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August 10, 2005“Pardon my crude mind”writes my Portland buddy Partisan Pete. Apparently there was one reading of the “finger in the eye” misplaced modifier (by accident, he poked the little girl with his finger in the eye) from axfiles #11, “Get Ready to Laugh,” that I did not consider: If you assume that the whole sentence is some sort of euphemism used to describe a sordid act, then I read it as poked being "fucked," and eye being "brown eye," or asshole, in which case he fucked her while putting his finger in her ass. Frankly I don't care what he says, I don't think that that was an accident. Thanks for weighing in on that one, Pete. Or if as you say, “poked” stands for “fucked” and “eye” is “asshole” then perhaps “finger” is “cock” and so then maybe he’s fucking her in the ass. However you look at it, man, it’s a citizen’s arrest for you. My mind didn’t leap to that crude interpretation, but reflecting again on h’s characterization of me as a “sex columnist,” I freely admit that I do have sex on the brain—but, I hasten to add, no more so, I contend, than anyone else. I don’t know what I was doing as a young teen reading psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel’s Sadism and Masochism (no doubt my sister Cruella had something to do with it), but in that book he put forth a notion that made a big impression on me, the “polyphony of thought.” [The] disparity between speech and thought or, better stated, between that which we want to express and that which we are able to express, arises for the greater part from the fact that we never have one single thought but countless ones, an entire polyphony, of which language expresses only the melody, while intervening tones and counterpoint remain hidden….thought is a stream of which we see merely the surface, or an orchestra of which we hear only the parts that give us the melody. It is evident that deviating tones in different voices would give a dissonance. The point being that though someone is speaking about one thing, they are invariably, or inevitably, simultaneously thinking a great many things that aren’t making it into words, just as on an ordinary television set you can’t broadcast more than one station at a time. But the other channels are there, ready to come on, contained within the set. Your mind is that set, tuned full-strength to only one station (the one people are “watching”), but you have an internal remote control whereby you can change channels in an instant, tuning to another station where the content may be completely different. I’m assuming that, like myself, most people have as many of these “channels” as premium cable, and most of them stay off the air much of the time. That’s why Stekel calls words “compromise formations.” You can express only so much of what you’re thinking at any given time. Filtering all these competing thoughts into one string of words is a task our brains are pretty used to, but we do so with varying levels of facility and efficacy. I’m a verbose writer, but I don’t, how you say, think on my feet very well. I have a hard time, how you say, gathering my thoughts into one channel. There’s a lot of static up there amongst the crossed wires. I have literally tripped over my tongue in the process of verbalizing thought. I was once doing an exercise from Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain, where you had to do a drawing and then write comments about it, and after spending close to an hour with my brain in “Right Land,” discerning and assembling shapes, I found I could barely form words. My brain was stuttering; I had to force myself to switch mental gears, like pulling a giant lever. As a writer I am used to having as much time as I need to arrange my thoughts and connect them to each other before I share them with anyone, and I have my voluminous reference library around me. Why do people keep books after they’ve read them? Jerry Seinfeld once wondered. Obviously the man is no scholar. I keep them simply enough because I might want to refer to something, like Sadism and Masochism, that I read 35 years ago (I never made it past the first chapter by the way). I stand in awe and am quite envious of people who can speak their minds with clarity and conviction in cogent and articulate fashion as soon as they think something. Take h. He’s a fast talker and I’m a slow listener. At least he’s got plenty to say. A lot of people’s capacity to talk for the sake of talking far outstrips my ability—or desire—to listen. I’m a closet daydreamer. And at other times, I just can’t stand the sound of the human voice, blabbering on about its important opinions, who screwed it over, what it had for lunch, loving the sound of itself. Unfortunately you can’t always just turn off the set when you’ve had enough. SEX ON THE BRAINWhat’s Stekel got to do with anything? I contend that in most people, at least one mental station is the porn channel. It’s not often on full volume, but it’s always there, playing in the background. I think most, or many, people have sex on the brain most, or much, of the time, if only on some distant scratchy station. And as I discuss these thoughts, I am certainly thinking about having sex with someone. But on a station at the end of the dial. POP