SHORT DARK

When the cats come to wake me up at 4AM (I can stall until 4:30 but no later), I get up and stagger to the kitchen to open cans of catfood and drink a cup of water myself because I dehydrate in the night.  Not much of a problem -- I just go back to sleep unless I've got a pressing idea.  Then I write for a while like this to drain the buzz.  

This morning, staggering in the semi-dark (the health busybodies forced me to install nightlights in spite of Valier's very bright and close street lights) I mistook a kitten for a shoe and trampled it.  It screamed but seemed to recover.  Nevertheless, it cracked my shell of habit and muttering.  Now a lifetime of evil things have come to plague me.  Mostly car accidents (none in which people were killed or some were hurt) and accidental cruelty to animals.  More crimes of negligence, omission, and delayed awareness.  Snatches of driving in blizzards, loading balky horses, or last winter's shoulder dislocation.  Painful things but no permanent damage and mostly self-rebuke for not being more skillful, more thoughtful, more careful.

This is not true.  There are many knotty deaths.  My brother Mark's was unexpected but not surprising.  My mother's was attended by all three of her children.  The doc had given Mark the swabs with morphine, fentanyl, or whatever and he used them liberally.  At the end some people arch their heads backwards, like the movie tropes for someone having an orgasm.  It's actually an attempt to get air.  The covid-19 victims must do it.

In the kitchen I kicked a cat's bowl and a dark insect scuttled out from under.  It might have been a spider but it seemed heavier with different legs.  I stomped it.  I did not scrape it off from the bottom of my slipper to see what it was.  I think it was a dermestid.  Google says it could be called a "skin beetle."  They eat what's dead.

When the provincial Alberta museum in Edmonton was knew, we were there on the way north to hunt moose.  In the hall was a padlocked box with a big sign:  "DANGER!!  DERMESTIDS  DO NOT OPEN."  The bugs were used to clean bones but if they escaped they would eat all the indigenous artifacts since most were made of tanned skins, sinews, bone, and other bits of bodies, both human and other species.

The dermestids are in my house.  For much of my life my job has been to cheer people up, to look for the silver lining, to promise good things later, to "re-frame."  At least to explain.  But a lot of that has been denial, blocking out, covering up. I am an American with much clinging rural culture.  But at night I dream of vast empty university halls.

Born in '39, I was too young to understand WWII.  I took in the patriotism, heroism, the fighter airplanes, the exhausted but determined men, the healing nurses.  This drama is what I understood to be the basis of life and worthiness.  After the war came a bit of relief and then the images of destruction and loss, the revelations about torture and mutilation.  The accounts of betrayal and deals between nations.  Those scandals went deep and vivid.  I suppose it's a form of PTSD that it comes back without being asked.  Most people shoved it down deep.

Call it depression, call it grief, call it lack of energy -- I'm not getting much done.  There's not much I can do for anyone else.  The idea of family is just historical now.  I'm not dead and don't intend suicide, but sometimes it would be good to just suspend existence for a while.

DARK INHERITANCE

Thinking about genetics, esp. the family kind that is sold to the gullible or the bogus tribal memberships, I naturally turned to my own family.  I have three sets of "grandparents", my mother's parents, my father's parents, and the parents of my uncles who are all Hatfields, brothers married to my mother's sisters.  Remarkably, my cousins on that side have a blip in their genetic code that interferes with the proper development of their phalanges: fingers and toes.  Among them are too many toes (easy to remove one), missing thumbs (docs moved her big toe up to be a thumb), and a club foot (the hardest one to fix).  This glitch goes back to Anne Boleyn, an ill-fated wife of Henry VIII.  In paintings her sixth finger was sometimes hidden in her skirt.

So I went to genetic websites  and found a far different and more serious mutation that carries susceptibility to rage.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17967965/ns/health-health_care/t/hatfield-mccoy-feud-blamed-rage-disease/#.XfFUxS2ZOHs

I know of no one like this related to me and don't carry those genes myself -- just know about the TV program deriving from the history of Hatfields.  One of the uncles-in-law never married and was institutionalized for what was understood to be "paranoid schizophrenia." He is erased from family history.  My mother's opinion was that it came from his mother's side, Ruth, who was a sweetly cherished homebody unlike the career Pinkerton women.  But this may be an idea developed by the Hatfields, aggressive dominators in style apart from genes.

