Studying Hunger Journals Read online

  Review: “You had a hard day.” “The car broke down and someone threw an egg at me.” “I have a dog and I work at Gimbel’s.” And so the next day, John Cage calls. Drug use and health foods.

  April 9

  Music play, accept dissonance relationships, I keep thinking where’s the danger in an experiment: non-negative lack of sleep makes me laugh and projects make me busy: to find a mate.

  Notes: anarchy isn’t anarchy, it’s only in relation as learning is to imitation. Sun’s out.

  April 10

  I get a check for $27,000. Ed is dealing with a woman in red fur for money.

  Notes: be 27. Two dealers. In Memory, the same dry spell, July 10-11.

  Observation: I expect something to happen, daze, and fear, mother exception, end of people having children but what happens too much is twice as easy.

  April 11

  I dream the history of all people in the world, good and evil. I zoom in on a familiar cat-face. The next part of the dream says to me this part is about you personally.

  Ann-Margret, that’s me (so history comes first, what about you personally, Gertrude?) is arrested for accidentally killing a guy she kisses. She kisses everyone especially a (golf) boy she doesn’t know at all named Clancy, that’s you Max. She makes scenes about people not wanting to get involved and her two children are with her, all the way from Texas. Now that gets complicated. And before that: a crowd scene here, everybody brought someone. Card playing just before we found some more money and Grace brought back a book that was a deck of cards and the money was in it and just before Max and I lie down on the bed a section of the loft wall isn’t there and somehow we look over, inches away, on Dick and his wife also lying down and I talk with him through the wall. He comes out where the “World Works” poster really is and later I can’t stand the crowds again and I think they’ll take our money, put away like Horace put away film, no they don’t want money, I see that now. Scene on the streets, I run and come back and they go.

  Oh heavy boxes, teach me a dance! To get out of this mess of names.

  April 12

  Why all these slices and pieces? A big cake is brought and cut and eaten. The cake gets eaten before it is shown. There aren’t many pieces left to go on a tray so they are eaten without a presentation. What came along with the cake was a bin, a display, a wall of slices of lime and grapefruit and fruit is no desire but these fruits are bitter and we live high on the top floor. There’s a religious Mass of some kind with science experiments and undressing, all is edible. A nun or a whore is temporarily in search of something, this old project. She’s just temporarily. They say they’ll send me to a doctor. I say no, anything but that, that’s as bad as what Phil Jackson or Jack Marin would do to me. There’s two sides to every question. Before that a museum.

  This is the dream answer, the dream summary, but not the dance, not cool. Sweet eats make a sour show, is that what I did or is that what they do? I think color is sour. A science system is what is prescribed or planned again, what have I got to show, what’s anyone? A nun is surely covered, what would they do to me? They punched each other in the nose. Jack-Jack. A museum is as old as a clock or a cock, Doc.

  April 13

  Can’t focus, it’s no wonder. I’m playing basketball, I dunk a box of cookies. Where’s the net? A little offense? A little man by a stream or sewer might get caught and we talk about streams or sewers, that little man is a desperate floater. Even these minor old cookies are still wrapped. Sweet sewer systems, sewer grate, net system, sissy. Sight is motion. I esteem you an elation.

  Subjects: fame/culture, handwriting, leave out/put in, do/not do (things (every)), feel.

  And, I miss the seven- and eight-year-olds’ trip around the world, it costs $121.

  And, mountain of chaos, I’m climbing up an almost vertical mountain, Max I’m counting on you. “If Max can’t do it I could try but the momentum’d be lost.” This mountain is in the picture. And, the payments on the car must be lowered by two dollars a month to keep Max out of jail, have I put you fear I put you in prison love? That would lengthen them to 35 weeks like a boat or a jeep but when we try, it turns out we’re all paid up anyway. And I see Carolyn Cornelia in here and later she tries to commit suicide. I give up.

  April 20

  It’s 4:30 a.m. and this is an unusual green, I feel the earth move, what does Hemingway have to do with this? I gave up the original project. And, mental anguish is middle English, listen is implicit. And fools feel fear, fear fools feelings, feel fear fool, feel fool fear, fear feel fool, or fool fear’s feeling.

