=au05021k
Being the 4th doc in my 2nd Autobiography
The preceeding being =au050218.txt , =au05021g.txt , and
=au05021j.txt
And this being started, 18 Feb '05, being 8 Adar A I think.
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I had been kicked out of the Abode in '84 for an unauthorized
flipout.  I fancied that PVK was up on the mountain, and that if I
could just get past the palace guard he would see me and fix me --
as it is said, the baal tchuva in a place that  the rightous
cannot attain  -- meaning if you can just take that psychic crisis
that is being exploited by dark forces, your own or others', and
flip it over to the side of light, and then get someone to prop
you up so you can hold your ground there, you will be in a high
place indeed.  Well, it sounds great, but I expectd there's some
fine print in that contract -- a bit like selling your soul to the
devil and then sneaking out and leaving the devil to pay the bill.
Anyhow, i did not do so, I did not walk anywhere that I should not
have -- well, I didn't invade any Abode rstricted turf anyhow, not
that I know of and not that I intend to -- but anyhow I was in
exile from the Abode.

Once Dorothy Day exiled me from the Catholic Worker Farm, in
Tivoli, New York. for allegedly sleeping with a woman who was
staying there, though that was the night that we did not sleep
together, she had twisted an ankle or something and at night I
just walked into the main house where she lay on a couch, to
stroke her hair on so forth.  But anyhow, this lovely young
Catholic couple who lived nearby said, Don't worry Steve, she
exiled Amnon Hennessey a dozen times.  And some time later I
chanced to meet Dorothy Day on one of those Dome-Car trains that
run from Chicago to the SouthWest, and we had a nice long talk
about this and that, and it was just like talking to a
contemporary.

So anyhow, I went to Israel in a huff -- I mean, if you've still
got a card in your hand, might as well play it -- and in the
background, my first order of business was to get back to the SO -
- without having to go through that ooky  psychotherapy of course -
- I mean really, they ask all sorts of peersonal questions, who
needs the aggravation.  A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do,
etc.

So it was all of 4 years later -- "quelle perdue de temps" as PVK
would say.  So I go to a payphone in Jerusalem, and call the SO in
Suresnes, and get Satchada Poinderry or whatever her name was --
quite a person, Latifa told me -- and ask her, in France, about
the Camp, and she says in effect they don't know yet, but it will
be near Lugano.  So I get a boat from Haifa -- it turns out that
my check bounces, and the ferry line is going to have me arrested
or something when I get off the boat in Athens, and Eliahu talks
to them and says, don't worry, I'm sure the check will be paid the
next time you put it through -- and it turns out that I miss the
boat at a stop on what of those little church islands -- I forget
the name for the moment -- one of my best poems is about that, I
was reading Auden's imitation of Byron at the time, two excellent
influences.
"I'm writing for the isle of Tilos where / I've rather
unexpectedly 'de-barque'd' / if one can call it that; in fact
quite weary /I from 3 nights on a double-diesel ferry / and
finding by the gods own luck a place / that still holds a bit of
that fleeting attic grace /
So anyhow it is only the next day that I get to Athens, and go to
the port, and walk onto the boat, and find my luggage just where I
left it, and walk off the boat with it unchallenged, and hail a
taxi and go on to Patra and then I think to Brindisi, and then on
up to Lugano.
In Lugano there is a tourist bureau to book rooms, and I ask the
woman for a quiet room, and she says there is no quiet room in
Lugano -- this was the time of some soccer finale, with cars of
fans driving up and down and honking.  And then she books me into
the Aurora hotel, which is a short walkway down from the train
station, and I ask them for a room without bath, and they say they
think they have one, and I am shown into this incredibly high-
ceiling room with great French doors overlooking the garden, and
some sort of most old-fashioned large bed, and they say, will this
do.  So that evening I call Suresnes again, and say to the
answering machine I am here now and by the way where is this camp,
and the next morning Sathada Poindroin calls me back at breakfast
time and says, it is above Acqwacalda.  So then I assk the Hotel
desk, where is Aquacalda, and they tell me, and I go go up there,
and leave my bags, all of them, at the Allbergo, and we walk up
toward the trail, and I tell people, I guess it is this way, and
they say, we think walk on a bit more, and we do, and we get
there, and later so does my luggage.

Oh also, when I get to Biasca I see the buses and I say to myself,
I am sure they do not go where I want to go so I should walk into
town, but then for some reason I go up to the bus and get on it
anyhow, or maybe i just ask directions, tho real men never ask
directions. and anyhow so I get to Aquacalda.
And in the morning prayers we say, who guides the stops of man,
and surely that trip illustrates it, for had I guided my own
steps, and not been pushed off my path a few times, I wll might
never have gotten there.  But also it is said, you must take the
first step, and then the forces of heaven will rush down and over
to assist you, but only if you have taken the first step as if
there was no one on heaven or earth to do it for you.

Well, that was the first week of the first Zenith Camp in
Switzerland.  They had tried to dig privics, but there was too
much rock, so they hired privicies, which were up on a hill.

Harvey had a bandaged hand, and was carrying slops down from the
pvivy, I think.  I told him, don't do that, you might get it
infected.  I had been in Vietnam, maybe there was something he
regretted doing, but that's not how to do pennance.  I mean, who
needs that Christian idiocy.

Rinata said before I left, be careful not to open up your soul
when the Germans are around, they give PVK a very hard time, all
that Sturm und Drang.  So I planned to not stay for the 2nd week,
which was a silent retreat, English-German I think.
I do not know whether or not that was good advice.
The Germans were washing pots, because there were not many people
and pots need to be washed.  I did not help, because we have a
score to settle with Germans.

Modern Germany is exemplary in its opposition to anti-Semitism.
Well, they'd better be.
The Austrians, in contrast, are unregenerate.
Germany should pay reparations for a thousand years and then turn
itself into a marina.
Claudia said, Germany should not have re-industrialized.  She
said, I do not feel guilty for what happened, but I do feel
responsible.
A German in Hamburg, a philo-Semite I think, said to me, here it's
as if the Jews can do no wrong.
A few years later I washed lots of pots at Zenith.
But I work quite fast and very funky, which puts some folks off.

Anyhow, that week, we had some of every kind of precipitation, and
some of each of it came into my tent.
Fortunately I had pitched my tent on a slid incline and skew, so
the water ran down to the lower-right corner and stayed there, so
I just tucked my feet up, bringing the sleeping bag with me, when
I slept.
The Talmud says, do not live where no dog barks.  And I think it
also says, do not live where no cock crows.  I add, do not live
anywhere where you can't piss out the front door.

