END OF STORY

For me, the following is sheer poetry. I do not know, could never know, do not want to know, what it might be for you. You are the audience. You have no meaning here.

— Tim Barrus

Tim, if you wanted to say a sentence or two or contribute an image, I would include it.  Unless it would get me arrested, of course.  Just a thought.  No obligation.

--- Prairie Mary

IN PRAISE OF THE AMBIGUOUS, INCOMPLETE, SHADOWY, IMPLIED INDEFINABLE JUST DISAPPEARING AROUND THE CORNER

One of the unique characteristics of the brain is that it’s so willing to work with evidence that doesn’t really add up, that it just adds up what it’s got.  Which means it’s frequently wrong.  Like that experiment where a man sees a rabbit on his lawn, walks towards it, sees that it’s a crumpled piece of paper, gets closer and finally sees that it’s sunlight coming through the leaves of a tree.  Animate> inanimate> illusion.  Except that often the gradient goes the other way:  a glimpse> a thing> a person.   In fact, they call that art.

The success of the strategy depends as much as the “receiver” as the composer.  The more references and associations in the person reading or watching or listening, the richer will be the person’s internal construct.

I’ve been sorting papers I’d meant to file.  Just running them under my eyes creates a narrative about the context in which I work.  Art Durkhee starts a comment with what he claims is a cliché.  (I don’t know — I don’t have any context.)  The cliche´is “the difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting.”  Out of my own experience, I take this to mean that if the lighting is blunt, flat, and bright enough to see everything (including appendicitis scars, acne and birthmarks) that’s more likely to be pornography.  Anyway, cheaper to make.  If the lighting moves, shows only parts, is startling, makes you strain to figure it out, it’s more artistic and therefore erotica.  That is, the difference between a commercial product and an artistic statement is control of the level of ambiguity.

But maybe this is just a conceit.  Maybe it’s just laziness on the part of the artist to throw up a few suggestive elements and make the observer work out what it’s all about.  How do you know?  You don’t.  That’s part of the incompleteness, too.

Pushing for closure is partly what draws us through the plot of a mystery, though some books will end with a shrug, throwing hands up, who knows?  We see it as a child’s preoccupation:  what really happened and how did it end?  Much of what we call the yearning for transparency is simply to resolve the issues so we can leave them, not so we can do something about what we see.  But there is always a contingent that says, you don’t need to know.  You cannot fix it.  It can’t be fixed.  That’s just the way it is.  Which point of view is the more moral?  Ambiguous.  Sometimes zeal to reform is worse than the original offense.  Scouring prevents natural healing.

The hypnogogic state is the one also called “drifting off to sleep.”  Vague visions waft through the head as though gauze scarves blown on the wind.  Scraps from the day: something overheard, a glimpse of a bare shoulder, the smell of someone’s t-shirt left on a chair, an intention neglected — what are you thinking right now?  If you were a poet, it might be a poem.  If you were a cook, it might be a recipe.

This is the opposite of the “outlines for how to write a book” I kept running across in my pile of tear-outs and down-loads.  The outlines are very definite: you MUST have this and you’ve GOT to have that (three crises in the rising action until the resolving climax is reached).  This sequence is taught from junior high onwards and informs ever so many LA written tales.  I myself taught that way: a paragraph with a sentence of introduction and assertion, three pieces of vivid evidence, and an insight.  The end with a bow on it.

The lives — the REAL lives — of my students were not like that and sometimes I would see rambling free-associations that twisted and turned like a burnt snake, totally ungraspable at first.  Those were the real writers.  They never get published.  Maybe it’s just as well, considering the consequences that might follow.


--- Mary Scriver

Heavy in Your Arms: Unplugging Orpheus

I’ve been asked to unplug Orpheus. I have just unplugged my end of it from Internet life support.

The request to me to unplug it was made by a kid. A kid in a lot of fucking trouble. I do not give a flying fuck what anyone in the audience believes. I don’t know you. And I do not owe you anything. I owe him.

There are places in the book where he’s not only there, but so is his family.

Enough.