  And, there’s an answer in dreams but there isn’t any question: Divine David “lets me out” at nine, an hour early, and Chris Max and Curtis Perry need a place to stay, I think Curtis Perry is somehow sad or pitiful. Old Bob is Gore Vidal in back of a convertible, he’s been hiding this secret identity and as his face changes before us, he begins to look slick. All this is on a bridge, back to the idyll: I return to David’s and wait with crazy people and friends on a country road, I try to rush in. And I go shopping with Justine in a box, when she gets up powder and smoke come out of her mouth, like an inactive volcano. We’ve climbed over a refrigerator but it’s only a display of tasteless food we’ve reached. “Don’t buy that it’s awful.” So we go back to our box to breathe smoke.

  And, David and I are in a booth, I give him lots of room. He’s writing down a time: 10:37, no 10:53, anyway it’s seven extra minutes.

  And one word, Jim Dine.

  And, Rico is on health foods, we eat giant hamburgers fried in the subway and hot dogs for two. I have to sleep in a bed with a woman who is having young boys painted.

  And the dream also says fuck Oscar Robertson as a letter of the alphabet.

  The weekend of May 6

  And surrounding positions and pictures: Max goes to Sweden, traveling with David: I refuse to zip up wombs: there’s a house in Bermuda, a stone castle and fields: “I have decided that a single book is the key to your life”: art convention fair and Bridget Bardot’s brother threatens me with a gold bullet, his thumb: everyone has to go to Vietnam, mines in harbor: there’s art to convince them: What’s B.B. doing cowering over there.

  This weekend I traveled all over. Ed loses his white coat because we have to make a run for it in the passport-like office. The only way he can make it is if we push him, me, over the sides of stairways and we know these stairways well. So we make the commercial, Holly plays the maid or dog. A little uncoordinated, we walk on land across the water.

  The ship is moving away from the harbor so low in the water I thought it was sinking. We eat and drink inside, outside a ceremony celebrating my basketball career in pictures.

  May 19-20

  I live with an Italian family, there’s a lot of cheese to eat but some of it turns out to be stomach (tripe) or skin (derma) or maybe fat. Teresa calls for $5000 for a loft like the man in the street undressing in Gordon’s piece. She says something like, “You were deep.” A group of people are on this floor, headed towards the hotel, one of them is “someone who knows you well from the past.” I say to them “Go home!” The two Annes of Berlin? Who are they? In the loft, poetry is in the spotlight. I go to the vegetable stand but too many relatives have come over. There are some kidneys roasting. The guy wraps and delivers one to a customer. I take one, it wraps around my hand. One of the kidneys starts to walk away, it grows a neck and head. I say to the guy, “I always think I want em but I don’t.” Back behind the stand are some wilted vegetables, the real food.

  Nap: a whole scene on a boat with Bartholomew. It’s somehow his trip. I sneak on. A leave-taking. Smaller boats go to shore. Before that many meetings. Max is Andy. The boat he leaves on goes to shore. He is being paged by his mother. I see him standing up alone in the boat, looking mythical, “the little man in the boat.” The boat I get into is crowded with women. I say no but I am in it. I think, “In case of a disaster there’s very little room here.” I imagine clinging to the s
ide of the boat and being pushed down. A woman, a gym teacher, pulls the motor. Another woman, her match or twin, steers. That is all there is of that.

  But next, I’m in bed asleep when some people bring in a sick girl, Nina I think, nearly green. But no, it’s ——-a, from 42nd Street. These people are strange, they sit and wait, they have infinite patience. Am I supposed to take care of this girl?

  So we do Chinese acrobatic feats to become one person joined head to feet, we make the mental leap. We haven’t been in training. The one, arms swinging, is made of many people. We can leap over states and giant-step united states in one to California. George McGovern gets his hair cut just like Jane Fonda and wears a black silk scarf like Nathaniel Tarn (not his real name). I guess it’s my father for president (Nathaniel and Theodore both mean “gift of god” one in Greek and one in Hebrew and Tarn is wiry but too romantic).

  All women are spies, I’m suffocating like a young boy in them. Down the dark cellar stairs there is everything and nothing to fear: it’s dark. Fern carries all kinds of reams of colored paper, she drops it, she’s suffocating too. One black sweater (Fern wore it and with teeth she gave me food) and one thing: don’t speak. You’ll just waste time. Until you grow up there’s nothing to say, there’s nothing you can be sure of. Hospital or dormitory, it’s all the same to me. Terror you threaten me with, we’re on a boat again and women engulf me.

