I believe in the existence of situational genius and that I occasionally possess it. An explanation of what I was doing leapt into being. It was that I was planning to make something for him, clothing, pants in fact, a surprise, so I’d been measuring his inseam on the q.t., I was sorry, his pants wardrobe was useless for getting an idea of how long a normal pair of pants should be because it consisted of pantaloons and shorts, and I was sorry.
He apologized for startling me with his reaction. I could see he was simply going to accept my explanation and not probe to see if there was any element of provocation in what I was doing. Something in his attitude convinced me, in the state I was in, that reducing him to paper was the right idea. I needed to proceed with it. I wanted him to leave the house so I could do that. I hope never again to undergo the state I was in. I even remember one peculiarity of it: I was aware more than usually of the edges of my field of vision, my lashes, the ghostly nose we forget is always there.
Religion, the Most Effective of the Placebos
Surprisingly, the conviction that getting Nelson on paper was urgent was just as strong in the days following. Denoon Evaginated was the secret working title for my compilation.
There was a significant amount about Denoon in my journal for me to extract and collate, for which I needed index cards or paper that could be cut up to serve as index cards. There were no index cards available. In fact we were in one of our chronic general paper famines. We had orders in for all kinds of paper, but inevitably they were the items left out of the consignments of sundries the supply plane brought in. In my journal I had no more than forty blank pages left, and these were not expendable because my diarizing was going to go on simultaneously with my anatomy of Nelson. An example of my focus was my strolling in the vicinity of the school one gloaming and being tempted to slip in and pinch one or two exercise books from the handful we had left. But I remembered how proud we all were of the absence of stealing in Tsau and controlled myself.
It occurred to me I could use aerogram blanks, which the post office had plenty of. In a way, that was perfect. I could appear to be writing to friends when in fact I was doing otherwise. Nelson for some reason liked the idea of my writing to friends, or possibly what he liked was the appearance of my having as many friends as my quote unquote letter-writing implied. Seeing me writing even inspired him to do more than he usually did vis-à-vis dinner and housekeeping, which was already substantial, though, it now came to me, not as substantial as he’d originally led me to expect. He thought I was referring to my journal for current incidents to include in my letters. It was admittedly a little reckless of me. The only drawback to the airletters was their price, but something about that felt right to me. I put fictitious names and addresses on my airletters and even sealed them up, only to have to later open them and cut up the sections for classification.
It was surprising to see how many sections I had that bore one way or another on Denoon and fatherhood, or more specifically on Nelson and his father. Was this because I was interested in any clue that would tell me whether or not he was germane as a father-of-my-child prospect? There was too much on fatherhood. I had to compress it. For example, I had a surplus on the contention that good father-son relationships are predicated on the father having some expertise or maestria to pass on to the son — nothing about daughters here — preferably something wherewith the son can make money, although sports or philately or hunting and fishing will do. Because his father was in advertising there was nothing vocational to convey, advertising being a fraud and something his father was ashamed of in any case. Pathetically, along these lines, he realized his father had tried to tell him about something he did know, drinking, or rather how to get away with it, as in avoiding hangovers by taking two aspirin and drinking all the water you can hold before going to sleep when you’ve overindulged. This was along with other advice at the time Nelson was leaving for college.
Religion was another hypertrophied facet. It was everywhere. He was adamant about the Catholic Church. Even if he acknowledged for a second that there might be some progressive Catholics in Brazil, say, his next question was sure to be Why is it it never occurs to the Pope to excommunicate a serial murderer like Pinochet? or something similar. According to the Koran, when Mohammed went up to heaven to meet Allah he asked Allah to reduce the number of obligatory daily prayers to whatever it is today, fifteen or sixteen, which Allah agreed to as a mark of approval. But did this belong under Religion or under Repetition, another very oversupplied category? Or where did religion, the most effective of the placebos, go?: under Religion or Humor? At this point I decided to let the category alone for the foreseeable future, which was, in retrospect, dumb of me.
Humor was tough for several reasons. Sometimes something I’d collected would seem to me to be humor and other times it would seem merely median sardonica. Did his singing go under Humor? He liked to sing a parody of The Impossible Dream, in which he ate the inedible meal and drank the unpotable beverage, and so on. The question was whether it should go under Humor or a character trait like obstinacy, because while I’d smiled the first two or three times I’d heard him sing this, I finally had to signal that I wasn’t finding it very funny, and finally that I wasn’t finding it funny at all. But he was still singing it off and on, trying to get my approval for ongoing refinements in the lyrics. Other areas of his humor were slightly invasive as well. For some reason he continued to think it was funny to pretend I liked the music of Bob Dylan, when in fact all I had admitted at an earlier point was that I liked It Ain’t Me Babe. He would murmur-sing How many times must the cannon balls fly Before they’re forever banned, and then shout Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Historic Agreement! UN Bans Cannonballs Forever! Flintlocks Next! And of course out of my supposed adoration of Dylan came our longrunning match on why the band can’t play. There were many more reasons than I’d remembered. Mine were consistently more hubristic than his, I noticed. He was not really ever going to evolve much beyond a strumpet stealing the trumpet or Jean Arp stealing the harp. Gender may be involved more than I recognized. He told me something he’d said jokingly, to which his wife had taken exception. Two people they knew had been living together for eight years and had decided to marry. So Denoon said to them Marriage is wonderful, this is great news, I know you’ll find the addition of the sexual dimension to your relationship a great improvement to your life and a real eye-opener. He seemed surprised that I agreed with Grace that this was low-level. I’d put down very few of my own sallies, except when he’d seemed to react inordinately, as for some reason he did to my I’m attracted to you as to a magnate, or you attract me like a magnate. I persevered with this category. And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? I replied quick as a flash That’s the only language you understand. Neither of us could figure out why we thought this was funny, but we both did.
The physical description I assembled is a masterpiece of some kind. I doubt that there is a more minute physical description of one human being by another anywhere. I wish I had never done it.