For Floria Tosca, With Love and Squalor.

July 22, 2011 at 1:45 P.M. Spacing was affected in several essays overnight and a single "error" was inserted in this work. I will do my best to make corrections of these writings from multiple public computers in New York. It feels like 115 degrees today. I will be walking in the city, moving from computer to computer, posting new comments on New Jersey's catastrophe. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.")

March 20, 2011 at 9:07 P.M. Continuing harassments make writing difficult. I will try to reach public computers tomorrow. My MSN e-mail account is inaccessible to me because it may have been used by hackers to send out spam. I do not have a mobile phone number to reopen the account which is what I am asked to provide, allegedly by MSN. I have never had a mobile phone.

March 20, 2011 at 6:49 P.M. Due to all of the computer wars and censorship, I have been unable to write today. I will do my best to create a new post concerning New Jersey's dismal reality from a public computer tomorrow. "Errors" inserted overnight will now be corrected. (From a public computer, Columbus Circle, 59th Street, I'Shallah ... )

March 19, 2011 at 3:15 P.M. Attempts to access my MSN Hotmail account were blocked at a New York Public Library Computer. I am informed that my MSN e-mail account has been "closed" or "blocked." I will be writing from another public computer later today. I am also told that MSN and MSN Groups have "closed." I cannot send or receive e-mails.

March 18, 2011 at 12:42 P.M. An "error" was corrected for the second or third time this morning. I expect to see that "error" again. I notice that additional graphics and other alterations of my "Dashboard" at blogger have taken place. Lots of graffitti. These actions are taken against my will and without my consent. No advertisement is permitted by me at this blog.

Compared to a bomb that blows up my home and kills my family members, alterations of my writings and defacements of my blogs are only a minor disregard for my autonomy. Salman Masood & Pir Zubair Shah, "C.I.A. Drones Kill Civilians In Pakistan," in The New York Times, March 18, 2011, at p. A4 and Jane Perlez & Ismail Khan, "Pakistan Pushes For Drastic Cuts in C.I.A. Activity," in The New York Times, April 12, 2011, at p. A1. ("On Obama's Secret Service.")

March 17, 2011 at 4:53 P.M. "Errors" were inserted and corrected since earlier today. I have a pretty good idea of how New Jersey is doing this "error"-inserting: corruption. I was prevented from posting my corrections from a library computer. I will check the text, again, later from another public computer. How many people have been seriously damaged through the use of these techniques? Why are persons permitted to continue doing such things knowing the harm suffered by victims? Senator Menendez, can you answer these questions? Ms. Ros-Leghtinen? ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "How censorship works in America.")

James Waddell, Erotic Perception: Philosophical Portraits (New York: University Press of America, 1997).

Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

J.D. Salinger, "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor," in Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (New York: Ballantine, 1977).

John Fowles, Daniel Martin (New American Library, 1977).

Tosca, Opera in tre atti; Libretto Luigi Illica & Giuseppe Giacosa; Musica di Giacomo Puccini; Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala, Milano. (Callas, Di Stefano, Gobbi, De Sabata. 1953.)

New York is a city of fascinating ten minute romances. ("A Bookstore Romance.")

There are millions of people jostling one another on busy sidewalks, many of them lonely in crowds -- often not the persons you may imagine to be lonely or unhappy. There are so many fascinating women in the Big Apple. Women who are beautiful in numerous and variable ways in every decade of their lives. Part of the pleasure of life in a great city is imagining the lives of women one sees, every day, coping with the rigors of urban living.

The inner lives of conscious subjects are necessarily veiled to us, except for writers who presume to enter into the mental inner sanctums of their neighbors and friends, without using hypnosis, by desiring "this man's art and that man's scope."

Perhaps actors must be especially adept at these techniques of "becoming" the other. For this reason, actors are often reluctant to judge others in the absence of all relevant evidence and circumstances. Often our own inner depths remain hidden. The mysteries of those obscured dimensions within others beguile or seduce us into conjuring worlds for shared adventures: weekends in Paris with the woman in the bookstore; A trip to Venice on the Orient Express with the pleasant woman in the restaurant with gentle and kind eyes; dinner in Chinatown with the dark-haired stranger on the A-train.

Is your life boring? Are you sad? Don't worry. We are about to embark on an adventure. I will describe the most memorable encounter of the Third Kind that I have experienced along these lines. Unfortunately, it was somewhat abruptly terminated leaving me with a feeling of frustration and longing for completion of revelations as yet undreamed or impossible.

