Of course when I reflect back I realize I never got a full frontal of mature Denoonism, partly because we were so busy the whole time we were together, I think. Sometimes he would say he had a complete system and other times he would deny it, or half deny it. Or he would take the position that his strategy was to develop and propagate individual pieces of his system and induce the world to figure out how they could cohere beautifully in some transcendent new whole. I always had a rough idea of his provenance: it was visible even in his little aria about solar democracy. He was a radical decentralist the elements of whose system were composed of the odd amalgam of collective and microcapitalist institutions he had come up with at Tsau. I was after him a few times to get things down in a more extended way on paper, for example re what seemed to me his hubris about solar technology, but this ran up against the extreme position he had arrived at vis-à-vis literary-academic propagation of the faith, which was that it was a waste of time, or rather that everything was so exigent there was no time for that.
One thing was his inordinate fear of vulgarization. He was willing to be cursory or epigrammatic about other peoples systems, but when it came to laying Denoonism out, you would need a seminar atmosphere, lots of time, la la la. He called certain people genre marxists, some of whom didn’t actually deserve it. Partly his fear of being vulgarized came from the caricature people turned vernacular development into after the book came out. And he was cornucopious with examples of good ideas coming into ludicrous incarnations, like Positivism turning into a spiritualist religion in Brazil, one of whose saints was August Comte’s mistress. There were other examples. His favorite thing to call himself in front of theStudent left in Botswana was scientific Utopian: I am a scientific Utopian. This was a calculated oxymoron built on Marx’s famous loathing of the Utopian socialists he thought he was so superior to and the absolutely unbreakable conviction among the students that socialism is one of the sciences. I should have pressed him more, I suppose. It would be nice if there were some great classic text. Of course now there never will be. Unless I’m wrong. I may be wrong.
The moment after he finished was wonderful in another way. It was not only erotic, it was nationalistically gratifying. Rra Puleng was an American. There have been a couple of other Rra Pulengs, and they also have been Americans. Nobody ever called me a Mma Puleng, but they would have if it had been the Batswana custom to notice the existence of women. No Brit that I know of ever got called Rra Puleng, and people say that even Sir Seretse Khama’s wife hardly speaks the language. Also it was normally so embarrassing to be American. Reagan had just been elected, which was so embarrassing to Denoon — I would discover — that he couldn’t speak his name and, for the first few months I knew him, would only refer to him as The Brazen Head, after the hollow metal idols the Babylonian priestcraft got their flocks to worship and which were equipped with speaking tubes leading down into the bowels of the temple whence the priests would make the idol speak.
We were having a distinct afterglow. Kgosetlemang had stopped moving purposively on Denoon. Mbaake was making his hitchhiking gesture, but halfheartedly compared to before. From the look on his face I think he was about to say something complimentary. And then everyone stood up, whites included.
It was not a tribute. A prodigy was happening. For a beat everything felt dead. The lights blinked and then resumed at a vaguer, almost orange level.
There was a sound like nothing in my experience. It was both a roar and a washing or seething sound. It was immense. And there was thunder all over, and ozone. It was a sound like the sea roaring back to reclaim the ex-seabed Botswana actually is.
It was a sand rain, my first. But it was a deluge. These have become more common now, with the drought. But all I could think was Africa! What next!
Grace Acts
The performance was over. Guys who had been hanging around outside wanted immediately to come inside, and guys who were inside wanted to go out. They were worried about their wives and their cars. Sand could get into the hood vents, and a fair number of the crowd had undoubtedly left their car windows open because of the heat. The Waygards who had come in out of the storm were pulling their shirttails out and spilling sand all over and laughing greatly. I would have gone out to see, except that I was concentrated on Denoon. Normally I’m as interested in a freak of nature as the next man, but I didn’t move an inch. I was determined I was going to chat Denoon up, but I had to act fast because Z would undoubtedly come to see if I was drowning in sand and I did not want to appear for the first time before Denoon in association with Z.
Before I could think, someone was pushing me from behind. They were a woman’s hands, and it was Grace. She had me by the hips and was steering me through the disintegrating crowd straight at Denoon.
The question is why I didn’t punch her, since my middle name is noli me tangere if it’s anything. Ever since I could do anything about it I have made it abundantly clear that nobody should touch me without being invited or until I make the first move. All the male-initiated touching and kissing currently going on is nonviolent aggression. It’s training for docility and should be fought until the valence of things is equal between the sexes, since as it stands if women touch first it means come and get it. I could become a militant on this easily. God save me from ever ending up working in some Aquarian-type office setting where friendly patting is the religion. I have seen these places. For a while at Stanford I was not staunch about this. I was there when faculty-student relations got oh so casual. The odd thing was that all the touching never led, for example, to even a slightly more expansive comment than usual next to the inevitable eighty-seven on my papers. I think the kissing and patting was worse at Stanford because of the odious human potential movement and the vapors wafting over us from the twit factory at Esalen, which was not so far away and was going full blast. There could be a campaign saying women who work in offices and who want to be touched should wear a button saying so.
Nelson always complained about how hard it was to get kisses from me. So be it, I had to tell him finally. Because to me a kiss is a carnal thing. In fact he said Getting a kiss from you is about equal in difficulty with getting the average woman to sit on my face. Clearly I see my mouth as a stand-in for what he cutely loved to refer to as my je ne sais quoi. I would be lying if I denied the linkage. We had other antic names for my pudendum, of which his favorite was sí-señor. We got into a small fight over why only women have pudenda, why only one sex has something between its legs to be ashamed of. I had to remind him that pudere, the root word, means to cause shame. He insisted the term was unisex until I got hold of a decent dictionary and converted him. I noticed we were generating more funny names for my private parts than for his: so I put my mind to it and overwhelmed him. I’m all for fun. I think he had been a little cheated in the past in this branch of playfulness. He was good at it. For example, if I prickteased him he would say I was in danger of getting my comeuppance. He wasn’t trying to be demeaning.