I got to singing, "When I get off of this mountain / there's one
thing I'm gonna do ---- " >(Gone to cripple creek / she sent me /
if I sprang a leak / she mends me / I don't have to speak / she
defends me / a drunkard's dream if I ever did see one" )

The day before I was going to leave, which was the day before the
start of week 2, Kulie and Barkat showed up.  They were amongst
the founders of the Abode.  Kulie once ran the printing press,
which was in the basement of the old barn.  And he was once works
commissioner, which is a job that rotates, so no-one gets on a
power trip with it.  And he once built a raft for the pond.  He
said, if you lle on it  and wwatch the stars come out, that's
great for the subtle body.
He decided to built a house.  He made plans that were pretty
elaborate, all solar heated and what-not.  They said, we can't
support this, its too elaborate.  So he build it anyhow, all by
himself.  A very beautiful house, all wood I think.  Maybe the
most beautiful house at the Abode, tho there are other very nice
ones too.
Somoene said, when Kulie says he will do something, he does it.
Barkat had trouble getting pregnant, and lost a tube.  I told her,
shoot to the right.  She said, I love it.  I told her, have lots
of children.  She would be a good mother, even now, even if they
are all adopted.
Kulie moved to Boston, to Jamaica Plain, next to that mansion on
the slum-line that Saphira and Puran scored for the Boston Sufi
House.  It faces the black ghetto and the elevated subway line,
but if you walk in the other direction your are in yuppie heaven
and come to Jamaica Pond.  And then if you continue you are in
Brookline and can buy lox and bagels and poppyseed cakes and lots
of Jewish books.

In the living room, which is the meditation room,  I saw a copy of
Kitov's Book of our Heritage.  That is one of the really solid,
basic Jewish texts.  The language sounds just about too pious, but
behind that piety is real depth.
                                                  
Kulie moved to Boston, with Barkat, to work on Puran's windmill. 
I'm sure Puran is a genius, but for whatever reason the windmill
did not quite make it, even tho Kulie went back to school and got
an engineering degree.
Also Puran has not emerged as one of the leading intellectuals of
the Sufi movement, and I don't really know why not.
PVK once said, Puran is always trying to systematize my teaching,
and I always keep changing the system.
I always though of Puran, if he saw a mountain, he would walk
right up the side of it, he would not take the trail.  Me, I
always take the easiest way up I can, even it is the highway with
hotdog stands.  That's how I walk up toward Lucamagno -- if the
highway is easier than the trail, take the highway.

Munir Voss is like that too.  A really nice guy, but when it comes
to a style of teaching, he's too rough for me.

I could never listen to any of the other teachers at Zenith. 
After listening to PVK, even the nicest of them -- like Feizy, and
Saki -- seemed crude in contrast.

So anyhow, Kulie and Barkat had come from Spain, and had a bottle
of Rioja, and offered me to join them for a drink, but I didn't. 
I'm often pure at the wrong times.  So the next day I left.  I
could hear PVK on the loudspeaker, teaching, as I had my pack on
and was ready to walk out.  I would not walk away while he
speaking.  But then he paused, and I walked over the rim and
started down.

First I went to the left side of Switzerland, to the Matterhorn,
then I went to the right side, to Zermez, which is the national
park.  
I walked up to the base of the Matterhorn and slept that night in
the "Hut", which is a large bunk-house with hot food etc.  but to
climb the Matterhorn is technical, and I could not consider that.

Some guy had gotten killed on the mountain, and the helicopters
came to take him off.  His family I think it was was there,
watching.  As soon as the helicopter came back down, there walked
briskly back to wherever they had to go.

I took a little sunrise excursion up the mountain, there would be
a breakfast buffet afterwards.  It was a nice sunrise, over all
that snow.  Very colorufl.   A voice in my mind said, that is the
meaning of Zahir.  Which is the name PVK gave me.

But I think that's maybe not quite my real Sufi name.
For one thing, I didn't really want an Arabic name, what with
being Jewish, I would have preferred someething Atlantean, since I
love the water.
Maybe I will call myself David henceforth.  With the Hebrew
pronounciation, of course. When Aziza showed up in 1999 I re-
introduced myself as Steve, but she was rushing to leave, and
said, How do you do, David.
So anyhow, it was at an Abode Camp, and they said PVK would not be
giving names thereafter, so I signed up to get one, or whatever
you do.  But right after class, I rushed down the hill to
transcribe something.  And it turned out that PVK had asked that
everyone who wanted a name be interviewed by him beforehand -- I
mean, sit or stand or something silently before him, or whatever.
So the next day, when I came back to get my name, he said, I'm
sorry, I just don't recall you -- and he offered an apology -- I'm
sorry, so many people -- 
Though of course PVK would not forget things -- 
He once said to someone -- I've seen you before -- I never forget
a soul -- 
So anyhow, there I am back in the line, or hanging out by the line
or something, and my kinswoman, even if she don't want to admit
it, Latifa Amdur is ahead of me, or I tell her to go ahead of me,
to be initiated in the healing order.  She could be pretty brusque
to me sometimes.  There was once a raffle for a quilt at the
Abode, and she won -- Barkat said, are you related to my friend
Latifa -- and so when she showed up I said someting like, I think
we're distant family, and she said, this is my family.
A few times she turned her attention upon me.  When she does that,
it is her entire attention.
So anyhow, things were just about over and I was ready to go, and
Latifa comes back and says, Steve, PVK will see you now.
So that's how I got that name, and it's a good one, with a lot of
use, and I have tried to live up to it, what with all these
transcriptions, and I will work more on archiving, but as I sat on
the beach on Rodos, which was a pretty dirty place from which to
be trying to pick up revelations, it did occur to me that this was
maybe not really my name.

And after I got, when I thought, but I didn't really want an
Arabic name, a voice said in my mind, we'll have to change it
then, but then another voice said in my mind, your father is very
pleased with it, so I never asked for another.

I mean, I just can't handle inner voices, I can't tell the good
guys from the bad guys.
PVK once remarked, in reponse to a thought of mine I think, that
the good guys, "don't order one about".
And when I was flipping out at New Buffalo, and of course hearing
lots of voices, I told Gail Duncan, and she said, It's ok, as long
as you don't do what they say.

All I can say is -- if an inner voice tells you to do something,
or not to do something, first check that this makes sense on the
rational level.  If you find no objections to it on that level,
you might do it.

Well so anyhow, as the sunrise is breaking over that vista of
snowy mountains, a voice said, and that is Zahir.  Meaning, the
epiphany, meaning, he who makes manifest the light.
So of course that is what transcribing and inputting and archiving
PVK  teachings does, so its not a bad job, not at all.

Maybe its not quite the right job for me, maybe it was not quite
my destiny, but it is a good job.

PVK once said, that was in England when also I was flipping out --
I seem to have done that rather too often, there must be somewhat
better ways to deal with stress and challenges and all that -- so
he remarked, as I considered, as I often have, asking for a job in
the SO Office in Suresnes, "There are not enough good jobs to go
around."

The trust fund I have, which I deeply resent for withholding
empowerment from me, does mean that if I ever am, or had been,
offered a good job I would not have to refuse it just because it
didn't include pay.

I used to say, there is no  problem finding a good job in Israel,
the only problem is getting paid for it.

Once a voice said to me, You have to live with your good deeds as
well as with your bad deeds. 

