Women in Love: Part I

November 16, 198- 

Dear Ruth,

Ever since that day on the beach, I feel I have slipped into an abyss. I have given myself completely to Candice. And when I am with her, I feel a wonderful, paradoxically content yet excited. But when I’m away from her I’m haunted by guilt. Oh, Ruth, am I so lonely that I must make love to another woman? Do I mistrust the world so much, especially men, that I must turn to my own sex for love and pleasure? I have suffered feelings that I believe I do not deserve, but which I cannot drive away. They are the same feelings that drove me from Albuquerque. And I can’t really blame Mother for making me feel like a freakish whore, though I wish I could. And if it were a shallow, indifferent society that makes me feel this way, then I could simply say no to its condemnation. But the condemnation comes from within me. I don’t know what to think.

I love Candice though not as I love you. I didn’t come to California looking for love or expecting it. I came to be alone. It comes as a surprise how easy it has been to find love when I wasn’t looking for love. Or did it find me? I thought that love was no longer possible for me. And now I have friends I love—Robert, Mr. Rieneau, Mr. Sage, Renée, Barbara and Candice. Why has that happened? Is it because loving comes easy to me? I don’t think so. It doesn’t. What I do know is that there is something about each of those people that makes them lovable. I find that amazing because each is so different from the others, unique in his or her own way. It’s a special kind of friendship that possesses love. I suppose my love for Candice goes beyond friendship, but I’m not sure. I do know the love you and I share is even more mysterious because it’s interwoven with the earth-world, a mysterious tapestry, in the way the Indian life was once interwoven with nature. When I’m alone in a wild place I feel at one with the nature that surrounds me. It’s a strange kind of love. It is love. I know that because here I love the ocean. We even play as children do. We intermingle as earthly companions. When I’m with you nature truly become my neighborhood, one we share with nature’s other residents. We see them as friends. We become wild like them, not unruly but organic in the way clouds, trees, and mountains are organic. Your love has defined me in some mysterious way that I don’t fully understand. I don’t fully understand the relationship a child has with the ocean he or she adores. It beckons to them. They rush to play in the foamy surf. I’ve watched this amazing relationship between children and the ocean. Like the painter Edward Potthast I find the relation mysterious. To me you embody everything. It’s as if Earth sent you to me with her knowledge to instruct me in the ways of nature. You complete my relationship with nature, with everything. That is why I love you in the way I love the ocean, sky, and birds, trees and rivers, the hot sun and cold wind and rain. They speak but no to me. They do not love me. But they do not have to. You speak for them. You love for them. They embrace me through you. That’s because you are one of them. I’m not, but you are. I know what you’re thinking: “Silly Chrissie, you overthink life. Just live and enjoy what can be enjoyed. Don’t let the haters prevent you from enjoying life. It comes around only once.”

How can I not love Candice? She is beautiful, tender, and caring. As you once did, she gives me the love and security and even meaning that I need here. She makes me happy in a way the other people I care about here cannot. Still the guilt returns, and I think it is as much for the pleasure I experience when I’m touched by her as it is because she’s a woman. I love being touched by her. I want to lose myself in her embrace and in her touch—as I once did in yours. When I left you and Albuquerque, I thought I was leaving those feelings behind, but I did not.

Whatever it is that attracts me to women and women to me, I guess it’s part of my being. I don’t think this attraction has anything to do with my feelings toward men. I like men well enough. You and I have enjoyed their company. But when we returned home, it was always you and I together. It’s just that I feel at ease when I’m with you and Candice, and usually apprehensive around men. It’s awful that my first responses to men are generally suspicion and distrust, but I blame them, not myself. Unlike women, they have to first earn my trust before I will accept them into my life. I know you and Candice enjoy me as much as men do, but you also respect me in a way most men don’t. You’re women, too. You know what it is to be consumed indifferently by a man. A man forgets that you’re a person—another human being. He remembers that fact only after he has satisfied himself, and even then his concern for you is not what it was before. Men feast upon women as lions feed upon gazelle. And afterwards, they lie in the warm sun of forgetfulness. You and Candice never forget me. To you I’m never merely a fresh kill.

