training wheels for my oedipus cycle

My voyeuristic conception of the afterlife. I wish for a heaven only as high as the maple tree canopy outside beautiful Danielle's bedroom window across the street.

There is something so wonderfully curious about the butterfly, which is so ultimately fragile and temporary, being a symbol, an inspiration for the idea of transcendence.

On the butterfly, its metamorphosis, as proof of immortality, Voltaire remarked that it, this proof, was not more weighty than the wings of the insects from which it was borrowed.

It is the recognition of the temporary that conjures the idea of transcendence; this recognition, caused by love. Love is what turns the mind to the idea of the spirit, the soul, transcendence, immortality. Love grows stronger as the body weakens, cultivates attention which yields a recognition of this inverse relationship: the eyes swelling with affection under the rains of time while the wrinkles surrounding them grow pronounced as parched earth.

I've loved women from 14 years younger than myself to 18 years older.

The same at 11 as at 87, the feeling of falling in love seems to be.

That one should fall in love on one's deathbed. . . . "After all, young and old leave life on the same terms. None leaves it in any way but as if he had just entered it," writes Montaigne.
***
Yes, Monsieur M., three cheers for constant beginnings! and that metaphysical mud in which we wallow, that essential soil of which the ground of endearing human being is composed, which allows a bud of love, a rose, to blossom on the last day of life!

Immortality for rest and relaxation in a land of milk and honey? Only if a woman's milk, a woman's honey.

Ponce de Leon should have looked no farther than his pantaloons; the sexual organ, whether male or female, is the closest we will come to the true fountain of youth!

Indescribable beauty of a middle-aged woman thoughtlessly repeating the movements of a mundane task that she has executed thousands of times during her life. There is a hint of spirit, of immortality, of her self existing independently of her body which by now knows well enough by itself how to function in this world. It is the same pleasure one gets from secretly watching a child play alone and quietly in a room his dreamy game which makes his hands invisible around the figures they move, allowing them the illusion of moving of their own free will. It suggests an existence apart from the corporeal. And the posture of the observer can only be described as posthumous. And a posthumous observer is immortal.

One of our oldest questions: the question of our own mortality: our quest for immortality. I used to think that it was a question of the voice asking the question that is its answer. I now suspect that the most profound treatise on the subject can only be expressed with a voice abstracted to laughter desperate for escape. . . .

Myself falling away from me like meat from a bone-- in big, sloppy chunks.

1, 2, 3: my self will be annihilated; my body, outlasting my self, will decompose; my notebook, outlasting my self and body, will be consumed by silverfish.

When one is in love, the desire for immortality multiplies maddeningly; we want to preserve our lover, body and soul, and preserve ourselves to experience her.

The mating-call of immortality is the sound of laughter.

The "mortal coil."

Why, in the end, is a mere century or less on earth a prerequisite for eternal life?

Would the question of being would persist as strongly in an afterlife?

Immortality for the continued development of one's character? I outgrew my interest in developing my character early in earthly life.

Take inventory of the world's laughter: compose poetic descriptions of every individual's laugh; the only way to pin them down-- let them fly! Possibly broaden this project to include smiles.

Her beautiful laugh: A long and drawn out wheeze followed by a loud and singular "HA!" (as though she blows up a balloon until it pops!).

An idea for a film: Fragmentary jokes cut and spliced together as the camera meanders past their tellers and laughing listeners throughout a large and crowded party, through clusters of people as though through solar systems composing a universe of laughter. Punch-lines should predominate.

Women with children-- more attractive; the beautiful mother less self-conscious-- her consciousness transferred to her child; when it returns to her with the comment that she is lovely-- that is the moment. . . .

