Like Noam Chomsky says (or seems to say), there is nearly always deeper meaning in what we say than we realize: So, when I said the "containment and refection of a beast," as I did earlier today in my blog about my dream yesterday of the Domus Aurea, I felt it to be the word exact, precise and not pedantic, but I did not explicitly know that definition 3.a. of "refection" is: "feeding [an animal its own] feces." I did not know that such a practise existed; but obviously my unconscious knows more about animal husbandry than I do.

Reading the last three or four days: collections of ghost and vampire stories. Not because I in any way believe in any of it, but because they're just so doggoned entertaining. Yestereve, having taken a sort of super-valium to calm the fury that had possessed me at one of my sleeping companions' on the lanai's playing there his goddamned boom-box ("Don't you like the Beatles, Bro'?"), I was draggy and snappish all day yesterday, and prone to unrestful little fits of narcolepsy. So it happened that in the long hour before lunch I fell asleep for a few minutes over The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories and had a dream--a long dream for so short a while: I was in Rome, walking through the newly excavated Domus Aurea of Nero's, as in fact I did do on my first visit to Rome six years ago. Everything was just as it was then: long narrow apartments and galleries lit by miners' lamps; and at first I felt what I had felt then, a kind of puzzlement at the mingled narrowness and vastness of the structure, without a twinge of anxiety about it. Then I began to feel very much alone (which I was definitely not on my first visit), and the oddity of it all somehow changed to horror at what had begun to seem less like a "house" in which persons might have dwelt than a labyrinth obviously designed for the containment and refection of a beast. I remembered suddenly then the popular myth (among the peasantry) which was believed until the end of the Middle Ages, that Nero had not died and would return....I woke with a start, saying to myself, "So that's why they buried it!"

Saw the good Doctor today, who gave me scrips for anti-biotics and inhalants (for asthma), as well as refills on my blood-pressure meds, which are working: As of this morning the reading was 124/71. I've been thinking too about my "moral" blood-pressure. Be it said--right off--that I am, yes, prone to irascibility, flying off the handle, losing my temper--even of permitting myself to do so (which is damned near unforgivable, I do realize). On the other hand, when I consider the rest of my character, I'm nothing so culpable: (1) I am decidedly non-covetous, envious, or jealous; and as a corollary, I am (2) habitually generous (with those I deem worthy of my benefaction), seldom or never thinking of recompense, nor even of the good karma I'm accruing. (3) I am never malicious, either in doing ill or in contemplating it. (4) I am kind; never (5) rejoicing in my worst enemies' affliction, nor ever (6) viewing with equanimity the afflictions of others.

And the proof of all this is that it utterly bores me to say so. Nothing is so insipid, so dully commonplace, as one's own virtues. I could go on, talking about my scrupulosity, my devotion to truth, my habitual honesty and fairness, my reverence towards affliction, my veneration of the young and of pure character in all beings both sentient and non-sentient. I could state truthfully that I never pick wild flowers and try to avoid even killing bugs. But whom would any of that interest? Much more interesting, I think, is that I distinguish, or try to distinguish, between different kinds of bugs: Mosquitos, wasps, flies, lice, cockroaches, bedbugs, and things which are too small to tell what they are, which are crawling on me, I kill with a glad heart, in as great a number as I can, with whatever means (swatters, poisonous sprays, powders, and ointments) I have at hand or can procure. I try never to kill bees or spiders, because of the benign nature of the former and the (to me) noticeable intelligence of the latter--I have played "gotcha" games with spiders as instinct with madcap charm and espieglerie as kittens. And, for the same reason that I do not eat kittens, I do not eat squids or octopuses: Things which are cute (i.e., which partake of the Spirit of the Rococo), or which are capable of cuteness, to me, are sacred.

Having delivered myself of the foregoing, I went into the lanai (interior courtyard) of the library to sit and listen to the new arrivals of baroque musique and to read criticism and commentaries on Mark Twain, E. Dickinson, and E.A. Poe--and was scarce adjusted in the tomb, when Douglas joined me, whom I could scarcely forbear to talk to, and then John, who rose to the bait, of my saying that I only truly, of all Debussy's works, love the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, "because it is diatonic," like a Pisces rocketfish: "You mean you make the whole world revolve around--not just you, but around--your [parochial] likes and dislikes!" "Well, yes," I said maddeningly, "--But look [I showed him the menu on the back of my latest CD, with the names of Alessandro Scarlatti, Locatelli, Geminani, Vivaldi, Albinoni]: Every single one of these works is a masterpiece. I haven't heard them all, and I know that. And I know, even without hearing them, that every single one of these composers has his own distinctive, individual voice. And the music they all have written, you'll notice, is diatonic. And at the same time that this music was being written, the greatest violins ever made [the Guernariuses and the Stradivariuses the like of which the world has never seen since] were being made to play them on. How do you suppose that all this wonderful music and all these wonderful musical instruments happen to have been made at the same time?"

