forums

10/24/97 wishes forum

If you had three wishes, what would they be?

EUGENE: win the nobel prize, achieve eternal happiness, become one with the universe .
JANET: i can't help but think that achieving eternal happiness would encompass all of the other wishes you could possibly have, you know what I mean? What does becoming one with the universe entail?
EUGENE : Well, I hope to accomplish these things in that order.... becoming one with the universe would be a total understanding of all things around me at all levels and at all times...of course the drawbacks would be awareness of evil and destruction, but maybe my omnitoence could eliminate some of that. Of course, there's no stopping nature.... I realize that 2 and especially 3 are not likely attainable, but if it were a magical genie, maybe i could get no. 3. You have to earn the Nobel, otherwise, what's the point?JANET: Well, shouldn't all happiness be earned? I mean, if someone kept giving you money and you didn't have to earn it, and people liked you without knowing who you are, wouldn't anything that would make you happy lose at least some of its value? That's what makes your first apartment and your first love so grand - because you earned it, not because you wished for it.
EUGENE: Happiness isn't earned, it's something that you find, often without looking for it, even if that means being able to accept that things simply are the way they are...to find yourself you must first lose yourself. Therein lies the dilemma, that we must achieve the often lofty goals we set for ourselves or that others set for us, lest we never find true happiness. Happiness can be completely separate from accomplishment.
JANET: How? I don't understand. If someone does something nice for you, they do it because they care about you, and you earned their friendship. If you get better pay for a job, it is because you do good work and earned the raise. If you get something that can bring you toward happiness without earning it, it is luck, pure and simple, and won't be constant and will not provide long-lasting, happiness.
EUGENE: Achieving goals can be a source of happiness and love and kindness likewise, gratification is achieved through work and determination, but not necessarily enlightenment. (By the way, I never said I wanted happiness to be dropped in my lap, but this makes for an interesting discussion.) You can achieve tremendous wealth and power of your own accord and still not be happy.
JANET: No, but earning things - working toward goals, whether monetary or pertaining to people and their relationahips or personal - is what makes you happy, isn't it? If that working and earning means studying texts and learning until you become "enlightened," I'm sure it would be a better method of achieving enlightenment than say having a chip inserted in your brain and you just getting "enlightened," for example. Know what I mean? It seems to me you always want fortune (i.e., happiness, on whatever level) dumped in your lap, earned or unearned. And I don't understand how that could make you happy. Is it that you don't know how to earn it?
EUGENE: No, enlightenment can not be inserted, it is the result of life (learned) experiences. Fortune just makes the path easier to navigate, regardless of means of acquisition, although theft would not be good. Winning money should not necessarily be considered cheating if it is used appropriately to further achieve goals. I'm not looking for an easy, path made of gold, just one where I don't get ambushed around every curve. Working towards goals makes you who you are, gives you substance, individual worth.

humor

A first grade teacher collected well-known proverbs.
She gave each child in > >her class the first half of a proverb
and asked them to come up with the > >remainder of the proverb.
Their insight may surprise you.

Better to be safe than..............Punch a 5th grader
Strike while the.........................Bug is close
It's always darkest before...... Daylight SavingsTime
Never underestimate the power of........Termites
You can lead a horse to water but........how?
Don't bite the hand that.............. looks dirty
No news is................................impossible
A miss is as good as a.............. Mr.
You can't teach an old dog new......math
If you lie down with dogs, you'll..............stink in the morning
Love all, trust.............................me
The pen is mightier than the........pigs
An idle mind is..................The best way to relax
Where there's smoke there's.......pollution
Happy the bride who...............gets all the presents
A penny saved is....................... not much
Two's company, three's..............the Musketeers
Don't put off till tomorrow what.........you put on to go to bed
Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and.............you have to
blow your nose
None are so blind as.................Helen Keller
Children should be seen and not..............spanked or grounded
If at first you don't succeed..................get new batteries
You get out of something what you............see pictured on the box
When the blind leadeth the blind............get out of the way

news you can use

TIME TO CELEBRATE MAN'S MIND
On Labor Day, We Should Honor Man's Mind, Not Men's Muscles, as the Real Source of Wealth and Progress
By Fredric Hamber

It is fitting that the most productive nation on earth should have a holiday to honor its work. The high standard of living that Americans enjoy is hard-earned and well-deserved. But the term "Labor Day" is a misnomer. What we should celebrate is not sweat and toil, but the power of man's mind to reason, invent and create.
Several centuries ago, providing the basic necessities for one's survival was a matter of daily drudgery for most people. But Americans today enjoy conveniences undreamed of by medieval kings. Every day brings some new useful household gadget, or a new software system to increase our productivity, or a breakthrough in biotechnology.
So, it is worth asking: Why do Americans have no unique holiday to celebrate the creators, inventors, and entrepreneurs who have made all of this wealth possible - the men of the mind?
The answer lies in the dominant intellectual view of the nature of work. Most of today's intellectuals, influenced by several generations of Marxist political philosophy, still believe that wealth is created by sheer physical toil. But the high standard of living we enjoy today is not due to our musculature and physical stamina. Many animals have been much stronger. We owe our relative affluence not to muscle power, but to brain power.
Brain power is given a left-handed acknowledgement in today's fashionable aphorism that we are living in an "information age" in which education and knowledge are the keys to economic success. The implication of this idea, however, is that prior to the invention of the silicon chip, humans were able to flourish as brainless automatons.
The importance of knowledge to progress is not some recent trend, but a metaphysical fact of human nature. Man's mind is his tool of survival and the source of every advance in material well-being throughout history, from the harnessing of fire, to the invention of the plough, to the discovery of electricity, to the invention of the latest anti-cancer drug.
Contrary to the Marxist premise that wealth is created by laborers and "exploited" by those at the top of the pyramid of ability, it is those at the top, the best and the brightest, who increase the value of the labor of those at the bottom. Under capitalism, even a man who has nothing to trade but physical labor gains a huge advantage by leveraging the fruits of minds more creative than his The labor of a construction worker, for example, is made more productive and valuable by the inventors of the jackhammer and the steam shovel, and by the farsighted entrepreneurs who market and sell such tools to his employer. The work of an office clerk, as another example, is made more efficient by the men who invented copiers and fax machines. By applying human ingenuity to serve men's needs, the result is that physical labor is made less laborious and more productive.
An apt symbol of the theory that sweat and muscle are the creators of economic value can be seen in those Soviet-era propaganda posters depicting man as a mindless muscular robot with an expressionless, cookie-cutter face. In practice, that theory led to chronic famines in a society unable to produce even the most basic necessities.
A culture thrives to the extent that it is governed by reason and science, and stagnates to the extent that it is governed by brute force. But the importance of the mind in human progress has been evaded by most of this century's intellectuals. Observe, for example, George Orwell's novel 1984, which depicts a totalitarian state that still, somehow, is a fully advanced technological society. Orwell projects the impossible: technology without the minds to produce it.
The best and brightest minds are always the first to either flee a dictatorship in a "brain drain" or to cease their creative efforts. A totalitarian regime can force some men to perform muscular labor; it cannot force a genius to create, nor force a businessman to make rational decisions. A slave owner can force a man to pick peanuts; only under freedom would a George Washington Carver discover ways to increase crop yields.
What Americans should celebrate is the spark of genius in the scientist who first identifies a law of physics, in the inventor who uses that knowledge to create a new engine or telephonic device, and in the businessmen who daily translate their ideas into tangible wealth.
On Labor Day, let us honor the true root of production and wealth: the human mind.

Fredric Hamber is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. http://www.aynrand.org

The Lure of Baseball Baseball's World Series Offers a Too-Rare Celebration of Goal-Achievement
By Thomas A. Bowden

As half the nation eagerly awaits the next game of the World Series, the other half looks on in puzzlement at what could be so enthralling about grown men hitting a little ball and running around in circles.
Baseball fans who cannot articulate why they love the game may retreat to their television sets feeling a vague sense of guilt that, perhaps, they are wasting their time.
However, no such guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need.
The essential value of spectator sports lies in their capacity to illustrate, in a dramatic way, the process of human goal-achievement. They do this by making the process shorter, simpler, and more visually exciting than it is in daily life - and by giving us heroes to admire.
A process of goal-achievement underlies everything that makes our lives richer, from discovering new medicines to learning about computers, from pursuing a career to enjoying loved ones. But success is not automatic - each such endeavor must be started and maintained, often in the face of great obstacles, by an individual's choices. To gather the moral courage to make their own difficult choices each day, people need inspiration - the spiritual fuel that flows from the sight of another's achievement.
Unfortunately, our culture's traditional sources of inspiration have dried up. Today's movies give us serial killers or self-mocking secret agents, novels feature the pedestrian and the neurotic, biographies revel in finding clay feet, and news programs are filled with public figures cravenly compromising their ideals. In this value-challenged milieu, sporting events offer us a rare glimpse of heroes at work.
But how can heroic stature arise from a perfectly useless act like hitting a baseball over a fence? The answer is that the non-utilitarian nature of sporting goals provides a limited, safe context in which everyone's focus can be on the process of goal-achievement as such, not on the particular nature or value of the goal. Just imagine how the carefree joy of watching the World Series would be crushed if, for example, one learned that a friend 's life depended on the outcome.
Spectator sports invite us to take pleasure in our capacity for admiration. Different athletes display different virtues - one performs well under pressure, another shows consistent excellence despite advancing age, a third publicly takes pride in his accomplishments - but each contributes to the vast storehouse of sporting memories that fans draw upon every day, as reminders that difficult goals can be achieved by focused, dedicated effort.
Because physical action is stressed in all spectator sports, some potential fans may be bored by the prospect of watching bodies run around on a playing surface. But in truth, sports - like all human endeavors - have both a mental and physical component, and the spectator who doesn't understand what's going on in the players' heads is missing the point of the game. This is nowhere truer than in baseball, where the brute physical action in a three-hour game probably totals less than thirty minutes, but where the intervening time is solidly packed with intrigue, as the strategy changes from pitch to pitch.
Sports offer as close to a universal value language as we have left. The sense of brotherhood that sports fans feel makes it possible for complete strangers to find themselves happily discussing the latest exploits of their favorite team.
Ultimately, sporting events like the World Series offer a microcosmic vision of what "real life" could, and should, be like.
In a society that increasingly rewards weakness and failure, sports fans know that each athlete has to earn his way onto the field by proving his superior ability, and that physical and mental handicaps will be recognized for what they are - obstacles to be overcome on the road to achievement, not values in their own right.
In a nation whose laws are increasingly arbitrary, sports fans know they can spend time in a world where the rules are explicit, known in advance, and fair to everyone.
In a culture that preaches the deadening duty of self-sacrifice and service to others, sports fans look forward to turning on the TV and immersing themselves in an exciting, suspenseful contest for no other purpose than their own personal enjoyment. In a world of life-and-death conflicts, spectator sports give us a "time-out" - an opportunity to relax and celebrate human skill, dedication, and success in a spirit of simple joy.
So let's all watch the World Series, guilt-free.

Thomas A. Bowden practices law in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. http://www.aynrand.org

The Lesson of World War II:
Free Nations' Lack of Moral Confidence Planted the Roots for History's Bloodiest Conflict
By Robert W. Tracinski

September 3 marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the bloodiest conflict in human history: World War II. Two days earlier, Hitler's troops had invaded Poland, initiating a conflict that would cost 57 million lives - including 293,000 American servicemen. Now, as we are about to enter the 21st century - in a world armed with weapons far more powerful than those used in World War II - it is important to understand the causes of that conflict, to make sure that we have learned its lessons and are able to prevent similar future bloodbaths.
The primary cause of the war was, of course, the totalitarian ideology of Nazism, which held that the state is all-important, and that the individual must be sacrificed to the good of the state. Hitler put this ideology into practice, sacrificing individual lives by the millions. But the success of German military aggression was not inevitable. The free countries of Europe had several opportunities to stop Hitler prior to 1939 - but at each turn they offered appeasement rather than resistance.
In 1936, Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland, on the border between Germany and France. This was the first major step in the Nazi military buildup and a direct violation of the treaty of Versailles (signed at the end of World War I). The German military was still small; if France had attacked, Germany would have been unable to resist. Instead, the French simply dropped the issue. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria; again, the democratic European nations did nothing. Later that year, Hitler demanded possession of the Sudetenland, an ethnic German enclave in Czechoslovakia. The European powers met at a diplomatic conference in Munich, where they acceded to Hitler's demands, promising, in British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's now infamous words, that this concession would ensure "peace in our time." Within a few months, Germany had seized all of Czechoslovakia.
By the time he attacked Poland, Hitler had received a consistent message: In the face of demands, threats, and outright aggression, the free nations would simply give in.
What could explain this weakness in the face of such a clear threat? France and especially Britain were nations whose citizens lived in freedom, who could claim a tradition of individual rights and the rule of law; their enemy was a racist dictatorship whose stated goal was to enslave and murder. Their attitude should have been one of righteous outrage and swift action to destroy an obvious evil. Yet their actual attitudes were the reverse. Hitler was the one who issued his demands in a tone of strident righteousness, while the free nations replied with compromising timidity.
The incredible truth is that the nations that best represented freedom and individual rights had lost the certainty of their own moral convictions. They were unable to muster the moral confidence necessary to threaten war in defense of their own freedom. Have we learned the lessons of World War II? Take a look at American foreign policy. In Iraq, where a nationalist dictator is attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction, we have let the issue drop. North Korea is building missiles and developing nuclear weapons to use against our allies in Asia; our response has been to appease them with money and aid. And China, which echoes Nazi Germany in its threats to annex neighboring territories, has met with the same appeasement that emboldened Hitler in 1938. In the face of Chinese missile threats against Taiwan, for example, we are now busy affirming our agreement with China that Taiwan should not declare its formal independence.
The only time we have had the nerve to face down a dictator has been in the tiny province of Kosovo - where the threat to American interests is insignificant.
The reason for U.S. appeasement is chillingly familiar. While the Chinese furiously denounce our attempts to "impose our values" on them and "interfere in China's internal affairs" - our president flew to China last year to acknowledge, in a televised broadcast, America's past faults. The same pattern is repeating itself: Strident moral certainty on the part of dictators, met by mealy-mouthed compromise on the part of free nations.
What is needed to oppose these threats - and avoid the necessity for a future war that will break World War II's record for carnage - is moral confidence on the part of free nations, followed by firm action. But the message to the world's dictators must be the opposite of the message given to Adolf Hitler prior to 1939.
It is not necessary, nor would it be in our interest, to go to war in all of these cases. What is necessary is for America to regain its confidence in the morality of freedom and individual rights - and to have the certainty to stand up for these values against the world's dictators.

Robert W. Tracinski is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. http://www.aynrand.org

The Bible Belt's Assault on Education
The Kansas Evolution Policy Attacks the Essence of Education: The Teaching of Facts and Reasoning
By Robert W. Tracinski

The essence of education is the teaching of facts and reasoning skills to our children, so that they learn how to think.
Yet for almost a century, our schools have been under assault by an approach to education that elevates feelings over facts. Under the influence of Progressive Education, "socialization" - getting the student in touch with other children's feelings - is now more important than getting him in touch with the facts of history, mathematics, or geography. "Creative spelling" - in which students are encouraged to spell words in whatever way they feel is correct - is more important than the rules of language. Urging children to "feel good" about themselves is more important than ensuring that they acquire the knowledge necessary for living successfully.
This emotion-centered, anti-reason assault on education has found a new ally: the religious right. The Kansas Board of Education has just excised the theory of evolution from the state's official science standards. Several other states have enacted similar anti-evolution policies, thereby elevating the feelings of religious fundamentalists over the accumulated evidence of the entire science of biology.
These policies do not actually ban the teaching of evolution, nor do they mandate the teaching of "Creationism" - the Biblical claim that the Earth and all life on it were created in six days. They simply drop evolution from the required curriculum. The goal of the religious activists is to keep students ignorant of the theory of evolution, or to encourage the teaching of evolution and Creationism side-by-side, as two "competing" theories.
Consider what this latter would mean in the classroom. On the one side, teachers would present the theory of evolution, supported by countless observations, all integrated into a comprehensive explanation of virtually every fact in its field. On the other side, teachers would present - what? All that the Creationist view offers is the assertion by would-be authorities that an ancient religious text reveals that some 10,000 years ago God created the world in six days.
Some of these religious activists claim that they reject the teaching of evolution because it is "unproven," since it lacks "sufficient evidence." Yet their arguments systematically reject the need for proof and evidence. Scientists can point to a billion-year-long fossil record of continuous changes across all species as they develop from more-primitive to present-day forms. They can point to the natural variations among members of a species, variations that change from one climate to another as species adapt to their environments. But the Creationist categorically dismisses the evidence - because it contradicts Biblical dogma.
The central issue is not whether there is enough scientific evidence to validate a particular conclusion - but whether science as such, rather than faith, is the basis for arriving at conclusions. There can be no scientific debate between these two positions. There can be no rational argument between a view that rests on observation and reason, and one that rests on blind faith - i.e., on its adherents' desire to believe something, irrespective of logic.
If the Creationist approach were taken seriously, what would remain of education? If evidence and reasoning are to be "balanced" by faith or feelings - what, then, would not belong in the curriculum? Even the theory that the earth is flat has proponents who feel it is true. More to the point, what is to stop teachers from presenting any other non-rational view of the origin of man? Why not give equal time to, say, the Nazi claim that the white race descended from the superior Aryans?
The most ominous implication of the Creationist position is its belief that, in judging the truth of an idea, one can simply ignore rational evidence - if it clashes with one's desire to believe otherwise. This is a disastrous methodology to inculcate in our children - and it is even more dangerous to back it up with the rulings of a government body.
The crucial role of education is to provide young people with the information and methods they need in order to learn how to think independently. Education has liberated mankind from the shackles of myth, superstition, and unchallenged tradition. But the prevailing trend - from both the "progressive" left and the religious right - is to reverse this development, by enshrining feelings over facts and faith over reason.
If campaigns such as the one against teaching evolution are allowed to succeed, the ultimate result will be the extinction of genuine education.

Robert W. Tracinski is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. http://www.aynrand.org

poetry

Messy

Heather Dyer

When you cry
I try
to pick up your tears
and stuff
them back in.

I don't want to
chip
your glazed eyes,
but we can't have tears
lying
around, he
hates
a mess.

Please be shocked.
It's easier
when your eyes are big.

There. All packed.
You're ready to go.
For me, I need a little
time alone.
I've really been a
mess
lately.

MALL

Michael Arthur Finberg
Mfinberg@hotmail.com
HarvestofGems@hotmail.com

My air conditioned anxiety,
is at first a sort of silent
frenzy, yet with this pressurized
approach, for choices that are
unknown, a child’s enchantment
is a gift itself from shuffling
shadows that command the fantasy
this enticement sang.

< i just found out today >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

that the beige wastebasket is in love with me
(oh my, i'm blushing right through my paint)

< how we sang >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

the day
at its end
a song
sung
we
dressed in our hands
cautiously
wrapped in our faces
deliberately
armed with our voices
willfully

< hot afternoon >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

in the hottest flush
of the afternoon
of course of course
it must be june
so we must wait
to rhyme with moon
in the hottest flush
of the afternoon
as the pudding eater
sucks his spoon
and the maid of hearts
she sweats her tune
she dries
the pudding eater's spoon
in the hottest flush
of the afternoon

< her feet >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

she's
counting toes
that wiggle
as she goes

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

< hello >

hello
my name is tommy
i was disposing of my
packing material
when you arrived
but don't worry
it's environmentally friendly
so
here i am in your choice of coverings
dusty rose
an excellent selection
now
in order to serve you better
there are a few questions
i would like to ask you
at your convenience
of course

< gotta pee >

ray heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com

an old bank lobby
busy speaking
of wealth and security
never notices
me
trying to find its toilet

The Last Week

Rochelle Holt

The sun shone with a brillaince
that has always made you yearn,
in subsequent incarnations, for sunshine.
in Ruth Montgomery's Companions Along The Way

The moon is full in the morning.
The mood is gold at night.
In my last week on earth
I have been filled
with sight beyond seven days
or dreams.
The experiment has been a mist,
a saffrom aura
permeating mind
penetrating body
both ignited with the passion
to live or to die
(seasons of birth)
as I walk content
blessed wholly in tune
with the music
I could only imagine
before creating music
symphony of stars and birds
of love and delight
in every green or fallen leaf.
The air is my breath
now crisp and chill
faint wisp of wind
cloaking these dancing bones
this singing heart
that lifts above
the chords of mortal flesh
wed to the light
even in shadows
in the dark sleep of the owl.
There are no tears.
All who haunt this fragile shell
have gone beyond
the weeping and the laughter
have risen over
the waves of aqua-fire summer
to ride an older steed
into the forest of winter.
And if you knew
this week, day, hour, minute
or second
were once and for all
forever the last
taste, touch, smell, sound,
your vision might also
bend to return
love to every stranger,
friend, relative or self
like the moon
like the sun
boldly reaching to embrace us all
in its waxing and waning
dim-bright light.

6 poems by janet kuypers:

Do That For Me Then

October 24, 1998

Is there someone around
who is designed to tell everyone what the problems are,
and what you have to do to solve them

people like that would have been found
a while ago, if they existed

there would be no more violence, there would be
a loving caring feeling among people of different beliefs

maybe people wouldn't have such strong beliefs

That's where the problems come from
The problems come from having ideas, having theories,
thinking they're the right ideas,
and then acting on those ideas
without checking your premises to
see if they were even the right ideas

I've done that

I thought that everything would fall into place
and everything would have a happy ending for me
I've discovered that after all of these years those happy
endings haven't come around, and that
there is no reason to have hope

But on some levels it's true
People want someone to deliver flowers
to them, for no reason, other than because
you wouldn't expect it and it would be nice
People could say something
nice to you, out of the blue, to
brighten your day

Wouldn't it be nice is someone you knew
came up to you to tell you they loved you?
I mean, you know they love you, and you
love them, but sometimes it's nice to hear

I think men don't get that

They don't remember that
women like nice things for them, even if
it's not expensive
if it's not
something they'd normally think to do

I hate having to be the voice of reason, but here goes
you have to do nice things

okay, you knew that, but you don't think about the nice things
and maybe that could be part of the solution

you think, I can take a girl out to dinner
but have you ever cleaned up the living room
so you could have dinner there
and it would seem like a restaurant

you could give her flowers
but if it's near Valentine's Day, don't bother
but give them on a weekday
when she doesn't expect it
and tell her you got them for her
because you thought of her
and you thought she deserved them

well, there are other examples
but I won't get into them now
I think you get the idea

I like nice things done for me
I want someone to call me when they said they would
I want someone to tell me I'm worth something

I've wanted that for years

Did you know I was watching?

October 28, 1998
first started July, 1998

Did you know I was watching?

you know, i watch you
when i'm sitting in the corner
and you're in your circle.
you know the circle, the ring
around you

that's what I've been
trying to avoid

and I've done a pretty good
job of it, haven't I

Deal With That Over The Years

December 30, 1998

I know I am a tall girl
most men are shorter than me
I've had to learn to deal with that over the years
you're not short
I wasn't even looking at your height
even though you are just about as tall as me
I was too busy thinking that you were cute
too busy liking having a conversation with you
you flirted with me
when you talked to me,
it did not seem like flirting

and yes, I know I am a tall girl
but I never thought that you were too short
and I never thought you were not adorable
In fact, I thought that I liked you
and I thought maybe you liked me too
and no, I never thought about your height

Creatures Can Live In Words

November 28, 1998

okay, it's one thing to say that whales are not smarter than humans
because they can't build buildings
and if you want to think of it on just those levels
you have every right
all people can think when you say that is
that whales don't have opposable thumbs
and they live in water
which makes the construction of building a little difficult
we forget to think that creatures can live in words
or worlds that are different from our own

Crazy Women Talking: This Much I've Learned

November 24, 1998

I'm beginning to think
the guy-side of me is supposed to make all the decisions
knows what is right and isn't

People look at men
differently
than they do women

This much I've learned

So maybe if I told you what went through my head
and I said it like I was a guy, maybe it wouldn't be
so bad then

maybe you could handle the news then

Maybe I could tell you there's this girl I know
and she can't be strong all the time
and she doesn't know how to speak sometimes

I could tell you she needs attention
she needs to be helped
but the punch line:
she doesn't need it from just anyone
she needs that from you

Maybe she wants to cry
but who to anymore?
she has no one
she needs someone
she needs that someone to be you

I could say
some of this doesn't make sense
some of it just sounds like a crazy woman talking
but sometimes that's what women are

But crazy or not, man
crazy or not, is it worth it to deal with it?

That's what I would
as a man
have to ask you

Isn't it worth it sometimes?

after I get all of this out,
I could stop acting like a guy
and just be a girl

you would listen
and you would know what to do for me
and maybe then you could
be the guy and take control
and make a decision
so that I don't have to make all the decisions
because I want you to make some decisions too

Changing Garments

October 28, 1998

Agonies are
one of my changes of garments,

I do not ask the wounded person
how he
feels
or
who he
is

I myself become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me
as I lean on a cane and observe

The Terror

Corwan knows blackness and the void, and Hitchcock and Poe. Beyond this, Pirannesi.

by C. Mulrooney

SIDMOUTH AT NIGHT

Anthony Robottom

Blue-blacked under white light,
Wandering through eerie-shadowed
Nether worlds, past the flurescent,
Pungent sanctum of the Chinese
Chip shop. All the shops blankly
Blacked for the night.
Occasional meetings with couples,
Short-lived happiness, with a girl
And a drink. Can't remember their names.
A tramp, kipping out on a bus-stop bench,
Clad in castaway clothes,
Threadbare, blanketed with yesterday's
Headlines. Here tonight, gone tomorrow.
Red fireflies racing away.
Met by white ones; opposite engine roars.
Muffled chatter, oozing under the doors
Of inwardly-lit Horses, Swans, Anchors,
Mermaids, and finding their way down
Over a pebbled beach out to sea,
Whilst the sea comes up, hissing over
Loose cobbles. A threatening tirade of
Omnipotence. Only I am listening
To its fanatic roar, and turn away
Back home over the liquid-lead,
Glittering river, quietly babbling
Down to the nightly ignored, roared
Briny channel.

