It’s prudent to not try to count a lot of living cells (under a microscope) because they divide. But they’re only cells because earlier (eonically so) archaeocellular entities merged. (Look at a cell: Its anatomy includes a bunch of little “organs”; I’ll spare you a list.) Infinite mixing led to permanent “preferences” by nature (as if nature has intentionality, thus selecting, like our gods mirrored). By archiving preferences in DNA/RNA machinery (bioglyphics), symbiogenesis led to our infinitely-flourishing (but finitely diverse) cellular life which led to sex, which led to mating minds at college student parties on New Year’s eve.

Leading to this, for my part, are notes earlier divided into uncounted strings of text (allegedly singular themes) which have now merged into 14 topics (with subtopics). That’s not counting 19 topics (with subs) carried over from earlier seasons. Time causes hybridity, so a numbers game is ephemeral, like actual lives and friendships, the look of cities, landscapes, hybridity everywhere, ecologies arising and passing away—so much drama and lack of drama, material for journalists or poetic leisure, historiographers and archeaologists, finding and giving meaning to manifolds of hybridity and symbiogenesis.

Don’t you enjoy this?

“What?” A woman (a girl-woman, otherwise known as a “Cal” student) on a stair step behind me was evidently lost in her inebriated reverie. Or bored. Also, there was the party noise.

“I said: ‘Don’t you enjoy this?’”

She looked at the noise. “It’s a party.” Finals are over. That’s all that matters. A guy came out of a bathroom. She stood up (unstably) to go in. “Happy new year,” she mumbled.

I went upstairs to the second-floor balcony over the front porch of the house: black sky (no rain clouds) for three nights this week. Black sky inspires me. It’s even better with stars (way up the hills), lucky nights.

I usually resent this house of girl-women (not a formal sorority) next door to my place, semester after semester. But when I’ve walked over to complain about party noise (a little odyssey, since it happens after I’ve gone to bed, then dress again, amplifying my pique), the being at the door always invites me to join them. Yeah, right: Deal with the antigen at the front door by inviting it into the immune system of noise—but the trope doesn’t fit: They are the den of transgression, the disease, and I am—

What the hell. It was New Year’s eve. (Don’t these people leave town?, you wonder. Many foreign students don’t. I might add that I’ve discovered that the university police have a phone number, and they bill the kids for the cost of knocking on their door; so, I can keep my clothes off.)

Days of parties....Once upon a time, it was a vital part of life (when one’s under 30)—the best days of the 20th century: the wake of the ‘60s. I’ve no regrets. I did everything I could get away with, including [deleted]....But now, girl-woman/boy-man parties are comical to me—especially since millennials (post-millennials, whatever) are such dorks—I know: It’s my years. But 1968 to 1972-or-so was Different, truly awesome, no cliché—especially when one is doing grad school in philosophy where psilocybin mushrooms grow in local cow pastures (in the dung, to be specific).

Anyway, having a house of princesses (in the worst sense) next door is not very interesting. College “women” frequently become squealing idiots when they’re with each other and guys are nearby. When they party without guys, they just yell a lot, striving for top position in the Best Attitude Voice-Over Competition or whatever. I don’t keep track next door (duh).

Amidst it all, I stand outside it all, extraterrestrial that I am. There are stories there, somewhere, somehow: Someone finds True Love at a party, in a café. Though guys tell each other they basically want to get laid, and girls tell each other they just want to have fun, they all—we all—want inspiration and lastingness, actualization of ideals and secure fidelity.

The real world is filled with passing episodes that retrospection selects, sequences, and makes into a story that seems to naturally belong to them all. The novelist distills a lot of personae from a lot of interactions into a small number of characters whose lives become magically followed (by authorial power) and observed by the narrator, thus reader, who gain godly access to mating minds.

What we want in a story is easily vicarious. We want entertainment. We want wisdom. We want a power of access we seldom (or don’t) get in real relationships.

The Austenian story, for example, especially worked because there were actually so few persons moving between a few estates (mixed with the fact that Jane was brilliant), and town-and-estate had only each other for decades. Discrete dramas give us a sense of a complete ecology, as if the universe is very, very finite. If only all the world’s merely a stage—if all we had to cope with was a theater, we could manage that. So, fictions let us pretend. The tragedy and the irony have been contained.

But let the comedy and romance burst the walls!

“Do you own the house?,” a voice asked. She was standing at the door onto the balcony.

“You mean: What am I doing here?”

Looking both perky and dizzy, she took a sip of her drink, waiting for an answer to my own question.

“I live next door,” I said.

She was someone with too much energy who’d gotten retarded from the booze. “Really.” Silence. “What do you do?”

A guy appeared behind her, put his hand on her waist. She lit up (beyond dizzy perky). Mating mind corrals mating mind, so she leaves before I answer.

