Dear Ralph,

Thanks so much for stopping by to visit last night. I'm very happy that you've been able to pop in sometimes. I really miss being able to pop in on you.

You know, Ralph, your music just gets "better and better", by which I guess I mean that it becomes more and more pleasing for me to listen to. You will understand, without being disappointed I hope, that I have a kind of inescapable predilection for what you're doing these days which is sort of built -in-- because it is you who is making it, because I can see parts of you in it (parts that I know, and glimpses of parts which I don't know very well), and because I love you. But that doesn't mean that I don't also listen to your music just as music too, from that general arena of music which comes my way, nor do I turn off all my sensibilities of-whatever kind. So you'll understand that there's no "soft soaping' or something like that when I tell you that I think your music is getting better focused, your ideas are becoming more individuated and precise, and the over-all shape/structure/form/gestalt - the whole piece as one shape might be the best way to say it - all that seems more and more "right". I'm not putting myself on any critical pedestals, or being patronizing , when I say that I am conscious (sp.?) of your increasing feeling-concern for your music as aesthetic object. It comes across, you see, in and through the music, quite apart from the way you talk about it (it would be there and would be evident even if you didn't also choose to talk with me about it). From where I sit and feel, that's all to the good, and it seems like it makes your music the more able to communicate to me even as you are growing, in your own directions and ways.

By the way, I can understand why you might fear being over-influenced by Morton Subotnik's music if you listened to too much of it. I don't think yours would be mistaken for his music, since the points of contact are no more than would be normal and expected given that you both work in electronic media, that there are certain tendencies "in the air", and that you may possibly share in some of the same musical tastes and predilections. Anyway, Ralph, as long as you continue to follow your own inclinations you'll just be Ralph, and if there are influences which might show at times, nobody criticizes Mozart because he was influenced by Haydn, I don't hear any complaints that Stravinsky was influenced by Baroque and Classic masters, (not anymore), I'm not recommending you listen a lot to his music, just reassuring you that I don't think you'll lose your individuality because of any music you might hear. - Just en passeunt,(however it's spelled), sometimes hearing some other composer's approach to a problem elicits a solution to one of mine even when the musical problem I'm working on isn't at all the same, or the music is in a very different style-practice. I'm not sure why that should be so, and this experience isn't at all inevitable or reliable. But sometimes, when I am pondering, for example, why Mozart chose to write a development section of one kind rather than of another possible kind in a given piece it stimulates a way of thinking which can help me to solve some compositional problem with which I'm involved, even if that problem doesn't have too much to do with Mozart's observation, just thought I'd mention it.

Change of subject - One thing you said puzzled me. When I mentioned that I know very few couples any more who haven't split up, and that in most cases it was the women who are initiating the splitting up, you said, "Yes, women are more together these days". Did you really mean that you think splitting up is a sign of having it together? Or that it's good that fewer women are able to, or want to, work things out? I guess I really don't know what you mean by that statement, so I need a bit of clarification. In my experience, unless it's obvious that there's no love left, it seems to me that splitting up is often an indication of failure on everyone's part, and not really an indication that one or the other party really has it together.

Well, I gotta go now. Course description preparation for the Recording Arts program is calling me.

If you want, you may certainly share this extension of our visit with Caroline. I sure hope to be able to visit her soon too. Just give a jingle and let me know when.

Take care, old buddy.
Yours, etc.,

You know, Ralph, I keep having negative reactions to the things you say which seem to make second class citizens out of men, things which I imagine grow out of whatever system of thought it was you got into with the Rainbow Culture. (I sure can't comment on it, that thought system, because I really can't even pretend that I understand what it's all about, what it is supposed to do for you, and so on. I can only react to the bits and pieces which I hear.)

I know that one negative reaction I have is to ways you formulate things which seem to indicate that feminine energy is creative and masculine energy is destructive. Feels like I imagine it did to women when they were told they were unclean because they menstruated. Anyway, it's a peculiar reversal of the idea of the creative function, which is probably about equally shared actually, but I'm going to make a case for saying that masculine energy is creative and feminine energy is nurturing. I think the destructive energies are probably about equally shared, though they express themselves differently. Anyway, you understand that all this has to be done from guess-work about what you really mean by those divisions of sex or gender oriented energies: I really have no idea which of the energies I feel in me might be masculine or feminine, except as they correspond to stereotyped notions about domination-submission, active vs. passive, etc. which are really more culture-value oriented ways of viewing masculinity and femininity than anything rooted in what men really are to themselves and women to themselves. I presume I have masculine energy in my penis, little though that may be when I don't feel accepted, but I can't really pretend that I even know where these different energies are supposed to be located exactly , in your view, or if they're a generalized field, or whether you understand the human energy field to have distinct locational divisions so that some parts are one form of energy, other parts are something else, and so on. So this is from pure guesswork, in terms of adopting your terms to my purposes.

