Sleeping with Hagar made him generous

Sleeping with Hagar made him generous. Or so he thought. Wide-spirited. Or so he imagined. Wide-spirited and generous enough to defend his mother, and to deck his father, whom he both feared and loved. p78 Morrison Solomon

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She moved around the house, onto the porch, down the streets, to the fruit stalls and the butchershop, like a restless ghost, finding peace nowhere and in nothing. Not in the first tomato off the vine, split open and salted lightly, which her grandmother put before her. Not in the six-piece set of pink glass dishes Reba won at the Tivoli Theatre. And not the carved wax candle that the two of them made for her, Pilate dripping the wick and Reba scratching out tiny flowers with a nail file, and put in a genuine store-bought candleholder next to her bed. Not even in the high fierce sun at noon, nor the ocean-dark evenings. Nothing could pull her away from the mouth Milkman was not kissing, the feet that were not running toward him, the eye that no longer beheld him, the hands that were not touching him. p141 Morrison Solomon

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Sure enough, a vision did enrapture me while I lay recovering in the clearing. But I couldn't share it. The clarity touches me, then passes swiftly. I can't teach it to stay. Nor do I have the words to convey a thousandth part of what I glimpse, the truth of this world rushing back through the pinhole that swallows it when the black fits seize me.
A rush. Then the absolute peace of knowing the world's whole again. The infinite parts miraculously reassembled. In an instant. Seamlessly. p.73 Wideman Cattle

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There's the tap-tap-tapping. You don't hear it, do you. You're asleep, aren't you. One last word tonight. I'll whisper it into your dreaming. May it take root there. One soft, soft whispered word. So no one at the bottom of the ladder overhears. So you, dear one, if you're teasing and only pretending sleep, won't hear. p54 Wideman Cattle

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For a long time Pyrrha to me was a fortified city on the slopes of a bay, with high windows and towers, enclosed like a goblet, with a central square deep as a well, with a well in its center. I had never seen it. It was one of the many cities where I had never arrived, that I had conjured up, through its name: Euphrasia, Odile, Margara, Getullia. Pyrrha had its place among them, different from each of them, and like each of them, unmistakable to the mind's eye.

The day came when my travels took me to Pyrrha. As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known that the sea is invisible to the city, hidden behind a dune of the low, rolling coast; that the streets are long and straight; that the houses are clumped at intervals, not high, and they are separated by open lots with stacks of lumber and with sawmills; that the wind stirs the vanes of the water pumps. From that moment on the name of Pyrrha has brought to my mind this view, this light, this buzzing, this air in which a yellowish dust flies: obviously the name means this and could mean nothing but this.

My mind goes on containing a great number of cities I have never seen and will never see, names that bear with them a figure or a fragment or a glimmer of an imagined figure: Getullia, Odile, Euphrasia, Margara. The city high above the bay is also there still, with the square enclosing the well, but I can no longer call it by a name, nor remember how I could ever have given it a name that means something entirely different. P92 Calvino-Cities

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I watched them sometimes. Perhaps they watched me. The only time I saw them pay me much notice was one day at lunchtime when I was laughing with the other men. The Mexicans sat apart when they ate, just as they worked by themselves. Quiet. I rarely heard them say much to each other. All I could hear were voices calling out sharply to one another, giving directions. Otherwise, they talked among themselves in voices too hard to overhear. p134 Rodriguez-Hunger

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I stay away from late-night parties. I disconnect my phone for much of the day. I must avoid complex relationships-a troublesome lover or a troubled friend. The person who knows me best scolds me for escaping from life. People I know get promotions at jobs. Friends move away. Friends get married. Friends get divorced. One friend tells me she is pregnant. Then she has a baby. Then the baby has the formed face of a child. Can walk. Talk. And I still sit at this desk laying my words like jigsaw pieces, a fellow with ladies in housecoats and old men in slippers who watch TV. Neighbors in my apartment house rush off to work about nine. I hear their steps on the stairs. Somewhere planes are flying. The door slams behind them. p176 Rodriguez-Hunger

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His faith was above conviction. Disillusion had come so often that it had awakened in him a strain of bitter suspicion, an occasional mockery, virulent, coarse, cruel and subtle, which was all the more scalding because of his own pain. Unknowingly, he had begun to build up in himself a vast mythology for which he cared all the more deeply because he realized its untruth. Brokenly, obscurely, he was beginning to feel that it was not truth that men live for—the creative men—but for falsehood. At times his devouring, un-sated brain seemed to be beyond his governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels. And this unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean and common all that he had clothed with wonder. p186 Wolfe Look

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That she had been near death from tuberculosis, that the violent and garrulous Sheba had married an old man, who had begotten two children and now was about to die, that the whole little family, powerful in cohesive fidelity, were nursing their great sores in privacy, building up before the sharp eyes and rattling tongues of young boys a barrier of flimsy pretense and evasion, numbed him with a sense of unreality.

Eugene believed in the glory and the gold. p187 Wolfe Look

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And Eugene, encrusted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was "a boy with a fine spirit." She said it very often.

