HAROLD BRODKEY
395
private authority.
It
was like a self-conscious but engendering fuck.
It leads to a pregnancy you don't abort. And, so, your life changes.
A party, a faction, a style .
It
was part of a moment of the cultural
death of a trumpery era-and all sorts of tyranny were going
down - it was a revolution - not beginning there - but shown to me,
I saw it for the first time, the dethronement of some of the second–
rate rules of our immediate pasts.
But nothing really first-rate was in place here: it was the possi–
bility of the first-rate that was being set in place there.
And people were dying in various ways on these barricades and
in these attempts . They were unbearably brave, unspeakably blind.
I have been drafted at times for others' daydreams. Often their
instructed daydreams. It is a curious villainy. I was the cause of evil.
One might have
a daydream
of having the issue in one of one's making
a sexual choice, one might daydream of having that forcefully dealt
with by a human authority, having human power in the sexual
world , someone to inflict with a kind of knowledge-and responsibil–
ity - the terror and rage that can be inflicted by actual command on
actual obedience, actual response-it is not particularly American,
this stuff-but it is always present here and it is sexual. I am an
au thority . I have some au thority . I have had it since childhood.
Sometimes it seems others will submit fully over the full range of
their capacities if! will it. My worldly value lies in a kind of warfare
with people that is hedged with hypocrisy since I am a kind of
pacifist. Cunning has its merits then but I am not especially cun–
ning. Or perhaps I am: cunning people thought so sometimes. But I
was in the position at a moment of the death of most kinds of
authority of being offered a sexual authority - among the rebels . . .
What I dislike most in the 'art' of the men of my time was their
boast of this sort of power in the world. They have it. But they trust
the atmosphere of the response to them as if it had led to a successful
affair-or a sad one but sad ones were all the world ever had.
It
seems to me a mind's trust, a heart's trust can be earned or won or
bought by the histories of one's successes and failures in the world
but then something is wrong. One is a teacher then.
If
one is not an
artist , if one is a fool, after all, one can believe that one's sexual
authority is only someone else's illusion and that one knows what the
world is : this was Ora's mistaken notion. But sexual authority is very
real. And it is an act of will. One can trust the spirit and .one's luck in
these matters but that's not the most suitable trust for art or love any
more than it is for piety. Nor are art or piety-or sexual authority-