And yet, and yet…as much as I care for Candice and enjoy being with her, isn’t there something more than love and security that I should be seeking? Is the meaning of life reducible to passion and pleasure? Perhaps I have allowed California—where there is no mystery—to have too great an influence upon my state of mind. Here everything is veneer. And if I scratch the veneer, will I find only nothingness? I don’t know, Ruth. You always seemed to be in touch with some deeper meaning, but it’s personal, belonging to you alone. But then you belong to the land of deserts, mountains, mesas and endless sky—the primordial world of mysterious meanings. It and you are one. Each day since I arrived in this place that borders the sea I have longed to return to the land of enchantment—to see the red sky and the purple desert. Yet, it was more than seeing as if I were only an observer. I learned from Mr. Rieneau that it was always a matter of being, being a part of what he calls the primordial world, the lifeworld. “We are Earth-clan,” he once said to me. And now I better understand you. Your people are the original Earth-clan, the people who have always belong to Earth.

Perhaps it too is only an empty mystery. But how can that be when it filled my life? It was there to see, touch, and smell. To feel all about me the wind, snow, and rain, the warmth of the sun. Perhaps nothingness lurks there as well. An idea also learned from Mr. Rieneau. If so, at least the nothingness is not hidden behind a plastic veneer. It’s there seen in old and dead things, Georgia O’Keeffe shows us. Her painting Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills reveals the Earth-world trinity. The hills represent Earth, the hollyhock flower life created from earth, and the ram’s skull representing death the return all things to their earthly substance. Death is at the center of the painting as it is the final destination of all things. One’s own ultimate nothingness can be meaningful when it is confronted and experienced as part of the life-death cycle. Mr. Rieneau would say it’s meaningful because it’s the truth. It’s frightening, yet beautiful, a world that creates beauty that is eventually reclaimed by death. That is amazing really. And that’s what O’Keeffe is telling us or at least me. Death does not deny the beauty of the Earth-world. It makes it heartbreaking. The skull tells us to pay attention to our primordial home-world and see its beauty that is more than its appearance. It is the beauty of the life-death cycle that all things are a part of. The struggle and suffering. Mr. Rieneau says that the most meaningful experience he has comes when he is most intensely aware of the insignificance of his own life. It’s then, he says, when he becomes a true child of the cosmos and a brother to all living and nonliving things—though for him, even that distinction is an artificial one.

After my experience with Candice I search for Mr. Rieneau at the pier. There he was standing under the dim amber light of a pier lamp surround by a night blue sky and looking out upon the ocean. It wasn’t long before we got into another long conversation on just about everything, but it was all connected to the meaning of life. It was another philosophical conversation, the only kind I ever seem to have with him. He has introduced me to so many ideas that I feel overwhelmed, yet I don’t want to lose them. Since I met Mr. Rieneau I’ve been going to the Pacific Beach library. I almost feel as if I’m back in school. But I don’t mind. There I sketch out what we talked about and look up some of the people and ideas that Mr. Rieneau mentioned. I now jot down notes when I talk with him, which makes him smile, but he never teases me about it. Then I go home and sketch out our conversation. It seems somewhat artificial but I feel this need to get it all down, all the details of what was said, but to do that I must first get the ideas straight in my head. Besides, I want to understand these things and not just have bits and pieces of names and information. So it seems that my letters are becoming like a book describing not only what I’ve been doing but what I’ve been learning and thinking about.

All this is good for me. My life is in such turmoil right now, yet you would never know it to look at me. I wonder how many people look normal yet are living lives in turmoil? I think the reading and writing and my conversations with Mr. Rieneau give me a way of dealing with the turmoil, and give my life some purpose while I’m in this state of limbo. I’ve discovered that I love talking with people, not just with Mr. Rieneau but everyone. In New Mexico I had long conversations only with you, which was all I needed. When I came to California I thought I would live in silence, like I had after being separated from you. But your absence has been filled by others, which is good because it was an unbearable emptiness. Besides, I’m interested in the people I’ve met here. Each of them has a story to tell, and now I realized that I’m not the only person who has problems, who has suffered. I hate my self-pity.