Finished now with The Recognition of Emily Dickinson. I don't know what I expected--maybe the recognition that I accord her: America's one and only great lyric poet. That, of course, is not what any of the critics and appreciators say; but I say it. I will go further: There are three immortal geniuses in American literature: Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Emily Dickinson. There are other geniuses, some of them very good (Henry James, Kurt Vonnegut, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, to name but four others), but immortality (in the sense of inexhaustible profundity, charm, and wit) belongs to those three alone. Contrarily, I very much dislike the formless maunderings of Walt Whitman (though--with reservations--I like the man), and the pathetic/sadistic, mannered nihilism of Hemingway nauseates me. What more is there to say?

Reading now: The Recognition of Emily Dickinson, which I ordered from one of the branch libraries on another island, along with CD's from several other islands: the Mozart horn concertos, wonderful late Vivaldi violin concertos, and, best of all, a dozen (count 'em) Albinoni Concerti a cinque--I thrill, I palpitate, I get gooseflesh, my eyes sting with happy-tears, listening-- remembering Venice, il basilico di san Marco, the engravings I have seen of concerts there of musica del maestro "dilettante di musica."

On my way here (the main library) this evening, cutting through the corner of the Iolani Palace grounds, I was hailed by Melchior (my "Shamaan"), who fed me sweet rolls and cherry-Pepsies, and told me of his plans to pray sincerely for George Bush, until God, seeing the hardness of his heart, destroys him. And then as I said, "Well, what you call praying for people I think I call believing that the naked truth about them will come out," I saw Rembo coming down the walk from the other direction. Rembo was full of bitter truth about the farting, smirking moron-in-chief, and concluded, "Those American soldiers who've died in Iraq have only been helping Bush and friends to murder Iraqi civilians and steal their oil." And when I turned around, Melchior had vanished. What scares me almost is that all my friends agree with me.

Dang. Coming sick today. In the way peculiar to me, apparently: Wherever I touch myself, and in all my joints, I feel an ache; most (subjectively) noticeable when I push down on the hair of my head with the flat of my hand, and the roots tingle and throb. Of course I also have a sharp, cutting, "productive" cough; but it's this business of having achy hair that makes me unique, so far as I know. Who knows what else about me is totally unlike the rest of the world? But also, something that no other man apparently has ever experienced, is that, whenever I unexpectedly hear or read about something gruesome or painful (whether the subject be an animal or a human), my balls ache, almost like I'd been kicked in them. I've asked other men if they don't feel something like it--and no one has yet said he feels anything like it. So here I am again, way out here in lonely-onlyland. I wonder sometimes if I'm human.

Finally today slogged through to the end of the first volume of Indo-tibetan Buddhism, which end being a synopsis and exemplum of the Hevajra Tantra--which is mostly, and greatly to my bitter disgust and scandalization, about Goddesses (or their representative, stand-in dakinis), nasty smelly lubricious ones. And the assumption--the damned presumption--is that any man who seeks enlightenment is jolly well just going to have to overcome his nauseated revulsion from them and get into squeezing their titties and licking their clitorides--even eating their shit and drinking their piss, and having three-ways with them and his guru--or miss out on the Supreme Wisdom that lies like a drop of his guru's jizz in their cunts. Like I once told a Lama Rinpoche's female translator and evident "assistant," "To get the taste out of my mouth, of your intrusive twat-heterosexuality, I'm going to have to watch a lot of male homosexual pornographic movies."

Reading Thoreau on the subject, for all his uneasiness when he talks about heterosexual love--there are a couple of unfortunate, ill-advised essays of his about it--is not much good. Obviously, though he can't just come out and say it, the two loves of his life were his brother John and Ellen Sewall's little brother, Edmund. Although, his quivery quatrains to the eleven-year-old Master Sewall pretty much (such was the innocence of the times) do say it.

Catching the bus in Chinatown this morning to come here to the Kaimuki library (open Sundays, even on this Fathers' Day) to blog, I sat up front in the first available seat next to a slender, ratty gentleman about my own age, with most of his front teeth missing, and the few that remained badly decayed. Nor, as I recall, was he particularly clean. So, ignoring him, I fished a recently acquired copy of a Suzuki comparison between Meister Eckhardt and Mahayana Buddhism out of my back pocket and started reading. "That's a very good book," said my seatmate.
"yes," I said, somewhat startled, "I just found it in a box of books last night that had been donated to the homeless shelter."
"You were lucky!"
"I think so. I like Meister Eckhardt. Do you like him too?"
"Did you say what's my name?"
"No. But what is it?"
"My name?"
"Yes, what's your name?"
"Pietro."
"Pietro? Parli italiano?"
"Si, parlo italiano io. E tu, come parli italiano?"
"Ho studiato in Italia."
And so it went, for three or four minutes, a feast of reason and flow of courtesies, till Pietro got off the bus downtown--the memory of which, as I write, stings my eyes with happy, nostalgic tears. There is nothing ironic about compliments in Italian; they go right to the heart.

