles off shore begin to sink, like Atlantis and az-Zahira) is precisely the message the 1950s ignored, with the result (Stone’s own mishigos? Or mine? Or Paul Krugman’s?) that this is where America has traveled: no strong native industries, everything off-shore owned and operated, the nation a seething cesspool of debt, Atlantic City for retirees or those who aspire to be, whose only hope is to aspire to be. Bush’s America – but also Ike’s, because no one else had the courage to stop it either. (Stone brings in Vietnam, I’m not sure how.) America of entitlement and insecurity, not America the brave. Sing louder and maybe the ghosts will stay out of our cemetery.

I hadn’t seen Executive Suite since they showed it to us in junior high school, in segments during lunch breaks. Don’t ask me what lesson they thought we’d be sophisticated enough to understand. We got that Shelley Winters was a trollop with a heart of brass, that June Allyson was the mom we wished we had (never mind what dad wished), that Barbara Stanwyck was a little long in the tooth to be boasting of her beauty. (Now I find her beautiful, especially at the moment that another actress could easily have made shrill, when she confirms her new faith in Holden with a simple, low, throaty, “Yes.”) (Curious fact: Stanwyck and Winters had both had affairs with Holden.)

I didn’t appreciate this film (and a whole lot of other things) at 14, I admit. I like it now, very much.

And when I fell asleep, I had a curious dream, in which Executive Suite was the template. Barbara Stanwyck was now Elizabeth the First, older, sardonic, shadowed by the unappeased ghost of her father; the dead man, Avery Bullard, was Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who died just after the victory over the Armada, the only man she ever loved (unless you count Tom Seymour when she was a kid). Gallant William Holden was Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, Leicester’s stepson and the favorite of the ’90s (until he attempted a coup in 1601, and she chopped his head off as he richly deserved). Calculating Fredric March was that saturnine little hunchback, Robert Cecil, Burleigh’s son. Aging, too honorable Walter Pidgeon was Lord Burleigh. Elegant Louis Calhern, out for the main chance, was Sir Walter Raleigh (or maybe Talbot). Sleazy Paul Douglas was Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford. (Okay, I’m being vicious because I despise the man for daring to claim to have written Shakespeare’s plays, a claim he himself never made – it’s being made for him.) June Allyson is Frances Walsingham, Lady Essex. Nina Foch is one of the queen’s confidante/handmaidens – Lady Northampton or Mary Sidney. Shelley Winters is Burleigh’s ward, Lady Oxford (or maybe she’s Lettice Knollys, Lady Leicester). And baseball playing Tim Considine, the kid, is of course James Stewart, waiting in the wings.

The boardroom and the proto-gothic décor fitted right in – though there would have been more windows in Elizabethan times, I fancy.

Dream: Amniotic Park

Visiting a foreign city - San Francisco perhaps - or Istanbul - or Stockholm - it had trams going through the parks - I took one - perhaps I arrived by cruise ship - and there was a splendid park, battlements and copses and formal gardens and a huge, palatial casino all lit up (rather resembling the Blue Mosque from my hotel roof), the grounds so laid out that there was a long, shallow lake in it, and I lay on a kind of raft that was somehow drawn constantly on a fixed path around the park - so I was rocking in a very pleasant warm bath (a very amniotic dream, eh?) while effortlessly moving through the park and looking at its sights and also at their reflection in the clouds above me, the lights of the carousel and a palatial casino like coronets of stars, and up into great spreading branches of old trees, and out into the ocean (as if from the hilltops of old Stamboul) at the passing liners and the distant hills - all this with such a sense of well-being I cannot tell you - all my anxieties drifted away (VERY amniotic, eh?) - and there were events, and I rose refreshed and strolled through a park filled with flowerbeds and tram tracks and into great teeming markets past sidewalk cafes into a city full of inviting squares and galleries. Yes, it was Istanbul, but somehow also Union Square.

A Dream of Las Vegas

No doubt it was the drugs taken to obviate the pain of yanking a muscle into spasm ten days ago (and the general lateness of the hour - I went to bed at 5am after writing six pages of fiction), but I found myself in a long and entirely pleasurable dream set in a huge pink chateau-like hotel-spa in Las Vegas, a green and hilly New England-like Las Vegas, so much more charming than the real city (which I have only visited once, and in August, for a witches' convention, and have no desire ever to visit again).

The room was vast and comfortable, the bed as well, and there were attractive persons wishing to share it with me. The décor of the establishment was imitative of European styles but in the very best of taste, a little gaudy but human. There were cozy nooks for intimate conversations and a kindly wait-staff serving margaritas. I never saw a slot machine or a card table, and until this moment did not remark how odd that was. (This shows you the sort of thing I am apt to like on a vacation.) There were fully-staged theater productions of South Pacific and Gypsy - the former starred the aging Mary Martin (when was this supposed to be taking place?) and we went backstage afterwards to get her autograph - she was utterly lovely about it. Somehow I encountered Megan Mullaly (Karen from Will & Grace), and she focused her voracious sexual needs on me, and somehow my face was full of pierced jewelry, which seems entirely anachronistic. (I did have an earring once, but my lobes are too thick for this to work.) While Megan and I were flirting up a storm and tossing back drink upon drink, lovely sunlight poured through the windows from well-sculpted lawns and woodsy landscapes. We sat on banquettes in a cheerful salon. (My bed in real life is placed to capture morning sun, of which there is a great deal today.) A couple of very well-built supporting stars of Megan's fluttered about us, and they too couldn't have been more friendly and interested - in both of us.

The whole show was moving - slowly but definitively - in the direction of a ten-hot-boys-and-Megan scene in my bedroom when I somehow emerged from slumber (the phone; wrong number) and found myself in a delicious, semi-sensuous, relaxed and content-with-life sort of mood. I'd so enjoyed the little thrill of nuzzling the hairs on the arms and neck of the young men and fending off Megan's flirtatious little hands, that I felt a lingering well-being. After many a decade, the orgasm has receded from anything like primacy in sex for me, and just having a hot body to nuzzle and to nuzzle me is all I could require. Good musicals around the corner and green landscapes out the window are also ... dreamy.

So I'm almost ready to hit the books - except my back is still unhappy and overstressed. Got a massage from Tim yesterday - he said, "I hate to be a broken record ... but have you been stretching?" Not enough, and he's quite right. I do envy him living in a cabin in the woods all through the winter, only hitting town now and then. I think my back and hips would me much happier if I'd lie on the floor with my legs over a chair every evening. Then maybe it wouldn't hurt to sit in front of the computer screen by the hour. Then maybe I could ride my bike, for which we are currently having (40s F) perfect weather.