ADD IT UP
Eagle Rock, Los Angeles
July 6, 1995
Dear Dick,
Last weekend I went up to Morro Bay and dropped acid for the first time in twenty years. The night before I’d dreamt about poverty. No matter what the rich may say, poverty is not just lack, it’s a gestalt, a psychological condition.
I dreamt about Renee Mosher, an artist-carpenter-tattooist who lives in upstate New York, the Town of Thurman, the same town she was born in. Renee has two grown daughters who she’s raised alone. She’s 39 or so and in the dream just like in life, she looked old and frightening. In the dream we were best friends, we told each other everything. But waking up, the impossibility of it—returning to an adolescent state where you choose your friends for who they are, and not their circumstances—flooded through me like bad blood. When you’re old, essentialism dies. You are your circumstances. Renee’s house is getting repossessed next month because she hasn’t paid her taxes for three years. Notices pile up, sometimes she opens them. And what’s the point of even trying? Even if she finds a way to pay, the taxes’ll just add up again. She can’t afford to keep the house. She’ll move into a trailer. She’ll walk away. A blood vessel burst in Renee’s eye while she was installing a kitchen window at my house. The doctor at the clinic said it was her gall bladder. That cost her 60 dollars. When Renee gets sick she misses work and loses pay. The poor do not write faxes, hire lawyers or cut backtax deals with Warren County. They get sick, they feel crazed, they walk away.
“Rich people are just poor people with money,” my socialite boss said 15 years ago in New York. But it’s not true. There is a culture of poverty and it’s not bridgeable.
John & Trevor’d travelled with a Warirapa shearing gang in the North Island of New Zealand since September. The job was lucrative and hard: start at 5, knock off at 5, seven days a week unless it rained. All spring long John and Trevor talked about the trip they’d take at Christmas when the job ran out. They’d put John’s ‘61 V-8 Holden on the road and take off on a drinking/driving/whoring tour around New Zealand. They talked about the trip so much we all felt like we were going, too. They left Pahiatua on Christmas Eve. But on Boxing Day the car got totalled in a drunken wreck. They spent all the shearing money that they’d saved just paying off the bondsman.
“The most important entitlement,” I think you wrote, “remains the right to speak from a position.”
The acid came from San Francisco and it was nice in a California kind of way. Mustard sunlight reflected like a digital display over splashing waves; tall seagrass dancing in the dunes. Is poverty the absence of association? LSD unlocks the freeze-frame mechanism behind our eyes, lets us see that matter’s always moving. Or so they say. But I was conscious while the grass and clouds were pleasurably roiling that they’d only be roiling in this way for seven hours. Unlike all the famous California acidheads, I was disappointed, underwhelmed, because drug-induced hallucinations are so visual and temporal.
What’re pictures compared to living’s endless tunnels, poverty grief & sadness? To experience intensity is to not know how things will end. This morning a Vietnam vet living with a hoard of dirty kids in a shack next to the Eagle Rock dry cleaners offered me 2000 dollars on the spot for my 1000 dollar car. Why? Because it (a 1967 Rambler) reminded him of his dead mother, the car she used to drive. We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what’s forever gone.
(For years I tried to write but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position. And “who” “am” “I”? Embracing you & failure’s changed all that ’cause now I know I’m no one. And there’s a lot to say…)
I want to write to you about schizophrenia—(“The schizophrenic believes that he is no-one,” R.D. Laing)—even though I haven’t got a wooden leg to stand on in relation to this subject, having never studied it or experienced it firsthand. But I’m using you to create a certain schizophrenic atmosphere, OR, love is schizophrenia, OR, I felt a schizophrenic trigger in our confluence of interests—who’s crazier than who? Schizophrenia’s a state that I’ve been drawn to like a faghag since age 16. “Why are all the people I love crazy?” went a punk rock song by Ann Rower. For years I was the best friend, confidante, of schizophrenics. I lived through them, they talked to me. In New Zealand and New York, Ruffo, Brian, Erje and Michelle, Liza, Debbe, Dan were conduits for getting closer. But since these friendships always end with disappearances, guns and thefts and threats, by the time we met I’d given up.
When I asked you if you’d been to school you acted like I’d asked you if you still liked fucking pigs. “Of course I’ve been to school.” After all, your current job depends on it. But I could tell from all the footnotes in your writing that you hadn’t. You like books too much and think they are your friends. One book leads you to the next like serial monogamy. Dear Dick, I’ve never been to school but every time I go into a library I get a rush like sex or acid for the first few minutes when you’re getting off. My brain gets creamy with associative thought. Here are some notes I made about schizophrenia:
1. Sylvano Arieti writes in The Interpretation of Schizophrenia that schizophrenics operate within the realm of “paleologic”: a thought-system that insists against all rationality that “A” can be both “A” and “not-A” simultaneously. If LSD reveals movement, schizophrenia reveals content, i.e., patterns of association. Schizophrenics reach past language’s “signifying chain,” (Lacan) into the realm of pure coincidence. Time spreads out in all directions. To experience time this way is to be permanently stoned on a drug that combines the visual effects of LSD with heroin’s omnipotence, lucidity. Like in a Borges world, where one moment can unfold into a universe. In 1974 Brion Gysin and William Burroughs recorded their experiments in time-travel via an awareness of coincidence in The Third Mind. It’s a self-help book. By following their methods (e.g., “Divide a notebook into three columns. Record at any given moment what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, what you’re reading…”) anyone can do this, i.e., can leave them “selves” and enter fractured time.
2. Ruffo was a 42-year-old man waiting to receive a full-frontal lobotomy in Wellington, New Zealand. He was an unmistakable sight in Wellington’s limited cast of “characters”—big and bear-like, tufts of straight black hair, bad teeth, broad smile, an energy and openness behind brown eyes that wasn’t English, wasn’t “European.” No matter what the season Ruffo wore a brown tweed overcoat wrapped around him like a cassock over sharkskin pants. Diagnosed incurable by New Zealand’s Mental Health, Ruffo was the most civil kind of “schizophrenic.” He never raved; in fact, he never spoke without considering the impact of his words with exquisite care. While privately he may have been delusional, Ruffo wasn’t bent on delivering any particular message. He’d discovered no conspiracies, and if voices spoke to him from radios, TVs or trees, he never translated them. His friends were his constituents, but unlike other politicians Ruffo was supremely patient. If plans were being made for him, perhaps they were for his own good. The Social Welfare agency that sent him checks hoped that once relieved of half a brain, Ruffo would become employable and self-supporting. He had no bitterness about this.