Untitled

Eric J. Swanger
jivatma@csrlink.net

Should I be willing to
swim to your hallowed shores
walk the sacred ground of america
live in your cities of loneliness
and wade in your ponds of obscurity
climb your mountains of apathy
sing your hymns of oppression
work in your smoke factories
and sweat shop ambassadors to china
to take out the trash of your apple pie?

my future

john sweet

how many years since the last holocaust and you smile

the question
is irrelevant if
the ovens still burn

you want names and all i have are pictures and the man across the street believes that every wall should be rebuilt

his eyes are blank and his wrists bear no scars

his wife hides the children

what he holds is my future and in his hands my future narrows down to nothing more than a locked door covered in blood

UMBRELLAS

Cheryl A. Townsend

The rain clings to my body
like the last five pounds on a diet
or the smell of him when I'm home

VEGETABLE SEX

Paul Weinman

Where his ear had been bitten
off - I mean, the whole thing -
he'd slice a pepper the long way
stick it there in flour paste.
We'd laugh, but some women
would nibble at it. Let him
rub their breasts as they did.
He'd stick green ones, red, yellow
...didn't seem to care which.
Or matter to those that teethed it.
He got sloppy, careless with age.
Took to using squash, eggplant
settles for a touch of elbow, wrist.

White Trash

Bryon Howell

Your mother
taught you
at a relatively
early age,
the value -
of clipping
coupons

It's too bad
she wasn't able
to show you
how
to find
a good man

The coupons
wouldn't be
needed
to boost
your self-esteem

LA SORTA

Taylor Graham
piper@innercite.com

The whole thing began on a paper napkin
in a place called La Sorta where all the locals
were holding menudo in chipped white bowls,
or was it their fingernails around the bowls
were chipped? The floor strewn with sawdust
and peanut shells so anybody - adventure,
romance, mayhem - could slip right up
behind you.

You studied the menu, while he spilled
margarita on the napkin where you’d scribbled
something inconsequential or else immensely
important: doodles or the phone number
of the man sitting across from you, or
the combination to a lock with everything
you possess inside, or lyrics to some song,

and smudged it all. So when you reach again
for your drink, whatever you wrote
is all dissolved into napkin, a watercolor
pattern shimmering tequila-green
like fate.

SILVER CIRCLE

Taylor Graham
piper@innercite.com

We bear it on sidewalks spattered
by taggers. Boys behind steel grates
curse the slagheap of a city
they call by their own names.

We bear this single bead of rosary.
A temple breathes blind incense,
a hospital groans in glaring light.
Banks and liquor stores and thrift
shops have no use for a silver circle.

We bear it past the leaf-bound park
where city birds dress themselves
in winter feathers out of season.
We call their songs unanswered
and go along our way. One
abandoned nest, a silver circle.

Living Sacrifice

By Ashlye Warner
ClioNestra@aol.com

Did you, the living sacrifice
know those old men?
The ones from the fiery depths of what was cranked
out of the minds of insane technologists.
Used to caramel over all the corduroy textures
divided amongst recipes of wooden death.

You are the living color, black.
The one that symbolizes demonic trait.
Worry not about your melon scented perfume,
only your budding flower.
Shooting feline claws, ripping at everything in its way.

Everyone squirms away from you.
Even her delicious taste sours in your presence.
Bath in your blood,
and make your slippery bed.
In the morning awake in it.
Feel it engulf your existence,
for once you suffer...
We can all live.

prose

from ANAIS NIN: AN UNDERSTANDING OF HER ART, by rochell holt

GROWING WINGS:
WASTE OF
Timelessness vs.
House of Incest

Waste of Timelessness

In the title story of what was originally Anais' "Woman No Man Could Hold" book, Alain's wife says, "There must be a trip one can take and come back from changed forever ... I am tired of struggling to find a philosophy which will fit me and my world. I want to find a world which fits me and my philosophy."
At age 27, Anais writes in her diary, "When I am less afraid of filling in, between intend and poetical writing, with human, consciously written pages (the diary?), the work will be more complete and have more blood." Already, her writing is diverging from her mentor's because of Anais' subtle sense of the comic.

"Come and see our wisteria. It has grown to the left after all, in spite of everything."
"During the night?" she asked.
"Have you Irish in you? Don't you remember how the wisteria looked twenty years ago...?"
"I have been wasting a lot of time," she said.

Thus, in "Waste of Timelessness," Alain's wife (Anais) lets readers know that indeed she has been dreaming, creating art for a long time and only now in her twenties awakening to the "real" world and to "the reality" of what her senses need, that to which she has been heretofore oblivious. "I made the sacrifice of marrying a banker and few people know what a misfortune that is!" Anais, the wife, tells her diary.
In "The Song in the Garden," the narrator "watched herself as an insect," thinking "she might be growing wings, such as she had seen in holy books." In keeping with Anais' growing disenchantment with idealism, this character/narrator reflects: "She needed not the key to the universe; the universe was in her." Always licking her wounds regarding the father who abandoned her, now Anais wonders if she has erred in her marriage. "If up to now she knew one had to live with fervor, and with intelligence, she soon learned one had not only to live for an idea, or die for it, but also fight for it." The idea is her independence as an artist.
Valerie Harms, whose Magic Circle Press published her own Stars in My Sky in 1976 (a year before the press published Anais' youthful stories of Waste of Timelessness) says that Anais' first novel was written when she was 19 "... about a girl named Aline who poses for artists in order to earn money for her father and brother.

"And what did he give you to amuse yourself...?"
"Books of poetry, instead of dolls," Aline laughed.
"And now I feel like taking a good look at the world outside."

Anais' next novel, written when she was 25, focuses on "Rita, a muse of the men but a strong believer in the talents of women. The men are rather chauvinistic ... but by the end they learn to be more sensitive."
Harms says that in this 150 page unfinished novel, Rita's husband, Joseph, replies: "I can't say I find our marriage is peaceful or as secure as before. You have shown a spirit which frightens me ... I suppose now it is up to me to keep you from wanting to go."
Anais' third unpublished novel, known as the John novel (first identified as Duncan) is about 170 pages long, written when Anais was living in France again; however, the first person point of view makes the writing less Lawrentian and more Anais. "The leading character ... is a woman who paints. She is married to Duncan ... (who) talks about when he will create but cannot match the constant creative force of his wife."

She was afraid of her body. When she looked at it in the mirror, she observed the mystery of its separate individual life.
Harms interprets this narrator/character as realizing she has deceived herself about Alain (a playwright) and "she dispels the illusion she built" around him. "... she had discovered in several ways that there was no sensuality in Alain, that it was all on the surface." (Valerie Harms and I both had the opportunity to read unpublished early novels by Anais with Moira Collins at the Northwestern U. Library - Special Collections in Evanston, Illinois in the Seventies.)
Only in 1996 did I realize that Anais had rewritten totally Lawrence's two stories "The Princess" and "The Woman Who Rode Away." Anais said of the former story in her Study that it was a "fairy tale of mysterious individuality," with "The Princess" learning from her father: "in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can't peel away ... and it doesn't care at all about the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person."
In "The Princess," the girl experiences the sensuality she has yearned for, only after her father dies ; but she rejects it as base and false when offered to her by a common man (much like Henry Miller). She prefers instead to marry a man like her father, who will treat her as "The Princess." Many of the men Anais was attracted to in her life bore a strong physical resemblance to her father, as may be evidenced in photographs within the diaries.
Harms interprets that Anais in the John novel "chronicled death in a relationship and followed it further than she had ever gone before." Anais, however, may only have chronicled suppression of her own conflict, i.e. the woman as self-contained, solitary artist vs. "the Woman No Man Could Hold." In any event, Anais therapeutically had worked through her obsession with John Erskine, her husband's mentor, a married novelist she may have imagined might serve her as Mellors did, Lady Chatterly's Lover.
In Lawrence's "the Woman Who Rode Away," the tragic heroine, a mother and wife who longed for time alone as well as adventure, rides off into the mountains and is sacrificed in a primitive ritual. Of course, she is never to return to the sameness of her routine marriage. However, in "The Gypsy Feeling," Anais creates a more positive ending to a woman's desire, also the rudimentary conclusion of the later House of Incest prophesied in the beginning of "The Gypsy Feeling" when Mariette sees Lolita dance.
"She made Mariette think ... of the sun stirring in generous gold bodies an ever rising and spurting sap ... slow undulations ... and then riotous dancing with feet, body and arms all at once ... arms curling and uncurling with joy, spiral movements of the body, turn and swirl ... and a smile of knowing intimate triumph, for the blood of the audience has caught up with her rhythm and they too are panting with ardent joy ..."
Anais also had been dancing, thinking she might become both a Spanish dancer and a writer, "melting more and more into the universal woman, by my physical attributes, my coquetry, my desire to please, my dancing." She believed she had freed herself from her obsessive attraction to Erskine, "his book, his work, his life, his lack of understanding - and I feel free of him." Thus, Anais ended her youthful story: "And all the strength she gathered from the freshness and the solitude would burst into dancing, dancing to the rhythm of her blood, and to the climax of her own emotions ... dancing a gypsy feeling." Ironically and humorously, Marietta is approached by the suitor of her mother named Lolita.

"What about Lolita?"
"She's mending socks. By the way, did I tell you I was a poet?"
"I would have guessed it," said Marietta.

Vicariously, Anais writes, "through the imagination, I am living out those things which are forbidden to me."
"The Russian Who Did Not Believe in Miracles and Why " affirms this belief (even though she has not yet met Henry Miller). The Russian says, "I like to imagine I have died, and then suddenly come into a new life." The woman in the story tells him, "You could do that without dying ... we can throw off yesterday's man like an old coat we don't want anymore, and actually enter into a new life ..."
When the Russian says he wants to make love to her, she tells him, "For a change the one woman you won't have. Isn't that interesting?" Anais is still at war with the inner and outer woman, the one who would be content to dream of love vs. "the woman no man could hold."
This is expressed in "The Dance Which Could Not Be Danced," which is "within herself ... hidden to human eyes" as the dancer wears "shawls and flowers ... a dance within a dance, a dream within a dream ... with the perpetual cadence of inviolate living."
From drifting on the boat "away from this world down some strange wise river into strange wise places," in the title story, Anais longs still so very much for "red roses, red roses" that in "Red Roses," the narrator ordered them to be delivered to herself, symbolic of the fiery passion she feels guilty for craving. However, the protagonist "carries them running to the Church" where she will add them to the flames of "flowers and candles perpetually offered in sacrifice," the opposite climax that occurred in Lawrence's "The Woman Who Rode Away," wherein the woman herself was sacrificed for her secret desire.
Anais writes, "She could add her dead roses ... sent by man to the virgin ... as an offering, of secret joy, and abdication." In essence, Anais has added her own postscript to Lawrence's story, allowing this sensual woman to return, to live again and tell her sensuous tale.
Still, Anais feels somewhat guilty for being so "modern as truly an inner feminist (a free woman) when in "Red Roses," the character says, I cannot bear it when my desires are fulfilled," just as Lawrence's "The Princess" could not.
"Our Minds Are Engaged" concerns two people who reunite "after eight years of separation." In her premonitory way, Anais has written a story that could apply to herself and her love for cousin Eduardo; her husband Hugo; her father; and prophetically, her lover Henry Miller, the latter two whom she would meet in less than two years after this story was written.
"He went to the very edge of the bowl and fell out of it ... He exhausted his physical impulses, and then returned. He did not want that climax ... What he desired was wholeness and normalcy."
As they "talk ... about their desire for connection with life through love and through creation ... all the while they wished a connection between themselves." Anais longed for the Prince who would be her equal. However, "She was tired of a man who could fear a woman's strength." Yearning to be the liberated woman in contrast to Hugo's belief that "the test of great love is endurance," Anais also bemoaned the fact that her type of writing was unrecognized and unappreciated. "Today I swear to continue in my seclusion, never to desire to be known, to go on with my work, as I have always done, without any popular encouragement," she reveals in Early Diary IV.
In "Alchemy," an author's wife receives his visitors, curious to see and know all details depicted in his novel Desperate Caverns. Anais admits her own dalliance with Erskine in this story (probably not consummated, as revealed in The Early Diaries) when she has the author's wife openly understand her husband's "illicit passion to ... a lovely woman." The wife confesses to her guests that she is the plot and substance of her husband's stories. But the truth falls on deaf ears.
Does the same hold true for modern times and those critics who do not comprehend the gravity of what F. Scott Fitzgerald did when he used his wife Zelda's life and sometimes even her written words as his own? Harms asks us, as have other critics who happen to be women. (We shall later see how Anais' words were also used without acknowledgement in reference to Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire, possibly inspired by her "Stella" and certainly followed by her own bold answer with A Spy in the House of Love.)
"Tishnar" may remind readers of a gothic Poe tale with its opening of fog, shadows, rain; a composite of the character's inner, sorrowful state (Anais'?). The poetic prose is prelude to House of Incest, the prose poem that ended the writer's private conflict (at least on a public basis because hidden in her diaries) regarding an artist's need for solitude and a woman's craving for companionship for others.

"Please," she said to the conductor. "Will you stop for me?"
"This bus never stops," said the man ... We make this trip only once ... Didn't you see the sign in the front?"
"What does it say?"
"Another world," said the conductor.

Realizing she does not want to leave her life, even as she knows it, the woman cannot exit at the exact moment she sees "the face she had long carved in her mind and wanted to find and to love all her life." Anais had thought of suicide as any young, spurned woman might (or one swayed dangerously by her bipolar disorder?) However, as always, her words were the process of therapeutic self-healing.
In "The Idealist" Edward says to Chantal, "I suppose you have guessed it. I am obsessed by that woman," the model they both sketch although he thinks her "a legendary apparition." The story explains any person's obsession, i.e. Anais' for John Erskine (and later Henry Miller's own insatiable need for whores that remind him of his bisexual wife June, depicted in Henry & June.) Hugo once said to Anais, "You fall in love with people's minds" (referring to Henry Miller explicitly, but serving also as an acute observation of his artistic partner).
Chantal says to Edward that she understands his obsession. "I know. I know ... I have known all those feelings. My will has been dissolved." He looks "crushed" because he states that he has "lost my ideal of you." (his ideal of her as woman, embodiment of pure perfect untouchable illusion, virgin?)
"The Peacock Feathers" is very Lawrentian about "a lady in the white house who had collected birds from all parts of the world." She invites a singer to her home where "the peacock paced up towards the voice and listened ... The next day the peacock was dead." The singer is given the peacock's feathers, but strange calamities begin to befall her: a musician kills himself at a concert when she begins to sing the compositions of others; she writes her memoirs, but they are "misinterpreted ... Many people ... satirized her ... It is the fault of the peacock feathers."
The singer smokes "a long pipe," but when "she ceased smoking she was empty of all energy and looked haggard." Although the singer blames everything on the peacock feathers, she keeps them, "to say to those who observed her ruin: It was the fault of the peacock feathers."
The theme of this story juxtaposes with Anais' chapter in her Study titled "Fantasia of the Unconscious" where she quotes Lawrence in his Studies in Classical Literature as saying, "'Commandments should fade as flowers do ..." Anais notes that Lawrence "expressed the instinct that there was a moment for ... the utmost clarity ... 'individuals who would create each one his own living formulas ...'"
In "Cocksure Women and Hensure Men," within Sex, Literature and Censorship edited by Harry Moore, Lawrence said, "It is the tragedy of the modern woman ... cocksure ... without ever listening for the denial which she ought to take into count. She is cocksure, but she is a hen all the time ... Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!" This is precisely Anais' conflict, cocksure, but henny (at this age) as Hugo's wife.
In "Faithfulness," irony abounds when Aline is visited by Alban, the playwright, who tells her, "Nobody talks about the unconscious with fashionable consciousness ... You should be the wife of a writer." He refers to Sherman, her husband, and to the businesslike milieu of the room. "Here are the pipes ... the office armchair"
as not befitting her temperament.
Another friend visits her and says, "I may be a clumsy old brute, but it seems to me you don't love him." Of course, Aline responds, "You're all wrong there, Mr. Bellows."
When Sherman returns home, she reports the whole conversation as something totally absurd. "Can you imagine such nerve, such nerve!" He laughs and replies, "You dear, faithful, honest little wife."
Anais longs to be truthful, but she cannot hurt the man who has been so good to her, to her two brothers and to her mother.
"A Spoiled Party" includes a woman "beautifully costumed in emerald green, watery silk," (Anais disguised again?) "personification of self-knowledge" as Harms interprets. The stranger, like two faces of Eve or Janus, eye to eye, recognizes herself as a split woman, one who longs for cocksuredness while in the henny state, and this is Anais' dilemma: whether to be the psychoanalyst of the creator exclusively or to be truly passionate beyond imagination. "The experiences of this woman are imaginary - most of her which fascinates ... is imaginary!"
In Early Diary IV, Anais had written: "I understood Lawrence's writing for what it was. Someday they will understand mine for what it is." She proclaimed, "I am a whole woman. I have put my soul into everything my body has done ... I ... have had no need of sophistry, no need of pride to sustain me. I have given, often unwisely, and I have lost nothing!"
The final story "A Slippery Floor" in this early sequence approved for release by Anais, reveals "A new woman, daring and assured." In (December '31 when the author met Henry Miller through Richard Osborn, a young lawyer in the same department of the bank where Hugo was employed, Anais had consulted Osborn regarding the publisher's contract for her Lawrence book.)*
Anita, the Spanish dancer in the story was "at the end of (her) ephemeral career," aspirations in that art. "She wanted a fantastic destiny instead of a wise one ... endless voyages, the perpetually shifting ground of stage life, rather than security." As "a dream-swallower," she knew Boris was right when he told her, books don't teach everything."
Confronting Vivien, the actress who had made Anita's father unhappy (no doubt representative of Anais' musician father), she is told her rationale for Vivien's absence which is stirring in Anais at this time since she too is "growing wings."
"Passion is exacting ... It never thrives on an idea ... of faithfulness ... I have loved white heat living."
Anita meets her mother's lover Norman and is shocked to learn, "I don't love her anymore ... I love you." Anita relays this to Vivien who tells her to go with her feelings and not "spoil it all with scruples." Anita, however, prefers to "resist" the unscrupulous loving style of Vivien; her indecisiveness sends Norman away, back to her mother. The masochistic and/or sacrificial theme is apparent: An artist seeks what is self-destructive, whether consciously or unconsciously. (Possibly a tormented artist more than a mature one, or a bipolar artist who receives no help with a serious mood disorder because schizophrenia and bipolarity were mistakenly identified as the same if even distinguished separately.)
Anais is conflicted about which path she herself will follow. She wants to be a dutiful spouse, yet within her is also the Donna Juana temperament of the artist, associated with her long-lost, moody father.
Anais has a conversation with Hugo, her husband, on this very subject of fidelity versus freedom with its jealous ramifications for either partner. Hugo says that his "jealousy would be stronger than his fancy for anyone."
Anais responds, "then I must find a way to help you calm your jealousy so you can enjoy yourself - by secrecy. If we say nothing to each other it will not arouse your jealousy ..."
When Hugo says, "No more of this nonsense talk," Anais repeats, "But I do think it ought to be a secret."
"I agree," said Hugo.
Anais thus believes (or wants to believe) everything settled although Hugo has considered the discussion hypothetical. September '31 entry includes Anais' further belief: "But I never wished for our old, peaceful, falsely ideal and unreal marriage."
Constantly unsettled with this tormenting inner desire, Anais writes: "life is also in desire, also in work. When one fails you the other two can keep you alive." Of course, she feels this way because of the double standard of that society and her Catholic upbringing, as well as example of her mother, Rosa Culmell, too involved working to even have time for matters of the heart.
"But a man without means can always find an object. The only way out is to eliminate feeling," Anais wrote. "One man is as good as another, biologically speaking. I write this and I absolutely cannot convince myself."

House of Incest

While Anais was living "in a quiet house once lived in by Turgenev," (actually Madame du Barry) according to photographer Brassai* in The Paris Years, Henry Miller was living with Richard Osborn, "the Diary consisting of no fewer than forty-two volumes." Brassai recalled how Anais "remembered having read an article about Bunuel's Golden Age by someone of that name ... and been struck by the savage, primitive exuberance of the prose ... his fierce appetite for living, his verile sensuality ..."
Miller, a German-American born in Brooklyn, may be the incarnation for Anais for "The Russian Who Did Not Believe in Miracles and Why." In Henry & June from the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, Anais describes Miller, upon their meeting in December 1931. "Henry has imagination, an animal feeling for life ... the truest genius I have ever known. 'Our age has a need of violence' he writes. And he is violence." She adds, "I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength."
However, talking to her diary later, Anais reveals, "You don't know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It's in us, not in your devious practices: it's in a feeling, in passion, in love." Anais was now more drawn to Miller's second wife, June Mansfield. "I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body ... I wanted to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, 'You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence ... If I love you, it must be because we shared ... the same madness, the same stage.'"
Influenced by her cousin Eduardo and having read Problems of Destiny, written by Dr. Allendy, Anais goes to see him, with varied conflicts, even though she writes, "Analysis is for those who feel paralyzed by life." While she does not feel paralyzed, she longs for her Mellors as Lawrence's Lady Chatterly did to awaken her to everything, including her duality: the lesbianism June knows, made a caricature of by Henry Miller in Crazy Cock "without charity, without feeling." (Not what Anais has planned to create for June at this time.)
She writes "fifteen little pieces like bits of prose poems" as her beginning "to achieve Debussyism;" after this, she "made a note on the psychoanalysis of the creator: 'creation by undirected imagining - a trance - produces subconscious poetry.'" She believes herself surrealistically "influenced by transition magazine and Breton and Rimbaud." She is half-aware also that Henry has cast a spell over her. "My father had icy blue eyes ... I became a child listening to Henry, and he became paternal ... I felt as if he had discovered a shameful secret ..." Anais has often referred to House of Incest as her own "Season in Hell."
Her apparent bipolarity is overshadowed by a greater childhood trauma; she yearns to be the Don Juan her father was as well as an artist in addition to Hugo's dutiful wife and Rosa's "good" daughter, an obsessive notion that had preoccupied her for years. At 18 when she read Sydney Smith on "Female Education," Anais rightfully interpreted these early nineteenth century essays when she reflected, "they seemed to mean but one thing: Choose between your home and domestic happiness - and your pen and your books." The choice seemed unbearable, i.e. "to banish ... love ... (for) absolute loneliness in the life of study and labor."
Anais resolved this conflict with "the key to contentment, the charm which dispels my 'dark clouds' .... (as) 'work for others. Never cease working for others. Do not think of yourself!'" Yet, she admits she could easily be tempted "to hide somewhere, to be left alone with my 'dark cloud.'" This is not only characteristic of the Nin temperament but also the absorbed artist in conflict with the evolving woman who, even after six months with Miller as her lover, could write: "With all the tremendous joys Henry has given me I have not yet felt a real orgasm."
She tells Dr. Allendy, "I have imagined that a freer life would be possible to me as a lesbian because I would choose a woman, protect her, work for her, love her for her beauty while she could love me as one loves a man, for his talent, his achievements, his character ... remembering Stephen in The Well of Loneliness." This is the secret to the mystical prose-poem, first published in 1936 in Paris as Siana Editions (Anais spelled backwards.) However, in Diary of Anais Nin, the first one released in 1966, years before the posthumous Early Diaries, Anais veils the theme as she did those truths that might be painful to others or herself.
On December 31, 1931, Anais writes:

"My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational devil of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose ... pure impulse ... my misery is a great joy. It is when I become conscious again that I feel unutterable pain."

Valerie Harms in The Stars in My Sky has interpreted House of Incest with the added research of early drafts of this work "composed in seven psychologically sequential sections ... narrated in the first person."
The Preface is germinal:

ALL THAT I KNOW IS CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK WRITTEN WITHOUT WITNESS, AN EDIFICE WITHOUT DIMENSION, A CITY HANGING IN THE SKY.
In Henry & June*(Aug, 1932), Anais wrote: "I have remained the woman who loves incest." In Incest (from Journal of Love)** she assessed "the schema of my lyrical book ... franker than Lawrence's treatment of homosexuality ... as, for instance, incest does not mean only possession of the mother or sister - womb of women - but also of the church, the earth, nature. The sexual fact is the lead weight only ..."
The essence of the plot is the narrator (Anais) and Sabina (June), "one woman within another, eternally." This does not mean only sexually but possibly unconsciously also two personalities joined, the manic with depressive. Anais sought the opposite of Miller's style: "when he writes, he does not write with love, ... (but) to attack."
"I AM THE OTHER FACE OF YOU" in House of Incest refers to more than the mystery of love between women that Anais explained in the first released Diary I (Harcourt, 1996) the same as she had in Henry & June; for she was now devoted to Miller's "intellect and emotionalism" while admitting her affinity to June Mansfield. "I have her in myself now as one to be pitied and protected." However, Anais added, "I was a fettered etheral being; in spite of my intellect."
Anais' words also refer to acceptance/rejection of her two personalities:

"The love between women is a refuge and escape into harmony. In the love between man and woman there is resistance and conflict. Two women do not judge each other, brutalize each other ... They surrender to mutual understanding ... Such love is death."

Although the narrator (Anais) believes she now knows what it means to love a woman (Lawrence's Women in Love), she does not, literally, in as much as she does not understand the bipolar temperament.

"There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through ... I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies ... I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution ... I prefer fairy tales."