My father once remarked to me that he intended that my mother
receive half the inheritance, and we two children each receive a
quawrter.  It was the day he died, and someone asked me to sign
something saying that i agreed that it was morally certain that he
had intended that my mother received the entire inheritance, and I
was overwhelmed with feeling contrite, for I had been freaking out
-- I often think that one of my weakenssees is that in an impending
crisis I perceive a possible future, and mistake it for the
present, or for a certainty -- but such foresight should be no
more than a "warner of coming dangers" -- a cue to turn to prayer
and whatnot.

In any event, my mother did deal most honorably and generouly in
the matter of inheritance.
If I had gotten money then, I would have bought land in Maine,
where we used to live, for her to go to.
I had long wanted to buy land in Maine, but never had the money. 
My grandmother left us each I think 2000 dollars, and I did intend
to use it for that, and once even asked about the possibility, up
near Port Clyde or Ellsworth, which is north of the Boothbay
region, but it really wasn't enough money by then, tho no doubt it
had been when she wrote her will.  

Well, these are things I suppose I've wanted in some sense down on
record, tho I don't know if I want anyone to read them.

At the moment what I would like is a hotdog, with mustard.
In honor of Shabat, I spared myeelf asking for food at Honest
George's this evening.   Did take an apertif and a bottle of soda
water though, but didn't linger to drink it in the Restorante.

I'm sure Honest George believes that if only I would disappear,
his world could be made clean and neat and nice with lots of
silver coins coming in every day.  Bit of a faggot that.
But then again, I don't shower or change clothes while I'm up
here.  Might wind up with iceicles on my back.  So I wait till I
go down to a hotel below frostline.

In Zernez, that year, I climbed up a bit on the trails, and saw
those delicate white alpine flowers, and also some of the wild
animals, the little deer and the larger -- I don't recall if
they're moose, I think not -- 

I also went back to Zernez this year, and took a bus up to that
pass hotel that I had walked up to, which was witin a day or so of
closing until Janauary, but it was too late and tool cold to hike
higher, so I saw nothing.

Did buy a Jerusalem Post weekly in a newsstand in Zernez though. 
Only place I've seen it in Switzerland, except for Zurich.  And
there just in the main train station, and at the Jewish bookshop.

I mean gvalt, no wonder Swiss journalists have such a strange idea
about Isreal.  They're building their image from CNN, and Israel
doesn't even challenge that.

So ok, that was my first year at a SO Alps Camp, and the first
season of Zenith.

Next summer I was flipping out over Amy or listening to the
minaret at 3 in the morning while carrying a loaded Uzi, or
whatnot, and so sitting on the beach at Netanya willing my soul to
fly across the water because the old bod was not moving with
alacrity.

Year after that I came back to Zenith.  I'd written ZR for a
volunteer position, but somehow I didn't think he'd confirmed it,
so I walked in the 4th week rather than lst week of workcamp.  He
said, You were supposed to be here a month ago.  I answered,
spontaneously, I'm here now, and he accpeted that.  ZR may have
limitations, but he often recognizes and over-rides them.
Merlin was there, and remarked, with ZR there, I remember you were
at the Abode -- you put cleaning solution in your eyes -- which is
true enough, but the bottle was sitting on top of the water heater
in the shower room, with a nice green label saying it was organic,
when all that really meant was that this was a creation of organic
chemistry, which is the manufacture of very large molecules for
weird plastics and whatnot.

Anyhow, that did work out ok, I went down to the Abode, went into
New Lebanon -- Yaquin took me as I recall, so for whatever
quarrels I may have with him, he did save me -- so the doctor
takes much time to sluice out my eyes, and Fatah Miller no doubt
added some healing prayers, and thank heaven, there was no damage,
just a bit of blurring for a few days.  Though also, as soon as I
realized my mistake, I did act clearly and decisively to ask for
and obtain the necessary help.

That was the spring I was breaking up with Ciel.  I suppose most
folks find somewhat less dramatic ways to resolve relationships. 
Something else that I should have done when, or rather if, I grew
up.   Cousin Joyce once remarked to me, you sometimes seem to find
some difficulty in ending relationships.

Welll anyhow, to wrap this story up, Merlin drops a remark that
might have impacted negatively on my employability, and I brush it
off with, "That was not a good year", and ZR accepts that too.
He could be surprisingly tolerant, and willing to give people a
second third or almost a zillionth chance.

It is the wake for Dashiel Hammewtt, and someone says, Lillien,
can I do anything for you, and she says, can you bring him back to
life, and they say, gently, No, and she says, then I'll have a ham
sandwich.  With mustard.
My mother told me that one, as I recall.

One must go on, and try to do something, however little.  For
onself and for others.  Though we fail our great challenges, one
can't wallow in the failure, that don't help nothing.

And, as I've often written, Adrian Gomez once said, it is great
chutzpah to suppose that your so bad that G_d has no use for you.

By the way, I forgot to mention , Amy is Amy Lillien Shames, and
she is descended from the renown Zionist art nouveu painter, David
Lillien.  I think David was he first name.  One often sees his
work reproduced in the Jerusalem Post.
                                               

Incidentally , and speaking of hearing innner voices, I seem to
write phontically, in the sense that I first compose the lines
speaking them in my mind.  I notice that because many of my typos
or phonetic.  Like, I just wrote 'when' for 'one'.

Well, I don't suppose that going to Zenith changed much year to
year.  I took to debarking in Rodos, where one could walk around
the customs authorities, tho I had nothing to hide.    I would
visit at the Old Synagouge for  few days, breaking the trip, and
then take a local ferry to Athens.  It was easier to taake the
train from Piraeus to Patra than the bus from Athens, which
required a taxi ride.  In 1988 one could take a boat from Patra
only to Brindisi, but then the line was extended to Ancona, and
then to Venice, saving one the hassle of a long ride on crowded
Italian trains.

The first time I saw Venice from the boat, I did not even stop
there overnight, it had rather a corrupt vibe, especially after
the open ocean.   Subsequently I would stop, usually for Shabat,
staying near the old Jewish Ghetto, which is near the railroad
station.  Venice fascinates me, but I wouldn't precisely say I
like it.

Some years I would stop off on Kephalonia, in the Ionic, off the
coast of Patra, for a few days.  Greener and much less touristed
than Rodos, with opportunities for hiking.

-----------------------------

Shabat morning:  The staff at Honest George's are having eggs for
breakfast.  I did not know they knew how to cook them.
In a few hours the customers, those who haven't frozen on the
trails, will be offered the option of eating lukewarm boiled fried
corn meal, which is polenta, no doubt with a garnish of pigs'ass . 
Today is a great competition, and the loudspeakers play Italians
trying to sound like black rappers.  At least they get the sneer
down easy.


Once I asked Honest George for an omlette for breakfast, and he
said, wait until evening. 

They blame us for invading Iraq, but they can't even make buttered
toast for breakfast.  Much less with a few fried eggs.  It's quite
true, this is a decadent civilization.