It’s not about Mary. It’s not about me. It’s not about us as writers. It’s not about us as people, either. Because it’s not about US. It stretches past us so significantly, no amount of my writing books in one lifetime could express a single molecule of it. Let us go to pop culture. Or what is it you understand. What symbols and representations do I have to construct for you to understand that real people exist and they’re flawed and they’re in agony a lot and they get sick and they love and they make love. What does anyone have to do to tell you that these things are real.

It’s called indifference. You are indifferent. You are.

It’s not my job to move you. It’s not my lot in life. It’s not even my job to know you.

This is what Mary and I share. And we share it no matter if we agree or disagree or blow bubbles at the moon. It’s not madness we share.

We are not indifferent.

I was a heavy heart to carry
My beloved was weighed down
My arms around his neck
My fingers laced to crown.

I was a heavy heart to carry
My feet dragged across ground
And he took me to the river
Where he slowly let me drown

My love has concrete feet
My love’s an iron ball
Wrapped around your ankles 
Over the waterfall

I’m so heavy, heavy
Heavy in your arms
I’m so heavy, heavy
Heavy in your arms

And is it worth the wait 
All this killing time?
Are you strong enough to stand
Protecting both your heart and mine?

Who is the betrayer?
Who’s the killer in the crowd?
The one who creeps in corridors
And doesn’t make a sound

My love has concrete feet
My love’s an iron ball
Wrapped around your ankles 
Over the waterfall

My love has concrete feet
My love’s an iron ball
Wrapped around your ankles 
Over the waterfall


I’m so heavy, heavy
Heavy in your arms
I’m so heavy, heavy
So heavy in your arms

This will be my last confession
I love you never felt like any blessing 

(Ohhhh)

Whispering like it’s a secret 
Only to condemn the one who hears it
With a heavy heart
Heavy heavy i’m so heavy in your arms

(i’m so) Heavy heavy i’m so heavy in your arms
(i’m so) Heavy heavy i’m so heavy in your arms
(i’m so) Heavy heavy i’m so heavy in your arms

I was a heavy heart to carry
my beloved was weighed down
My arms around his neck
My fingers laced to crown

I was a heavy heart to carry
But he never let me down
When he had me in his arms
My feet never touched the ground

I’m so heavy, heavy in your arms.
Heavy, i’m so heavy in your arms.


--- Florence and the Machine


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BELNiWGF0aM

I do not owe anyone an explanation.

The very idea that someone could be irreparably hurt by the publication of that book makes me want to vomit.

Am I angry with Mary.

Get a life.

Have I stopped speaking to Mary.

Go fuck yourselves.

It’s not about Mary. And it’s not about me.

It’s not about a book. It’s about a life.

I’m not going to expose any more people to any more hurt. And people would be hurt.

That is how it works. In your indifferent culture. Stories are power. And proximity to power can hurt.

Even writing this makes me demented. It’s wasting my time explaining anything to you. People I do not know or want to know. Oh, he’s so militant and nasty.

You have no fucking idea.

One kid could be hurt. It’s all I need. Done deal.

Art will survive.

When I needed him to be there for me, he was. I had been left empty and wounded. He never wavered. He would not waver now.

To expose him to a public that is as stupid and vindictive as it is is not something I can do when the kid has asked me not to. His reasons are valid. Case closed.

We both have work to do, Mary and I. And we will do it.

That’s what really scares you. Not that you get to think of us as annoying or crazy.

But that we will do what we do and we will keep doing it. Art is not about the brain to me. That is not how I make it and I do make it. Art is not my sunlight through the tree.

It’s blood and bone. It’s testicles and guts. It’s war and survival. I have a heavy heart to carry but he never let me down. When he had me in his arms my feet never touched the ground. I’m so heavy. So heavy in his arms. 


— tim barrus

STRANGE COLLABORATIONS

A human being forms physically inside another human being. From the beginning the enclosing person influences the development of the cradled interior person. Something like that happens -- except outside the mother -- after the infant emerges. To form the personality and talents of that child, one might say they install the programs in the tiny smart-phone-sized computer they are except that then the child begins to write its own apps, explore it’s own internet, and . . . you get the idea. But from the very beginning there are always two in relationship, even if one is the child and the other is the world.

