Barkis was willing. I love you. Nancy.

"Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the ones nature imbeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler's best metaphor for the living gene... Superimposed over those first four triplet rungs, a diversionary tune that, with grace notes, contains twenty tones. Two halves of the aria, each sixteen, bars, both scored to repeat, totalling sixty-four measures.... two copies twist around one another with helical precision... I listened to these miniatures for a year, pulled out of them the most marvelous genetic analogies. But at the end, the music refused to reduce, and it hurt worse than before."
(cut and paste from whatever i could find on the web from "the gold-bug variations")

i'm not sure about the muse's potentially violence producing endurance to say or unsay (did it hurt? where are you going, without me?). but you're right, in the song suzanne just makes you understand what the river is saying, and jesus' less conflicted place as a sailor. and oranges. that's enough. that and mr. c could sit there and smile. and then end up in the chelsea hotel with janis joplin and produce that whole other song. i'm thinking that was his thing. and some people write about angels descending firescapes dressed in workman's overalls, because that's what they saw and it flows in that transcendant american lineage, and life, in some way, is fought for.

weirdly, a little later, we're having dinner right around the corner from the old loft. we moved from the townhouse on 11th to this place on jane street. that was where i'd come back to for approximately 8 years starting in the early 90's and through my stepfather's death. i go to a very specific place in that area now, mostly florent, but i just realized that i avoid the entire place if i can. and i say weird or uncanny because the night before he died we had a not too often dinner with all of us. i mean, i usually saw them once or twice a week, at least but not all of us together like that. me, my brother, my stepfather and my mother, his kids at the big chinese place that's right on hudson (i'm wondering right now if it's still there. i'll check.) My stepfather came rushing in excited to say that he had figured it out and it came down to this, a dialectic between intellectualism and anti intellectualism. sounds stupid! he exclaimed. ridiculous! but 40 years of piecing it together and that's it! it covers everything! it's only apparently contradictory. the realists against the nominalists, like philosophy: the idealists against the materialists and so forth, but we have no grasp on relationship, or our language doesn't... are you mediocre or are you a fanatic, are you a mystic or a sensualist? degradation is only associated with subjective shame. not everything is allegory and symbolism. and there is limitations on human energy. i think at that point i ordered some orange beef with chestnuts and it had come and other things had come, and someone got a diet coke and the dumplings were good. i do remember we also talked about the klee show that was up at MOMA. and time. and paradox. free will vs. determined. to be honest, in my more crystal visions and totem animal moments i believe that he had entered the way. or at least he was in that almost incredible place of total acceptance.

he did another thing that was uncharacteristic at the end of the night. he gave us all hugs, slapped us on the back. he always gave his son a great big hug. P. has autism, so my stepfather bypassed the social constructs he maintained to give his son a huge beautiful hug everytime they saw each other, and that night he extended that to all of us. okay! he said we're okay! and he laughed his great laugh. the next morning he died of a heart aneurysm within 20 minutes. he was young, just 66. i think he travelled and thought a little like wittgenstein, who he loved and admired, and he wanted a less conflicted relationship with the world and especially his mother, who committed suicide and caused his sister to kill herself before she did. he was an insomniac and a wanderer. i think i told you? but i would go into florent all cracked out from a night of dancing or sex or whatever at 4 or 5 in the morning and there he would be, reading. i'd come over and sit with him and he'd order me a chocolate milkshake, or an egg cream. and we'd talk. he got a big kick out of my tranny friends. no one wants to be different, no one wants to really be a coherent self. he could be really mean too, it must be said. he told me that i was alienated. isn't that mean? but i kind of agreed. he was probably after a nondestructive jouissance and he loved the radical shattering, like anyone else. wow, i love him.

so. he's gone. and that's my whole rambling point. you have this long conversation with someone, all parties are right and wrong, a significant conversation (itself in the language of natural love, just and unjust), they show you things, rivers, consciousness, fear (i'm thinking of the yeats poem) faith, questions. and he did not want to die. where did you go, david. without us.