And as for a normal Israeli breakfast, with soft white cheese and
tomatoes and cucumbers and yogurt and boiled eggs and maybe a bit
of herring -- they won't even consider it until the last soldier
leaves the occupied territories.
I mean, a poor people, by definition oppressed, has at least the
right to live in a region free of Jews.
We violate the rights of Palestinians simply by standing in sight
of them.
Or so the goyim, with their polished plastic manners, presuppose.

Well, not much more to say.  Once on an Italian train, which are
always overcrowded, the 2nd Class anyhow that being all I know, I
gave my seat to a nun.  She smiled, seeming most grateful.  The
Papacy is wasted on the Italians.

Once in Gorda I passed some nuns, coming from the Church I
suppose.  They were singing Swiss yodels to each other, and to the
mountains.  Incredibly beautiful.

Once in Campra some nuns came by, with a picnic lunch, and I
brought them some chairs and maybe a little table, and a bottle or
two of bottled water.
Christianity is wasted on the goyim.  Jesus said that, or one of
his crew.  "The word will be taken away from you, and given to the
goyim."  Pearls before swine I suppose.

Some guy was courting a woman, ineptly.  Shatiya said, You should
treat her right.  I would.

Saki had gotten married that past winter.  Latifa saw me and said,
well Steve, you missed your chance to marry Saki.
She said, Saki said, he is safe -- physically, emotionally, and
intellectually.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

The week I met Ciel, TIME magazine had an article on Herpes.  I
finally got to asking Ciel a question.  She said, You've been
reading TIME magazine.

Since after adolescence, I have never understood what people saw
in kissing.  Much less open-mouthed, though it did seem a signal
of source.
Through adolescence, I took kissing as the quintessence of
romanticism, which for me it was.

I do miss all-night foreplay.
Consummation seems to me merely an obligation, to one's peer group
if not to one's woman.

Nancy said, it was the cuddling together that to her was most
attractive.
I was wont to roll over afterwards and withdraw into my own space. 
A woman said, please continue to hold me.  So I teached an arm
back and over her.  She said, thank you.  Some weeks afterward she
broke up with me, though I don't know why, and rather resented it
as the time.  An unjustifiable theft of personal property, or some
such.

And Mike Nichols says, it is hard to say something new and true
about sex.

I had planned to take piano lessons, but at the last minute I
chose clarinet instead.  
The clarinet teacher, Mr. Shmaltz, came to our house once a week
to give me a lesson.  I suppose that sounds most aristocratic, but
I suppose he was as poor as we were, and didn't charge much.  My
mother said, you can always say that you play clarinet with
shcmaltz.  A very yiddish expression, I think, meaning something
like, smoothly, almost too smoothly.

One of the exercise pieces was Humoresque.  My mother said, as we
were talking in the kitchen, I will tell you some words, but maybe
you will never forgive me:

"Passengers will please refrain / from flushing toilets while the
train / is in the station; darling I love you.
" When the train is at the station / we encourage constipation" 

Et al.  I have long wanted to post those words in railroad car
privies.  To this day, for all the hi-tech, they still just swing
open a flap and dump the poop on the track.
The sea-ferries use some sort of vacumm-flush holding tank system.

When first I came to Rodos the boats would discharge everything in
the harbour, polluting the sea being illegal.  The Rodos harbour
smelled quite bad.  Brindisi, as I recall, was worse.

A few years later Rodos town strictly forbad that, and I think now
they say fairly that the beaches in Greece, on the islands anyhow,
are among the cleanest in the world.

It is said that the Mediterranean is a nearly dead sea, and it
does have that feel.  I wanted it to be a real ocean, like sitting
by the shore in Maine, but it is not.  There is a deadness in the
air, not a freshness.  Even though the fishing boats still go out.

Durrell said, the pebble beach of Rodos is possibly the most
beautiful in the world, and they likely was once true.  The stones
are volcanic, having rolled from the volcanic isle of Nissyros,
maybe 30 miles away, and become highly polished in the process,
and very smooth, with lovely random coloured lines, nicer than
almost any modern art.

Each year the town of Rodos dumps truckloads of coarse sand on top
of those rocks, so the German tourists "of a certain age" can come
and put their tits out to attract a gigilo or two.
At night it is rather the done thing to bonk on the beach, which
did rather distractd from my naptime for a few years.  Once there
was a couple on either side of me, the women, hookers I assume,
like bookends.  I went back to sleep and then they went away.

No doubt they had considered it a minor thrill to do it before an
old bum.  Ah, the culture of western civilization.  The Dutch,
they say, very much resent the presence of the Muslims, who
shamelessly flaunt old-fashioned morality.
I doubt that there is anything which the Dutch would deem kinky. 
"A tube as bent as a Dutchman's candle", or so said Jarry, in the
time of Dada. (the Evergreen translation of Pere Ubu, to be
precise.)

On the beach on Rodos, the privies were locked at night.  One
winter someone had kicked in the door, for which I was mos
grateful.  Even us bums like propriety.  "No man does evil but
through ignorance", as Plato said.  Or from lack of a dime.

The Swiss railway stations usually charge a half-franc to poop,
though gentlemen may pee for free.
That used to be the case too in the USA, until someone brought a
court case and Justice decreed that it was human right to crap.
Whereupon there was always one free stall, although often
minimally maintained.

In Israel, one should always carry a little packet of kleenex in
the back pocket.  There are many poor people in Israel, and I
suppose some obtain their toilet tissue from the public
facilities.  Or so it still was when I came there in the late 80s. 
Now I suppose the poor are mostly the Ethiopians, and they are a
very noble people, with faultless manners and strict ethics, I
should say.   Well, they are a rural people, the last of the
civilized races I shouild say.

I don't think of much more to say about Zenith just now.

This double-pane window-door even keeps out the shlock rock.  Now
that's good construction.  And it seems so simply built.  That's
even better.

About 5 below today, or was.  Sun's out now.  Not much of a
competiton, just a few bunches of kids.  Maybe George will get
rich selling them his instant diced freedom-fried potatoes, and
then he will go the Caribbean on a one-way cruise and meet some
dusky buxom maiden if he likes those -- I mean, who could not,
especially after Gaugin -- I mean, no wonder they call them queers
for queer it is not to dally thus.

But thousand pardons gentle reader -- perhaps you would rather red 
of the time I cohabited with an ourang-otang.
See, this was in Belmont Senior High School and -- 
                                                                  

-----------

I was renting 103 at Modi'in and as usual wanted to go away for
the summer to Zenith in the Swiss Alps.

If Zenith had been held in a warehouse in Hoboken New Jersey I
doubt I would have been so drawn.

Someone once said to Ciel, perhaps at a wine-and-cheese party,
"I'm from New Jersey.
She responded brightly, 
"What Exit?"
Sounding like a Negro city urchin.  Or so she told the joke.

Patia looked up indignantly and said, "One more remark like that
and you'll never see the inside of me again."

