We talked some too about how annoying it was that nobody thought of religion as an intellectual subject at that time. This was particularly true at the sort of parties I went to then. It was just verboten. I remember once being at a party with a bunch of music critics, and the very smart and wonderful Bob Christgau, when I mentioned something spiritual, said to me, “So you believe in a man with a long gray beard in a white dress,” and I just sort of lost it. All the historical theological thought, what religion meant to the civil rights movement, the great thinkers, Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Rabbi Heschel, got reduced to this idea that I was a soft-brained moron believing in a version of Santa Claus.
So I was very interested in your idea of pushing back. I think before we started Joyful Noise, though, we read novels that may or may not have had a religious theme and talked about them. I remember a heated discussion on Endo’s Deep River, which at that time was a favorite of mine. I remember we talked about Simone Weil some too. We read Gravity and Grace. Our exchange of ideas about religion was the first I had with another writer. Since then I have had many; over the years I have sought them out. Ours had something very alive about it.
You mention your sister. Another landmark in our friendship was the fact that your sister died and then my daughter, Abbie, was born a week later. When you called me to tell me she had died I was very pregnant and to hear you sobbing on the phone just obliterated me. Also, the details of her putting her kids to bed and the very maternal and domestic way it happened haunted me. I had Abbie just a few days later and I remember calling you on the hospital phone to tell you. I was so anxious to tell you about new life coming into the world. During that call you told me about the plans for your sister’s funeral and I told you about my labor. It was a conversation with so much honesty and rawness.
Love,
Darcey
November 15, 2015
Darcey,
I’m writing this on the plane to Seattle, while on book tour, an adventure that I feel both lucky to undertake and about which I am extremely apprehensive. I don’t want to do what I have to do this week, the glad-handing, and I feel the cost of doing it. I don’t feel like myself when I am touring. I feel simulated, artificial, other than myself. I feel reduced to an animal that can merely survive. That is the extent of it. And yet I also feel like I am lucky to have the chance to meet the readers.
And: there’s no way not to talk about how you and I got to be the kind of friends that we got to be without talking about the portion of our friendship when we were in love, in the eros sense, but I don’t know if I can do it without real regret, or some balancing of real regret and great joy. I learned so much from going through what we went through, even though I also feel awful about it. In a way I was hoping that you would go first in writing about this part.
I remember that we were in a taxicab going back to Brooklyn one day when you started crying. I remember there was a time before this, some weeks before, when you had described telling someone that I was your “intellectual boyfriend,” and rather than dwelling on this with any rational sense of what was happening, I kind of filed it away and tried to pretend to myself that the phrase did not presage anything much. But then we were in the taxi, and I don’t know what we were talking about, but you were suddenly crying. And when I asked what you were crying about, you said, “I think I am in love with you.” Or words to that effect. It was pretty close to that sentence. And then I remember that you wanted to get out of the cab immediately, you almost flung yourself out of the cab, without allowing me to console you, nor to talk more about what you’d said.
I think I went after you. I know at some point I lodged a reply, which was, “Well, I always loved you.” That was the comeback as I recollect it. A face-to-face reply, not a telephone reply, maybe? In those days we talked on the phone a lot.
It’s no coincidence that I was grief-stricken at that time, as far as I recollect it. Something happened to me when my sister died, and some of the moral framework that I thought I had, that I thought I could rely on, lapsed, and I sort of stopped caring whether I was as morally upright as I had been before. I couldn’t understand the purpose of moral thinking, because I thought my sister’s death was pointless, arbitrary, and the effect of it on many people I loved was unthinkable and devastating. If there was a moral operating principle to creation, to the ontology of it all, it seemed to me then, if there was a God, then God had somehow blinked on November 1, 1995. It’s not that I set out to do things that were pointless and arbitrary, as befitted the way I thought about God and God’s works for a while, it’s that I stopped caring. It was obvious to me that I had always loved you, and I didn’t see any reason to do otherwise.
The situation was a dishonor to us both because we were both involved with other people. It’s a dishonor because we knew better, and we had the ethics to discuss doing better, but we failed to do better. We could have done better, even if it hurt, even if it was costly to us. But we didn’t do these things. So the failure part of it was uppermost in my mind. That I was failing. That I should not have been doing what I had done. That whatever ethics I was practicing in church, or alleging to practice, I was not practicing them very rigorously in real life.
But maybe, just a little bit, there was a point to this too. A humble purpose to it. I remember your saying to me, one time, in this period, “My soul wants your soul.” Which is one of the most wonderful things anyone ever said to me. In many ways, I was so hurt then that I didn’t know if I could live up to this remark. But let’s say, just for the sake of the conversation, that you were really telling the truth then. Then maybe the eros-not-agape part of the whole thing was something that we had to go through to come out the other side? Maybe we couldn’t really care about each other the way we do now if we had not gone through that?