This lack of ultimate satisfaction is most fitting in erotic life where fulfillment is always partial and incomplete, only for now or until we meet again. Borges said that, until he died, he would "remember the face of Beatriz Viterbo" glimpsed in a Buenos Aires street 50 years before he wrote these words.

I got on the subway train heading uptown at 59th Street, Columbus Circle. Directly ahead of me, on an MTA plastic bench sat a woman staring deeply into the middle distance, almost in a trance-like state, as the train began to jostle forward. The level of concentration was almost guru-like for this person. She must be one of the few women in the world who can transform a plastic bench in a subway train into a throne in the Hermitage, owned by "Catherine the Great, Czarina of all the Russias."

This woman -- whoever she is -- has "attitude." I doubt that she saw me -- this mysterious stranger -- and yet, I am certain, despite the transitoriness of the "encounter," so similar to one in Paris many years ago, that I will never forget one second of those twenty to thirty minutes when we were "together-in-the-moment," as they say in Left Bank cafes, this "Dark Lady" and I. When I am very old, I will relive that encounter as if time has not passed.

Let me hasten to clarify some issues for the feminist thought police: I am not saying that this was strictly a matter of eros or sexual attractiveness. I could not help looking at her because she was seated directly before me in profile while staring, intently and blankly, away from me. I made no impression whatsoever. I often have this effect on women. I doubt that she registered my presence -- or any other passenger's presence -- remaining within her shelter of emotions and "intending" a very dark and sinister world of monumental pain. (I have now made the identical correction in the word "passenger" several times.)

Is life really that awful, young lady? As she exited the train at 175th Street, rising slowly, she wiped a single tear from her left eye, then walked out into a hot summer afternoon. I remember the white mark at the center of her back where a birthmark was removed, perhaps, against the dark tan of her skin.

This incident occurred during last year's sweltering summer. I have given the matter some thought. My loves are expressed, indirectly, by way of Shakespeare's Sonnets. I can't think of a better way to suggest to this mysterious lady what she may be feeling for someone in her life, a person missing who is much-missed, than to offer some verses from the Bard:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear Time's waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancelled woe,
And moan th'expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

A police report of what transpired on the day in question concerning the "subjects" -- this woman and me -- would be about the length of a paragraph. Nothing happened between "us." There was no "us." There were no significant "facts." There are only interpretations.

The women who matter in my life, romantically, are well-known to me. Two women matter in terms of the meaning of my life in its entirety after fifty-one years of living that life. One of those women is present, physically, "for us" (as a family community) on a daily basis; the other is absent, physically, but still part of every second that I am alive and with me, emotionally, regardless of physical separation.

I miss you, Marilyn Straus. "And thou ... hast all the all of me."

My intimacy is held in fee simple absolute by those women -- along with other parts of me in the case of one cunning little vixen! -- I doubt that there will be any competition on that score. Nevertheless, I am not the same innocent person after experiencing the overwhelming reality of that woman's pain. She has taken some of my remaining fragments of virginity. I feel so used. I know. Laughter is good. Laughter heals us.

What happened to you? Looking at you, Tosca, is like seeing myself reflected in a shattered crystal. Owen Flanagan, "Multiple Personality, Character Transformation, and Self-Reclamation," in George Graham & G. Lynn Stephens, eds., Philosophical Psychopathology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 135-163. (How many women are you, Floria?)

Her beauty and pain are not easily forgotten, nor is her courage in rising from her seat and exiting that subway train. This princess is still fighting the dragons. We will help her to win against those dragons. I cannot stop thinking about what I saw or refrain from trying to be clear about what she was telling us. I know -- as surely as I can know that the sun will rise tomorrow -- that the woman on the train that hot day is one of the bravest human beings in the world. Looking at her, as she rose from her seat, was like seeing someone coping with a terrible physical ailment and burden. She seemed to find it difficult to move and appeared to be walking towards a gallows.

If you remember the first Ali/Frazier fight at the Garden, there was a moment when Ali was caught by Joe Frazier in the fifteenth round with a perfect left-hook. Ali went down and got up at the count of "three" to finish the fight. No other man in the world would have risen after taking that punch.

The woman I saw was Ali rising from the canvas to finish the fight after taking the hardest punch of a lifetime (I suspect) filled with hard punches. I have never seen a tougher human being than this woman. Did we finish the fight? I think we won by knockout.