I was going to say that Mr. Rieneau has become like a surrogate grandfather to me, but that’s not true, except perhaps in the way your people refer to old wise men and women as grandfathers and grandmothers. He’s like a priest but a philosopher priest. From what he tells me the Greeks had philosophers you could talk to about anything, like Socrates and Epicurus. Even women priests who could be consulted until they were banned when Christianity abolished religious freedom during the persecution of the pagans of the Roman Empire. Speaking to a pagan priestess would have been illuminating. Talking with a Christian nun that serves a masculine religion wouldn’t be the same. The God of the Bible would be all they could talk about. Greek priestesses could offer advice from a dozen goddesses on wild animals, nature, vegetation, childbirth, care of children, beauty, love and chastity. From the goddess Athena a woman would be given knowledge of how a woman can be skillful and wise. Jesus protected women but a woman could learn nothing from him about how she should live. He ignored his family and would have families torn apart by his religious ideology. Besides, could nuns really speak their minds? I find it dismaying that the oppression of women lasted two-thousand years, and Christians sought to inflict genocide upon your people just as the ancient Jews did upon the nations of Canaan. I understand even better your hostility toward the white man. The violence and oppression were the product of masculinity, not femininity.

Still, the old cultures did have their wise men, men like Socrates, Buddha and Lao-Tzu. But not today except for mavericks like Mr. Rieneau and Mr. Sage who exist on the outskirts of society. What we have are ministers and psychotherapists. That’s pretty sad. Either you’re confessing or mentally ill. Either way you’re messed up. With Mr. Rieneau it’s just talking about life and ideas, not about being judged. Yes, he is a man and I thought my anger wouldn’t allow me to have anything to do with men, at least for a long while. Robert changed that. Sometimes life just doesn’t play along. Besides, I don’t think of Mr. Rieneau in terms of gender. Well, yes, he is an old man, which does fit the stereotype of wisdom, but believe me, Pacific Beach and La Jolla have many old men who don’t seem very wise to me. Old men driving Porches and Jaguars. Old men trying to hold on to their youth by dating women our age. Old men who continue to live like adolescent beach bums on roller-skates. They seem foolish to me. Like the old women who drive Rolls Royces or cute little white convertible Mercedes.

However, I do enjoy watching the old men sea swimmers at the Cove. They may or may not be wise, but they look like old sea lions, and I like that. There are of course old women who swim there. They love the ocean. You can see it in their coffee-colored sun-tanned bodies and wrinkled faces. I think anyone who loves the ocean as they do must possessed wisdom of some kind. They love the sea more than they love the land because it’s still wild and primordial. They want to be immersed in it. For them it’s a baptism that renews them. It remains primordially pure because it will not allow itself to be destroyed by developers who, if they could, would build giant floating platform communities upon it. Suburbs upon the Sea! Robert said developers pave over open space with tracks of homes as if they were putting down asphalt or Astroturf. I didn’t know what he meant until one day he drove me to where I could see swaths of homes covering the hills like a carpet. The sight depressed me. For the first time I saw a form of urbanization worse than the city of Albuquerque. Lego communities is what Robert called them—clean, hygienic, tidy and soulless.

Robert said they’re called bedroom communities, but that they’re not communities at all. They’re manufactured barracks for commuters. They indicate how reason and wisdom are not always the same thing. Mr. Rieneau said that reason must be used wisely. He said high-rise public housing and suburbs were a rational solution to a growing shortage of housing after the war. They were an efficient use of space, but their designed prevented them from becoming communities. Living space that works for bees doesn’t necessarily work for humans. For one thing, the residents were strangers thrown together. Bees are not strangers to one another. He believes that communities need a unifying principle that used to be ethnicity or the local economy—farms, fishing, and factories. They grow from a single seed, which means that genuine communities are organic even if they located in cities.

Grungy Pacific Beach seems organic to me, even if blemished by endless cars, cheap apartments, and oil stained driveways. What is the unifying principle? The ocean. The name of the town says a much. It grew over time. It doesn’t look like a Lego community as do the manufactured suburbs, but more like quilt made from scraps of fabric randomly yet aesthetically pieced together. My grandmother made quilts with other women. The process was organic. Anyway, I like Mr. Rieneau very much. He’s an old human being full of ideas. And he has lived. His spirit and body bear scars of loss. He was wounded in the American army during the invasion of Italy. He reminds me of an old oak tree scarred by time and the elements yet still standing.

