The Laughing Heart—Revised

By Robert Arnold Johnson

This is a story of epic ambition—literally. It is one of an ambiguous and contestable heroism, of guilt, of stigma, of resilience, of mental illness, and of baseball. There’s music and murder, sanity, sainthood, and sickness. There is love within and across generations, and there is loss and grief. There’s hatred, crime, and revenge. There is baseball, the violin, philosophy, natural and hard-earned talents, mentored and mentor.

Not enough yet? Here is a story of Kid Dee, of his unusual mother, and of religion, pro (his) and con (hers)—not to speak of a memorable father and friendships. Kid talks on and on, and for some, he gets tedious. It’s all made-up. Strange things happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796030365

Robert Arnold Johnson

Robert Arnold Johnson (www.rajohnsonmd.org) is a physician whose career spanned two epochs of specialty over nearly a half century: cardiology and internal medicine 1969-2001; psychiatry 2004-2018. He is the author of more than forty medically related publications, including co-editing The Practice of Cardiology, a popular textbook of the 1980s. His book of short poems, the Inconclusive Rule was published by Xlibris in March 2018 (www.robertarnoldjohnson.com). A philosophical work co-authored with Thomas Alderson Davis on the nature of identity and its implication for medical practice, Story by Story: Who I Am, What I Suffer, will be released (Cambridge Scholars Publishers) during 2019. He is married, now thirty years, to the violinist and author Susan Eileen Pickett.

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Copyright © 2019 by Robert Arnold Johnson.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2019905107

ISBN:              Hardcover                              978-1-7960-3038-9

                        Softcover                               978-1-7960-3037-2

                        eBook                                    978-1-7960-3036-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Rev. date: 04/26/2019

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CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Dedication And Acknowledgements

Book 1. Los Angeles—Plus Ireland, Some Paris, and Venice, Too

Book 2. From Venice to Chavez Ravine

Book 3. Again, Los Angeles

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Laughing Heart—Revised is an epic. Well, it isn’t one yet, but it contains that ambition. Because I am laying claim to the word epic, I want to say why. What does the word mean to me? This: a long poem that tells the story of a hero or heroine, wherein the telling itself makes use of some sort of consistent metrical stratagem. It is the latter choice by the author, the use of a metrical stratagem, that, in my opinion, embeds most obviously his or her work in the epic’s tradition, an ancient one beginning perhaps with the Assyrian story of Gilgamesh. I’ll add that the metrical structure must be a conscious one: the author has had to be aware of it; it cannot be one that arose spontaneously, solely from the author’s poetic unconscious. Other features of the composing, however, such as alliteration or internal rhyme, may have come from just that source. These two features I’ve specified for the definition of an epic do not exhaust those, to say the least, that have been suggested by various literary scholars, historically or in the present; see the excellent discussion on the website of the Academy of American Poets. Just for example, my story contains none of the three essential features for an epic proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in a now-classic essay, Epic and Novel.¹

A hero or heroine is a person, real or imagined, that a culture makes use of for its own cohesion. Such a person, in other words, does a cultural service. Her or his concerns are more than simply personal to begin with, yet, more still, they are the material for an afterlife as their reciprocals: the culture’s concerns about her/him. The story, Joseph Campbell has pointed out, typically is about a journey (requiring a departure, literally, from an ordinary rhythm of life, relatively speaking, within an ambient culture) and a transformation taking place as a consequence. At one or more points, courage is required. Of course, many people, thank goodness, do courageous things for altruistic reasons. But the status of hero or heroine is conferred when such a person’s story becomes familiar enough that it has entered the collective unconscious. A particular collective, one whose members, just enough of them, share certain unconscious stories, images, and presumptions, is what I mean when I refer to a culture. My outlook on the heroine/hero does not signify that such a figure exemplifies consistent virtue. Beowulf seems overly inclined to self-advertisement as a beneficent assassin. Ulysses makes one hell of a detour when returning to his homeland, whereby people, those closest to him especially, suffer; once home, his reprisal toward those who have betrayed him in his absence is merciless. The Laughing Heart—Revised embodies my ambition to create an epic, but it will not become one, in fact, unless and until the role of putative hero, heroine, or both (both fits best in its case) is embraced as such within the culture of its creation. Until then, this is another long story.