Rewind: A woman enters the subway train. She is anywhere from thirty to forty years-old in appearance, but she may be older. She is wearing a black, sleeveless t-shirt, plain denim-like pants, sandals. What do I notice first? The absence of female armor. There are no displays of jewelry. I do not remember earrings. No watch. No rings. No expensively painted fingernails. No pedicure. There is a slight scent of shampoo and maybe a mild perfume or deodorant. Nothing expensive or very good in the way of fragrances. Her sandals are free of girlish pretensions and might be worn by members of the Israeli military. Never mess with a woman in a no-nonsense mood.

Although her clothes are clean, they are not expensive and do not call attention to her physical presence. She wears no makeup. Her hair is drawn back, cut Louise Brooks-short in a different style from the "Lulu in Paradise"-look, held in place by a headband of a light brown color. Her eyes are large, soft brown or green, high cheekbones, perfect symmetry in her features, full lips, nothing about her suggests the former model that she must be. Everybody in the subway train is an extra. She is the female lead in a film -- her film: She is both Sophia Coppola and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I am staring at a reincarnation of Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace.

She is in agony, however, a bundle of paradoxes and contradictions, visibly intelligent in an almost scary Simone de Beauvoir-kind of a way. She is also disengaged from the world of moronic others, like me, who presume to breathe the same air as she does. Instinctively, I protect my balls.

Who is she? Why will this question not leave me alone? Why all of this pain that is so visible in her features? Who hurt you, Signorina? I do not know your name. I will always call you "Floria Tosca." I guess an Italian-American ancestry is appropriate for this unusual person. Nothing about her suggests the typical behavior of a beautiful woman. I suspect she comes from money -- at least, in comparison with me her upbringing must be affluent. Dad is in the cement business? Linen supply? He does a little something, you don't know what. Just kidding.

Most beautiful women decide to make their appearance and the fact of their beauty their claim to fame in life while perfecting the art of receiving facials and shopping in expensive stores. I am sure that such a life was an option for "Our Lady of the A-train." She rejected that life. She is clearly someone who is very sexual. I am sure that she has known "conjugal bliss" with persons of both sexes -- perhaps at the same time -- but is no longer in a frisky mood. Why? Abandonment of eros is the surrender of life. I think that "conjugal bliss" means sex. Presumably, after marriage. My guess is that La Floria has never married. Are you ready to leave us so soon, Ms. Tosca? Is it a matter of Baron Scarpia? Or Mario Cavaradossi? ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

Fade to black: Lights gradually fill the space of the train. We are in slow motion. A man rises, moving easily as others are nearly frozen in a molasses-like slow time signature in the symphony of this moment. He is dressed in black, gray-haired, resembling me, staring at the woman in the train and the man looking at the woman in the train. He smiles, looks at his watch. He is death. Without hesitation or second thoughts, death would be closest to the two most intensely alive persons on the train: a man and woman sitting next to one another, each in his or her own world, suggesting a weird kind of quantum similarity.

Why did the universe align these two people in this way on this occasion? We were in color; everybody else on that train was in black-and-white.

A woman appears dressed in red, resembling the beautiful stranger: She is eros. The two most erotically-engaging persons on the train communicating sexual energy are the man and woman in close proximity who combine intellectual coldness with indifference to all others as they, unknowingly, also seem to extend sexual invitations in all directions while having nothing to do with one another. I know that, like me, Tosca has been told that "there is something very sexual about you."

A woman is suffering and desiring. A woman is abandoning the detritus of a broken life and a dead earlier (or other?) self. A woman is asking for my attention who is, seemingly, unaware of me. Is she aware of me at a deeper than conscious level? I am jolted out of my "splendid isolation." I am forced to feel her pain and presence as she overturns the furniture of my life. What is this about? What happened to you? Are you O.K.? I have seen that kind of look in a woman's face only once before. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

If a woman, especially, may be thought of as a powerful transmitter of signals, then reception of those signals is also a gift or burden for those around her. How many others, men and women, felt the power of her energy or have been destroyed by it? None that I can see in this train are getting her messages. Are they stupid or inattentive? Same thing? Why is a woman who looks like her in this state? What has her life been like? Who did this terrible thing, whatever it may be, to you, Ms. Tosca? If it is any comfort, I am sure that he (she?) -- the man or woman who matters -- loves you. (Please see "Bernard Williams and Identity.")

