Robert Roth

The Genius of 10th St.

About twenty years ago …

You can print this page by copying its URL to printfriendly.coM.

About twenty years ago Michael Kranish who was a manager at a public housing project in NYC one night saw a security guard recently here from Puerto Rico sitting in his security booth reading my uncle Sandor Voros's book American Commissar. The book is about my uncle fighting in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. It was published in the mid 1950s. There might be only 10 copies of the books left in the world. Somehow he got hold of one of them. And there he was 60 years later reading my long dead uncle's long out of print book. And on top of that meeting a good friend of the author's nephew.

To have just one person stumble onto something I wrote and get absorbed in it, argue with it, spin out with it, do whatever they will do with it, is beyond thrilling. Maybe they'll search for other things I have written, or use it as a key to a universe way in the past. Embark on an effort to discover something about the world I inhabited and people I knew. What if they follow the clues or information or evidence to wherever they lead. What might they find?

There are Many of Us

There are so many people with the same name as me. People whose politics, whose sensibilities at least from afar or maybe even up close are very similar to mine. All in fact have done impressive things in their lives.

The subtle distinctions I make, the choosing of words to express my deepest thoughts/feelings/political perspectives seem totally useless in distinguishing me from the others.

Still there are things I sometimes seriously disagree with, sometimes there are things I know nothing about. And often enough things are said in ways I wish I was the one who had said them. Particularly if sometime way in the future I am going to get credit for it.

How will those differences be reconciled? He said one thing here. Another thing there. He doesn't even acknowledge that he is doing it.

Robert Roth author
As a working-class queer nerd and author, Roth uses his writing to challenge the status quo and question the capitalist patriarchy.

Robert Roth (artist) paints idyllic visions of landscapes seen from a distance. Roth's atmospheric works, influenced by Modern luminaries ranging from...

Robert Roth (born 1950) was an active member in the anti-war, anti-racism and anti-imperialism movements of the 1960s and 70s, and key member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) political movement in the Columbia University Chapter in New York, where he eventually presided. Later, as a member of the Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization he used militant tactics to oppose the Vietnam War and racism. After the war ended, Roth surfaced from his underground status and has been involved in a variety of social causes to this day.

I first learned about this Robert Roth when a woman I met at a movie screening called me and pretty early on in the conversation told me she once had an affair with him. And while not being in the grip of a powerful and rare fetish, she did find the thought intriguing of maybe us having an affair also.

Often after seeing my name on a mailing list or a petition, I would get emails, phone calls and letters from people who thought I was him. Talking about some shared experience from the past. I would have to tell them that it wasn't me.

And just a couple of years ago a new neighbor looked me up and was so impressed with what she read that no matter what I said I couldn't convince her that he wasn't me.

Robert Roth (born 1966) is a songwriter, vocalist and guitarist of 1990s Sub Pop and Capitol Records band Truly. He is still touring today.

And then there was Robert Roth gay movie critic, as opposed to the novelist, who died a number of years ago. I think he may have also started a film magazine in Chicago.

And what about the Robert Roth who wrote an eloquent letter to the NY Post furious at George H.W. Bush for calling someone retarded. He wrote about his two children who had Down syndrome and the wounding ignorance that slurs like that have as well as what they reveal about the person using them.

He had at least two children. I see he got acknowledgments in landmark books on disability. Yes. It is very likely he wrote the letter. As far as I know, he didn't write about his children anywhere else. That doesn't mean it is not true. He has a brother who he rarely mentions also. But I did find a manuscript of scattered typed sheets where he wrote a lot about him.

Then there was the Robert Roth who made an anti-war movie. He fought in Vietnam.

Now it is possible some of these Robert Roths are actually the same person. What do I know?

There was also a person whose name was close to mine who wrote a letter to Seven Days, the radical weekly not the sleek trendy weekly of a few years later, that a number of friends—yes friends—complimented me on.

And then there was the Robert Roth fighting for the preservation of landmark buildings on the upper west side of Manhattan. Why not?

Mobilizing support he used all his political organizing skills to convince people who thought there were more pressing problems that it wasn't a question of either/or. It was important as a way to resist the uglification of the city and the desire to erase history and that the huge power of the real estate industry had to be prevented from imposing its will whenever, wherever it pleased. He learned the history of architecture in New York. He became an expert on the social political economic forces at play when the buildings were built. He was very well versed in housing law. All this while touring the world with his band, raising at least two children. He was continually on the front lines of social activism, and while there is no recorded evidence it was rumored that he was the last person to swim the English Channel before it became a stretch of hard dry dirt.

And before I forget there was an article in New York magazine that a Robert Roth and Arnold Socher opened up a club in lower Manhattan featuring drag performers.

That has to be them. Arnie's name is a little off in the spelling. It should be Sachar. But mistakes like that happened all the time.

It was mind blowing to stumble across this article. Arnie and I did so much together. We wrote poetry, short stories, public statements and public petitions where we had to gather signatures of as many people as we could. Our politics roughly, anarchist, pacifist, sex radical. We organized discussion groups, writing groups, sometimes gatherings to discuss a particular issue. We started And Then together with Shelley Haven and Marguerite Bunyan. So in some alternative universe we might have opened up a drag club. Again just reading the article some people might just assume it was us. In addition Arnie one time heard both our fathers discussing what kind of business they could set us up in. They were worried about our future. He said it was both funny and moving hearing them trying to grasp who we were and trying to figure if there was anything at all that could be done.

One time I did meet a Swiss banker at a wedding anniversary and spoke to him for about a half hour discussing the finances of the magazine and what it took for us to break even. “If lovers or friends or family members of the contributors buy copies that is a big plus.”

Dead Friend Press

Stephanie's novel 40% done
Muriel's book about her therapist crossing basic sexual boundaries 97% done
Shulamith's novel 100% done
Karen's memoir one chapter short of being done (there are extensive notes of what she might have included in the section)
My mother's dissertation 100% done

A writer I greatly admired and was friendly with died and left boxes and boxes of notebooks filled with descriptions of people, interactions of people in various circumstances, descriptions of nature and small town life. Powerful thoughtful descriptions infused with the full power of his genius. His two literary executors poured through them and selected sections and put them together into a book. Both were fine writers and though half a generation younger shared a similar sensibility. But even though all the words were entirely his, the book itself, how these sections interacted with each other was entirely theirs. It was unsettling. You had absolutely no idea how he might have used each of those sections in some larger work. In the way the sections were arranged, the book seemed much more politically and culturally conservative than any other work of his I had ever read. The executors were very close friends of his. So maybe they remained faithful to how he saw the world at that time.

I hope not.

One time I read an article by a friend of mine that appeared in Ms. She and I had some political differences over the years. But in the article those differences were taken way beyond anything I had read from her before. I saw her later that week and she was livid. They had changed her ending without telling her. She was very embarrassed and distraught that people would think she would say those things.

I ran into another friend sometime later who said The Nation. just published an article under her name where they changed every word of it.

In the first issue of And Then Volume One, 1987 we published a conversation between Gary Sheinfeld and James Baldwin.