We were in a little supermarket doing food shopping.  Ciel was
trundling along doing the real shopping, while I branched off to
other sections addressed myself to obtaining the delicacies. 
A woman came up to Ciel and said in tones of shock, "That man is
eating raw hamnburger."  "Yes+", said Ciel brightly, "that's my
Boyfriend!".  
Or so the told me.

I mean, you have to know how much light she could project. 
Scarcely even trying.
Those delicate features, and close-cropped off-blonde Afro hair,
nearly glistening, and big round eye-glasses -- 

For all that she was serious, even sad, and in chronic pain from
back problems.  She had been molested as a girl -- I did not press
for details, though one might guess -- and as a young adult taught
herself to be orgasmic.
As I said in a poem:
"She was very strong.  I said, I'd like to take a pill and be
strong like you.  She said Don't, they're bitter."

Maybe I should go by Honest George's and eat something.  It has
been a few days, if memory holds.  I'm living mostly on leftover
Rivella, anything else is too much hassle.  I mean, either walking
down to Olivone or sloughing off the contumnley from daring to
venture into Honest George's Restorante.  Maybe they don't like
Jews.

Atum O'Kane said, he always tried to convey the most favorable
impression possible of the Jewish people, in order to forestall
anti-Semitism.  I thought, and a good thing too it is, between the
two of us we may break even.  

Thomas Atum O'Kane.
"Everything he knew about Yiddishkeit could have been poured into
a thimble, with room left over for a short dry martini."

They asked me, are you coming to the Tent to hear Atum make
Shabos.  I mumbled something like, oh, I suppose I'll just do my
own more orthodox version.

I thought, I must at least make kiddish available, in case there
is someone here who needs it.  
I felt, if I commit myself to doing that, I can I hope claim
permission from my own authorities to get out of this miserable
Moshav from the heat of the cloudless summer, and sit in the Alps
and listen to some real teachings, unemcumbered with all that
halachic and mythologic trapping.

For many years it did indeed seem to be that I was being held back
in Israel, quite against my will, and that maybe there was
someting I had to do to get free.  I would think, maybe I am
obliged to first take a mikveh, that is, to immerse onself naked
in water, usually cold water, and so sometimes I would play games
with that, refusing to do it, and sometimes too I would try it.
Once in a canal in England, and then some guy walked by but just
smiled and walked on.
And I would sit on the shore of Kineret, just below En Gev, and
not do or do it.

I drank the water from the Kineret.  I guess one should not do
that.  But where I was was a rocky sort of shale bottom, and the
water tasted fine.
Some guy from En Gev came by a few times, he is one of the great
old Zionists, who has written booklets on the biblical Kineret,
and he seemed to say it was ok to be drinking that water.
I was very hot in the day, over 40 I suppose, and I would try to
scrunge under the shade of little waterline shrubs.
The kibutz has a date-orchard there, with some banana bushes, and
the dates were ripe all summer, so I would pick and eat them, and
occasionally some bananas, though I feared for the sprays.
I do not seem to have been bent on self-destruction, for in all
little matters I took reasonable and rational care of myself.
But anyone attatched to a great spiritual teacher must fear to
encounter him, and even seek excuses and devices to avoid it.  For
to see one's teacher is to risk seeing one's true self, and so to
see all one's failures, and to see the absolutely urgency and
imperativeness of transcending them, and that is the leap into the
Void across the Abyss that poor old Kierkegaard interminably
natters about.  For him it was just a matter of marrying some
dumping old Danish broad and settling down as a country parson,
and he never did it, he just kept on writing and writing and who
really wants to read all that "over and over and over" again, as
Frank Sinatra sings so short and concisely.           

When Sinatra died, I said to Alev, who I admire as much as any
singer and more than most, that was a great man  -- or a great
singer anyhow -- and she agreed.

I think it is in Thourgh the Looking Glass that one of madwomen, a
playing card come to life, says, You must beat time, you must not
it beat you.  Or Richard Wilbur:  "But Nijinsky / didn't have the
art to make the rules / for learning to loiter on air; he 'simply'
said / 'I simply leap -- and pause -- '/
Oy, and I call myself a poet.
So Sinatra can do that, and does -- they say it was because he
practiced swimming underwater to learn to hold his breath and long
long time -- Recall "If somebody loves you " -- 
And Alev can do that do, as I recall, and sometimes I try to
though I can't pretend to have a singing voice, except alone in
the shower -- 
I mean, I blame it all on Bach.  Who ever needed metered rhythm
anyhow.  And all those bars and beats, what does that have to do
with singing music -- 

Well, I'm like a cat up a tree, branching and branching and not
looking back, so soon I can't remember where I was coming from or
what I was trying to do.

In Hingham, where we had gone for summer vacation during the War,
because I suppose my father could only get away from MIT on
weekends, as he was working on a project of great urgency, where
even an hour of delay could be said to have cost American lives --
I mean really, the crime of Hiroshima/Nagasaki was that we didn't
get it done in time to drop it on Berlin instead -- "and then you
would all have six fingers and glow in the dark" as I could say
today to many of my best friends, if I can be said to have friends
-- well, there are some who hold me in hiigher regard than I will
ever hold myself , and maybe rightly too, much good it is likely
to do any of us -- 

So anyhow, our cat ran up a tree, and my father went up after him
-- he must have been physically quite a ppowerful and competent
person, for all that he became a bit frail approaching 60 -- 
and the cat scratched or bit my father -- but fortunately in those
days they had penicillin, it may be that he had to pull a string
or two to get it, I don't know -- but a professor at MIT would
have carried some wait, especially in wartime, for all that he
would barely have been an assistant, and hence untenured,
professor -- or maybe not even that then, just a Lecturer or
Instructdor -- 

So then they or we called the fire department, who went up the
tree with their long hook-and-ladder ladder, and brough down the
neurotic little animal that we loved, and I remember my mother
cried, and I asked why, and she said, I am crying with relief --
or joy, or some such.

She says that once I came back from school -- kindergarten it must
have been, or maybe nursuery school -- and said, "I'm not going
back to school again."  She said -- "Why not, Stephen."

 -- You see, even at a relatively young age I was being accorded
the respect due a member of the intellectual community.  Which
says little about me, but much about my mother.
You see, a child never thinks of himself as a child, just as a
somewhat smaller adult, with a better-developed taste for sweets
perhaps, and somewhat immune to the follies of larger people.
Amd if you honor that, as so few do -- R. Shlomo speaks obliquely
to that point -- "oh that silly baby, I'm much bigger and smarter
than him" -- but if you honor that, this may help the child to
grow up believing in the essential harmony and rationality of the
universe, or world, or society, or whateve it is we thik we live
in.  That, and growing up in a safe country environment, where no-
one can intrude who has not been accepted as part of your world.
I did that, first in the house in Cambridge with its large yard,
on a quiet old street, and with a school to go to every day that
was very much a closed coherent and very reasonable community. 
And in spending the entire summer up in Maine, on a house a mile
down a dirt road from the nearest neighbor, with no gas or
electricity, so it really was our own world.
My father would come up for his 6-week vacation, tho he would
spend much of the time in his study, doing calculations on a
mechanical crank-up calculator -- but also come down sometimes and
play badminton with us, and at the end of every summer go into
town, that's Boothbay Harbour, and carefully select the best
available steak from the butcher -- which was not something we
could casually afford - and back at the house make a good fire in
the fireplace, and when it burned down to coals put on the steak.