This rage gene is a more immediate version of the idea of "bad seed" that curses some people.  Bob Scriver was accused of that, through the MacFie side.  His obsessions, hot temper, narcissism were the markers.  Late in life he met a cousin who was almost exactly like him, even played the cornet just like him.  The idea haunted him and got confused with racism, but he had it backwards.  It would have been more protective to marry an indigenous person with an entirely different genetic code.  On the other hand, maybe Blackfeet were formidable warriors because they carried this gene.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/code-rage-the-warrior-gene-makes-me-mad-whether-i-have-it-or-not/http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17967965/ns/health-health_care/t/hatfield-mccoy-feud-blamed-rage-disease/#.XfFUxS2ZOHs

We think of genes in terms of one-gene/one-trait but the truth is that it takes a whole sequence of interacting of genes coded for certain proteins, cultures rewarding certain traits, and individual histories that accumulate trauma, deprivation, frustration, and failure.  When these small things interact to create a syndrome in a lot of people, there are riots in the streets.  But vulnerability (as many as fifty may be involved in schizophrenia) is not inevitability: some cultures (including some indigenous communities) find ways to adapt and channel schizophrenia, for instance, into shamanism.

The amount of research is impossible to keep up with, far more complex than we thought.  I'm going to post the list I keep for myself separately.  Feel free to download and use it as an introduction.  It's not the same as Google.

DARK VIOLENCE COMES AND GOES

For purposes of thinking, I'm taking the position that violence is defined by emotion and that, as well, emotion is the definer of morality.  That is, if the community in power thinks something is repugnant or immoral, the two are conflated and entangled with personal emotions about it.  So it goes to identity, how children are shaped as they grow.  And it goes to George Lakoff's formulation that there are two types of government: that of the protective and benevolent papa and that of the stern and disciplining patriarch.  This is reflected in governments.  And cops.

In the early days, the Sixties, any indigenous woman who came to Bob Scriver, for help or to sell something, was modest and soft-spoken, always respectful and praising.  Generally, he gave them what they wanted.  By the Nineties, I saw a young woman come to ask for a job.  She was demanding, gave references, knew what she was talking about.  It made Bob crazy.  Even if he had needed her (which he probably did) he would not have hired her and when she would not leave until she had an answer, he just went in the back room and shut the door in her face so she couldn't follow.  He felt attacked.

What happened in those intervening decades?  Headstart.  Fathers who were never there or who left or who were abusive.  Mothers who held jobs because the kids were hungry.  As well, the culture began to change because of government investment, local organization and examples, television reaching everyone, and the magnificent climax of Eloise Cobell's lawsuit for the Indian Trust Money that had been retained by the government and spent in the interest of major capitalists, just as is happening now with money allocated to foreign nations.

There was by now enough culture shift to support a moral demand for dignity and equity.  Why wasn't there violence?  There is.  Especially in northern Canada the use of violence is common.  Up there the whole environment is threatened by pipelines and whole populations have been decades without proper water.  That's enough to tip the scales from demonstrations and protests over to violence.  The big corporations, already in trouble because of the shrinking demand for oil, and the government, itching for tax income, feel that the right is on their side and are ready to escalate to deadly force.

It's not just that the victim is "Other", though that's part of it, it's that the violent person feels that he/she is personally justified in lashing out (maybe by immediate danger) or that he/she is culturally approved and defended.  An officer who shoots Blacks (even as he works with Black officers) is also crippled by his personal experience and lack of realization that the larger culture is against him.  He/she'll find out in court.  No one is likely to address his lethally distorted mind and he/she likely would resist anyone who tried.  It would feel as though they were trying to make him or her stop being his or her self.

In the Forties Bob struck his much younger wife across the face.  (She had been his student and he married her because he got her pregnant.)  This is recorded in the divorce testimony.  He felt entitled to strike, she felt entitled to divorce.  In the Fifties he was about to strike his second wife but she bounced an alarm clock off his head and knocked him out cold.  In the Sixties I was the third wife.  He raised his hand once -- then thought and pulled back.  I don't know what happened with the fourth wife.  I suspect she had lived a life that caused her to be struck many times.  Time passing is like traveling to new countries.

