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Seven Pillars, Wadi Rum, Jordan
His first glimpse of what would be his own
home sweet home and boneyard
came in 1975, twenty years before his death
Before arriving at the University of Kansas in 1970,
Ph.Deed from Notre Dame and Indiana
traveled in Europe and Mexico trying to write
Came to KU the the same year that I came back from Vietnam
where I’d learned to keep a low profile
Tom was “black Irish” he liked to say
a lovely man with a grave sense of humor
We worked together on his Confessions
of T. E. Lawrence in the mid 1970s
Me banging the Underwood, him proofing the copy.
I took him to the boneyard—in ’95, one of my shining mistakes.
the gravestones made him nervous. He asked to go home
He liked Michael Leiris's Manhood (L'Age d'homme)
Though the book appeared in 1939,
four years after Lawrence’s fatal motorcycle crash
it concludes with an afterward "The Autobiographer as Torero," dated anno mirabilis 1946
Less a history of a life than a listing of limitations,
beginning with the body: baldness, chronic inflammation of the eyelids,
hunched shoulders, a habit when alone of scratching his anus
Leiris's is the art of that venerable preoccupation with sincerity peculiar to French letters, coolly exploring erotic manias and scabs of emotional disengagement.
His vices aren't lurid, only a cold temperament
unredeemed by any of modesty or self-respect
“Wisdom hath builded her house,
she hath hewn out her seven pillars"
says the Book of Proverbs
T. E. Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash in 1935,
at the age of 46.
After the passage of seventy years, numbers spoken by a sphinx.
Odd how much Tom liked this book:
put it in the genre of “confession” along with Augustine’s mea culpa, Lawrence’s Seven Pillars, and others that spoke to the itch in his Irish-American soul,
spoke to that other self emblemized in Lawrence's logo for Seven Pillars,
the crossed scimitars shown below.
By the mid 1970s romance and enigma had become an inseparable part of Lawrence’s reputation. The stain went deeper than soap could clean.
To be a writer is not enough, Leiris explains
in "De la litérature considérée comme une tauromachie".
It is boring, pallid. It lacks danger.
He wants to feel the bullfighter's knowledge that he risks being gored. Only then is writing worthwhile. Leiris' problem is the chronic thinness of his emotions— that, and boredom. He flogs himself just to make his lungs consent to draw air.
His book addresses Rimbaud's great recognition,
how the pronoun I becomes, on the other side of "writing," the pronoun he.
Tom liked Leiris but he loved T. E.
The Turk used a whip of the Circassian sort,
made it whistle over my ear, taunting me that before his tenth cut I would howl for mercy, and at the twentieth beg for the caresses of the Bey; and then he began to lash me madly across and across with all his might, while I locked my teeth to endure this thing which lapped itself like flaming wire about my body.
I had strung myself to learn all pain until I died, and no longer actor, but spectator, thought not to care how my body jerked and squealed. Yet I knew or imagined what passed about me.
in Daraa that night the citadel of my integrity was lost
remembrance of pain, pain lashed with pleasure.
“Unclean, unclean,” was his self-assessent.
Freud in his 1919 paper, A Child is Being Beaten
about a fantasy frequently found in his psychoanalytic practice
In the firs phase, 'My father is beating the child . .. whom I hate';
the second by, 'I am being beaten by my father', which is unmistakably masochistic;
and the third phase in which the patient is an onlooker and subject and object are altered to impersonal and ambiguous individuals.
I becomes he. Sexual excitement attached to the third phase,
serves as a stimulus to masturbation.
The barrenness of Bedouin life and
of the desert matched Lawrence's out-
look. "Semitic creeds" preached "world-
worthlessness ... bareness, renunciation,
poverty.... The Bedouin ... haunted star-
vation and death." In an almost incom-
prehensible episode, Lawrence urges a
camp of tribesmen to battle not for vic-
tory but failure and death. "To be of the
desert was ... to wage unending battle with
.. hope.... Death would seem best of all
our works.... To the clear-sighted, failure
was the only goal."Years later, the desert
retained its hold on his memory. "I wake
up now, often, in Arabia: the place has
stayed with me much more than the men
and the deeds." "Whenever a landscape or
colour in England gets into me deeply, ...
often ... it is because something of it re-
calls Arabia." He rode his motorcycle over
the sand dunes at Poole-"They remind
me of the desert.”
Robert Graves characterized Lawrence
as "a broken hero who tried to appear whole"
like many an adolescent male
looking for something to fill the hole in his soul.
Tom, Leiris and Lawrence were crossed scimitars—
Lawrence's logo for Seven Pillars
With one hand, "the sword also means cleanness + death"
and with the other hand Leiris's chronic anal itching
Tom’s second book was The Crazymaker,
about a Kansas City woman who conspired with her son to kill her stepson,
driving him to a deserted place, making him dig his own grave, and shooting him in it.
In 1996 it took Tom only a year to die of virulent Alzheimer’s
Let Wisdom hew out her seven pillars
fitting these pieces into the jigsaw of time.
His daughter Erin died earlier the same year Tom died.
She was sixteen. Her mother found a better boneyard for her.
Oak Hill also holds "Dutch" Olson
brother of my great-grandmother Celia Olson
like him born in Sweden. She died with her ninth childbirth in 1906.
Dutch died of old age in 1952
Tom and Erin variously in 1996
And the author of these notes in time to come.
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