GENIUS FORUMS

[This is the first draft of the first chapter of a story I began. I got busy and haven't added anything. I am thinking of finishing it].

1.

I received an invitation to a series of lectures and conferences on a provocative and controversial topic of great interest to me. The title of the lectures was The Molding of Woman, a bold but ambiguous phrase whose punch was not softened with: The Female: A Product of Man’s Will. One immediately noted the use of the singular noun to specify Woman as a whole category, a way of framing the topic sure to raise eyebrows, and to produce predictable reactions of outrage with attendant shrill response. But, since these were private and even secret lectures that were not publicized in any journals of opinion, and each of us had been carefully screened before being invited to participate, it is clear they felt free to frame the conversation in precise and direct terms.

I had been selected because of my work in brain science and on the merit of papers I had published over a 12 year period on the subject of subtle but notable differences in brain structure between men and women beginning in the embryonic stage, the result of hormonal pressure. I confess that when I began this work 15 years ago I had no inkling that I’d be dragged out of academia and paraded as a spectacle in the public sphere. An ‘object-lesson in erroneous theorization’, a ‘sexist dinosaur from a bygone age’ was how I was described in the press. But this kind of work, for obvious reasons, is highly contentious in a social environment dominated by political and social conventions that insist on minimizing or eliminating gender-difference, and framing these issues according to an established, immutable canon. Nearly the entire feminist-oriented academic establishment of the major universities condemned my assertion and, unified against me both academically and personally, sought to discredit my work and to remove me from my academic post. At great personal cost, both in time and legal fees, I succeeded in thwarting these assaults, yet I admit with unconcealed bitterness there have been moments I’d wished I’d never set out on this path of research.

However, and I have no embarrassment to confess this openly, as a result of all I have been put through by an implacable opposition committed to my elimination, whose attack functions as an assault against unprejudiced inquiry and honest, methodical science, I received my invitation to attend these clandestine lectures with subversive delight tinged with vengefulness. I had been selected from among thousands of so-called leading men from the world over to participate in a series of lectures and conferences on a subject of tremendous importance both for the present and for the future of our culture, and though it seems exaggerated to frame it in grandiose terms, it nevertheless really is an issue of this scale, so that if my intellectual labor was to be rejected and condemned in the public domain, I would yet have an opportunity to network in the private domain with powerful men in science, government and the humanities who, and here one must not mince words or shy away from precise descriptions, have the will and the power to reconceptualize, restructure, redesign and reprogram women from the ground up---in theoretical terms to be sure, but theory tends to percolate down and concretize itself in practice, eventually.

It's definitely cosmic irony---I have always maintained that if God exists he surely has a devilish sense of humor---that when I retrieved the mail and opened the envelope with my invitation to these conferences, I overheard a heating technician talking on his cell phone while loading equipment out of his van. “Yo, I’m with you on that one, man: What I want is a bitch who’ll suck my dick all night long and then get up an COOK ME PANCAKES!”

While one man demands only a sex-worker and a cook, another man moving in a radically different domain wants a Beatrice made of light who’ll guide him through the seven layers of hell and up into the radiance of divinity.

God definitely has a sense of humor.

Some personal details about me will be useful to provide a sense of my perspective and ideology in respect to these issues. I live in a two-bedroom brick home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a upscale suburb of Boston. I am 46 years-old, slender and athletic, I play tennis 3-4 times a week, drive a metallic gray Audi, like Italian sport coats, shirts and shoes, and graduated in the top ten in my class. I have never had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than two years, am presently unattached and though I have strong attractions to women I work with at the university, I am in an undecided state about women generally. I wouldn’t go so far as to say confused but something close to that, and what I mean is I am uncertain as to what exactly I want from a woman, any woman. Indeed, over the last few years I have realized I have difficulty forming a concrete definition of woman, not an uncommon dilemma among men, and women too, though often they remain unconscious of it.

‘Woman’ has become a shifting cultural symbol, shiny and attractive as quicksilver but impossible to pin-down, constantly on the move, fixed in one moment and then fluid again, filling up one arbitrary mould and then shape-shifting to another; an unstable quantum-particle in an uncertain cultural field. They say that the quantum-particle is, in some way, aware when someone is observing it. Similarly, woman is like that, and in fixing your attention on her you are in fact creating her, and she returns your gaze and seems to ask: "Is this what you want me to be?"