Anyway, here goes.

I submit that the masculine function is creative and the female function is nurturing. Before I can launch into the argument from the positive position-establishing side, I have to blow away a bit of mystique and a myth or two.

That the woman bears the child within her has nothing to do with being creative . That is a bio-mechanical function, automatic in operation, involving not one whit of will, synthesis or extrapolation, producing nothing original except in the most insignificant details, and requiring not even a rudimentary intelligence. That is why it is called procreation, not creation. I'm not putting it down, it has its own form of natural beauty,, but there's nothing more or less mysterious about it than there is about why you have hair on your head, and it lies in the realm of the most unremarkable of phenomena since existence is predicated upon it. No reason to get tangled up in verbal knots in the value sphere, rather will simply point out that without it we have no existence nor the means for contemplating the same: it is therefore quite unremarkable, the most commonplace and unextraordinary thing we could ever consider. And I ought to know, because I've been pregnant dozens of times.(Only the last sentence is intended to be humorous, but possibly the rest may be as well.)

Of course the biological-chemical differences needed to promote our particular form of procreative function make for very real differences between men and women, not only in physiology and psychology but possibly in the basic perceptual realms. I will tell you that so far as these biological, physical, psychological etc. differences relate to creativity, the only real way to develop a model (if one is necessary) is to look at collected data, facts and such, and see how things actually work out in practice (in the real world) in the long run.

Trouble with that kind of data, by the way, is that you have to make all kinds of adjustments to account for societal expectations in various cultures at various times. You have to take into account, for example that if women weren't allowed or encouraged to go into the sciences (fields from which until our own century women were mostly excluded) you can't claim that the lack of first-rate female scientists for so many centuries proves women are no good in science. It is a little more certain, however, that, statistically, males have greater early aptitude for mathematics, spatial logic and certain related areas, while females seem, on average to have greater aptitudes in the verbal areas. This will be very important to something I will say a little bit down the line.

Historically, the arts have been more friendly to women than have the sciences, possibly because of the finishing-school concept and things like that - ladies of quality should be able to draw, play the harpsichord, we need them for choirs and operas - things like that

It is not, therefore, quite as surprising that there should have been excellent female poets, novelists (just think about those fabulous Brontes!), performers of various kinds, and top-drawer female artists in various of the above categories; if they have not surpassed the numbers of first-class male artists in those categories, it is likely to be because of various impediments which have been placed in women's way more than because talent in these areas is not often found among women.

But there have been far fewer first-class painters among women, and among the ca. 5000 female composers listed in that registry not one is first-class - possible exception, Thea Musgrave. Here I think it is not being chauvinist to point out that we have a simple fact: women are not generally as creative in the spheres of music, or mathematics, (there are almost no women among creative and theoretical mathematicians, and there is not one single incident I can find recorded, of a woman having had a metanoic mathematical-universe-modeling experience - the kind of experience which has gestated the most significant and far-reaching model-understandings of this type). I think the more or less proved fact of early aptitudes continues into adult development. By the way, I'll applaud louder than most when that female Stravinsky comes along, and I'm not saying she won't: someday there will be one, then a few more centuries will go by, and there will be another one and so on. (It's a sad fact that we haven't had any Brahms or Stravinsky of either sex in what seems like ages.) - What I'm about to say now is pure speculation, and I reserve the right to decide later that I'm full of shit. Like higher mathematics, music is essentially a non-verbal mode of thinking. One thinks in the mode of music when you think it, just as one thinks in the mode of mathematical symbols when doing rapid calculations, not thinking the words "five" or "equals", or something like that - which one may do, of course, but it slows you down. Anyway, it may be that there is some gender oriented predilection for specific modes of thinking just as there are predilections sort of "built in" for physical accomplishments of some kinds, and if so, well then you're just going to have to give the nod in terms of creativity to men, at least in certain areas, and not assign it any particular role equated with feminine energy.

I guess if one simply must get into sexual functions as the basis for universal and cosmic views of things, one would have to say that the out thrusting masculine energy was the creative one, putting out into the world, while the female is a receptacle, an interior chamber, in which things happen to the woman, and its product is expelled into the world. The aggressive energy is the creative force, since only it forges into the new territory, daringly assembles and reassembles at peril to itself and to the race even (so potent is it), and has the will and focus to tear something apart to assemble it anew. By contrast, the sort of feminine procreative energy is sluggish, occupied in slow torporous and peaceful spinning of he same net in the same patterns.