You see, we had are little family rituals, and that helps too.

So anyhow, as my mother told me the story, I answered, "Because I
know it all."

Well, Plato says so too.

Well, where was I.

My sister-in-law the social worker would maybe like to see that I
am demonstrably senile so they can put me away in a nice clean
little box and not have to worry about me any more.
Well, that's not doubt quite untrue and unfair, but it would make
a nice setup line for a short story. 
And I would continue -- so I taunt them and tease them, like a
circus slack-rope walker, a clown on a slack-rope,  pretending to
fall and then pulling himself back up again.
Pity Nietzche was such a prat, he might have said a few more
things worth reading.
As if one's paramount responsibilty to friends and relations was
merely to keep them physically safe.
Physical safety is a most a prerequisite, but often not that
either.  Like Jesus said, spiritual survival is much more
important, regardless of the physical risks.
PVK saw that, of course, though with what sorrow he must have
watched his students going out into dangers and defeats.
He once remarked, at the close of Zenith week, "My crown is thorns
-- but I am dancing."
He once remarked, in effect, I think I have it down in
transciption, 'but I try not to let myself fall into self-pity,
because then I am no good to anyone'.
So when he saw himself getting close to self-pity, he would try to
make himself do something he enjoyed.
Someone one asked him, Pir, what do you really want to do for
yourself, you do so much for the rest of us, and all he could
answer was, conduct the Bach B-Minor Mass, so then he did , for
many years.  Though I don't feel that was what he most wanted for
himself.  He once remarked that "I do like a shampoo in the
morning".  And he once said, in effect, "If you no longer want to
live for yourself, live for others."  But I think that remark was
not essentially self-descriptive, but was directed mostly to those
in the audience who might have needed it, like me.

We're sitting at supper at Zenith, and Manaje tells a Winston
Churchill story.  "Winston, button up your fly."  "It's quite all
right my dear, a dead bird cannot fly."  Manaje said, That's
funny.  Mike said, That's tragic.

And now Mike has a new old lady, and they have adopted children,
and live on his farm in south France.  

Maybe Manje bought it for him, she was a refugee from Iran, so
maybe had been rich under the Shah and maybe got out money.  Or
maybe Mike, having finally demanded "real money" for having
designed and creatied the physical infrastructure of Zenith and
building it up every year -- as ZR somehow designed and built up
the administrative infrastructure -- both of them geniuses of
sorts, and cool about it too, retreting sometimes into aloofness
and irony, but never putting on airs and almost never pulling rank
-- "well, hardly ever" -- 

So one day I say something about the Jewish people being enemies
with the Iranians, and a bit later Manaje says, I'm sorry we're
enemies, and I was chagrinned and said but I always thought of you
as a refugee -- and hence preumably more or less on our side -- so
anyhow, one evening I push my way into the closed booktent,
because of course I took it upon myself to guard Zenith, since I
was an Israeli and this it what Israelis do, or why else have one
if you don't want him to do guard duty, and since you have one I'm
obviously supposed to do guard duty, against the wind and rain and
infidels -- so anyhow, there's Manaje ina would-be private tete-a-
tete with her daugher, who has come to visit, and Manaje, with
standard upper-class manners, says, this is Steve who lives in the
Holy Land, and I say, trying to match her courtesy, yes, some call
it the holy land, and some call it Palestine, and some call it the
land of Israel, and her daughter, with that American innocence,
says, oh yes, we have a girl from Israel in my class.
That was somewhere just up from New York city, maybe she even went
to Fieldston, the Ethical Culture Society school that may mother
went to.
Well, her daughter was applying to colleges then, and one was
Boston University, where my brother taught Business -- Operations
Management, I suppose -- part-time in night school, and I had said
to Manaje, if you like I can ask my brother to put in a word for
her, and Manje was surprised and touched and thanked me.

Well, I hope she did ok.  She had been ill one year.  When she was
at Zenith, the wife of the boss as it were and so not obliged to
work etc., she did go to significant effort to do nice things for
the work crew, at her own expense I'm sure.  Like making a
barbecue.

I step outside this electric heated hot air shack.  The width, as
Mark Twain wrote of his ship cabin in Innocents Abroad, is
"scarcely room enough to swing a cat".  The length is maybe that
one one side of a tennis court, but maybe less. At least there is
wood panelling, and one window as well as the window on the door.
So outside, the mountains are bleak and austere, in the pale grey
light of an overcast day, and all dusted with snow, a cover of a
few inches I suppose, but before I can relax into tht austerity I
hear the music, from which I've been shielded by that double-
glazed window door, otherwise I could not write at all.
The music at the moment is shlock mambo.
Weekend goofers in their bright tights.
Well, it could be worse, they could be Americans.

I think I was trying to make a few points, but I forget what now. 
I could scroll back up this doc and find out, but with all this
hot air heat, I do not feel that I have the energy just now.
Take me to the rest home, lock the door and pocket the key in a
clean white apron, and put my pablum on to boil.  I won't drop out
the window, maybe. Not today anyhow, maybe.  Unless I read
something upsetting in The New York Times and need to go out to
save the world again.

As a child, I did like all those super-heros, or heros anyhow,
comic books.  And as a young adult of psychedelic pretentions too. 
Though then our heros took on the modern style.  Teen-age mutant
ninja turtles and all that.  Dr. Stephen Strnge, The Incredible
Hulk, and all that.  Someday they will put all Marvel Comics in a
museum.  Very strong graphics, and that was the least of it, they
were psychedelic parables, tho I can't say how good.  But we did
like them, and they did give a sense that "I would not be so all
alone" as Bob Dylan says.  An honest man, that.

Read Hemmingway's Snows of Killimanjaro last night.  He's good,
but not that good.  As he sees too clearly, success and money had
blunted his insight into the way that man must walk.  He becomes
self-pitying, and bitchy toward woman.  But much insight remains.
And much clarity of expression, though it falls off far from
crytalline.

Faggots should not have the right to vote, especially in the
Herald Tribune.  I mean what is this men's liberation, the
counter-attack against I Like Ike ?
"I learned to cry / Now I have to learn not to." I wrote that in
the 70s.  Fry me a pineapple, with a side of ham.

Once in Albuquerque I finally went to a Topless Bar, it was
somewhere up on Universsity east of the campus, with a big sign,
and good sized parking lot.  Orange and blue-lit tits as I recall. 
I mean really for that price the least one should expect is
Gaugin.  

Where's Dorothy Parker now that we really need her.  Stuffed into
a chair in the Algonquin.  And I think the wreckers came last
summer, and all that dust.