Harms translates that "through dream imagery she (Anais) tries to understand her birth and the woman she is becoming."
However, Anais may also be masking the truth of another merging, a childhood trauma she can never reveal to anyone, which we know now may have involved the first seduction by her father when she was barely ten years old.
Anais' mentor, D. H. Lawrence, said in "The State of Funk" essay published a few years before she began House of Incest, "As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern ... I am going to accept my self sexually as I accept myself mentally and spiritually ... My sex is me as my mind is me, and nobody will make me feel shame about it." Anais may have created House of Incest to minimize the deep shame she still felt for what happened in her childhood at a time when she also was guilty for betraying Hugo who did not satisfy her physically in the passionate way Miller did or the delicate, poetic facade of June's persona.
In her Study on Lawrence (Anais appears to have created her prose-poem in the same fashion), she analyzed "Fish" in the chapter "The Poet." Anais stated, "We are not merely looking at fish ... We are by a kind of magic shedding our human feelings like a costume, to enter ... -the world of the fish." In the first released Diary of Anais Nin (Harcourt '66), July, 1932, she still reveals her affinity to Lawrence and not Henry Miller; however; "I see the symbolism of our lives. I live on two levels, the human and the poetic. I see the parables, the allegories. "
Although the mature Anais who wrote Novel of the Future has said, "All my stories are based on reality," while prefacing that admission with, "The external story is what I consider unreal," the psychoanalyst of the artists and herself knows: "Psychoanalysis may be the study of neurosis, but while studying illness, it has given us techniques for discovery of the hidden self."
At one point Anais had both a housekeeper named Jeanne and a friend, very attached to her brothers, which Anais certainly identified with because of her own admiration for Joan of Arc. Anais had translated one of her middle names Juana as Jeanne. In House of Incest, the narrator says, "But Jeanne ... only the fear of madness will drive us out of the ... sacredness of our solitude," when Jeanne confesses, "I LOVE MY BROTHER!" *
For BROTHER, substitute FATHER since Anais wrote in Incest (published diary volume of previous expurgated material of October 1932): "I will put pages of my journal into the book but never pages of the book into the journal." When she visited Dr. Allendy, Anais was also well aware of "The pathological basis of creation!" In June, 1932 in The Diary of Anais Nin (Vol. I, first Harcourt '66) she relates a memory when her youngest brother Joaquin was taken to the hospital with appendicitis. "He is not only my brother, he is my child ... I love my brother ... man, my brother. Needing care and devotion." In the simultaneous (but unpublished until 1992) Incest from Journal of Love:

"I am so absolutely woman that I understand my Father the human being - he is again the man who is also child ... I meet my Father and I am strong ... My Father comes when I have lived out the blind, cruel instinct to punish ..."

This masks the punishment she wanted to return to him for having abused her as a child.
Unlike Henry Miller or anyone who might gaze in horror upon those who love differently, Anais had "compassion" early on as revealed in House of Incest. "We all looked now at the dancer at the center of the room dancing the dance of the woman without arms" who does not grow these wings of flight again until she realizes why "she was condemned not to hold."
So too, Anais, as Brassai notes when she met Henry Miller, tried "everything: travel, pleasure, creativity, drunkenness, even drugs" while still searching "for the 'eternal moments' not in the reminiscence or in the 'ruminescence,' but in the very same instant and life as the spirit of photography."
In House of Incest, the dancer's arms and hands returned to her because she did not cling; nonetheless, such a conclusion may only describe one facet of Anais and the narrator, who says: "All flowing, all passing, all movement choked me with anguish." Still, the dancer turns "to light and to darkness calmly, dancing towards daylight." Anais who took up dancing to escape the pain of her fluctuating moods and insulation as a writer/reader was certainly also turned to the light as the dancer in her prose-poem. However, since Anais may also be the narrator, we know that She looked upon all that was before her as though it were a play on stage.

TOUCHED BY FIRE:
Is the Bipolar
"The Double" ?

"THE WHITE BLACKBIRD" - THE BIPOLAR?

Strangely enough, aside from Harms' "Witch of Words" in Stars in My Sky, very few critics acknowledge why Anais "by writing ... can examine her wounds privately ... The act of creation itself ... a balm, a tonic." Spencer in Collage of Dreams refers to Anais' "occasional moods of despair" although notes in Preface to Anais, Art and Artists: A Collection of Essays of being told, before seeing Anais in "the process of death from cancer," that "Anais is in control of the mood. She sets the tone. What we have to do is wear our brightest, most exotic clothes and sing and dance for her.'"
As she had lived, apparently unaided by anyone regarding her moods, so Anais died. The posthumous Early Diaries I-IV, however, present sufficient evidence of the writer's ability to wear two masks: her duality of persona, related directly to her undiagnosed but self-acknowledged, characteristic bipolarity; and the secret in her childhood, either buried consciously or (over time) unconsciously, in any event, hidden in reference to the possible child abuse that may have exacerbated her fiercely, rapid-cycling moods.
According to Noel Riley Fitch in her biography, The Erotic Life of Anais Nin, that Anais' father "seduced his daughter ... is borne out by her subsequent behavior, which fits the classical patterns of a child who has been seduced." Fitch quotes a fragmentary entry in Anais' later diary: "'Guilt about exposing the father. Secrets. Need of disguises. Fear of consequences.'"
In "The White Blackbird,"* that appeared in The Mystic of Sex (two years after the release of Noel Riley Fitch's biography), Anais depicts a visit with Carteret to the psyschiatric ward of a Paris hospital. "The white blackbird entered into me and that is why the haddock are pursuing me" is a quote based on what the "mad man" told the doctors during his interview.
The doctor in this entry responds, "'You see, he's incoherent. It doesn't make sense, it isn't logical ... And I am not telling you a mystery story.'"
A similar exchange precedes Tennessee Williams' depiction of Blanche DuBois which may be a misinterpretation of a disturbed woman or even his misunderstanding of Anais Nin herself (although she remained supportive of him).
However, the characteristics of the bipolar seem evident to the discerning eye in the Diaries as well as the fiction of Anais Nin, even within the Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934, the first journal edited for commercial publication.
In Linotte, Anais, at age eleven, includes a photo of her pianist father and notes, "The way he plays tells me whether he is sad or gay." Describing her own disposition, she writes, "I get angry easily." At age thirteen, she notes, "For me, life is: noise, madness, amusement or pleasure, bitterness." Two months later, "... when I am sad everything looks dark ... I feel that everything in me is breaking ... except the thread that keeps me on earth ..." At age sixteen, Anais believes "that the predominant feeling in my heart when I am not melancholy is tenderness and pity for the whole world. That doesn't prevent me from being afraid of it." She alludes to her return to the state of "the horrible Serious One of the old days!"
At almost seventeen, Anais writes: "no one can understand my strange feelings and my moods. I don't even understand them myself." She notes that her friend Frances writes "about melancholy too, so I am wondering if this strange emotion is just a crisis, at our age - and it may pass away." Anais adds, "I will be happy some day when I have learned how ..." while wondering "who will teach a little philosopher, poet, and linotte to laugh?" On Valentine's Day a week before this 17th birthday, "Once again it's a feeling of sad and absolute loneliness - and without any reason. I can't sleep and would rather write."
Even though she has Marcus as a boyfriend, Anais says he could not "really understand my strange Desert, my moral solitude." This isolation and disassociation from humanity she describes adeptly: "the feeling of being alone on a mountain-top, detached from other people, as I observe them."
The state of paralysis when a depressed person is incapable of concentrating is also depicted perfectly a few days later when rapid-cycler Anais writes: "The days that have passed without my writing were days of 'attack.' I went to bed early so that I would sleep instead of think ...Perhaps it is because I am in this state of mind that a simple accusation seems to me unjust."
Hypersensitivity is a marked trait of the bipolar as is flirtatiousness and, at times, a "hunger" for sensuality, the "blood connection" Lawrence often referred to.
"They call me a coquette? ... Well, fine, a coquette I am."
Absent-mindedness is another characteristic of bipolarity. "I always regret the scatterbrained things I do!" Anais said, who, like her father, imagined she had varied illnesses and loathed either being "sick" or around people who were. "Oh, Incurable Sickness, Hypochondria!" Workaholism, another trait, is exhibited in Anais' Early Diary II: "Whenever I dream I feel sadness creeping into my heart, and so I work all day long and it makes me contented." However, she had actually and intuitively been engaged in art as self-healing since childhood for reasons of the "traumatic experience" and her desire to be an artist like her father. "This seems to be the list of necessities for a would-be author: Imagination, Industry, Perseverance, Patience."
Acutely cognizant of her severe moods, Anais rationalized, "I suppose I am sleepless and troubled just because I have been very happy lately." Mania, that extreme elation known as bliss beyond compare (to the bipolar) often is also the cause of insomnia. She metaphorically notes in the same September 1920 entry: "Were I to be made into a pie, I know that at the time to be eaten, blackbirds would fly out of me ... because my mind is indeed in a sad state of contradiction and ecstasies and doubts," germinal to "The White Blackbird."
Only one month later on a "rainy, rainy day," Anais records: "What a lot of things I burned today," referring to "Plans for the future, at ten years of age, a mania for charity and ambitions then to erect orphanages, asylums, convents, all this with the money I would earn as a painter ..." as well as "confessions, and long articles describing Father and Mother." At the end of the same month, "Sometimes my heart overflows with a queer happiness. And yet no one is the cause of it, no incident ... nothing outside of my very own self." At seventeen, Anais rationalizes, "Just as I create the greatest portion of my sorrows, sometimes I create a happy day ..."
Without any direction or guidance, Anais identified the therapeutic value of nature, "the greatest consolation for human woes that heaven ever gave us ... and ... books." She labeled abnormal curiosity "a pedantic mania" and granted: "I do believe I am developing bibliomania." Temporary relief, escape, invented explanations for her fluctuating moods combined to provide Anais solace in "these pursuits" from childhood throughout her life. "God sends us our sorrows, and though we, with our human minds, cannot understand His designs in doing so, we must know that they have a divine cause."
The young artist tried to convince herself stoically of such a stoic belief, but "when the sorrow does come to me ... it takes possession ... and leaves no space for thankfulness." The determined Anais truly believed that she could balance her moods through self-education and her art, her diaries, for "... wisdom is, after all, a matter of balance and proportion ... (while) sadness is an illness of the heart, and it should be conquered."
Like Byron, who Jamison in Touched by Fire says, "exerted extraordinary intellectual and emotional discipline ... over a kind of pain that brings most ... to their knees," Anais fought to overcome the negative associations of a "Byronic" temperament: theatrical, Romantic, brooding ... heroic ... cynical, passionate" which Jamison asserts "from part of the argument for a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness."
Anais sought her own intuitive cures also when she urged her mother to let her go to the city (NY): "If I stay home ... I write and read all day and when night comes I want to throw myself into a river ..." Ever the idealist and psychoanalyst of the artist and herself, she adds, "Sadness gives you a greater knowledge of the Soul, and a joy of knowledge of what is tangible and real in life."
In Journal d'une Fiancee,* from June 1922 to January 1923, Anais further identifies the fear most bipolars have regarding whether the severe mood known as manic (or its opposite, the state of depression), is visible to others. This fear, coupled with Anais' rebellious and growing feministic attitude, may explain her statement: "If you have a mind, make a secret of it, or bury it in some sort of secret place, but for heaven's sake do not use it ... my spirit will never bow to these things ... I shall teach my body, and the outer envelope, to endure, and to appear resigned, and neither by word nor by look shall I betray the fire within me."
At this time, Anais, however, is not only mentally fluctuating but physically burgeoning with her natural desires as a woman which she attributes to her fluctuating moods. "I struggle against ... the animal in life, against which my whole nature rebels violently." Why? one might ask. She hints at something greater than abandonment by the father, even greater than her moods, always intensified by either insensitive remarks and certainly some traumatic experience as well as evincing the nature of a bipolar.
"The gift of seeing beyond the facts ... into the thing itself ... That is what truth is!" Anais writes. "I am still and shall forever be alone in my sorrows, because they are always deeper than the normal and reasonable and can be neither shared nor communicated to others." This entry only a few months before she will marry at age twenty.
When Hugh Guiler, her American fiancee, has doubts about Anais, she writes him, "I am intent on dissolving all your fears of the 'high peaks of life' habit which so distressed you."
Towards the end of this second Early Diary (Journal d'une Fiancee), Anais also has doubts about herself: "Will I lose myself in these labyrinths of personalities, assumed yet unassumed, sincere and yet unstable, real and yet fictitious ...?" Anew, however, she rationalizes that her duality may be the result of knowing three languages which may conflict her regarding all thoughts. English poetry brought her "a deep and enduring enchantment besides which all the evanescent qualities of the Spanish, the fire, the passion, the enthusiasm, gradually fade."
By the end of this diary, Anais still denies that she hides from her journal the reasons that worsen her varied moods, in her mind, "my two personalities," although she may have known why she had "shame ... courage's shadow." Readers only learned of the seductions by her father after Anais' death which may allude to "self-condemnation" and "I am going to be good."
Susan Kavaler-Adler says in The Compulsion to Create ...: "From Nin's descriptions of her father, we can infer that she suffered severe oedipal humiliation, seductive paternal exploitation, and her father's use of her for his own narcissistic mode of mirroring in which he sought a compulsory reflection of his own grandiosity." The clinical psychologist/psychoanalyst indicates that "Nin's anguish, confusion, and manic and depressive reactions to despair" are normal, but she does not acknowledge that Anais herself is a manic-depressive (as Nin's father appeared to be) in reference to Jamison's description of the Byronic mercurial Don Juan temperament often associated with bipolars.
April 7, 1921, Anais wrote: "I am suffering still, suffering with the fear of suffocation ...Someday the long pent-up emotions will break forth in some furious, dangerous rebellion. Music doubles the pain." The next day, "I am so glad to be alive!" She "humbly recognize(s) the fault to lie in me" which shows she has disassociated herself from her father and any memory of a painful experience in her past childhood, conscious only that she had to work more assiduously at becoming "balanced."
In Early Diary Vol. III, R. Maynard, the painter of Anais' "Unfinished Portrait" asks if she ever has fears of her diaries "falling into other's hands." Anais confides in him that she has used "a sort of protection by generalizing ... by vagueness ... by maintaining a peculiar impersonality." At 21 she admits she does this less often but that there is "one subject I often long to write about particularly," although she does not because it "might cause a great deal of trouble." She also notes that her "idealism has been mixed with fatalism."
When she sees her father in December 1924, she has forgiven him "for the most illogical of causes ... the heartrendering (sic) pity ... for what I once hated." Cryptic? Later, she notes her Father "was Paris - intelligent, insidious, cultured Paris." Her "reaction to sensuality causes ... infinite pain." And not long after this traumatic event of seeing her Father a decade after the "abandonment," Anais is "struggling against one of my worst 'crises' - a deep, unreasonable, intensely painful melancholy."
Anais has to cope with her intense moods as well as endure the repressed (or recalled?) childhood event which may combine with inexplicable guilt regarding the pleasure of her punishment, distinctly aggravating to any depression.
"In dancing, I shake off sorrow," she writes, because the daily act of self-analysis for so long a time only intensifies "dissatisfaction, my doubts, my desires, my restlessness ... a kind of madness." But Anais was a workaholic obsessed with "not wasting time," another characteristic of fastidious bipolarity.
Kavaler-Adler commends Anais for "working through her wounds ... Nin used her creative work to express her struggle and navigated her way through it.' Silently, "Nin gains affective awareness of childhood traumas so that they can be resolved." Indeed, by the end of the third Early Diary, Anais surely was familiar with the pattern or cycle of her moods: "Have been depressed and self-centered and critical. Such a familiar mood had to come alter a month of insouciance and action and exhilarating fullness." Returned to Paris, she takes up smoking, "tense with memories of another arrival."
In Early Diary IV, Anais is preoccupied with another "eternal problem" as the artist who struggles with her best vehicle for her work. "Turn the Journal into a novel? Copy out the Journal as it is?" She acknowledges "Erskine's own writing" as liberat(ing) my intelligence from scruples" while crediting Sherwood Anderson as the writer "who liberated my feelings and dreams from timidity and self-consciousness ... Dancing (though) has liberated my body ..." Nonetheless, Anais, who describes her life as "rich, beautiful, creative," confesses that she "continue(s) to suffer" while blaming no one but herself.
"I only mark Time with experience, and learning and suffering." She is bent on "conquer(ing) faults ... for lying (another bipolar trait); ... jealousy (another form of obsession/compulsion/neuroticism, all bipolar characteristics); desire to outdo everybody;" (perfectionism which is that side of mania that becomes the other side of despair when failure occurs. )
Jamison's research of artists and writers "in the group with no history of treatment showed mood and productivity curves that more closely corresponded with one another." (It would be an equally intriguing project for someone to chart Anais' moods with her work patterns although she may also have been a victim of SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder, which would have to be figured in along with the rapid-cycling bipolarity.)
"The sunshine healed me, the smells, the colors, the dry air." Throughout her diaries and fiction, Anais alludes to her healing "sunbaths" a.k.a. D.H. Lawrence's story "Sun." April 5, 1928: "An inexplicable sadness, a terrible emptiness, a burning of the blood ... I suffer most of all from a breaking up of myself ... I feel weak, soft, multiple."
The diary that has been her friend and constant companion is now seen as something much more. "I owe to it what some people owe to psychology: knowledge of myself." Formally, her cousin had introduced her to psychoanalysis. "Eduardo wants to get rid of the past, as I want to get rid of it ... I have been, until yesterday, my own analyst." Anais realized she needed help. "I'm sick. I have been too unhappy and too tired ... Winter is here ... my old enemy and tormentor."
While she waited for the right opportunity or analyst, Anais began "the Second Book drawn from my Journal ... I am beginning to feel the need of fiction, of a disguise." Hugo commented on the transformation. "You seem to have finished just suffering life and are beginning to dominate it."
Like Byron, whose poetry Jamison indicates "masks his passion and makes it endurable art," quoting Byron himself, an extraordinarily disciplined bipolar: "'Yet - see, he mastereth himself, and makes/His torture tributary to his will, " Anais too had decided to conquer her temperament. "I possess a power of magic" to "destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny - with my diabolical mind."
That doesn't mean she will be the master of her moods. For the artist who is bipolar relishes mania not despair. "I am always afraid when I have reached a peak of life, of its being the highest and the last." A few pages later, "My sadness is so strong that my body aches." On October 3, 1929, Anais noted that she wrote "eight stories in two weeks or so" (the posthumously released but approved with her own preface: Waste of Timelessness). While praising her output, she simultaneously chastised herself: "Why must I be so excessive, always leaning one way or another...?"
In spite of this, Anais knew the result of her moods was worth the art she felt balance had to (and for) be sacrificed. "When I write I feel exulted. When I feel exulted and excited mentally I want to act ... Having such a temperament is like having a shameful illness."
Physicians in her time, of course, knew little about the bipolar temperament. When Anais visits one doctor, he says her problem is "nothing but a strong nervous depression ... and pernicious anemia." Shortly thereafter, she deduces, "You can only return through the mind, to get your balance again." This is incredible fortitude and will-power which has been consciously developed by her self-education with hundreds of books as well as her devotion to her journal, her fiction, her study of Lawrence and her "companionship" with cousin Eduardo since he cannot love woman."
" I believe in poetic prose. I'm doing it," Anais writes, gaining strength mentally and emotionally. "My philosophy ... will grow with me, out of my defects and my shame and my madnesses." She reads Freud and Jung, anything that will help her understand the psyche of the artist, of her Self. She determines though: "consciousness and knowledge of our phantom world, of our neurotic instincts, is perhaps not sufficient for the cure." Anais believes Eduardo (as herself) should be "urged to an energetic application of consciousness to living."
She had crafted the key to cracking a narcissist's shell so that she might connect with others; to intensify her distinct individuality (the bipolarity and the childhood trauma). "A rich personal intensity breaks its own shell and its own obsessions - and touches the mystic whole." At the end of Early Diary IV, Anais thinks she has "discovered my own illness and am taking care of myself" when she reads Freud's symptoms for "anxiety neurosis. Cause? Sexual." And, certainly this particular disorder can indeed be caused by something related to sexuality. But, bipolarity is more than nervous disorder; however, bipolarity intensified, made worse by a severe childhood sexual experience may be exactly what Anais stumbled upon.
Jamison makes "a literary, biographical, and scientific argument for a compelling association, not to say actual overlap, between two temperaments - the artistic and the manic-depressive - and their relationship to the rhythms, cycles, or temperament of the natural world." That Hugo understood and accepted Anais and her moods throughout their marriage is prophetically acknowledged by Anais in October, 1931:

"We may both be again pulled apart physically. But we know that our marriage stands, our love will accept and understand, and that we will not tell each other until the experience is over, because we cannot know, at the moment we are in it, what the meaning of it is, or estimate its importance."

With this self-assurance, Anais has resolved that her temperament may be cured with conscious action, i.e. relevant to her past and "the double" (her father); there is nobody to guide her in any other direction (manic-depression was not in her youth seen as a genetic inheritance. Heaven knows there was no consciousness of the gravity of childhood abuse on the bipolar.) "Though I double the dose of my sedatives, it is no use. I'm dancing inside myself with a new bliss." Awakening to her sexual desires, Anais surely must have felt herself justified to opening the door to anything or anyone that might come her way to remedy her existence as a rapid-cycler writer, weary of her studies and her singular devotion to the diary.

'THE DOUBLE'

In Linotte, Anais wrote, "It seems that all my gestures are like him (Papa), the way I walk, talk, my profile, etc., etc." She expressed her "loss of faith in men" and referred to "the selfish attitudes" of her brothers, Thorvald and Joaquinito. She also noted a quote from Heller in her reading: "'True artists are all a little pagan,'" identifying her Papa as an artist, not herself, while realizing, "I have inherited almost all his ... faults!"
A few months later in the spring of 1920, she reflected on coquetry as "the horrible fault I was born with and that I can't help." She was referring to the reason her father abandoned the family, ultimately to wed a younger woman. At 17, her cynicism of men was aided by Rosa when Anais answered her brother why loaves of bread are called "married." She opened the two loaves and explained, "You see, something is missing. They don't have a crust on one side." To her mother, Anais asked, "It's just like people - they are lacking something when they get married, aren't they?"
Rosa replied, "that's true - common-sense!"
Notwithstanding her own cynicism, Anais proclaimed in Early Diary II, "I am not like Mother. I am like Father." Told that she looks like him and likes being alone like him, "proud and haughty," Anais reflected that she wanted "a different outlook on life ... I want that passionate temper curbed and that disdain softened." She did not want "to act like a savage" but wrote that she was "cursed with a strange dream, one I dare not dream too often."
At 18, Anais appeared to be cured partially of that secret dream when she wrote, "I thought you were lost for a while and would return, but ... you are not loved anymore by anyone under this roof ... and I love you only because you are my father." Filial love is dutiful and expected; however, only Anais writes her father many letters, aware that he "is a critic and a champion of musical opinions ... using his pen when he is not at the piano. I have ink in my blood."
At 16 she had acknowledged the flaw of her similarity to her father. "I am my own severest critic!" Looking at her incorrigible brothers, she noted what she observed was necessary to improve her own behavior and spirit, since "... as the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined, unless the faults are corrected." Anais realized she was her father's double, "the phantom of the Nin lies." Or when her moods were deeply fluctuating, "I know that Papa is sometimes sarcastic, skeptical, pessimistic and sullen without any reason." She called herself "fickle" in more ways than the ordinary definition since Anais, who had been like a mother to her younger brothers and a helpmate to her own mother for years, was really quite weary of being "angelic and compliant" when she would rather express her rage. However, "I will continue to be good, I suppose," she confessed as Linotte.
When Anais married Hugh Guiler in March of 1923, she may have hoped he would be her Sun, her dream-love, her father in a more perfectly stable and loving role. She had, however, been haunted by "persecution from Man, my only evil and terror up to now on this earth..." while drawn to Hugo because she felt she must atone for why her father abandoned the family. One month before her marriage, Anais wrote: "I am torn by regret, by shame, by pity, by the desire to atone, to soothe, to console," to escape marrying a man who looked like her father and therefore might be oddly like her self.
Early Diary III reveals that Anais dined with her father in 1924 "and met the little lady he is about to marry." On the day before when first she and her father had met, she described her feelings in this manner: "I forgave, consoled and deceived him for ... pity! - the heartrendering (sic) pity I feel now for what I once hated." A day later, she wrote, "My problem just now ... is Father - Father in relation to mother rather than me." Anais was aware of her father's temper and moods, because she had been analyzing her own since childhood. "What is this feeling which has pursued me through childhood and now and which I can trace all through my journals?"
Hugo knows only that Anais is the struggling writer at this time. He said to her, "'... you know that our ideal is the truth, and truer than ourselves. If you don't believe, I shall not love you any more ...'" in response to her verbal suffering regarding her self-doubt and deep despair. By Early Diary IV, she has recognized, "it is not only the bad qualities which are inherited. Like father, I love a tidy house, filed papers ... no confusion in any detail ..." to rationalize away both the moods and the associations they have with her father.
Nonetheless, Anais, who identifies always the two women in her, has no conscious awareness that she is suffering the disorder of "the Double." (And, how could she when modern medicine had not even identified manic-depression, now known as bipolarity and more currently, an inherited "mental challenge.") Anais wrote, "I was tempted today to keep a double journal, one for things which do happen, and one for imaginary incidents ... I live double. I'll write doubly ... feeling myself split into two women - one, kind, loyal, pure, thoughtful; the other, restless and impure, acting strangely ... seeing life and tasting all of it without fear ...without restraint ... I have the capacity to live several lives - one does not satisfy me." She still appears to feel unconscious self-doubt regarding her part in the childhood episode, told only cryptically in her Early Diaries (I-IV, 1914-1920, released posthumously).
Married five years, Anais exhibits typical disillusionment; however, added to this is her natural stirring as a woman versus the disciplined writer who must find an outlet for her growing sensuality and an escape from her insular mental activity. "In spite of the dancing and writing I still have this terrible hunger for a friend, the desire to love and be loved. Hugh is never there ... (and if he knew, I am mad most of the time) ..."
When she met Henry Miller, a passionate, intellectual artist, impoverished and in need, Anais confronted the shadow again of "the Double," her father, whom she will meet for the second time in 1933, two years after Miller and the other side of her self, the other woman who was ready to melt into John Erskine but did not. "I have lost my balance. I feel only my body, its burnings, its languors, its desires, and its defects. I cannot think, but I will find measure." Consciously and with determination, she wrote in April, 1928, "I never, never want to hurt him ... But I cannot stay at home ... Hugh will forgive me."
Anais has told us Hugo was "incredibly wise, loyal, whole, balanced," which means (she adds) that "he knows everything except only one secret." That secret Anais would keep from Henry Miller as well the world. Conflicted by her desire for passion and her need to create in the torment of fluctuating moods, Anais "concentrated on the art of understanding. I'm going to make a science and a religion of it," which she did until she agreed to meet her father, three years after she had written: " - if you think you lie, you lie. If you know what you are doing, you know the real meaning of lie; a lie is not something you tell others, but yourself."

