Going Too Far (9 page)

That night, both of us utterly spent with emotion, we went to a small New Year's Eve gathering at a friend's house. I remember that the genial level of moronic conversation there served to unite us, reminding each of us of the value of the other. But what I remember most is our standing together on the front stoop of that New York brownstone before we rang the bell to our friend's apartment. The bells of the city were announcing midnight, the breaking of the new year, and the wind cut so punishingly that neither of us could have said whether we were crying because of the cold or because of
the moment. Both, naturally. The clouds of our warm breath formed a misty screen between our faces, as if we were swimming toward each other through fog. We stood there a long time, like figures on a stele, looking into each other's eyes. I remember thinking with a sense of outrage what a pathetic waste it would be if we were to lose one another, what a failure of nerve. I think we kissed, then; I think we told each other that we loved; I think we said “Happy New Year” to each other. Then we went on in to the other people.

There were days of talking after, of sorting things out, still without the aid of translation (which would not be available for three more years), but with renewed will. There would be more bitterness as well, more pain, more sign language. Yet I never again left K., nor he me.

In the years since, one or the other of us has spent time away from home, giving poetry readings in distant cities, lecturing, traveling around the country in a political context. There have also been those nights when, both of us home and in the same bed, we were hoarding each our separateness, not speaking, not touching out of anger or hurt. But the night before this journal entry was written is still the only night we have ever really been apart.

Day
#1, 8:00
a.m.
, 31
December
1966

T
HE LAST DAY
of the old year, at Micki's, in her bedroom. She generously insisted on sleeping on the couch, giving me the privacy of a closed door.

I'm still numb. Haven't eaten since Wednesday night (today is a Saturday). I went off tranquilizers on Thursday, but took two last night, to sleep. Dropping off like a stone at eleven, I'm surprised to find myself up now, wide awake, unable to sleep any more. That's a disappointment—I had hoped, given the exhaustion, that I'd sleep much longer, all day perhaps. I'd like to be unconscious for days, weeks, to escape feeling anything.

Numb, bitter, injured, self-pitying, self-righteous, scared. A little excited, too; curious as to how K. is taking it. I'm not lonely yet, although last night, after having left the apartment, I felt horribly alone and very cold. I had too little money on me for cabs, and the long, aimless bus rides were like trips through hell, a surly Charon for a driver, my few companion-passengers the tired night-shift workers of the city and the late-night drunks who huddle for temporary warmth into the yellow fluorescence of a bus, not caring where it takes them.

I had nowhere to go. Too many friends who would have received me with unabashed glee, Job's comforters who would underestimate
what K. and I mean—together
or
separately. To their hospitality I could not sink. My mother, out of the question. And so forth. So I rode the buses of New York for hours, finally winding up at Times Square and Forty-second Street, where the movies run all night. Except that most are pornographic and sado-masochistic flicks, the audience filled with middle-aged men hunched over the secret in their laps, with young gay male hustlers taking a break from their cold rounds on the winter streets, with more drunks loudly sleeping off their stupor. Only one movie was acceptable: Godard's
Masculine-Feminine
—ha! Which I ignored while staring at the screen, thinking about K. and me, and phoning Micki every fifteen minutes until she returned home. Not the ideal hostess, Micki, for such a guest as me, but I knew she would at least sympathize, shut up mostly, and leave me alone, as well as let me spend the night.

At last she answered the phone, and so I left Godard without finding out how his film ended—ha
ha
!—and came here.

Now: resentful, worried, yet strangely relieved. I can't believe the separation is other than a trial one, can't believe it will take as long as planned, until April. My eyes are swollen with crying. My body aches. I feel like I used to after big-scene-fights with my mother, needing to sleep, to heal, to be comatose for days afterward.

I have actually left K.

I can't help being stunned that things have gone even
this
far, for
us
, we who were going to be different.

But I have hope.

Why do I have hope?

I have hope because there's nothing else for me to have.

9

My pregnancy and childbirth were “natural,” the Lamaze method, wherein the mother is awake and the father present throughout labor and delivery. In the early stage of labor, before we left for the hospital, I carried out a plan I had contemplated for some months: I sat down at my typewriter and wrote two letters. The actual writing was punctuated, therefore, by a labor contraction every second paragraph or so, K. meanwhile timing the length of the contractions, Lamaze style, with a stopwatch. At my request, he did not read either this letter or the one following until he returned home alone from the hospital, after the birth, some fifteen hours later.

We had been active in “New Left” politics, demonstrations, and actions for some years at this point, and had not infrequently feared for our lives. Though active in “Women's Liberation,” I was not yet a feminist, but as any woman with her first childbirth, I was prey to deep, almost archetypal feelings that I must be ready for the possibility of losing the child—or of dying, myself, in childbirth. No matter how “modern” we become, it will take still more time and consciousness and change in medical procedure before the imprint of a million ghosts dead in childbirth will be erased from the secret thoughts of a pregnant woman. This letter was written, as was the following one, out of an acute awareness that these might be the last words I would ever write.

Wednesday
, 9
July
1969

D
EAKEST
K.:

It's almost six o'clock in the afternoon now and we know we definitely are in labor because of the bloody mucous plug having loosened, and we've had our baths and are all ready, just playing hide-and-seek now with the irregular contractions. And you're running about crazy loon with our color Polaroid camera taking pictures of me typing this very letter to you—images of images—visual of verbal—as we each try to reach and make permanent contact with and of and for each other.

