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FERMENTVol IX,4May 22,1995ROY LISKER

12 Frazier StreetMiddletown, CT 06457

1-203-347-4648

------SEQUEL------

The exposition of this series cadenced on a lyric evocation of my reception by Alexander Grothendieck's friends, Yolé Levine and Tiberio Wilson , in their adobe clay-pot mansionaisse in the sunburnt village of Mazan . Their neighborhood , a confederation of clustered domiciles , grows around an embedded planar graph of village gardens edged with muddy walls and fences and vertexed by knobby homes - as if a potter had wheeled several mounds of clay into this part of the village ,dumping them at random, then opened passageways and poked rooms into them with his thumbs.

Yolé and Tiberio invited me back for the Spring. Visiting Alexandre Grothendieck would be best arranged through them. Alexandre also had asked me

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to keep in touch with him by letter . Between the two households I had been charged with several missions :#

(a) To contact the publisher Odile Jacob to learn what stage had been reached in the publication of Grothendieck’s large philosophical memoir Recoltes et Semailles (R&S), ;

(b) To make a rough translation of a passage in R&S that he had indicated ( “Tous les Chevaux du roi”) , to help him decide if he wanted to engage me as translator for the whole massive work ;

(c) To contact Parisian art galleries and persuade them to exhibit Tiberio's work .(^) For some reason, Tiberio’s painting is known in Italy and Brazil, but not in France;

(d) To find a lawyer for Alexandre if Le Monde refused to reprint his letter in its entirety and without deletions (Ferment, November 27,1989 .)

(c) and (d) were fanciful: I didn’t know any gallery owners, I didn’t even know any French painters, I’d just returned to France a month ago. In 1970 it is true, I lived in a commune in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in the northern suburbs of Paris, populated with a few exceptions, (including myself), by a wild revel, a debauche en permanence , of art # a word for which Alexandre has a particular fondness. ^ Tiberio Wilson has evolved a style which one may call Rococo Cubism: large canvases covered with elaborate ornamental shapes held together by the rigid decomposition of polytopes.

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students and painters. As for searching out a lawyer, it made no sense to me that Grothendieck would give up his cherished isolation to wage a frivolous lawsuit in Paris. I will describe (a) at the proper place: I did not get a friendly reception. We will get to (b) near the end of this article.

The evening in Yolé ’s kitchen was consumed with eating, drinking and conversation. I recall a few guests who showed up, stayed a short time and left. Several bottles of red wine were emptied during a heavy pasta meal, (by all but Tiberio. He is a stabilized alcoholic and only drinks weak beer which, however, he uptakes in large quantities). I made the mistake , although my smoking habit had been stubbed out in 1985, of smoking a fungial Gaulois cigarette. My stomach felt very sick : the clope may have conjured up some ancient intestinal chemistry from the 70’s. Around midnight I excused myself and went to bed.

When I rose the next morning I knew that I was seriously ill. Yolé would not have let me continue my travels had she had realized the seriousness of my condition; but one doesn’t always know how to articulate the symptoms of a disease one is experiencing for the first time. I spoke to her in a vague way of headaches and stomach nausea , but the disequilibrating sensations underlying these

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indicators could not be conveyed. It felt as if the body were preparing itself for death; that bad . Recollecting the ordeal I see this description as accurate: the illness directly attacked the vital processes.

Yolé , knowing no more than I, gave me some Tylenol and a glass of Perrier. Then she drove me to the bus station in Carpentras. From Carpentras I rode in a Cars Contandin buses to Avignon. You will find these buses all over the Provence , diverting their savage occupants from some of the most gorgeous countryside in the world with pop music excreted through tinny amplifiers. It is quite painful , even in normal circumstances, to be subjected against one's will to an hour of Radio Nostalgie, but ever more so when some kind of brain-fever virus is settling in and has plans to stay for awhile. In Avignon I walk a few blocks to pick up my luggage, still sitting in the hotel room I’d retained for this research project . Then I returned to the train station and boarded the next train to Valence.

I should observe that I was then stricken$ by a respite from money problems. Mademoiselle Montpellier, (Ferment, October 25, 1989 ), has been providentially endowed in her potential for managing exchange relations, (although probably not what the

$ If we say ‘poverty-stricken’, then why not ‘money-stricken’? ‘Poverty graced’?

