Reverie, part 3?

(Tôi chả cần. Tôi đóng cửa, tự việc huyên thuyên một mình. Như vậy dễ chiệu hơn. )

I went to Au Coquelet to sit, but found that sitting was too static, so I took a long walk around downtown Berkeley. I could have bought another pair of pants, three other shirts, all the while thinking about her, and the boots that I would buy to complete my dress up for her, if she was with me, if I should run into her, if she was within my view or my arms. Whenever I manage to escape my body and throw myself towards her (which is not thinking about her but think her), I call her my Tamara, and she is not at all belonging to me but for a second I have her. She is my ideal; I make her my ideal.

I want to get away from the staticity of the body: Why should the body be so important? Is the body all that important? My body is not. My body is to me only a faculty with which I touch the body of an other. Any other. Her body, for example. But it is not my body that I want to get out of. I want to get out of my self, which is constituted in this body, this body that exists in the world’s reality. Perhaps what I want to get out of is the world reality of this body. I mean the situations that make up, that cut, that take from and give to this body. I mean the situations that give rise to this body and drain it. The situations controlling the being that is this body and not me. I am in search of an I that is not me. I’m looking for a way to get to that non-I which belongs to the I, a non-I that enchants the dreamer and which poets help us share. But I don’t want a non-I that is universal. I need the universal non-I which poetry lets me see, but I don’t want to be a being shared by all the dreamers. I am my own dreamer; my dreams are my own—I can’t get rid of that. Once I have seen this universal non-I, how do I get back to my own self with a non-I that is me?

But this body is one that is also…I was thinking…my discovery of a body that marks all the bodies after. I discovered the body’s flesh through a man’s body, but before that, before I could do that, I had to discover women’s bodies. But I couldn’t have been able to do this had I not known men’s bodies, living the heterosexuality that I had learned to identify myself with. I discovered his body beginning with a woman. Because of Helene, actually. I’ve been reading a little bit of Helene’s works. I read her, but they were not just words I was reading; they were also words I was hearing. It was as if she was speaking to me and me alone. Her reveries are cosmic reveries that opened the worlds to me. They helped me re-discover my voice. But first—first they were directions on how to reach a body, to reach it and through it reach the universe’s other. Was it before, or after his body had come to being for me?