>>60

I very much doubt that that was her. Our erotic communion with one another has long since deepened beyond the point where she would ever defend or compliment me, or indeed speak to or about me at all - meeting, touching, fucking etc. being SO far out of the question that to even mention the possibility is - to use a term that will certainly be recognized and welcomed on this board - "blasphemous".

We are "the world's last romantic couple" and stand in the same relation to other romantic couples as did, to other imperial horse-purchasers, the imperial horse-purchaser described in the old Chinese parable with which J.D. Salinger opens the first of his Glass Family stories "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters":

"You are now advanced in years, said Duke Mu of Chin to Po Lo. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?" Po Lo replied: "A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse — one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks — is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him." Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. "It is now in Shach'iu" he added. "What kind of a horse is it?" asked the Duke. "Oh, it is a dun-colored mare," was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. "That friend of yours," he said, "whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?" Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Has he really got as far as that?" he cried. "Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses." When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal."

My union with RavRav is a union which has dispensed with sight, with dialogue, and with the hope or expectation of physical possession as just such negligible inessentials. We persist in the state described by Eliot: "neither living nor dead, looking into the heart of light, the silence". The regular payment of 500 dollars a month persists, I surmise, by reason only of the fact that money represents the archetypal placeholder of total abstraction amidst the profane concreteness of everyday human experience (see Karl Marx, "Grundrisse").