Why this ambition toward an epic, not a novel? One reason for the epic’s metrical stratagem is to facilitate the reciter’s (or singer’s) performance of it: the lines are more easily remembered. Verse is a mnemonic. A majority in our culture has been literate for awhile now, though. We read rather than listen to long stories; no reciter or singer is needed. So, once again, why the verse, verse of the kind I’ve specified? Were the work just to create heroes and heroines a novel would do just fine. Or a long poem, a work in verse, but not a verse persistently metrical in the same way through and through. I did not know the answer to this question when I began, or even formulate the question. I just began. This book has been over two decades in process (several major revisions—last in spring 2018—all in the way of reduction, despite its final length—and many minor ones). My first thoughts toward its content were in 1988; I began the writing in 1994. So, there’s a quarter century to look back. My impulse originally was based, I’d guess, on sheer hellishness: I’ll show you a metric that’s still functional, and close enough to prose that people will read it. And they will read it even in an age in which prose has long been the means for a long story.² About five years after I was underway, Seamus Heaney published his translation (from Old English) of Beowulf, taking care to get the stress-bound metric of the original as right as he could make it. It’s a marvel. The epic form has life still. Perhaps this is an understatement. The epic form produces an experience like none other. We are connected yet with peoples in a manner of speaking, literally, in a manner of speaking—a form of intimacy—who told or listened to long stories on special occasions. Is some kind of reciprocation at play? Does an internal and unconscious representation of such long-ago people give me their audience when I speak now, through this work, for the purpose of a long story? A briefer way of putting this might be to say, or wonder if, the epic form murmurs of resurrection.

DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated to my wife, Susan Eileen Pickett. Her resolute encouragement and limitless patience made the project possible. There’s more, though, within the story itself, having to do with her life’s work (music) and her life’s passion (the Los Angeles Dodgers). That must be enough to say here, but it is barest beginning of what I could say. Another Dodgers’ fan, this one from the team’s Brooklyn days, Patrick Henry, read early drafts of the work and made invaluable comments and suggestions. I want to thank, too, Calvin Shaw, then at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, for taking time from his graduate studies for a careful reading of an early draft of the text. Another friend, Richard Simon, Jr., was encouraging early on: I am so grateful.

COVER. The sculptor for the bronze baseball is Mark Anderson. It was cast (Walla Walla Foundry, Walla Walla, WA) in 2002 and is owned by the author and his wife, Susan Pickett. The violin was loaned for the purpose of this photo; its maker was Joseph Paul Christa, late 18th century, Germany. The wooden baseball bats are owned by a friend of the author, Donald Schacht; they are approximately 65 years of age.

ADVISORY. The narrator, my hero, for this long story is of mixed race, and his mother, my heroine, is white. I, their author, am white. I have two other important characters here who are black, several who are Hispanic, and some, two in particular, who are white. Some readers will see my creation of these relationships as a moral impropriety, an appropriation or theft from American cultures or cultural emblems not my own and for a selfish purpose. I hope the story itself dispels that notion.

BOOK 1.

LOS ANGELES—PLUS IRELAND, SOME PARIS, AND VENICE, TOO

1 Mom was a mereologist (meer-awl-oh-jist). Of

2 her clients, many came from faraway cities,

3 ones likely I’ll never visit: true of nearly

4 anywhere. I’m untraveled almost, a constant

5 more or less of all that’s right here. The same’s all too

6 true of some of my friends. Our experience of

7 place, first-hand, is exceedingly local, and this,

8 I hope to persuade you, is a theme of distant,

9 that is, far-reaching, consequence. None of us

10 here has known another of Mom’s occupation.

11 Her favorite answer to some very strange questions

12 she put into a slim volume entitled The

13 Logical Foundation of Condominiums,

14 the sight of which could send her into laughing fits

15 one or more times daily, given that several

16 copies were strewn, perhaps strategically, about

17 our home. Here’s its first sentence. "Everything is the

18 subject of borders." She goes on to say that the

19 mereologist’s job is to show people willing

20 to listen, and willing to pay for the advice

21 they listen to, that the truth of this sentence will

22 bear on any topic of interest whatever.