I am not the sort of man who needs a woman, in the sense of needing a maternal figure, a Rock of Gibraltar on the home front, though I note this tendency among a number of my academic colleages, the ones who are now getting pudgy physically and also psychically, becoming docile and manageable as they progress into middle-age. I frankly never conceived of myself as one to marry in the traditional sense, but I have ardent longings for women, an appetite that is both physical and spiritual, that I most often satisfied with extended sexual affairs where affections are very real but secondary to physical union. When I say ‘spiritual’ I mean that in all the ‘higher’ senses, insofar as an intelligent, cultivated woman is a delight to the spirit, a compliment to one’s masculine self, an inspiration, but also simply as something that made my spirit feel good, complete, energized, vital.

As I said, these affairs were not without affection, care, sharing, concern for each other and all the rest, it is just that the sexual relationship was primary and sexual union the event around which everything else constellated. At some point though, often with no warning or any obvious sign, with or without a certain amount of emotional trauma, these relationships went up in smoke, I entered a not unpleasant dormant phase, and when I’d restored myself, I’d look for the same sort of relationship again, even when I’d resolved to commit myself to a ‘real’ relationship, whatever exactly that is.

My last affair, though, ended catastrophically and at a great emotional cost from which I have still not recovered, though it began in almost exactly the same way as so many others have begun, and with the same focus.

It started two years ago, when I took a sabbatical to live 6 months in a rural hamlet near Bentonville, Arkansas. My plan was to devote myself to a study project only tangentially related to my own scientific work: Archetypal Psychology, completely in the domain of the ‘soft sciences’ but a subject personally significant to me though irrelevant to my academic labors. I had completed 5 years of intense but fruitful professional work and felt I was in a position to splurge on myself, to allow myself a bit of metaphysical delight. I rented a country cabin near the end of a long, shady dirt road 7 miles out of town. Overarched by huge, leafy trees at the edge of an open field where iris and wild rose grew, the cabin looked run down and rustic from the outside, with a sagging green shingle roof and rickety screen door. But the inside was well maintained, with a terracotta tile floor, a simple kitchen with a gas stove; wainscoting painted off-white and above that slightly aged wallpaper with little peony bouquets wrapped with pale blue ribbons. From the living room a wide Dutch door opened onto a large, brick patio with a flower garden abounding in lilac bushes, margaritas, and wandering Jew, and at the edge of the lot and enclosing the back yard there was a forest of blackberry brambles that attracted flocks of colorful birds in the day and raccoons and opossums at night.

My closest neighbor was a widowed, white-haired Black woman named Loretta Carson who’d grown up in Alabama. At 21 she married an engine mechanic from Bentonville and moved with him to Arkansas. She was widowed 13 years later and has lived in the same sagging bungalow for the last 45 years, the last 10 of them with a grayed Black Lab named Persimmon. She cleaned, scraped, painted and repaired her house, chopped wood for her cooking stove, watered and weeded her vegetable garden, collected wild fruit and berries to make jams and preserves, hunted rabbits with an old 16 gauge shotgun that could have been a Civil War relic, and every day walked briskly to a Gospel church 4 miles up the road. She spent the whole day Sunday at church and came back after it was dark, humming spirituals and praying out loud. Aside from a religious novel or two and a book of hymns, I think the Bible was the only book she’d ever read and a great deal of it she had memorized.

My house was owned by an old red-faced crawdad of an man named Hank Peterson who’d moved up to Little Rock to live with one of his daughters. He rented out his house between January and September for the extra income and only stayed there himself in the late Fall months. Loretta looked after it when it was vacant. Her house, which I could see from my porch if I leaned out, sat a quarter mile down the road. She took personal care and interest in the occupants when it was rented, and this care included country remedies, roots and salves, long conversations about the South with anecdotes that would’ve intrigued a historian. She made potpourris of aromatic herbs and flowers for the clothes drawers, Ball jars of jams and jellies sealed on the top with paraffin, the white labels scrawled in a formal cursive, and offered spiritual guidance and quotes from the Bible, and from time to time a beautiful, pure Gospel tune sung a capella.

Right from the beginning, on the first day I met her, she took my hands, closed her eyes and prayed out-loud for my well-being and salvation, and the force in her voice made the hair on my neck stand up. Months later, she told me that every person she ever met came to her with a sign linking them to a scriptural passage, and in my case the license plate of the rental car I drove down from Little Rock on that first day was ‘55 ISA’, connecting me then and there to the 55th chapter of Isaiah.