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First World would call wealthy) . When her father died, she inherited the royalties on his books: a popular historian, he produced a series of picture books on French history for children , semi-literates and jingoists, reactionary evocations of the glories of old France, potpourris of dueling knights, gory battlefields, swashbuckling pirates, villainous and saintly kings, and homologous materiel . I always admire the writer who can thrive by his works.

I don’t know much about her political opinions, but suspect they are much closer to mine than to his. She took no pleasure from the thought of me wandering around starving in a foreign land, (in contrast to publishers, editors and the academic world, who prefer that I drop dead tomorrow(+)). She also preferred that I not play the violin in public, primarily because the Montpellier bourgeoisie tend to think that this kind of thing is a disgrace, but also because, under the pressure of time, travel and necessity, my performance standard ( and ability to meet even that! ) becomes quite mediocre.

Altogether she gave me enough capital to seek out Grothendieck , make a leisurely return to Paris,and re-occupy my former hotel for a week. This establishment ,the Hotel Telemaque on the rue Daguerre in Montparnasse, is the mainstay of 14 + The crank is there and comes out once in awhile.

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North African brothers who manage it via Algiers through round-robin commute.

Upon my arrival in Valence, despite her advice, I set out at once to play the violin. Within the shopping district of Valence is a pedestrian mall of about 3 blocks . It holds several department stores and 3 centuries of architecture. Some of the modern buildings are bordered by rows of high plate glass windows. A street musician can station himself in front of these for a few hours without being terrorized by shopkeepers. I unpacked and played for about an hour; I was too sick to do more. I will never forget the flower vendors who initially regarded me with the uttermost contempt, yet dropped 15 francs into my opened violin case before they left. Towards the end of the hour, as the storefronts and signboards and street dusts of the avenue began to glow with that soft illumination , characteristic of the Provence, of the approaching night, a woman in her twenties, plainly dressed and holding an infant in her arms, stopped to listen. She waited for me to pause, then asked: " Have you seen Jean-Michel recently?” I admitted that I didn't know him: " If you meet Jean-Michel in your travels, tell him that Simone is still waiting for him ." Then she walked away.

This brief conversation disengaged a vortex of guilt and fear that involuted through my inflamed and

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over-susceptible conscience like the reification of a fractal pattern through the cosmos. Who was this Benoit and how could I say that I was better than he? What if my friend in Montpellier had become pregnant through our brief romance, and I , too, would never develop the means or the lifestyle for the raising a child?(1) The symptoms of my illness , enhanced by the weariness of a day’s travelling , returned in amplified force. From this tiny infection , feelings of guilt were to swell within my unbalanced mental state to a cruel torture ; obsessive dwellings on a world of suffering, of disease, violence, injury and death, and all the weight of responsibility involved in bringing someone into it ; on the thousands of acts of neglect, hostility, irresponsibility , childishness, betrayal, going back to the earliest recollections of youth and infancy; combined with an abyssal sense of worthlessness, for which there could be no pardon, no forgiveness, no forgetting . It felt as if a flock of birds of prey had nested inside of me and were pecking away at my mind. These tormented obsessions served as the gateway to the visions of Heaven and Hell that would overwhelm me in Lyons and Paris.

1 People don’t understand my lifestyle. I’m not really a traveller. I’m just looking for either a publisher or an asylum, in that order. Once I find these, I’m settled for life.

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I closed up the fiddle case at around 5 , put it into a locker in the train station and walked the kilometer and a half to Valence’s quite remarkable youth hostel: l’Epervière. (The Dandelion )

L’Epervière combines a youth hostel, a low-cost hotel for traveling families , and a camping area for tents and mobile homes. The lobby, entered from the compound , is a glitzy construction of glass, metal, vinyl plastic and potted plants, its windowglasses set at odd angles giving a rigid polytopic decomposition of the surrounding vegetation . Across from this stands the registration desk. One may enter a wide, careening lounge by turning to the left, with a bar at the far end and the ubiquitous color TV, ( one of the 2 machines that, along with the automobile, are most atavising to our civilization ) .The television was only turned on in the evenings, when it made an infernal racket. During the day the lounge was a pleasant place to sit or to order sandwiches, a drink , a cup of coffee. During my illness I made the discovery of a good beef bouillon drink that is served at most French bars, Viandox .

To get to l’Eperviere you make an orthogonal cut across the town center to bring you to the municipal park. Follow this down along your left to the banks of the Rhone river.One of the great rivers of France, it can scarcely be appreciated in this town owing to its

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mugging by industrial pollution. Then you must walk against emetic traffic congestion on a road never to be attempted at night, without sidewalk or tolerance for pedestrians ,for about half a kilometer. After another half kilometer you come to a bridge.