23 A wise person ponders its application, then,

24 in every present issue possibly of her

25 future’s concern. "Every whole (the empty set’s one,

26 too) has parts depending on borders. Every whole

27 with borders is a part. A definition is

28 a border: therefore, nothing is indefinable

29 and/or incomplete." Her business exploded with

30 publication of these lines. Persons from 16

31 to 86, of nearly every race and job-

32 description, have trooped into our house seeking her

33 counsel: entertainers, historians, senators,

34 artists, philosophers, preachers, developers,

35 executives, and, of course, lawyers. For those who

36 will be satisfied by brief consultation, the

37 fee’s relatively modest; where more’s needed, it

38 gets pricey. Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp

39 Cantor, the famous German mathematician,

40 was a darling among the introjects she most

41 cherished. He’d found about the on-and-on-and-on.…,

42 the infinite, that it has sizes: the smallest

43 is unendingly large, next is more-unendingly

44 large, then comes still-more-unendingly-large, and so

45 forth, seemingly infinitely. She sighed always,

46 reflecting on Cantorian marvels, as a

47 professor might, yet in my lifetime refused out-

48 of-home jobs, such as teaching. Our colleges and

49 universities, she’d say, tend toward the smug

50 (a favorite pejorative). "Plus, I’m ill-fit for

51 institutions. I gave teaching a whirl in my

52 grad school days and a few times after: impatience,

53 cocksureness, acidity—other faults, too, I’m

54 sure—made me a menace." Yet in her care and love

55 I was never to witness there at home the sins

56 (impatience, cocksureness, acidity) she claimed

57 would be truly assigned were she to be found on

58 Judgment Day within an institution. I made

59 promises (to read in bad weather and be of

60 good cheer when that might be helpful) and I kept them.

61 I learned to sing or practice the piano—both

62 were welcomed—with little regard for moods or weathers.

63 In time, Mom would be amused by my visitors,

64 about whom a short prelude. Belief is odd. Great

65 writers make of this point a big commotion. These

66 visitors, however, brought belief to me as

67 a matter more urgent than art, more urgent than

68 philosophy. Each was incorporeal. Each

69 spoke in a voice assuredly unique. Each held

70 a life not mine at this or any other time.

71 Yet their stories began mixing with my own. I

72 had what psychiatrists call insight. My

73 experiences were hallucinatory,

74 mad, crazy: I knew that. Still, consider. Their tales

75 never had me as a subject. None came really

76 uninvited: I had to signal somehow that,

77 yes, I’m free now: entertain me. So, practically,

78 crazy or not seemed not so important once I

79 got used to them. My sleep was fine. They never came

80 in dreams. Each voice stays put; I could walk around it.

81 None asks or answers anything. None is separate

82 from its story; each from the present (when for me

83 it’s now) is thus removed and of no future, it

84 seemed, susceptible. After the first surprised me,

85 I got prepared. The three next appearances I

86 recorded. Alas, from the tape on playback, just

87 silence, yes, nothing apart from the words by which

88 I, the usual I, posed hesitant questions

89 or comment to a someone. The latter someone,

90 undeniably, was a being audible

91 never, precisely never, beyond or without

92 my own mind. Here’s more by way of prelude. I’ve been

93 given to long, pensive sessions with myself. Such

94 a time became after a bit somehow a cue

95 for a foreknowledge to make itself abruptly

96 evident to my mind: someone was waiting in

97 the wings of consciousness, mine, waiting for me to

98 welcome an audition by or of him or her.