I suffered both with you and in the absence of you, in this period. It lasted until I went to Yaddo at one point, for a residency (I must have been starting The Black Veil then, because I know you had already read Purple America), and you visited, and I felt stuck with this awful feeling that I was not smart enough nor adult enough nor perfect enough to get out from under everything, all the entanglements of the real world, as opposed to this intense but slightly sequestered place we had got ourselves into, in order to be together. I was afraid, and selfish about it, because I was afraid, and this was mixed up with the feeling that we had dishonored ourselves, and we needed to stop. And so we stopped. Most of the blame for it falls on me, I believe. On that point, I could go on and on.
It is part of the Song of Songs that one should mix up the ecstatic with the spiritual, that the two kinds of ecstasy are consubstantial. But maybe this is like the incarnations of the Buddha—they are all great, all these incarnations, but some are greater than others, and to rest in eros, thinking it was the ultimate destination, thinking it was our friendship, that was rank vanity, with which I was much afflicted in those days. We were all done with that part by, what, the late nineties, and then we had to weather all the transition out of it. You had a child, for example. A lovely, excellent child.
Love,
Rick
Rick:
I remember well the car ride. It was cold out and we both had on big coats and gloves. I remember you saying something about going away, maybe to Yaddo and I started to cry. It was one of those very surprising cries that just started up without warning. And I did tell you that I loved you. I had not till that moment thought this in the front of my brain, but the way it hurt me, the idea that you were going away, made it all suddenly clear how I felt. But what I remember most was that we both had our gloves on still and we held hands with our gloves on for a few moments. And I always remember that as a sort of image of the whole thing. That there was a deep connection but we could never completely connect in the romantic love sphere.
The context that made my own life morally wobbly then was that my marriage was in deep trouble. Not that this is an excuse, it’s not. Abbie, my daughter, was t
wo when this happened. And while for a while I was very happy in my marriage, with the birth of my daughter things changed. I felt out of sync with my partner and very lonely. We spent so many beautiful hours together, Abbie and I. It was almost like loving her I realized what love could really be, and I wanted more from a partner. Also we were very emotionally intimate, you and I, and that also made me realize I wanted more from a lover.
I can see now that in some ways I wanted an escape hatch from my life and myself.
After the car ride I think there was only a few weeks of actual connection. I knew it was wrong—I remember thinking we could be friends still, trying to meet as friends, but that never worked out once the proclamations were made. I remember this happened over and over again. You went to Yaddo, which was good. And I did come and visit once. I was up near Saratoga to do some research on my Millerite, Great Disappointment book, which is of course very ironic. That was also the time I realized, while I did love you, you were not the answer to my problems with my marriage and my life in general. You were sort of closed off and distant then and that was hard for me. I remember driving away from Saratoga and listening to Leonard Cohen on the radio and feeling in a sort of free fall. It was a relief in a way but very scary. I knew then I would have to make changes to my life myself without the support of someone else.
It sounds crazy but I have always been grateful to you for this. I know I could have jumped to someone else without really looking at myself closely, what I wanted and who I was, but that did not happen and it’s been a great gift to me. Also just the open feeling I had with you at times, I remember talking to you and feeling that, after a long time, I finally sounded like myself again. It was like the very pitch of my voice had changed and I recognized myself. What happened between us was very powerful. It was the first step leading me toward a new and bigger life.
I went away to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi then. And thank goodness for that. That time gave me the space away from my marriage to figure things out and also away from you to get over you and the idea of you and me together. I was so lonely that year but what a beautiful year it was. I was broken open and I experienced so much, the blues, I also read like a maniac. Also Abbie and I had a sort of magical time going across the street from our house to Faulkner’s and chasing rabbits. It was idyllic and profound. I remember one night I had put her to bed and I was reading, I think, a book of Thomas De Quincey’s essays and I had the feeling there was a presence in the room, it was like my loneliness had broken off from me and hovered nearby, but my loneliness was also transfigured—I knew then that my daughter and I would be all right.
When I got back from Mississippi, I rented an apartment for Abbie and me in Fort Greene. I don’t remember how we started to put it back together as friends. Do you? I do remember you coming to that apartment and we played our guitars together a few times. I was starting my band Ruffian then with my friends. I also remember that I interviewed you at the New School. We might have read together a few times. I remember you and your partner were moving toward marriage in those years and I wondered about that for you.
I was angry at you still for a while. What bothered me was that you sometimes minimized what happened between us and this hurt me. I knew too that it was not going to work, that it should be over but I also felt it was BIG, and I sort of wanted that honored somehow. I see now that to calibrate the Bigness might have meant getting into it all again.
The lovely thing is now, while admitting it was fucked up, we can also sort of honor it.
The thing that has always been remarkable about our friendship is that whenever I see you I feel transported back to this spot where frankly “my soul wants your soul.” And not in a romantic way. Which is crazy beautiful and very rare.
