March 28th, 1976 at 8:30 pm
(1976)
It's like I've lost a major battle in the war of my life, that Boyd is dead. It has made me feel so much angrier, and bitterer, and more determined. But it's taken all the appetite away from me.
It's like I'm dead up against a wall that I can't shake. I so desperately want to talk to Boyd about it. I want to reason it out with him. I need his support—to verify me.
I just need to talk to him to talk. Suddenly I am dangling in the world. I don't know how to reclaim my life alone—but now I am really alone.
I don't have the appetite anymore, that I would pick up from seeing Boyd. I don't have the string to dangle from anymore.
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March 20th, 1976 at 8:10 am
(1976)
It is often said that the roots exist for the tree, but maybe the tree exists for the roots.
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March 18th, 1976 at 11:00 am
(1976)
What man used to do for his life for work has been narrowed to the modern sense of work, and that part that has been squeezed out of it has manifested itself anew under the name of play. Once play and work were so intermingled they were one thing; now they are separated into two.
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March 17th, 1976 at 9:15 am
(1976)
There is also the obvious analogy between animals in laboratory conditions, the techniques of manipulation used against them,—and brainwashing, as occurs in P.O.W. camps and kidnappers' closets and slave plantations.
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March 17th, 1976 at 8:30 am
(1976)
The human body is so very strange-looking. But from the waist down it is beautiful—so animal-like. It is an education just to look at our body from the waist down—especially the powerful legs. Of course the shoulders and neck—they are beautiful too. And the forearms when they are strong—so animal-like. The breast, even the belly when it is not too big—they are beautiful, as are the strong hands. And the human face, too, has its good points. The eyes are animal-like and beautiful. And the nose, the ears, the cheeks, even the mouth. The human body is so animal like and beautiful above the waist. But so strange below it: the legs are like stilts. We walk like we're walking on stilts.
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March 12th, 1976 at 10:00 am
(1976)
It is only in a tragic world that death becomes such a tragedy.
Babies cry at everything violent, at the slightest tragic loss of love, and do not understand death; adults no longer are aware of most violence and tragedy short of injury or loss of life, and still, still they do not understand death.
We now have a world that to survive in, you have to be happy go free and care lucky about it.
You have to live every minute of your life as if you are in a state of war with civilization around you, as if every minute is a minute exposed in a combat zone, in danger for your life and your children's lives.
Because it's almost literally so.
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March 10th, 1976 at 2:45 pm
(1976)
Yesterday I felt generally worse than the day before, generally felt extremely uncomfortable in my stomach and my head, very uncomfortable and tired. I think I was more resigned to his death and able to accept it, to allow it, except for the funeral.
Boyd would probably not have appreciated the funeral, though he would have the concern of people—all the friends who came, the relatives and friends there to help his parents.
The funeral was not for Boyd but for the people there.
The funeral was for the preacher, to advertize Christianity.
It was for the funeral home and the ritualistic, to make a pageant of it.
It was for the rest of us, and especially for Boyd's parents—to see the coffin containing his body lowered deep into the earth, and covered with shovel after shovel of heavy dirt. This meant it was true, he was dead, and now he was buried. It could not really be understood until it was seen.
The wind blew hard during the grave-site service—blew viciously at the tarpolin and at the flowers stood around the coffin, knocking some off, some over. Glory to the wind, for trying to express the anger and viciousness I felt. Back at the funeral home during the chapel service earlier I had wanted everything torn and knocked apart—all the flowers there be tumbled over, as if by hurricane. But the wind could not get inside the chapel.
And so they buried Boyd, and placed the flowers over the open dirt. I picked up a flower and tossed it on, to buck the neatness of the placed flowers—the only way I could state my protest.
I hated the neatness and order of the whole thing. I wanted chaos and confusion—because what I felt was chaos and confusion. I felt anarchy and disruption and viciousness against the neatness of it all.
They made his dying all neat and tidy and orderly: they perverted what really happened: they denied what I felt, and what more than anyone his parents felt; what, I think, all felt at least a little of.
It was a thing of destruction and violence, chaotic and confusing and bitter.
How I wanted to protest: Don't you know what you're doing? Don't you realize? Don't you realize who you're burying? What are you doing? What are you doing?
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March 8th, 1976 at 10:15 pm
(1976, Journal)
I guess I am too intellectual about it to cry. I approach life with my head and not with my eyes and ears and mouth.
People who believe in God cry so much more easily.
Boyd’s parents have cried more than I have in my entire life.
Perhaps it is because of the contacts, maybe they have ruined my eyes for crying.
God I wish I could cry.
I simply can not lose control of myself—I never lose it any more. I drain it all out of me by thinking instead.
I wish I could cry and not think.
Anyway it would be better for my eyes.
Several times I was about to lose myself and my face into tears—and then I was aware of it and thought, ‘I am about to cry.’ But that would destroy it, and there wouldn’t be anything but a little wetness on my eyes, that my contacts quickly soaked.
I want to cry and not be aware.
Will ever again I do something unaware?
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