The body of theory called “object relations” or sometimes “teddy bear psych” is about the relationship between two persons. The publishers like to put plush bears on the covers but they could use a “blankie” or “binkie.” The teddy bear is a kind of mother surrogate when the youngster begins to break away from the real physical mother, a courage talisman. The image that sticks with me is one I’ve often seen: a group of women sitting and talking at a ball game or a church event and a toddler still gripping his or her mother’s skirt, getting brave enough to venture out onto the empty vast floor after something, but panicking and rushing back to bury his or her face in his mother’s lap. I know you’ve seen it, too. That child is Columbus sailing to the edge of the universe, then returning to safe harbor with, um, Queen Isabella. The theorists I read were D.W. Winnicott (Lady Di uses his theories on her princelings), Piaget, Kohut, and Bowlby (who talks about attachment) but there are others.

The takeaway I valued was the idea that two people, whether mother and child or therapist and client or two lovers, create some kind of virtual world in the space between them. It is not a physical object but one can see it on film, that construct spun of glances and gestures and possibly the moving of objects or maybe even touching, embracing. It is best when the partners are equal, or at least focused on the same goal, because then that unholy struggle to control in the name of virtue is absent. So much in our lives, at least those of us living in media-dominated world, is about sex and so little is about intimacy in the sense of emotional or mental sharing. We’re so busy figuring out how our bodies work (seen the latest fMRI studies of the pre-frontal cortex?) that we’ve lately been neglecting our minds and imaginations. I think of Anne of Green Gables, so starved for affection and interaction that she made friends with her reflection in the glass of a bookcase. Now maybe the glass of a computer screen.

Now comes Joshua Wolf Shenk whose article in Slate, the online magazine, explains how he is going to create a work about partnerships by throwing open the doors of the comment section so we can all share. (Shenk’s name has always stuck in my mind because in his previous book, “Lincoln’s Melancholy,” he speculated on the erotic potential of Lincoln’s long pale shanks.) Shenk has some interesting anecdotes, like the one about Tiger Woods’ caddie, Steve Williams, manipulating Tiger’s performance by lying about distances, but he strikes me as a person making checklists off Google rather than a deep thinker reconciling concepts.

Still, I often reflect about the dynamics of my own dyads, partly because the Sixties with Bob Scriver were so wildly dramatic that it’s been hard to settle down for the last forty years. At seventy I have finally found someone who can collaborate intensely -- while all the time letting me live quietly with my cats because it is a writing relationship. My fantasy is that we sit across the table from each other with old-fashioned straight pens as syringes, mainlining ink into each other’s arms while a stack of manuscript accumulates on the table. In reality we’ve never met and have communicated for more than three years through keyboards and the Internet. We don’t stick to print: Tim Barrus uses video and we both use sound and image. Sometimes the product is near-liturgical, certainly a binding together as in the root of the word.

At first we were simply keeping something like a journal. Then one day. rereading, I saw that we had created a kind of document and set out to organize it, create transitions, and find the narrative “spine” of a year. The theme is always survival: Tim’s, mine, and the boys of what was then called Cinematheque. And the theme is art, which is a form of survival. (Think of the productive shared worlds of art therapy, especially with children.) This became “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” the beseeching song during the passage underground and the inability to bring back those we love. At first we just had a lot of dramatic stories about boys, both Tim’s and “mine.”

Then we ourselves began to change as we wrote. Our writing deepened and intensified as we challenged and explored. In this time period Tim’s shoulders had to be replaced, extremely dangerous surgery since he carries HIV and is a recovered morphine addict since the replacement of his hips. My ministerial education was worked hard to supply courage, especially since we are both post-Christian, living in a construct mostly supplied by physics and wilderness, searching for talismans of courage. I kept trying to use my strategy of analyzing the family past. Tim has a huge taboo on this. Tim kept trying to explain the criminally sexual underworld and its enormous power now. Even after five years doing law enforcement, I had a hard time getting my head around exactly what that meant to individual victims. I was amazed to realize how complex and philosophically-based were the American gay world of San Francisco, Florida, and Fire Island and how many gifted and wealthy people have been doing good in ways that began while quietly carrying casseroles to brilliant loved ones, dying in SRO hotels.