You can understand that I take a personal interest in this stuff.  But for me, it's not immediate. The divorce was in 1970, Bob's death was in 1999.  I'm the only living former wife.  But the consequences for others in uneven relationships have been grave.  Violence is not just in the moment and keys with neglect.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/brain-injury-public-health-crisis-1.5388677

This article compares sports violence but the ideas of Other and stigma are muted.  Nevertheless, we distance and victimize our kids, esp boys, with games that give them concussions while we watch.  That's violence.  When I briefly taught in one of the sports-obsessed small towns, the boys knew it.  They knew what it meant when grown men urged them to fight without limits in back alleys (to avoid cops, though the cops probably knew about it).  A student I taught in the '70's explained in the '90's that he had blackouts lasting a half hour from playing football.  You've heard Trump endorse and call for violence.  Our culture is full of it.  The media does not expose it -- it celebrates violence.  But covertly.

By the time I went back to Portland about 1990 for a visit -- against the advice of my Heart Butte rez students who considered Portland dangerous --  my mother's house was surrounded by violence.  NE and N Portland had become notorious as Black people moved in so that the average income crashed and the drugs and gangs followed.  When I was growing up, the house across the street belonged to Ma and Pa Schaeffer, quiet old people.  The closest to violence was when Pa Schaffer tried to burn the tent caterpillar nests out of his walnut tree and instead set it on fire.  Now I was instructed that if there were  shooting nearby, I should turn the lights out and sit on the floor.  There was.  I did.

But the worst had happened months earlier.  The Schaeffer house had been sold and resold and was now inhabited by hooligans who got in a terrible fight one day.  One man was beating up another with a 2X4 and chased him onto my mother's front steps.  My brother, who had been an MP in the Marines, went out to intervene and took away the 2X4 just before the cops arrived.  All the black and whites in the nabe were two man cars.  They drew their guns.  They assumed my brother was the aggressor.  My mother was at the screen door.  My brother did a drop-and-roll, yelling,  "Call Terry Shrunk."  He was a city official the cops would recognize.  Also, a high school classmate of my brother. 

When the matter settled, both of the violent ones insisted my brother really was the aggressor, but the cops believed my mother and took the two fighters in for questioning.  That household soon moved on.  Violence is everywhere.  It breaks out everywhere emotions are strong because of unmet need.  

We considered ourselves a virtuous, middle-class, educated family and we were.  Now my mother has passed on and we've scattered.  The tide turned and the neighborhood gentrified.  Today Alberta is a street of artists and bodegas.  Our house is renovated, even upgraded.  Portland is considered progressive, cool, weird in a good way.  And yet the Portland violence crops out on the light rail line or someplace else unexpected. An example just days ago.

"KATHRYN BOND STOCKTON" -- SHOCKING!!

Yesterday the news was so predicted and so grotesque that I was left wordless.  I meant to post that I was speechless, but never hit the final button and therefore nothing was published, which was perhaps as eloquent as anything I could say. 

When Tuxie the cat began labor on my lap, I carried her to the birthing box -- the one she was born in -- and pulled up a chair to be a coach.  Clearly, I was involved.  In a minute her inseparable mother, Blue Bunny, came and climbed in on top of the process.  Each baby, thankfully only two of them, came with screams from the narrow Tuxie.  In a storm of licking, both blobs were dry in a minute.  Bunny ate the placentas, sharing hormones and instincts and, um, nutritions.  One is a white kitten and the other is dark.

It was no more grotesque than reading email about Epstein's "crime movie stereotype" death in his cell.  We've seen it on TV movies so much that we know the "tell" signs of an imposed versus a voluntary hanging:  "the petechial hemorrhage is a tiny pinpoint red mark that is an important sign of asphyxia caused by some external means of obstructing the airways. They are sometimes also called petechiae. Their presence often indicates a death by manual strangulation, hanging, or smothering."  We know the red neck marks of a self-tied noose from one imposed after death.

I could not find a new path to understanding the macro tangle of these now global forces.  The two half-grown tomcats, previous births, were embracing in my reading chair, to stay warm on a dark, stormy day, so I went to a different chair in an alcove between bookcases and idly picked up an unread book -- well, I evidently did read the introduction, then put it down. Then picked it back up.  "Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where 'Black' Meets 'Queer.'" by Kathryn Bond Stockton.  A vid about her is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcbZTHrNrPQ

Though I'm about as vanilla, straight, American-Scots, celibate,  ordained, old lady as you are likely to find anywhere, I write against that in search of understanding.  Esp in our current political predicament, the crux seems to be a confluence of status/class/sex/gender roles/skin color/wealth/Camp/ sophistication/intellectual-adventure.  I just struggled through the Conclusion:  "Dark Camp: Behind and Ahead."  It includes a comparison of Toni Morrison to some of the most violent, melodramatic, ironic writers of our times and calls Morrison excessive, outrageous, and even laughable.  All the sentimental love of Mammy is blasted. 