The need -- I said, need -- for understanding will not leave us in peace. Hence, the calling to make art, create religions, do science. Man must create narratives; woman must paint pictures; then we come to resemble the images and stories that we create. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")

"Man who dares to split the atom and measures the heat in the heart of Orion ..." cannot fathom the depths of a woman's mystery. YOU are a mystery, Floria Tosca. Italian-American, middle-class background. Queens or Bronx, maybe New Jersey or "elsewhere." Good schools, Harvard or Yale, St. John's University or good-old Fordham, or (my guess) she skipped college for the wonderful world of modelling and acting. She reads. She is articulate. Few friends. No one gets her. She is "weird," says the family friend. Trauma, major trauma. Mental illness is possible. Loss of memory. The struggle to remember is walking through the flames. I know. Me too. Crime and punishment. I know, I can feel it with you. Sexual violation. It hurts and hurts, keeps hurting. To recover memory, you must accept and walk towards the pain. ("What is memory?")

A memory is repressed (involuntary) as opposed to suppressed (voluntary) only when it hurts. You must accept and choose to hurt in order to recover the memory. Not to recover memory is highly dangerous because it could result in fragmentation of the psyche into various personalities, or worse. I am an expert on this subject of the dynamics of emotional recollection.

How badly do you want to know what happened? It is when we can answer this question, affirmatively -- no matter what the answer or price may be -- that we will regain memory and, with those memories, emotional affect. We must remember to feel; we must feel to remember. The body remembers even when we do not wish to recall physical pain connected to deep emotional catastrophe. Ian Hacking, "The Sciences of Memory," in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton, 1995), pp. 198-220. (People to read on "memory as mistress" include: Ludwig Bingswanger, Carl Jung, R.D. Laing, Judith Singer, Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur, Proust and Santayana on "essences" will also help.)

"As Alfonso Lingis says, erotic perception is not simply a change in chemical, physical, electrical or mechanical properties; it is a different way of relating with the other. It is moving away from seeing the other as one who is interchangeable with others as happens 'in the exchange systems of discourse, productive labor, commerce, and the institutions of the polis. -- ' ... Chemical, physical, electrical, and mechanical analyses of the bodies of myself and the other will not account for this perception 'any more than the anatomical investigation of the mouth and throat explain what speech is.' Any more than a scientific analysis of the fingers moving will account for me touching this woman. ... " (Waddell, p. 9.)

Touching. Who did this to you? Terry Tuchin? Diana Lisa Riccioli? Someone like those monsters, maybe. Hypnosis. Date-rape drug. "Tragedy is the struggle against a fate that cannot be escaped." (Miguel Unamuno) ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

You are a brave woman, Floria Tosca. I love another brave woman who is similar to you. I love several brave women. What is the meaning of a man's gentle touching of a woman's face? What is the significance of his wiping away a tear from her cheek?

We arrive at the George Washington Bridge "exit." Please do not go gently into that good night, New Jersey. Please stay in New York, Ms. Tosca.

You rise, slowly, and walk out of the train with a deep breath, wiping a tear from your eyes. Me too. How is it possible that a woman like Floria is wiping a tear from her eyes as she exits a subway train alone on a weekday? Is the key word "alone"? How many women in New York are shedding a tear when they enter their homes at the end of the day? How is it possible that this brief experience of another person's wounded humanity alters my perception of reality forever after this day? Floria, you are one of the most solitary persons I have ever seen, a female wolf, dwelling in "splendid isolation."

I may never know this woman's name. She does not know me or have any idea that I saw her on that fateful afternoon. I am sure that it was a fateful afternoon in her life. The world changed for you that afternoon, didn't it? "The world is darkening ..."

I arrive in my home. Home. What or who is my home? I fix the face that I will offer to the faces that I meet and love. I button-up my social disguise. I pick-up the pieces of my psyche, shattered crystals. I glue them together every day. Any "errors" inserted today? What is it like to be raped? This is what it is like to be raped? Repetition. (Kierkegaard)

"In darkness, bed, that eternal nocturnal re-entry into the womb, he lay for a minute or two staring at the ceiling; then smiled wanly to himself, a kind of metaphysical smile, potential being making peace with actual being. One would survive, being English" -- visse d'arte, my good lady of the A-train! -- "knowing to the farthest roots of one's existence that it was all, finally, a comedy, even when one was the butt, [Do you speak to me of ethics, New Jersey?] and the great step in the dark only from terra firma to banana-skin."

John Fowles, Daniel Martin (New York: New American Library, 1977), p. 609.