I looked into the downstairs window of the living room. A girl was talking nonstop to a guy, but looking away every few seconds toward someone else. It’s all about her figuring out how she’s going to get the other guy’s time—which isn’t rocket science, since guys are such horny puppies. But it was OK that I gave her something to be doing while she thinks about him. This is why I look unresponsive to her apparent interest, gazing into my drink. I know about women and ambivalence. I could have her. I could make her feel she’s the most unique being I’ve ever met, so inflating her self esteem with my awe at her audacity, she’d want my number (as a matter of simple curiosity: that she could be so inspiring); we’d text, and next week, when she doesn’t want to be alone, and no one would see her going to my place—

“It’s cold out there,” a girl said from the door to the balcony.

Yeah. I was not down there being talked at. Rather, I was rudely reminded that I was in the cold. So, I went back indoors.

And I wandered down their short hallway to a bedroom. I might have been looking for a bathroom, but I was just curious about their place, a building so close to mine, a bedroom window across from me (I never wish to see into—give me a break—but recollection is that the curtains have “always” been closed). What is on the other side of those curtains? Why not wonder.

The bedroom door was closed. But suddenly, it opened as I got to the adjacent bathroom door. A girl-woman was startled, then looked insulted.

“The bathroom?” I whimpered.

As if I’d said nothing, she went into her bathroom and shut the door, leaving her bedroom door open.

On her bed was an open book, pages down. For Derrida, the title read, by J. Hillis Miller (one of the few fair readers of Derrida, I happen to know). I’d seen the book in Moe’s Books recently, but hadn’t bought it (I’m a member of Bibliophilics Anonymous). I knew I shouldn’t walk in, but I did; and picked it up. She was somewhere on pp. 102-103. The top of 102 reads (I did buy the book today; Moe’s was open this afternoon, so I’m not quoting from perfect memory.)

His concepts of ethics and of community are consonant with this assumption of each ego’s inescapable solitude. According to Derrida, I remain alone, on my own, however much I may be open to the ethical demand each other, though “wholly other,” makes on me. Each demand, moreover, as Derrida says in The Gift of Death (GD, 68; DM, 98), is incommensurable with the demands made at the same moment by all the other “wholly others.” I discuss this aporia in detail in Chapter 9 of this book....

This random page experience was amazing to me. I swear to you, it was (from my perspective, that moment), like my opening the book to a random page and finding what I needed: I’ve been struggling with how to confess a condition I’ve grown into, such that I prefer the presence of my library to most all other persons passing through my life, yet enjoy others immensely. Derrida finds such a condition unavoidable (for his kind of mind). I easily get weary of others and fear being honest about it to those who make me want to withdraw, though I’d rather be kept interested. At a party, I can easily be wonderfully entertaining (as I “read” from others’ enjoyment of me), but I’m glad to leave. My curiosity about others can be insatiable—but I usually reach a border that makes others anxious, not that I seek that; but I seem to have radar for it. But I have plenty to keep me fascinated. I’m not lonely.

Over the years, I’ve had wonderful friendships, the best I could have hoped for (and loves—which, in the long run, are only as good as their quality of friendship). We’re unafraid of borders. We love play that’s long and deeply open, abundant, curious, and adventurous—with plenty of silliness decorating something not basically vacuous.

But paths, careers, accidents, decisions—well, it’s a lot of long stories. There can be no short stories fair to great friendships.

Such thoughts take a couple of seconds to have, long to write. No more than 45 seconds had passed since she went into the bathroom.

....Most modern and postmodern philosophers or theorists, in one way or another, assume that our primordial, inalienable situation is a “being with” others who are more or less like ourselves and to whose interiority we are granted some degree of access....

She burst out of the bathroom. I felt like a 10 year-old shoplifter caught. “I like Derrida.”

She smiled politely, waiting at her door for me to leave.

We have no idea what’s going to happen in ordinary days. Today is an ordinary day on my street of slumming princes and princesses (deteriorating old houses, new BMWs in the driveways). Yesterday was not an ordinary day (that party), but its real frame is very ordinary. Is there some generic ordinariness that requires no recounting? Is it enough to say the days are ordinary? Why take time to detail a minuscule part of the ordinary days. I think of a plane crashing into the frat house across the street because it entertains me. But a few hours later, I remember Robin Williams in The World According to Garp. There are grand storytellers (John Irving, for example). I am not one of them.

Yet, books are my friends.

Derrida was married to a psychoanalyst, and he is the Master of Textuality. I get exuberant thinking about such a relationship. I count 14 books in my library on psychoanalysis, literature, and textuality. (You thought my interest in textual intimacy was some kind of symptomology.)

My Berkeley is a little café society near campus that has none of the bourgeois overtones of Parisian cliché (whose lineage becomes The Village, then North Beach). Berkeley is Berkeley. The Strada (a darling café) is especially interesting, near the huge International House, bedding so many academic tourists who easily give summer afternoons at the Strada that aire of Parisian cliché (rich kids in tennis shorts, but no rackets), where all is little theater. Generally, though, the place can be interesting, when the weather’s nice (May through September): Some of the brightest lights on earth, mostly seeming to study, never cease to be mating minds—easily obvious during any single doppio. I mean, really: If you want to study, are you going to sit in a café? Scoping competes with page time.