I told him that I felt guilty about my experience with Candice. It wasn’t easy confessing my love for a woman to a him, but I needed to confess and to someone. And that person had to be someone I felt comfortable with and most of all trusted. And Mr. Rieneau shows no interest in sex. He seems indifferent to it. He has evolved to a higher mental and emotional plane, perhaps a level that is spiritual. One would say he is like Jesus, but he isn’t. Jesus wasn’t indifferent to sex. He hated it because it has to do with the body. He says, 

But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. 

I read the Gospel of Matthew because Mr. Rieneau talks about it all the time. But he also said not to trust the words attributed to Jesus. Yet, those words have mattered for centuries. He said the Matthew’s gospel is a gospel of hatred rather than love, and that such an attitude shouldn’t be attributed to Jesus. It’s true that Jesus doesn’t hate women—though I don’t find him expressing much love for them. The love comes from the women. In the passage by Matthew he characterizes sexual attraction as lust, a word that condemns rather than celebrates sexual intimacy. Why? Because it has to do with the body. And, rightly or wrongly, the woman’s body has been considered the epitome of seductiveness, thus the primary cause of lust so is to be hated. But again Mr. Rieneau doesn’t blame Jesus for the hatefulness of the body but another writer, Apostle Paul, who also never met Jesus, but was influenced by Plato who disliked the material world.

So though Jesus was a protector of women, but his words imposed upon them the status of being humanity’s greatest source of corruption. Accordingly to them, he would send to the fires of Hell the adulterous woman he protects from stoning! At least the scribes and the Pharisees consider stoning sufficient punishment of an adulterous woman. According to what he says, Jesus would have you and me and Candice the three of us burn in the fires of Hell. Jesus didn’t improve the status of women. The philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Hypatia was brutally murdered by a mob of his followers, not by pagan men. And because of the Bible women would have to wait two-thousand years before they could once again study philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. They are still waiting in many countries all because of a religion born somewhere in sands of the Canaanite desert with “a gaze blank and pitiless” toward women.

I’m not comfortable with physical intimacy. That was ruined by a man who deserves to go to Hell for terrifying and abusing a child. Still, I wouldn’t want the man tortured. Not because I think he was a sick man. He wasn’t. Men have abused women and children since forever. The Jewish saint Abraham and King Agamemnon prove that much. From what I’ve read Mary was barely a teenager when God impregnated her. She surrender to God’s will when she was engaged to be married, thus against her wishes. And men have taken God’s behavior as permission to take advantage of women.

And advising gouging out an eye that sees another person as physically enticing is barbaric—as barbaric as symbolically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the God a person worships. What would Jesus think of you and me or of Candice and me? That we should be stoned? We know the Old Testament recommend the death sentence for homosexuals, though I don’t consider myself a homosexual. Just a loving person. He prevents a woman from being stoned for adultery, but if he follows his father’s advice he’d have us burn in the fires of Hell in the afterlife, which is infinitely cruel and morally unjust. The moral wisdom of Mr. Rieneau is simple: Immorality has to do with causing suffering, nothing more. And unlike Jesus he loves the physical world. He said this world is miraculous and deserving of reverence and appreciation. I would add joyful appreciation.

So I asked him if such a relationship that seems unnatural should be considered immoral. His response was that natural and unnatural are irrelevant to moral judgment. He said, “The poet Tennyson rejected nature as a basis for morality when he condemned nature for being ‘red in tooth and claw.’ He asked, ‘Are God and Nature then at strife,’ associating God with love and being oppose to strife. However, the God he believed in encouraged and participated behavior red in tooth and claw. Thus, neither nature nor God are relevant to judgments of morality.

“If one seeks love and security, if one seeks pleasure but is uncomfortable those who usually provide it, then one naturally turns to someone else who can provide those things.” He seemed to sense my discomfort with men, but then he said, “If your relationship with Candice makes you happy, then in itself it isn’t wrong. It’s certainly not morally wrong. Morality condemns causing suffering, not happiness. Altruistic morality commends actions that enhance people’s happiness. Happiness is what morality seeks to encourage and protect. The greatest philosopher Aristotle said happiness is the central purpose of human life and a goal in itself, not philosophy unless studying philosophy makes one happy. A wonderful idea really, the more happiness the better. And Kant would add as long as your pursuit of happiness doesn’t interfere with someone else’s pursuit of happiness then it isn’t immoral. The foundation of morality is really that simple.”