Baldwin: Giovani's Room was one of the most troubling I've written. You know I was warned not to publish it....I'm a Negro writer and I can't afford to alienate an audience...they told me. I don't think any artist can be told who his audience is or what to write. I believe you had a similar problem, with your short story, about a black child on the subway.

Sheinfeld: I think so. Yes at Columbia the editors of this journal wanted to publish it, but they said it was a racist story, because a white man is able to calm a black child while her mother remains helpless. They wanted to change a few key words. I asked them not to, I'd rather they not publish the story. They assured me they wouldn't change a word. They published it after changing “white” to “withered.”

Baldwin: It was a very beautiful story, very bitter, but very beautiful.

Now my uncle told me that Esquire wanted to change the ending of a short story he wrote. He told them he wouldn't. So they didn't publish the story. He felt he made a grave error. No other opportunity of that magnitude came his way again.

So my way-in-the-future biographer sleuth soulmate friend collaborator can't be sure that whatever appeared under my name, assuming it was actually me, really was what I had intended. Also will they have to track down these unpublished works of friends of mine. And follow wherever they lead. Traces of me might be found in at least some of them.

We published the original version of Gary's story in And Then Volume 2, 1989.

Acknowledgments

One time in the 1970s a woman came over to me and said I can't read a book about feminism without seeing your name in the acknowledgments. This has been true of many other subjects as well. Jazz, opera, Eastern Europe, cook books, even real estate to name a very few. Books, articles, dissertations, an occasional footnote, being mentioned in the program of concerts and plays. Called out from the stage by a singer in between songs. Is he a critic, does he work for a record label, a producer, a musician, a song writer, a family member, a former lover? There are works that I feel particularity attached to. And then there are poems and prose pieces and music pieces dedicated to me over the years. I feel very appreciative and grateful and deeply moved when that happens. But still it might not be so apparent to someone looking back from the future as to the "why" of some of those acknowledgments.

As the lights went on in the darkened theater, my name was the last to appear in a long list of credits that rolled across the screen of When Two Worlds Collide. a documentary about the struggle over resources in the Peruvian Amazon. The credits disappeared in the Netflix version, eliminating crucial primary source material. Basically my role was to put the filmmakers up in my apartment when they came to New York. I also accompanied them to Chinatown where they bought film equipment from the back of a van.

How Reputations are Formed

My friend Marvin Schwartz was the official photographer for the Calder exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The animal sculptures for the mobiles to be assembled were all inside a roped off area. Marvin stepped over the rope and started combing the hair of one of the lions.

A higher up in the museum, worried that he would damage the lion, started racing toward him waving her arms frantically yelling for him to stop.

A friend of Marvin who worked there raised his hand and said, “But Marvin is a genius.” She stopped in her tracks and said, Oh!”

And that, according to Marvin, is how he became a genius.

Roth's understanding of the cultural, political and economic forces in Peru was legendary.

A friend was doing a dissertation on the political economy of Peru, very detailed very technical work. Different from the more accessible, incisive essays she wrote for various leftwing journals. As we were putting together the first issue of And Then, I asked her if she could write an essay about the clashing economic forces in Peru. Instead she wrote a magnificent poem about Peru and the infliction of economic pain by powerful forces there to plunder the country. One great thing in doing the magazine is that I always have to let go of whatever preconceived idea I have about what the person will do. Usually it does take a couple of days to adjust. And then, Wow!

I also remember my friend once did a phone interview with Noam Chomsky. They just couldn't click on anything. Noam said, Let's try again tomorrow. And they did. And it went extremely well.

In any case, the dissertation was being written in very technical language. At one point she got totally stuck, I suggested that each month she send me something that she had written, “It will give you a goal, something to shoot for. I won't understand a word but so what.”

So each month she sent me a number of pages she had written. And I was right. I couldn't understand one word. Still I read everything she sent. One month she sent me something that somehow made less sense than everything else that made no sense to me. With great hesitation I wrote back and told her that maybe there was something off about that section. Being an exceptionally warm, generous and considerate person, she tried to be as nice about it as possible. Reminding me that my role basically was to be someone to send something to each month to motivate her to keep her on track and to mark her progress. That she very much appreciated what I was doing but there were no expectations beyond that. I loved her even more than before for the care she took in telling me that.

Three days later she called and apologized, telling me that her dissertation advisors told her that section was a total mess.

Later she submitted an article to a journal where an outside reader wrote a totally ridiculous nitpicking critique. I said why don't we turn this into a poem. And we took the words from the critique and arranged them into a poem. We called it Reader's Comments. It was published in a Socialist newspaper. Previously we had submitted it to Monthly Review. Paul Sweezy, one of the most important Marxian economists of the 20th Century who was both founder and editor of Monthly Review wrote back an absolutely gracious, apologetic rejection letter saying how much he liked our poem but the Review didn't publish poetry. It was such a high being personally rejected by him in this way.

Still as rejection letters go it was a distant second compared to the one another friend once received. When her short story was rejected by a very prestigious literary journal, the editor wrote, “Sorry. I just don't get it.” In a handwritten note underneath, the woman working as his secretary added, “But I do.”

In addition to being an adviser for a major documentary and the go to guy when it came to understanding the Peruvian economy, there was his life long friendship and collaboration with Fredy Roncalla, Peruvian writer, poet, musician, literary critic, political analyst that was crucial to the forming of his deep grasp of the subtleties and intricacies and beauties of Peruvian culture. Fredy and Robert wrote poetry together and essays. They would meet every Sunday before the flea market opened where Fredy would sell his jewelry. While they often conversed just with each other, people would gather nearby and try to overhear their conversation. So immersed were they in conversation they barely noticed other people being there. Even though the conversations moved seamlessly back and forth through Quechua, Spanish and English, what they were saying could immediately be understood by anyone who just spoke any one of those languages. It was a vivid example for a discipline started a couple of decades later by someone overhearing them and then using them as the original model to build a whole theory around. It is the study of how through facial expressions, intonations of the voice and an overflowing humanity and intimacy, “understanding” in its rawest and most authentic form, can break free from the confines imposed by spoken language.

There was immediate pushback from poets who knew them both and who thought to reduce them into being examples for a new academic discipline was a way to neutralize the actual expansive power of the words themselves.

No one knows how Robert at 105 or Fredy at 95, who were known to still meet regularly, felt about any of it.

Poet, composer, librettist, economist, cultural critic, map maker, all around troubleshooter

Two super close friends of mine who were working on an opera had a bitter falling out. They wanted to complete the opera but because each had taken an order of protection out against the other, they couldn't be in the same room together. I was asked to be the go between.

One would say “You go tell her that...” I would answer, “I can’t ‘you go tell her that.’ There must be a better way to say it.” Only to have the other person then say, "You go tell him that...” “I can’t ‘you go tell him that'...!’”

I also received a phone call from an entertainment lawyer who was beside herself about what to do. And so on and so forth until the opera was completed.

And what an opera it was! And just for the record they later made peace and went on to do other magnificent things together.

There was a reading of the opera in the huge loft of the director. Instruments from the 13th century to the present in one section, posters on the wall from hit shows he had directed on other walls. In the program there was a special mention of how indispensable I was to the completion of the opera.