....

He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne--it must go to Parnassus. p196 Wolfe Look

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In the kitchen, Nelly is rolling out a crust. Nelly is herself, always herself; always large and red, regal, indignant, as if she'd spent her life in an age of glory and decorum that ended, forever, some ten minutes before you entered the room. Virginia marvels at her. How does she remember, how does she manage, every day and every hour, to be so exactly the same? p84 Cunningham Hours

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Sally appeals, silently, to Walter. Speak, you moron. Walter simply nods, blinking, basking, alert to the possibility of danger and, at the same time, all but hypnotized by the heat that emanates from Oliver St. Ives, who is trim and ruffled, forty-five-ish, keen-eyed behind his modest gold-rimmed glasses; whose image on celluloid has survived countless attempts by other men to murder him, swindle him, blacken his name, ruin his family; who has made love to goddesses, always with the same abashed ardor, as if he can't believe his luck. p174 Cunningham Hours

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..American macho is drag--the false type for the male--as Mae West is the false type for female.

Machismo in Mexican Spanish is more akin to the Latin gravitas. The male is serious. The male provides. The Mexican male never abandons those who depend on him. The male remembers.

Mexican machismo, like Mexican politics, needs its mise-enscene. In fair Verona, in doublet and hose, it might yet play. The male code derives less from efficacy than from valor. Machismo is less an assertion of power or potency than it is a rite of chivalry.

The macho is not urbane Gilbert Rowland or the good guy Lee Trevino; he is more like Bobby Chacon, the slight, leathery, middle-aged boxer, going twelve rounds the night after his wife commits suicide. The macho holds his own ground. There is sobriety in the male, and silence, too—a severe limit on emotional range. The male isn't weak. The male wins a Purple Heart or he turns wife-beater. The male doesn't cry.

Men sing in Mexico. In song, the male can admit longing, pain, desire, weakness.

HAIII-EEEE.

A cry like a comet rings over the song. A cry like mock-weeping tickles the refrain of Mexican love songs. The cry is meant to encourage the balladeer—it is the raw edge of his sentiment. HAI-II-EEE. It is the man's sound. A ticklish arching of semen, a node wrung up a guitar string, until it bursts in a descending cascade of mockery. HAI. HAI. HAI. The cry of the jackal under the moon, the whistle of the phallus, the maniacal song of the skull.

So it may well be Mama who first realizes the liberation of the American "you," the American pan-usted, the excalibur "I" which will deliver her from the Islamic cloister of Mexico. (Tu.) p56 Rodriguez Obligation

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On a Sunday in summer, ten years ago. I was walking home from the Latin mass at St. Patrick's, the old Irish parish downtown, when I saw thousands of people on Market Street. It was the Gay Freedom Day parade--not the first, but the first I ever saw. Private lives were becoming public. There were marching bands. There were floats. Banners blocked single lives thematically into a processional mass, not unlike the consortiums of the blessed in Renaissance paintings, each saint cherishing the apparatus of his martyrdom: GAY DENTISTS. BLACK AND WHITE LOVERS. GAYS FROM BAKERSFIELD. LATINA LESBIANS. From the foot of Market Street they marched, east to west, following the mythic American path toward optimism.

I followed the parade to Civic Center Plaza, where flags of routine nations yielded sovereignty to a multitude. Pastel billows flowed over all.

Five years later, another parade. Politicians waved from white convertibles. "Dykes on Bikes" revved-up, thumbs-upped. But now banners bore the acronyms of death. AIDS. ARC. Drums were muffled as passing, plum-spotted young men slid by on motorized cable cars.

Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet within the old man's power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom. Lonely teenagers still arrive in San Francisco. The city can still seem, by comparison to where they came from, paradise. p26 Rodriguez Obligation

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I don't want to write about Rocamadour, at least not right now, because I would have to get so much closer to myself, to let everything that separates me from the center drop away. I always end up talking about the center without the slightest guarantee that I know what I'm saying, and I slip into the trap of geometry, that method we Occidentals use to try to regulate our lives: axis, center, raison d'etre, Omphalos, nostalgic Indo-European names. Even this existence I sometimes try to describe, this Paris where I move about like a dry leaf, would not be visible if behind it there did not bear an anxiety for an axis, a coming together with the center shaft. All these words, all these terms for the same disorder. Sometimes I am convinced that triangle is another name for stupidity, that eight times eight is madness or a dog. Holding La Maga, that materialized nebula, I begin to think that it makes just as much sense to model a doll out of crumbled bread as to write the novel I will never write or to give my life in defense of ideas that could redeem whole peoples. The pendulum immediately changes direction and there I am again among calming notions: a worthless doll, a great novel, a heroic death. I think about the orders of values so well explored by Ortega, by Scheler: aesthetics, ethics, religion. Religion, aesthetics, ethics. Ethics, religion, aesthetics. Doll, novel. Death, doll. La Maga's tongue tickles me. Rocamadour, ethics, doll, Maga. Tongue, tickle, ethics. P15 Cortazar - Hopscotch

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