  I have a date to meet someone at three for fucking. “Someone wants you.” I watch the clock, I’m at a lecture. My whole (dead) family’s there. I get approval, wear a skirt, fly in the streets. At three I go upstairs, it’s David B. but you are lying drunk in the corner. Where’s David? “He’s in the corner.”

  I am on a moving island where everyone is stuck in a hole. With great effort we get out of them, extricate ourselves, so we can swim in refreshing waters. Those of us who get out first, I am second, feel guilty that the others will be too discouraged to try because we’ve moved so expertly and so fast. The water is very deep. On an edge of the island they give out presents which we unwrap, arrange on boards. Some things don’t stand up.

  June 7

  Dennis turns into a moth.

  Harris and I sit by a sewer system.

  Thomas decides to climb up the rope ladder and fly away.

  Horace and Hollis look at a white mound to the left.

  I kiss Bartholomew in back and white, he walks down the hall smiling with Andy. “You get a lot of rest,” he says, “Max is coming.” David calls, “It’s I.”

  New men, menu.

  Look up excuse: n. 1, a plea or explanation given in defense of one’s conduct, an apology. 2, a release from obligation, duty. 3, something that frees a person from blame; extenuating or justifying circumstances. 4, a pretended reason for conduct; pretext.

  I have a pretext to weave before disguise, I have a false reason or motive to be happy; to be happy you need an excuse to hide the real one. I have another person in the room. It’s the U.S. It’s the book with the writing as a pattern so that only the names of colors emerge so that one page reading green actually makes red and it’s too much writing for the west coast. Those long swinging suspended bridges, some without sides, some submerged in the water. We get to the house of the sewing girl and the books start to fall. I try to help by removing Stefan Themerson from the shelf. Willoughby’s storehouse of food is all corn, I cook a pot by submerging it in water.

  June 19

  We look for a California beach, they’re all numbered, I have a portfolio. Mal de Primitives or “as bad as they come.” We get to make the movie without having to pay for paper. Larry and Bill take away our-creative control, stubbornly they wait at the door. Joe kills Bartholomew for being young.

  Swell and neat it’s the heat and I don’t need that much to eat and so on: Bartholomew’s going away party, we put off the pleasure of touching him, then he’s gone. The dangerous room of the men in the subway but, we get to touch first in the dream. There’s another party of rare red meat given by Holly for dinner all over, she gives me a pink fur piece too. Then a turquoise insomnia after the symptoms of not breathing disappear, I envy Jack Kerouac not afraid to be alone on Desolation mountain at the cost of a vision. It’s wet but it’s been wet for weeks rain no sun the rain’s a relief a week of surface a week of rain, I plead with the man at the railing in the dream, please come forward come out of the shadows, show yourself, show me who you are, I need some basis for a new dance, I battle those demons you already halfway know, mixing colors, I’m trying to remember something it involves a buzz and an explosion and three sentences. I don’t. Now I see it now. This information is chronological and that explains unwelcome and tedious guests, the dreams. But what else after memory, put together all too quickly as a framework to do this and to do more of this all at once. To write it in one moment, when you are ready. The fiction. Change names. Max. More than a personal space is here. But no more information than what’s here to start with. Ice isolate cold, review: I could write it now: “I had to stop. I had to stop and begin again slowly…

  Because I (act as if I (children)) shouldn’t be left alone. And why child again (I was already one). So I am afraid because other women die. And then I painted my toenails red and wondered about just general pain and did I really believe what was written on the page and what else could be threatened but my health or sanity and what is it about being imagined alone with no one to make existence firm but not dead I suppose not dead, is someone thinking of you and must you meet someone, are you in transit, is forgotten the word, are you found, discovered and loved all of a sudden, is the thesis “Unless there is somebody watching you you are dead” and certainly when they go away I think they are dead and when they go to sleep there’s a heartbeat next to me and I’m an animal, I don’t like to listen to my own, go to bed, why sleep.

  A trace of a half-moon, a blue spot in memory. These diaries are for David, I want to make love to him.