Afterward I was approached by a number of people. They asked if in some way I helped with the libretto. Or just assuming that I must have some vast knowledge of music did I help get over any rough spots in the composing of the music.

So if that program is ever discovered in the directors papers or written about in the biographies of the composer and/or the librettist, or even somehow salvaged from wherever it is in my apartment, it will provide further evidence of my multiple talents as a writer and musician. While my ability as a world class mediator will simply get lost in the shuffle.

Just as I was completing this section, I received Ahmed Abdullah’s memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the introduction he described a conversation we had In Prospect Park in 1997 that helped start him on creating this historic work. It felt so good to read. He and his life partner the oh so brilliant poet and singer Monique Ngozi Nri have been a constant source of validation over the decades.

What I haven’t written about here is how much I like writing acknowledgments myself.

Often when I write acknowledgments I get swept away with pleasure in celebrating people who are vital to my life. If these acknowledgements survive into the future they will provide a treasure trough of clues for My Looking Back into the Past (my present) Companion. They will provide a sense of the people I knew, the environments I was part of. The joys, the terrors, the ferment, the tragedies, the magic and richness of sharing this time on earth with all these wondrous people I love beyond measure.

Pen Names, Pseudonyms, New Names, Different Names

Doris Lessing wrote two short novels under the name Jane Somers to see how people would respond to her work not knowing it was her who had written them. It was also done to highlight the difficulties of unknown writers getting their work published. A respected publishing house rejected the novel out of hand. A small publisher finally published it. It received a couple short reviews that were low key in their praise. Of curse when it was revealed who wrote them all that changed.

Both novels were released as a paperback called “The Diary of a Good Neighbor.” I got a copy of it as a present. Many years later the Living Theatre did an adaptation of one of the novels. The play was called Maudie and Jane. Judith Molina was breathtaking as the lead character.

One time in my early 30s I was more or less just staring through the window of the New Yorker Bookstore not focusing on anything in particular when Stanley Aronowitz, radical social critic, author of many books and articles, and non stop political organizer came to stand next to me. He pointed to a book and asked if I knew who the author was. I said I didn’t. He then told me it was a pseudonym that Murray Bookchin the great anarchist theorist used at some point in the past, quickly adding that he thought it was cowardly of Bookchin and anyone else not to write under their own name. He sounded totally ridiculous.

Without even thinking I blurted out. “Well people have their reasons. In fact I’ve written books under a different name that you use in your courses.” Which was totally untrue.

Stanley was one of the creators of The Free Association, a radical libertarian socialist/anarchist school. He was in his early 40s. He had a huge personality. A mix of insecurity, massive ego, profound commitments, genuine accomplishments, warmth and a compulsive need to assert his brilliance and importance.

From treating me like an “equal” he was now very unsure and clearly nervous about where I fell in his hierarchy of importance.

“Robert, Do you write popular best sellers?”

“No, radical social criticism. Like I said, you are using my books in your courses.”

He grew more nervous.

“You can tell me. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

“I’ve said too much already,” I replied, a bit guilty that I was carrying it too far, but still locked into it.

“Really. You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Forget I said anything. I was just joking.”

A few days later Joyce Johnson, the writer and editor, who organized a writers group I was part of, came over to me at the The Free Association. With a big conspiratorial smile on her face she whispered that Stanley had come over to her apartment after our exchange and asked her who I really was.

She said she answered, “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

Now I’m not one to talk. A scene for a movie was being filmed in a long unoccupied bar on the corner of my block. I stood behind a police barricade watching the filming when an extremely friendly black man his shoulder warmly leaning into mine started talking to me. He was straight out fun and we just got into a totally riotous back and forth. We were talking and laughing when suddenly it dawned on me that it was Richard Pryor. My voice cracked in mid sentence. I tried to continue as if nothing was different. Fortunately for me he had to go back to work.

“Nice talking to you, man.”

“Nice talking to you too.”

A number of years after my conversation with Stanley in front of the bookstore, while attending an anarchist conference in the early 1980s in Montreal, I showed Murray Bookchin a copy of a magazine where my short story In the Audience had recently been published. It was the first story of mine published since college.

It was a long short story. It had the feel of a novella, even a novel. It was about people who inhabited an alternative universe of radicals, who had one foot in and one foot out of the mainstream world that they were trying to change, overthrow and yet find a place in. The ways also they had internalized the values of the dominant culture and how the impact of those values seriously undermined the types of transformations they, with great imagination and courage, were devoting their lives to achieving.

As soon as Murray took the magazine from me his eyes lit up. A big smile crossed his face. He saw that Raymond Aron had an essay in it and without even the faintest acknowledgment or congratulations turned immediately to Aron’s essay. On top of it he wanted me to share in his delight. Those tiny slights, these tiny hurts, in this case more an expression of his massive self-absorption than any desire to diminish me, though in this case I wasn’t even present enough to be diminished, can, at least by me, be quickly rationalized away, overly understood and easily buried. Only to unexpectedly surface like now many, many decades later.

Early in her career, the brilliant Argentine pianist Arminda Canteros developed a huge reputation as a classical musician. But unknown to most people she was also an extraordinary tango player. At the time it was considered unseemly for a woman to play the tango. It was considered too bold, too sexually assertive. Somehow a radio station hired her to have her own show where she would play the tango. But they insisted she assume a male persona whose name would be Jacinto. People went crazy over Jacinto and during the 1930s and 40s, he developed an avid following. To keep the ruse going they created a whole ongoing story about his life. For example the publicist from the station would feed juicy gossip items to the local tabloids. Last weekend Jacinto and a beautiful (unnamed) starlet were sighted at a romantic hide away by the ocean.

Eventually the stigma of women playing the tango lifted and Arminda would give full concerts performing as herself. Over the years she would tour the world sometimes doing classical music concerts, other times concerts where she only played the tango. Once in New York after a tango concert, an older man came up to her and said it was the most beautiful tango he had heard since listening to someone named Jacinto play the tango on the radio a long long time ago.

I went to a concert of Bennet Lerner who had once been a student of hers. It was through him I had met Arminda who was also at the concert.The concert was in the small theatre inside a piano store. After the recital there was a reception in an upstairs showroom filled with pianos. Bennett was on the far end of the room when he heard one note coming way from the other end. Arminda had hit just one key on one of the pianos. As if almost connected by an invisible string, you could actually see Bennett’s ears perk up as he spun around searching, smiling, instantly knowing who had played the note and where it had come from.

My uncle keeps popping up in this piece. I sent my cousin Jos Kraay, Sandor’s daughter, the first few pages of Genius of 10th St. where I write about her father. She sent me this email in reply.

Thank you Robert, what is a name. When my father Sandor as the last of the family went from Hungry to Amerika, he was asked his name. He thought it would be better to to not gave up his Hungarian name, Voros, Voros was translation of red from Russian, so he translated and as red, he meant Roth, but they understood Wrought, therefore his name is different from the rest but sounds the same. When Sandor was here in Amsterdam in 1966, we went to the big synagogue at the Waterloopplein, Sandor said to the woman who was in the entrance that he was not a jew at all, she laughed and said you are an Askenace.