QUIZWho wrote this? Forgive that boldly risking scorn The Soul’s deep yearning to confess, The singer’s lips must hotly burn To waft the flames of his distress Can I against myself then turn And lose myself, dumb, comfortless, The very name of singer spurn, Not love you, having seen your face? Who wrote that? You’re right. Karl Marx. The small theater at the John C. Sims Center for the Performing Arts was full the other night, but I was surprised to not see anyone I know at the performance by Jerry Levy of Howard Zinn’s one-man play “Marx in Soho,” wherein Karl Marx comes back from the dead to comment on humanity’s “progress” in the last century, presented by Bay Area United Against War. What a missed opportunity for y’all, folks. How often does that one come around? What a tour de force! Jerry Levy’s got the body and hair and the passion to inhabit this giant intellect for 2 hours. Apparently Marx was a devoted family man passionately in love with his wife Jenny von Westphalia, and wrote several books of poetry to her and for her early in their courtship. He also purportedly had painful boils on his butt, lovingly attended to by Jenny. So I scanned my bookshelves for City Lights’ little edition of Marx’s poems. On the whole they stink, buddy, stick to political economy, but I held onto the book knowing I would someday no doubt want to refer to it. Apart from the old guy across the aisle with his shrill exhalations like the whistling S’s of Aaron “No Shame in his Game” Peskin, and the mysterious, sickening smell of burnt rubber permeating the place, I enjoyed the intimacy of the theater, with the actor close enough to look into my eyes, and the opportunity to take in some intelligent theater to cap off the workweek. There are certain things that inspire a sort of strangled joy in me, short of breathless but eliciting an audible gasp, and walking home from the play up South Van Ness I encountered two of them at once. Sparkly sidewalks. I find them magical, and they hearken back to the Philadelphia of my youth (that home you can’t go to again) and induce a warm nostalgia for those few parts of my childhood I found pleasant. And dense SF fog rolling 100 mph under the streetlights and zooming across the sky. It excites me every time. It was one of those I love this city! nights. I’m on the bus island with the wind smacking my face. The usual goose-fleshed idiot is out there at 9:30 pm still wearing her shorts and tank top from the warm afternoon. A daring street person with scabs on his head inspires a cacaphony of car horns by walking straight into traffic against the light at Market and Van Ness. A car of rowdy youths flies by, all shouting “Hey San Francisco rocks you guys! San Francisco rocks!” When the 6 Parnassus comes along, the Asian bus driver is sporting a surprising raffish pompadour, a slick wedge of hair sticking up from his head like the bill of a cap. Friday night is revving up on Haight Street, the natives are restless at Molotov’s Cocktails. I bypass the strip and go home to my keyboard. One thing that is sure to induce joy unto hyperventilation is Beethoven’s “Grosse Fugue” String Quartet. It is simply the most exciting piece of music I know. It literally makes me swoon (of course I was also once brought to tears by Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture). One time—I was managing an apartment building in Portland for no rent, which is how I came up with the bucks to buy my house—I was on a ladder in the hallway changing a lightbulb when I heard the fugue in question coming out of this guy’s apartment. How about that, I thought, and the next time I saw him I said, “I heard the Grosse Fugue string quartet coming out of your apartment. I think it’s the most. exciting. piece. of music. on earth.” And he said, “Never heard of it. Must be on the other side of something.” OK, tovarich, carry on. Later on, when he vacated his apartment, I found something like a dozen empty 40 oz. bottles of Olde English “800” malt liquor in his cabinet. By the way, Marx knows Jesus. He’s not coming back. Speaking of Brahms, I was on the 6, again, the other day, heading for work. Across the aisle from me was an old man—a regular old man wearing old man’s clothes—except that he had on costume silver chandelier earrings and red lipstick. Doesn’t he know that’s an evening look? I took out the book I’m reading, Why Bother? a groovy volume by Sam Smith that Ralph Nader turned me on to, and the guy next to me said “You like books? You want this one?” He took a large bound pine green book out of a plastic bag and handed it to me. It was volume 3, BALTI to BRAIL, of the 1961 Encyclopedia Britannica (Baron George Calvert Baltimore to Braila, a Danubian port of Rumania). I said why are you getting rid of that? “I’m clearing stuff out of my place.” Why this one volume? What about the rest? And where had he been taking it, in a plastic bag? To offer it to anyone who crossed his path? I said I’d have to pass, but then I stopped to wonder if there was a picture of Brahms in there and said I’d take it off his hands after all. An article, but no pic. I in turn will leave it on the Fillmore Street trash can where the neighborhood exchanges its goods. HOW FAR DOWN THE ROAD DO
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