This was the filter through which she viewed me and interpreted everything I said or did, and all that she thought about me depended on this initial association.

The afternoon I drove up to her house the sun shone softly and sweetly, with long afternoon shadows that lay across the brown dirt road and on the white siding of her house. The warm, still air was filled with flecks of dust and dandelion cotton that lilted in the sunlight. Loretta peered at me from her porch, and when I parked and walked up to the gate, the first words she addressed to me in her thick Alabama accent were, "You want water, but what water are you going to drink?" with a big smile that showed her gold-lined teeth. I figured she must have thought I was a tourist coming to ask for a drink of water, so and explained I was the new renter for Mr Peterson's cabin, but later I realized she was referring to the first lines of Isaiah 55: “Come, all who are thirsty, come, fetch water”.

©Talking Ass 2009

[Beginning of rewrite]

I sat in my metallic gray Audi R8 and stared at the entranceway to my apartment building. The interior of the car was clean, precise, with black trim and brushed aluminum fixtures, like the inside of a fighter plane or a space capsule. There was still that new car sweet leather tanginess that’s almost erotic, and if I were a car manufacturer, I’d finish the upholstery with leather treatment containing real human pheromones, girl scent from the thighs of Brazilian teenagers that would communicate forcibly with the unconscious, the secret desire-impulse of the prospective buyer. We all accept now that no one really buys for rational purposes, as if it was a thought-out, rational decision. We buy something because it satisfies a deep, unconscious need, a desire or a longing that lives in some invisible part of our psychological self like some exotic deep-sea fish; gulping and bug-eyed but never seen. When we become aware of the desire, unconsciously, when it asserts itself and clamors for satisfaction, different parts of our conscious mind then have an adult discussion about the pros and cons. But all of that is just a charade, a rehearsal. The decision was already made; we’re only looking to justify it.

I’d driven around for the last 4 hours, killing time, trying to get my head in order, again. It hadn’t worked, but 4 more hours had gone by. A nice car makes driving for no good reason a delightful experience, something you look forward to, crave. You are insulated from the outside world, you don’t hear any of the garish sounds of the street or the highway or they’re so faint and distant the impact can’t reach you. You don’t even hear the engine, but you feel the engine vibration and the pulse of the 180 horsepower acceleration when you step on the gas, another erotic feature of a high-end car, like a mechanical puma, the material manifestation of an inner animal. The car came with a top-end audio system and the sound was unparalleled, from the deepest bass all the way up to the treble top, perfect definition. This afternoon, driving for no reason, I listened to Bach piano preludes, guitar sonatas, and sonatas for flute and fortepiano.

I left my apartment in Golden Gate Heights, swung down to Lincoln and then across Divisadero to the entranceway of the Golden Gate Bridge. The rusty red color of the metal contrasted against the green of the Marin Headlands; vibrant, rich greens with living dimension and depth. It rained for the first part of the day and all the plants sucked up that water and pumped it out through their cells as pure, efflorescent energy. The ocean had a savage look, torn up and streaked with white caps. Seagulls were uncontrollably blown by the racing wind through the bridge’s suspension cables. A fog bank hung a few miles off shore and all the lighthouses waited with their flashing lights ready to shine and fog horns ready to bellow. It would come rolling in later and cover the city in wet, gray gauze. I got off the main highway after Marin City and took the coastal highway up the headlands until the road dipped back down toward the ocean, a driver’s dream of swervy road surrounded by some of the loveliest scenery anywhere in the world. I drove with determination and control all the way up to Stewart’s Point, then turned around and drove irresolutely homeward, exhausted.

I wanted to get out and go up to my apartment, but I knew that when I got there I’d feel oppressed and would soon want to go out again. This is what I had been doing for almost 2 months now, since I split up with Felicia and left Panama. I just couldn’t sit still; I couldn’t stay in one place for very long. Now, my life had become broken heart management; adult supervision of topsy-turvy emotions; a sort of reptile mind’s take over of adult function to get you through a difficult stretch. I couldn’t change the wasted feeling in my chest; I couldn’t make it stop or turn into something else, though I tried everything. It wasn’t only the pain of leaving someone, someone I knew I’d never see again or talk to, but all the other stuff it brought up with it. Last night I woke up at 2:30 unable to sleep and stepped out onto the deck to look at the moon. My cat looked at me like I was a ghost. I don’t know if I had ever really seen the moon in that way before: this unreally bright, glowing orb that seemed like a conscious being, a being in another dimension, with clouds sliding across it and igniting rainbows at the edges, like sundogs on clouds at sunset. Or maybe I was so stressed I was imagining it, hallucinating. The moon in a deep blue night sky with a few bright stars, the skyline seen from my apartment, the damp silence of the city, trees wet and still, everything icy and cold, frozen, like a scene from another planet.