Piercing "the Double"

Anais had written in Henry & June* (Harcourt 1986) that she "had a terror of being driven again to the point of suicide," a fate that has befallen many bipolars and manic-depressive artists before, during and after medication. She has mentioned her "neuritis" and pills for same as the only expedient for her moods. Engaged in lying, she knew her "continued craving to be loved and understood is certainly abnormal," in reference to Henry Miller and other varied meetings, sexually and intellectually stimulating. When she meets Dr. Allendy, her first therapist, because Anais is involved with both Henry Miller and his wife June, Anais confides that she "had imagined seeing ... father at my dance recital in Paris."
Allendy responds that she wanted "to dazzle" her father yet was "frightened. But because you have wanted to seduce your father since you were a child and did not succeed, you have also developed a strong sense of guilt." Already, he has explained to Anais that "sometimes the sense of sexual inferiority is due to a realization of one's frigidity."
At this time, Anais reported in her diary that "Hugo has at last been taken up by men. He has loved it," which may explain Anais' affinity toward homoemotional men (and women) most of her life. Strangely enough, most photographs of her father depict a man who outwardly appears effeminate. Perhaps Anais intends to free both herself and Hugo when she tells him, "Go away, travel a great deal. We both need that. We can't have it together. We can't give it to each other." A few pages earlier, Anais admitted to herself, "My love for Hugo has become fraternal."
No doubt, there were other reasons why Hugo did not want to be mentioned in Anais' public diaries or why she chose to stay legally married to him all her life, besides his reputation as a banker, but Anais was not a financially independent writer until very late in her lifetime.*
When she abandoned Allendy, Anais wrote in the expurgated Journal of Love: Incest, "I was fucked by death;" apparently, this psychoanalyst had simulated her father's brutality or merely verbalized what Anais could not admit: pleasure in punishment (which may have explained her later attraction for Antonin Artaud, originator of Theater of Cruelty). "Allendy accentuates the ambivalence of my desires. He senses that he is also approaching the sexual key to my neuroses, and I realize he is, too, like a deft detective."
In addition, Allendy had deluded Anais' "conquest of her father through other men," no doubt as "The Woman No Man Could Hold." Afraid to be hurt, Anais hurts instead. Finally, she reveals to herself, "I have remained the woman who loves incest;" perhaps she means this only partially figuratively, disallowing still the impact of the childhood trauma, even disguised in Early Diary II when she writes at 18: "Oh, I must not look back or I will be frightened by what I am." Recall too that in Linotte,the first volume of Anais' Early Diaries, she had "decided very firmly only to love boys as little brothers."
In her (unprofessional) Study of D.H. Lawrence (Paris, 1932) Anais has certainly made a few readers wonder about a particular reference to the subject of incest. "Suppose that psychology contends that a certain incest dream is a wish-fulfillment. According to Lawrence: 'an incest dream would not prove an incest desire in the living psyche.' Rather the contrary ..."
Hidden in Early Diary II, however, Anais recalled her "Father ... a mystery, a vision, a dream," when for her tenth birthday she was allowed to stay at Arachon. Villa les Ruines, "where Father was already staying" to recover from appendicitis. "Strange forebodings caused me to weep uncontrollably the greater part of the night ..." However, "a few months later Father left us ... I kissed him wildly ... weeping hysterically and clinging to him, a scene nobody could understand."
At 18, Anais still retreat(s) far into my shell and remain(s) sadly brooding there for hours ... Yet it is my true self ... who thinks painful thoughts. Deep down in my heart ... I do not like boys."
A year before her marriage, she was "haunted by the ugliness ... I feel now when I look at a child's face that I could ... shield him forever from what I have undergone ... Can I forget all I have learned of ... harsh, unrelenting truth? ... a jungle of ... men waiting to touch me, grasp me."
Hugo, however, appeared to have the personality opposite of her father. And "Henry's blue eyes reminding me of my father's," in the first published Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1934) (which journal we will see contains all the truth about Anais even if veiled for the sake of public prudency, the possibility of slander and/or genuine compassion towards her family.)
In the posthumously released diary Henry & June, before the meeting with her father, Anais accused herself of being "the most corrupt of all women, for I seek a refinement in my incest ... With a madonna face, I still swallow God and sperm, and my orgasm resembles a mystical climax. The men I love, Hugo loves, and I let them act like brothers." She seriously sought to rid herself of "the Double" once and for all and was only half-joking when she wrote, "It only remains for me now to go to my father and enjoy to the full the experience of our sensual sameness, to hear ... the obscenities, the brutal language I have never formulated, but which I love in Henry."
Still, if Hugo was Anais' anchor and her rock, "June... (was her) adventure and ... passion, but Henry is my love." What then was her father, "the Double?" In Journal of Love: Incest, Anais quotes Henry Miller as telling her she had "an incapacity for cruelty." However, on May 5, 1933 Anais wrote in her journal, "I look at my Double, and I see in a mirror ... When I look at him I am sick of my lies."
She added, "I have lived not to be my Father ... a ghost of my self-doubts, self-criticism, of my malady." Already she had admitted to herself a few days earlier, "I am aware that in my unconscious there is a fund of cruelty and fear which makes me want to punish and abandon man."
Allendy's use of the whip as re-enactment of punishment by her father, to rid Anais of the scar of those beatings "was not really, deeply savage ... I liked that whip ... virile, savage, hurtful, vital. It still stings!" She knew that if she met her father and gave him back a taste of his own seduction, perhaps this Allendy technique would work on him even though she says it did not on her. She wants to punish her father who "used to call me his betrothed after I sent him a photograph of myself at sixteen."
Jamison reminds us that Byron was "a victim of 'his restless moods, his sensual appetites, his wild gaieties and glooms,'" as were Poe (recall his marriage to youthful cousin Virginia) and the poet Anne Sexton (who repeatedly slept with her daughter out of loneliness). Include Anais Nin and her musician-father, although in this case the daughter may have intended only to be a coquette with the idea of seducing her father to a certain point (punishment for child-seduction abuse?). However, "lying on his back" and unable to move," her father asked to kiss Anais' mouth. "I hesitated ... We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire." (On his or her part?)
Even though the father deceived Anais by admitting, "We must avoid possession," and Anais "resisted, I resisted enjoyment. I resisted showing my body," she wrote, "I lay over him ... He uncovered himself ... With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him" to re-enact (more or less?) a reversal of a pose from childhood.
"Still, in some remote region of my being, a revulsion ... I wanted to run away ... But I saw him so vulnerable ..." She then went to her room. "I was poisoned by this union."
There may have been no one to blame but the Father who had no guilt, no shame, according to Anais who said to him, "You are still a child." Anais recalled her father, saying at the moment of penetration, "'I have lost God.'"
This event, no doubt, drives her to seek out a more-known second analyst, Otto Rank. "Is this love of my Double that self-love again? ... Is it always ... my Father, the male half of me?" In the meantime, before and during all doctors, she credits "my journal (that) keeps me from insanity," because "No one can teach me to enjoy my tragic incest-love, to shed the last chains of guilt."
Did Anais re-enact the traumatic childhood experience as retribution, or to free herself from the self-doubt and guilt she had felt all her youth regarding her pleasure in the seduction? If she intended merely to "tease" her Double to the point of insane pain, was she forced to follow through with her seduction-plan because she had to rid herself of "the Double?"

TRANSMUTATION:
ANOTHER STAGE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS-
Stella in Streetcar Named
Desire before A Spy
in the House of Love

Stella*

In the first Swallow edition of Winter of Artifice (1961), published for a larger audience than earlier private press versions of certain novelettes, Anais included Stella (from This Hunger - 1945), title long story (originally Lilith in 1939 Winter of Artifice); and The Voice (same for all versions.) "I have never planned my novels ahead," Anais said in 1974 Preface to her continuous novel, Cities of the Interior. "I have always improvised on a theme ... a study of women."
Stella is a star, the sun, basis of the solar system, an actress whose father "was an actor. In Warsaw he had achieved fame and adulation." However, she "almost hated ... her 'double' (on screen) ... a work of artifice." Stella may represent Sabina (June/narrator/youthful Anais) of House of Incest as well Lillian and Djuna (moon in all phases) of This Hunger in Anais' struggle to dance D. H. Lawrence' s "dance with the elixir of life" (from his essay, "Making Love to Music").
"For Stella ... love had been born under the zodiacal sign of doubt. For Bruno, under the sign of faith ... Stella consumed with a hunger for love, and Bruno by the emptiness of his life." Bruno and Philip may be representative of Anais' father, Henry Miller, Otto Rank, that man who is unaware that "no love (is) ever self-sustaining, self-propelling, self-renewing."
Stella is conscious, however, of the negative power of "a colorful ballet of lies" (her own, others) and sees how she too is like the men she has been involved with. "The child is passive, yielding and accepts everything, giving nothing in return but affection," which she employs to give "them the illusion that each was the center of the other's existence."
In "On Writing" (1947), Anais wrote, "Naked truth is unbearable to most, and art is our most effective means of overcoming human resistance to truth." (Her own included?) Stella "is no longer and actress willing to disguise herself ... Yet there is no blindness or deafness as strong as that within the emotional self."
D.H. Lawrence has said in his essay "Love" that the human must act "creatively" with others and "separately and distinctly" to "have understanding." In Stella, "Seeing has to do with awareness, the clarity of the senses (as) linked to the spiritual vision, to understanding." When Bruno walks away (as in reality Anais' father did from her), taking "everything away with him because he took away the faith, her faith in love," as Anais had written in Early Diary III, both Stella and Anais were left "the prey of doubts and fears."

A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams' play, published by New Directions (1947) in the same year of its presentation at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, contains elements of Anais' Stella, even to the point of including certain lines of hers. She first met him in 1941, noted in Diary III (1939-1944): "Tennessee was inarticulate and his eyes never met mine fully. " She mentions casually in Diary IV (1944-1947) that "Tennessee Williams sent me tickets for his new play." (Streetcar ...) In Diary V in May 1954 she writes, "Dylan Thomas, Tennessee, Truman Capote ... What support did they give me?" Fall, 1954, she adds: "... in Tennessee Williams, in Proust, the time which counts is the time of the mother's youth. They like antiques, objects from the past." Anais had gone beyond this theme she had noted as "the fixation upon the past seems to be a homosexual trait and may be connected with the fixation on the mother." (Or "father?")
In 1942, Tennessee Williams, who wore an eye patch after another operation, was doubling as a waiter-entertainer in Greenwich Village and as a night elevator operator in a New York hotel. In 1945 after The Glass Menagerie fame, he had gone to Chapala, Mexico where he wrote "The Poker Night," later incorporated in Streetcar. Falk in his critical study on Williams (Twayne Series '61), determined that "If the third scene was the beginning of the play, then the southern gentlewoman (earlier referred to by Falk as symbolized in Blanch DuBois, "too delicate to withstand the crudeness and decay surrounding her" as well as "clue to theme ... that life is equated with passion, and its opposite is death") ... must have been a later edition.
Anais' The Winter of Artifice, third and last volume released by the Villa Seurat/Obelisk Press (1939), again appeared in May 1942 a year after she established the Gemor Press in Greenwich Village; the novel was available through Frances Steloff's Gotham Book Mart since Ms. Steloff had loaned Anais $100 to start her own letterpress in the Village (New York). Anais' privately handprinted This Hunger (STELLA, LILLIAN & DJUNA) was "nearly sold out" in late 1945 (according to her letter to Henry Miller in A Literate Passion). The first British edition of Winter of Artifice (1947) originally appeared as "Lilith" in The Winter of Artifice (Paris: Obelisk 1939) released as revised First American edition in 1942 with untitled story and "The Voice."* The father-daughter theme was extended to conclusion of former long story in Swallow edition (1961 - three novelettes) as "their destiny - the railroad track of their obsessions," the opening of Williams' play.
Scene One of Streetcar has Blanche taking "a street-car named Desire, and then transfer(ing) to one called Cemeteries ... (to) Elysian Fields!" The play concerns the rape of Blanche DuBois by her sister's husband, her brother-in-law Stanley, originally Bruno in "The Poker Night." Stanley Kowalski, of Polish descent, is "a ruthless exposure of ... dreams and delusions and deceit ... affectations and pretenses," according to Falk who explains how the brutish Stanley mocks Blanche "to look at herself and her ragpicker outfit (A.N.'s "Ragtime" in Seven '38) to recall that she may think of herself as a queen but still has been swilling his liquor."
In Williams' play, Blanche tells her suitor Mitch, when he confronts her with the truth of the Flamingo hotel, frequented by prostitutes (information passed on to him by Stanley), "I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth ... I didn't lie in my heart." This precedes a symbolic Mexican woman vendor outside who repeats, "Flores, flores. Flores para los muertos ... " (Flowers, Flowers. Flowers for the dead...) among the last lines of Anais' Stella, wherein the character acknowledges that she is aware her fans send flowers for a screen star who is not real. Stella is similarly cognizant of her posing and position.
"Flowers for the dead, she murmured. With only a little wire, and a round frame, they would do as well." Although Oliver Evans (introduced to Anais by Williams) end notes in the first critical study on her work (1968) that there is no other resemblance "between Blanche and Stella." he may have erred since Ladders to Fire (Dutton '46) contains "This Hunger" (Gemor '45), whose contents included Prologue; Hedja; Stella; Lillian and Djuna*. In "Stella," her novelette within Winter of Artifice (Swallow '45) "the window of the solitary cell of the neurotic" opens to the "name of the enemy (as) an emotion of helplessness against him! What good was naming it if one could not destroy it and face one's self?"
Scene 9 in Streetcar ends with stage directions of Blanche "[rushes to the big window ... and cries wildly] 'Fire! Fire! Fire!'" foreshadowing her own real enemy. After "[she smashes a bottle on the table and faces him]" even "[strikes at him with the bottle top but he catches her wrist]" similar to the symbolic broken crystal bowl in the version of Anais' "Winter of Artifice," before Stanley, who rapes his half-willing victim, Blanche, says, "We've had this date with each other from the beginning." Recall Anais' "Today she recognizes an inhuman love." (page 90 in novelette "Winter of Artifice" within same Swallow collection.)
In Ladders to Fire, Djuna hears the same one-note song of a mechanical bird in her dream which "seemed more real to me than the callous hands of the orphan asylum women when they changed me into a uniform." Streetcar- Scene Eight incorporates Blanche's parrot story in the same way. "The only way to hush the parrot up was to put the cover back on its cage so it would think it was night and go back to sleep," before another monologue foreshadowing Blanche's deliverance to the doctor. "I'll be buried at sea sewn up in clean white sack and dropped overboard - at noon ... into an ocean as blue as (chimes again) my first lover's eyes!" (The male character pitted against woman in almost all of Anais' novels has the color of her father's eyes, blue.
The comparison of daughter/father veiled in "Stella," This Hunger, "Winter Of Artifice," Ladders to Fire is fascinating when juxtaposed against Blanche/Stanley in Williams' play from Bruno's double cry of "Stella ! ... Stella ! in Anais' "Stella" to drunk Stanley's "baying hound" repetition of his pregnant wife's name after he has struck her, "Stell-lahhhhh! ... STELL-LAHHHHH." Both writers were invariably influenced by D. H. Lawrence, using literally and symbolically, elements from "Cocksure Women and Hensure Men" essay from the ribald cock and hen joke in Streetcar to Stella's "responding with her answering blood rhythms" while desperately struggling to become Lawrence's "dauntless" as well as "demure" woman.
A Spy in the House of Love

First edition of this novel appeared in 1954 about which Anais said in Novel of the Future, "I wanted you the reader, to know Sabina (Spy) better than you ever knew Tennessee's Blanche DuBois ... I wanted you to feel as if you had been intimately related to her." There she identified also that "Stella" was her "first attempt to extend the poem (House of Incest), to carry into prose the poetic condensation and abstraction of the poem."
Sabina, the main character's name, may be derived from "Carl Jung's longtime operatic affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein" of which recently Susan Baur has noted in The Intimate Hour (1997): "However questionable Jung's behavior was from a moral point of view ... somehow it met the prime obligation of the therapist toward his patient: to cure her."
Anais must have had her own ideas about her liaison with Otto Rank or similar type relationship between Jung/Sabina, for she has Sabina (herself)imagine a lie detector as a spy who is symbolic of her animus, that inner masculine personality of a woman, more evolved than Stella and unlike Blanche (Streetcar), who does not depend on "the kindness of strangers" but is free "as man ... to enjoy without love. Without any warmth of the heart as a man could ... (to) enjoy a stranger."*
That is Sabina's definition and "meaning of freedom. Free of attachment, dependency and the capacity for pain" which was preceded by House of Incest and "Stella," where both narrator/Djuna, who identified vicariously with Sabina/June, "become the actress who loathed her false image on screen," and are struggling to accept the external "exact portrait of herself as she felt inside." Sabina now mirrors Blanche, that "poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives," to whom she might throw always "an unexpected ladder ... and ordained, 'Climb!'" even though Sabina knew her "ladder led to fire."
Although there is no reason for Sabina to feel the guilt of betraying her husband, Alan, since man never feels guilt (a.k.a. Stanley's more gravely violent lies), Sabina half-conceals from herself mentally, as well as by wearing a long black cape, her "desire to feel the brutality of man, the force which can violate? ... perhaps a need in woman, a secret erotic need" to which Anais adds in Diary II (1934-1939), "I have to shake myself from ... these violent images, awaken."
However, Sabina (unlike Blanche, who was forced unwillingly and deceptively to a mental asylum at the end of Williams' play) admits to herself honestly that she lies "to protect one human being from sorrow ... (while) wishing to be that ('role of a whole woman') ... not altogether a lie." Anais' personal desire echoes in Spy with "Anger ... at this core which will not melt, while Sabina wills to be like men, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger."
In Novel of the Future, Anais offered more information about how her "women did not break. They sought by every means to walk the tightrope between various roles, conflicts, and dualities of a personality." She repeats how she wanted her readers "to know more about Sabina than you were allowed to know about Madame Bovary (Flaubert's sensual wife protagonist who was punished by the author with suicide!) or Blanche DuBois." A few pages earlier Anais alluded to her theme in Spy. "Identification and empathy are the opposites of alienation and separation."
When Sabina says, "I am an international spy in the house of love," she is Donna Juana, no longer living "according to (society's) taboos against multiple lives" or multiple loves. She is conscious of her desire for pure sensual freedom, pleasure arising initially out of guilt for loving the father, her "double," (her self) in every man she unconsciously sought to punish like Stanley (Streetcar) who has no qualms about raping Blanche, blaming his sister-in-law as the seducer and then coupling shortly thereafter with his wife Stella, returned from the hospital with their first baby, to disbelief of Blanche's tale.)
In Spy, Sabina "wanted to prove to him" (her father, Hugo, John Erskine, etc.) that this guilt was a "distortion, that his vision of her and desire" and of "his hunger as bad, was a sickness." The parallel of a Sabina more powerful than Blanche in Streetcar spirals to her certain self-knowledge surpassing Stanley's primitive and cowardly deception which punishes Blanche as the helpless woman-victim (or Blanche herself doubting sanity, allowing herself to be escorted to an asylum!).
Anais through Sabina "wanted to erase" the creation of Portrait of Madonna (Williams' play of 1947) about the frustrated southern spinster which Falk has described as "a study of repression and a sense of guilt (which) may have inspired (earlier) final scene in Streetcar" to make him (Stanley?) aware "of a mutual guilt which only an act of love could transmute into something else than a one-night encounter with a stranger."
Anais already told us at the end of the Henry & June diary in Oct, 1932 that she no longer loved "with a child's blind faith, ... my eyes were opened to reality - to Henry's selfishness, June's love of power" and her own realization that "I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly." This means Anais admits she can never abandon her husband, Hugo, as her father abandoned her and Rosa, his wife, Anais' mother. "I will not do to others what was done to me, ever." But she will not be contained either.
No doubt, the theme of all Anais' fiction as well her diaries which depict the same evolution of one woman (who may be Everywoman under varied names), remains what she determined was her philosophy of life, connected to Lawrence's "flow," yet surpassing such mobility with true self-awareness. "Understanding means love." In Incest, she added, "He (Henry Miller) did not understand me, but he nourished me." In Spy, Donald (one of Sabina's young lovers) shares his letter to an actress with her, unlike Blanche who could not share her letters from Alan with anyone because of the guilt she felt that somehow she was responsible for his suicide after he confessed to her his homosexuality.

"... you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING ... That is why we love the actress. They give us the intimate being who is only revealed in the act of love."

Sabina knew that disparate lovers had to be taken for what they were, not as alchemical passions "to weld these fragments together ... (which) had failed! ..." for "the mood of lostness persisted." Anais invented Sabina's lie detector because "Guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone ... She needed a confessor." And this animus within Anais, Sabina's lie detector, assures her that she has only "been trying to, beginning to love. Trust alone is not love ... (because) Some shock shattered you and made you distrustful of a single love."
The ending of Spy is reminiscent of the beginning of House of Incest, except with a homeopathic panacea offered therein, "a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music" (symbolic of Anais' musician father), chameleon ... as ineffective as her pre-earth birth," those "water-veiled" memories wherein the eyes of the House narrator "looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self ... Born full of memories of the heels of the Atlantide ... standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with memories, and (but) walking with a swimming stride."

THE MIRACLE OF
METAMORPHOSIS:
Voice of Djuna in
the Winter of Artifice

The Voice of DJUNA

Djuna, Lilith, and The Voice in 1939 Paris edition of Winter of Artifice were revised to include Stella, Winter of Artifice and The Voice in Swallow Press 1961 edition. In between was the 1942 release by Gemor Press of Lilith and The Voice before Ladders to Fire (1945) with "Hejda" of Under a Glass Bell stories, Stella, Lillian & Djuna.
Although Anais has said that she found the name Djuna in an anthology of Welsh names and that "it's actually a man's name" as response to the "angry letter" she received from Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood (1937) for using her name as a character, Anais may have reversed that order (neither here nor there) since originally "Djuna" was Anais' "Henry & June" novel, her "Hans & Johanna" (before that "Hans & Alraune" manuscript) which evolved simultaneously with the more disguised "poetic version of The House of Incest ..." wherein the narrator admits, "The only thing I do not tell Hans is that I too am a Johanna ... I want to live out the evil in me." However, Anais had written in April, 1933 Journal titled Henry & June that she deemed her deception necessary for varied reasons. "But, lying, too, is living, lying of the kind I do." A month before this, she had equated herself with Miller. "I am like Henry. I can love Hugo and Henry and June."
In "Hans & Johanna," Anais identities herself as "the witch of words ... forgetting myself, my human needs, in the unfolding of the tale ... - a watcher who never let life flow into herself because this life belonged to another." This was Anais' winter of artifice (Rimbaud's Season in Hell)* where she was engaged in loving myriad people. The narrator (Anais) described both June as well herself: "Everything which composed the external Joanna was a concealment of her, not an expression ... for lies have that power that they create solitude ...You are the face of my unmasked self."
(Intriguing that the name Johanna if lexigrammed includes Hans=Henry; June and Anna each literally a jo or sweetheart of the other while Djuna includes June and You (Henry?) as well Una=One, first person as well as all combined.) The face/phase of June was not only the "daring, fiery, manifesting in acts. My free self! The incarnation of my imaginations" for the narrator but "the desired, unrealized half of my self," that type woman Anais longed to be: "Johanna, the born whore, who would triumph as a whore" although "the soul will not be traded!"
"Chaotica,"* a working title for what became "The Voice" was the name "Anais Nin had christened her work space where she saw her analytical patients," says a March 1935 editorial footnote in Fire where Anais writes, "My next book will be called White Lies," while she was living at the Barbizon in New York. "The Voice" is the story of a therapist who becomes troubled by the complicated problems of her patients as did Anais, a lay analyst who assisted her own therapist Dr. Rank in America, while empathizing with the difficult profession of The Voice, "an alchemist who could always transmute the pain" until Djuna realizes she cannot become like him (or Proust), lost in "the labyrinth of remembrance." Djuna's choice is to live for "the eternal moments" instead.
The patients in this novelette are extensions of Djuna who has had not
"a lot of affairs with women" (but bonding/identification/understanding of June): Lillian, the violinist who clings out of loneliness (recall the dancer without hands in House); Mischa, the cellist whose assumed limp is a decoy for his crippled hand (Anais' persona with a hypochrondriacal as well as theatrical penchant for costumes); Lilith Pellan, ill and pale, who "loves only a mirage in The Voice" (Anais before her own epiphany regarding Rank).
Lilith "found the absolute only ... in multiplicity ... lived in the myth." When she asks The Voice if she is "like the first Lilith," Anais is cryptically referring to herself as Stella, originally "Lilith" as well as the Biblical woman who is said to have existed before Eve as a more powerful first wife, unsatisfied with her mortal role because she was "seeking a belief, a God, a father who is God, a God who is father. "* Anais echoes her own (and/or) The Voice's (Rank) wisdom, when the Voice tells her "a woman can find her way alone ... In the world of feeling ... not in the world of interpretation" which is a circular spiral that leads always back to the original obsession.
By the end of Voice, Djuna is still June/Lilith/Stella, "the layers and all the things that she was not yet " in spite of and because of the spiral labyrinth wherein a troubled woman has sought to evolve, rise to heights above but not yet truly away from the foundation of House of Incest, much like Poe's House of Usher which will devour Roderick (or Djuna) in the cursed swamp that yields ghosts every time a foundation is built over it just as coiled tower is attached always to its dangerous base (Tarot allusion). "On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness ... where the sails of reverie could swell while no wind was felt." In the middle, "There was no time ... a stage surrendered to fragments ... At the tip of the spiral I felt passive, felt bound ..."
Thus, at the conclusion of The Voice, the same boat from "Waste of Timelessness" returns as an immovable symbol; for there is nothing to guide Anais or all her characters, women who are reflections and fragments of herself, away from the memory within her past, which may be as simple as abandonment by a father or as complex as a double trauma, one from childhood and the successive reunions with her father, especially in 1933. Nonetheless, Djuna/Anais will recreate and translate that event into art as she had been doing all her life.