My uncle used two names. Alex Wrought in his daily life and Sandor Voros in his creative public life. People keep asking me if I have an uncle Philip. I do. But not the Philip they are asking about. My uncle Philip was pretty spectacular in his own right. His name was Philip Voros. He toured the country as a mind reader. Also held private mind reading sessions at rich people’s homes. He had a photographic memory and developed a recipe for diet bread. A bread company stole his recipe. I saw an item in the newspaper that he won a suit against the company and was awarded damages. Not exactly a fortune, but still something.

When I was in the first grade we went around the room to introduce ourselves. I said I was Robert Roth (pronouncing it as Wrought) The teacher said, No it’s “Roth.” I said it was “Wrought.” I was furious. I went home all upset I told my father they said my name is Roth. I told them it was Wrought. He said they’re right it is Wrought. He tried to pronounce “th “and just couldn’t. Even now I have a slight moment of hesitation and discomfort when I have to say my last name.

My father, Irving Roth, who came here from Hungary as a kid was never fully comfortable in any language. He spoke Hungarian, English and a bit of Yiddish.

Twice I wrote a letter to the editor using the name Laszlo Voros, Laszlo being my middle name, my mother’s “maiden” name. I felt a sense of freedom to write something I thought, without the need to add a 10th qualification to what I was saying. I also named a character in a short story Robert Laszlo. My father got a particular kick out seeing a character who clearly wasn’t based on me with that name.

As for Jos. Her mother met my uncle in Spain. She had volunteered as a nurse in the fight against Franco. She and my uncle had an affair there and Jos was conceived. With the defeat of the International Brigade her mother went back to The Netherlands and my uncle came back here. Fast forward. For reasons too complex to go into here, Jos and Sandor met for the first time when Jos was in her late 20s. I knew nothing of her existence until I was in Amsterdam in 1968 where my aunt Gladys was also visiting. I went to see Gladys in her hotel room and with maybe only five minutes of a heads up, in strides this woman dressed in black leather, all filled with attitude, passion, warmth and having something to say about everything. In short, looking and sounding like all the people on my father’s side of the family. She is now in her mid 80s. Five books could be written about the astounding life she has lived.

Many people have written pieces for And Then using a variety of names, sometimes writing under different names in the same issue. I never ever reveal who wrote what except with their permission, even with a co-editor. In issue two we published a couple wrenching, jumping with energy, personal letters to ex lovers written under different names. At some point one of the writers, someone pretty well known, became very frustrated that people didn’t know it was them that had written the letter. So they said I could reveal it if it came up. The person they had written the letter to originally had made a number of other lovers miserable in the same ways. Once I could reveal who wrote the letter, I sold a bunch of issues to those who had waited by the phone for the call that never came.

I invited my friend Shulamith Firestone into a discussion group. She was withdrawing from public life and really didn’t want to be recognized during that period in time. She agreed but only if I introduced her as Kathy and not tell anyone who she was. I agreed. It was not a great thing to agree to. At the end of the day it was worth it. Because our friendship blossomed. But I would never do it again except if someone was really in trouble. Because you are constantly making up things on the run, misdirecting, deceiving. It became very unpleasant.

One time someone in the group brought up her book The Dialectic of Sex. As the person was about to say something, the conversation shifted direction. Shulamith laughed and later said that that would have been the only time she would have heard a totally honest response to her book from someone who didn’t know they were speaking to her.

Over the years Shulamith used various versions of her name. You can identify each distinct period of her life as well as when any one of us met her by what name of hers we use. As well as what name we use when writing about her.

It was rumored that Roth wrote many books under a whole series of different names. He was very prolific. Each name opened up a whole wide avenue for expression. Before computers James Baldwin, the iconic mid to late 20th century Black author had typewriters (a popular writing instrument of that period) in different parts of his house in Southern France, each with a piece of paper from a different book he was working on.

But in Robert’s case no one really knows. He was very secretive about it. In a surviving oral history recording a friend of Ann Snitow (Ann is credited with being instrumental in forming what was known as the second wave of the feminist movement), said Ann had introduced her to Robert whom she called a “major figure in the downtown art scene.” It was said by many others that his endorsement of an event would guarantee a huge turnout.

Asked about Ann’s description of him, Robert at the time replied that he didn’t even know what the downtown art scene was. But that he went straight home and wrote a poem.

Roth was protective of these multiple creative identities. He would never acknowledge that any of them were him. Or maybe in fact all those disputed identities were really other people and not him. As a biographer, historian and sleuth I am torn whether I am justified in revealing identities he kept protected. A kind of outing that has no real purpose. What are my responsibilities to him/they and what is it to history. Compounding it all I am far from certain who wrote anything other than what has survived. Things written under his name are in the Aronowitz Pavilion where relics from the ancient moderns are stored. So even speculating out loud about authorship of works attributed to others creates doubt. Even if disproved, once that doubt is there, it remains there forever.

One thing I plan to discuss though are unattributed social political psychological categories he created as well as aphorisms he wrote without signing his name to them, that have become part of the language. I will trace them back to him and discuss their original meanings and discuss how those meanings have changed and evolved over time.

Part Two or multipage footnote

“Who are you favorite writers?”

“Margaret, Amir, Brian, Tania, Marlene, Gilbert.”

No. I mean who are you favorite writers?”

“I just told you. Tania, Amir, Margaret, Gabbie, Brian, Marlene, Gilbert. Oh I forgot to include Luisa.”

“I mean who are your favorite writers?”

“And you too of course.”

I delivered newspapers for close to 30 years. For a few of those years I delivered the Poetry Calendar to various locations throughout the city. Hundreds of events were listed. Within the pages of the calendar no event was privileged over any other. Unlike most of the other things we delivered this felt like something more than just a job. My boss was Donald Lev, who with Enid Dame, was co-editor of Home Planet News. Both Donald and Enid were almost mythic presences on the alternative poetry scene. For him delivering the Calendar was part of his poetic calling. For me it was still a job. But a job with emotional benefits. HPN, Central Park, Socialist Review, Socialism and Democracy and The Sun were older siblings of And Then. Our magazine reflected different aspects of each. Working with Donald we had endless discussions in the van, a kind of constant cross fertilization of our two publications.

In the calendar no event or any particular writer was treated as more important than any other. So at least inside its pages everyone was treated equally. The poetry calendar was sold and taken over by very politically astute, culturally aware editors whose entrepreneurial energy mixed with insurgent cultural awareness would, in their minds, merge seamlessly with the most dynamic forces inside the poetry scene. In this new vision of things certain events and writers were highlighted. Who could object? The cutting edge writers to be featured were part of something vital. And the new poetry calendar was going to reflect that vitality, to amplify it. In the very first issue there was a beautiful photo of a friend of mine on the cover. Along with a very warm profile of her which included an interview about her life and work. It was a strange feeling. My dear friend through no fault of her own, an active symbol of my [am not sure what word to use]. And here I am distributing her all over the city. Which under normal circumstances would be downright thrilling. It was ironic and a bit comical, but still genuinely unsettling. In what was started as a service to a community where multi hierarchies of talent, status, location, power, money, lack of money and consciousness often felt intractable, the calendar reflected the part of that world filled with yearning, respect and far reaching artistic ferment.The new calendar pretty much was designed to become an organ of all the stratifications inside the poetry world or probably more accurately in the semi alternative, semi insurgent version of it.