A sign directs you to cross it. You obey the sign ( 2) . Shortly you come to a dusty road with a restaurant near its foot. On the left you will find an academy for training police dogs . One hears the ferocious barking of these dogs all along the road; sometimes an equally ferocious policeman will be seen coming out of the ancillary barracks. Once inside l’Eperviere - unless perchance you attempt to hold up the bar or set fire to the place - these beings are part of another world.

For the next 3 days the nearly empty dormitory was my hospital ward. (**) In a mental state bordering 2 Blind obedience to signs must be one of the hallmarks of ‘Western Civilization’. No other peoples in history have been so stupefied by their conditioning as to imagine that some kind of authority automatically lies behind notices like “Stop”, “Go” “Keep Out”, and so forth.** I only bring it up because my experience at Pittsburgh’s Youth Hostel was quite different. It was the summer of 1987 and I was travelling to the East Coast after 5 days in Cincinnati at a conference given by Benoit Mandelbrot (Ferment, Jan 1,1988). I was very sick that time also, with dysentery . Again the hostel was virtually empty and I was bedridden. (People like myself have not earned the right to afford to see doctors, the crowning glory of 5 centuries of scientific culture.) On the third day the hostel receptionist insisted I leave, citing a 3-day rule. It was only when I broke down in front of her that she conceded that perhaps I was too sick to move on. I did leave the next day. As to the meaning of this for sociologists judging the relative civilizations of France , America, Pittsburgh and

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on delirium, my fever-soaked body lay in a bunk bed . I ate very little, and no solid food. For several hours a day I sat in the cool, shrouded corridors of the unoccupied floor, stunned by an oppressive force weighing on mind and body, happy at least to be granted shelter, nor goaded to move on. On the afternoon of the second day I had recovered sufficiently to take a walk to the municipal park. May in Valence, compared to the intense heat of the Midi ,was cool: every passing breeze drew like a moist sponge across my inflamed brow. This park contains a botanical garden, long circular pathways, steep bushy climbs and rides of opaque dark trees opaquely green . To sit on a bench and soak up the sunlight for a few hours gave, despite the persistent and intensifying sensation that my body, having no disposition or motivation of its own , was being dragged through life, some relief.

After 3 nights at L’Epervière , I continued onwards to Lyons, where I stayed once again at the Youth Hostel. I shared a room with two others travellers. One of them was a French engineering student . He maintained, apart from any evidence one way or the other, that Les Grands Ecoles were the finest engineering schools in the world. It reminded me of the joke about the demographics of Hell, Valence , I know nothing at all.

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( which I did not tell him) : English chefs, German police, Russian economists, American lovers and French engineers.

The other was an Algerian medical student. He observed my symptoms and wrote out a prescription that did, in fact, relieve them. I saw him again in Paris a few years later and had a chance to thank him.

Followed a succession of sleepless nights, days with little food, glazed eyes in a haggard face, wanderings through a city fortunately not unfamiliar to me, spiritually if not physically lost. Periods of heightened and inflamed vision, in which all persons and things appeared surrounded by halos of intense light. Strange auditory hallucinations, paralyzing melancholy ,corrosive thinking, regret and remorse for a wasted life, fear of retribution from malicious enemies, cold symptoms, headaches and nausea.

And states of euphoria mixed with devastating despair: during the days, walking about the terraces of this ancient city, visiting the public monuments, the gardens, fountains and collosal structures, where all the evidences of a rich history unfold along steep roads , where grand vistas open without warning at one’s feet , I could be seized by powerful upsurges of mystical power. Returning in the evening to hellish nightmares intertwined with long trains of

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speculation, convictions of panic and doom, debilitating meditations and intimations of violence.

In addition there developed two kinds of symptoms which so terrified me that I really began to believe that I might live out the rest of my days as a tormented mental cripple.