And all I really wanted to say in this letter was and is and will be that I love you very much and am very happy at this second of our
absurd existence. These last days have been so beautiful, as we finally seemed to find some way of growing closer out of all the difficulties we've been having these past months. I want you to know that I feel these days have been so perfect
because
of you—how you've tried (and how I know it) so hard, so very hard. I feel very sad because of the previous months—when I did fail you in your own crisis, out of which by sheer will you seem to have pulled yourself (and me) to make this birth a beautiful thing.

Maybe the ways we have failed each other in the past are no longer relevant, except to look back upon and learn from a little, like people after a revolution reminiscing about the old, corrupt system only enough to stay aware of its ways not creeping into the new.

We're an odd pair, odd enough to have changed shape many times already in our living together, but only now, I feel, somehow to be really challenged—not just by this new person living with us but by the objective reality of our planet and species in what could be birth- or death-throes—to build whole new previously unimaginable miraculous forms, with our flesh and genes and words and light-screen colors and tape recordings and politics and will and blood and love.

Even if some inverse miracle should occur; should anything that people other than you would be silly enough to consider negative or tragic or whatever; I mean if anything should happen to the baby or to me, I know that we still have—in truly remarkable ways—each other, and that the years I've lived with you have taken me in directions I've so wanted to go, since I can remember wanting anything. What I'm trying to say, rather badly, is that it's already been worth it, after all, you see, even if there isn't any more. I know you, and know that you'll always find your art and your politics, know as certainly as I knew years ago in that dumb chrome luncheonette that what shines in you is irreplaceable and irrepressible and inevitable. It's that in you that I can never help fighting for and against, because it sustains and threatens me—challenges me—almost unendurably.

But our time for psychic analytical indulgence of a certain type is over. We have begun to act, separately and together, in response to a challenge that will test us in new ways. I'm less afraid now than I've ever been, although with more reasons to fear for us all. Not that any of this matters, as acid has taught even me.

But for the time left to us—you and me and our child—and for the work and play we have ahead of us to do, for whatever illusory, arbitrary, exquisitely insane reasons that we choose to believe are our purpose, I think we've only begun to surprise each other, only begun to live.

I love you, K.

R.

10

We had chosen together a “genderless” name for our child, whether it was to be a girl or a boy: Blake, because the name means “bringer of light” or “illumined one,” and also for William Blake, the eighteenth-century poet and mystic who knew and was deeply influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as by Catherine Boucher, the artist whom he married.

I am touched, now, by the innocent false consciousness of this letter, the simple-minded views on oppression, revolution, sexuality, parenthood. Some of the language reflects a striving to be “hip,” although a tug toward careful articulation is also present. Mostly, though, I am surprised at how deeply this letter still moves me, how much I recognize its sense of urgency, and how intensely I still validate what was happening there—in that woman's body, and on that woman's page.

Wednesday
, 9
July
1969 6:38
p.m
.

D
EAR
B
LAKE:

I've written you no poems or letters while carrying you these past nine months, and somehow feel I can write you now only because we know, K. and I, that our labor with you has definitely begun, and so you seem finally very real, beginning your own struggle into the conscious universe.

First, I ask you to forgive us for having coalesced you via our genes from that whirling matter and energy that you were before. A planetary famine is likely within ten years; nuclear, biological, gas, and chemical warfare are all possibilities; our species is poisoning what little is left of the air, water, and soil that is our natural Edenic heritage, and it is moving out later this very month to land on (explore? contaminate?) our satellite, the moon. You are part of a population explosion which may well be alone responsible for the destruction of life on earth. Overbreed and overkill begin to be common everyday phrases.

Yet we have conceived you from our sex and love, from the blending together of our brief tissues, K. and I. I could cite excuses, some of which I believe and some of which I don't: our own egos, our curiosity
about what our genes would produce, our callousness, our desire to make an ongoing revolution in our own lives, on and on. Perhaps none is the truth, or all are. Perhaps none is really relevant.

The fact is that you are now being born, a woman or a man, but mostly yourself, Blake for now (later you might want to change that name to one nobody has a right to give you but yourself), into a dimension we are all struggling to space out, to make freer, until we are ultimately free from it, into some new life or death—some meaningful way of living, or dying at least, in ecstasy.

Some people are arming themselves—for love.

Some people are refusing to bear arms—for love.

K. and I will be trying to find new ways to save ourselves and our sisters and brothers from suffering and extinction under the greedy powers of a few madmen, and you will be involved unavoidably in that struggle. But on your own terms, as soon as you know them and make them known.

We have no claims on you. We are your genetic mother and father, and beyond that, and more important, merely two people who will take the responsibility of you while you are still small and helpless, who will love you to the best of our ability, provide you with whatever tools of knowledge, skill, humor, and emotional freedom seem to interest you, respect your own individuality, hope you dig us as people but hardly dare insist on that (only try to earn it)—and let go.

Of course, I already envy you. Despite the horrors that oppress people around the world, those people are rising up to fight for their freedom. You are born into the age of worldwide revolution. You will be thirty-one years old in the year 2000. You may well travel to other planets. More prosaically, you have one hell of a groovy father, which I never had, and in some ways I trust him more with you than I do myself. I know you two will have crazy beautiful fun together. I have to get my ass in gear so I can join in.

If you are a woman, you will grow up in an atmosphere—indeed, a whole Movement—for women's liberation, so that your life will be less reflective of sexual oppression than mine, more human.

If you are a man, you will also be freer; you will not need to live a form of stereotyped masculinity which is based on the oppression of the other sex.

If you are a woman, you will be free to think—unlike so many women today. If you are a man, you will be free to feel—unlike so many men today.