All this was clashing inside me as I was carrying a bundle of the calendars to Poetry House when it was still located in a small office in SOHO. Convincing myself that I was less upset than I was, rather than waiting until I could put the bundle on a table to cut the plastic straps binding it, I took out my box cutter and tried to cut it open while walking. The blade slipped and I badly sliced a couple of my fingers. Back in the van, I wrapped my fingers with a page from one of the newspapers we were delivering to absorb the blood and try to slow down the bleeding. We went straight to a clinic where I got my fingers stitched up.

When Arnie Sachar and I started discussing doing And Then we wanted it to be as open as possible. The age range over the years has been 5 to people in their 90s. A mix of people who saw themselves as writers and artists and people who didn’t. It could be someone who hadn’t written since junior high school and some who weren’t yet old enough to be in kindergarten. And it would include a whole range of people coming from different backgrounds different cultures. People with widely different experiences. We decided early on not to have readers notes except where it was crucial to what was being written about. So at least inside the pages the pieces and contributors were all equal. Marguerite Bunyan and Shelley Haven who started the magazine with us, who worked on the design over the years tried as much as possible not to have one piece privileged over any other. Nothing was considered or treated as a filler.

While doing the first issue of And Then I asked my friend Gary Scheinfeld, a writer and close friend of James Baldwin if he thought Baldwin would agree to interview Gary for the magazine. I thought it would be an interesting reversal. I very definitely didn’t want it the other way around. It started out as the interview we envisioned and quickly evolved into this powerful conversation between two close friends who loved and admired each other deeply. Sadly the conversation chronicled [James Baldwin’s, Baldwin’s, Jimmy’s] last day alive in the United States. The piece ended as he was about to board a plane back to France where he died a few months later.

Kate Millet also agreed to contribute an art work. How did this come about? I was going with a friend to an exhibit of hers. The Loony Bin Trip was about her experiences in the mental hospital. On the way there my friend had just given me a copy of a publication he was working on. I said why don’t you wait, maybe you would like to give a copy to her. He said he is not into that type of thing and I should just keep it. We were in the room for maybe thirty seconds when he grabbed the magazine out of my hands and ran to give her the copy. The exhibition was of Kate’s drawings. I thought maybe she would give us one for the magazine. I spoke to my friend to try and get up the nerve. He said he would ask her and he did. And she agreed. He then said to me, maybe she could do the cover. Why the fuck are you suggesting that when you know Shelley is doing the cover. I was really angry. But there is where the temptation and the corruption begins. Two world famous artists appearing in the very first issue. And one doing the cover.

What are you guided by, a silly sense of loyalty? Big things can happen here. And of course it wasn’t just loyalty to Shelley that I would be betraying but also the deep sense of exhilaration and satisfaction that I got from working with her. And the spectacular creation she would come up with for the cover.

Fortunately and unfortunately because of certain questions of logistics things fell through with Kate and the drawing. I pretty much let it slide. I was in fact more relieved than disappointed.

Here were two people, public figures, who politically and spiritually were as close to us as could be. We had some personal connection to each. In that sense it was organic and continuous to how we took in the world. Still to have two world famous artists in the first issue would have very possibly killed something vital to its emerging essence.

Recognizable names (just because someone was well known didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be included) in a sense helps everyone else in the magazine. It draws attention to the magazine and everyone in it. But the down side and it is a very serious downside, is that a very famous public person no matter how you might want to get around it will create the lens though which the magazine will be seen. And the stratification in the outside world will reproduce itself almost immediately in how most people will take in the other work. As well as how the magazine itself will be defined.

Recently, I finished reading Ahmed Abdullah’s memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra.

In addition to being an extraordinary musician and band leader (and friend), Ahmed is a vivid story teller. Reading the book you actually hear the “music of the spirit” pulling you along as you keep turning the pages.

The book is one of celebration, yearning; a deep exploration of creativity, pain. Connection. Resistance.

Profound social and cultural analysis is laced throughout. Oppression, neglect and brutality in the overt and more subtle forms are looked at, then looked at again. He describes and reacts to the devastating fault lines in the society as well as the serious fault lines that [exist, are created] in the responses to it.

It is a story of his life beginning at a young age, but also of SunRa’s vast, remarkable life, and Ahmed’s complicated, at times tense relationship with him. There are many crucial historic and personal insights about Ahmed’s life in the Arkestra. His own years as a musician performing with it. The book also brings to life the musician driven Loft Movement of the 70s. Insurgent, communal and forging an alternative vibrant music [scene, community]. The Loft Movement grew as a response to forces of repression and oppression and marginalization. We see people immersed in a culture of intense ongoing creativity. We see the tragedies that can unfold. The tensions, the cruelties, the intense disconnectedness as well as the profound life affirming creativity of the musicians. The strains and pains pulling at them. The enormous love binding them together.

These dynamic are important to look at and understand. But what also is looked at with extreme sensitivity is how new and far reaching insights when applied to real people in real situations can curdle and become dehumanizing and one dimensional. Insights hardening into truism can at times be comical, absurd but also deeply hurtful if not outright destructive.

One particular scene keeps playing itself out in my head. There was an all black music venue where whites were excluded from. It was presented and thought of by the people running it as an autonomous liberated space, space free of the intrinsic racist dynamics that would automatically be set in motion even if the most decent white person would be there. One night a number of groups were scheduled to perform. A musician came with his white [girlfriend, partner, woman]. The man at the door said the woman couldn’t come in. He was somewhat uncomfortable doing it, glancing in her direction saying no disrespect intended. The musician was indignant. Particularly so since no one told him about the policy beforehand. Back and forth like this. The woman spoken about in the third person, treated more like an object of contention than a person, finally expressed her own bewilderment and anger. Then a parting shot of anger from the musician as they left.

If she had come into the venue, the dynamics inside would change instantly. Keeping her out, a real person not an abstraction, intrinsically changed the dynamics inside also. And winds up being written about in a book 50 years later.

Discussed briefly but pointedly in Salim Washington’s Forward, and alluded to inside the book itself, without Salim or Ahmed fully going into the whys of it, the sexual, romantic relationships between white women and black men is spoken about as a particularly complex and fraught one.

Inside the venue that night groups performing would create beautiful music together. The venue and others like it were in significant and real ways liberated territory. Where racism and humiliation and oppression [dissolves, melts away, is transformed] But also at the time except maybe for occasional dancers and/or singers, transcendent in their otherworldly/ this worldly brilliance, black women for the most part, if at all, were not performing with any of the groups. Instruments like the trumpet or the saxophone were played exclusively by men. Invisibility, one of the most powerful tools of oppression, one that the male musicians knew all too well and had resisted with great courage and imagination, was being used against women musicians without giving it a second thought. Except where it was willfully and very consciously done.