Got an email from Gloria a couple of days ago, saying Ham has prostate cancer. I emailed her immediately back saying how sorry I was, trying to give her hope by telling her how she could help Ham not to try to "tough it out." It was all I could think to say. Then this morning, having got a brave, frank reply from her, I 'mailed her again, making no direct reference to Ham's affliction, but telling her in some detail of the constrictive horrors of existence in the "criminal shelter," and expressing hope that the amusement she must feel at hearing of my suffering might divert her for a little from her own "sorrows and tribulations." Well, I try to be tactful, and not to add-to the sufferings of others.

Reading now more Thoreau criticism, holding to my own infallible Gaydar-intuition, I note that the second contemporary (April 2, 1849) anonymous (pseudonymously styled "Timothy Thorough") criticism of Walden cited, contains the following female point of view (purportedly "Mrs. Thorough's"):

"...The young man is either a whimsy or else a good-for-nothing, selfish, crab-like sort of a chap, who tries to shirk the duties whose hearty and honest discharge is the only thing that entitles a man to be regarded as a good example....Nobody has a right to live for himself alone, away from the interests, the affections, and the sufferings of his kind. Such a way of going on...is not living, but a cold and snailish kind of existence, which is both infernal and internally stupid."

Need I say more?

Doubtless I don't need, but on October 21st, 1854 another review of Walden was published in the Boston Atlas, from which I excerpt the following:

..."He differs from his brother moralizers simply in this:--they think and speak of mankind as being themselves units of the many, participators in the heritage over which they mourn:--he fondly deems himself emancipated from this thraldom, and looks upon them as an inferior tribe....It is difficult to understand that a mother had ever clasped this hermit to her breast; that a sister had ever imprinted on his lips a tender kiss...[He has] written a volume treating expressly of human life, which exhibits..an utter dearth of all the kindly, generous feelings of our nature....Did he never people that bare hovel, in imagination, with a loving and beloved wife...or did he imagine that to know what life is he must ignore its origin?...He has much to say to men, and tells them bitter truths; but there is not one recognition of the presence on this earth of woman. There is not a word of... pure, constant, suffering woman's love...."

And women wonder why men despise them.

Peculiar how this blog, the blogging of it, pacifies me and gives me purpose. I put myself to sleep nights at the homeless shelter, reviewing in my mind what I have blogged for the day, planning what I shall blog on the morrow, and when I wake momentarily to pee in the hour of the wolf it puts me back to sleep even faster than visualizing the Taj Mahal (my usual quiet-mantra).

Bridged today at the Central Union Church, from 10:00 till 3:00, with Mildred, Eugene, and Wilfred. Jolly we were, forgetting all time and all our cares.

But then, actually having begun to the Tibetan Book of Great Liberation, I found it made ever so much more sense without the introductions (so long, of course, as I assiduously read all the footnotes): clear as a bell; nothing mysterious or doubtful. But when then I went back and tried to slog through Jung's pre-digestion of it, it turned to mud. Hah.

Now, I do have something to add to Thoreauvian criticism. Say it loud, say it proud: The reason James Russell Lowell and Robert Louis Stevenson had their heads so far up their butts when they tried to deal with Thoreau (in a manner largely unconscious even to their uneasy, searching malice) is that: They were crude, half-consciously doctrinaire heterosexuals, resentfully perplexed and piqued by Thoreau's pure individualist male homosexual ethos and esthetic, in which the center of their universe (their relationship with women--their animae, so to speak) is completely absent, never considered, utterly disregarded, implicitly scorned. Makes 'em waspish and queasy.

Reading: (on-going) Indo-Tibetan Buddhism; (since yesterday) The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Wendell Glick; The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, edited by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, with a (priceless, fatuous, totally humbuggous--I know without having read it [because any poop-head who could postulate an anima in men and an animus in women, is, by definition, a priceless, fatuous, humbug]--commentary by Carl Gustav Jung, which takes up half the damned book--Jesus fucking Christ!). The Cup of my Disgust at the devolution of Buddhism into the nasty, cannibalistic, piss-drinking, shit-eating, mother-fucking, obscurantist heterosexual mire of Tibetan Tantrism, which was nearly full (despite my best efforts to suspend judgement and disbelief), utterly slopped over when I started re-reading the pure and noble, better-than-Tathagatan, utterly clean, perfect, gay, individualist, pantheist ethical philosophy of the Sage of Walden Pond. Who the hell needs Buddha? Not I.