The Winter of Artifice

In Early Diary III Oct. 1926, Anais expressed her disappointment in Hugo, because he seemed to escape into "coarsely beckoning nakedness" when he examined prurient photographs of women that were in direct opposition to her "belief in love as the 'poetry of sex' - sex without love I hate." She had preceded this perturbance with the idea that "In the end his love of the body will estrange us."
A month later Anais personified Paris as "the city ... full of sounds that tell stories ... faces that scream tragedies ...whispers that reveal secrets." Of a ragpicker, she asks, "Where does he come from, where does he sleep at night when his bag is full of rags?" which may have been the seed of "Rag Time" wherein broken objects (fragmented personality) "could be transformed ... the beginning of transmutations" for both narrator and author. "Nothing is lost but it changes" is seminal, remaining in Anais' unconscious when she rereads Marcel Proust with a more discerning eye two years later after initially not being drawn to his work.
"Proust may be right; there is no unity ... broken necklaces, dead leaves, scattered mosaics, a kaleidoscope." However, Anais insists she "see(s) things ... the opposite of Proust."
In Early Diary IV, she writes on June 30 about a child in a yellow dress whom she chases playfully before the child runs away, then back before the mother calls. "I felt a second of struggle, as if the child were demanding a kind of surrender. And though my body was sore with passion, with hunger, with pain, I smiled ... & will never escape from myself, neither by love, by maternity, by art ... and can never escape the vision that haunts ..."
With that realization, Anais confronts herself and her double, the father, while she was having a relationship with Miller in Clichy who wrote her on Oct 17, 1933, "Do you want to express yourself as a child? Is that sufficient?" In her response to him from her home outside Paris in Louveciennes, she replied on Nov 1 in a letter that she had decided to transform "Alraune ... the dream-like book" into "the human book .... more reality ... I will refer from now on to 'Alraune One' (House of Incest) as the fantasy, and 'Alraune Two' (Winter of Artifice) as the human book." Instead of escaping into the traumas of her broken past, Anais consciously decided she would transcend experience to make something new of what she could never deny or escape.
Anais intended to conquer her obsession regarding her father in an imaginative confrontation which she believed might rid her forever of this ubiquitous living ghost father and her fixation with John Erskine while at the same time creatively yielding to her sensual Donna Juana urges for both June and Henry Miller. Miller wrote her a week after she had been with Joaquin J. Nin Y Castellanos (her father) that: "You do need each other. You never had a proper relationship." A month later, Miller's letter reveals a different opinion with perhaps greater understanding. "Jesus, he's courting you with a vengeance," Miller wrote, aware now that Anais "wanted to spare him (Miller) something."
Yet, only "the journal shares (her) duplicities," and Dr. Rank, to a certain extent, for Anais was now seeing him because she knew from Dr. Allendy that "to lie, of course, is to engender insanity" and because she was "beginning to love (the Voice) ... there is in him a certain element of homosexuality" (which may refer to Hugo/Eduardo) since she could no longer love her former and first analyst, since he represented "the father" to her. "I have lost a father."
Although Anais wrote in Journal of Love: Incest May 18, 1934 that she was upset Dr. Rank did not appreciate Miller's ongoing work on D. H. Lawrence; and "This is all the more tragic to me because it comes at the same time as the discovery that I carry in my womb the seed of Henry's child," a year later in Fire, the third volume of the "Journal of Love" series following Henry and June and Incest,* Anais revealed she could not tell Rebecca West "about my love affair with my Father, and that I killed my child ... (abortion) I do not show the chaos, ever, outwardly." Rebecca West "in her analysis ... uncovered a memory - her father raped her ... Rebecca said it was real but now she did not know."
One might speculate why Anais could not reveal her own past to West, but perhaps there was a hint of guilt she was still concealing beneath a public mask of serenity. No matter. On Oct. 16, 1933, Anais said, "I write my Neptunian book (House) at the same time as the human 'story,' and I also add fuel to the journal." This line and the last one that follows three days later might have been written to instill doubt in any reader regarding Anais' connection with her father at any time. "I have had a great yearning for absolution. It is nonsense." Nonetheless, on May 18, 1934 she also had written, "Henry doesn't want it. I can't give Hugh a child of Henry's." August 29, 1934 she continued, "You are a child without a father ... You are born of man, but you have no father. This man who married me, it was he who fathered me."
Now, Anais already had revealed that after Allendy introduced Antonin Artaud to her (the one who took drugs to induce or escape his fantasies and/or reality), she felt an "extraordinary twinship" with him, as well to "use" him as "using everything, of turning all things into nourishment ... imaginative writing!" She admit(s) ... "abnormality" with her "neurosis" related to the fact that "I elude my own detection. I do not tell all my lies." adding: "I am aware in my unconscious there is a fund of cruelty and fear which makes me want to punish and abandon man." This desire linked her emotionally, if not physically, to June: "Her duplicities and my enigmatic/symbolic, hieroglyphic words. Her inventions and my mad fantasies, through which nobody can trace the fact."
But, when Anais wrote on May 10, 1933, after her sexual dream about the father she is again meeting, following "another interim of a decade," readers are appropriately engaged in the author's technique. "I jerk backward suddenly and push the crystal bowl against the wall. The bowl breaks and the water splashes all over the floor. The meaning of this I don't know. " Her Early Diaries had indicated that Anais read Edith Wharton; in Diary III, Anais referred to The Glimpses of the Moon as a novel "exactly as I would like to write ... in the manner of a clever woman" to become "more mature in (her) writing," as Hugo urged would only happen, he said, when she "stopped being surprised by evil."
Anais then may have incorporated the symbolism of Wharton's own crystal bowl, using it as foreshadowing in her human book, "Winter of Artifice," first titled "The Double" which she had to retitle, remembering Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name. In Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911), Mattie, the housekeeper, accidentally breaks the wedding dish belonging to Ethan's wife, her distant relative gone to the doctor. This universal broken symbol foreshadows not only the climax of the Wharton novella but the first physical union of Ethan and Mattie after they attempt to glue back the pieces of the broken bowl. Anais also may have used the shattered bowl that flows water onto the floor as she confronts her father, as a womb-like symbol, sexually maternal and daughterly dutiful, but also the opportunity for rebirth of a new relationship with her father.
Before the entry in Journal of Love: Incest that may or may not be a combination of fabrication and "fuel" for diary and fiction, Anais admitted, "the evil I do not act out, I write out." which leads readers to wonder about the purpose of the "strange violence" possibly placed in the diary for superimposition on the novel. Still, Anais also may have been sincere when she wrote, "Now I will live as in the journal, and write as I live."
For, if Anais is living as she writes and writing as she lives, which is the truth and what the fantasy? August 30, 1933, her father says, after meeting Henry Miller who has just left, "'What more can you want than a gentlemanly husband and an ardent lover?'" Three months later, Anais writes in her journal: "sitting near him (Father) while he was reading, I felt the melting liberation of my sensuous feelings. It was my first going out to him since our sensual bond, because until then I had yielded. My love was yieldingness, submission, with a mixture of fear and joy." (almost a re-enactment of the childhood seduction?)
Grist also for the human book with confrontation to punish and abandon her father in the same way he abandoned her? Violation to reproduce childhood trauma and therefore be rid forever of this neurotic obsession that had plagued Anais since her youth, along with the other side of that emotion, jealousy? However, in August 1932 Anais had written in the Henry & June diary (half-fiction , half-fact): "I am not the slave of a childhood curse. The myth that I have sought to relive the tragedy of my childhood is now annihilated ... I am going to run away from Henry as actively as I can."
We know that she did not flee so easily or quickly, either from Miller or her father. On December 21, 1932, Miller, Hugo and Anais together read Rank's Art and Artist when Anais wrote, "I am an artist, but I am not living as an artist." She was still longing for the freedom of Miller, of Hugo, of man. Five days later, she was "experience(ing) the need of making it (diary) more artistic, or a notebook for my creation." Development of the crystal bowl symbol may have even begun in January 1, 1933 diary entry when Anais referred to her mental preoccupation, talking to herself, about how she would use her home as a setting for her fiction: "Louvenciennes ... some laboratory of the soul."
She talks to herself internally about the process of making art out of the mundane while "nailing down a torn carpet," seeing the loss of "the goldfish ... in the cement pond outside ... replaced by glass monsters swimming in an electric bowl - psychologic fish that have no problems ... Fish who swim motionlessly - as a substitute for living ..."
What began as a need for passion and experience with Henry Miller turned into "Mothering" which Anais knew she was weary of from her childhood and adolescence in New York. "Winter of Artifice," originally titled "Lilith" was begun in 1933 and completed in 1934, according to Spencer in Collage of Dreams. Nonetheless, in Early Diary II, Anais wrote at age 18, "If I were a man, I would certainly make love to someone, like Don Juan." The character's name "Lilith" may then also refer to John Erskine's mistress and a character in his novel. "Pauline knew about Lilith. She knew John was returning to New York to see her." Anais met Lilith and said, "We clasped hands like two real, honest friends, elated by a moment of understanding," the dark woman, counterpart to Eve, "her docile replacement."
In Walker's Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, "Admission into the underworld was often mythologized as a sexual union. The lily or lilu (Lotus) was the Great Mother's flower-yoni, whose title formed Lilith's name." Lilith," originally narrated in the first person was revised deliberately by Anais to the third person point of view in the 1939 publication of "Winter of Artifice" with a specific intended change because of the association that "She" and "He" have to each other sexually, woman and man, not daughter and father.
"I am waiting for him ... He is coming today." versus "She is waiting for him ... He is coming today." "She" is more definitely the dark, devouring disobedient Lilith of the original version, transmuted beyond the "I" of the daughter who realizes she is or can be like Don Juan not "the mouse, the tin, cold mouse of Richmond Hill ... (who) is dead."
Anais has masked the relationship of daughter to father, often referred to by critics as "a mystical rather than a physical relationship," because there is art in artifice. "This was the winter of artifice," a line from Winter of Artifice novelette. Anais has said in the Henry & June diary that, "The Journal is a product of my disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it" after acknowledging that Hugo had kept her "from misery, suicide, and madness." Thus, we know Anais chose to stay with Hugo at this time (and, in fact, was legally married to him all her life) not only because she "heard Hugo tell Allendy he'd kill himself if he lost her," but because Hugo was "the father-figure/brother" she could depend upon always to understand and to accept her no matter where her manic-depressive moods and artist's will took her.
Winter of Artifice is "dreaming spiral of desire" where the ghost of her potential father who tormented her (Anais) is buried like a hunger for something which she was not certain had been invented or created solely by herself ... Where was the man she really loved? ... She was coming out of the ether of the past ... The little girl in her was dead too. The woman was saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father."
Reading all of Anais' published diaries to date is like never reaching the end of a non-stop continuous novel as she intended all her fiction to be although Cities of the Interior Vol. 1 was not published until 1959. In December 7, 1932, Journal of Love: Incest entry, Anais wrote that she had "believed my own lies, as my father believed his own lies" even though she added, "I hate lies, double lives ... this keeping up of many lives and loves, this living on three or four levels."
Nonetheless, what Anais said of D. H. Lawrence, she, no doubt, hoped might be said of her: "his convictions were the emanations of a life deeply lived through all its failures and contradictions."

...from "I've Got To Write a Book!"
by Ira Wiggins

Panama

Our life in Panama had several aspects:
1. The medical practice.
2. Social life in & around the Canal Zone.
3. Snorkeling.
4. Frequent trips into the countryside to mingle with the country folk and the primitive, indigenous indians.
We lived in the spacious quarters formerly occupied by naval officers when Coco Solo was a U. S. naval base. I was assigned to work in the outpatient clinic of Coco Solo Hospital. Our patients there were:
a. Employees of the Panama Canal Co. and their families. This included both U.S. and Panamanian citizens. Many of the latter spoke little or no English.
b. U.S. Army personel referred to us from the army clinics on the military posts.
c. Passengers and crew of ships transiting the canal.
d. Emergency cases regardless of status.
With some notable exceptions I found the types of cases to be treated were essentially exactly what I had been treating in my practice in Jonesville, Mich. I still saw lots of colds, flu, psychoneurosis, hypertension, minor and major injuries, family problems, foreign bodies under the skin and in various body orifices, etc. Malaria occurred but was rare. I never saw a case of yellow fever. There was, however, a vast increase in the number and variety of venereal diseases and intestinal parasites to be seen. Some of my experiences in the practice of medicine in Panama are worth the telling.
*****
In the second week of my work in the Canal Zone a Panamanian farmer (he worked for P.C.C.) entered my office stating he thought he had a worm under the skin of his arm. Where I came from that smelled a mental problem. I examined the area and found only a very ordinary looking tiny pimple with a slight swelling beneath it. I gave him some ointment and a reassuring pat on the back.
The next day a grinning lab worker presented me with a small specimen bottle in the fluid of which lay what appeared to be a small maggot.
"The emergency room doctor took this from the arm of a patient of yours last night, doctor. He thought I should show it to you."
I had been totally ignorant of the existence of the worm known as a "gusano" in the tropics. It results when a certain type of fly lays an egg on a person's skin. Poor hygiene is usually a contributing factor. Fortunately the patient had realized that I was an uninformed "gringo" and had the good sense to return to the emergency room that evening when a Panamanian doctor was on duty. Subsequent to that I had occasion to see several similar cases and, of course, used the appropriate treatment. I always made it a point to show such cases to recently arrived American doctors so they might be spared the chagrin which I had experienced.
*****
I am almost too embarrassed to relate the case of the elderly lady with vaginal discharge on whom I did a vaginal smear test. The result was "gram-positive diplococci present" and I informed her she needed to be treated for gonorrhea. It had been so long since I had seen a case of gonorrhea in my practice in Jonesville, Mich. that I had forgotten the positive diagnosis is made from intracellular gram-negative diplococci. I had been used to a negative report reading "no gram-negative diplococci present." She went to another doctor in the clinic who wisely informed her that the test showed nothing needing treatment and reassured her that she did not have gonorrhea.
The chief of the out-patient department had a little discussion with me about that case. My apologies were profuse and sincere. I am sure he reviewed my case records for a time thereafter and I can't say that I blame him. It wasn't long before I became all too familiar with positive reports for venereal diseases. Syphilis had become a great rarity in my practice in Jonesville. Here even the secondary state was not uncommon. I learned to differentiate between lymphogranuloma venereum and granuloma inguinale, chancre and chancroid. Condylomata accuminata (venereal warts) were common.
*****
I learned to recognize with reasonable certainty, the occasional case of dermal leishmaniasis - "tropical sore". It is transmitted by the bite of a certain type of tiny sand fly and causes a chronic skin ulcer which doesn't heal for many months. The permanent scar is often quite large and, despite years of research, consistently effective treatment had not yet been devised.
*****
It was about 10:00 p.m. and I was on duty in the emergency room. The buxom black Panamanian lady settled her ample proportions in the chair beside my desk.
"Yes, ma'am. And what may I do for you?"
Her accent was 100% Jamaican. Many Canal Zone workers were of Jamaican ancestry.
"Doktah, my pye she too tweet, tweet, tweet."
"I beg your pardon."
"Doktah, my pee she too tweet, tweet, tweet," she emphasized.
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
This time she stared fixedly into my eyes and slowly and firmly, as to a small child, she repeated, "Doktah, - my - pee - she - too - tweet."
It sounded to me as though she were telling me that her pee was too sweet.
"Do you mean that your pee is too sweet?
With a sigh of great relief, "Yaaaaaaaaasssssssss, doktah."
The nurse was listening with an amused smile on her face.
Well, I had to ask it: "How do you know that your pee is too sweet?"
"Wy, doktah, I tasted it."
She had not been to the clinic recently but had no record of diabetes on her chart. A bit non-plussed, I managed to say, "Well, we certainly should test a specimen of your urine. Take this bottle to the service (I had learned to use the local term for 'toilet') and bring some back for me."
Sure enough, it tested four-plus for sugar. Later blood testing confirmed that she was, indeed, a diabetic. I could hardly believe that in 1967 diabetes had been diagnosed by the "taste test" as used to be done a few hundred years ago when the doctor was expected, as a part of the examination, to taste the urine of the patient. The alternative was to pour the urine on the ground near an ant-hill and see if the ants were attracted to it.
On a subsequent visit I could not resist trying to find out how she had come to taste her urine.
"Mrs. ________, you were very fortunate to have found your urine to be too sweet. How did you happen to taste it?"
"Wellll, doktah, y'see I has a weak bladdah. Wen I coughs oh sneezes I lose mah pee lessen I puts mah fingah down theah and presses. Also I cooks at de cafeteriah in______ an I taste de food ah lot. Well, wan day I puts mah fingah down to stop de pee, den I forgets an I tasted it."
Of course the story was too good to keep. Medical ethics not withstanding there was a lot of good-natured jocularity about "Dr. Wiggins' sweet-pea patient". One of the last to hear the full story was my wife and then only after the patient no longer worked at the cafeteria for we had occasionally eaten there.
*****
Before I had learned that the local term for toilet was "service" derived from the Spanish word "servicio" - a Panamanian mother brought her teen-age son in with the complaint that "when he was in the service he saw some blood."
I thought it not unusual that someone in the military service might see some blood.
Groping for further explanation, I asked, "And how long ago was that?"
"Just yesterday, doctor."
After ascertaining that the blood had been in the stool and finding that he hadn't been "in the service" yet today, the meaning of the term gradually dawned on me and, after the appropriate examination, I proceeded to treat his anal fissure. It was several months before I became really comfortable using the term "service" instead of "toilet" with Panamanian patients.
*****
Sexual morals and mores were somewhat different in Panama than those to which I was accustomed. It was not acceptable for a man to appear in public bare-chested. If company arrived the typical Panamanian man, if shirtless, would immediately hurry off to put on a shirt. Once in Choco indian territory as we approached I saw the man hurry to put on his shirt (his only other clothing was a G-string) while the wife and grown daughter unabashedly continued their chores completely bare-chested, as was their custom.
As I was returning shirtless in my car from the beach one day a guardia stopped me, pointed and sternly reminded me, "La camisal La camisal" ("The shirt!"). A friend of mine was not so fortunate. He was given a ticket for the same offense, appeared before a judge and was fined $10.00. The ticket he kept as a momento. It simply said, "sin camisa." ("without shirt.")
On the other hand it is a common sight, and an apparently acceptable act, to see a man (never a woman) urinating at the roadside. I have never heard of guardia action against this.
Also, prostitution is legal in Panama but quite discreet and never advertised as such. Street-walkers are apparently not allowed and the "houses", though well-known by everyone, are unobtrusive. One unique feature there is the B.Y.O.B.(bring your own babe - a Gringo term, not theirs) motel. My information is solidly second-hand, obtained from a friend who, out of curiosity (with his wife, I hasten to add) utilized the services of such an establishment. Word of mouth is the only advertisement; the building is about 100 yards off the highway and mostly hidden by trees. Rental is by the hour. Weekends, I am told, there is often a waiting line of cars. The car drives up to the automatic door; it opens; then drive in and the door closes behind them. They then enter the clean, orderly room. In one wall of the room is a lazy-susan type of turn-table, one half of which opens into the room and the other half of which is looked after by an attendant. If drinks are desired, such are noted on the paper provided which is then placed on the turn-table, to be rotated 180 degrees for the attention of the attendant. Drinks, the bill and the payment thereof are all provided by the same means. No words are exchanged. No one sees the customer and the customer sees no one throughout the entire procedure. Amazing! I had never heard of such a thing.
I was amazed also by the amount of venereal diseases of all kinds, which, fortunately, were usually relatively easy to cure with modern antibiotics. I usually asked such patients, "Did you pay for it?" Judging from the answers I concluded that VD was much more apt to be contracted from "a friend I met on the street" than from a professional, who could ill afford to have her business diminished by such bad news.
*****
The couple came into my office with the complaint that "his sex functioning isn't as good as it used to be." From his chart I could see that he was 16 years of age. She appeared considerably older, but I assumed from the nature of the complaint that they were married. Never assume! I was wrong. After a bit of delicate (and not so delicate) questioning I found that she was the boy's mother - he was single - and had become concerned about his health because he had told her that lately he had not been able to perform as well sexually as he used to. Ah, the worries a mother has! It was one of the many occasions I had to remind myself, "Equinimitas, doctor, equinimitas!"
*****
It was not unusual for the member of a crew of a foreign ship to be unable to speak a word of English and to come to the clinic armed with a medical phrase book - German-English, Spanish-English or whatever. We would then point to the appropriate phrase(s) to inform the doctor of his symptoms. I had finished treating one such Japanese patient when a fiendish idea struck me. My sign language I asked if I might have the booklet; I was sure there were plenty more aboard ship. He readily agreed.
After office hours I took the booklet home and laboriously copied on a slip of paper the "chicken-track" characters which translated into English as "I have symptoms of gonorrhea."
One of our good friends in the Canal Zone was away. Arnold, the modest, good-humored but very proper Japanese wife of our square-dance caller, Sid, who had been in military service in Japan. Partly because of her modesty, some of us liked to tease her and to watch her blush, but we truly admired her. Her command of the English language was excellent and she had assured us that she could read Japanese characters "perfectly well." I decided to put her to the test and have some fun at the same time.
Our "after-party" following the next square-dance was at the home of Sid and Kay. I had revealed my plan to no one. In the later part of the evening, as we were sitting and talking, I said to Kay, "By the way, I had an interesting experience today. A Japanese physician was in my office with a patient from a Japanese ship. He spoke excellent English and we chatted for a bit after I had finished treating the patient. He was very friendly - even gave me a note so that if I am ever in Japan I can show it to any Japanese doctor and he said I would be immediately accepted as a fellow doctor and shown every courtesy. Wasn't that nice of him?"
"Oh, yes. How very thoughtful. He must have liked you."
"He appeared to. Here is the note he wrote. Perhaps you can read it for me." Whereupon I solemnly handed it to her.
As I watched her face I had no doubt about her ability to read Japanese.
At three seconds her jaw dropped. Her face froze in horror.
At five seconds an intense flush spread rapidly across her face. Her mouth opened. She did not breathe. Finally she gasped, "That's awful!"
"Kay, what's the matter? What does it say?"
"That's awful! That's awful! What a terrible man to do such a thing!"
"Do what? What does it say?" I was merciless.
"Oh, I can't tell you. It's terrible! And he doesn't write Japanese very well either. How could he do such a thing?"
At that I broke down laughing and confessed the crude practical joke to her. She was confused and duly flustered but accepted my apologies. When I complained to her, "Kay, you said I didn't write Japanese very well."
"Oh, but for an American you wrote it very well."
At a square dance later, in retaliation, she pinned a paper to the back of my shirt: "Watch me. I can dance the part of a girl better than anyone."
*****
Seamen on U.S. registered ships had a clause in the contract whereby, if removed from the ship by a doctor's orders the shipping line had to pay their transportation back to the U.S. and continue to pay them their regular base wage until the ship returned to its port in the U.S. This applied even if the man's illness lasted only a week but the ship did not return for three months. Meanwhile the man could be collecting wages from another job if re so desired. At times this could produce a tendency to gross exaggeration of symptoms or even outright malingering. The shipping companies understandably frowned on our ordering a man removed from his ship. But if a man had abdominal pain and there was any chance of early appendicitis it was hardly sensible to send him to sea on a ship without a doctor.
Sometimes, due to conditions aboard ship, a man would go to great lengths to be medically ordered from the ship. On one occasion a seaman came to ms with a swollen wrist.
"A beam fell on it, doc. I guess it's broken."
"Could be. We'll get an x-ray."
The x-ray was okay. The most I could give him credit for was a bruised wrist.
He was stunned. "Are you sure, doc? I thought sure it was broken."
I showed him the x-ray.
After a few moments of silence he took a deep breath and confessed: "Look I gotta get off that ship. I hate it!"
"I'm sorry, but I can't give you a medical certificate for that."
We talked a bit and he told me how he had wrapped a sweater around his wrist before striking it with an iron bar in an attempt to break it. The most I could offer him was my sympathy.
"Well, can you tell me how I can break my wrist?"
"I'm sorry, buddy, they didn't teach us that in medical school."
"Well, stick around. I'll be back, you can be sure of that, doc."
I heard no more from him. He may have returned on a different shift.

portions of c ra mcguirt's
blur collar ballet

121

Gypsy Joe And The Job Boy

Joe told the marks to kiss his ass
and kicked the crap out of that kid.

"I told him to take some," he told me.
"Boy wouldn't do nothin'! I had to
use him to put on a show...

Come on, queer! You're next!
Get ready to go!"

