Collected Fragments

RECORDINGS

 

 

“I want something.” As usual he meant cocaine, but in addition I read in his com­plaint the desire I shared with him:  to be in a different place, with different people, all to fire our imaginations in a way for which drugs were only a makeshift.  We longed to plunge ourselves into some superb performance, but the cast was all wrong; props, scenery and music were all off.  We lacked a producer.

* * *

These flowers planted by the sidewalk (for me) against all that ugliness....  A fine-featured Asian man sitting by a fountain in a courtyard read­ing a newspaper:  even here, on such an intolerably hot day, if you dig into the morning and push away the garbage and ugliness, it is possible to find a scene like this which changes every­thing for a moment...

* * *

Pornographic loop with no sound except music:  A tall bearded census taker in sun­glasses and a dark suit knocks on the door of an apartment in Southern California.  Short muscular Nordic blond an­swers, wearing only a light brown towel and a nipple ring.  He sizes up the older man with undisguised lusti­ness and invites him in.

The census taker pauses be­fore a window overlooking patio and swimming pool:  two naked men are going at it on a mat next to the pool, oblivious to anything else that may be going on, as though they were in some other movie.

Without the blonde’s noticing, the census taker ob­serves the scene through the parted curtains, but just for a moment.  Close-up of him caressing a generous curved outline through his pants.

The two protagonists go out by the pool and sit on chairs placed close together.  The blonde rests his bare foot with feigned casualness on the other’s chair between his legs; the towel shifts provocatively.

As they chat, both pretend to ignore the continuing sex­ual scene, which is reflected in one of the glass sliding doors separating the patio from the interior of the house.

What fascinates me here is the wonderfully implausible and untenable relation of foreground and background:  two erotic scenes or figures occur simultaneously, within the same private space, in full view of each other; and yet the lovemaking scene is as if closed off voyeuristically by surreal convention or etiquette.

At the same time, the lovemaking scene functions as background for the seduction scene, like an erotic film be­ing projected on a wall, like a “natural” scene such as a waterfall, or like outdoor sculpture that serves to create an environment of seduction.

The seduction scene, of course, erupts into a sexual scene, which in turn could be­come background for another seduction scene, and so on:  thus, a great Sadean conflagra­tion.

* * *

Blanco Road, San Antonio:  a boy, about sixteen, trying in vain to start a lawnmower; his buttocks and legs in denim remind me of the segmented legs of a spider.  By the front lawn:  a hole like the grave of a small child.

* * *

. . . What struck me as I was leaving the gym was the difference between the image I had had of him before we had spoken and the impres­sion of warmth I had received of his eyes in that first mo­ment of verbal commu­nica­tion.  I realized that the gri­macing monster and the pa­ternal figure who addressed me (with what motive?) were in fact completely different substances:  as distinct as gold and lead.

* * *

The daydreamy cocodrilo with golden eyes and im­mense belly senses the undu­lations of a river skate gliding along the white bottom of the clear shallow river.  Soon it returns to shore with the disclike skate in its mouth (the dejected tail of the ray hangs down like an elec­trical wire).

Since the crocodile cannot chew, she must shake her prey to bits in her jaws (like a dog or a shark, but with a more stately reptilian phlegm).  The skate disintegrates and falls into the upraised maw with gelatinous resignation. 

* * *

In the restaurant Arnaldo pre­tends to chastise Stephen for flirting with a handsome youth who has been sitting at a certain table.  In fact it is only Arnaldo himself who has been flirting with the youth, or who at least desires to flirt with him, and has been watching over him with that subtle, jealous, half-ironic alertness of his.  They refer to the youth as “A7”—the table number.

The number sometimes also refers to the party at a cer­tain table or, even more ab­stractly and loosely, to what that party represents to the owners, socially, profes­sion­ally, personally, etc.:  the party who may need to be “taken care of” or who may be “a pain.”

Thus, the code that oper­ates on the level of the busi­ness of the restaurant, the code that only the owners and staff know, may be used perversely for a sort of intimate game, the richness of which may go far be­yond the mere function­ing of the restaurant itself.

* * *

Some morning doves have made their nest somewhere above my window.  One day I heard one cooing on the sill.  I peeked around the edge of the blind at her.  I had never seen such a thing before:  its feathers were like a grayish-pink mother-of-pearl, and its perfectly round black eye blinked inquisitively.

Now I hear them all the time, but especially in the morning, and the cooing is so beautiful that at times it actually gives me chills.

I have been thinking about a certain quality of the dove’s feathers that I don’t know ex­actly how to name.  It is like the mysterious mixture of pink and green in the iris of the eyes of certain cats; and also reminds me of the scales of certain fish, and of the colors reflected from oil mixed with water.  I have already mentioned mother-of-pearl; would it be “mottled,” “iridescent,” “speckled”?  It seems a combi­nation of all of these, and yet something altogether differ­ent.

* * *

In Sitges the second time, alone and quite drunk in the wee hours, I actually whis­pered to the ocean:  “Tell me a secret.”

 

Cats still live under the rocks, but different ones, and not so many.

 

In Sitges in the afternoon, one keeps looking and look­ing at the ocean trying to re­solve the beauty.

* * *

Snorkeling off Key West:  in the little whirlpools and currents between two islands (mangrove and egret’s nest), under the fatherly eye of the dark-skinned captain, one’s ego would begin to become loosely moored to the body (and perhaps dissolve alto­gether for moments) but for the disturbing sound of one’s own breathing in the mask.  Disturbing because at once real (that is my own life I hear; it could be interrupted or stopped if I drowned) and cinematic (it is like the sound of a diver’s breathing used conven­tionally to create apprehen­sion in the viewer).

One could for moments become nothing more than a great fish among smaller fish; one could glide or stand still in the current like other fish; one’s movements might cause little waves of panic among them (one senses how the phenomenon of panic in a shoal of fish may be trans­mit­ted not only from environ­ment to body but also from body to body, resulting in a certain choreography, a pat­tern of ricochet, a mobile rep­resenting a certain mea­sure of panic); or be observed warily by them from the haven of a cranny (Woolf:  “There are then warm hol­lows grooved in the heart of the uproar; al­coves of silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth which I de­sire”).

* * *

Herring Cove, Provincetown (September 1992):  Charming intentness of the handsome beachcombers (what tiny objects were they looking for?).  Yet each one paused to nod, to wink, to smile at me (as I lay on the sand)—as though divining and obliging my vanity—with pleasing playful dreamlike in­timacy, like a mussel shell opening and closing.

Their passage a dance or a series of tableaux, a sequence of postures—never flirtatious or self-conscious, and therefore all the more seductive (the ob­ject seduces to the extent that it appears to be oblivious of me).

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