beginning in the 1950s, had been outstandingly abstract, even the novels (I never identified with any characters), but most explicitly those in art history and literary criticism. Slowly, for me anyway, lives heaved into view. After a pure astral experience, i.e. not induced by LSD or mushrooms or the like, I found things in my own head more interesting than all the things I had been seeing “out there.” Undergoing a revolution that was personal, I left the public one I had helped create in writing about the work of Merce and his friends and many more. Just recently, I was reminded of my serious defection when one of Merce’s friends told me in so many words that my writings were no longer interesting when they concerned mainly myself. Luckily for me, the men who owned my newspaper were in a different “family” circle, and didn’t care if I wrote about goldfish or manhole covers. Years later, my defection turned into a liability when upon re-entering a career of writing about artists, I sought wherever possible to integrate their lives with their work. Now it’s easier to contemplate the fortunes of Obama, whose communications skills have brought him to a precipice. No longer a man in search of a father, he looks like a lost son, kidnapped first by the joint chiefs, now by a European institution in a stroke of Nobel Oblige, prescribing something he can’t do. Obama may be a man of peace, but his nation is addicted to war, and he risks his life if he tries to do more than just talk about peace. He must of course talk about it—one of the established smokescreens for war. So what does he believe on his own by now? Does he believe anything at all on his own? Did he ever? His rhetoric sounds empty to me. In the vacuum, if such it is, I’m tempted to regress to predictions and heroizing. Besides affairs of the military, we know he is on schedule to posture over finances and the banks, unemployment, health and insurance, and such lesser items as the Defense of Marriage Act and the scandalous Clinton era’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy afflicting military personnel, and still lowlier issues, involving women and abortion, and the abduction of children. So what can we imagine as an authentic future for him? My crystal ball has fogged up. If I threw it down on a concrete surface, its pieces might arrange themselves like tea leaves into a new idea or two—spelling out perhaps: wait for something dramatic to happen, something totally unforeseen and unexpected, and look to the man who is still searching for his father to come to life. In the meantime, I might acquire a piano, in other words twiddle my thumbs. I say “acquire” because I can’t afford one that I would like, nor even have the space for it, and I saw one advertised on a tree for nothing. Calling the lady who was giving it away, she said it’s a big upright, missing some ivories, and hasn’t been tuned for years. She doesn’t want to throw it out. I guessed she figured it would be a lot cheaper for her if someone else hired a truck to remove it. It’s a WW Redcliffe Boston USA, a make I never heard of. I should contact David Bradshaw to come and shoot it to death—an art form in which he specializes. I covered one of his shootings in the course of my return to art criticism. I covered Merce at home February 9th 2006 in my journal. An artist took me there for dinner, and it was a real pleasure. We communicated personally with great ease. He didn’t stand on any ceremony, i.e. no career arrogance was evident. He couldn’t stand at all any more, except to rise from his wheelchair and hold on briefly to a walker. I’m not sure about that. I understand he was taken by wheelchair every day to his studio at Westbeth where he worked with his last dance company until a week or so before he died, when he got too tired to go on.  He was once awarded America’s Nobel for artists, the Kennedy Center thing. No oblige was involved. I suppose we shouldn’t begrudge the “entangled giant”—as Obama has been called in his imprisoned executiveship—his hometown longings in AF One outings on behalf of Chicago, or his appearance at the All Star baseball game, rushing onto the field to throw out the first ball in a Chicago White Sox jacket. I’m concentrating on walking myself, a new revolution in my personal histories. A lady around these parts who knows about my troubles, saw me on a pathway one afternoon and said from her car window, “It’s a nice day for a walk.”

*See pages 144-45 in At Sea On Land: Extreme Politics