That seemed reasonable to me, though I do not seek sexual pleasure without love. I need love and comfort first. Otherwise, I would feel worthless. And I would want any pleasure I give to be given with love. Apparently, he felt that there was no reason to discuss the topic further. I think he sensed that it made me uncomfortable, so I asked him to tell me why he spent so much time sitting alone, gazing upon the sea....

Women In Love: Part II

Commentary

November 5, 198- 

Two women in love, three I suppose if we include ever-present Ruth, is this not most unusual? It seems so judging by Christine’s response. But if it is love, is not love always good? This is a difficult matter for me to decide for my lack of embodiment gives me insufficient guidance. If I were a man or a woman, then making a determination would be easier. Being neither I am drawn equally to both. I am unable to judge persons according to their sexual desire. Personally and disembodied, I don’t see much advantage in using sexual longing as a standard for judging true love because there is so much more to true love, without which sexual desire does not qualify as love but only as a desire for physical pleasure.

If the love between persons having the same sexual embodiment is true love, that is, love based on respect, devotion, care, and commitment, should it be denounced as evil? Or should it be judged according to the same principles used to judge between persons having different sexual embodiment? If each partner seeks above all the complete happiness of the other, then I don’t see how this cannot not be love. Besides, sexual desire alone is selfishly motivated—be it homosexual or heterosexual. The highest form of love seems to be unselfish. Is that love of Mr. Rieneau’s historical Jesus? So it seems to me. However, I do think Jesus ignored the central role the body plays in all forms of love experienced by most people. Why did he do so? Because as the old philosopher explains, Jesus aspired to a spiritual rather than a carnal existence. And he taught how humans can achieve spiritual transcendence, as he did. Even before Jesus, Plato explained that a relationship based solely on sensual desire is the least fulfilling. For Jesus the highest form of love is altruistic, totally unselfish. Carnal desire is degrading thus sinful. Why? I believe it is sinful because it wrongfully treats a person, most likely a woman, as a material object, a sex object, thus dehumanizing her as a spiritual being. As Mr. Rieneau explains, to treat people as objects is morally wrong because it negates their humanity.

It seems to me that love is inherently drawn to beauty and goodness, the beauty and goodness of the other’s physical being, the beauty of the body but also the beauty of something else expressed through the body—the gentle voice, the loving touch, the concerned countenance. And the beauty and goodness of the other’s actions—especially those selfless, generous actions that seek with enduring commitment the benefit and welfare of the other. If such beauty and goodness might be found in another, what matters the sexual form? Is not the genuine love of the soul expressed though the body? In fact, isn’t it the soul which is sought by the lover, sought through the body itself? Isn’t the body nothing more than the house of the soul? If this is true, I would think true love sees in the body the manifestation of the soul—which is nothing more than the true person. And if the soul is good and beautiful, then it is a proper object for love, regardless of the body and its sexual embodiment.

And if the soul is evil and, consequently, ugly, then it is a proper object for hatred, regardless of its bodily form. And when love or hate fixes upon externals such as the body and fails to see the soul within, then it is said that love or hate is blind.

Christine is able to love both those who wear the female body and those who wear the male body for she is able to see the qualities of goodness and beauty beyond the bodily form. Perhaps this is why she eventually disassociates herself from her body—because she believes that in some deeper way she is neither a man nor a woman but a soul in search of other souls like her own. To her, the dwelling place is less important than the soul of the person, be that place male or female, young or old, black or white or brown. She will love those souls that are good and beautiful and hate, as much as she is capable, those that are evil thus ugly. Is that because she sees the world as an artist? Perhaps.

I speak as if such matters were so very easy to decide, but they are not. Christine herself, as we know, is filled with guilt over her love for Ruth, and her thoughts on this matter of loving are in a state of turmoil. But such turmoil seems to be a natural part of being human, which is, if nothing else, an endless process of searching for what it means to be human, the Universe’s greatest and most mysterious creation.

