But he is working more now that the house is done. I have given him a lot of the good stuff: kinship, social structure, politics, technology, religion. He is focusing too much on kinship though, just as he focused too much on religion & totems with the Mumb. He thinks he has cottoned onto some pattern which he refuses to share with me. It does give him direction & energy so I can’t complain overmuch.
2/9 Fen & I have just had the fight I’ve been trying to avoid. Nothing that escalated—he is much better now. It really was a Mumbanyo thing. He has focused on that damn kinship theory to the exclusion of all else so that we now have nothing on government, religion, technology, etc. He suspected it was a cross-sexual rope system, men inherit from their mothers and women from their fathers, and got more & more excited about it, interviewing in the men’s houses all day and staying up sometimes all night trying to put it all together. And now it has all crumbled to bits and he refuses to do anything more, won’t figure out what the pattern really is and won’t work on anything else either. I have asked to trade food & nutrition (which I have already covered sufficiently) for kinship & politics, but he refuses. So I will have to take it all on in secret.
2/10 Thick dreams about Helen in Marseille. Over three years ago now but am still stuck there, going back & forth between the two hotels, trying to split myself in half. H in her blue hat on the quai, her lips quivering: I’ve left Stanley, her first words to me, and then Fen not giving us the time he’d promised me, coming right up behind me, leaving no doubt, no room for an explanation. Oh rotten days. Rotten. And yet I return to them like an opium addict.
I want too much. I always have.
And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? Charlotte wrote that rumors are flying about Howard and Paul, and Howard might lose his job at Yale. And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there. I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilates them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia.
This mood is glacial, gathers up all the debris as it rolls through: my marriage, my work, the fate of the world, Helen, the ache for a child, even Bankson, a man I knew for 4 days and may easily never see again. All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.