I christened these “womblies” and “gremlins” . Womblies were pain and pressure sensations that took over my psyche and maintained a relentless presence through many hours, fields of pressure on the mind that rolled in breakers and waves, taking possession of consciousness. In addition to making sleep impossible, I was overwhelmed by the fear that they might never go away. Gremlins were even more terrible. Free association through streams of visual images is a normal mental function , but it is quite terrifying when this streamflow accelerates a hundredfold. The astounding capacity of the brain for the storage , formation and projection of images is thus revealed; at the same time it becomes very clear that stimulating these capacities all at once does not produce a supergiant in psychic powers or intellect , but rather a totally incapacitated mental cripple. In a flood which could not be checked came images of mobs, of landscapes and exotic scenery, the cacophony of several orchestras playing simultaneously, scenes of menace, dramas of violence, grandiose elaborations

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of ambitious plans, projects and schemes, and much else that I am happy to forget. These phenomena were first studied by the great Russian neurologist Luria . The popular accounts of Oliver Sacks are also filled with much disturbing evidence of our inability to function when the capacities of the brain become overcharged.

On the train to Paris I sat by a window on the left side of the car. The day was mournful ; patches of sunlight glanced off the surfaces of the clouds, forming a quilt over the landscaped green hills. In the towering clouds I sensed the powerful stirrings of what I believed to be a spectacular war in heaven. Naturally this led me to wonder if there were not the imprint of some greater destiny in all this: the way I imagine Alexandre Grothendieck feels all the time. I am sure that there is;I am only sceptical of our ability to know what it is.

Phenomena such as the womblies and gremlins had emerged in Lyons, yet it was only when I arrived in Paris two days later that I acknowledged to myself that I had become so handicapped by my symptoms that I might be forced to cancel my European sojourn and, perhaps strapped to a stretcher, be returned to the United States. Enormous confusion and effort were involved in the performance of each small yet

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aggrevating chore (#), but it may well be that the necessity of hard work saved me from dwelling on my condition and giving up : storing my luggage at the Gare de Lyon; walking 6 blocks to find a post office with telephone from which I could call friends in Holland to ask if I could stay with them, learning that they were away; calling the Paris Youth Hostel ; navigating the Metro to the extreme east of Paris near the Père Lachaise cemetery ; filling out the registration forms at the desk and finally collapsing in a bunk bed under the simultaneous assault of fever, headaches, nausea, aural dysfunctions, pressure womblies, speeding gremlins and the quite rational fear that this was one episode I just wasn’t going to make it through alive.

I felt better after a few hours at the hostel and went out to find a grocery for some fruit juices. I remember sitting on a bench in a small park near the hostel, noting that , although my mind was not capable of focusing , I was comfortably under the sway of an indecipherable euphoria that I labelled a “chromatic state”, a peculiar rapture characteristic of situations of extreme mental stress , often brought on by hunger , ( I need only recommend that one listens

# I repeatedly asked myself throughout the day, “Where am I?”, and it seemed as if a tiny Zen master inside of me replied, “Why, you are here!”

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to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, to know exactly what I’m referring to), and thinking to myself:“ Well, what’s this one all about? I’ve been through worse and at least my life is never dull.”

Such distancing and capacity for reflection would have been quite unimaginable back in 1974 when I was totally psychotic for exactly a year. It is my impression that the psychic antibodies I’d inherited from this earlier experience gave me the composure to wait out the siege.

Sickness is always adventure. It must be placed in the category of all intensely lived experience. Indeed, when we examine the masterpieces of the great artists, we recognize that they considered it in precisely these terms: from Beethoven’s String Quartet #15,(the “Heilegedankgesang”), to the monumental Naked Lunch of William Burroughs, sickness has ever been, if not the principal consideration, then certainly the mother lode of inspiration.

I sat awake in my bunk bed all through the night at the Youth Hostel. I was convinced that my ability to function as a rational, active human being had been destroyed. The rest of my life was doomed to be spun out from one asylum to the next; all I had to look forward to were decades of pointless suffering, to an

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equally pointless termination. Nor was it comforting to realize that this fate does indeed befall some people, that, in other words, I was not indulging in exaggerated fantasy brought on by my condition.

I compared my mental condition to that described in Hunter & McAlpine’s book, “ George III and the Mad Business ”: perhaps I ,too, was suffering from Porphyria, the incurable inherited liver condition that has caused insanity across all the royal families of Europe: after several relapses, and under the care of a entire family of psychiatric ghouls, the Willises, George the Third lived out the last decade of his life in a condition resembling that in which I was then immersed.

The next morning I made my way across to Seine to the Hotel Telemaque. At the registration desk was Hamid, the brother with whom I felt the most rapport. As he checked me in, it was quite clear what he was thinking: “My friend Roy’s completely messed up. ” I rented my old room on the fourth floor , with a window looking out over the rooftops of Montparnasse. I stayed there for two days, stepping out for no more than an hour each day to get a bowl of soup.

