Tues Sept 16 Am I to write you a letter? Would it be Sept 16th or Tuesday? Am I to question everything, or shall I say, admit, your name, and write for you what’s on my mind, Liz? I am in Palo Alto with a headache. It is after midnight, after the last in the series about Elizabeth R on TV, and the dogs are barking. The headache is due to the way I, on my back, propped up my head reading Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus this evening, overdue to eyestrain. In DF, Adrian Leverkühn suffered headaches that clouded his eyes, tonight I suffer eyes that clout my head. I am not accustomed to this head’s dull aching, by any means, and it’s not the ache that prompts me to write. I shut my eyes to sleep and what happens. It is only nervous agitation. I am troubled by the problems with the clset I’mbb, the closte, the closet I’m building for my room here. In the design, I didn’t account for the fact that half-inch plywood is 9/16 of an inch wide, or, in some places, the saw had an eighth inch cut. My papers scattered, my books in boxes, clothes dispersed, my circumstances altogether untogether. Forgive me. I promise to work again tomorrow to put the thing together. No more problems. Just let me move my desk in here. Put up shelves, finally, get organized. Adrian said that “Organization is everything.” Wed Dear Liz, The closet is up, the drawers pull, the doors slide, and now I’ve slipped out of the house. Now it’s The Palm at the End of the Mind in the Stanford campus coffee shop, 8:45 PM. Wallace Stevens. A nice place. Everything just happens to be here. The black ceiling, the dark gray carpet, the wooden tables, etc., windows rather like black mirrors, reflections of planes of color, unfocused glances, many people smoking, playing chess, reading, drinking coffee. Everyone here is waiting to be discovered. I’m no exception, in general, although I’d like to be. In particular, you’re my new friend, and I feel if I send this letter, in discovering myself / I have you / discovering me. Writing is an odd thing, I think, because of the subtle inversion of these points of view, how the inside is mad eout, but also how the one you see is the one / who I’d like / to be / discovered. On the other hand, no one here seems to notice the young man in the red shirt with the curly fly-away hair studiously well at least purposefully writing this, sipping coffee, not seeming to notice the young woman in a tan skirt wool sweater reading a textbook over in the light, or the old man with a mustache stirring his coffee and staring into the vacancies around him. No one here seems to notice the existence of the poem at the end of the mind about a young man’s introversion of seduction fantasies, a romantic love story about a woman he met once at a party and to whom he happens to be writing this letter. Now he is falling in love with every woman who comes into the coffee shop. They couldn’t be too old for him, they wouldn’t be thinking of someone else, at another place, in another country. You see, there are problems, but in the way the mind works, they could be worked out. They seem to be the escapist type, hardly saying anything, at least not to me, but at the end of the book: You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. W.S. Thursday Liz, Joanne Kyger won’t read until Dec 2 and there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to take you to see her so far off with school and all I don’t know; however, Oct 2 Jim Thorpe 21 Michael Wolfe Nov 4 Bill Berkson 18 Lewis McCadams Dec 2 Joanne Kyger Jan 6 Tom Clark Dec 16 Aram Saroyan. Now these are Tuesday nights and we’d have to be at the church in Bolinas by 8:30. I never asked you but it seems possible you might have school or something Tuesday nights. There might be some other excuse for we two to see each other again. Write me. Mon Sept 22 Dear Liz, Now it has been so long that I’ve written. So it seems to me, but for you this letter will come at once and stand as a whole. For me the intervening days are rude and blunt. I avoid them for you. For you, there would be no intervening days. What do I mean? Nothing. At least nothing intensional, fantasies rather than definitions. Love stories, irresponsible seductions. I know they are fantasies because they do not come from you. What I mean seems rude and blunt, to me. Are you to let me avoid them? Love, Tom Sharp
16-22 September 1975