Week Four: The Best Gimmick

When the IWA's first TV showed aired, I missed my Nolensville debut - I was at my friend Ross Massey's house, and his satellite system apparently pulled in everything on the planet except for local Channel 2. But I did manage to catch the second show, which aired my Nashville Armory bout with Willie. Despite wincing at some of my clumsier moves (which seemed all too glaringly obvious), I was still fascinated seeing myself up there on the tube, a living cartoon character in pink tights and a spiked dogcollar, looking literally larger than real life. It felt almost schizophrenic - I knew this Luscious Leslie guy was me, but he seemed to have a personality and presence of his own.
After the bout, they aired an interview where I castigated Willie for cheating, and promised to get my revenge on him. The Clown snuck up behind me, snagged

122

an ankle with the curved handle of his umbrella, snatched me off my feet, and gave me a fairly good, if brief, beating. It was almost better than the match had been...
Dr. Squash had definite ideas about the direction our show should take, but he liked some of my creative ideas, and within a short period of time, I found myself unofficially co-producing the IWA TV program with him. I didn't mind not getting my (real) name in the credits, because the show was corny and juvenile beyond belief. After all this time, I still can't believe that Channel 2, despite then being a distant third in the local ratings, was desperate enough to take our money.
The Doc and I were really the only people in the organization who had any sort of acting ability - the Good Guys were especially terrible - so we ended up taking the show over. We accomplished this by having the masked Interns, I.V. & Scalpel, (AKA Bubba & Mike) beat the crap out of the regular announcer, Roger Allen, and toss him off the set - albeit temporarily, because Roger was actually pretty good on the mic. His lady friend, Janie Bacigalupo, was another story. However, she was putting up a lot of bread to promote the IWA, so, despite her lack of acting skills, we were forced to use her on the TV show. Janie was a nice lady - too nice to be very interesting, I thought. So I solved that problem by having The Luscious One "brainwash" and "hypnotize" her into becoming "evil".
The "wickedness" of the dark-haired, middle-aged Ms. Bacigalupo mostly took the form of her sitting between myself and the Doc at the announcer's desk, wearing my biker's cap and shades, grinning in what I'm sure she imagined to be a fiendish manner, as the Doc proclaimed:
"She used to be "Miss Janie', the June Cleaver of professional wrestling, but


123

now she's "Mistress Jane', and she's one of us! Right, Luscious?"
I'd cackle madly and agree. The words and basic plot were mine, and I knew they weren't high art, but what the hell - we'd come into Allen's quaint little mini-
studio to put together next Saturday night's TV show, and no one would have any ideas. Finally, the Doc would turn to me and say: "Well, what about it, Lush?"
Time constraints didn't allow me to come up with anything more than basic garbage - it was a lot like improvisational theatre. Had the creative approach of the IWA, its "angles" and "storylines" been up to me, I could have done better, but I was working within the parameters Squash had laid down. At this time in rasslin' history, the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, wrestling was aimed at a much younger audience than it had been 10 years before, or would be 10 years later. The WWF was the leader of the pack. It had a Saturday morning cartoon show featur-
ing a wholesome, red-white-and-blue-blooded Hulk Hogan who urged kids to take their vitamins, say their prayers, and beat up Iranian terrorists. WWF's live show was nearly as cartoonish, its roster jammed with muscle-bound, steroid-gorged semi-wrestlers who came to the ring accompanied by dogs, birds, snakes, circus midgets, and etcetera. Ironically, for a form of entertainment predicated on the simulation of savage combat, in the early-90s WWF there was a very definite backlash away from blood and "violent violence" - like "Trix", it was for kids.
Dr. Squash had decided to hop on the "wrestling as a cartoon" bandwagon. To a large degree, I thought he was off-base. It's one thing to have a cartoon production
when you have the money, talent, and technology to make it look slick. But if you're a poor outfit like the IWA was, your best bet is to make up for the relative

124

squalor by offering intense, gory matches and truly hateful feuds. Instead, the Doc was coming up with ideas that went beyond cartoonish and into what I considered to be embarrassing absurdity...
"See, Lush, when we're on the tour, each night, after the matches are over, we'll have the Elvis imitator come out and sing "Peace In The Valley", while all the wrestlers gather together in harmony..."
As Gypsy Joe would say, "Please, brother!"
That wasn't all Joe had to say after viewing the first couple of IWA TV shows.
"What a bunch of friggin' garbage!" raved "Daddy' one day after practice. "The damn Doc wants to be funny, with all these queers and clowns, but this ain't New York, brother! The people here ain't gonna buy it!"
(Speaking of "queers", the WWF had then just gotten rid of my fellow rasslin' androgyne, Adrian Adonis, after working a less-than-successful storyline which had him "come out of the closet" and start wrestling in a pink dress. Adrian had been a conventionally macho sort at the begnning of his career, when he'd teamed with Minnesota-Governor-to-be Jesse "The Body" Ventura to win the world tag team titles. In his later years, he put on an incredible amount of weight, and the simple truth was that 1) Personality-wise, Adrian was not at all convincing as a "flaming fag", and 2) He looked absolutely terrible in drag - so bad, in fact, that he couldn't even play it for laughs - the marks seemed to be struck dumb with a mixture of sympathy, horror, and disgust. Poor old Adrian was canned by the WWF, and went on to perish of that common wrestler's occupational hazard, Terminal Car Wreck, but he was not the last big-fed "fag wrestler" of the 90s, as we shall see...)

125

Listening to Gypsy, I could only shrug. I found myself in the middle of the road as regards what was then the New School vs. Old School battle. In theory, I agreed with Gypsy, but, bad as it was, I enjoyed being involved with producing the TV show. I thought maybe if I became important enough to its workings, I could help swing it over to something more resembling our local Memphis-based CWA, later the USWA, which, before its sad demise in the late 90s, became kind of a "farm league" for the WWF.
USWA, which I'd grown up watching on TV, attending the occasional live card at the Nashville Fairgrounds "Sportatorium", was a no-frills, meat-and-potatoes, Old School fed, running shows throughout the mid-South. "The Memphis Circuit" was a proving ground for many workers who went on to major stardom in one of the "Big Two" feds, including "Macho Man" Randy Savage, Sid Vicious, Sting, The Ultimate Warrior, Rick and Scott Steiner, and yes, even Hulk Hogan.
I once asked Gypsy if he'd ever wrestled Hogan. "Oh, yeah, brother, sure. He was the pits. He made you look good, queer!" I chose to take that as a very minor compliment, however backhanded. In any case, I was more a fan of the USWA than the WWF, then and now. I also believe that Philadelphia's infamous and (for its size) now enormously influential ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling) was, in turn, influenced by the "Memphis Style" of no-nonsense, high-impact, occasion- ally bloody grappling.
Speaking of blood, what goes around comes around. In the old old days, there was a saying: "Red turns to green," i.e., if the fans expect lots of blood, they'll show up in droves. During the "Cartoon Period" of the WWF, blood, like big fat

126

pseudo-queers, excessive T&A, and decent wrestling, was absolutely forbidden. Just as the Coyote never bleeds after falling off a cliff chasing the elusive Road Runner, late-80s/early-90s WWF workers, like the living cartoons they were, pounded and pummeled each other to absolutely no visible effect. The same was mostly true over in the WCW. But red once again began to turn to green as the ECW got cranked up.
Extreme Championship Wrestling began as a "microfed" with very little national recognition, holding the majority of its cards at "ECW Arena", a former bingo hall under an interstate overpass in an industrial area of South Philadelphia. Its workers, whether classical brawlers, high-flyers, or mat technicians, were hungry, highly skilled, and not afraid to take risks. Though much more excessively violent, bloody, and sexually-oriented than USWA had ever been, there was and is still an element of the old-style Memphis Circuit work ethic in the ECW - when the soap opera is over, it's time to get in the ring and give the marks a pure wrestling show they'll never forget.
As ECW grew through the 90s, getting plenty of coverage in the wrestling mags, a TV show, and national pay-per-view exposure, it was at first mocked and disdain-
ed by the Big Two, especially McMahon's WWF, which was beginning to lose ground in the ratings to Ted Turner's WCW. But the worm slowly turned as ECW began to increase in popularity. It became the first "cult fed", with fans more likely to chant the name of the federation itself, instead of cheering for individual wrest- lers in particular. Also, as the case has always been in Japan, the crowd was prone to applaud exceptional moves and maneuvers by any wrestler, rather than cheer the "good guy" and boo the "heel". ECW has had a great deal to do with ridding the biz

127

of the old "hero vs. villain" dualism - its stars are primarily antiheroes and misfits who find each other at odds over personal and professional issues.
ECW, "the home of hardcore wrestling", finally became such an undeniable presence on the scene that the Big Two began to raid its talent and imitate its attitudes. There is much talk today of "the hardcore style" in both WWF and WCW, but, as WWF has become more and more adult-oriented, profane, and flamboyant, and WCW has apparently lost its lead in the Monday Night TV Rasslin' Wars by adopting a more conservative approach, both feds now freely plagiarize the ECW by smashing their wrestlers through tables by the dozen, offering copious amounts of "falls count anywhere" and "weapons" matches, and repealing the prohibition of hemoglobin. Yes, blood is back in mainstream wrestling. Perhaps not the gallons of it one expects from an ECW production, but definitely pints and quarts. Therefore, the fine art of "juicing" is still a required subject for any aspiring wrestler...
Soon after the IWA's TV show started up, two new disciples appeared at Joe's School. For a change, neither of them was a "Mike"; they were Mark and Tim, two young police officers from Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, who came into train-
ing knowing that they would be forced to wrestle under masks to avoid getting in trouble with the Department, which apparently took a dim view of cops moonlight- ing as rasslers. They planned to work as "The Medics" when they got good enough to appear in the IWA. Though I felt this was redundant, given our team of masked "Interns", and further considered the "Medics/Interns" gimmick to be more shop-
worn and cliched than classical, I liked the two young cops a lot, and they liked me, despite my less-than-macho persona. They caught on quickly, though the tall, burly


128

Tim had nearly knocked my ass through the ropes with some overenthusiastic fore- arms to the chest, before he got the idea that we weren't there to kill each other.
After some basic practice one day with me, Tim, Mark, and Jerry (who was still hanging in, with no improvement to his stiff and competitive approach), Tim said,
"Hey, Joe - what about bleeding?"
"What about it?"
"Well...how do we do it? I've always heard wrestlers use "blood capsules'..."
"'Blood capsules'?" Gypsy's voice was cold and contemptuous. "I never heard of no "blood capsules'."
"You know, like they use in the movies...you bite on "em and fake blood comes out..."
"This ain't the goddam movies, brother. If the boss wants blood, you gotta use your own."
All of our eyes widened a little as Joe explained "juicing":
"See, what you do is get a little piece of razor blade, tape it up real good except for one little point, and hide it in your trunks. Then, when you get hit and go down, while the ref is friggin' around with the other guy, you sneak it out and run it over your forehead. You don't have to make it real deep or long - if you're sweatin' and strainin', the blood'll pour out like a friggin' fountain, and the marks'll think you got busted wide open. You hide the blade again, and that's all there is to juicin'. "
Gypsy ran his fingers over his forehead. "I didn't get this from no blood capsules, I can tell you that, brother..."
If you only do it once in a while, "juicing" won't leave many marks. But if you

129

do it frequently for thirty years, like Gypsy or Abdullah, your forehead will come to look a lot like theirs - a mass of raised, criss-crossing scar tissue, like a roadmap of every town you've wrestled in. I was not particuarly anxious to start juicing. (The only time I ever bled in the ring, it was unintentional - remind me to tell you this amusing story before we're through...)
Blood. Betrayal. Unexpected alliances. Foreign objects. Stirring music. Weird hair. Outrageous costumes. Heated harangues on the microphone. Animal mascots. Amusing sidekicks. Silicone-enhanced babes in leather miniskirts. Gratuitous profanity. Fireworks. Celebrity referees. Queers, clowns, smoke, and mirrors. They're all valid, if formulaic - and at times absurd - gimmicks when it comes to enhancing the Blue Collar Ballet. Styles and approaches may change; "hardcore" might be hot today and old news tomorrow, but Gimmickry is eternal. Promoters and wrestlers are always reaching for a new gimmick that'll put asses in seats or "put them over" with the fans. But it still comes down to the Dance itself, and what Gypsy said to us on the day we held our "Juicing Seminar"...
Half-seriously, though I was happy with my own gimmick, and planned to keep it for a while, I asked:
"Joe, what do you think the best gimmick for a wrestler would be?"
Gypsy looked at me with an expression of mixed annoyance and amusement.
"Do you really wanna know?"
"Well...I was curious about what you might think..."
"Daddy' laughed. "Hell, brother. That's easy. The best damn gimmick is to be a good wrestler."

130

Week Five: Luscious Leslie's Revenge

The IWA put on another show, this one in Manchester, Tennessee, in the parking lot of a small shopping mall. It didn't feel right to me - wrestling outside, in bright daylight, robbed the proceedings of a certain mystique. Though our TV program had aired the night before, the card was poorly attended. I stumbled through a short match with Willie, bored with our old routine, but not yet confident enough to wing it entirely. Initially, Dr. Squash proclaimed that the show hadn't made enough money to pay anyone anything, but he seemed to have second thoughts when it came to his uncredited co-producer, Luscious. The Doc slipped me twenty bucks on the side, and made sure I got a free meal at Jiffyburger, our sponsor in Manchester. It was a small investment to keep his "idea man" happy...
Shortly after the Manchester gig, Squash decided that the IWA was going to do a show in Joplin, Missouri, and he even rented a luxury bus for the trip. Why Joplin? Well, he did have relatives there. Why the bus? For the upcoming Western Tour, and for the same reason why we all called each other by our wrestling names - it was cool.
All of us boys were supposed to meet the bus in the parking lot of a Nashville mall for the trip to Missouri. Cool Breeze, Robert Scorpio, Barri Cuda, Gentleman Jim, Willie, and I were right on time. We stood there for over an hour, waiting, before finally calling the Doc.
"Look, guys," he said. "The trip is cancelled. We're having a meeting at my place."

131

As you can tell, the Doc still believed in telepathy for communicating with his workers. We all went to his apartment in south Nashville, and he laid it on us:
"Guys, we just don't have enough advance ticket sales in Joplin - " (Not surprisingly, since no one there knew anything about us.) "No use wasting a 13-
hour trip. But we have another gig at the Armory, the tour is coming up, and the TV show is still running...guys, I'm telling you - it's all up to you. You have to improve your work. After all, you guys are the Superstars of the IWA."
I enjoyed my promotion to Superstar, but was considerably irritated. I thought the Doc could stand to improve his own work, especially in the areas of interperson-
al communications and sound business dealings...
We did another TV taping, and I began to intensify my feud with Joe Rossi. In that week's episode, I called his father, Len, "a broken-down old has-been who should be shot to put him out of his misery." Joe took exception, raided the set, slammed my head into the desk a few times (I got my palm between desk & head just in time to absorb most of the impact), then proceeded to slap me silly.
How did we fake it? We didn't. If you want a genuine-looking slap, you can't fake it. You gotta take it. So I took several series of vicious open-handed blows to the face. By the time Roger Allen got just the shot he wanted, my cheeks were burning, and I was beginning to think that Big Joe Rossi genuinely enjoyed slapp- ing the crap out of guys in pink tights. But I also felt exhiliarated, with an odd sense of pride at my cheerful endurance of what would ordinarily be painful and humiliat- ing. I could take it! Anything for art! Friends who saw the finished product on TV said it looked like authentic violence; Joe and I shook hands and congratulated each

132

other on a job well done.
Through heavy hype on TV and radio, and giving away hundreds of tickets, we jammed the Nashville Armory with a respectable crowd for our next live show. This time around, I brought some "personal valets" with me, which seemed appropriate for a well-off sissy like Luscious. Except I didn't call them "valets" - they were my "International Beauty Consultants" - Neo-Nike ("The New Goddess of Victory') and Weeni Weinstein, AKA Pamela Hirst (a hairdresser and poetry promoter) and Lena Verges (a singer/songwriter).
Pam and Lena, dressed in flamboyant clothing and spooky shades, accompanied me to the ring for my fourth match with Willie. For novices, they did a damn good job. Since they were with Luscious, whose sexuality was questionable, the fans immediately assumed they were lesbians. This bothered them at first, but the girls quickly caught on to the game, and spent the rest of their time in public holding hands and snuggling.
I was beginning to make an impact on public sensibilities. Back in the dressing room, Dr. Squash read me some letters from the Nashville Gay and Lesbian Coalit-
ion, which had shown up at the IWA offices after the Luscious One's first TV app-
earance. The folks at NG&LC were displeased. They considered Leslie Love a poor role model, a stereotype, and an affront to decent gay people everywhere.
I could see their point, of course, but not completely. Every Bad Guy is a poor role model, and every gimmick is a stereotype. To complain about bad role models and stereotyped images in pro wrestling is right up there with protesting the use of face paint in Kabuki theatre, or smoke pots and strobe lights at Heavy Metal rock

133

concerts. I know it doesn't seem very politically correct, this strange experiment I performed for a year or so; I'm sure that Luscious didn't advance the alleged "Gay Agenda" by even an inch. Yet, had I never pulled on pink tights and studded leath-
er to menace the status quo, most "good" and "normal" people would have gone right on hating and/or fearing those folks who are "different".
It's also true that I was planning to eventually attempt the stunning reversal of turning Lush into a "Good Guy", by pitting him against someone the fans would hate even more than him. I'd discussed it with the Doc, and we both thought it was an angle with potential, to be saved for later. Maybe, I'd proposed, we could even have Luscious fall in love with one of his female valets, and stun the marks silly...
Partially, I felt like writing a letter of apology (or at least explanation) to the NG &LC, but I never did. After all, I was a Heel, and Heels provoke anger, not recon-
ciliation. Besides, who said that Lush was actually a homosexual? Maybe he just liked to wear pink. To be honest, all that really ever bothered me about having a gay gimmick (apart from the death threats, which were actually kind of exciting) was the fact that I didn't attract any female groupies.Ah, well - art demands sacrifice...
Speaking of sacrifice, I did the only bleeding of my career that night at the Arm-
ory, and it didn't happen during my bout with Willie. As part of our ongoing feud, I was supposed to come charging out and attack Joe Rossi with my dreaded "fairy dust" following his match with Jack The Ripper. As I stood there watching Big Joe finish off his opponent, getting psyched up to do the "run-in", I suddenly realized that my freshly-purchased container of baby powder was still in the dressing room.
When I tried the door, it was locked - Gypsy Joe's wrestling girlfriend, Robbie

134

Rage, was inside getting suited up for her match. I pounded on the door, begging Robbie to hand me out my powder. I finally got it, but the container was sealed with some sort of heavy plastic which even a pit bull would have had trouble chewing through. As the ref raised Joe Rossi's hand in victory, I tore at the plastic in a futile panic, ripping the hell out of my fingernails. The container eventually popped open. I poured a handful of baby powder into my palm, and charged the ring, where Joe was waiting patiently for my attack. He ducked the "fairy dust" I hurled at his face, then bounced me off the ropes for a Clothesline across the chest. I sold the hell out of it, flopping back and jackknifing like a rag doll as I crashed to the mat. Big Joe picked me up by the hair and followed up with a right cross, which I sold a little too well; as I spun around and fell, I forgot to pull my head back, and my face literally bounced off the canvas. I still wince when I see it on tape.
At the time, I was too full of adrenaline to notice that I'd really banged the hell out of my cheek, and was lucky not to have broken my nose. But as I rolled out of the ring and fled to the dressing room, I began to feel some stinging in my finger- tips. Looking down, I noticed they were bleeding profusely. Backstage, I borrowed some white adhesive tape from one of the masked Interns and wrapped them up. Not the most macho way to spill blood - tearing at a baby-powder lid - but it seemed appropriate for Luscious Leslie.
I was really up for my fourth match with Willie. Being pinned three times in a row by a clown was getting old, and tonight, I would have my revenge. Of course, it was all worked out in advance with Willie and the Doc, even though the clown and I hadn't practiced together this time - the plot was too simple to require it.

135

I strutted into the arena accompanied by my "Lesbian" Beauty Consultants, Neo-Nike and Weeni, with my theme music (Bowie's "Rebel Rebel") blaring, exulting in the homophobic catcalls of the wall-to-wall crowd. After interfering against Rossi and taking a couple of good bumps, I was warmed up and loose, ready to rock and roll. Backstage, I'd given Willie a new squirtgun, a large purple Uzi-shaped one, saying "Take this, brother; may it serve you well." As I climbed into the ring, the clown came charging out and attacked me with the squirt-Uzi, driving me back out onto the floor to the thunderous cheers of the marks.
I sputtered and fumed for a moment, then grabbed the microphone and began howling: "This is the third pair of two hundred dollar designer tights that you've ruined, clown! I wanna know why the IWA allows this flagrant use of illegal foreign objects! Then again, I don't need their help to take care of you! Tonight's the night, Willie! You're gonna pay, brother!"
All this as Weeni and Nike fanned me and massaged my poor tense shoulders - it's nice to have a staff. Finally, the referee threatened to disqualify me if I didn't get on with the match, so, with a show of great reluctance, I climbed back into the ring, handing my ever-present large pink handbag to Weeni. We had our overblown introductions, the bell sounded, and the clown and I locked up.
Willie pushed me back into the ropes, where I made a great show of giving him a clean break. We circled, lunged, and locked up again. Once more, the clown forced me back into the ropes. The ref called for the break; this time, I did the pre-
dictable Bad Guy thing and gave the clown a vicious slap across the face. As I congratulated myself with a pat on my own back, Willie threw a left hook that sent

136

me spinning to the mat. In a classic "Evil Valet" maneuver, Neo-Nike immediately leapt up on the ring apron and distracted the referee with bullshit complaints and a bit of cleavage, while Weeni leaned through the ropes and slipped me my big pink handbag. As Good Guy rasslers have been unwisely doing in the midst of battle for over half a century, Willie turned to see what was going on with Weeni and the ref. I snuck up behind him, handbag raised high over my head, and bashed him right on top of his multicolored wig. The clown dropped like a poleaxed steer. Throwing the handbag back to Weeni on the outside, I fell on Willie with a single-leg Grapevine pin, yelling: "Come on, ref! Are you blind?"
Right on cue, the referee turned around just in time to see the pin, and slapped the mat as I counted off on my fingers - "One! Two! Three!" The bell sounded, and I bounded up ecstatically, my first victory under my belt. It was really funny - I knew I was merely a meat puppet in a low-rent passion play, but it still felt different to be "the winner".
As the marks booed and shrieked and offered their interpretation of events to the official - "His bag was loaded, ref! Check the bag! He cheated!! He cheated!!!" -
I spat on Willie, and danced around giving him ribkicks and falling elbow smashes. IWA "President" Joe Silver, a distinguished-looking music-biz friend of the good Dr. Squash, who had agreed to play the role of our federation CEO, came to the ring in his power suit, and began to consult with the referee.
Taking the mic, Silver said: "Mr. Referee, I don't usually interfere in official decisions, but in this case, things have gone too far! Leslie Love used a foreign object to win this match, and it would be a gross miscarriage of justice to allow this

137

to go down in the record book as a fair victory!"
Continuing to stomp and spit on Willie, I had to grin. "A gross miscarriage of justice" is one of the Classic Rasslin' Cliches, right up there with "His face is literally a crimson mask!" and "He went to the well one too many times on that move!" I was also amused by Joe's reference to "the record book" - like the "Rule Book", this ostensible tome is primarily mythical.
Silver continued: "Other federations may let their wrestlers get away with these kinds of shenanigans, but not the IWA! I'm ordering an official search of Mr. Love's handbag!"
The mob bellowed approval. Weeni protested, but gave up the bag. When the ref upended it, out fell spare pairs of kneepads and pink tights, sunglasses, lipstick tubes, mascara brushes, gym towels, and, making a booming thud on the mat -
"A brick! Luscious had a brick in his handbag!" Announcer Roger Allen ex- claimed indignantly.
Indeed I had. Nor was it a fake foam or plastic object. My dad, Gator, had given me this particular brick, a keepsake from an old Nashville bar and songwriter hang- out called "Country Corner", with the date of its demolition on an attached brass plaque. I'd wrapped it carefully in several layers of towels, and placed it near the top of the bag, being careful to strike Willie only with the bottom. (In some practice runs on myself, using fewer towels, I'd nearly knocked myself silly.)
I'd decided that having the brick in the handbag from the beginning would add to the realism of the scene, and apparently, it had - the crowd was yowling with seemingly authentic rage. "All right, Luscious," said "President" Silver. "This is an

138

outrage! I'm ordering that you be banned from wrestling in the IWA until you've paid a five thousand dollar fine!"
The marks screeched and hollered in approval. I snatched the mic from Silver and shouted: "Well then, if I have to pay, I might as well get my money's worth! Yoo hoo, Dr. Squash! I have some work for you and your boys!"
Willie had just been struggling to his feet, looking wounded and shaky, when the Doc and his heels stormed the ring. Cool Breeze and The Interns put a good stomp-
ing on the helpless clown, with me getting in an occasional cheap shot, until the Good Guys, including Ricky Morton, charged out and ran us all back to the dress-
ing room. The babyfaces supported a sagging Willie backstage while the arena resounded with thunderous boos over this "gross miscarriage of justice."
Squash was immensely pleased with the bit, and it ended up getting more exposure than any of us would have believed possible. A few months later, my ex-wife Patty told me that a friend of hers had been watching the TV news while vacationing in London, England, and a videotape of this incident was shown as an example of "the uncontrolled violence in American sports"! Who taped it, and how it ended up on the BBC, are questions that were never answered, but I was happy to hear that Luscious, one of the most obscure wrestlers on the planet, had somehow become an international outrage.

philosophy monthly

A Brief Defense of Free Will
By Tibor Machan

Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 04:05:42 -0500 (CDT)
From: Tibor R Machan machatr@mail.auburn.edu
To: AYN-RAND ayn-rand@iubvm.ucs.indiana.edu
Subject: Free Will Essay