Love,
Darcey
Darce,
It’s just a couple of days before Christmas, and it’s true that I have Christmas to blame for my slow response time here, and I also have the fact that my wife is pregnant and not feeling well at all. These would be good reasons to be preoccupied. But there’s also the fact that I have been feeling low about my behavior during the period we have been writing about most recently, and I feel there’s a way that I have not sufficiently apologized. In a way, I know this is not entirely true, because I have amended my behavior in ways that I am proud of, and have become, I feel, a real adult, which I don’t know if I would have said of myself in the late nineties. But I still feel dumb about what happened, about not honoring what happened, as you say, and I feel I did the stupidest possible thing at the time, which was to spurn a heartfelt connection for no reason but that intimacy was painful to me in those days. I regret it a lot.
The question of how we rounded the corner on all of that is an interesting and meaningful question. My recollection is that partly there was the work of Joyful Noise, which went on for a while. We were known, for a spell, as literary people who had something to say about religion (which made my publishers nervous), and we got to be on panels of the like-minded. I know we did that panel at St. Luke in the Fields for Roger Ferlo, which led to my being in his Dante class, and then becoming a parishioner there. And then were on that panel at NYU which concerned new thinking about faith. I was on that panel, in fact, the faith panel, and at a celebration of Kathy Acker’s work in the same week. The concerns of the two panels could not have been more disparate. (And yet I still think of myself as a guy who both loves Kathy Acker and the New Testament.) The Acker panel had Kim Gordon on it, and Richard Foreman, and a bunch of other eminences, but it did not compare, in terms of weirdness, to the new-thinking-about-faith panel, which in my recollection was full of people with a tentative grasp on the real world! If you had told me there were bipolar sufferers and schizophrenics in the audience, I would not have been surprised. But the Acker panel just had celebrities. I loved that we journeyed to the much more dangerous and surprising place together, you and me.
Anyway, we did that, all the stuff relating to the anthology, and then we did some music stuff together for a while. I remember you were in Ruffian, and then you and I played together on a Tin House event of some kind, which must have been in 1999 or so. I remember we were talking a lot about music there for a while. It was before I was playing in the Wingdales, so it was sort of an area of great fertility for me. I was thinking a lot about music. And somewhere in that span we did a joint appearance in Oxford, Mississippi, which did provide the occasion on which the two of us went and sat out on the lawn in front of Faulkner’s house for the afternoon. There were a couple of things that were memorable about that trip. I remember you finding my airport-related anxiety irritating (you told me so!), which was a rare moment of your getting impatient with me, and I remember telling you that I was going to marry the woman who became my first wife, which you took in stride, and then I remember sort of asking somehow if our friendship was going to have to change because I was getting married, and you saying, more or less, “Well, of course.” And I was really disappointed by that! Maybe not the perfect kind of way to be thinking about someone who is not your wife when you’re about to get married, I’ll hazard.
But the apex of the trip to Oxford was going to Al Green’s church in Memphis, and attending the service. Truly one of the great experiences of my life. I didn’t quite know what a musical ministry was until we went there. All the improvised testifying and everything. It was incredibly powerful. And I remember Al looking at us, you and me, at one point and saying “You all got the light! You people there, you got the light!” Or some such. It was maybe one of the only times in my life I felt really sufficient as a spiritual being, because Al Green said so.
My supposition was that we put in a lot of work, in this period of the early twenty-first century, to become friends who were not lovers. In my life, this has not always worked at all. And there was ample reason to suppose that it would not work this time. But I feel like we both put in a lot of work. And it required respect and real forbearance
and spiritual effort, and it required putting other people ahead of one’s own wishes, at least on my end of things. I so delighted in our conversation and our area of shared interests that I really wanted to solve the impediments to our being friends and moving forward. I wanted to survive my own mistakes.
I suppose the truly transformative moment came when you announced that you were getting remarried.
I’m leaving out a lot of ligamentary passages in this span of years—like you had your problems at the New School in this span, and I got really lost with addictive behavior for a few years in there too—but somehow there was a sense of shared purpose that had to be nurtured in order that we could become something like what we are now, and that sense of purpose and mutual respect that came from working on stuff together and not shrinking from that. I have had people in life who say that I am in some ways impossible to be friendly with if you don’t work with me in some capacity. My bandmates have said that. And after Joyful Noise came out in paperback and during the years that followed we instituted some of the right kind of boundaries, and worked together on various things, at various times, and I really loved that. I love it still. I loved making an anthology with you, I loved singing with you, I loved reading your books in manuscript, all of that.
Merry Xmas,
Rick
Rick:
Now it’s between Christmas and New Year’s, the twenty-ninth to be exact, and I am staying with my husband in my mother-in-law’s assisted-living complex in Richmond, Virginia. We took the long and lovely train ride yesterday from Penn Station. I love the train, how you can look into people’s backyards and see their overturned birdbaths, woodpiles, laundry blowing on the line.
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