99 I was not required to utter, Yes? but simply

100 think it: Lo! A speaking-to-me commenced. A long

101 lapse separated the first from ones to come; yet

102 from the first I knew he could not be last—never

103 a doubt. Slowly, they came more often, maybe as

104 my conveyance improved. I’ve never recalled a

105 single special feature of that first day. It was

106 an otherwise ordinary month of May; I

107 was 18. My description of these vocal but

108 bodiless persons will be abbreviations

109 because each went on and on. I just get too damned

110 weird if I tell their stories in full. I’ve done

111 so in drafts of this work; I learned something—I can’t

112 bear it. The first voice, a guy, claimed to be a five

113 hundred-year-old Italian from Milan who, under

114 a pseudonym, Innominato, created

115 the first violin! (True, I found by researches

116 later, the violin’s inventor has never

117 been named.) Further, he claimed to have been a friend of

118 Leonardo da Vinci, with whom he and a

119 circle of very clever confidants played some

120 mathematical games! And what details he spun! How

121 the violin got its fourth string when Amati

122 gets into the act; Leonardo’s departure

123 eventually for France; Innominato’s move

124 then to Brescia. To name three such only. Mom was

125 off on a business-trip at this time. Befuddled,

126 my weekly routine fell to pieces. I missed a

127 Dodger home-stand. I failed to show even for my

128 own team’s game! (I played first base for an amateur

129 team; I was hitting three-fifteen; mild attention

130 from pro-scouts was coming my way). To Mom on her

131 return I said, "I was brought down by something, but

132 all’s well now." No more comment was needed just yet.

133 Baseball had become important at age eight, thanks

134 to Fence, he who’d become my oldest friend. More on

135 this later. Weeks after Innominato, a

136 conviction grew: no reason to put off counsel

137 from my mother. I asked for a couple of hours

138 when I might have her complete attention, then told

139 my story about the vocal visitor. She

140 was silent, then bemused, then delighted.

141 The possibility that I had succumbed to

142 psychosis was, it seemed, much more vivid for me

143 than for her. She smiled at my bringing it up… and

144 murmured favorite words from Midsummer-Night’s Dream—

145 "The lover, the madman, and the poet are of

146 imagination all compact…"—then began an

147 impromptu oral essay on the Greek Muses,

148 the poetic Muse, words like amuse and music,

149 the concept of Grace, thoughts about dreaming, myth, and

150 hallucination, and the prevalent mental style of

151 ancient by comparison with modern peoples.

152 Here, indeed, is one example of a stubborn

153 difference between us. Her attention seemed always

154 first to focus the things (ideas, concepts), the

155 abstract objects, of the mind, features within the

156 Mindscape; mine, on the other hand, turns to the world.

157 Crazy? Or not? Seemed to me of somewhat more than

158 secondary concern. Her smile, though, and the near-

159 rhapsody that followed held a message. "Well, you’re

160 sane about being possibly crazy. How may

161 one do better? Where’s the problem for the world when

162 a mind contains itself? We cannot ask, or wish,

163 that the mind has just one melody or sounds in

164 just one chord. We can ask, however, that it

165 plays in tune, and thereby it is aptly contained."

166 Mom’s love for musical metaphor’s well known. One-

167 and-Plural (1-&-More), for example. To her

168 mind’s ear, this cipher is one of a family, the

169 five, the First Family of Cosmic Melodies. I’ll

170 wait to name the others, and yet note this: 1-&-

171 More’s the music of mereology, which is the

172 application of this very melody to

173 life. (Parts-and-whole is what mereologists often

174 say.) By cosmic mom means "all that is or

175 can be imagined to be," the All that’s mental

176 united with the All that’s physical (spacetime’s

177 included), since All’s otherwise less than itself.

178 Indulge me. If you’re bored by this kind of talk, think

179 what I went through! Yet one’s mom is one’s mom.

180 Her story will charm you: you have my promise on

181 that. Further, I’ll deal here with music and murder, with

182 love and with hatred, with beauty and its beast, with

183 peace and with war, the sane and the sick, and yes, with

184 baseball, too. But my mom’s thoughts illuminate all

185 things, and I’ll add a few of my own. You must bear

186 up. Skim along whenever you wish. That’s what I

187 did. In Mom’s opinion, the Five Melodies are

188 Existence’s roots, indivisible duets,

189 wherein each voice (the angel 1, for example)

190 is the complement of the other (the angel

191 Plural, in this example), with their infinite

192 variations and embodiments. Melody

193 itself is a 1 made up from Plural notes and

194 durations. And music has other words in its

195 language wherein the 1-&-More is the general

196 idea: bar (measure), concert, ensemble, song,

197 harmony, key, and so forth. An instrument

198 itself’s a 1-&-More device: its several parts

199 within and in its function(s) without. Hearing Mom

200 talk about this made me look and listen and see

201 and hear the 1-&-Plural everywhere, hardly

202 surprising, given its 1st Family membership.