“Certainly, [Sun Ra’s] views on women were stringent, whether they were Black or white. Sometimes he’d say that women interfered with the creative process, so much so that he didn’t encourage females to attend rehearsals. But then he’d make exceptions. June, for example, was one woman who was regularly allowed to be in on rehearsals. She seemed to transcend every one of Sunny’s dictums and helped to create his persona—the enigma wrapped in a paradox. He didn’t think too much of women as musicians, and yet there were two women pianists I frequently heard Sun Ra praise, Dorothy Donegan and Mary Lou Williams.” [A Strange Celestial Road, p 120]

And then there was the question what was the relationship of venues like these to the citadels of mainstream culture like, let’s say, Lincoln Center. Do they exist outside the cultural pipeline as [autonomous, confined, obscure, liberated] venues. Was this an autonomous space rich in creative ferment—subversive and independent. Were the musicians pitted against each other. Who would be selected, highlighted, their talent validated, celebrated by the cultural machine. And when and if the music reaches into the cultural mainstream is it absorbed and transformed in some negative way. Or in very positive ways reaches and impacts much larger numbers of people. Or some combination of all the above.

Throughout the book we see musicians change in very dramatic ways. As they transform themselves, laying claim to their space in a society structured to control and humiliate and diminish them. And inside the groups themselves the tensions between leaders of a band and the others in it, between those who have, will have a large public following and those who do not and will not, is explored with great love and sensitivity and pain and at times anger.

Ahmed grapples with these deep clashing [forces, contradictions]. He rests inside those spaces and others like it, with great humanity as well as with humility and self-reflection. If people can tolerate the deep discomfort of those spaces and don’t immediately need a way to escape from them, I think far reaching forms of awareness, change and resistance are possible.

My friend Lana Povitz is writing a book about Shulamith Firestone who was one of my all time closest friends. Her project has brought Shulamith vividly back to me. Among the things she will write about will be the early days of radical feminism. My strong guess is, but would not remotely presume how she will go about doing it, the structural oppression in the society and the fault lines inside the response to it will be looked at, explored and discussed. The burning hot intensity of Shulamith and the other women in the first rush of insight and awareness that ignited the second wave of the women’s movement. The breathtaking connections made at dizzying speed, as awareness and understanding just kept multiplying almost by the second. Then the implosion and crackups that followed. Many of the same issues—personal/political/structural —that are explored in Ahmed’s book, some in different guises along with some that are very different, will also I think be discussed.

As if in a call and response to Ahmed’s description of Sun Ra’s views on women, in her first draft of chapter one, Lana quotes Shulamith saying:

“Though men in general believe women in general to be inferior, every man has reserved a special place in his mind for the one woman he will elevate above the rest by virtue of association with himself. Until now the woman, out in the cold, begged for his approval, dying to clamber onto this clean well-lighted place. But once there, she realizes that she was elevated above other women not in recognition of her real value, but only because she matched nicely his store-bought pedestal. Probably he doesn’t even know who she is (if indeed by this time she herself knows).”

I am writing this shortly after the Oct 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel and the mass slaughter and destruction in Gaza by Israel.

One of the very few places I can turn to where people are talking about it with any real seriousness is Democracy Now. People being interviewed clearly trust the consciousness and integrity of host Amy Goodman and co-hosts Nermeen Shaikh and Juan González.

In addition to what is being reported an extra layer of horror is watching someone interviewed one day —a reporter, an aid worker, a thirteen year old girl whose legs have been amputated —and learn a few days later that that that person often along with their entire family has been murdered by an Israeli bomb or soldier.

As the carnage mounts even some writers in the mainstream press are beginning to speak with rare seriousness and concern. In cases of reporters who have been killed it is hard to know whether they have been specifically targeted or their death is more a random part of the wholesale carnage taking place.

One thing I have noticed that in listening to Democracy Now there is very little interchange among those interviewed. The positions and statements that people say seem at times subtlety, at other times markedly different from each other. The large outlines of what is said are similar: serious revulsion and opposition to the Israeli orgy of violence in Gaza, criticism (with various degrees of intensity) of the Hamas massacre and the taking of hostages, long standing opposition to the Israeli occupations of Gaza and the West Bank, condemnation of settler violence with the complicity of the Israeli military and government on the West Bank. Everyone agreeing and calling for an immediate ceasefire as a minimal demand they all can agree on. Now does the way people speak reflect real differences, differences that can lead to very different outcomes down the line?

Shulamith once told me that bitter skirmishes over seemingly small differences taking place on the outer margins can widen as they work their way from the margins to the [mainstream, center] of what people will focus on in the future. At which point those differences can magnify and widen, often impacting the shape, focus and direction of a movement. So are these differences just questions of semantics or differences that seriously portend very different, and if history is any guide, often tragic outcomes.

As important as what people say, is what they don’t say. And it is always important to pay attention to both. Though often enough you might not be clued in until way later to what was left out.

Something not said could be an oversight, or someone might think it is implicit to what they are saying. It might only be different words used to express shared outrage and pain. Also someone might not want to say something that feels like they are capitulating to bad faith objections and being trapped or folded into an agenda they are actively resisting. It also can be a form of conscious misdirection or outright manipulation. Or can lead someone to think they know more than they do about what is happening. Also words and ideas don’t remain static. As more people are exposed to them they can start to take on different meanings. And powerful ideas often get coopted, absorbed, transformed. The liberatory power of those words reduced, diluted. So as a result people often talk past each other.

I think there has to be a place where these differences can be discussed. Right now as things grow increasingly more dire everyone on the show seems to implicitly agree that in the midst of unspeakable horror that discussion will have to wait.

One thing about the show that seriously does upset me. It is kind of what the new poetry calendar was trying to achieve writ large. Other than where it is important to know, like if someone is a doctor in a hospital that is being bombed, people are way too often introduced by the status conferred on them by powerful corporate institutions: award winning writer, long time Harvard Law professor, best selling novelist, Dean of the Media Department at MIT, star of the new hit Netflix series, winner of the prestigious Booker prize, Three time Emmy award winner, Nobel Prize recipient in biology, Pulitzer prize winning, Recipient of the prestigious MacArthur grant, Acclaimed World Renowned .... Golden Globe nominee for their role in.” All said with a flourish that seriously reinforces the potency of those institutions in giving them the legitimacy to determine who will be listened to or not. Achievement means institutional and corporate validation of what you’ve done. And who should be paid attention to. All the more disturbing because the people themselves are serious, socially/politically engaged, often physically courageous and have important things to say. The intense stratification creates a kind of animated docility where your thoughts, opinions, curiosity, commitments are validated, yet simultaneously you are over and over again being told to know your place.

There was a documentary called Shulie made in 1970 that surfaced a couple of years ago. It was about the then 22 year old Shulamith Firestone in art school. She speaks of a life she wants to live where every word, every brush stroke is infused with meaning. It was about a year or two before all of everything started clicking into place for her. She doesn’t yet have crucial categories at her disposal, some of which she herself as well as others will create in the years to come. She is piecing things together with words and concepts that are available.

I think we are at a similar point right now. We are going to have to figure something out. Circumstances [might, could, should, will] force us to. Or if not we might be frozen in place. Or worse just ride the momentum to unexpected and grim places that our increasingly unexamined and significantly inadequate assumptions might take us.

On Turning 80

Between twilight and daybreak
Lovers who were never lovers
Come to me and say,
“You were always so clueless
How can someone be that dense.”

