Overnight reading: The New Oxford Anthology of Literary Anecdotes. Most of it surprisingly dull stuff; even Congreve, even Gore Vidal. About the only anecdotes that didn't bore were those of Robert Louis Stevenson (especially Henry Adams' malicious little vignette of Stevenson the crypto-Presbyterian moralist), Henry James, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Gertrude Stein, and of course the lovely little come-uppance given his local vicar by Edward FitzGerald. 'Twas satisfying to read of William James's humiliation in the horse-car to Boston (I've never liked Henry's brother, never found his writings in the least insightful or interesting--and I am happy to have all my instinctive aversion from the man and his works vindicated). The interest in it all is how similarly hatefully boring/appalling are the anecdotes of the first several hundred years of English literature, and the last hundred, of the latter of which the vile/insufferable Evelyn Waugh's confiscation and devouring of his starving children's bananas in front of them--vouchsafing them nary a bite--serves as a horrifying epitome.

9:35 a.m. Stopping by the main library to blog, on my way to play bridge with the millionairesses at the Central Union Church (as I do, or loyally try to do every Tuesday and Thursday morning). I have read overnight, and am now returning, Robert Bernard Martin's With Friends Possessed, a biography of Edward FitzGerald, another other self--the woods are full of us homophile misogynist multi-talented ADD-types, once you let your intuitive serendipity start looking them up in the card catalog (had to send to the reserve stacks for this one--and there it all was). Embarrassing similarities (if I could be embarrassed): Same taste in music (we both like, and dislike Carmen for the same reasons), same indifference to cultural norms, same distaste for female literature, same rude sense of absolute entitlement, same irritating hobbyhorse teasing, same inability to know when we're overstepping our bounds. It's like I've found my twin and he is dead. Other than that, there are differences; a big one being that 'Old Fitz,' as Robert Browning called him, was a lot less physically clean than I am, and for all his much broader erudition, far more insular and less well traveled. It must have been a stinky time, because none of his close contemporaries seem to've detected what I over the scores of years smell about him.

Finished Maguire's Son of a Witch this morning over coffee, having read it over the last couple of days. Then, later, here at the library, like I like to do with anything that captivates me, I googled it and read the reviews. Funny how it is, being the genius with adult ADD that I am: It always seems to me that my fellow human beings, even the ones who like the same things I do, have half their brains missing. Doesn't anybody recognize allegory? And the majority seem to think that the "lighter" version of Wicked represented by the Broadway musical (I shudder to think) is not a grotesque travesty. Other than that, I've been listening on my portable CD player to Die Schoeppfung--going over and over the depiction of 'chaos' at the beginning, at first trying to visualize the images of deep space from the Hubble telescope, then trying not to visualize them. If that ain't Brahma, what is?

But seriously, is my disease Adult ADD or Egotism? Or is it really a disease at all? It's something I frankly wonder about with Dr. C. When I told her the story of how I reacted to the senseless horror of the obscene U.S. military adventure in Viet Nam, Dr. C. herself volunteered, "Who was crazy then, you or your country?" Which takes me back to Les Opinions de Jerome Coignard. Who indeed?

For the first time really, explicitly, in my session with Dr. C. yesterday, I articulated as well as I ever have my own version of Natural Religion; i.e., those things which I do religiously. In the first place, as a devotee of my own cult, I define myself: A steward, or caretaker, of (1) my physical/psychic self, and of (2) the physical/psychic universe. As the caretaker of myself I have the obligation to maintain my health and well-being; to see that I am adequately fed and housed, that I take the medicines my body requires, that I practise the rules of hygiene that I have, by inclination and reflection, determined as necessary for me-in-particular (suitable exercize, flossing and brushing my teeth, one complete bath a day, always washing my butt when I poop). As a caretaker of the universe, I am governed by the principles of (1) appreciation and understanding of every kind of character of things living and non-living; of (2) reverence/deference/sustenance of sentient beings; these being, in order of deference and reverence: The sick and afflicted, the young, those things which are cute, those things which are capable of cuteness, the virtuously intelligent, the virtuous, the old (who are cute or in their second childhood), and lastly, everything and everbody else about which or whom I know too little to judge and may therefore suppose to be worthy of deference and reverence. This means that all deference and reverence, except normal civility, cease when if ever I do judge them unworthy--and if I can't just ignore them then normal civility ceases too.

