R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

Chicano at a private school in New Jersey for a summer, confused. I didn’t want to
drive a pickax through his head, but instead smiled, and stopped pumping my leg
in class, and waited for all eyes to return to the lesson at hand, embarrassed. But
this leg problem, and my loins, won’t ever leave me in peace. Yes, I think it’s
connected to my loins. I want to have sex all the time, or at least I think I want to
have sex all the time. (Have old New England gentleman lost their appetite for sex?)
I have this warmth between my legs that causes my leg to jump, that prevents me
from averting my eyes from beautiful women, a warmth that seems a source of
excess energy, and anger, and motion. Sometimes I just want to run for five miles
to cool it down. No luscious maiden need be in front of me. I could be staring at
my Internet cable, its connection to nothing, and my mind could turn to the
warmth between my loins, to this energy that wants to explode, and I start to
imagine, look for a tight blouse, or go back in time to a memory, or think about my
wife. Yes, that’s one benefit of my malady. I love being with my wife, and I make
her consistently happy (unless I have deluded myself), and I am proud of that. Not
macho proud, just warm-in-the-gut proud to please her at night. That’s the
channeling, that’s the productive use of this leg problem, that’s what society
expects, wants, and winks at. But there’s still so much more energy left over at
this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am simply semi-asleep at night in our
bedroom, attempting to get a good night’s rest for once. There’s too much loin
energy, and it seems to spill out from my pores as if I were a cracked, bottomless
drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to let this excess energy out, in my
way, in words, in stories and books.
Now, at Columbia, I am actually writing, and thinking in a new way. I am
trying to write and think in a new way. Yes, I am writing, being productive, and my
leg is still bouncing. And my accursed warmth is still there, but at least I am
putting fingertips to the keyboard, and words, sentences are forming. I am using
my senses, and not analyzing anymore, not interpreting, this nuclear body my
vehicle. Robert Olin Butler taught me that. Not the person, but his book, although
the reason I bought the book was because I met the person, and briefly chatted
with him, and he seemed friendly and funny. I think Butler-the-Book is mostly
right (we should write through our body, which is the one thing we share with
every reader), although I worry about our visual, glib culture, and what it has
sacrificed in the name of making books entertainment. Do we not trust any author
to have anything to say to us, in conclusion or analysis, anymore? God is not only
dead, but the author as God is dead, and we have many bodies writing wonderfully
--experiences, perspectives, personal histories-- but rarely about the meaning of
modern America, or morality, or what should be done. We write with our bodies,
but what happened to our minds? We are lost as a culture, and that in itself is
entertaining, until it matters. Until we have a war. Until China conquers us. Until
we realize we have crumpled under our own weight, and become another France,
without the good wine. Or worse. Right now at least I am writing, and that’s all
that matters. It is hard writing, writing in this new way, through the senses only,
but I am writing, and my day has meaning again. But it is oh-so-hard, and I only
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