Today I can say that the symptoms were not as painful as the sense of sheer terror that I would never emerge from this mentally crippled state. At a critical

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moment in this period, I wrote up a contract in which I bound myself to a strenuous program of moral reform. I believed that the slightest relapse into this state of abject terror would be enough to keep me to it. I still have the contract with me: as is only to be expected , I have consistently violated it over the ensuing years.

One stipulation has been maintained: to recognize my limitations and not overstep them. Still, I’m certain that if I ever develop an illness of this magnitude in the future, I still won’t be able to see a doctor. The world has decided that what I do does not constitute a profession, so why should it spare the resources I need to protect myself?

In the first stages of recovery I wrote letters to Yolé and to Alexandre Grothendieck in which I described both the ordeal and the contract: his reply is published below.

I was very lucky in having enough money coming in from several sources (##). This made it possible wait out the storm, which did eventually pass away in a matter of weeks. Without it I would ended up in the hospital: exciting places perhaps, like the Bicêtre where Phillipe Pinel struck off the chains of the ## Whenever I come into any money I call it luck: heavens forbid I should be able to earn any of the stuff! ( This kind of reflection becomes tedious, but I’ve decided that it’s better to state it than to say nothing, just for the sake of the bourgeois order.)

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inmates , or Le Saltpetriêre , where Charcot separated hysteria from epilepsy while confusing hypnosis with play-acting. Le Nouvel Observateur reimbursed the travel expenses of my search for Grothendieck; this brought in $300. I was able to call upon the help of several friends that I’d known in Paris back in the 60’s and 70’s. I must take this occasion to give especial thanks to André Gorz, who sent $200 at a moment when it looked as if I would have to pursue my convalescence on the Parisian sidewalks. ( I am speaking ungenerously: the Algerians would not have insisted I leave until I was better.)

Mademoiselle Montpellier and I spoke to each other on the telephone and exchanged a few letters, but the extent and power of this trial effectively killed off any hope of a continuation of our rather tender companionship. In a few weeks I received this letter from Alexandre:

(approx.) June 20th, 1988Dear Roy:

I've been waiting eagerly and impatiently for the writings of yours you forgot bringing from Avignon, and for the translation too you promised ( of section 15 "Tous les Chevaux du Roi" of "Promenade à travers une Ouevre" , just half a page...) In the long last yesterday I

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finally phoned to Mlle (..........) to ask her if she had any idea whether you were still living, but she only giggled and just didn't want to believe that I really existed, and didn't seem too sure of your existence either. So I gave up in despair, when I was cheered up by Yolé bringing me your letter - a life-sign in the long last! I'm afraid, Roy, I've appeared too reticent to you, to be talked to at all, etc., that I scared the hell out of you and you don't dare write to me directly like a normal and sensible man. Awfully sorry Roy I have been so slow realizing I didn't need to be defensive at all with you. As a matter of fact, the very evening you left my place for Yolé 's 3; for instance that you were exactly the only kind of chap which makes sense for translating Reaping and Sowing into English. You look just the same brand as Yuichi Tsuji , the japanese friend of mine from the Survival times ( I had more or less forgotten all about him in the 3Emphasis added

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meanwhile), who as soon as he got ahold of RaS started translating it into Japanese, without so much as asking me nor worrying if there would ever be an editor to publish his translation. He's a "mathématicien marginal" like you, never looked for an institutional job anywhere, lives in giving lessons and the like, doesn't know French any better than you and still does a beautiful job. Asks me whenever the exact meaning of something remains dubious to him, I have quite a few lists of questions to answer, which makes it quite clear how painstaking he is in his job. By the way in my last letter to him I told him about our encounter, and in his answer and in spite of his being a man of scarce words, he showed himself very glad about it.

After you were off to Avignon and Paris I realized I shouldn't have let you go before a few days at least spent at Les Aumettes taking your time documenting you on this and getting acquainted with the place and with me. Unless of course you had some urgent matters in mind you had to pursue elsewhere.

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In your letter to Yolé you don't make any mention of the translation of RaS4 you speak of an "interview" instead. Whether publishing interviews with me at present is timely isn't too sure to me, at any rate it looks to me as quite a secondary matter in comparison with translating RaS, and possibly also some of the maturer and deeper books which are to follow. If the magnitude of the task doesn't overwhelm and appall you, Roy, and if my person, style and thought appeals to you as your own style. ways etc. are appealing to me from what I got of you so far, why don't you come here and start the work in quietness, down in the dojo where I accommodated you when you came? There you've full independance of living, for preparing your meals etc., I can lend you the car for your errands or visiting your sweetheart(s). If we get along with each other OK and your interest in translating my stuff prevails, you are welcome to stay as long as the work demands and as yourself like it here, while I would take 4Recoltes et Semailles ( Reapings and Sowings)

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charge of your expense by an appropriate monthly allowance.