This country still suffers from two huge pandemics: the tuberculosis that devastated the Transcendentalists and the AIDS that wiped out so many in the arts and that has allowed tuberculosis to return. What I never thought about was the loss of real-life partnerships, not all of them sexual. My first AIDS loss was a ministerial colleague.

Writing with Barrus is deeply satisfying, but I would never have considered such a thing before he proposed it. If it had not been for AIDS, he would not have lost his earlier male co-writers. If it had not been for the collapse of publishing, we might both have found collaborating editors. If I had not been so stiffly independent, I might have been subsumed into another relationship like the one with Scriver in the Sixties where collaboration made me so invisible that some Montana people still can’t see me. Barrus treats me like a man, with dignity and equality. This is revelation I was seeking. This is work I can do. As for Tim, he has found a circle of poets who are peers in a way I am not, but he does not abandon me.

AM I ME OR AM I YOU?

They’re saying that I’m really Tim Barrus. Not that I’m Tim Barrus’ co-writer, but that Tim made me up. I’m flattered that they think my writing sounds like Tim Barrus, but then they can’t tell one person’s writing from another. That’s because they rarely read it. They like oral scandal. Harder to trace.

Who are they? I run across them now and then. If they’re in Montana, they’re bound to be in Missoula or Butte. If they’re on the rez, they’re bound to be in the three resort towns, usually in a bar. It’s always a little mysterious where their money comes from. They used to show up on www.2blowhards.com all the time, not so much as the regular posters but in the comments, more likely. They know ALL about everything. Because they SAY so. No doubt their mothers agree with them about that. And everyone they know in Manhattan. They’re the Entitled Generation. They Know Everything and edit Wikipedia, so the masses can become enlightened. At least as far as their term papers go. They are conservative -- they don’t want to lose their status -- but they love porn -- that’s what their status is for.

When I first started corresponding with Tim, I got warnings from friends. In some ways it’s my own fault because years ago for April Fool’s Day I invented a long story about how I’d fallen in love with a three-hundred-pound Samoan man half my age and would be moving to Samoa soon, except that his mother really didn’t approve of me. But we were soul mates and so on. I was highly entertained that so many people believed this tale. Of those people, half congratulated me and remarked on what a wonderful thing love is to transcend all barriers of culture and age. The other half were concerned -- “Oh, it’s not going to work out and your heart will be broken and think of that young man’s future, after all!”

Of course, some of these same people had watched my romance with Bob Scriver, warning me away from him and pointing out the enormous difference in age and culture and predicting that I would soon lose interest. After twelve years I got pushed out, but I never lost interest. In fact, he’s dead and I’m STILL interested.

When we started corresponding, even Tim didn’t quite believe that I was real. Once he asked me to post some photos of my growing-up years, showing me with family. He has stalkers and spies, you know, and he thought I might be one of them. Sometimes I think he still wonders whether I’m real. I might be Marie of Roumania.

Not that I would mind. When I was a little kid, my family used to take Sunday drives up the Columbia River to the Maryhill Museum where Marie of Roumania’s coronation gown, cloth of gold encrusted with diamonds, is on display along with her golden (and very square) carved throne. She was quite lovely. Alas, I can tell I’m not Marie. She had one of those 17-inch corseted waists. Tim’s wife Tina would fit into that gown. Not me. (www.maryhillmuseum.org) Very nice short vid there about art.)

Anyway, after being fooled by that Samoan (I think they really just WANTED to believe in him!) my friends were suspicious of Tim and went straight to Wikipedia to get the TRUTH. Oh, no!! I was co-writing with Rasputin! There was no Evil beyond him! After all, he had written three books in which he pretended to be half-Navajo! Few things are such ghastly acts of betrayal -- at least since the actual prairie clearance massacres -- as claiming to be a Native American. Esp. when indignation is good advertising for an NA stand-up comedian who needs a little boost. (The secret thing this guy and Tim really shared was agony over a disabled son.)

Everything is turning out pretty well between Tim and I, considering that the publishing industry is down the drain. I mean, Tim and I co-write day after day after day, preparing for the time when some kind of “publishing” re-constitutes itself and is ready for words both spoken and printed, mixed with video, music, and whatever else we think of. Tim wants to be published more than I do, but he has real work in his real life. I don’t give a rip about fame and fortune. I’m retired.