I stared and stared at the face of the moon, but the moon-being couldn’t help me, or not in any way I could feel right then. I’d had insomnia for a month now; it was beginning to affect me. I fell into bed exhausted and slept deeply and obliviously for a few hours. Then I awoke at 2 or 3 AM, always at the same time as if an invisible alarm went off---the sufferer’s alarm. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I was forced to think of all sorts of things I didn’t want to think about. Like the futility of everything. The sense that no accomplishment really matters, no matter what you have achieved in the eyes of the world or the people you know. Or your own self. The most gruesome thoughts are about death itself that comes gnawing up from the silence underpinning your thoughts. And because you can’t escape into forgetfulness, it’s like something is rubbing your nose in the knowledge of your mortality, enveloping you in it, and since you can’t sleep and escape, you're forced to look at everything, to trace all those dimensions, the contours of what you really know, all the stuff about yourself and your life you can only avoid if you don't think about it, if you just keep moving.

I watched my neighbor Jennie Silverstein get out of her car with some shopping bags and walk saucily up to the entrance. The doorman smiled and opened the front door for her. Her perfect, symmetrical ass communicated with the deepest part of my animal consciousness and told me, ‘Here is a perfect breeding unit’. The synopses sparked connections, neurons congregated, cells exuded juices, and my body temperature went up a degree. Everything about Jenny Silverstein is symmetrical and she really is a perfect breeding unit. And she’s bright and cheery and rich as hell with dot-com money. She has the same build as Felicia though she is definitely from another social category, a much higher one. There is something in certain women, it’s really hard to say what it is exactly, that just clicks in you. Or rather there is something that just reaches out and grabs you, or locks onto something inside of you with invisible hooks, becomes an obsession you have to fulfill, but you don’t really know what it is that drives you. The core of it, of course, is sexual. If we weren’t connected to people with the sexual impulse it is hard to imagine what life would be like. It would be radically different, that’s for sure. There are root forces at work in the world that drive people in habitual and predictable ways. It starts early and continues almost to the end of our days. The truth is it is disgusting when you really think about it. I looked at Jenny Silverstein’s sumptuous uptown ass in uptown blue jeans with tan leather belt with uptown southwestern silver ornaments, and it rang a bell inside of me---a little, insistent, biologically and psychologically determined bell. But we pretend we are not determined beings, we dress up all our intentions in false garb. We trick ourselves. If we really internalized the truth, perhaps we’d all lie awake at night with insomnia, and we’d get up and go stare at the moon. And death would rise up before us, the silent teacher, the silent interrogator. My death, my guru.

I left the engine running; thinking I might just take off again, go somewhere else in my superbly engineered, metallic gray mid-engine super-car. Maybe over to the East Bay to browse the used book stores. Parked in front of me was a Porsche and behind me a red Mercedes sedan, testament that I live in one of the better districts of San Francisco, a successful person among successful others.

I looked across to Golden Gate Park and the silhouette of dark green juniper trees against the afternoon sky, the carefully cultivated flowerbeds, a running path going on for miles. Some bikers sailed by, gaudy as macaws in their bright biker’s outfits, one guy in Italian white, green and red, and the other looking like a Fourth of July sparkler. The guy in the American get-up looked sort of like my colleague John Baxter from the Department of Evolutionary Biology at UC, with whom I spent many damp, San Francisco nights discussing the conflict between modern, liberal, feminist ideals, and the colder, harder, ingrained facts of evolutionary biology that drive the female system and her brain as well. John’s a silky, groomed, house-broken politically correct lap-dog, and always smiled condescendingly at my riskier opinions. If there was something politically correct to be defended, he’d defend it, but I define myself as a demon of the politically incorrect, and with sardonic glee love to watch people’s smiles flatten and disappear, leaving a disapproving, concerned expression, when I express what I know beforehand is an idea that runs counter to their received, PC formulations. I used to feel guilty, but I learned to take pleasure in it. The fishbowl of the Bay Area is filled to the brim with all the variegated specimens of PC thinking; a permanent, breeding colony that never migrates and just keeps attracting opportunistic new-comers from the whole world over.