Your playing the violin wouldn't be a disturbance to me ( still less so when you play Bach), however I'm quite allergic to radio and television blabber. You could work part time at the translation, part time at your own writings. At any rate, I don't expect a translation of the whole of RaS to be completed before about two years. If needed, every few days we could spend a while on the difficulties you encounter with the translation. Possibly it will take you awhile till you get the right feeling and twist for doing the job, admittedly quite a delicate one.

I'm very eager to know what you think of these suggestions. If you feel like having a try at my place, please give me forward notice of your arrival at Carpentras so I can pick you up there. If you like to have a phone talk first, please tell me where and when to ring you up.

Looking forward to hearing from you again, and with my best regards. ALEXANDER

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P.S. : I've talked with Odile Jacob. She looks quite impressed with RaS, just a little worried it is so long and so unusual and it may bring in lawsuits, ( ). But I believe she will not miss the chance and will take care that it gets out soon, and nicely. The contact with her was quite cordial. I'm kind of impressed to that she was able to feel some of the substance which makes RaS a long-term investment for a publisher. She well understands it will be read still in a hundred years and more, something which very few of the colleagues to whom I sent it ( and most of whom never so much as acknowledged reception) got any inkling of........ ........................................................................

After receiving this letter, I re- examined Recoltes et Semailles . I realized that I didn’t want to work on the translation, ( Alexandre’s notion that I had been sent by God did not go over very well to someone in a somewhat shattered condition who really just needed

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to be left in peace for awhile.However, the mathematician Peter Freyd thinks that I should have agreed to work with him anyway, for as long as it was possible: the decision is still , I will admit, controversial .) In the meantime I’d been offered a contract from Ellis Horwood, a publishing house in England , to do a translation of a treatise on Information Theory written by Jacques Oswald, (formerly the director for the research labs of the Electricité de France, a position roughly comparable to director of the Bell Labs ). I told Alexandre about my illness, my visions, my decision not to undertake the translation of Recoltes & Semailles, and of the offer from the publishers in England. I listed a number of objections to his book, the principal one being that many of the people he attacks in it are known to me and I didn’t agree with his unrelentingly negative opinions of them . I avoided saying that I would take no pleasure in translating paranoid ravings, which is what much 5 of the book is filled with. I also, as gently as I could, took exception with his view of himself as the greatest scientific thinker in recorded history. I suggested that perhaps Isaac Newton had also had a few good thoughts in his day. Alexandre’s reply arrived in a week:

Les Aumettes July 4,19885 But definitely not all

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Dear Roy:I am glad that your short passage

at my place triggered what you call a (fifth) "religious experience", and still more so, that this has called forth what looks like actual change - a kind of thing which doesn't happen too often in peoples lives. If this change is rooted in some new understanding as it seems, its doesn't need any contract nor mathematical proof of unbreakability of contract, in order to be and remain effective. And if the understanding remains a shaky one, there are more efficient ways than contracts and proofs for rooting it deeper ... I am sorry that you've been dragging your fever and delirium from one hotel or auberge de jeunesse to another, rather than curing it out in quietness at Les Aumettes. Yolé had told me that you'd caught a cold at my place . But maybe we shouldn't lament, if the cold was instrumental for your visions of hell and heaven, which is well worth some sweat and trouble!

Sorry Recoltes et Semailles doesn't really appeal to you. Some of your

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criticism intersects with my own ( see my previous letter on this). It was my dreams first (back in December 1986) which made me get aware of big defects, so much so that I finally gave up the idea of publishing the stuff altogether. After which other dreams told me that God collaborated with the writing ( of course he's not responsible for the defects!), and that I should publish it. And the day before I got the letter from Odile Jacob, I had another dream which ( of course always in a very allusive way) told me about the same, and suggested to cut off "Promenade" - a suggestion which came as a relief, because I had felt before ( though it remained subconscious) that this apology of my work was out of place in the whole. Still it isn't maybe quite as bad as you say and you reading may have been a little quick, saying for instance that I don't as much as mention Newton's name, whereas he is named three times on the very page ( P 62) opposite the one which made you feel so uncomfortable, ( and rightly so I'm sure), including once in the very sentence before the one

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you've been citing. At any rate I'm quite grateful to you for being so outspoken about your feeling with RaS, and quite agree that there would be no point whatever engaging yourself in the translation of work which doesn't appeal to you.

