Permeable Gray

"Permeable Gray" was the title of an essay I had started when I was twenty-four, but never completed, during my first year in Diamond Park,  during my first experiences with the assault of the barren, like drywall and plaster, on my aesthetic sense. Every urban skyline in America probably looks like the urban skyline of Philadelphia, unpleasantly garish, thus my title, which more readily found its thematic intent in my dead cat, and so became the essay I wanted under another title.

I believe I tossed the original hard copy, or will, if any pages are left in my folder bin, but today it looks like the callow transitional day I had in mind, a garish permeable gray that deters me from driving outside, and yet is also a signature of my defeat, my failure to succeed against the merciless indictment of American poverty. Like Studs Lonigan, which I indifferently purchased last evening, as if I need to keep replaying An American Tragedy in a thousand variations, I am apparently in need of hardier mettle, though it could be argued that I've read enough of Dreiser and company to not need anymore educating on reality by the American left.. Books have to be everything for me now, absorbing all the passions of failed lovers, absorbing my inability to travel safely as affluence might allow, and return to my origins; this is to what my life has to cling, the damn text, the narrative, the homosexuality and hetero-romance that subverts itself within it, that is repulsive to observe as I have observed it, and contradicted myself within its planks rather than found reconciliation, and I mean this as a progressive matter, not that I am tormented about a personal homoerotic experience that Linda once gave me and made me feel threatened. I can look back on my conversation with her and objectify it: she was being literal, knocking down my longing by giving me a picture of how fantastic it was for her to fuck her then spouse Bruce, but it was still insensitive. She knew nothing about my personal life and made assumptions which were inaccurate.

My desire to get laid just cracked open, out of nowhere, evidently, except for seeing Linus Roache as Merton Densher. And I have no male on me to seize the moment. I may not be the only one in deprivation and sensual starvation, but I do not know how we accommodate it and come out with a happy ending when war wounds come into play.

For those of us who know The Wings of the Dove Densher's name is ironic, a prelude to his retirement from the world, because his guilt is weighed upon the innocence he trampled. Maybe I will finally publish something in The Henry James Review to please the dead ghost of my memory of Michael C. Clark. I scribbled out an idea on the James list, an idea derived from my imperfectly tortured account here, and I have a year to send the editor Susan an acceptable abstract. I have not written a damn abstract in years, but let's engage in hypotheticals:

I put my wounded intellect to the grind, complete my task, and let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it passes Susan's peer review, and is published. What happens then, the pearly gates open and I can get the fuck out of Presby?  There is no joy juice that in turn can reconcile how much time and strength I've lost, that can offer me achievement, the foundation of any happiness.