Saw my ancient face in the mirror of the cafe. First time since the pandemic I didn’t wear a mask inside. The first time that I bought coffee there that they could see my face. Ghostly, faded, my thinning hair powdery white. How do I deal with this ever growing older, old, old me.

At 79, this is the first year I said kaddish on my father’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of his death, when I was older than he was when he died. Looking at him from this side of the divide I feel his vulnerability/fear. How he was only a younger version of me. In fact everything he ever did in his life he was younger than I am now.

A dream by Myrna Nieves:

I wake up, and miss many things, including my friend Ana and her curious face.

Sueño

My friend Ana came to me (she passed away years ago). I tell her:
—Ana, let’s visit the past.

A whole world of people we knew shows up in a slightly blurry way. They move around and seem to be inside a room or several rooms. Our world is separated from that world by a thin transparent membrane or wall, like the one made by a bubble of soap. We enter the “bubble,” which does not burst, and join a familiar world of 30 or 40 years ago. I tell Ana: “this is how we can visit any time frame, any place.”

We look at the people in the world we entered, including us at that time, and delight on how lively and joyful they are. It is not blurry anymore. They cannot see us. We can watch, but not interact with them.” There is so much passion and light on their faces. They are all beautiful, in the prime of their lives. I watch them more than I watch me. I am aware that I am there at that time, 40 years younger, but for some reason I mainly focus on the people I knew. They are not concerned with their bodies; if they look good and are healthy or not. They just are. Bright, alive, fully existing in the now.

I don’t know how long we can stay in this time. We are just visiting, but I am also aware that there is no pressure to return to our world.

Ros Pechesky 81 year old professor arrested at a major demonstration in Grand Central Station calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. I hadn’t heard her name for over 40 years. I was so happy that she was still on the planet. I don’t even know if we ever spoke. But I remember her as someone front and center in the struggle for reproductive rights. And I had a very vivid memory of how she looked. The next day I saw a clip of her being arrested. Her voice sounded different. She looks the way politically engaged older women looked when I was younger. The same commanding presence, commitment and unswerving purpose.

Dec. 2, 2023.

I turn 80.

I see people who I think I know. They have grown ancient. After the initial confusion I try to place them or more try to confirm my initial “could that be, that must be, is it.” I recognize them by my general impression of them. I look for familiar mannerism, how they scratch their head, tap their feet. Maybe by their shoes. Often by something I never realized I had observed before.

I attended the birthday party of a friend who turned 88 at the rehab center where he was recovering from a fall. The place slowly filled up with members of a music group he was part of. A group whose concerts I have attended for decades. I heard someone say something about “D minor.”

I sat sunk deep into a sofa, making groaning sounds, a bit exaggerated, whenever I had to get up. For years now I thought a recording of the sounds many of my friends and I make when we get up would be a huge worldwide hit. I guess mostly for a niche audience. But a huge, huge one at that.

I keep reading about what 80 looks like, feels like, is capable of being. For me the experiences of my childhood are growing further and further removed from what other people’s childhood memories are. Even then all of our childhoods from the time I was a child were quite different. But still the differences across generations are pronounced.

I have a friend who is 37. While much of our thinking is very similar we have very different associations about who and what brought us into consciousness. Sometimes our conversation go too quickly and those differences don’t fully register. In the sense I have a second conversation, always rich and interesting in my head after we separate. “What in fact did she mean by that? I think I responded too quickly.” Many people she read and was influenced by, I knew as actual people. Some of whom she now knows in their older forms.And many of the wide range of people she knows and has engaged with are people I have never heard of.

That has always been the case. Even now as people keep dying, people I never knew or at best barely heard about, as I read about them, major blanks get filled in. Things of great importance were happening in and around me and off to the side as I was stumbling, sleep walking my way through the decades.

The last few years I have grown more distant, more removed, more cut off. A fear, an emotional lethargy, a sense of resignation intensified during the pandemic.

Illnesses related to age also loom large. Dread is a constant companion. But what I also do find very disturbing is the attempt to continually socialize me or imprison me into very demeaning social categories. Negative or positive stereotypes about how I look, what my desires have to be, what I am capable of and on and on and on about things that have absolutely nothing to do with who I am. Though a lot to do with what I have to contend with: the structural and personal ageism and bigotry that I am continually faced with. And in that way has had an impact on who I am. Not to absorb the bigotry coming at me is an effort that does change you.

One thing I have noticed is friends and family of friends that have died, people I felt close to, maybe not in the same way as to the friend who died, slip away. I make some efforts to stay in touch. But those don’t take hold. The pandemic I think played some role in this. Before, I might be invited to a gathering, a party, a seder as a way to stay in touch. But when those stopped, all contact basically stopped also. This hasn’t always been the case. Things are a bit more fluid than that. But it has happened more than I expected. It has not been hurtful in the sense of feeling rejected (well maybe a little). But painful in the sense of missing them.

A quiet death, a painful death, a violent death, an accidental death, a drawn out death, a whatever death—expired is a word that seems to describe the state right after your last breath. Maybe that’s too tame a word to describe a violent death. Your first breath at birth is the one you breathe in. Another thing I learned just recently.

A sudden scream of anguish and dread coming out of me in the middle of the night bolting me upright in my bed. A groggy, worried voice from the other room asking me if I were okay. I reassure her that I was.

Death terror seized me. With a rawness I haven’t experienced since I was in my early teens. Not the when of my death or the how of my death. But the very fact of it. Periodically that terror seizes me again. The reality of it, the unreality of it. Not as fiercely as that night. But there never the less.

At some point as a teenager the death terror left me. I actually remembered the sense of relief I experienced when it was replaced by other fixations and pain.

Now sixty five years later it is back again.

Right after I wrote those last words, I wrote a comment to the Times, very tangentially related to an article I had barely glanced at, “Easter 2050. Here’s What American Religion Looks Like” by Ross Douthat. I was surprised that they actually published my comment. Even more surprised when one of my favorite commenters (a reader who responds in the comment section to articles in the paper) responded to what I wrote. We kept going back and forth, the paper still publishing our exchange, even as we moved further and further away from the original article.

Even though a bit lighthearted, my own state of mind was very unsettled when my initial comment sprung out of me. I think it was a way to neutralize the actual unsettled state I was in. The intensity of my emotions were more visceral than my words would indicate. I often write about very intense emotions as well as very scary, unsettling situations. But this was different. The very act of writing and reading my fellow commenter’s responses triggered panic. After one exchange I lay down and for about thirty seconds images kept fracturing, spinning and spinning ever faster in my head.

The Exchange:

Robert Roth
NYC 4h ago

60 years ago I was 20. In 60 years I will 140. Time moves fast and slow.
9 REPLIES

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 4h ago

@Robert Roth Or, if you look at it another way, you’ll have reached infinity—or maybe negative infinity.

Robert Roth
NYC3h ago

@617to416 Since it might be my forever future what do you mean by negative infinity.?

Robert Roth
NYC2h ago

@617to416 Have been thinking and writing (at least trying to write ) a lot about that recently.

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 2h ago

@Robert Roth I guess if you’re religious, it’s infinity—eternal existence. And if you’re not religious then maybe it’s eternal nonexistence?