203 One more example and I’ll get on from this. I’ve

204 used the word complement. This word holds 1-&-Both

205 (the simplest variant of 1-&-Plural) right

206 within itself implicitly. The faint, dark part

207 you do not (just barely) see is complement to

208 slivery moon: a 2 making up 1 full, round thing.

209 More than a hint of paradox. Purposefully.

210 Paradox, she thinks, is just a pointing toward some

211 unrecognized whole. I propose, too, some hint of

212 religion. Her comment? OK, hint, but no more!

213 She’d grown up in Ireland, her mother Catholic and

214 her father Protestant. Early in life she had

215 dispensed with belief in God (retaining, even

216 so, some affection for gods, plural), because she’d

217 concluded from childhood that Belief, especially

218 religious belief, besmears the Sublime with the

219 Just-Too-Ridiculous. Words like "hint, humor, muse,

220 music" held truths about a Divine that won’t be

221 confined, local, even describably finite.

222 ‘Final’ is mysterious, she’d say. "Mystery makes

223 many so mad they fall prey to Belief," meaning

224 by Belief the One-True-God kind, which, she’d argue,

225 was a violence from its very birth, simply

226 placed beyond her capability for respect.

227 Perhaps her choice of profession, mereology,

228 a look over and again at the 1-&-More,

229 took hold out of her antipathy toward the One-

230 True-God, who, for her, has just too much One. James Joyce

231 was her favorite artist, the artist, she’d say, "next

232 to Homer(s), yes, most continent of the Plural."

233 She went further, so far as to give One-True-God

234 partisans (monotheists) their own acronym,

235 OTG (each letter is pronounced). "The mental

236 affliction suffered by an OTG," she said,

237 "may be likened to the bodily affliction

238 of an incontinent orifice!" I felt in

239 this a surge of cruelty. And yet in it, too,

240 there’s, admittedly, a brilliance. Her opinion

241 was that the land of her birth, Ireland, lovely

242 as it was, was incontinent, nevertheless,

243 with its religion, much too prone to make messes.

244 Her life’s purpose was to propel and protect the

245 joys of imagination, which beliefs oppose

246 as if by a shut-off valve. Belief singular,

247 that is. Beliefs plural, she said, "are natural

248 hypotheses, ubiquitous; they are, or are

249 more easily, subjected to experience." We’d

250 argue sometimes. "Imagination’s unequal

251 among us, I’d say, and many of my friends can’t

252 afford it. Or I’d say, Religion, Belief: these

253 are at least possible for the dispossessed and

254 dispirited! You’re right to point this out," she’d say,

255 "but you stop too soon. Alongside the benefits

256 Belief provides to Believers are the terrors

257 it creates for Others: and always there will be

258 Others." OK, I knew this argument was sound.

259 Yet the present had a power over me more

260 than it did over her. Misery and poverty

261 all around me calls for action! (meaning, Belief

262 has standing over imaginations), or so

263 my feelings went on most occasions. Mom’s life, she

264 said, had taught her otherwise. We both knew about

265 violence, had been the target of it, via

266 acts that had defied, indeed, Imagination.

267 Mom began always with the Irish. "Each party,

268 Catholic and Protestant, is stupidly guilty.

269 Favoring one over the other is nonsense. I

270 have favored neither, therefore, and in fact oppose

271 them both by having become a kind of nun to

272 the cause of Imagination, a herald for

273 that which they’ve each refused." I’ll speak now about the

274 Melodies, the 1st Five Family. Here her prizing

275 of Imagination is on display. Plural-

276 &-1 I’ve told you about. The other four: 1-

277 &-Nought (0); 1-&-All; 1-&-1; 1-&-

278 Other. 1-&-More lacks a nickname. (U.S. coins’

279 E Pluribus Unum comes close, but appears to

280 favor its Unum over its Pluribus). The

281 other four don’t, which I’ll get to later on. And

282 each has a musical nature, presentation,

283 according to Mom. She had more to say than this.

284 (She’d earned graduate degrees in both mathematics

285 and philosophy.) Naming, she said, the making

286 of nouns, is the creation of Mindscape.

287 And Mindscape and World are complements; each being

288 each, yet inseparable from the other. Cardinal

289 (how-many) numbers, stand as an example. When

290 we think of them as nouns we’ve transported them from

291 their life in the World, as adjectives, to a new

292 life as objects, things, in Mindscape. Once in Mindscape,

293 they can be examined. Lo! These mental objects

294 in their interrelations obey and create rules.

