I Measured Dimensions Not Standardly Taken, Why Not?
His not responding in any way to my breakfast activities led me into a brief and I think genuine mania. I think that was the effective cause although something else might have done it later on.
I sat fixatedly staring at him. I moved my footstool around and stared from different distances, getting into it, getting into not washing, sitting there in my yakuta, not getting dressed, feeling aggrieved. How could I believe he was truly asleep? I knew his habits, his sleeping modes especially, since my insomnia gave me such amplitude to study them. I deserved to be talked to about yesterday. If my intervention was stupid I deserved to be comforted. I needed to be kept from succumbing to a certain metaphor for marriage I was recurring to too often, that is, of marriage as a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà.
There is a condition you can precipitate in yourself by staring intensely enough at another face, or even your own. The face reorganizes itself subtly. The condition resembles the feeling you get when you look at a face upside down until it seems correct, a real face with eyes where the mouth should be, a possible kind of face. The face you’re staring at reorganizes itself into another face. The Rosicrucians encourage you to stare at yourself in a mirror by candlelight in a dark room until your face changes and you get a glimpse of yourself in a previous incarnation. Actually I knew about this from Nelson, whose father at the very end of a lifetime of florid atheism became a Rosicrucian and performed this very exercise so excellently that Nelson heard him yell with fright. The story was that he had seen himself as a bearded man imprisoned for his beliefs in a dungeon. The whole subject of his father’s fall into Rosicrucianism was painful for Nelson. Somehow his father had gotten into it as a crutch for his final abstinence from liquor, but then he had begun believing its tenets, going so far as to take up chanting mystic vowel sounds supposed to vibrationally lift the mind to a higher state. This was a morning and evening thing. He would begin with low steady sounds like Aum and Ra, which were all right, but he would end with a piercing nasal cry of Ain! which could be heard on the lawn.
I was staring at Nelson, and there was a flicker, and then something made Nelson’s image seen smaller, as though he were receding. It was instantaneous, but there was no question about the reality of it as I was seeing it. What I saw was a distinct event, not on the scale of a cartoon character shrinking or anything remotely like that, but a shift, a recession away from me. I reacted with chills. I knew the answer had to be brain chemistry in essence, but I still felt shaken and weak.
Try not to interpret everything, I warned myself as I concluded instantly that I knew what the experience meant. As things were going, I was going to lose Denoon, one way or another. This was my unconscious taking the bit between its teeth in a friendly way, for a change. I was going to lose Denoon because I wasn’t acting intelligently. And I was acting unintelligently because there was too much of him I didn’t understand. And I was failing to understand because the situation of trying to learn while I was in the act of living with him recapitulated my difficulties in absorbing material in lecture settings as opposed to absorbing material from a text, from something I could reread and underline. And this illumination yielded a subillumination to the effect that I had to reduce everything about Denoon to writing, classify it, so I could learn Denoon the same way I ever learned any subject decently. This did not seem bizarre to me in any way.
My project came to me with insane clarity. My previous piecemeal treatment of Nelson had to go. It had been wrong simply to strew bits and fragments on him through my Tsau notes-cum-ongoing-analysis of my unique self. I needed to cull and put together under the right headings everything I had on Nelson so far, and I had to get more. What I had on Nelson had to be inadequate and misleading. He was the one who talked about protean behavior, namely the tactic in almost all mammal species of jumping erratically and randomly around in response to being chased. This could apply to him. I had pursued him. There was no argument about that. So a lot of what I’d captured was undoubtedly not what it seemed.
As a task, this project was perfect. Of course, this is as I see it now. It was perfect because of its penultimacy. It was concrete and it was urgent, but it was the act preceding the final act or decision, which would have to be postponed, necessarily.
I wanted to begin right away — in fact it felt urgent to begin right away. Whatever the mental equivalent of flailing around is was what I was doing. I knew it but couldn’t help it. Somehow I had to get the true dimensions of this man. The word “dimensions” galvanized me. The minutiae of this are important. My attention was caught by Denoon’s beloved retractable steel measuring tape. It was Swedish. It had been everywhere with him. The reel case was the size of a compact, but the steel tape seemed to come out of it forever. The quality of the tape was amazing: it was like silk but indestructible. He loved his measuring tape. It was on the floor near his head, where he could reach it. It and his slide rule and his hunting knife were equivalent pet things. The hunting knife I was ambivalent about because he wore it around too much and also because by using it in mundane little chores he rendered them overdramatic, in my humble opinion.
I know there are lines in the Greek lyrics that describe the frantic state of mind, derived from love, I was entering. You burn me, someone says to Eros, and in one epigram someone complains that Eros is inside him and he feels his limbs being shaken by Eros’s wingbeats, approximately. I crept over to Denoon and lifted the blanket. He was deep asleep, naked as usual. He was sleeping the sleep of true exhaustion. He was on his left side, his right arm stretched out as though reaching for something and his right knee raised. He looked like a hurdler. I was going to measure him.
I wanted him to wake up and not to wake up, both. I was pulling his blanket off but I was keeping the place dark, not opening the curtains. I was going to measure him, but gently, not letting the metal tape measure touch him, lest the cold of it startle him.
I measured dimensions not standardly taken, thinking Why not? I measured across his buttocks. I measured his right calf. I wrote the numbers in ballpoint pen on the palm of my hand, like a Motswana clerk in a small general dealer shop. I was being outré in other ways too. I never sit around in the morning in my yakuta. The yakuta was for sex. Sitting around in a kimono was too much like my mother clinging to being not dressed for work as long as she could. But there I was. My hair was a wreck. Either he was genuinely sleeping the sleep of the dead or he was faking: whichever it was, I had to know, because my personal motto should probably be You lie to me at your peril. I measured his fingers, still keeping the tape from touching them. I decided I would measure his penis.
Obviously I wasn’t delicate enough because voilà he was awake, explosively. He pushed me away. It was understandable. I was a shadow to him and was no doubt conforming to some invasive hag archetype we all carry around within us. Also he’d caught the glint of the metal tape and hadn’t had time to process exactly what metallic thing he was seeing. Then also I give him credit for sensing I wasn’t in normalcy, the proof being that it was no problem for me to wait until he spoke first, even though I was the invasive one and the convention of the female speaking first when an unresolved conflict has gone on long enough was alive and well in our house. Ah good, I thought, another thesis topic although unfortunately not in my field, id est proving that women are almost invariably the appeasers when fights occur that lead to stalemates. Nelson was alarmed. Finally he said something like What was that?