Dying Inside

Thursday. I do two paragraphs, a. m., for Yahya Lumumba. Very apprehensive about his reaction to the thing I’m writing for him. He might just loathe it. If I ever finish it. I must finish it. Never missed a deadline yet. Don’t dare to. In the p.m. I walk up to the 230th St. bookstore, needing fresh air and wanting, as usual, to see if anything interesting has come out since my last visit, three days before. Compulsively buy a few paperbacks — an anthology of minor metaphysical poets, Updike’s Rabbit Redux, and a heavy Levi-Straussian anthropological study, folkways of some Amazonian tribe, that I know I’ll never get around to reading. A new clerk at the cash register: a girl, 19, 20, pale, blond, white silk blouse, short plaid skirt, impersonal smile. Attractive in a vacant-eyed way. She isn’t at all interesting to me, sexually or otherwise, and as I think that I chide myself for putting her down — let nothing human be alien to me — and on a whim I invade her mind as I pay for my books, so that I won’t be judging her by superficials. I burrow in easily, deep, down through layer after layer of trivia, mining her without hindrance, getting right to the real stuff. Oh! What a sudden blazing communion, soul to soul! She glows. She streams fire. She comes to me with a vividness and a completeness that stun me, so rare has this sort of experience become for me. No dumb pallid mannequin now. I see her full and entire, her dreams, her fantasies, her ambitions, her loves, her soaring ecstasies (last night’s gasping copulation and the shame and guilt afterward), a whole churning steaming sizzling human soul. Only once in the last six months have I hit this quality of total contact, only once, that awful day with Yahya Lumumba on the steps of Low Library. And as I remember that searing, numbing experience, something is triggered in me and the same thing happens. A dark curtain falls. I am disconnected. My grip on her consciousness is severed. Silence, that terrible mental silence, rushes to enfold me. I stand there, gaping, stunned, alone again and frightened, and I start to shake and drop my change, and she says to me, worried, “Sir? Sir?” in that sweet fluting little-girl voice.

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Friday. Wake up with aches, high fever. Undoubtedly an attack of psychosomatic ague. The angry, embittered mind mercilessly flagellating the defenseless body. Chills followed by hot sweats followed by chills. Empty-gut puking. I feel hollow. Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Can’t work. I scribble a few pseudo-Lumumbesque lines and toss the sheet away. Sick as a dog. Well, a good excuse not to go to that dumb party, anyhow. I read my minor metaphysicals. Some of them not so minor. Traherne, Crashaw, William Cartwright. As for instance, Traherne:

Pure native Powers that Corruption loathe,
Did, like the fairest Glass
Or, spotless polished Brass,
Themselves soon in their Object’s Image clothe:
Divine Impressions, when they came,
Did quickly enter and my Soul enflame.
’Tis not the Object, but the Light,
That maketh Heav’n: ’Tis a clearer Sight.
Felicity
Appears to none but them that purely see.

Threw up again after that. Not to be interpreted as an expression of criticism. Felt better for a while. I should call Judith. Have her make some chicken soup for me. Oy, veh. Veh is mir.

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