I actually don't ascribe much to the above crap, I imagine you know. Having focus, memory, the ability to think in creative ways, don't have much to do with gender or sexual functions, and certainly to apply sexual-gender terms to energies of kinds we all have within us, is a tactical, if not a syntactical mistake. (Oscar Wilde would give me a B+ for that ). It would be much preferable to call it force A and force B, or something like that, and if there are male-female distributional differences to say that the fellows have a bit more of this one, and the ladies have a bit more of that one, and so on. Otherwise you get into all kinds of male-mystique and female-mystique stuff which benefits nobody, creates a false picture of things, and which is just too Victorian for good taste.

Anyway, isn't this fun? I tell you, I really miss being able to spar with you on stuff like this. What a worthy adversary you are! This is at least twice as good as table tennis and billiards because at least I've got a better chance of coming out even. And it feels the same, (and even better), as arm wrestling. I miss it so much, Ralph.

And I have to trust that you know however radically, disparagingly, even insultingly I might formulate things, it is never done to hurt. That's my exultant side being the insensitive child, and the minute you bleed, my other child feels dreadful pain and remorse. I mostly do this only with very strong people like you, who understand or intuit that I get intense and sometimes thrash about a bit, and if I accidentally sting it's like when you were a kid pretending to box and the other kid just didn't pull his punch quite enough: it hurts but he didn't mean it, he just got a little careless or carried away, you know. And you're so much stronger these days, Ralph. It's for real too, of course. I don't just toy around with people, because I'm too heavy and serious to do much of that, and I can't really feel good when I'm mocking someone. But it's damned exciting, this 'for real' sparring, because if everyone plays fair you come out with something - sometimes something new.

Date Unknown

Dalph (contraction of 'Dear Ralph') and Caroline,

Have a rather interesting perception going right now concerning marijuana and intensity of feeling.

I have an idea that the effect of marijuana on feeling intensification is as much the effect of relaxing or changing certain habitual tension patterns used to repress feeling, as it is the actual stimulation or elevation of certain systemic functions.(Emotional release in the sense of releasing the emotions and allowing them to be felt, not release in terms of post-sexual satisfaction.) (the latter, by the way is obviously also concomitant with emotional release). That relaxation of the eyes, for example, occurs both with the use of marijuana and after doing emotional body release work, or having an emotional experience first hand (to a certain extent). Following the successful termination of a fear-producing incident there will be a notable relaxation of tension around the eyes, that tension having been induced to make the fear level reduced as Felt Fear.

You will remember telling me once that marijuana used to be prescribed for glaucoma because it relaxed pressure in the eyeball. Before and after tests done on persons undergoing Reikian therapy (before and after a therapy session) showed a reduction of several diopters - cc. Pressure in the eyeball. Many feelings, particularly those involving fear, are repressed using or with the eyes and associated muscles. It leads to short-sightedness ultimately, (the flattening of the eyeball on the horizontal plan which causes the eyeball to loose elasticity and thus the ability to change focus, as well as causing the focal point for distant visual images to fall behind the physical limit of the shortened eyeball's retina) once the repression of fear using the eyes, or more accurately, not using the eyes, has become habitual enough to be reflexive (If one takes the environmentalists point of view, rather than the fire-proof "there are no other factors" type of geneticist view, which is sometimes called the hereditarian point of view), whole families can be short-sighted because of use of the same fear-reduction patterns. The like-father, like-son equation is, in a sense, often correct when it comes to habitual response to emotional states. We have few other models but parents when we're very young, and responses to emotional states, etc., are very easily sensed and seen by the child.

Anyway, you might say that marijuana does some of the same things chemically to loosen up or alter some tension-repression patterns that are or can be done mechanically (physically) with Lowen stools, breathing exercises, etc.

I could get more personal about this for the purposes of illustration, but right now I'd rather not, because it's the connection I've just discovered for myself that I'm excited about right now and wanted to share with you.

I will say that the effect of heightened feeling is, for me, very much like re-discovering what was always there but had been forgotten; meaning that I believe I at one time lived very much like I was always 'high' on marijuana, or to put it a different way, living in an authentic way without a lot of repressions was how I once lived. Elementary, my dear Watson, you might think, and in a way you're right: I don't claim to be saying anything new. But there's an additional factor to be considered in my case. You will recall that I had chorreah, which in the St. Vitus Dance type (which was the kind I had) represents an overstimulation or constant stimulation of the nervous system. This means I cannot be sure the unrepressed way of living which marijuana induced feeling intensification causes me to recollect is the 'normal' or healthy kind of lack of inhibitions living state', or is in fact the recollection of an unhealthy, overstimulated-due-to-disease state.

Anyway, all the above presupposes that some of what is appealing to you about being stoned is an increase in emotional intensity, and thus body sensitivity as well. Which is one of the things that makes sex so great when you're stoned, right? But your experience may be essentially different from mine, so if you've any thoughts on the subject I'd love to hear them.

See you soon, I hope. At least we'll see you after one of the Gershwin performances no doubt.

Yours & c