When I was working with Bob Scriver, he instructed me that I was the subordinate, that I should not get the big head or imply to others that I was doing anything except what I was told. Actually, of course, I was up to my elbows and sometimes over my head in what was happening, but he said that people expect an artist to be in charge, to be the only genius. So I agreed. But Tim is not like that. He believes in equals. That’s partly the difference between someone born in 1950 versus someone born in 1914, and partly a matter of personality. But I love it. It’s inspiring.

Maybe I ought to be angry at these guys who think I’m only an assistant person for Tim, a sock-puppet, the way Bob asked me to pretend to be. To them it’s a further demonstration that their interpretation of the world is rock solid. They will not change it and they will not accept any evidence that would ask them to. They will not believe that I’m the co-writer of “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” even though I’m sending out the queries and my name is all over it. They say the boys helped write it, but they also say the boys don’t exist. In fact, anything they don’t like simply doesn’t exist except for Tim Barrus.

They crave Tim Barrus. If they thought I was real and if they really wanted to know the truth about Tim Barrus, they might ask me. But they don’t want to know. They don’t want to talk to me. They make no contact with me. (They don’t like girls anyway.) They just want to get their hands on Tim Barrus: it’s a love/hate thing, I guess. It was there before the Nasdijj scandal. It was even there when he was a little kid. Charisma, I suppose. Bob had it, too. Dangerous. It attracts abuse.

How do you relate to a person with charisma that everyone wants to get their hands on? Well, it’s a helluva lot easier when it’s only in print. (I’ve never met Tim, I keep saying.) I mean, when you’re eating and sleeping and working all day every day with such a person, things get a little “fraught.” Ask those boys, those “unreal” boys. Now and then everyone has to stop and sort things out. Bob and I didn’t get to do that. The dramas got way too intense. I don’t miss that part, but it sure supplies a lot of writing material.

At least Tim and the boys read it. And I read what they write. Because there is no better way to get really close to a person than by reading their writing when it’s real and it’s true. If you can tell that’s what it is. The first way is to give up your entitlement. Marie of Roumania did.

LET ME ASK YOU THIS. . .

The manuscript of the book I’m writing with Tim Barrus is complete. Now comes the hard part. It’s easy to generate a lot of print -- high quality and exciting -- from Tim because he’s like a volcano throwing out lava. My job has been bricolage and writing the interstitial transitions. He’s the stained glass, I’m the lead caning. Actually, it’s been a lot of fun. Tim’s ramrod, Eavan, thinks he’s also writing this book, but the truth is that he’s not, at least not this book -- there are others. However, some of his writing is included as well as some of the writing of the other boys, assuming they’re real. The words are real.

While I’m still trying to figure out the last editing and thinking ahead to queries, Tim has already leapt to publicity, his favorite part. His idea of how to entice media coverage is to insult and mock them, on the premise that they’ll want to set everyone straight. Maybe. He describes an interview with the genteel Jackie Leyden in which she failed to perceive that he wasn’t Native American, although all good liberal intelligentsia are supposed to know their stuff about Indians. (archived at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1112194)

When I listened to it, I laughed, because he DID sound Indian! I know Jackie was sitting at her mike with a paper prepared by someone else that told her what to ask, which parts to ask him to read, and what topics NOT to raise. Also, she undoubtedly had a Borgian earpiece guiding her if things went too slowly or quickly. On his end, in a different city, Tim sat in a little room alone with a mike and tried to respond to someone he couldn’t see, without even knowing her appearance much less her body language and responses. He came across as meek and gentle, which is hardly his normal mode.

Bill Houff, author of “Infinity in your Hand,” an overview of his near-Buddhist religious philosophy, used to wax indignant over the many radio interviews he did. Someone in some other place, intent on looking good to a cadre of devoted listeners, would ask questions without ever reading the book. Based on their limited understanding of religion, some would attack and some would interpret what Houff had written, but he was basically there as a stooge. The point of the interview was to make the interviewer look good.