I don't doubt a second, Roy, that you are well able to make your living with translations of this and that and don't need me for anything like that.

That's what my offer to you was all about, never mind RaS. Time is ripe for harvest, " and the fields are white with wheat" I'm sure you feel this, and that's why I felt God sent

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you to my place. Maybe you need some time of quietness first to reap the fruit of your past, as I've done by writing RaS. This quietness, as far as outer conditions go, I am glad to offer you as your host. Maybe at a later time you'll be more interested in some of the stuff I wrote last year, or in some of what is to come, than in what you read so far, and you'll feel like spending some of your time on translating it into English.

6

Thank you for your intriguing oldtimish booklet on Ferment Press * and the impressive list of your ( maybe not even complete) works. I won't read through all of it any more than you through mine, and look forward rather to the samples of your writings which you'll find appropriate. By the way, one of your titles 6 This level of paranoia would become considerably worse over the next few years, up to the time of his disappearance.

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2s = To , struck me as a joke 7( or do you have an altogether different notion of "cardinals" to offer?)Yours very affectionately, ALEXANDER ( To Be Continued)..............................................................................................................................................* Please tell me if you want it back

qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qwe e e e e e e e e e e e e eqw qwe e

LETTERSDaniel Lee Anders #49750 5 April 9510,000 S. Wilmot Rd. CimmaronArizona State Prison Complex - TucsonTucson, AZ 85777-0001

(Not: It iz mai pah’lisy too e’dit aez lait’ly az pah’sibl, aend

rytain’ thy orid’jinil punk’shooay’shin aend spel’yng, byly’ving thaet ay

haid’bownd’ elly’djens too thy ‘ofish’il dik’shinaryz’ straenglz’ theh

naet’sherl groth’ uhf theh laeng’wedj.)

Dear Mr. Lisker: Thanks so very much for the unusual and

refreshing response to my letter. It renews my confidence in humanity.

The man who gave me your address has been transferred to Florence

Super-Maximum Isolation Facility. About three hundred miles of my

location: between Tucson and Yuma, AZ.; in the middle of the Mohave

7 To have one’s work treated as a ‘joke’ by the great Alexandre Grothendieck is equal to the high compliment of many another, so we let it go.

#30.

Desert where temperatures hover at 115 degrees during the day and

drop to 40 at night. Truly a place where the legend of “frying eggs on

the sidewalks” is one of the exhibitions provided tourists who visit the

old Yuma Territorial Prison; now a museum with exhibits suitably

macabre to titillate the concealed de Sade in each person who pays to

have man’s inhumanity to man revealed in stark eloquence.My letter to

you was one of fifteen I wrote to poets, publishers and bookstores across

the country. Each letter explained my situation and motive for writing.

You and an academic publisher in Scotland were the only persons to

respond. How delighted LOT would have been to present so many

righteous out of Sodom... N’est-ce pas? Plus ça change,

plus c’est la même chose!The genuine shock you expressed regarding my

42 years to life sentence was comforting also. Genuine sympathy

regarding a prisoner’s misfortune is so rare that when it occurs, the

prisoner is tempted to heap the entire burden of his need on top of this

sprout of compassion, so that only crushing suffocation can result. I try

not to surrender to such temptation.There are many men and women

serving sentences equal to and greater even than mine. The Arizona

media and politicians love to prate about the thousands and thousands

of years of gut-rending servitude in Arizona’s TOUGH PRISONS. 60%

of Arizona’s population LOVE reading in newspapers and seeing on TV

that 40% of Arizona’s State Prisoners are serving terms which can’t be

completed in one lifetime. When the prisoners die of old age they are

buried standing upright in graves on BOOT HILL and remain standing,

until the Prisoner Records Department record each expiration

officially. Only then is each “standing dead” , ( whose sentence has

expired officially) , exhumed and placed in the “Classic Prone Position”.

#31.

This bizare practice is part of Arizona’s Legislative Law. Every four

years the “standing dead amendment” comes up for ratification- but

perpetually dies in Committee due to popular-vote. POPULAR VOTE

being the vast retirement communities alive and thriving on SERUTAN.

