little death

Little deaths is a phrase, if I recall correctly, Anaïs Nin used in "The Delta of Venus". It's been a while since I've reread it and it's been long over due for another reread, with another perspective shift in mind. I have a first edition. Even though I had ordered the first printing they screwed it up and never got it in where I had ordered it and was lucky to catch it elsewhere. It wasn't so much that I was interested in having the first edition, I wanted it as soon as I read the review in the NY Times. I suppose there are people that still consider it porn and wouldn't read it or try to burn it, too bad for them. It isn't so much the burning that I care about anyway, at least read it first.

Many have used some very clever phrases, sub plots, perhaps, to get around censorship. Frank Zappa did it all the time, so did Joyce, or so I'm told. Nin wasn't hiding it, well, she did, in plain sight. I think a bit of a different perspective shift from her. At least I hope some one found it and just read it for the pictures, I sure as hell did at times. Want to to see the dog eared pages? Oh shit, you're not suppose to do that with first editions. Fuck 'em, my book, not theirs and I'm not selling it. That's a bull shit statement if I ever saw one.

In the symbolism is where I thrive or try. It's in the try that I have to have some of it explained else-wheres. I really need to read more and it's still hard to read again, but in short bursts. So it is all on hiatus, in a way. "The Golden Bough" sits on the shelf, unread, and that is no short burst read. But sometimes I feel the need to stop reading it all and get it out. But, perhaps I am more interested in the process then the finished, because in many ways I could call an end to it and yet go on.

Previously here, and not too many posts ago, I had said, that boy was about to enter the twilight zone. It was big death, of a kind, and it is still a bit beyond me to go into the details of it and that detail is of huge importance, for me, to get the post or posts right. The experience and the hind sight and, yes, the fore sight. Perhaps I'll some how touch a bit of it in this writing, I'm never really sure.

SwampBlossom (The Wife) reads the obituaries in the local newspaper, on line. She asked me if I knew a person that had died over the weekend. I do and did. She in, an odd way, was part of my big death. I hadn't known when she and her husband had come to this country from Germany, I do now and it's of no importance other then she was in Germany as a young woman during another war. That I knew, as I also had met her eldest son and I commented on a really nice leather trench coat he wore. He said it actually had belonged to his Uncle, perhaps Grandfather, who was in the Gestapo. What the hell, it was still a nice coat. Her husband is or was a lawyer and I see the in relief metal plate of both of them every time I go to the mall, in a section there. I think of her from time to time and don't need the sign to remind me, as that big death of mine still is a poser in some ways to me. It is much much clearer what really happened and I do not mean it in a literal sense. They have a name for what happened and it isn't what I use anymore. But, it was a very trying experience and now I hope never ends. It's kind of ironic in the sense that Ernst, Immgard's husband, was shooting at Dad. Ernst was forced, as just a kid and I'm talking really young, to be an antiaircraft gunner.

I was an antiaircraft gunner of a type, among other things. I did receive mail once in a while, in that place, the machine, the Army. Mom sent me books and artful covered cards, which I put up inside my locker door, and one of the books she sent me was "Catch-22". Good god Mom, I was in the living belly of the beast and quite frankly Heller did a good job, but you have to fucking live it. Which is true, I think, of many books to really appreciate some of them more fully. I didn't need Heller's version of it. Mom, at that time, was managing a University book store and that's where I met Immgard. I was more than a bit smitten with her, I will admit. There was an air about her and age didn't matter. That she was estute enough to have noticed it, I have little doubt. As I hung out on some of the days that I was home on various leaves at the book store, I suspect Immgard started to see a change in me and I'm sure Mom told her what was going on when I was back in my war, but only as much as I let out. The real truth I hid.

I received one thing from Immgard while I was in and out of hell. I'll never forget how I felt opening the small package and the wonderful taste of that home made German type bread. It was someplace between a bread and a cake. Erotic.

Fire, water, forge.
I have bore.
Little deaths I feel.
I feel, oh I
feel