In general, this sort of writing -- which is very like the super-sophistication of the Algerian French philosophers you can find online at YouTube -- is so detached from the concrete physical progress through daily life that it's surreal, a performance of ideas.  And yet the manipulation of how the aristocrats of the 17th and 18th centuries gave the male homosexuals their manners and taste in clothes, their entrée into arts salons, is suddenly obvious.  The obscene violence of killing black men as an expression of sex becomes impossibly but maybe plausibly the same function of Christian mythology as raping blonde, innocent, sub-teen girls in the manner of the Medieval virgins who caused unicorns to lay their phallic heads in their laps.

The personal is overwhelmed; the girls are interchangeable and so are the black men.  They have no personalities, unique lives, names and families.  As nearly as I can tell.  I haven't seen a discussion of Native Americans (male and female) but I see the possibilities.  Also, in the context of intellectual Jewish Europeans in Manhattan and New England, a group with a special care for "Indians."  And now, esp now, the category of the unwanted, uneducated, unemployed, unmarrigeable, far right who take refuge in appearance righteousness.  

Certain alcoholic men on the Blackfeet reservation, usually with enrolled wives who owned land or at least a fractured part, would say "At least I'm white."  But that was only their skin, and on their dirtiest, most sunburned days they were pretty dark.  Skin color is only one indicator of culture, and only an issue where it has more-or-less matched some demographic in another place, so they can be marked as intruders.  

I particularly paid attention to the definitions and explanations of "camp" and "drag queen."  I admit to an occasional yearning to dress up and act extravagantly, though my notion of the latter is to wear high heels and fake eyelashes to the Opera.  Stockton didn't address "camp" in terms of "kink," though it's easy to see that both are over-the-top gender displacements.

I'm finding, here in this small town, a far deeper division around people who are so entrenched in a certain way of life that they are terrified that the circumstances will change, and they should be.  Their ways of earning money through labor, their basic 3-R skills, their appeal to high status people, that skin color mean little.  (When you're on a computer no one knows who you are -- but these guys can't keyboard.  Like Trump, they might manage a cell phone.  Or a Gameboy.)  At an extreme they kill women of color as a form of sex and domination.  Trump, of course, can erase whole categories of people.  Epstein, on the other hand, was using as a luxury a culturally endorsed category of innocent blonde girls.  A certain kind of man thinks there is no sexier category than that.

This link is to more about Stockton, whose role as a professor at the University of Utah is rather a bit like a Manhattan Jewish lawyer visiting a high plains reservation.  https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/kathryn-bond-stockton/  Now I see that I own another of her books, "The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century."  Other titles include "Reading as Kissing, Sex with Ideas." or "God between their Lips: Desire between Women in Irigaray, Bronte, and Eliot."

I'm not sure I have the "chops" to read and understand all this, particularly as an isolate in a small Montana village, but it seems like a template for a new way to push people in ironic and surprising ways.  I certainly couldn't do it as clergy except in disguise.  But we've got to find some way past this ghastly immorality powered by money and rage.

ENDARKENMENT

In Portland, OR, on every Good Friday in the Seventies the downtown big church ministers sponsored an "Endarkenment" service to prepare for Easter dawn.  One of the church sanctuaries had no windows, so as the story of crucifixion was acted out -- with Jesus speaking through a PA system -- the lights were turned off, one after the other.  When we were sitting in total darkness, we pondered in silence for long minutes before the lights came on and we went about our business.

The UU ministers were always a little nervous about the strand of religious dogma exploring "endarkenment," a word meant to counter "enlightenment" which is often used religiously to mean seeing the final truth.  Others use the trope of light/seeing/understanding to mark science as a higher form of understanding.  The science-honoring ministers joked about endarkenment, esp. the ones who suffered from it in their private lives, not knowing what to do about things like their own family wars.  Sometimes endarkenment is used to refer to the "dark arts" like witchcraft, magic, sorcery.  The Dark Web carried the meaning to secrecy, even the illegal.

Science as it stands does not replace the benign anthropomorphic old white king-on-a-throne with any idea as reassuring.  But if honest believers in "God" are real, they admit that the Old Testament's jealous punisher is more than a little bit Satanic.  

