The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part forty-eight


I just got a letter from Ishmael Gradsdovic from Arkansas. Interesting to hear how he's doing. I've put the interesting excerpts below. He didn't give me an address where we could write him, but it sounded like he wasn't going to be in any one place for long, anyway.


Dear Dave,

I've been spending the last couple of weeks squatting with D---- in this abandoned shack just off the highway looking like a set from Deliverance. D---- goes into town early so she can shower up at the Y before work, and I stay at the shack and try to make myself useful by patching up the ceiling or cleaning up, and I watch her dogs Fester, George and Redrum.

It's fun watching the dogs because I see what a complex, evolving, never- resting social life they have. Lots of ritual, lots of handshakes, lots of maneuvering, lots of signals. It's not language that makes humans unique, it's syntax. Different stuff.

Fester's the bitch, and has been paired off in a loose doggy way with George. But Redrum is the alpha male of the pack, and now that he's back from The Palace he's calling the shots. I watch `em play. Fester digs up some gopher or something, and the rest of 'em chase it around for a bit, barking at holes and chasing each other around as they get more hunt-crazy, rolling around and coughing barks at each other. Redrum brought back some half-dead bird the other day and dropped it in front of Fester like an engagement ring. When they mate (and I watch, trying to quell instinctual shame), George trys to act like nothing's wrong, scratching himself, sniffing around the gopher holes, etc., but he always stays in sight and always keeps his eyes open, and I don't think I'm projecting when I say he's protesting overmuch.

Not that he has much to complain about -- he gets his from Fester regularly, and he's got a stray bitch who lives up in the valley somewhere who comes by from time to time as well, and they couple up away from the pack and the alpha male.

Makes me look back at my own primate mating dance. Currently, I'm dancing with D----. Didn't think she was my type when we first met; she's very southern white, a high-school dropout, big on astrology and tarot cards and stuff like that. I met her at the sperm bank, which sounds like a bad opening line.

It's a little town, about the size of Morro Bay maybe, but it's the County Seat, and maybe the biggest town around, I dunno. Anyway, it's got a sperm bank. Go figure. And they were advertising for donors. It's okay money, and I can give every three days. I just lie about whether or not I've had sex in the interim, and about whether I've had sex with another man since 1977 and if I'm a drug user and if I have a tattoo. Then they give me a form that is supposedly absolutely confidential but is matched up by a number with my sample, and I tell the truth on this form and drop it in a box. Somewhere, further down the line, my samples are being discarded, but they pay me anyway.

D---- is the woman who took my biographical information. Donors are supposed to provide biographical and family medical history information so that when infertile couples go shopping for genes they can make better decisions. I guess D---- liked my genes, too, 'cause she invited me out to lunch with her. I thought the idea of dating a woman you met at the sperm bank was too good to pass up, so agreed before I'd even formed an opinion of her.

But turns out she's pretty neat. She's squatting rent-free in this run-down, almost falling-down two-room house, and she hops a Trailways bus in the morning to get the two and a half miles into town then walks back at night (she charms the Trailways drivers and never has to pay for her little hop ride).

There's a line of ants on the table and one ant removed from the line who seems caught in an endless loop. He walks forward about a half-inch, then whirls his antennae around in circles, then turns to the left, then backs up to the right, spins around to the beginning again, does some more antennae whirling, then stops and repeats the cycle. He's been doing this for about five minutes now.

D----'s cool. She's got a good sense of humor, and weird as it sounds, I like the way she smells. Go figure. I also like her sense of adventure, picking out a shack and turning it into a home. She's also teaching me about the culture of the area, and demonstrating to me a different list of Important and Unimportant things than I'm used to seeing in people.

She's also seeing a couple of other guys, including this guy named F---- who lives at The Palace. When she went to pick up Redrum a couple days back she stayed the night out there -- she'd told me that maybe she would, so it wasn't a total surprise. In fact, I thought she probably would, and I knew she'd been sort of pining for getting frisky with F---- again so I acted very encouraging.

But that primate mating behavior won out in my head and I had these feelings I'd always sort of lumped under the general "jealousy" category. Of course, rationally I wasn't going to let myself fall for that, because there wasn't any reason to be jealous. After all, I haven't asked for or claimed any sort of relationship-like control over her, and don't have any right to anyway. And it's not like she likes F---- more than me -- it's just one of those "the grass is greener" things. But the feelings were there, anyway.

Then I started wondering why I was beating myself over having feelings that I disapproved of. I thought I'd decided that that was a fairly worthless undertaking. Sure, it's stupid to have these feelings. Sure, it's not what you'd intended to do. But you've got them. Deal with it.

And then I wondered if "jealousy" was the right label. Sometimes I wonder if part of the problem people like me have with emotions is that we have too few words to cover the emotions we have, so when we have a feeling, we apply a label to it that isn't large enough to cover the emotion. Then we react to the word/concept instead of the original emotion, causing all sorts of confusion.

So I tried to look at the emotion as if I didn't know its name or what it represented -- only to look at how it felt and what it did. I'm still observing, but in a preliminary analysis it seems to be a combination of effects on the mind and body. First, memories are involuntarily triggered, as well as fantasies (both good and bad) with symbolic content. Often these are accompanied by (I'm not saying where the causality lies) what appears to be an increased heart rate and blood pressure and tightness of the throat, a slight transient headache, and deep breathing (sometimes "melancholy" sighs).

Perhaps I'm wrong to even call this a "feeling" or "emotion." It seems to be a physiological response to external stimulus akin to a shot of adrenaline that you get when you're climbing over a coupler and you hear the cars up toward the unit start to clank and buckle. When I have that feeling I call it "fear," but it's not an emotion the way I usually thing of emotions, just a natural response of the body.

But maybe it's my definition of "feeling" and "emotion" that's at wrong here. By trying to dominate the emotional with the intellectual, I seem to have intellectualized emotions, so that I think that valid emotions are responses prompted by intellectual considerations, and that emotions that happen without being preordained and designed by the mind are alien and wrong.

Maybe to say something like "I shouldn't feel jealous when the woman I've been sleeping with sleeps with someone else" is as silly as saying "I shouldn't blister when I recieve a serious burn" or "I shouldn't pucker my lips when I chew on sourgrass." That's the way the body works. Emotions aren't something you decide on; they're something that happens to you.

Any time you say "I shouldn't feel like X" you're really saying that you want God to issue a recall on your model.

Oh well, I've got to stop writing. D---- said she'd bring some tri-tip back with her so I've got to get the fire going if we want to eat before dark.

Love,
Ishmael



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