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8 PSYCHODYNAMIC ELECTROHELMET Fellows, it’s happened to us all: you’re having a glass of wine with a beautiful woman at an outdoor café, and the weather’s nice, sunny and cool but not too, and she’s wearing this floral-print dress, and one of the straps keeps sliding down her arm, and she keeps putting it back on her shoulder but finally decides just to let it lie there, and you’re feeling pretty sexy, pretty happy about the way things are going and confident that they’re going to get better, when suddenly her eyes roll up in her head and she says, “Some people are doorways to other worlds.” What are you going to do at times like this other than give mad love and props to whoever came up with the phrase, “What are you going to do?” Why, just the other day, I was putting out the trash, and my neighbor Richard walks by with his wife Kim, and as I’m lowering the bag into the bin, Richard looks up and says, “Nice trash,” and I’m thinking, Richard doesn’t know a thing about my trash, and then I realize he’s just making small talk, is trying to be nice himself. I say there’s a lot to be said for niceness, especially in light of all the stupidity out there: this morning in the paper, it said that masterpieces are always being stolen not because there’s a Dr. No paying top dollar for Manets and Picassos to hide away on his secret island but because art thieves think there’s a Dr. No paying top dollar for Manets and Picassos to hide away on his secret island. See, the art thieves have forgotten their Plato, who says, in the Phaedrus, that we must carve nature at its joints, that is, that the world is made of parts that divide cleanly when we’re thinking right, though when we’re not, we’re like drunk butchers swinging blindly at a carcass, our dull choppers bouncing off sinew and bone. But you can’t stop people from having ideas, especially wrong ones. Where do we go when we leave this earth? On the shore of tiny Aldeburgh, on the coast 9 of Suffolk, I saw a war memorial that said, “They who this monument commemorate were numbered among those who, at the call of king and country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardship, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men.” Where’s that, though? In a dream once, I was wearing my psychodynamic electrohelmet, which is like a fifties football helmet with a single-bar face mask and an electric cord with a plug you stick into a wall socket. My psychodynamic electrohelmet would have explained everything to me, but I never got to use it. I was at my parents’ house even though I was the age I am now, whereas they were younger than me even though they’re my parents and have themselves passed from the sight of men. And then I was in France. And then the dream was out west somewhere, though this time I wasn’t in it anymore, just a lot of cowboys, and some had clown noses while others wore tutus. My psychodynamic electrohelmet would be a miracle of rare device, and with it I would build a pleasure dome, sunny but with caves of ice, and a beautiful woman there, and honeydew, and I’d drink the cherry cola of Paradise. ...

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