At last I've got my blog back from the pestilential "improvements" of Google Corp. Now I have to sign in twice--but so be it. Blogspot is, after all, free. So what if I hung out in limbo for a month or so, wondering if I'd lost my blog forever.

'Tanyrate, back to our backass approach to the Anima, of Jungian ill fame. That's what I've been worrying at: This bland, heterosexist damned presumption that Jung and his ilk have laid on us, with no evidence other than their precious feeling that it must be so, that all men, like themselves, are psychically half female, and that women must therefore be possessed of a similar and opposite Animus. Not that anybody but the most doctrinaire Jungians have ever really accepted the silly-ass theory in its entirety; but rather unconsciously than consciously it has seeped into the corpus mentis publicae, sustaining the delusions of transsexuals and that unfortunate class of non-men whom I call pussy-men, of whom Maury Povich and Tom Cruise are signal, sickening examples.

Talking today with my Thai psy, Dr. Chanida, explaining to her what I'm using these life-sustaining amphetamines for--outlining to her my course of studies (Vedanta, brain sex differences, etc.,)--she said, "Well, that's interesting, but not very practical. How is this going to get you out of the homeless shelter?" I was rather taken aback, not having understood how much of a priority that was for her. So I guess I have to prosecute my plan to get into a Masters/Phd. program at the university. I am, after all, a fairly recent graduate, with a Magna cum Laude B.A. in French and Italian, and a still glistening Phi Beta Kappa award. So I guess I should.

I quit smoking twenty-one years ago at the age of forty-three, having smoked a pack a day since I was fifteen. There were two benefits to my addiction: (1) the experience of quitting and (2) the revelation, in the glozing, lying tenacity of Lady Nicotine, of the only female characteristics that I have ever known in myself. Otherwise I'm all boy and always have been. So far, of course, as I can tell. I can only relate to what other men--most men that I know--have said, that they have impression that some part of themself is female. What exactly that impression is, of course--it having to do with the inherently mysterious female--they cannot exactly say. But they say it, and I believe them, having, fortunately, had the experience within myself of Lady Nicotine's controlling a part of my brain. Otherwise I should have said that they were just imagining it.

Who dares misery love,
And hug the form of death,
Dance in destruction's dance
To him the Mother comes.

Vivekananda



Which, if you mean by "misery" the misery of innocents, and by "Mother" your delight in and essential indifference to it, is just what the comte de Sade meant (insofar as meant anything at all). The perfection, of what Jesus said some would be better hanged with millstones and drowned in the depths of the sea for, is waxing sentimental about it. What an invitation to the cheapest and easiest sort of self-congratulation is that "dares"! And of course the principle invoked here is feminine. Feminine as in soap operas and "romance" novels, shit and tears, blood and semen.

"No magic potion" Dr. Chanida said; and yet it has been: The past several days I've been taking the recommended maximum dosage of amphetamine/dextroamphetamine, and reading deeply, and deeply reflecting: How did Vivekananda, who started out, as Ramakrishna's favorite disciple, utterly poo-pooing the very notion of the "goddess Kali," come eventually to be her chief devotee in earth?--even writing poems in the last years of his life celebrating her horrible/terrible/miserific aspect. What?! I've found it so unsettling/perplexing that I've checked out and am reading books on the subject of Kali and "the feminine in religion." Not that I believe there is such a thing, or ever could be, or that I could or would want to understand it if there were. Still not mentioned here has been the story of how I insulted the goddess in her very stronghold (Perugia, Umbria, Italy), saying twice before witnesses "La Vergine e' una putana," and had my ring-finger broken twice in the same place by her--Walked around in a cast with wires sticking out of my finger for six weeks--and never for a minute doubted that the Virgin had done it, just to show me. Even so, still, in my heart I despise and defy her: "Kali, Mary, or Coatlicue" I call her, and "patron saint of the comte de Sade--ho hum. So fucking what."