I looked at my left hand in the pale afternoon light, turning it over, flexing my fingers, gripping and ungripping the black steering wheel. I lifted the thumb and studied the wrinkles on the mound; looked closely at all the fingerprint lines covering my whole hand, the creases of the heart, head and life-lines, the pinkish color at the articulations I have a scar on the mound at the base of my little finger. I don’t know how I got it. A hippy fortune-teller told me she’d only seen that line once before on someone else’s hand but never told me what it meant.

I had an idea for a book, but still couldn’t quite take it seriously. I would call the book something like ‘Manual for the Molding of Woman’, and I’d use the singular noun to stress that I was speaking about women as a genera, about Universal Woman, not just some women but all women. I’d include a sub-title, something like The Female: A Product of Man’s Will, and I’d use all politically incorrect language, what we think but won’t say; sure to raise hackles, sure to get the feminists screaming, that shrill wailing of the Sirens along modernity’s boulevards, but mostly the ones running through academia. I would condense 15 years of physiological, evolutionary theory on the differences between the male and the female brain and hormones into a handy manual for men’s use in understanding of the true nature of woman. To understand and to better manipulate. I even had part of the introduction worked out: ‘Woman’ has become a shifting cultural symbol, shiny and attractive as quicksilver but impossible to pin-down, constantly on the move, fixed in one moment and then fluid again, filling up one arbitrary mould and then shape-shifting to another; an unstable quantum-particle in an uncertain cultural field. They say that the quantum-particle is, in some way, aware when someone is observing it. Similarly, woman is like that, and in fixing your attention on her you are in fact creating her, and she returns your gaze and seems to ask: "Is this what you want me to be?

A dangerous motorcycle gang of middle-aged doctors and their accountants, dressed in black tank-tops and black leather jackets with headbands, rumbled by. The vibration of the Harleys produced a buzz in the dashboard and made the alarm system of the car in front emit warning beeps. ‘There goes the neighborhood’, I thought, and laughed. I listened to Bach’s flute and piano sonatas, and the segment I like most came on. Felicia and I listened to this music quite often when we were together in Panama. It spoke to things right on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t put into words, a sense of deep connectedness to life, great sorrow and great happiness, hope and anguish.

I’d gone to Western Panama on a year sabbatical from the university after 5 years of intensive and fruitful research. I’d also made a shit load of money on some real estate deals in San Francisco which made the whole adventure possible. My plan was to devote myself to a personal project unrelated to my scientific work---Archetypal Psychology, completely in the domain of the soft sciences but a subject of personal significance. After years of intense professional work I was in a position to splurge on myself, to allow myself a bit of metaphysical delight, to recharge my spiritual battery packs. I rented a small house in Cerro Punta, in Western Panama, near the end of a long dirt road 7 miles out of town, owned by a friend of mine who’d retired from the university a few years earlier. Overarched by huge, mahogany trees at the edge of a field where stands of fern grew, beside a swift moving, clear mountain stream, the house looked run down from the outside, with a rust-stained, zinc roof and rickety wooden door, but the inside had been remodeled. It had a terracotta tile floor, a simple kitchen with gas stove; wainscoting painted off-white and above that an outdated wallpaper with little peony bouquets wrapped with pale blue ribbons. From the living room a door opened onto a large, brick patio with a flower garden abounding in yellow margaritas, bright orange fire bush and tall purple and yellow iris, and at the edge of the lot and enclosing the back yard there was a forest of zarzamora azul, a kind of blackberry that attracted flocks of exotic, colorful birds in the day and yellow-toothed, greasy opossums at night.

©Talking Ass 2009

This rewrite doesn't look like the right direction to me but perhaps influenced by your own moods. More sexual undertones, direct and symbolic, more pining: more self-absorbing prose altogether. I suspect it seems to try to paint a clearer psychological picture of the currents that drive the narrator but does one need to know that on the first page already?

It could improve immensely by pacing that self-revelation or otherwise making more clear that the powers that are driving the narrator are unknown to himself but at the same time he starts to realize this unknown, gets attracted to it, seduced by it somehow. The way it stands now it seems the story is designed not to go too much further.

Just my first impressions, I tried not to over-analyze it but just typed my response straight after reading.