Someone recently said, when the news about the Notre Dame Cathedral fire was relieved by billionaires pledging enormous sums of money, "It makes one believe there is a God after all."  Someone less sentimental suggested that if there were a God who valued cathedrals, "he" would not have let the fire start.  Divine intervention has yet to be proven.  Others cried out, "So that's where all the money for the poor and suffering has been!  Billionaire's pockets!"

We want to reform, be reborn.  But it's difficult to envision what the future might be when it's not like us and we're not in it.  This vid linked below is a version of the vision according to one rather dark branch of scientific speculation.  It is not about salvation or humans.  But it is about participation by each of us in an abstract and strange way, too overwhelmingly dark to understand.

https://aeon.co/videos/deep-time-and-beyond-the-great-nothingness-at-the-end-of-the-universe?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=693fd0c379-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_04_11_03_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-693fd0c379-68600437

Before Jesus, a body of expectation was based on the idea of "The Christ" in a world of oppression by the mighty.  It pictured the Christ as a savior coming down out of the sky at the head of a legion of angel warriors who would end the Roman hegemony.  A lot of people still appreciate that idea.  But when Jesus, the humble kid in what appears to be a nightgown, finally showed up on foot with only twelve disciples, some insisted he was nevertheless the Christ.  His weapons were love and generosity: he didn't live by the prevailing rules.  He had more of an Asian idea, as in Buddhism, and some suggest that Jesus had followed the Silk Roads out to India where he learned these ideas.  They still haven't prevailed, but we are hopeful.

Others have made a home in the dark, accepting secrecy and anonymity as a way of finding peaceful safety, avoiding the glitter, the dazzle, the wealth.  Hopefully also escaping the Stigma Cross that crucifies those who aren't part of the wealth-pursuing world that makes the cross into crosshairs marking violence compelling obedience to some new oppression.  The key idea is that we are flesh, as was Jesus, but our ideas are invincible.

A FEROCIOUS VULNERABILITY BETWEEN FRIENDS: 2 PROSPECTORS

“Ferocious vulnerability” is a phrase that kept occurring to me while reading the letters between Shepard and Dark in their compilation called “Two Prospectors.”  Yeah, old-fashioned prospectors with long red underwear and suspenders are pretty vulnerable and might be ferocious.  (Other related concepts might be “fear-biter” or “counter-phobic,” which is what a counselor told me I was.  Counselors are not always right, but they bring up interesting ideas.)

This oxymoron develops among those whose only defense is at least seeming tough, mysterious, maybe sinister:  the young, the old, the disabled, the minorities, the stigmatized, and all the other needy people.  Are there needs that can make a person INvulnerable?  (Need to be in control?)  Can a person be ferocious without being vulnerable?  Isn’t ferocity a vulnerability of its own?  (It’s a pretty good marker and may be one of the ways women get pulled towards tough guys.)  Or is it possible to repair vulnerability without becoming callous -- confident simply because of being unfeeling?  Shepard and Dark discuss these issues while nicely sailing on pot, but I’ve never tried pot and am not about to -- I save my money for books and cat food.  As I get towards the end of the book, I see that they are persuaded towards my policy, though they lean more to dogs than cats.  Sam hits bottom in a drug rehab group, his sentence for a DUI.

Sometimes I respond to vulnerability (my own and that of others) with ferocity.  (My mother attacked me whenever I seemed weak.)  Sometimes I’m disproportionate, becoming enraged over something no one else thinks is a problem.  Are they callous or am I over-sensitive?  The social consensus so far is the latter.  Why get so attached?  Why use up precious energy over something that can’t be changed anyway?  But these two guys seem matched, to be sharing their vulnerability ruefully -- with or without regret.

Gurdieff (left) and group

Maybe the missing third force is consciousness: awareness of both vulnerability and of ferocity.  (Pi and the Bengal tiger?  This is just riffing. )  That’s what the Gurdjieff stuff seems to be about.  There’s another remedy, which is simply leaving.  Just not being in that situation, which Sam seems to do but actually doesn’t.  Neither Sam nor John thinks of children as a burden. ( I decided early they would make me too vulnerable. How many plots turn on the threatened loss of children -- or the actuality?  Remember that my earliest understanding of the world dates to WWII.) I would not be able to contain my ferocity, I would kill.  I feel even for children who aren’t mine.  I try to avoid knowing them because too many have died.  (Valier culture considers avoiding children monstrous.  Tiger mothers are the norm here.)  But then I end up knowing them anyway.  Shepard and Dark are entirely different:  they love children, embrace and protect them, seem to feel that the children are the strong ones and it is they, the adult men, who suffer and are lonely.