People want so little, and nobody sells it to them.  Like a high-
class whorehouse.

The former Chancellor of Germany was said to have had a taste for
Palantine Sow's Udder.  "Just when you thought it was safe to go
back in the water."

Honest George sold beef today.  Bully beef, probably been embalmed
in sodium nitrite since the last schooner docked in Basel, that
was shortly before the glaciers receeded.  With a nice cow-plop of
polenta, that I can eat if I don't think about it too long.
I get some Heineken in one of Honest George's shrinking bottles --
still holding at 250 cc I think, tho the tonic water's down to
200.  Set out in the cold for a little bit, its surpringly good. 
Clean taste.  I don't think I'd say as much for Honest George's
on-tap kickback beer -- Ergeleberry or some such.

"How long is a novel?"
"A hundred thousand words Ma'am."
"OK, I'm done." 

---------------------------------------------------------------
Campra, 19 Feb '05 . Shabat, 8 Adar A.  Overcase, no wind.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Well, there I was sitting at Maria's in the old city of Rodos --
the house was within the former Jewish quarter, and one does not
ask too closely how all  those houses have passed into Greek
hands, but if anyone has loyally supportd what little is left of
the Jewish commuity of Rodos -- that being not much more than
Lucia Soulam -- it is Maria PaapMikeles, who sleeps in her home
every night.  And I suspect htat is to shield Mrs. Soulam from
ghosts and memories, for Maria has no lack of places to sleep, and
little enough need for sleep anyhow, and no fears that ever I saw. 
She went thorugh the war on the adjacent island of Simi, with its
two monastaries, where I suppose they avoided almost all of the
German occupation.  That was her island, and why she came to
Rodos, and to the city of Rodos at that, I'm not sure.  Maybe to
eat.  In world war II the people of the town of rodos used to keep
their pet cats on a leash, whihc otherwise would have been eaten.

Someone asked, but why could the Jews of the town of Rodos not
have escaped into the hills of Rodos.  
I have not heard an answer to that question.

The Greeks will tell you much of how they defended their Jews
during World War II, and maybe and is true, maybe even mostly so,
and maybe also it is somewhat not true.

And if I do not now stop reading Thackery you will have to pack me
off to the Literary Society, which is a section of hell in which
the footnmanis forever late bringing the ptits fours for luncheon.
Vanity Fair is a book not to have fallen alseep over, the more so
if one intends upon awakening to resume typing.

Amd Truman Capote said of stream of consciousness writing, Taht is
not writing, it is type-writing.
Or so my mother told me.
Because only Ray Bradbury matches the elegaic lyricism of Other
Voices, Other Rooms. 

I mock the week-old reheated minestrone served up by Honest
George, each day bathed in a new barrage of microwaves.
But my own lines are no less re-re--used, and as inorganic too.
I have no idea anymore whether any of them were once true.  Like
the glass flowers in the Harvard Museum, works of great ingenuity
no doubt, but resembling notghing living except at best on the
surface.  A wandering goat could take no pleasure in having eaten
the lot of them, and would nees be reduced to nibling on the
formaldehyded fur of the embalm'd narwhals.
Whateer a narwhal was.

That was scarcely 10 minutes down Oxford street from where we
lived, and I often went to see it, was taken, rather, each time
quite bored by the excursion.

Shakespeare and the Bible are wased on the young.  But at Modi'in
the put kippas on 8-year-olds, and younger, and are most upset
when the silly little things fall off.

Whenever I see a kippa I think, you meally must have a mounting
embedded in the skull, upon which to moor it.   Or 'affix it'.

It was motzi Shabat, as I sat in Maria's courtyard.  I was at the
point of having to decide whether to take boat for Israel, there
to meet ZR, who was to have come with PVK, most confidentially for
PVK feared attack -- from Islamic fundamentalists, I suppose,
surely not from our side.  I had volunteered there to offer my
services as some sort of guide, neglecting to mention that I had
packed up and been packed out of my house at HaOn before I left. 
It is not so easy to come back to somewhere you live when you hve
no home there, one can't sustain oneself with the pretense of
being a tourist.

So truth to tell I would rather have returned to Switzerland, on
the usual route via Venice, but I was drawn in the opposite
direction too, for having given my word, however univinvited, no
doubt unneeded, and maybe unwanted.
But I was keeping my cool

So I tried to find inspiration, or revelation, or clarification of
some such Latinate excuse, in meditation, and made havdala not
over wine or beer, but rather a cup of flavoured sugar-water,
called soda-pop.
And traditionally one extinguishes the havdala candle in the cup
of wine, thereby doing less than no good to candle cup nor wine,
for reasons long obscured, so I tossed the last of the orange
soda-pop out into the courtyard, where it landed on a cat-
Scarcely a a good omen, as the shades of ancient Greeks no doubt
called out to me, or tried to.

At that point I sat down to meditation, whereupon meditation so
forefully that I stood up and rushed out to the farthest point on
the city beach, hoping thereby clearly to perceive the words as
well as the music.
And more or less stayed there for several years.
At times the words were clear and too much so, but at the cost of
inaction, I was so overwhelmed by the wonder of it all that I
coould scarcely get up to eat, which I did from trashcans, or to
buy a Herald Tribune, which I did for drachmas, tho that's not in
the Hermit's Handbook.  But there were some funny ongoing stories
then, like the submarine that burst to the surface with a
supercargo of VIPS, contributers to the Republican Party I don't
doubt, but unfortunately passed into daylight through a Japanese
fishing boat with a supercargo of students.
For which the Captain of the submarine found his career quite
sidetracked, and even had to offer an apology.

So you see that though somehow incapacitated, I was not then
irrational.  

I once read an article by O.K. Bowsma.  Something on
Wittgenstein's Brown Book if I recall.  He writes very well, in a
run-on sort of way, like an acrobat who keeps falling and falling
and always somersaulting and cacthing  himself up again.

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, sing for the note is o'er"
As stupid a line as ever I've heard.
So it seems that even in Shady Hill, that ideal society, I was
taught some shtuyot.
'Oh Brother -- no more shall I vex myself for the toffee I took
from you, for Jesus has come to redeem me from my sins.'
'That and a five-pound box of chocolates will get you off the
hook, if you don't do it again.'
The Rabbis taught -- before asking forgiveness from heven for your
sins on Yom Kippur, first be reconciled with your fellow man,
insofar as you can be.
And they taugh:  Who is forgiven a sin:  
he who repents it, makes restitution, and does not do it again.

"I'm in the mood for love -- just because you are near"
Dorothy Stoneman had a handsome chest and a nice smile and set in
the front left seat of Pancho Hennessey's German class.
Donovan, who later became a surgeon or some such, sat behind her.
He said, "Dorothy, are you in the nude for love -- just because I
am near."
She smiled and said nothing.
We did not learn very much German from Pancho Hennessey.
We called him Pancho Hennessey because he also taught Spanish.
We learned German in Gothic script, and read about Hans und Fritz.
"Und dann bekammt Hans und Fritz schlage."
This was about 1956.