Axioms that I adhere to:

1. Nothing is to be learnt from insanity (e.g., Freud, de Sade, Jung, Ann Coulter, M. B. Eddy)

2. Never leave any baby in it when you throw out the bath.

3. If a thing is funny, it's true.

4. The only things wrong with Jews, Negroes, and the Irish are their music and their culture.

5. There are two kinds of people: Those who dread being a public nuisance, and those who don't.

6. The other two kinds of people are: Those who dread making anybody else a captive audience, and those who don't dread it.

7. If anybody asks you if you think they're crazy, say no--They're crazy.

8. People who love anchovies (cilantro, Broadway musicals) can't imagine why anybody would hate them.

9. Always believe the evidence of your senses.

10. Always trust the judgement of your sensibilities.

I do have a few friends at the homeless shelter actually, and they sustain me: One, John, understands music; one, Jim, is Tibettan Buddhist; one, another Douglas, is gay; one, Rembo, is a warm-hearted Samoan ex-con; one, Ben, is a light-hearted Chippewa Indian with a passion for movies; one, Timothy, is a half-Italian, young (thirty-something) San Franciscan, literate, well-read, polite and fair-spoken as only the natives of San Francisco are polite, urbane, masters of the Standard American Dialect of English--music to my ears. I have enemies too, of course--almost as many as I have friends, now't I think of it--but I don't think about them much, and certainly don't worry about them; although, as occasion prompts, I am sometimes amused or intrigued by their awful wickedness.

So talking with Timothy, like I like to do (How is it that denizens of The City know how to converse, to talk [oh so correctly, oh so clearly] about things [of general interest], while other Americans talk only of themselves?), during and after lunch, about the signature aspect of the murders of Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, and John Kennedy Junior, and about the signature aspect of Bill Clinton's dirty, and dirtying, little massacre of the civilian population of Serbia. He understood immediately. And when I said, a propos of the so-called Security Agencies of the United States, "The essence of tyanny is having a secret budget," his fine Italian eyes flashed with startled wrath.

Reading lately: Indo-Tibettan Buddhism; the which--as much as Bill Weaver loved it, could quote and expound on the Tantras thereof--is still weirdly grotesque to me. I keep trying though, suspending judgement, trying to imagine what it could mean. And listening, whenever I find a quiet time and space that I can hear it in, to: Corelli trio sonatas; Handel concerti grossi; Mozart clarinet concerto and symphony No. 29 in A, Mass in C Minor; Cecilia Bartoli singing Rossini (wow!). I don't know if these heavenly delights infuse and transform me--but, without my being the least affected, without my even being aware that I am observed (idly chatting and chaffing with my friends), first acquaintances and complete strangers keep coming up to me and asking me if I am not a professor of English, for I certainly sound and act like it. So I must. But it always catches me by surprise and nonplusses me. I had much rather be thought a retired sea captain.

So we arrive, as it were, by the backdoor, at some of my fundamental notions of self. One of the things I noticed when I went mind-diving with David Hume in search of causes--and not finding any--was that, when I "entered most deeply into myself," "I" disappeared right along with the causes of things. Later study of Buddhism and Vedanta confirmed this curious inmost vacancy, and I have lived without an ego in the usual sense of the term for most of my life. Nonetheless (and if this be paradox, make the most of it!), I have a very strong and consistent inner sense of what my life is about and what I must do in it. One thing I knew as far back as I can remember was that Mastery of the Great Art was the goal and purpose of this life or any putative future lives. Furthermore I have always had a fairly distinct notion of how I should go about acquiring it: (1) I study (my infallible Internal Guide has led me to many sources of perfect wisdom); (2) I receive direct transmission of the Dharma from a qualified Master; (3) I perfectly and absolutely master at least one of the Lesser Arts (Music I think, and I suppose Calligraphy); (4) I consciously embrace, and practise, the Way of the Boddhisattva (nurturing sentient beings and [insofar as they have character] non-sentient beings, disdaining cruelty and indifference, striving always to attain to the Perfections and the Virtues). Note that when I say "perfectly and absolutely master," I damn-it-all mean it. And when I say this of music I mean: Mastery of all the elements of music (harmony, mensuration, counterpoint, and melody) and all basic musical forms (songs, sacred and profane, for voices and for instruments; dance-music; choral music; instrumental sonata-allegro). One could, of course, do as some demon-ridden modern German composers do, and crank out passably correct "music" which is utterly without charm or character (and indeed it must be very hard to do), but such lucubrations can give no pleasure, and are, therefore, not music. Mozart said so.