My policy has been that “having stuff” is a vulnerability, because then it needs to be defended and maintained.  When I’ve stayed with very wealthy people in ostentatious houses, I notice that they hire other people to do the actual work, but then must take on the work of supervising and double-checking the workers.  They do not have the option of just letting the whole palace sink under the weight of dust and leaking pipes.  (I do.  Is that vulnerability or a kind of passive ferocity?  Valier culture considers this flat out sin and grounds for intervention.)  

Shepard and Dark are into stuff in different ways.  Shepard has whole ranches and abandons or loses things.  Dark lives on an economic edge but saves all the letters and photos.  Dark esp. is a neatness guy.  After living with and without family all sorts of places -- partly because that’s the necessity when making movies and staging plays -- Shepard comes back to the refuge of his stone porch festooned with roses on his Kentucky ranch .

As I read these letters, I stopped to hit Netflix, looking for whatever movie or play Sam is mentioning. Sam and John, like many other men of a certain type, were deeply into Kerouac, Beckett, Bukowski, but these two are the only men of that kind I know about who are so into Gurdjieff, whose movement could be compared to Scientology.  I even looked up Gurdjieff, though I’m impatient with such thought systems, no matter how grounded and sophisticated they are.  John and Sam never went so "high" nor so "low" as their heroes did, but their partnership was probably as strong as any.  They quote the movement a lot.

Beckett

Bukowski

Cassady and Kerouac

I hadn’t really watched or read any of Shepard’s “official” published writing.  “Curse of the Starving Class” streams on Netflix, so I stopped reading to watch it.  The pivot of the tale is what we would now label a veteran with PTSD self-medicating with alcohol.  (Sam’s dad.)  We used to just call them drunks and consider them wicked.  After reading the letters, it’s clear how this real-life painful struggle has become art.  But it never seems healing, at least for Sam.  It’s all about the “long receding roar” of the frontier, of the heroism of WWII, of any real possibility of coming to terms.  “Curse of the Starving Class” includes a redemptive conversion near the end, but it is too late.  In real life, John, who married and protected Scarlett, their shared “mom” with her unconditional positive regard, comes closer to redemption.  Even Sam manages to be a good father, even to the son he ran out on.  But he can NOT forgive himself.

These letters en masse are all-of-a-piece, the attempts of two men to understand themselves -- even manage themselves.  They are good about children and pets: tolerant, indulgent and mostly conscientious.  They really NEED women as in one-at-a-time, but are easily overwhelmed by a household of females: daughters, wives, helpers . . .  aaaeeeeiiiii.   Many women confronting such men are seemingly compliant, but secretly eager to control them, partly for their own good and partly in order to guarantee resources for the household, like income.  Dark outwits women by joining them in domesticity. (He cleans houses for a living during some of this time period and does most of the cooking and laundry.)  Shepard, a hot commodity, is often on the run, sometimes trying to keep up with Jessica whose career is often hotter than his.

I suppose Shepard is the one with “ferocious vulnerability” while Dark’s is more like “evasive vulnerability”, which allows him to lower the barriers, including any cultural stuff about not being manly or assertive, which haunts Sam the Man, who worries that if he gets an airedale, it will make him look gay.  Around here an airedale is a bear-hunting dog, so I don’t get it.  He worries about that stuff way too much -- maybe he’s joking.  After all, he lived with Patti Smith for a while. 

The vulnerability the two men share still comes through from beginning to end.  It’s powerful to write to an intimate as they do, rather than writing “into the dark night.” They do exchange their formal writing, awkwardly, since John knows that Sam’s writing is on a different planet, hooked into a reputation and different kind of skill. 

Only once did Sam try to push John towards “proper” authorship, urging revision and that he tighten the writing up.  Almost immediately he apologized, saying that he realized that John was doing a different kind of writing, for its own sake, for the pleasure of dwelling “in” it.  But he did help John get one book published, “People I May Have known.”  After reading the letters, one does feel these two men knew well at least each other.  It is intolerable to think of them ending the relationship.  I refuse to believe it’s possible.