  Sex and generals are all alike, I throw a stone to you. Fucking wow it’s as simple as that, hot shit, Francisco’s cute and the Chinese man on the t.v.’s cute and it’s getting warmer out, that’s so masculine, everything takes time. There’s no competition between the me on the streets and the me in bed. I can’t move fast enough, I pulled my shoulder muscle, I’ll probably save the round world but not as Gertrude Stein, you see I’ve read her secret journals at a talent hunt and we won. So what is all this shitwork I have to do as the page is filthy with ordeal, holy cow hot shit jesus christ suck cock or maybe make me well and then maybe come and see me. I saw this movie before and what I mean by that is baby I actually sat through it and you’re not the one to tell me who you are, you’re the director giving me a hard time, jesus christ. You’re always trying to find me but when I creep around corners to meet you then you change your mind. Up our ass we turned the tables on ourselves, you prick think back, don’t worry that’s a line from some poem called memory and what I wanna know is how far can I go with you for a dad. Ha ha you win, your head makes me feel skinny.

  Dear Agnes, Lamb of God, you make me sick, I wouldn’t drink milk in a moment, you sink the same old ships again, flooding America’s flames. Married buried, three drive to get the wedding ring. Gold and silver paper routes and yes, that’s the trap door to America under the rug and Jack Kerouac and I go down there and giggle a lot.

  June 27

  First dream I remember in weeks, sleep in hammock, nap, and I’m sitting on the bed watching a movie and suddenly there’s two black people sitting next to me and I say I’m sorry I was so engrossed in that movie I didn’t even see you come in and they brought two half-cakes and I eat a piece of the cream and someone else eats a piece of the other and that’s the one that’s got tuna fish in it.

  Free and ritualistic, eh? Moralistic and righteous too? And so on, so is it all forbidden pleasure? It’s not or it can’t be so you must believe we’re doing business, I’d like to mention so-and-so but I won’t and I hope we haven’t offended anyone so far,
or, specifically, so-an-so, though I wasn’t really listening again, I was thinking about something completely different then.

  I couldn’t live just anywhere but I’m tired of rearranging things here: what you do, who you barrage, what you garage and shit. How does Andy keep his papers in order. And you can’t relate (tell recount remember) but you can address (love) vision. Vision your house on a street, Jack and David is your pen name SHUT and what am I beginning now a work that goes off into a distance I’ve created, it was so easy, from now on I’ll start to say nothing, I’ve hidden too much already. I need more to amuse and Saturday will be the moon July 1.

  July 11

  Near noon on the night of the morning before, leave near noon, not the total eclipse not the sun and the moon (I can’t write it, Poe is right), not the menstrual rush, not certain and like a doe and a lamb I concert my escape, mechanic effort lamb and dove that I am I flew not overlooking you, can you and men America come quite hard they don’t record it, it’s a waste of time, why do I think that, hello I’m jealous, I tingle, not enough hands and try to get to the black forest, melt one like sons the method tried, serve deserve rest work to melt code and risk die, tie the same something nothing, meet me, it works, you come, I move in, you move over way back, what is it? Memory design, when you go I’ll meet you and melt, I next a mushroom embrace, service health center edges yes I do I repeat over and over, you do need space and design time, the blood wine you concentrate need, you must it’s a design you see people moving in time, you conglomerate align you move you sink you are like wine, you want someone to be coming in you’re swell, well-liked and cunning, short and giant in fact, you could list them as associates in cunning drift desire, they know how, as you do like Jack and you are not distant or dead, that is, you don’t make time you swing the dials around, you’re over your head mink coats and dashing cars, why not, you exit dance you South America, dazzling design that’s not my eye, I’m straight as a mask in seven circles, dash and devastate you mix yourself a punch and I send you in and we’re free, we each make up words, don’t use the old ones keep it down, hush it up, you empty you full, you’re still giant and this is an awful stand to take nationally, it’s all a trick, got any gum on you dick, the mast of this darling ship is pointing south-divine and so we sink, it’s a win for you, for me how long and longer each can this go on, well, Shakespeare says a neater yes to it and nods in something smites consumption, says it’s smaller than a wink in lime, a sauce, a notion towards learning the right gesture for I’m learning I’ll call, you ask me now when I can’t stop, design design, he’s young, you’re young we wing it and crows like those we fly by, roofs of starling city draughts of heavy drifting, our refusing edging sister country by is mother, a nation derivation come from where, the start the stars of sea she melts, she works she rests too when will the rest begin.