The Importance of having Free Will
This is not a common topic of discussion outside the discipline of philosophy and some other fields.
Nevertheless, political economy is related to this philosophical problem in more ways than one. For example, if,
say, a certain system of law is just, it is implied that we ought to implement it - even if only gradually, over time.
If we claim that aggression is wrong, we implicitly hold that people ought to refrain from it. Indeed, even to say
that some argument concerning any topic from logic to astronomy is unsound, we are claiming, implicitly, that
one ought not to propose or accept it.
But as the philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out, "ought implies can." That means, in part, that only if it is
possible to choose to do something can it be the case that it ought to be done. So the very meaningfulness of the
advocacy of political ideals implies that free will exists. (The other meaning of "ought implies can" is that some
objective standard of human conduct must be identifiable, otherwise one could never do what one ought to do.)
Thus, clearly, it is of some value to explore briefly whether human beings have free will. In connection with the
particular principles of classical liberalism, the issue of why respecting individual rights is vital and possible
relates to the problem of free will. Individual rights need to be respected because we must have an area of
personal responsibility within which to make our choices about our lives or wherein to initiate our own actions.
The need for this kind of respect assumes, again, that human beings have free will, that they can make basic
choices about their lives, initiate basic conduct, that can turn out to be right or wrong. Furthermore, requiring of
people that they respect individual rights also assumes that they possess free will. Otherwise it would make no
sense to require such respect from them: something they have no choice about cannot be something they
morally ought to and can fail to do.
But there is also the more familiar matter of the issue of personal responsibility concerning everyday conduct,
those matters discussed daily in the home, in the press, and on the various media. Not only is there the issue of
who is responsible for various good and bad things, but there is also the question of whether most of us are, as
so many people seem to believe, in the grips of various forces over which we have no control. This or that
addiction - to drugs, sex, violence, power, athletics, or work - is supposed to be our master, with ourselves
merely puppets on strings moved about by them.
Yet, only if we have free will does any talk of blaming our parents, politicians, the rich, bureaucrats and the rest
make sense. But there are many people who believe that modern science, including, of course, all the social
sciences, leave no room for such a thing in human life. Where does it stand, then, with the free will issue? It
seems to me worth discussing this topic outside the confines of philosophy graduate seminars and encourage
some thinking about it on everyone's part. After all, it is a central feature of the political philosophy of liberty
that individual citizens in society must not be thwarted in making choices for themselves, in initiating their own
thinking and conduct. What does this come to unless they possess free will, the capacity to produce their own
behavior?
I want to argue that there is indeed free will. And I'm going to defend the position that free will means that
human beings can cause some of what they do, on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable
solely by references to factors that have influenced them, though, of course, their range of options is clearly
circumscribed by the world in which they live, by their particular circumstances, capacities, options, talents, etc.
My thesis, in other words, is that human beings are able to cause their actions and they are therefore responsible
for some of what they do. In a basic sense we are all are original actors capable of making novel moves in the
world. We are, in other words, initiators of some of our behavior.
The first matter to be noted is that this view is in now way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural
phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their kind of minds,
namely, minds that can think and be aware of their own thinking.
Nature is complicated and multifaceted. It includes many different sorts of things and one of these is human
beings. Such beings exhibit one unique yet natural attribute that other things apparently do not exhibit and that
is free will.
I am going to offer eight reasons why a belief in free will makes very good sense. Four of these explain why
there can be free will - i.e., why nature does not preclude it. But these do not yet demonstrate that free will exists.
That will be the job of the four reasons I will advance next, which will establish that free will actually exists, it's
not just a possibility but an actuality.
Nature's Laws versus Free Will
First, one of the major objections against free will is that nature is governed by a set of laws, mainly the laws of
physics. Everything is controlled by these laws and we human beings are basically more complicated versions of
material substances and that therefore whatever governs any other material substance in the universe must also
govern human life. Basically, we are subject to the kind of causation everything else is. Since nothing else exhibits
free will but conforms to causal laws, so must we be. Social science is merely looking into the particulars of those
causes, but we all know that we are subject to them in any case. The only difference is that we are complicated
things, not that we are not governed by the same principles or laws of nature.
Now, in response I want to point out that nature exhibits innumerable different domains, distinct not only in
their complexity but also in the kinds of beings they include. So it is not possible to rule out ahead of time that
there might be something in nature that exhibits agent causation. This is the phenomenon whereby a thing
causes some of its own behavior. So there might be in nature a form of existence that exhibits free will. Whether
there is or is not is something to be discovered, not ruled out by a narrow metaphysics that restricts everything
to being just a variation on just one kind of thing. Thus, taking account of what nature is composed of does not
at all rule out free will. Yet, simply because of the possibility that there is free will, there may still not be. We
consider that a bit later.
Can we Know of Free Will?
Now, another reason why some think that free will is not possible is that the dominant mode of studying,
inspecting or examining nature is what we call "empiricism. " In other words, many believe that the only way we
know about nature is we observe it with our various sensory organs. But since the sensory organs do not give
us direct evidence of such a thing as free will, there really isn't any such thing. Since no observable evidence for
free will exists, therefore free will does not exist.
But the doctrine that empiricism captures all forms of knowing is wrong - many things that we know not simply
through observation but through a combination of observation, inferences, and theory construction. (Consider,
even the purported knowledge that empiricism is our form of knowledge is not "known" empirically!)
For one, many features of the universe, including criminal guilt, are detected without eyewitnesses but by way
of theories which serve the purpose of best explaining what we do have before us to observe. This is true, also,
even in the natural sciences. Many of the phenomena or facts in biology, astrophysics, subatomic physics,
botany, chemistry - not to mention psychology - consist of not what we see or detect by observation but that is
inferred by way of a theory. And the theory that explains things best - most completely and most consistently -
is the best answer to the question as to what is going on.
Free will may well turn out to be in this category. In other words, free will may not be something that we can
see directly, but what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the many
mistakes that human beings make in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that
human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanical causation, the type
associated with physics. We can examine a person's background and find that some people with bad childhoods
turn out to be decent, whole others crooks. And free will comes as a very helpful explanation. For now all we
need to consider that this may well be so, and if empiricism does not allow for it, so much the worse for empi
ricism. One could know something because it explains something else better than any alternative. And that is not
strict empirical knowledge.
Is Free Will Weird?
Another matter that very often counts against free will is that the rest beings in nature do not exhibit it. Dogs,
cats, lizards, fish, frogs, etc., have no free will and therefore it appears arbitrary to impute it to human beings.
Why should we be free to do things when in the rest of nature lacks any such capacity? It would be an
impossible aberration.
The answer here is similar to what I gave earlier. To wit, there is enough variety in nature - some things swim,
some fly, some just lie there, some breathe, some grow, while others do not; so there is plenty of evidence of
plurality of types and kinds of things in nature. Discovering that something has free will could be yet another
addition to all the varieties of nature.
Let us now consider whether free will actually does exist. I'm going to offer four arguments in support of an
affirmative answer.
Are We Determined to be Determinists - or not?
There is an argument against determinism to the effect that, if we are fully determined in what we think, believe,
and do, then of course the belief that determinism is true is also a result of this determinism. But the same holds
for the belief that there determinism is false. There is nothing you can do about whatever you believe - you had
to believe it. There is no way to take an independent stance and consider the arguments unprejudiced because all
various forces making us assimilate the evidence in the world just the way we do. One either turns out to be a
determinist or not and in neither case can we appraise the issue objectively because we are predetermined to
have a view on the matter one way or the other.
But then, paradoxically, we'll never be able to resolve this debate, since there is no way of obtaining an objective
assessment. Indeed, the very idea of scientific or judicial objectivity, as well as of ever reaching philosophical
truth, has to do with being free. Thus, if we're engaged in this enterprise of learning about truth and
distinguishing it from falsehood, we are committed to the idea that human beings have some measure of mental
freedom.
Should We Become Determinists?
There's another dilemma of determinism. The determinist wants us to believe in determinism. In fact, he
believes we ought to be determinists rather than believe in this myth called "free will". But, as the saying goes in
philosophy, "ought" implies "can". That is, if one ought to believe in or do something, this implies that one has a
choice in the matter; it implies that we can make a choice as to whether determinism or the free will is a better
doctrine. That, then, it assumes that we are free. In other words, even arguing for determinism assumes that we
are not determined to believe in free will or determined but that it is a matter of our making certain choices
about arguments, evidence, and thinking itself. That's a paradox which troubles a deterministic position.
We Often Know We Are Free!
In many contexts of our lives introspective knowledge is taken very seriously. When you go to a doctor and he
asks you, "Are you in pain?" and you say, "Yes," and he says "Where is the pain?" and you say, "It's in my knee,"
the doctor doesn't say, "Why, you can't know, this is not public evidence, I will now get verifiable, direct
evidence where you hurt." In fact your evidence is very good evidence. Witnesses at trials give evidence as they
report about what they have seen, which is introspective evidence: "This indeed is what I have seen or heard."
Even in the various sciences people report on what they've read on surveys or seen on gauges or instruments.
Thus they are giving us introspective evidence.
Introspection is one source of evidence that we take as reasonably reliable. So what should we make of the fact
that a lot of people do say things like, "Damn it, I didn't make the right choice," or "I neglected to do something."
They report to us that they have made various choices, decisions, etc., that they intended this or that but not
another thing. And they often blame themselves for not having done something, thus they report that they are
taking responsibility for what they have or haven't done.
In short, there is a lot of evidence from people all around us of the existence of free choice.
Modern Science Discovers Free Will!
Finally, there is also the evidence of the fact that we do seem to have the capacity for self-monitoring. The
human brain has a kind of structure that allows us to, so to speak, to govern ourselves. We can inspect our lives,
we can detect where we're going, and we can, therefore, change course. And the human brain itself makes it
possible. The brain, because of its structure, can monitor itself and as a result we can decide whether to continue
in a certain pattern or to change that pattern and go in a different direction. That is the sort of free will that is
demonstrable. At least some scientists, for example Roger W. Sperry - in his book Science and Moral Priority
(Columbia University Press, 19983) and in numerous more technical articles - maintain that there's evidence for
free will in this sense. This view depends on a number of points I have already mentioned. It assumes that there
can be different causes in nature, so that the functioning of the brain would not be a kind of self-causation. The
brain as a system would have to be able to cause some things about the organism's behavior and that depends,
of course, on the possibility of there being various kinds of causes.
Precisely the sort of thing Sperry thinks possible is evident in our lives. We make plans and revise them. We
explore alternatives and decide to follow one of these. We change a course of conduct we have embarked upon,
or continue with it. In other words, there is a locus of individual self responsibility that is evident in the way in
which we look upon ourselves, and the way in which we in fact behave.
Some People are, some are not Determined.
There clearly are cases of conduct in which some persons behave as they do because they were determined to do
so by certain identifiable forces outside of their own control. A brain tumor, a severe childhood trauma or some
other intrusive force sometimes incapacitates people. This is evident in those occasional cases when a person
who engaged in criminal behavior is shown to have had no control over what he or she did. Someone who
actually had no capacity to control his or her behavior, could not control his or her own thinking or judgment
and was, thus, moved by something other than his own will, cannot be said to possess a bona fide free will.
Those who deny that we have free will simply cannot make sense of our distinction between cases in which one
controls one's behavior and those in which one is being moved by forces over which he or she has no control.
When we face the latter sort of case, we still admit that the behavior could be good or bad but we deny that it is
morally and legally significant - it is more along lines of acts of nature or God by being out of the agent's control.
This is also why philosophers who discuss ethics but deny free will have trouble distinguishing between morality
and value theory - e.g., utilitarians, Marxists.
The Best Theory is True.
Finally, there what I have alluded to earlier, namely, that when we put all of this together we get a more sensible
understanding of the complexities of human life than otherwise - we get a better understanding, for example, of
why social engineering and government regulation and regimentation do not work, why there are so many
individual and cultural differences, why people can be wrong, why they can disagree with each other, etc. It is
because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern the way cats and dogs and orangutans
and birds tend to be.
In principle, all of the behavior of these creatures around us can be predicted because they are not creative in a
sense that they originate new ideas and behavior, although we do not always know enough about the
constitution of these beings and how it would interact with their environment to actually predict what they will
do. Human beings produce new ideas and these can introduce new kinds of behavior in familiar situations. This,
in part, is what is meant by the fact that different people often interpret their experiences differently. Yet, we can
make some predictions about what people will do because they often do make up their minds in a given fashion
and stick to their decision over time. This is what we mean when we note that people make commitments,
possess integrity, etc. So we can estimate what they are going to do. But even then we do not make certain
predictions but only statistically significant ones. Clearly, very often people change their minds and surprise or
annoy us. And, if we go to different cultures, they'll surprise us even more. This complexity, diversity, and
individuation about human beings is best explained if human beings are free than if they are determined.
Is Free Will Well Founded?
So these several reasons provide a kind of argumentative collage in support of the free will position. Can anyone
do better with this issue? I don't know. I think it's best to ask only for what is the best of the various competing
theories. Are human beings doing what they do solely as the consequences of forces acting on them? Or do they
have the capacity to take charge of their lives, often neglect to do so properly or effectively, make stupid
choices? Which supposition explains the human world and its complexities around us?
I think the latter makes much better sense. It explains, much better than do deterministic theories, how it is
possible that human life involves such wide range of possibilities, accomplishments as well as defeats, joys as
well as sorrows, creation as well as destruction. It explains, also, why in human life there is so much change - in
language, custom, style, art, and science. Unlike other living beings, for which what is possible is pretty much
fixed by instincts and reflexes - even if some extraordinary behavior may be elicited, by way of extensive in
laboratories or, at times, in the face of unusual natural developments - people initiate much of what they do, for
better and for worse. From their most distinctive capacity of forming ideas and theories, to those of artistic and
athletic inventiveness, human beings remake the world without so to speak having to do so! And this can make
good sense if we understand them to have the distinctive capacity for initiating their own conduct rather than
relying on mere stimulation and reaction. It also poses for them certain very difficult tasks, not the least of them
is that they cannot expect that any kind of formula or system is going to predictably manage the future of
human affairs, such as some of social science seems to hope it will. Social engineering is, thus, not a genuine
prospect for solving human problems - only education and individual initiative can do that.