My experience with George Cole at Yellowstone Public Radio was much better. To hear the interview go to www.ypradio.org. Look for “RealTime,” George’s program, and then the Archive. This link might be a shortcut: http://ypr-pc.streamguys.net/podcast/realtime/rt090420.mp3 We didn’t know each other, but we met and chatted for a while beforehand and had the advantage of sharing some of the same worlds: Montana, Unitarians -- he’d even met Bob Scriver long enough ago that Bob hadn’t sunk into old age yet. We were in the same small room, looking at each other’s faces. George had a cheater in front of him to remind him of names and events, so he’d get them right, and I knew he was watching my face to see how far I would go on some topics, though he’d cautioned me that if I got too far off the rails, it would be edited. We had been VERY frank beforehand. Much useful information was exchanged! George hasn’t been a king-maker, but close: a governor-guider, you might say. I was in my devoted wife persona and trying not to pound the table for emphasis because it goes into the mike as thunder.

It sounded like the most relaxed and spontaneous of conversations and some people, including some of my relatives, considered it very daring because George asked me if I still loved Bob Scriver and I said yes.

Well, you know, define love.

One of the continuing themes of “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” is love and the other is death, which you might expect if you read mythology. Because the real subject matter of the book is boys with HIV, “at risk,” which means they die. In fact, some of what is included in the book is now posthumous.

But, you know, define death.

This morning (5AM in Montana is a good time to talk to Europe) Tim and I had an exchange about the above thoughts and death. This is what we said:

TIM: RE: “Do you still love. . . I would have said: he's dead.”

MARY: “As long as someone remembers you vividly, are you dead? Dead is if you never existed in the first place. Lots of people are walking around looking undead, but they are dead.

“Dead is in how you feel about someone. He doesn't feel dead to me. If you don't like that answer, ask someone else. Anyway, George loved having a romantic answer. It was a romantic question. I was there to sell books, not pass a lie detector test.”

TIM: “I like that answer.”

That’s how the whole book goes. Our problem is to keep a balance in the book as well as our own sanity as authors and peace between us. One of the best loved of Tim’s little community recently died. I never met the boy but he was real to me. I grieve but he’s not dead to me.

It is also a problem to fight off Tim’s critics and accusers, a weird collaboration of jealous gays and resentful Native Americans. The two realms, gay and NA, do intertwine in a shadowy and sometimes illicit way on reservations and in big city ghettoes, mostly through the underground artifact trade.

I once asked Sherman Alexie whether he liked “Fancy Dancer,” a novel about a gay priest and the gay motorcyclist (Leather Man) who teaches him to be proud of his sexuality. I haven’t read it for a long time so I don’t quite remember which one was Indian -- I think the priest. Alexie did like it. I’ve wondered how much that book influenced his “The Toughest Indian in the World,” which some thought was about being gay but which I believe is about the “Mythic Indian,” the one that Jackie Leyden thinks is real and believes she interviewed. That Indian has been killed over and over, but constantly resurrects.

This book that Tim and I have written will not tell you who the real Tim Barrus is. Nor the real Mary Scriver either. In the first place, like all fully alive humans, we’re both many personas. In the second place, define real.

CITY STREETS CAN BE CATACOMBS

When they think of catacombs most people think of the catacombs of Rome because of the stories about Christians who hid there to celebrate Mass, even though they had to keep a napkin over the wine chalice so no untoward substances from the bat-infested ceiling would fall into the wine. But the Catacombes de Paris, officially known as l’Ossuaire Municipal, are also famous. Built on valuable deposits of “plaster of Paris,” clay and other building materials, the city has long been under-tunneled with caverns and mines. When the mining stopped, the spaces were pressed into service as ossuaries, in order to reclaim the overcrowded and fetid cemeteries of Les Innocentes and Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. Bodies of the dead from the riots in the Place de Grève, the Hotel de Brienne, and Rue Meslee were put in the catacombs on 28 and 29 August 1788.

The catacombs contain the indissolubles, the indescribables, the spines and phalanges and skulls of the lost. But they also shelter those who are hunted, seeking burrows like any other mammals, a literal underground society of those too wicked or too virtuous or too revolutionary for those walking above.