Non-American women want experience with an older American man they don’t have to see again, if they don’t want to (unlike cohort men at “I-House” or faculty they work with). It would have something to do with “the human career,” in the broadest sense—“the self in the symbolic world,” according to anthropologist W.R. Goldschmidt (1992). Also, it’s about “the odyssey experience.”

It’s not about sex, per se. It’s about minds, which are embodied in aspirational, imaginative, disappointed, hopeful, and idealizing lives, fascinating to me as an anthropologist, as a dramatist, as a clinical psychologist.

I was married to a psychotherapist, so that adds to Derrida’s appeal. He would find my Eros of the text interesting (but he died of cancer, still in the peak of his faculties). He taught regularly at UC, Irvine (south, not far, really), sometimes here. J. Hillis Miller, at Irvine, was a close friend. For Derrida’s cover shows the two of them seated in a car (evidently), J. Hillis expounding, Jacques looking at something in his lap, distracted or bored.

I shared with hardly anyone that we were married, firstly because it was our game: We never told many persons. (I liked having others believe I was celibate—then: too old. Funny how people regard that. Oh, those poor priests, nuns, monks, the really disabled, and celibates. What must their relationships be, without bonds based on sexual exclusivity?) We were fun, beginning 1984, mind lovers—fun to tell someday—or could be, if I’d take the time to learn to do a story well. Getting distance is an issue.

We had a condo in the upper Haight, but she used one of the bedrooms for her practice, and we were both solitudinous types; so, we also kept an apartment in Berkeley, which I used as a storage space for my massive library and as an occasional workspace near campus, when I didn’t want to go across the Bay late at night or she was in one of her New Age retreats or wherever (sister in Peru). Eventually, the reason I’d not say I was married was because we separated as a “Relationship,” after—hmm—24 years. The apartment became where I live. Now it doesn’t matter what I said or didn’t say. I sold the Haight place. I don’t know when I’ll buy something else. It should be with someone else—someone who (excuse me) doesn’t get boring.

It’s ordinary days we meet persons who so happen to begin a legacy. It’s ordinary days when, like a bus hitting an absent-minded professor crossing a street or terminal cancer or suicide, a legacy ends.

But I’ve not ended. There are always themes, countless and counted, vining and diverging—33 yesterday for my current project, and not counting the chances for appreciative engagement that new seasons provide.

Years ago, when I was a grad student in Florida, I happened to see Robert Rauschenberg come into his studio before his morning coffee had brewed (dead to the world, maybe suffering a party of ambitious young artists the night before, hungry to mate with fame), looking at all he’d gathered—such odd things—into his studio, as if having no idea who’d done that, let alone what’s going to seem to belong to what freestanding combine. (Well, actually, he gave up doing those. But the mess remained.) He got to live long, and died May, 2008, a few months before my separation, which took me far into something lost. Ah, there’s an original motif for a story (—not).

I like what Michael Kimmelman says in his obituary for R.R.: “A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did.”

That’s me. I’m Bob’s son, and ‘Gary’’s my ‘Mark Twain,’ though I lack the garrulous, hard-drinking aspect of having been a Southerner, as my Old South was all about manners. So, I have some of the charm and felicity. Had I been a “good ol’ boy,” I mighta turned out like James Dickey—who nevertheless gave me an ‘A’ in his poetry-writing class. But he commonly lectured drunk (always wearing Burt Reynold’s hat from the movie version of Dickey’s novel, Deliverance, which had recently come out), so maybe everybody got an ‘A’ for enduring him. Poets who survived the “European theater” of WWII had a certain attitude.

The artist gives significance to things that have no significance because it’s what the black sky and cold night say to do.

“Hey, are you going home?”

I didn’t leave, did I. I sat on the edge of your bed and started talking and talking. And you let me.

This is what youth’s for: to remind one’s elders that the past will be dismissed, if not forgotten, because our species is primordially futural (or present-centered).

There’s always news! The daily present. Somehow, everything fits together—or deserves to be seen so, surely. All the singularity of our revolving habitat has evolving order, somehow in the gravity of its cycles. A topology of it all can be found.

“Yeah, right,” “says” a photo of Derrida looking into the camera, squinting, as if the light is too bright, or the presence of the photo occasion lacks credibility, but looking at me, thus I lack—or that’s all he can do, after metaphysicalism has wiped out so many lives, and all the gods are made idols: He plays “Derrida,” especially apt for the cover of a little book titled Copy, Archive, Signature: a conversation on photography.

I saw the movie. It was titled, simply “Derrida,” following him around as he went to lectures, held interviews, and suffered Parisian traffic. He plays Derrida.

I am not a narrative figure implying ultimate futility, and I am not an authorship undermined by my narrator’s voice, because I have found the scholars and scientists and theorists and philosophers who have all the pieces of all the cells that are composing all the order, and I can see how it all fits. I can do this.

She sighed. “Well, it’s late.”