Free Will
By Paul Hsieh
Date: 25 Sep 1994 21:16:01 -0700
From: Paul Hsieh hsiehp@crl.com
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
Subject: Free Will Essay (warning: long!)
dhankins@vnet.net (Dan Hankins) writes:
>For instance, I have logical problems with the Objectivist arguments about
>free will. In particular, I find flawed the argument that physical
>determinism and conscious free will necessarily contradict each other.
>This is something I'll be addressing in posts in the future. In the
>meantime, the works of Daniel Dennett (specifically, _Elbow Room: The
>Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting_) will provide the same arguments in
>a more detailed form.
Dan has chosen to open an interesting can of worms.
Although there hasn't been a recent shortage of active topics on a.p.o., I'd like to go ahead and start yet another
potentially controversial thread.
The following is a (slightly modified) copy of a letter that I've sent to some friends a few months ago. In this
letter, I argue that even in a completely deterministic universe, it is possible for entities to develop/evolve which
display most (?all) of the traits which we associate with free will.
The immediate implications for Objectivism are still unclear to me. I look forward to hearing what others have to
say.
Let the opinions fly!
(For the record, I am *not* trying to claim or prove that we live in a universe such as I discuss below. My essay is
instead intended to spur some further discussion on the subject of free will vs. determinism.)
====================
Copyright (C) Paul Hsieh, September 1994
Again, permission is granted to distribute this via Usenet, MDOP, Vixie's Objectivism list, or private e-mail. I do *
not* grant permission for this to be distributed via the OSG mailing list. Thank you.
============================================================
START QUOTED LETTER
============================================================
Dear [Insert Name]
This is the essay on free will and determinism that I promised to inflict upon you. Most of what I'll propose has
been liberally plagiarized,^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean adapted from Dennett, Dawkins, Conway, Poundstone,
and others whose names I can't remember. I've listed the references at the end. If you don't understand
anything, it's probably due to a flaw in one of my arguments, not Dennett's or those other writers'.
With all these caveats, here goes! (Warning: This is pretty long.)
========================================
Overview
Question: Can one meaningfully speak of "free will" in a deterministic universe?
Answer: I think so. Let me try to demonstrate this by showing how an organism can evolve in a deterministic
universe, yet exhibit all the characteristics we mean when we talk about free will.
Introduction: The Game of Life
I'd like to propose a thought experiment using a simple deterministic universe. Let's consider John Horton
Conway's game of Life. I assume that you're already familiar with his game, but just in case you aren't, let me
summarize it briefly for you.
Conway's Life is one of the simpler cellular automata played on a (preferably) infinite square lattice of cells. Each
cell can be in either one of two possible states: "on" or "off". All cells start in one of those two states at time=0. The
universe then evolves according to certain simple, well-defined transition rules.
For each cell C, consider the 8 adjacent neighbors (including the cells connected via a single diagonal to C).
If at time n, a cell C is "on",
¥then { C is "on" }
¥If either 2 or 3 of C's neighbors are "on",
. . . . then cell C stays "on" at time (n+1)
. . . . else cell C becomes "off" at time (n+1)
¥else { C is "off" }
¥If exactly 3 of C's neighbors are "on"
. . . . then cell C turns "on" at time (n+1)
. . . . else cell C stays "off" at time (n+1)
Time is a discrete, quantized variable that only takes integer values. At time=0, each cell is in its initial state. The
transition algorithm is then applied to all cells in the lattice. The values for each cell for the next time period
(time=1) are calculated. Then, each cell is set "on" or "off" simultaneously to its new value as specified by the
transition rules. This generates the new state of the lattice for time=1. This process is repeated to give a new state
at time=2, then time=3, etc.
It is easy to see that the state of the lattice at any time=n is completely determined by its initial state at time=0. It
may not be a trivial task to calculate the state at an arbitrary time=n for any given any initial condition short of
actually executing the algorithm. (I think this means that it is a Wolfram Class 4 cellular automata, but it's been a
while...) However, the evolution of the lattice is deterministic - there is no randomness in the transition rules.
Some Properties of Life
Computer people have noticed that Conway's choice of transition rules leads to interesting results. All sorts of
small stable and semi-stable structures are seen in many different Life games using various initial conditions.
There are static clusters of cells that don't change with time, and some of the configurations have names like the
"block" and the "beehive". There are structures that oscillate in a fixed sequence between several different
patterns and some have been given fanciful names like "blinkers", "tumblers", "traffic lights", "ferris wheels", etc.
There are some structures that move - for instance, the structure known as the "glider" goes through various
contortions, and after 4 turns, it reappears, but displaced diagonally by one cell from its original position. Other
larger structures, named "spaceships" behave similarly
Other structures will proliferate wildly. Others will die out either slowly or quickly. Some will shoot off all sorts
of moving debris. Others have the capability of being able to absorb gliders and other moving debris without
suffering any permanent change in their configuration - these are called "glider eaters". Some structures can
grow arbitrarily large - i.e., the number of "on" cells will increase without bound. Others can even reproduce
themselves - i.e., they evolve in such a way that after a certain number of turns, there are two copies of the
original structure. These copies, can then of course make additional copies, etc. (The future generations may not
necessarily all survive, but some will.)
It is often difficult to predict the final behavior of any given structure. Sometimes changing the state of one of its
initial cells can lead to a dramatic difference in final behavior.
(It's even been shown that, given appropriately clever structures, one can implement the equivalent of memory,
registers, logic gates, and bit streams in Life - all the components necessary to make a Turing machine!
However, that fact is not essential for the argument I am about to make. If you want references to this fact or to
other aspects of Life, I can dig them up for you.)
How Might "Living" Creatures Develop in a Life Game?
Now, let's consider an infinite lattice with a random distribution of cells turned "on" during the initial state. We
would probably want the density of "on" cells to be fairly low, just for the purposes of this experiment. The
reasons why will become clear later.
The lattice will therefore consist mostly of empty space ("off" cells) with a few scattered "on" cells. All of the
isolated single "on" cells will die out in one turn. A few might (by random chance) be distributed in a cluster that
will be stable and won't die off. A very few might even start off as a cluster or set of clusters that will move and/
or grow. And a miniscule fraction might start off in a cluster (or evolve into a cluster) which is one of those
reproducing structures!
So what will happen as we track the lattice through a long period of time? This is my (and others') guess:
First, there will be some reproducing structures that are far apart from each other, and separated by mostly
empty space (with a sparse scattering of static blocks, oscillators, and gliders/spaceships randomly located in the
otherwise perfect vacuum).
Not all of the reproducing structures will be equally efficient at reproducing. Some will be faster than others.
Some will be more robust than others - they might create copies that are spaced farther apart from each other,
and therefore less likely to interfere with each other during successive iterations of the reproductive process.
Some will be very sensitive if they run into the occasional stray block or glider, and will stop reproducing when
they strike debris like that. Others might be less sensitive to debris - for instance, they might include an outer
shell consisting of glider eaters or other equivalents that act to protect them from the random debris. Others
might even include components that shoot out gliders that interact and destroy any potentially harmful bits of
debris out there before they can harm the main structure.
Basically, some reproducing structures will simply be better at it than others. Hence, over the long term, we will
see many more of the better reproducers than the poor reproducers. There's no teleology involved - it's just a
description of these deterministic events unfolding.
There will be hazards that face these reproducers. Interactions with debris can be potentially catastrophic,
resulting in loss of the integrity of the reproducers. Hence, those reproducers that are able to either harmlessly
absorb the debris or pre-emptively destroy the debris will have a reproductive advantage over the others.
In other words, the presence of these hazards creates a form of natural selection pressure.
There will even be mutations (of a sort). Occasionally a stray glider or random bit of debris will slip through the
reproducer's defenses. Most of the time, this will throw a monkey wrench into its works and have a severe
deleterious effect. However, occasionally, it might result in a beneficial change - i.e., in something that permits
the organism to reproduce more effectively.
There may even be the equivalent of food. Some forms of debris might be in a configuration that is readily
absorbed into the structure of these organisms in such a way as to allow it to increase its size or replace damaged
components. (I'm not sure about this particular point, but it's not essential to the argument.)
What Sorts of "Living" Creatures Would Develop in a Life Game?
Now we get to some of the more speculative ideas. I can't prove all of the following ideas, but I hope I can at
least make them sound plausible.
As the system evolves, there will be a slow reproduction of widely-spaced reproducers, as described above.
They will proliferate in proportion to their reproductive fitness. Because we have an infinite (or arbitrarily large)
universe, pretty much every different possible variety of reproducer will exist *somewhere* in the universe.
Some will have (or may develop) fairly sophisticated capacities. One would be the ability to "sense" characteristics
of its immediate neighborhood and react accordingly. For instance, there are probably ways for an organism to
send forth (via gliders or some other mechanism) some part of itself which can interact with the neighborhood
and send back a signal which conveys relevant information - e.g., "this part of space is good; it has no
appreciable harmful debris" or "this part of space is bad; there is lots of potentially harmful debris; stay away" or
"this part of space is very good; there is static debris in a benign configuration that we can use as food". If the
organism also includes a mechanism which can take this "sensory" information and use it to appropriately drive
some crude "motor" mechnisms which can steer the organism towards a good area of space or away from a bad
area of space, then we will have the beginnings of purposeful behavior. I'm not claiming that these reproducers
have any conscious sense of purpose or intention. They are more like amoebas, which have crude stimulus-
response behavior patterns hardwired into their cells. These sophisticated reproducers would be similar, and
those which are able to more quickly and accurately "sense" their environments and respond accordingly would
have a survival advantage and would proliferate preferentially to those which were less adept.
This is the crudest level at which "perception" can be meaningfully said to occur. (In this case, we have a crude
analog to the sense of smell, which is considered by many to be the most fundamental of senses.)
One major leap occurs when these creatures are able to take the information gained, and maintain some crude
internal representation or model of its environment within its structure. The exact details aren't important - the
information acquired would presumably be stored in some pattern of on/off states of certain elements within
the organism. As long as there is some way in which this information from the sensors is stored, and later
referred to by the mechanisms which control actions, this can be thought of as a very crude form of
"knowledge". Organisms that were able to quickly acquire "knowledge" that accurately reflects the state of the
outside world and were able to act on it would have a definite edge in survival over slower and less accurate
competitors.
The next major leap is the ability to predict future events. If an organism had a crude information processing
mechanism that was able to keep track of past events and was also able to recognize patterns and correlations in
this knowledge base, it would have another strong survival advantage. For instance, if certain stimuli always
correlated with the eventual appearance of food in a certain direction, it could use that information to move in
that direction before the actual food debris was directly encountered by the sensory stimuli. Similarly, an
accurate predictive mechanism could help an organism detect and avoid dangers more quickly than it otherwise
would have, by detecting the presence of relevant warning signs.
At this stage, one can speak of these creatures as acting *as if* they had intentions. One does not actually have to
prove that there is conscious contemplation of intentions going on - it is enough to say that these creatures uses
senses to grab and filter information from the environment, and use it to act in seemingly purposeful ways to
seek good things and avoid bad things. (Good and bad of course being defined in terms of survival.) Let us call
these creatures "intentional beings", meaning they act *as if* they had intentions.
Eventually these organisms will encounter other organisms. That's when things get interesting. They might
compete for a limited amount of food. Or one might make good food for the other! Or one might pose a direct
danger to the survival of the other in other ways. In any case, it would be advantageous for an organism to be
able to sense the presence of other organisms and treat them like other natural hazards (or natural benefits).
Again, those that are more proficient at this will have a survival and reproductive advantage.
Even more sophisticated creatures will include in their knowledge model the existence of other creatures not as
mere natural phenomena but as other *intentional beings*. Such a creature will be able to take into account the
apparent intentions of others. If an organism's knowledge model includes a crude representation of other
creatures with *their* knowledge models, this will let it engage in behaviors that looks like what we call
cooperation, deception, evasion, etc. It can perform actions that are designed to elicit a desired effect in another's
knowledge model which works towards the first creature's benefit. Those creatures that are able to more
accurately assess and predict the knowledge and behavior of others will have a powerful survival edge. This is
the stage at which it becomes meaningful to speak of communication.
Yet more sophisticated creatures will include in their knowledge model a representation of themselves! If a
creature is able to "know" its own strengths, weaknesses, knowledge base and likely patterns of behavior in the
same way that it knows others', it will be able to use that knowledge to its benefit. It won't attempt tasks that are
beyond its physical or computational capabilities. It may detect weaknesses in its physical or mental assets and
attempt to strengthen them or work around them. And, if its internal representation of its own knowledge base
and computation mechanism is sufficiently detailed, it can apply that computational mechanism onto itself and
examine its chains of calculation, performing high-level error checking - a crude form of "self-awareness" and
"rationality". (Again, I'm not claiming that such a creature necessarily has the same subjective sensation that we
call self-awareness. All that I am saying is that it will act in a very similar fashion to one who does.)
And finally, we get to the point where organisms include in their own knowledge models representation of
other organisms with their own self-representations. We can obviously extend this to even higher levels of
representations-within-representations of self and others, but there probably isn't too much utility beyond this
point.
How Would These Sophisticated Organisms Behave?
Depending on the complexity of the sensory, motor, and (most importantly) the computational apparatus, these
creatures would probably behave similarly to animals in our real world.
These organisms would be able to extract information from the environment and act upon it accordingly. They
would seek out good environments and avoid dangerous ones. They could even communicate and cooperate
with other organisms, if appropriate. Presumably language would develop in those cases where there is mutual
benefit to all concerned (most likely within reproducers of the same species, but perhaps also between closely
related species). Because of the richness of their mental maps, these languages would include fairly sophisticated
concepts like "food", "danger", "good", "bad", "I", "you", "cooperate", "deception", "past", "future", "maybe", "what
if", "almost", etc.
The more sophisticated ones would be capable of memory, learning and even some reasoning using the
information contained within their representations of the external environment. Some might even have the
equivalent of elaborate internal conversations with themselves, via mechanisms that are the same or similar to
the ones they use to communicate with others. For instance, if a hungry organism with a highly advanced brain/
CPU receives some apparent "food" stimuli, the following "mental traffic" might pass between different
subportions of its CPU:
Subprocessor 1: "Hey! This stimuli means food! Let's send a signal to our motor mechanism to move in this
direction!"
Subprocessor 2: "Belay that order. After reviewing some recent events, we have found that this particular
stimulus is a trap. It is a form of deception put forth by another predatory organism that is subtly different from
the real 'food' stimulus. The last couple of times we've pursued it, we only narrowly escaped being eaten
ourselves. Steer clear of this false 'food' stimulus."
Subprocessor 3: "Correction. This stimulus does come from a predator, but not from a living predator. Other
information shows that the predator is not moving and its physical integrity is disrupted. In addition, some
scavenger organisms (approximately 10) are around the predator picking at its internal structure and absorbing
food value from the predator's body. The false 'food' stimulus the body is giving off is coming from one of its
internal organs. This is probably the source of such a stimulus in a living predator. It is therefore safe to move in
its direction. Furthermore, if we wish to partake of this rich food source also, we had better move towards the
body swiftly."
Subprocessor 4: "Revision. The scavengers are too numerous. Although we can drive off one or two, we cannot
fight all ten without risking serious harm to ourselves. Another solution is necessary."
At this point, the processor might invoke a problem-solving subroutine to analyze the available data. Additional
"mental traffic" might consist of the following:
Subprocessor 5: "Goal: To get to the food source. Problem: The presence of 10 scavengers poses an unacceptable
threat to us.
"Solution 1 - approach the food source in such a way that we only contend with 1 or two scavengers
at a time. Objection - only a small amount of food can be obtained that way before the others are
alerted to our presence.
"Solution 2 - find a way to reduce the number of scavengers. Objection - we don't understand
enough about how the scavengers perceive the world to manipulate their perceptions in a way to
drive them off.
"Solution 3 - find a way to reduce our vulnerability to attack from the scavengers so that even 10 of
them do not pose a threat to us. Protective shielding may help. Let us look for raw materials
necessary to make such shielding."
Then, the organism initiates the motor commands to enable it to look around for materials with which to make a
shield. Because of the tight time constraint (i.e., the food will be all gone soon if it doesn't find some shielding
material), the organism devotes most of its "attention" (most of the computational resources at its highest level)
to finding some shielding material, even if it means allocating less than normal to other forms of sensory input
that pertain to other aspects of the environment. Unfortunately, there is not a sufficient quantity of shielding
material available to allow the organism to carry out its plan. The organism is aware of that, and responds by
searching a wider area in a more rapid and hasty fashion. The search is still not going well. The organism is on
the verge of concluding that the search will not succeed and the problem is unsolvable - i.e., that the next best
step is to abandon the search and look for another food source.
But while searching and moving, the organism "accidentally" interacts with some static debris and makes the
equivalent of a loud noise (i.e., it runs into a locus of debris that it would have normally "noticed" and avoided,
but failed to do so in this case because of its altered focus of attention). The interaction between the organism
and the debris results in the production of some striking stimuli that catches the attention of both the organism
and the scavengers.
The scavengers cease eating the carcass for a moment then look around somewhat nervously. They don't
perceive the organism that caused the "sound" and slowly resume eating the carcass.
Our organism, *does* notice the scavengers' behavior, however. The following mental traffic ensues:
"This 'noise' appeared to startle the scavengers. Re-examining our earlier options, we may have found a way to
implement solution (2) above. Perhaps if we reproduce the noise louder and more frequently, we will drive
them away. Performing solution (2) would be preferable to solution (3) because it will take less time to
implement."
The organism then deliberately repeats what it had "accidentally" done last time, but in a slightly different way in
order to create a much louder 'noise' than the last time. (Presumably it uses its knowledge about 'physics' in this
universe to enable to do this.) This time, the scavengers are all spooked and they all run away.
Our organism proceeds to move towards the now-unguarded carcass of the predator and triumphantly enjoys a
much needed meal.
As the organism eats, various changes take place in its CPU/brain. At some low level of brain function, some
strong reinforcing stimuli are released that serve to 'lock' this new piece of information into memory - i.e, a
certain type of 'noise' will scare this species of scavenger away. Other levels of reinforcement are also done -
reinforcement is also given to the problem solving subroutine to let it know that 'thinking' in a certain way led
to productive solutions. This reinforcement is designed to help the problem solving subroutine repeat that same
mode of analysis for future cases. Other reinforcing stimuli are stored about not letting one's attention wander
too much while performing an urgent task, lest an unfortunate accident occur. (It is tempered by the realization
that this time things worked out well, but next time it might not.) All sorts of high and low-level lessons are
learned from this episode and incorporated into the memory of our organism, at different levels.
A Few Observations About This Computationally Sophisticated Organism
By nearly any standard, this organism displays fairly intelligent behavior, close to if not on par with that
performed by humans. It integrates information, it learns, it modifies its subgoals in pursuit of a main goal, and
it learns how to modify its own and other entities' behaviour. I think that it is in principle possible to achieve this
level of sophistication in both the Game of _Life_ universe as well as in AI labs in our universe. (Maybe not
today, but someday.) Furthermore, it wouldn't take much more before we have a creature in the _Life_ universe
that would be as intelligent as humans and as capable of using language as we are.
(Since we can program a computer to run the Game of _Life_, once we learn the language of intelligent creatures
that evolve within our program, we can interact with them. We could for instance introduce our own bit streams
into portions of the universe which to the organisms would seem like voices from nowhere. And since we can
control every aspect of their universe, we could be literally like gods to them, if we so chose.)
These organisms would reproduce, pursue goals, communicate and transmit information and otherwise act very
much like living creatures in our world. Some of their behaviour would be hard-wired in, based on traits that
developed during its species evolution, much as our own biology causes us to have some hard-wired behaviors.
Other forms of their behaviour would be subject to modification based on facts that are learned either by direct
experience or communicated by others.
Again, I think that the natural course of evolution would lead to the development of truly intelligent species with
their own languages and cultures, all implemented on this simple cellular automata!
Yes, But Do They Have Free Will?
That depends on what exactly you mean by free will. On the surface, the answer would seem obvious: "Of
course they don't have free will. Their behaviour is completely determined by the state of the cellular automata
at time=0, before this species even existed!" This is true. But on the other hand, the following facts are also true:
(1) Although the creature is influenced by external stimuli (and by past events), in a very real sense, it controls
itself. It would be similar to NASA engineers trying to design a space probe that could land on other planets. If
the planet were close by in our solar system, it could be reliably controlled from Earth via radio transmissions.
However, if the planet were too far away (where the light-speed delay becomes too long to be practical) then it
might be a better strategy to give it more advanced programming and allow it to make its own decisions on the
planet surface. That way, the probe would have a better chance of avoiding dangers and accomplishing its goals
than if it had to wait several hours for instructions and information to go back and forth between Pluto and
Mission Control in Texas. In this case, the NASA engineers would have relinquished control of the probe from
themselves to *the probe itself*. (Or as Dennett says, the probe ceases to become a puppet and becomes a
robot.) Yes, the probe responds deterministically to the stimuli it receives on the planet Pluto. But *it* decides
what to do - certainly no one else is doing the deciding!
The same would be true of our organisms in the Game of Life - they would be in control of themselves. No one
else decides for them (although others can attempt to persuade them, deceive them, coerce them, etc., just as we
humans can do to each other.)
(2) But, you say, its decisions are predetermined, given a particular set of stimuli. It can't *really* choose between
two alternatives. On the other hand, *I* can!
Here I disagree. In the example I gave earlier, our organism had to decide between three different strategies for
getting food. It looked at them, rejected #1 and #2, and decided upon #3. Then, when that didn't work out, it
came across some new information which led it to re-evaluate its decision and choose #2.
Sometimes the organism will be confronted with a decision in which there is only one obvious rational choice. In
that case, its decision-making algorithm will probably quickly settle on that choice while barely giving the
alternatives any consideration at all.
That's pretty similar to what you do in these circumstances. Suppose you are at a cross-walk, waiting to cross a
busy street. The red "Don't Walk" sign is on. You basically have two choices - [1] either to wait until the light
changes or [2] go ahead and take your chances and cross against the light. But as the heavy stream of cars whizz
bye at 45 mph, you decide to choose number [1]. In fact, the choice is so obvious, no one in their right mind
would choose number [2]. And in fact, you probably don't even give [2] any conscious consideration - your
subconscious prunes the decision tree for you before it gets to your conscious level. So, you don't really choose
between two alternatives here any more than our Life organism does.
Sometimes the organism is faced with a decision between two viable alternatives. In that case, the choice is not
so obvious at first glance. The organism will therefore have to spend a longer time deciding. Part of the decision
process may involve weighing a complicated set of factors, some of which favor one alternative and some of
which favor the other alternative. In that case, the organism may include as part of its decision-making process
an algorithm to attempt to extrapolate the future based on all the available relevant data to see what the future
would look like if it takes option [1] vs if it takes option [2]. Depending how sophisticated its internal modelling
process is, it may simulate within its CPU all sorts of details of the two potential outcomes. It may go back and
forth trying to extrapolate all sorts of variants of the two futures - "What's the best case if I take [1] vs. the best
case if I take [2]?" "What's the worst case if I take [1] vs the worst case if I take [2]?" "How easy is it to undo the
effects of a wrong decision?" "What other information might make the decision easier? How can I obtain that
information?" "How urgent is it that I decide now - can I delay the decision until later?"
Eventually, it reaches a decision. Somewhere in its decision making algorithm, the scales tip just ever so slightly
in one direction over the other, and that becomes its choice. (Perhaps it may even require the functional
equivalent of a random number generator if the two options are perfectly balanced, but *a* choice needs to be
made quickly.) In this case, all of the mental traffic of the organism would reflect the equivalents of mental
writhings and contortions that it went through.
How different is that from what you or I do? Whenever I've been faced with a difficult decision (which medical
school to go to, which job to take, should I break up with this girlfriend, etc.) I've always agonized over it,
sometimes for a long time. At some point however, after a lot of deliberation, something seems to percolate up
from deep within my innards, and it almost feels as if the decision were made for me! It's difficult to describe, but
I assume that you've had similar experiences.
The reason that you feel like you could choose either way is because part of your mental analysis includes
imagining yourself in both possible futures. In fact, the very process of imagining both alternatives (sometimes
in excruciating detail) is a crucial part of the decision making process!
So, yes, you *do* choose. You analyze and integrate the available information and arrive at a decision. But then,
so does our game of Life organism!
(3) Ahhh, but you say, I am *responsible* for my own decisions. The deterministic organism bears no
responsibility for what it does - things can't turn out any other way for it than the way it actually does.
Dennett discusses this at great length in his book on free will. I'll just attempt to summarize his main point, as I
understand it. (The examples below, are mine, however.)
The concept of responsibility is important for us as rational creatures. If we act as if we had responsibility and
freedom to choose, we will have more options than if we sit by with a fatalistic attitude and ignore opportunities
that come by. Furthermore, from a moral point of view, if we accept responsibility for ourselves and hold others
responsible for their actions, this helps lead to greater morality in ourselves and others.
Can a computationally sophisticated Life organism understand and accept responsibility? The answer is yes.
If it performs an action that leads to a bad outcome (either for itself or another organism that it values), it will
critique that prior action, much as in the example of the food seeker I gave above. Depending on the situation, it
might say to itself (i.e., it's mental traffic might consist of symbols which translate to the following sentences)
something like the following:
Example 1
"That was a foolish move I just did. I should have paid more attention to the warning signs. I almost walked into
a predator's trap, thinking that I was chasing food! I'm smarter than that. Next time, I'll just have to be more
careful!"
(If the brain were structured properly, this higher level mental traffic would also induce changes in lower levels
of cognitive functioning that would have the effect of causing the brain to "remember" this lesson and alert the
higher levels to this lesson the next time a similar situation is encountered.)
Example 2
"My trustworthy colleague that I've known for many time cycles is dead! And I was the direct cause! I incorrectly
overestimated my degree of control over this lethal weapon in my 'hand', and it slipped and 'killed' my partner!
This disrupts my expectations of the future (in which I pictured my partner as being with me for a long time,
engaging in mutual cooperation with me). This is very detrimental to nearly all of my short and long range
goals. I must never to allow something like this to happen again!"
Similarly, it might hold another organism responsible for its actions, as below:
Example 3
"A certain subroutine in your decision making process - the one which kicks in when you need to perform
rapid, hasty actions under severe time constraints - was invoked inappropriately. You almost caused me great
harm! I wish you to think about what could have happened and I expect you to take steps to control your
'temper' so that it does not happen again!"
If the Life organism has a sufficiently complex mental life that it has symbols for "I", "you", its own thought
processes, others' thought processes, and it has the ability to perform "what if" calculations, the ability to critique
its own and others' behavior in light of its goals, the ability to remember the results of its critiques at some level
of cognitive function, and the recognition that critiques are valuable *because* it can remember lessons learned
from critique sessions, then all of the above conversations are possible (and even desirable).
In other words, in a very real sense, the organism can understand that it is responsible for the outcomes of its
actions. It can also meaningfully hold other organisms responsible for the outcomes of their actions.
Some Concluding Remarks
If you were to encounter in real-life, a sophisticated android with all of the above cognitive and information
processing capabilities, but was completely deterministic, I don't think you could distinguish it from a person
who had "free will". Even its internal mental conversations would be nearly identical to yours or mine, as it tries
to make a decision or it attempts to bear responsibility for its actions.
There are a lot more subtleties to Dennett's book that I haven't touched on in this essay. I have to re-read it to
make sure I understand all of his arguments, since a lot of them went over my head the first time I read it. But
after my first pass, here are some of the major ideas that I took home from it:
1) Most (if not all) of what we mean when we talk about free will is not necessarily incompatible with a
deterministic universe.
2) We may in fact be highly sophisticated "organic robots" following *very* complicated programs. This does not
necessarily invalidate all our concepts of self-control, volition, responsibility, etc.
3) Rather than thinking - "You mean we might be nothing more than organic robots! How terrible!", we should
think, "Wow! I never realized that organic robots are in principle capable of such astoundingly rich and
intelligent behavior!"
A Few Marginally Related Topics
1) It's still unclear to me if these Life creatures would experience qualia, like we do. What would it be like to be
one of them? Would it be like anything? Is there a consciousness "at home" in these creatures?
2) What sorts of communications could we humans in our world have with these Life creatures implemented on
one of our supercomputers? I would imagine that we could discuss mathematics with them, as well as the
physics of their universe. But would they have a sense of humor, for instance, and find jokes funny? (I suspect
so, at least for the right type of jokes.)
3) In a very real sense, we would be like gods to them, since we can arbitrarily control and alter any aspect of
their universe. They, on the other hand, would have no way to even begin to understand what our universe is
like.
Is it possible that we are intelligent beings implemented in someone else's cellular automata system?
References
1) Daniel Dennett; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Bradford Books/MIT Press; 1984.
(Best discussion of free will I've ever read.)
2) Elwyn Berlekamp, John H. Conway, Richard Guy; Winning Ways (For Your Mathematical Plays); Vol 2,
Chapter 25, "What is Life?"; Academic Press, 1982. (The entire 2 volume book is about mathematical analysis of
games. Chapter 25 is devoted to Life. Of course, one would expect Conway to be pretty knowledgable about the
subject.)
3) William Poundstone; The Recursive Universe; Contemporary Books; 1985. (Also discusses Life and how it
might relate to cosmology. A little speculative at times in the cosmology sections, but the chapters on Life are
good.)
4 and 5) Richard Dawkins; The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker (I don't have them with me, so I don't
remember the publisher/date. Excellent discussion of the evolutionary process and how amazing order can arise
out of mere "blind chance".) ============================================================
END QUOTED LETTER
============================================================

Floating Abstractions and Stolen Concepts
Stolen Concepts vs. Castles in the Air
Copyright 1996, J. William Pierce.

Foreword
This short essay compares and contrasts "floating abstractions" and the fallacy of the "stolen concept." These two
epistemological errors are different in many ways, but both are rooted in a single, more fundamental error.
* * *
Castles in the Air
A floating abstraction is an idea that is disconnected from reality. This statement itself is a very wide abstraction;
it refers to both ideas and reality, and describes their relationship in a very broad manner (i.e. connected or
disconnected.) By "connected to reality," I mean that an idea is based on observed facts, fundamentally. If an idea
is the result of a long chain of reasoning, and this chain of reasoning is supported by facts at each step- then the
idea is connected to reality- it is not "floating." In contrast, if the idea is not based on any facts, percepts or any
process of logical inference from facts, then it is a "floating abstraction."
So far, I've refered to floating abstractions as a kind of idea; but more fundamentally, a floating abstraction is a
floating concept. The method by which you arrive at an idea distinguishes floating concepts from valid concepts.
For example, a person can hold "Man has a right to his own life" as a floating abstraction, if he has no
understanding of the nature of man (survives by means of his mind, is mortal, must act long-range in the pursuit
of his values, etc...) This person does not understand that man has a right to his own life because his concept of
man is not formed by facts (ultimately.)
Consider the method of forming valid concepts: differentiation and integration of concretes (or abstractions
even) based on a unit common to all the things being conceptualized, as they differ from everything else (in the
context of your knowledge.) First-level concepts arise from differentiating actual concrete entities (apple, orange,
cat, dog, etc.) These concepts are based on the perceptual observation of the concretes. In essence, they all look
different (though as your conceptual understanding of the world expands, your context expands.) These first-
level concepts are necessarily valid because they are based on observable differences - metaphysical differences -
between a group of similar things and everything else. These first-level concepts are connected to reality because
they are formed directly from percepts.
Once you form a concept from other concepts- you step away from reality toward higher abstraction. Because
we are fallible, you must employ a valid method to ensure your concepts are valid as you move towards greater
abstraction; this method is logic. For example: one concept formed from other concepts is "animal." The actual
referents of this concept are real-life animals, but the concept subsumes every animal, i.e. cats, dogs, ducks,
snakes, etc... You actually form the concept "animal" by grouping all your particular animal concepts and
identifying their distinguishing characteristic(s). In this way, the concept of "animal" is just a bit further removed
from the perceptual level than the concept "cat." As you build your conceptual vocabulary, each concept must be
formed from percepts, concepts, or possibly both. This is how concepts form a hierarchy. Your concept of
"animal" is based on lower-level concepts, which are based on perceptual material. Then, you could form the still
higher level concept, "living thing," from animal, plant, fungus, etc... Thus, each concept has a connection to other
concepts, which are connected to still other concepts, which ultimately are based on the evidence of your senses.
Now, consider the biggie "floating abstraction" we all know and love: "god." For most people, their concept of
"god" is a floating abstraction because they do not form it from a valid integration of other concepts, nor is it
based on direct perception. In other words, their concept of ``god'' is not arrived at through logical induction or
deduction from other valid concepts; nor is it based on direct observation of "god." Their concept of "god" is
totally disconnected from their conceptual hierarchy. This is the exact meaning of "floating." Their concept of
"god" metaphorically "floats" off on its own, as opposed to being part of a valid conceptual hierarchy.
Note: this only applies to those people who accept the concept of god on faith. If you use a process of reason to
try to arrive at a concept of god, but make a mistake in your reasoning, then your concept of "god" is not a
floating abstraction. A mistake in your reasoning can lead you to form invalid concepts- but not every invalid
concept is a floating abstraction. If you tried to reduce your concept of god back down to the perceptual level-
you would fail, because the concept of god has no referent in reality. God does not exist.
The Stolen Concept
The fallacy of the stolen concept refers to one's method of argument or alleged reasoning. If one argues that you
cannot prove that you exist, he commits the fallacy of the stolen concept because he relies on the fact that you
exist to accept your proof. Essentially, he denies that you exist, and will accept a proof from you (who does not
exist.) The concept of proof is very abstract, and in the context of human argument, is based on the fact that a
person (who exists) is providing a series of logical statements. The concept ``proof'' depends on a host of
concepts: language, man, truth, consciousness, and existence (to name just a few down the conceptual chain.) To
hold the concept of "proof" as an irreducible primary "steals" the concept from your conceptual hierarchy: it no
longer logically depends on its constituent concepts or percepts.
The Essence of the Problem
To summarize the differences between floating abstractions and the stolen concept fallacy:
¥While a floating abstraction has no possible reduction to the perceptual level; the fallacy of the stolen
concept ignores the logical reduction of a concept.
¥A floating abstraction has no relation to reality; stealing concepts denies a particular concept's relation to
reality.
But, these two errors are very similar:
¥Both are a fundamental rejection of the hierarchical nature of knowledge. Floating abstractions are
detached from the conceptual hierarchy, and the fallacy of the stolen concept destroys the existing
hierarchy.

J. William Pierce
Copyright © April, 1996.

Return to the Essays page!

Nick DiSpoldo, Small Press Review (on "Children, Churches and Daddies," April 1997) Kuypers is the widely-published poet of particular perspectives and not a little existential rage, but she does not impose her personal or artistic agenda on her magazine. CC+D is a provocative potpourri of news stories, poetry, humor, art and the "dirty underwear" of politics. One piece in this issue is "Crazy," an interview Kuypers conducted with "Madeline," a murderess who was found insane, and is confined to West Virginia's Arronsville Correctional Center. Madeline, whose elevator definitely doesn't go to the top, killed her boyfriend during sex with an ice pick and a chef's knife, far surpassing the butchery of Elena Bobbitt. Madeline, herself covered with blood, sat beside her lover's remains for three days, talking to herself, and that is how the police found her. For effect, Kuypers publishes Madeline's monologue in different-sized type, and the result is something between a sense of Dali's surrealism and Kafka-like craziness.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada
I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer's styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.

Ed Hamilton, writer #85 (of children, churches and daddies) turned out well. I really enjoyed the humor section, especially the test score answers. And, the cup-holder story is hilarious. I'm not a big fan of poetry - since much of it is so hard to decipher - but I was impressed by the work here, which tends toward the straightforward and unpretentious. As for the fiction, the piece by Anderson is quite perceptive: I liked the way the self-deluding situation of the character is gradually, subtly revealed. (Kuypers') story is good too: the way it switches narrative perspective via the letter device is a nice touch.

Children, Churches and Daddies.
It speaks for itself.
Write to Scars Publications to submit poetry, prose and artwork to Children, Churches and Daddies literary magazine, or to inquire about having your own chapbook, and maybe a few reviews like these.

Jim Maddocks, GLASGOW, via the Internet I'll be totally honest, of the material in Issue (either 83 or 86 of Children, Churches and Daddies) the only ones I really took to were Kuypers'. TRYING was so simple but most truths are, aren't they?

---

what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don't consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.

why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.

so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.

A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.

vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444

---

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review (on Children, Churches and Daddies) CC&D is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist. "I really like ("Writing Your Name"). It's one of those kind of things where your eye isn't exactly pulled along, but falls effortlessly down the poem. I liked "knowledge" for its mix of disgust and acceptance. Janet Kuypers does good little movies, by which I mean her stuff provokes moving imagery for me. Color, no dialogue; the voice of the poem is the narrator over the film.

Children, Churches and Daddies no longer distributes free contributor's copies of issues. In order to receive issues of Children, Churches and Daddies, contact Janet Kuypers at the cc&d e-mail addres. Free electronic subscriptions are available via email. All you need to do is email ccandd@aol.com... and ask to be added to the free cc+d electronic subscription mailing list. And you can still see issues every month at the Children, Churches and Daddies website, located at http://scars.tv

Also, visit our new web sites: the Art Gallery and the Poetry Page.

Mark Blickley, writer The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

---

MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)

functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen

We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.

---

Gary, Editor, The Road Out of Town (on the Children, Churches and Daddies Web Site) I just checked out the site. It looks great.

Dusty Dog Reviews: These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding.

John Sweet, writer (on chapbook designs) Visuals were awesome. They've got a nice enigmatic quality to them. Front cover reminds me of the Roman sculptures of angels from way back when. Loved the staggered tire lettering, too. Way cool. (on "Hope Chest in the Attic") Some excellent writing in "Hope Chest in the Attic." I thought "Children, Churches and Daddies" and "The Room of the Rape" were particularly powerful pieces.

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review: CC&D is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist.

Cheryl Townsend, Editor, Impetus (on Children, Churches and Daddies) The new CC&D looks absolutely amazing. It's a wonderful lay-out, looks really professional - all you need is the glossy pages. Truly impressive AND the calendar, too. Can't wait to actually start reading all the stuff inside.. Wanted to just say, it looks good so far!!!

Dusty Dog Reviews: She opens with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers' very personal layering of her poem across the page.

---

Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA
Indeed, there's a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there's a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Mark Blickley, writer
The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.

Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book or chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers. We're only an e-mail away. Write to us.

---

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies') obvious dedication along this line admirable.

The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST's three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST's SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does "on the road" presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies') obvious dedication along this line admirable.

---

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA
"Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family.
"Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

want a review like this? contact scars about getting your own book published.

---

Paul Weinman, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) Wonderful new direction (Children, Churches and Daddies has) taken - great articles, etc. (especially those on AIDS). Great stories - all sorts of hot info!

The magazine Children Churches and Daddies is Copyright © through Scars Publications and Design. The rights of the individual pieces remain with the authors. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Okay, nilla wafer. Listen up and listen good. How to save your life. Submit, or I'll have to kill you.
Okay, it's this simple: send me published or unpublished poetry, prose or art work (do not send originals), along with a bio, to us - then sit around and wait... Pretty soon you'll hear from the happy people at cc&d that says (a) Your work sucks, or (b) This is fancy crap, and we're gonna print it. It's that simple!

Okay, butt-munch. Tough guy. This is how to win the editors over.
Hope Chest in the Attic is a 200 page, perfect-bound book of 13 years of poetry, prose and art by Janet Kuypers. It's a really classy thing, if you know what I mean. We also have a few extra sopies of the book "Rinse and Repeat", which has all the 1999 issues of cc&d crammed into one book. And you can have either one of these things at just five bucks a pop if you just contact us. It's an offer you can't refuse...

Carlton Press, New York, NY: HOPE CHEST IN THE ATTIC is a collection of well-fashioned, often elegant poems and short prose that deals in many instances, with the most mysterious and awesome of human experiences: love... Janet Kuypers draws from a vast range of experiences and transforms thoughts into lyrical and succinct verse... Recommended as poetic fare that will titillate the palate in its imagery and imaginative creations.
Mark Blickley, writer: The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing the book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.
Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book and chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers - you can write for yourself or you can write for an audience. It's your call...

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA: "Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family. "Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

Dusty Dog Reviews, CA (on knife): These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding. Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Dusty Dog Reviews (on Without You): She open with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers' very personal layering of her poem across the page.
Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada (on Children, Churches and Daddies): I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer's styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.
Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA: Indeed, there's a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there's a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Published since 1993 No racist, sexist or homophobic material is appreciated; we do accept work of almost any genre of poetry, prose or artwork, though we shy away from concrete poetry and rhyme for rhyme's sake. Do not send originals. Any work sent to Scars Publications on Macintosh disks, text format, will be given special attention over smail-mail submissions. There is no limit to how much you may submit at a time; previously published work accepted.