Elderly persons retire to Arizona to live out the remainder of their lives

“enjoying some peace of mind.” They don’t want anyone nor anything

rocking the boat during the final miles of their Life’s BON VOTAGE.

Arizona politicians and media have other plans for these “Old Folks and

their fat I.R.A. Accounts.” These Oldfolks are seen as convenient targets

for exploitation by self-serving politicians and the mendacious media in

collusion with the politicians. The feeding frenzy begins.....These old

folks are bombarded by politicians via the media with much

misinformation about the full scale crime wave in their neighborhoods -

which are subdivisions located in the middle of the desert. ( What career

criminal not in the terminal stages of PCP addiction would elect to wage

a crime war in the middle of a desert where temperatures are 100+

during the day and drop to 40 at night? The bushes and cacti he would

have to lurk in are alive with chiggers, fire ants, African Killer bees,

rattle snakes, tarantulas, and colonies of deer mice spreading the Hanta

Virus...) I’m not suggesting that there is no crime problem. It’s greater

Nationally than it was in 1942 - but so is the population Nationally

greater also.The media terrifies these old folks by replaying t he same

criminal event on 6 seperate news channels, three times daily, six days a

week. No rest on Sunday. NOPE! Lots of “Special Editorials” and door

to door outreachers from various political war rooms. Well - it’s no

wonder these old folks give huge sums to politicians promising more

prisons and “Standing Dead” Room only. Most of these poor ol’things

#32.

don’t dare to venture out from behind the titanium plated burglar bars

on their windows. All areas of the service industry exploit this golden

apple...grocery delivery people, air-conditioning and plumbing ,

maintenance people, all getting fat off the artificially created fears of

these old folks.Getting back to me. I’ve participated in every attitude

adjustment program offered by the prison: A.A., N.A. , New Directions,

Encounter Groups, Effective Communication, Sensitivity Training,

GAVAL Club, Toastmasters, Veteran’s Club, Lifer’s Club, Self

Hypnosis 1 and 2 , G.E.D. Program, Creative Writing, and various

religious disciplines _ settling finally in the Sikh camp, mostly because of

the excellent Kundalini Yoga exercises. I’ve been active in all the sports

programs and Hobby Craft (before the prison declared it a Security

Threat and discontinued it). I did these things not because they produce

an early release - but only because they helped to make my body and

mind more flexible and receptive. The tragedy attendant upon these

programs is No follow up program for anyone - especially young people

leaving the prison. All support and encouragement ends at the gate as

you go out. Prisons leave here with $50.00 which has been deducted

from their prison wages and held in an account which the

Administration earns interest off of - and freely speculates with in the

economic areas prisons speculate in. Nothing is returned to the prisoner.

He or she eventually leaves here with $50.00 which has to buy clothes,

pay rent, provide transportation to the employment which takes at least

a week to find and then two additional weeks before receiving a

paycheck. I hate to ask this question - but: Is it any wonder that so many

prisoners return to some degree of crime faced with these stark

conditions? I wrote a letter to Tucson’s City Planning Commission

#33.

describing several industries that prisoners ( in and out) could

participate in to the benefit of the entire community: Waste water

Management, Textiles, Agriculture, State Vehicle Mechanical

Maintenance, Materials Recycling. The Commission returned my letter

with an unsigned note reading: “We do not accept suggestions from

convicted felons.” VOILÀ! Arizona’s government is so infested with

corruption & political scandal an ongoing Fed. Criminal indictments - is

it any wonder they need prisoners as whipping boys and girls?Alcohol

and a violent nature led to prison for me. My wife died of cancer in

1978, and me and “GRANDAD” began our journey down the bloody

brick road into the maw of Hell. I orchestrated my misfortunes. People

die every day leaving bereaved bereft of joy - but not many of these

fellow sufferers chose my path of rage. Thank you for the promise of

some books. They will probably have to arrive with MADE’s*

publishing legend on the box. I believe this is prison policy: “All

publications from a company label , Political Science, Philosophy, Poetry

( Kalil Gibran - Dame Edith Sitwell - T.S. Eliot genre),Semantics

( Leo Buscaglia-John Bradshaw genre)..... You be the judge - well -

maybe not THE JUDGE. Respectfully Yours, Big

Dan*Dan evidently confuses my projected political organization, the “Movement Against Education Discrimination”, with the newsletter .qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qwe e e e e e e e e e e e e eqw qwe eqw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qw qwe e e e e e e e e e e e e eqw qwe e