"Therefore with joy our song shall soar -- in praise of G_d for
evermore."
We all sang that in Shady Hill.
It's a translation from a line to the tune in Bach's Wacht auf,
Ruft uns die Stimme.  
I suppose Luther wrote the German.
As strong a line as I know, a quintessence of Judaism.

At Shady Hill we also had songs from the Red Army.
And performed The Lonesome Train, which is so patriotic it must be
CP.
They say -- they must have been my mother -- that our 2nd grade
teacher, was or had been a Communist -- that is, a member of the
CP USA.
For all I know she may have been descended from Nathan Hale, who
spied upon the British in the Revolutionary War, and was hung for
it, and said, I only regret that I have but one life to give for
my country.
Noblesse olige and all that.  I mean, if it wasn't for Miss Hale's
ancestors, we could all now be eating toffee and treacle and
drinking tea in India -- I mean, with proper American management
one would never have had to divet the Colonies.  Nor license
MacDonald's and George Bush.  Though a more suitable successor to
King George II or III or whichever the congenital idiot was who
glew it, even Thackery could scarcely have designed.

The British had a spot of luck with Elizabeth, but apart from that
have not done much for manarchy.

There is scarcely a US president who would have lasted 10 minutes
in Israeeli politics -- nor 10 seconds in any other mideast
country.  Except JFK who had real class.

The Democrats keep putting up real men, and the Republicans keep
defeating us with cartoons.  Except Clinton, who was a real man
hiding behind a cartoon, but the cartoon won.  That's why we have
Junior Bush now.  A proper iconic portrait of Clinton would have
to show him with potbelly and unzipped fly.   There is no evidence
that Bushie ever did it more than once, and most economically at
that.
Whatever Americans want in a Presidential election, it is not a
CEO.  A king or a pope perhaps.  Or King of the High-School Prom.
The USA represents the degeneration of democracy into virtual
reality.  Shades of Plato's hell.

I slept out on the beach on Rodos every night, and was never
attacked.  It must have been that the local police chief was
protecting me.
Once, only, a guy try to take my wallet.  In that sort of
frictionless way that pickpockets have.  I awoke.  He threw sand
in my face.  But fortunately the sand was only little pebbles, so
it just bounced off.

Well, I should go back.
It was Dec 31, 1999, the eve of the Millenium.  It as the evening
that PVK would be conducting the Bach B Minor in Ulm, in the Great
Cathedral, which was surely the most important place to be during
the next 1000 years.  I mean, if PVK could not set those years on
the right track, why learn to read.  Besides, there would be a
free buffet after midnight.  So i was walking toward the airport,
which is the best I could do under the circumstances.  Though
perhaps I realized subconsciously that perhaps this was not
precisely the way one does such things nowadays.
I had wanted to walk from Switzerland to Ulm, and might even have
done so -- I could clearly envisage myself walking up the Strada
Romana acorss from Campra, perhaps with donkey and woolen cloak
and a servant or slave or two.  Perhaps I was confusing the coming
Millenium with the onset of the prvious one or two, but they
needing fixing too.
Just past the city limit of Rodos I saw a guy who gave me a most
evil look.
I turned off the road and onto the beach-- one is always safest
with nature, spiritually if not physically.  It was just before
sunset.  I passed a few seaside caves -- who knows what or who
they held -- and then lay down near one for a nap.

When I awoke, I was being hurried wheeled on a gurney into some
sort of examining room in an apparent hospital, with an huge
electronic cerebral scanning machine.  I was instantly alert, and
took a quick inventory of myself.  My mind was ok -- I have taken
various drugs, and can perceive their effects, and there were no
noticeable disruptions, from injury or anything else, my mind was
clear.  So I tried to tell them the scan was not necessary.
I did have a dislocated neck or something of the sort, so I could
barely raise my head, nor sit up without much care.  Apart from
that, I had only minor injuries, and nothing painful.  There was a
small laceration on my head that had been given 2 or 3 stiches.  I
had a bit of a scratch on my ass, a small laceration, nothing
significant.  No indication of rape.  (Eliahu had once told me of
having had to check himself for that, after drinking the wrong
mixed beverage in one of the lesser bars of Venice, and losing
memory of the intervening time.  He told me had found no evidence
of anything unfavorable, but went to a doctor for a vacination in
order to be able to return to his wife without scruples.)

No other injuries that I recall, no inside pains.
They told me I had been hit by a car, and that it had been driven
by an Israeli on holiday.  At one point I was asked to sign a
statement to that effect, but I could not do so.  It was just
before that that I was asked to state my father's name, which is a
bit of validating evidence inscribed in a passport by visible only
to official reading machines.  My voice quite stuck in my throat
at that, I could not state it.

My guess is that I was not hit by an Israeli driver, but that
maybe an Israeli driver had seen me, and maybe saved me from a
beating, and taken me to the hospital and then been charged.
In any event, I did not enable such an indictment, although that
means there is no official police report of the incident, and I
may never be able to collect travel insurance reimbursement, if we
paid the hospital bill.

My own guess, but here I cannot sort intuitive insight from
imaginative invention, is that I was seized by agents of the Greek
secret police, one taking each limb, and shaken against the rocks. 
Maybe it was then that the Israeli, if such existed, came by and
rescued me.  The reported scence of the accident, or so Mike told
me when I walked out of the hospital and back to his Pension, was
in front of the casino, where I often had been seen, for they had
an excellent trash-can with nices slices of adequate cheese, some
pastries, and occasional slices of lox, all usually unmixed with
cigarette ash, which I do not especially like.  One could also
count on the odd bits of whiskey or wine.

But the casino was a good kilometer or more from where I had laid
down to sleep on the beach, and not such a simple walk, and surely
one filled with many people.
The British tabloids, which one can always count on for weird
news, were writing at the time of a sort of rape drug, such that
the one who is given it has no memory of the intervening time.  
There was a gynacologist of sorts who made much use of that, but
one of his victims had a very strong mind.  As he injected her,
while she was waiting for an operation -- I mean really, Portnoy
fornicating with evening's boiled liver is in contrast cherubic --
he said, you won't remember this, and she said to herself, oh yes
I will, and on the strength of that resolve she did so and gave
testimony at his trial.  Really, civilization needs a string of
MacDonald's whorehouses, if only one could obtain enough throwaway
girls.  The Germans recognize this, and have a red-light districtd
in every town.  The Germans have always been scrupulous about
attending to their hygienic needs, even to the point of cleaning
away the Jews in isolated facilities constructed for the purpose.  
                                                                  
As I say, I have no evidence that I was beaten up rather than hit
by a car.  My believe on this matter, which I formed shortly after
the event, has for me the feel much more of imagination that of
recollection.  I have subsequently had no recollection of the
matter, nor do I expect to.
But I would say that being hit by a car, except for maybe the most
glancing brush, would have left injuries which I did not have,
both external and internal. 

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