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 1h ago

@Robert Roth On immortality (or the lack thereof)? I’ve always thought that the infinity of the universe focuses briefly into a point that is our individuality and then, when we die, that point dissolves back into the infinity of the universe. Or something like that . . . I think this is why I’ve always been drawn to Wordsworth’s poetry.

“….And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

Robert Roth
NYC50m ago

@617to416 Thanks. Sort of right where I left off this morning. Might quote you in my piece.

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 37m ago

@Robert Roth I’d be honoured—and would love to read it.

617to416
Ontario via Massachusetts 16m ago

@617to416 Oh, and I’d also say that philosophically there’s something in my thinking very close to the idea from the Bhagavad Gita of the self (atman) yoked (yoga) to the self of all beings (brahman). So Wordsworth and Krishna . . .

Robert Roth
NYC 3m ago

@617to416 definitely grateful the infinity of the universe focused briefly into a point where we could have this exchange.

Robert at 80 [Written when I was 65]

What a Pathetic Life I Lead

A German filmmaker in her 70s
A Zimbabwean woman in her 20s
Love them both
Wildly attracted to each
Have no chance with either

“I’m a very good lover, a terrific friend and a lousy boyfriend.” I would say this to women and it worked like a charm and more often than not we would have sex. An anarchist poet living in the Village. Sometimes that’s what it would be. We would keep it that way. A bit impersonal, more impersonal maybe than it should have been. It created a space of excitement and had an allure of freedom. Sometimes my actual talent would disrupt the fantasy. “Hey, you write beautifully” with a slight surprise that was always a bit hurtful. But still I enjoyed it. It moved from a kind of cool “impersonality” in playing out a fantasy, to a subtle but real distancing which while at times disorientating was not the worst thing. Because I thought it was still mostly play acting and not all that impersonal. And I said what I said with conviction because I thought it was true. But unfortunately emotions crept in. Jealousy. Possessiveness, expectations etc. One lover said, “I have the worst of both situations. I’m too caught up with you to have other lovers. And I don’t have the security that a commitment would give me.” And that was it in a nutshell. Not exactly a nutshell. Because it doesn’t include my own insecurities and jealousy. Once I understood that I really couldn’t follow through I could not say it again. It would have just been a line, a lie to get sex. And without conviction it wouldn’t have worked anyway. So I stopped saying it. Have not really been able to figure out what to say or do since.

My downstairs neighbor. A very thin dark brown woman always spectacularly dressed. A Mohawk haircut and an aura so bright it lights up the stairs or the street, always bringing a big smile to my face. Before we actually met I saw her talking to a tender, muscular man who works in the restaurant on the ground floor of my building. His father had recently died and he had been away for quite a while to be with his family. They stood in the vestibule, her empathetic face filled with emotion, her heart wide open and present. A couple of months later we spoke. A fashion designer from Zimbabwe with magic, soulfulness, tenderness and wild, brilliant perceptions. My head spins whenever we are together. What can I have with her, a woman in her 20s maybe early 30s, who wants to get married and have children. And who doesn’t want anything interfering with the plan.

There is nothing I can say at 64. If I were 28 or 33 or 42 I wouldn’t have wanted children any more than I do now. And I certainly never wanted to get married. A younger me now would probably be different than the younger me then. Who knows how and in what way. But for better or worse it is this older me that’s at issue. What would I need to change in myself to have even a remote chance of being lovers with her?

Friends with benefits? My feelings for Aziza too intense and complicated for that. Fuck buddies? There is I guess a difference between fuck buddies and friends with benefits. Fuck buddies might in fact be easier. More straight forward. More direct. Why? I don’t know why. Just felt like saying it. Though I haven’t heard that term for a while. Francesca’s fuck buddy moved into her apartment after 9/11. He came over the night before and it was two years before he left. What starts out as friends with benefits often winds up on court TV. At 65 being Aziza’s “boy toy” is probably out of the question. But then again stranger things have happened.

I think again of my beautiful downstairs neighbor. For the first time age really comes in on me. I think of myself at 80. That is just 15 years away. Though 50 was a while ago. And what does she need with that? And how then can this intimacy be expressed without committing her to the possibility of tending to an old man. Obviously anything can happen to anyone at any time. But here there is an almost certain future if I live that long. A commitment to each other would take that into account. Eighty though is still potentially very vibrant and very sexual. Another reason monogamy as an ideal is shit. With some real fluidity between us whatever sexual connection we had would not limit her to it. Me neither I guess. But in this case it would be her I would be most concerned about. Why am I obsessing and fretting about something that is very unlikely to happen? I guess because it’s fun to do.

Months later. We speak about one weekend before we became good friends, when she was still living downstairs, when she cut herself off from everyone and everything. No email. No phone. A four day urban retreat, looking deep into herself, trying to find a “purpose,” a direction, a deeper meaning, a deeper pursuit. I tell her about a small cottage on the top of a hill somewhere in Zimbabwe where I imagine living when I’m 80. In my fantasy Aziza has created some space for me on a large plot of land that is dedicated to some very significant pursuit. Maybe a place for children. Maybe something entirely different.

“What will you do there?” she asks. “Well, I’m there. That should be enough,” I answer. “You have to do some work,” she laughs.“You can’t just live there.” “I’ll be a presence. What more do I have to do?” “A presence is more than enough,” she answers, yielding to the power of my argument. And so there it is. My future. A cottage on a hill in Zimbabwe. The destination a certainty. The route getting there very much a mystery.

Walking toward the East Side I come to Greenwich and 10th where there is a fork in the road. Totally forgot where I am going, who I am visiting. A total absolute blank. This has happened a few other times recently. Two times at that very spot. Scary feeling. Tried to relax. The destination returned and I continued. At 80. Hot muggy Zimbabwe summer. Wild committed energy everywhere. Up and down the hill. Not knowing where I am. Which direction I am going. Maybe this is something that will happen from time to time. Hopefully no more than that.

The total blank was very scary. Maybe try to surrender to it next time.

My father at 76 had sold his business, but still tried making deals, still overflowing with energy. “You’re still wheeling and dealing,” I said. “I’m doing more wheeling than dealing,” he replied.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Postscript:

At 73 I might have a whole new future.There was a magnificent Times Op-Doc [documentary] focusing on a heavy set black woman in her thirties who had taken up pole dancing. She was beyond graceful. She was strong, limber, just shining with energy, focus, charm and determination. She spoke of the racist, sexist body shaming forces she had to overcome in pursuing her pole dancing career. In addition to performing she had started a pole dancing school.

Here’s a link to the video. The comment section seems to have disappeared. So I reproduce the exchange we had below the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/opinion/dangerous-curves.html?comments#permid=20725831

NYC December 7, 2016
I just turned 73. Was wondering what I should do to strengthen my body and increase my flexibility. Admittedly from this chair to a pole might be a long trek. But then again...

Roz The Diva
Brooklyn December 8, 2016
Robert, I’d be HONORED to have you in my class. HONORED. I’m not kidding at all. Hit up my website to see my schedule: rozthediva.com/schedule

I was walking on air for two days.

to be continued

All rights to this story are retained by the author. All rights to the artwork are retained by the artist. Thank you for allowing its publication on this site.