The two sides of my right hand, the palm and the knuckles, still argue over the incident on the playground. It was in sixth grade, and I was attempting to wrestle a dodgeball from the clutches of a girl named Stephanie, who hugged the ball defensively to her breast. Once I thrust my prying right hand between her body and the ball, the palm of my hand, on the coarse rubber ball, was instantly dethroned as the sensitive, feeling side of my hand; the other side, the callous, bony back of my hand, coming into contact with something so unlike itself, something so indescribably soft it seemed to dissolve, became, we may say, as a palm. Thusly, a hand with a palm on both of its sides, even momentarily, is reduced to jelly. . . .

She has touched him so deeply and so many times, effortlessly, without any intention of doing so. The cute, little-girlish way she keeps a tissue tucked in the cuff of her sweater during the days between winter and spring. . . . So moved, he even finds the fact that her birthday, 20 April, falls on Adolph Hitler's adorable and endearing.

Why I visit her office so often: She radiates such warmth so naturally that I am attracted to her as to a lighted fireplace on a bleak work's day as on a cold winter's night.
***
I tell her not to be surprised if one day I take off my shoes and wiggle my toes at her feet.

I dream her eyes closed until she sleeps beside me, wake to an open window for air.

Hearing that she is beautiful, she covers her face: two equally beautiful hands.

She shakes her hair to untangle the sunlight. Diamonds shake similar light in their tin cups.

She stands, contained in a distant wind, her posture a bottle of still perfume.

First there is infatuation: I dream of her lying beside me, her head resting on my chest, my heart pounding. Does she hear?

There are many who would inspire children to dream and fulfill those dreams. What of the man who would inspire women in middle age, with whom he has affairs, to remember and fulfill their dreams?

The joy experienced by two lovers who take a potted house-plant on a picnic, for a walk. Liberation. Weightlessness.

How many lovers have lain their naked bodies on cemetery grass!

The smile, . . . and the arch of raised eyebrows completes the circle of joyful surprise.
***
The youthful face is already smiling, already halfway to the buoyancy of joy.
***
Give me the older woman who wears the relaxed mask of gravity but is not grave, whose smile and eyebrows rise up, in time, life against death.

The older woman engorged with the juice of life, having spent more days under the sun of experience.

Sunday. Removed the training wheels from my Oedipus Cycle.

Strolling hand in hand with an older woman in autumn.

My attraction to older women . . .
***
My reaching for them with the desire to pull them back through the years as from the edge of an abyss?
***
My attraction to the abyss itself, my desire to acquaint myself with death before my time?
***
Or is it a combination of both-- two desires flaming up in conflict?

He dreams of secrets faintly whispered from the most exquisite creases and wrinkles on the nape of an older woman, dreams about mortality-- about the girl's firm flesh which will ripen to such a nebulous tender, about the tender which was once firm; about taught skin which will loosen to a less ostensible boundary, and such a boundary which was once a line clearly etched in sand-- about the pubescent girl whose fresh playfulness resembles so much the flirting of romantic love, the startling maturity in the eyes of this girl and the innocence glimpse in the eyes of an older woman. . . .Through this dream he contemplates the degrees, from beginning to end, of youth and age, to comprehend life itself, through intimacies with women, all of whom had no uncertain passion, and flushed, blushed and smiled as though they would burst with life, baffle time. It is the same with all ages, this constant, this intimation of immortality he adores.

Mature women with an irresistible, charming disregard for mortality, who give you a glimpse of the little girl they once were.

Betty Ann,
Beauty Ann,
Betty Annswer to my prayers . . .

She is such a little lady container.

To be imprisoned in her exquisite ribcage . . .

Her eyes and her wrists and the way she rolls them . . .

Baudelaire said form, rather than content, was immortal.
***
My personal proof for the existence of the human soul: If it is possible for me to carry anything from this world into the possible next and keep it in death, it would be not her words but her laugh, not her hands but their endearing flight and flutter, the ensign of gestures memorized through intimacy and attentiveness, her subtleties of form swaddling, infusing what must be my soul.

The soul? The soul is that essence of yourself which swoons with and around the roller coaster of each and every one of your lover's pubic hairs.