You are probably thinking that all this philosophizing about love, the body, and the soul is fine but something more must be going on in Christine that would explain her powerful attraction to women. And what if I remind the reader that Christine has also given herself completely to Robert? I know. It was a gift. She was not drawn to Robert as she is drawn to Ruth and Candice. She gave herself to Robert because of his soul, because he is a wonderful human being. It was never a romance, and if Robert had not become ill and lonely and in need of love, Christine would not have given herself to him. They would have remained friends but never lovers. In fact, I would go so far as to say Christine was never his lover. Her giving of herself was a gift of friendship. One of those greatest gift of all that are motivated by selfless love. So does this simply mean that Christine is a lover of women, a lesbian, to use that awful sounding word? That would be a convenient explanation, but is life ever so simple that labels can serve as explanations? No. Never. You know that as well as I, and perhaps that is why you remain unconvinced that I have provided a satisfactory explanation for Christine’s behavior. Certainly, my views are only my own and you are free to develop your own theories about such matters.

Still, there is something more, something I thought would not have to come to light in this story, which has problems enough. It’s Christine I’m concerned about, that her image might be sullied. You know how people are, how they so unfairly judge. Nonetheless, I understand I cannot allow the truth to be compromised because I fear the truth will diminish Christine’s stature in the mind of an unsympathetic reader. And really, any reader who has chosen to read about Christine’s journey and has gotten this far, having even put up with my idiosyncratic and obviously biased commentary, could be neither so unsympathetic or narrow-minded. Nevertheless, it seems I must provide that “something more” in order to provide the reader with information that might further explain Christine’s reluctance to become intimately involved with the opposite sex, information that I had knowingly concealed earlier.

You may recall Christine surprisingly angry comments about having to bow down to a divine HIM. I do not know if her willingness to speak openly of her dislike of the masculine god of Christianity is the result of her conversations with the old fisherman, whose dislike of that anthropomorphic deity is by now evident, but I suspect those plainspoken conversations have enable Christine to think critically about divine matters without the pangs of guilt that she might have felt in the past. We know society strongly condemns freethinking when it comes to the questions of religious belief, often heaping ridicule upon the questioner. Even today in many parts of the world the utterance of any criticism or doubt concerning religion can result in death.

Yet, whereas Mr. Rieneau’s criticisms of the anthropomorphic deity are rooted in what he sees as the destructive and deceptive influence of the God of Judaism, Christine’s criticism seems much more personal, as I believe it is. I know you’re wondering what all this has to do with her budding romance with Candice, but there is, I think, a connection, and this connection takes us back to that unforgettable hellish event that would forever change Christine’s life by inserting into it an evil that shadows her like a demon, a demon inextricably associated with masculinity. You may recall the story of the small, smiling Mexican man who had come to Christine’s door and asked her if he might use her phone because his car had broken down. Yes, now you remember. She looked at the dark, smiling face that appeared to have seen many years of hard, honest work, and then let the man into her home. She did this because she was still a young girl who naively trusted adults. And when the man had determined that she was alone, he took a knife from his pocket and told Christine what he wanted to do and that if she let him do it and did not scream, he would not kill her. And she said yes because she did not want to die. That was the masculine evil that had entered into her life.

But that was not the end of the story—though there can never be an end really for a victim of such violence. It was not long after the incident that it was discovered that the young Christine was pregnant with her attacker’s child. When that became known to the media the case received more attention than it normally would in a city where rape occurs daily. Interestingly, the issue that was addressed in the media was not the crime of rape but the issue of abortion. The pro-life organizations argued that the life of the unborn child should be saved, that it would be a great act of compassion if Christine allowed the child to live and be adopted. What the pro-life advocates seemed to overlook was that Christine was really still a child herself.

The pro-choice advocates argued that every woman has a right to decide whether or not she goes through with a pregnancy because it is her body that is being used as a host in the parasitical relationship between the mother and child. In a pregnancy that occurs out of love the child remains a parasite living off the mother, but it is a beloved parasite, just as children remain parasites until they leave the home, which replaces the womb, to live off their own labor. But this is especially true, the pro-choice advocates argue, in cases in which the father of the child has forced himself upon the woman against her will. In such a case, the mother of the child becomes a slave of an unwanted parasite, just as the rapist made her a slave, a human object, in the act of raping her.