295 They are governed and governing. The show-stopper,

296 the epiphania primum, is this: the rules

297 among numbers, these invented objects there in

298 human Mindscape, are discoverable! They just

299 are, it seems, as if the Mindscape were just

300 there, whether or not the humans whose minds explore

301 and populate it ever had to exist at

302 all! Yes, the mental objects are invisible,

303 many of them, to persons who haven’t learned how

304 to see yet in such a place. Thus, the purpose of

305 education and research: to make these objects

306 visible, some for the first time to anyone,

307 some for those of us who follow. So, such objects,

308 which Mindscape is made up of, are real, as real as

309 objects of the World. Spooky. OK, what about

310 false or illusory things of the mind, myths and

311 fables, misconceptions, wrong conclusions? They’re real,

312 too, in Mindscape. There they are what they are (myths and

313 fables, misconceptions, and wrong conclusions). They

314 may be falsehoods about the World, yes: in Mindscape

315 they reside truly, as falsehoods about the World.

316 Onward now to the subject of play, another

317 big deal, very big deal, Mom makes much of. Play, she

318 loved to exclaim, expresses the procreative

319 principle, one at work in Nature generally

320 and at work in Mindscape, too. Consider. If we

321 make use of the phrase, We’re jus’ fuckin’ aroun’ to

322 mean we’re playing around, we’ve got it just about

323 right. For Mom, Innominato’s story is one

324 about Play, and in more ways than one, as if, she

325 said, it came to us as an emblem of his age,

326 the Italian Renaissance, "Oh, that orgasm

327 of the Western Mindscape." (She loved sexual as

328 much as musical metaphor). A view of mine

329 took hold sometime after Innominato. If

330 Play is to Mindscape as sex is to World it must

331 have its birth in the body, i.e., have been a

332 product of evolution. Whatever its end,

333 its purpose, is for other animals, for us

334 humans it creates a beam into the Mindscape,

335 our particular access to its contents; it is

336 the light of Imagination. I decided

337 this, too: belief in Play was here, right within me.

338 Every belief, I thought then, has some color of

339 One from 1-&-Plural; every Plural has some

340 color of Imagination. Which reminds me.

341 With Innominato, craving for paintings took

342 hold. Now I could get myself to museums in

343 town beyond my former reach. I have something I

344 call philotopophobia, which I’ll describe

345 shortly. I found no talent for making paintings,

346 just for looking at them. Music’s different. I was

347 born musical. So was Pop, Mom, too. Plus, Mimi,

348 a girlfriend then, was a violinist. Older than

349 I and past college, she was studying in New

350 York for a concert-career. We’d been kids in the

351 same neighborhood. We had music in common, of

352 course; also, we each adored my mom. We each then

353 required private time in no small magnitude, she

354 for seemingly endless practice. We each bore great

355 fondness for her pop and mine (her mom had died). No

356 sibling blessed the life of either of us. Poems

357 mattered to us both. And we were similarly

358 libidinous. I told Pop that Mimi and I

359 wanted to date. Kid, he said, "you’re lucky,

360 violinists are horny!" Truth’s in those words, if

361 Mimi is representative. I sometimes think

362 talent for playing the violin, attraction,

363 at least, for playing it, comes through inheritance

364 of a very keen tactile-pleasure circle in

365 the brain. And the tactile (smell helps, too) is the most

366 sexual sense. Thereby the violin is sexy,

367 especially as the strings make it vibrate and its

368 player. In theory, the same should be said of the

369 viola, the cello, the bass, stringed instruments

370 generally, but I have no sexual experience

371 with their players. Possibly my pop could comment

372 from self-knowledge. Sexually, as in other ways,

373 I was Mimi’s completely. Some of my friends

374 thought my fidelity was a little crazy

375 (particularly as she was often off in New York),

376 akin to my phobia for foreign neighborhoods,

377 what I called, learning the Greek word, topos, place, a

378 topophobia if I’m without, topophilia

379 if I’m within, my own neighborhood: I loved the

380 mirroring quality in this idea. (By

381 the way, phobos = fear, philos loving.) I