Love

A love that went all to Hell resolved with me ending up in a city mission. Love with a great beauty inspired by genius can do that to you. On my first Mother's Day there my friend Gregory invited me to his brother's in Kenmore for an Armenian feast. Gregory stood maybe 5'4", looked like the guy on Sweet Caporals, and was reputedly the welterweight champion of the Russian Navy. A gold tooth, an unself conscious swagger, and a definite don't mess I can take care of myself and you, too, attitude. Could do anything with his hands: body work, welding, Chopin. He'd come from Baku with the American propagandistic belief that with hard work he could make big money. His mother had died poor and virtually alone in Los Angeles. He later stabbed his brother in the belly during a Dosteyevskian family discussion. But this last was after my dinner with Gregory.

I caught a Sunday bus up to Kenmore and found Gregory on his haunches in front of a habachi, six pack at hand and half gone, with a deliciously smoking heap of marinated lamb kabob. Beeel, he said, throwing his arms around me, dreeenk. But I'm not a drinker. Four hours later, Gregory had consumed two six packs and a fifth of Vodka, and had opened his heart to me about his grief for his mother and his guilt. Four hours and two minutes later, we were bombing down Kenmore Ave. in his little jalopy going 50 in a 30. The flashing lights of the cruiser weren't long in appearing. Kenmore's finest is known for its cordon sanitaire: low lifes and niggers--KEEP OUT. My friend Eric, a large black man and former minor exec with a Fortune 500, never once drove down to the river there in his Town Car without a cop pulling up next to him and asking "How you doing today, Sir." Once Eric dared embitteredly to ask, Do you take an interest in EVERY visitor. At any rate, the young brushcut fullback who emerged from the cruiser was very interested in the fact that aside from the 50, Gregory seemed to have a complete lack of vital papers: driver's license, registration, insurance. In addition, there was the apparent possibility that a lit match could produce the belch of a flame thrower. Piqued, but in control, the officer asked Gregory to step out of the car, move away, and allow him to go to work on me. A quick check of my flimsy mission ID led to a call to crime central who apparently told the officer there was an outstanding warrant for someone with my name. While he sent for the Buffalo constabulary to deal with me, he noticed Gregory pissing into the Delaware Avenue gutter--Ïs he doing what I think he's doing? His tone was noticeably less cool. To make a long story short, when I finally got back to the mission several hours later after my time at the slammer, Gregory was peacefully unconscious and snoring in his bunk.

alchemy

I am going to tell you somethings about my goddam childhood. The sheer miracle of aliveness and perception itself was a constant wonder to me. How could it be??!!! And then, How could I be? Somehow I wanted to learn everything. But as Polyani, I believe, distinguished, there is knowing that...and knowing how.

Let us skip along to college, because there was no Beatrice. I was blessed to have a great teacher, John Crosset, who ended his days as a professor of classics at one of those fine mid-western liberal arts schools, but who taught English seminar to me. Lionel Trilling said Crosset had given him the best English translation of the Aeneid he had yet read, when Crosset was 15. So much for bona fides

We started with the Iliad, Lattimore's translation, and metaphor, which is analogous to alchemy, was introduced. Crosset taught through the Socratic method, almost exclusively asking questions---gold to answers' lead. But what questions! On beginning the Old Testament he asks, "Why need God ask questions, presumably He knows the answers?"
Oh, you mean authors actually think about these stories they write? And deeply? Think does not go deep enough. In His own image created he them. Male and female.

When I dabbled in the intelligent layman's guide to physics, seeing if there might be scientific correlates to imagination, memory, & self reflection and lost myself in speculations about holography, superstrings, quantum mechanics, and relativity, I found Mandelbroit, Godel, and even Dirac's Unitary Hypothesis. But none was as profound as that cartoon in the New Yorker: two physicists, young and old on a Princeton- like campus, the younger crying to the older as a voluptuous earth goddess of a coed strides by, "Look, professor, there it goes, The Grand Unified Theory of Everything!"

So I became a psychoanalyst: first because I thought I could never study German to get a Ph.D. in English; and then because I thought an M.D. would make more money and have greater social prestige than a psychologist. Status feels very important when you feel insecure and inferior.

But there is no escaping your fears. I know that one's fears is the proper construction, but if there were anyone I knew as well as yours truly, I would write about him or her. And this enabled me to pursue my alchemic researches (metaphor, dear reader), though which the life of the mind and heart could be joined to God's.