However, Christine’s parents refused to enter the debate. For them, there was nothing to debate. Their child had been rape and implanted with a presence no less unwanted than the rapist himself. Christine’s mother took her daughter to a doctor in San Francisco where an abortion was performed. Christine was then sent to live with Ruth and her father until the trial.

Now the reader can better understand why Christine was withdrawn during her high school years, during which she imagined that she was known as the girl who had been raped, though most likely very few people knew that she was that girl. The traumatic character of the incident also explains why each summer Christine would leave the city Albuquerque, a haunting city for Christine, and why her parents allowed her to go though they did not want her to leave.

So now we come to why Christine has been drawn to Ruth and Candice. It makes perfect sense. You may recall Christine’s remark about the seaman Art’s bright sea-blue eyes that revealed an enchanting wantonness and that she would not allow those who ravaged her once to enter her garden again. But who are those? We know of only the small, smiling Mexican man who forcibly stole Christine’s innocence. I know of no other. Thus, those must refer to all men, to masculinity itself. So now we are able to understand why Christine welcomes the love offered by Candice, a love not tainted by memories of harm done as a result of masculine desire. What about Robert? That Christine would give herself to Robert, not out of desire but out of compassion, reveals the generous nature of her gift to him.

Before you leave me, I wish once again to confess my bias. This story is my world, and its characters are my characters. I cannot escape, though often I wish I could have had at least a minor role to play, the opportunity to love just once… But each of us must be satisfied with the degree of reality that fate pours into his or her small cup. I sometimes think that my cup is a little too small, a demitasse, certainly much smaller than yours. For me, this discussion about love is merely academic. I envy you, my reader. I envy even the confusion you might experience. I don’t envy suffering, though I might pretend to so that I might know more fully the human experience. Suffering is the price that all creatures must pay for their existence. It is a severe price that to my mind make life an inherently tragic affair. I believe the old fisherman said as much. I was saying that old woman fate has been awfully stingy with me. My cup of life is not filled with the wine of life, but only with words—dry, brittle, fleshless words. Yet, perhaps I should be grateful. It is the world I was given, and it is certainly a better world than none at all. And though it be a confined and arid place, it does not lack love, beauty, and charity. Thus, I cannot condemn those young women who are so important to my little kingdom of words and its beauty and goodness. Their generous hearts are too good, their love—amid the eternal elements of the sky, sun, sea, and earth—so extraordinary and indispensable. I cannot condemn two souls drawn together by their own goodness and beauty. I would gladly give up the emptiness of my arid disembodied state to feel such love and tenderness if only for a moment.

An Apology to Italy’s Glorious Giorgia Meloni

For my (not really, I didn’t vote for it…him)

lumbering fool of a president who

insulted Italy’s glorious prime minister.

Trump defined:

ungentlemanlike

impolite uncivil unrefined crude loutish rough vulgar 

inconsiderate insensitive 

unchivalrous indecent undignified

unseemly inept graceless offensive shameless

tactless gauche maladroit

perverse

Please accept my apology, people of Italy, but also appreciate that in spite of the disgusting words of America’s presidential fool toward your triumphant, glorious leader, she and Italy remain untouched by his malicious idiocy that we American must suffer daily. Count yourselves lucky that you are Italians and not Americans. Trump falsely claimed that “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” What he has completely and totally obliterated is America’s integrity, honor, and moral character.

He has destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people—including those of Americans. And unaware of Jesus' parable of the GOOD SMARITAN, he has allowed thousands of mothers and children in impoverished nations to unnecessarily die from starvation and disease.

So, you glorious, life-loving Italians, be grateful that you do not have to burden the shame that Trump has inflicted upon America. My parents were of America’s Greatest Generation. They shone brightly under the suffering and hardships they endured during the Great Depression and World War II. And they endured with dignity. But America’s Greatest Generation is extinct, and there will not be another. Corruption has taken hold of the government and has metastasized throughout the nation. So, take heart my Italian friends that

While you are led by the

Glorious Giorgia Meloni

we Americans must live

under the tyranny

of an inglorious orange

narcissistic monstrosity

because

our Senate, Congress, Supreme Court

are too cowardly

to rein in his madness

which has destroyed

the USA.