Once we leave the Latinate word and think of tunneling, we think of the Vietnamese underground towns; the tunnels that bypass the walls we build to keep Israel from Arab, Mexican from American; escapes from jails -- many patient hours of slow small labor in confined spaces. A list of notable burial “catacombs” includes Anatolia, Turkey; Sousse, North Africa; Naples, Italy; Syracuse, Italy; Trier, Germany; Kiev, Russia. The Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily were used as late as the 1920s.

Underground galleries and mines are dangerous, collapsing without warning, creating sinkholes that swallow houses. But we continue our tunnels for sewers, water mains, subways, raceways for wiring, reinforcing as necessary and -- hopefully -- keeping accurate maps. Tunnels are scary and yet we dare to drive the Chunnel between Franch and England; mock danger by floating in small boats through “Tunnels of Love.” Coastal cities have underground labyrinths created for smuggling inland from ports as recently as prohibition or created in small Western towns by Chinese hiding from authorities and hostile ruffians. Everywhere the piling up of new construction on top of old buildings, the filling-in of streets, have caused what was once ground level to become subterranean.

Very early caves surrender neolithic hair and not-yet-coprolites for analysis, high and dry places preserve ancient artifacts of remarkable fragility and ingenuity -- in America, sandals said to be 60,000 years old, even though no humans were supposed to be present so early. But the most touching are the early art like the painted figures at Lascaux, ghostly animals and handprints so deep in caves that the sun has never seen them. We almost know what they mean: something religious no doubt, something about good fortune and success in the hunt.

What worries us about the underground is not being able to see. Miners and spelunkers hope they have enough fuel, enough battery power, to last through their work. We feel our way through our dreams, not quite able to see what looms over us, what falls away beneath our feet, what paralyzes us.

Human thought is topographic so we speak of the subconscious, that part of the mind that cannot be consciously, deliberately, conveniently accessed, but that constantly controls from underneath our feelings and ideas -- only now and then surprised into observation by a clever psychoanalyst or poet. Now and then we feel something “in the back of our mind,” know it’s there but can’t quite drag it out with memory or logic. We hate not knowing our own minds. We pry at the doors of perception with drugs or lately with mild magnetic currents applied to the temples, hoping to see through to some bright vision.

Likewise, on the social level, for every culture there is a subculture where forbidden things happen: drugs, sex, violence, captivity. The underground is where messages are passed and censored information is accessed. Books you aren’t supposed to read. Like the tiny filaments of fungus that crisscross beneath groves of trees, unseen unless they pop to the surface as mushrooms, these mycelia surreptitiously supply elemental substances that support the trees, things that polite society doesn’t want to know about. Death, disease, perversion, sociopathy, betrayal, slavery, murder, infanticide and forbidden love. These surface in novels, plays, opera -- all the arts. Sometimes they burst out in revolution. Everyone is curious, but most don’t dare go into the dark, unless safely removed to a stage or a book or a screen. We are always there to watch. Car wrecks and pornography, or are they the same thing? (J.G. Ballard thought so.) The insane deaths of famous artists, movie stars and princesses: we review them endlessly in search of what? A key? An explanation. There is none.

When we wander the catacombs, we hope to meet the dead, the dear faces we used to know -- not the old mother we last saw on her deathbed, but the young mother who came to us at bedtime. The once-so-well-known faces of the past wax and wane, so that we wonder whether losing the memory of the faces means we are losing the person.

I remember many things. Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, is portrayed as a green city, honorable and progressive. It has its street people. It has its runaway kids, sleeping on the porch of the Outside-In, an agency run by First Unitarian church, because in the Sixties, when they were allowed inside to sleep on the cushioned pews (in spite of semen stains discovered on Sunday morning) one of the crazier runaways set a fire in the organ loft that destroyed the sanctuary as well as (temporarily) the sanity of the minister. In the Seventies someone showed me where the young boys sat along a parking structure, waiting for the chicken hawks who came by in expensive cars to choose someone for the evening -- maybe the night. It was dark and we didn’t get out of our own car, but the street lights were strong enough for us to identify a few politicians.

But would you want to take one of these boys home? To save, I mean? What would make them stay with you? What would you do with them? Who do you think you are -- Orpheus? Or Jesus? What do you know about the catacombs of their minds? What do you know about how AIDS reduces boys to bones?