I love your mind, I said.
A Shift in the Scenery
It seemed we could ride up and over everything, not excluding the to me rather bold maiden decisions of the new mother committee to postpone the plenary and admit men to full membership in Sekopololo. Men could work for credits now instead of only for pula, which was an economic advantage to them, but they were still ineligible to run for any office or serve on committees. And there was no question of any change in the system of female-only inheritance of chattels and homesteads. I tried to tease Nelson by comparing men in Tsau to Jews in the Middle Ages or Indians in Fiji, with respect to land ownership. I was being polemical, and I was quick to add that I appreciated that the difference was that men in Botswana, on past performance, deserved it, unlike the Jews or Indians, obviously. He wouldn’t be drawn. The mother committee was shifting the scenery around quite a bit, I thought, but he was remaining serene.
Except that he did want to talk, however calmly, about the postponement of the plenary. His point was that there had to be a plenary. It was the custom to have at least one a year. He said more than once We have to assume they’re going to change their minds. Everybody had liked plenaries in the past. It was important to collect the whole social body together periodically. Batswana loved kgotla meetings, so they should love the plenary, which it was just like. He felt strongly enough about this that he had gone to the length of socially letting fall expressions of disappointment that the plenary was being postponed, obviously with the expectation that they would be passed along.
Letting his opinion be known around the plaza a few more times seemed to be enough for him. He stopped bringing up the plenary altogether, which was what I wanted.
So naturally I brought it up again myself. I had something to say that I thought might put the whole question to rest in a profounder way.
I think I put it confusedly.
I said: One thing about yourself that I think you don’t appreciate is the complexity of why people tend to accept things you lay out for them as good ideas. Don’t get mad, but in a way your lifework could be described as getting people to do things you regard as improvements, better for them. You have great powers of getting people to do things the way you want. Only partly is that because the things you come up with are sensible in themselves. The rest of it has to do with something benign about you, unusually so. You seem good. You seem unselfish. Even people who are really at loggerheads with you see it, although it may drive them even crazier against you when they do. Also you look counter to what you are, since you look more like an unemployed wrestler than anything else, which incidentally adds to your power. What you are operates cross-culturally, for some unknown reason. I may be trying to say that possibly the plenary is less important in a structural way than you think, and that it should sink or swim but you should hold back from using your powers to try to get it reinstated. What I want to feel is that you’ve divorced yourself from it.
This is as I reconstruct it. By the end of it I was confused about what, really, I was trying to say, other than quite obviously declaring appreciation tantamount to the most abject love.
His reaction to this was to say Light from the caves! This was a standby he used to greet solecisms or cant.
I was overwhelmed with the desire to apologize, which I suppressed.
An Impassioned Lecturette on the Enclosure Movement
When Nelson said in so many words that he loved me, I should have felt it more as the major benchmark it was, the thing long sought, than I did. We were living as though he had already said it, for one thing. And for another it seemed to me that something about his almost always appending a phrase like heart and soul or root and branch to his declaration made it more literary and less real. Something fell off a shelf in the middle of the night and when I said What was that? he said The scales falling from my eyes. I love you.
He started talking about movies with me, gamely but lamely, because he was worried he’d insulted the cinéphile in me by earlier saying things like Only a fool could think an art form is significant where your emotional response to it is signaled to you by mood music. He made good-faith efforts to think of movies he’d seen but forgotten he’d liked, like Dead of Night and Fame Is the Spur, neither of which I’d seen at the time, unfortunately. He was going to get better movies for Tsau, not just the kung fu films that were so popular: I should think about what classics I might like him to try to get. I remember saying to him Explain to me how I can love someone who has never seen a movie he liked enough to see twice? This had even been a point of pride with him, and it derived from his huge antipathy to repetition of experience in general, to which he attributed his recoil from the prospect of university teaching. I had tried lately to get a little deeper into that famous aversion of his.
I was also getting sensate confirmations thick and fast. It was cold and we were cutting back on using the bathing engine because of that and also to set the usual noumenal good example re water use, which resulted in cooperative rather sloppy indoor showering and sponge bathing. I actually had to admonish him to slow up on the worshipful and hyper-intimate aspects of our lustrae unless he was willing to be a little less sparing with the briquettes we used for our heating fires, which were kept minimal, also as an invisible Kantian good example.!Gum, we would say, shivering and lumbering around in our anoraks and layers of sweaters. He was sexually very available. The number of erections coming to my attention was, for someone his age, outstanding, I told him, willing as ever to stoop to any depth for a smile.!Gum is winter in Sesarwa.
This especially I prized: once when he was refusing to let me help wash up after dinner I decided to read something while he finished, but there was nothing to read immediately visible so I mock-complained, to which he said You can read my fichier if you want to. This was a surprise. His fichier was an oversized oilskin wallet he kept next to his bedlamp and in which he stored excerpts and quotations that spoke to his essence, in essence, all transcribed on two by five cards in his neat handwriting. Nothing he’d ever said had specifically laid out that these were private materials — in the way my diaries were, for example — but the tender way he handled this wallet when he wanted to find something in it told me it was at least personal. My hood is up, is what he was reinforcing with this offer, clearly. I was flustered because I felt reading hungrily would seem unseemly, so I was brief and consequently remember only a few things in any detail. There were his warhorses à la Zeno’s arrow in my heart, and Society — an inferno of saviors, but there was also a quotation from Rousseau that struck me as central and which he later let me copy for my own information, and which I still have: The problem is to find a form of association which will defend with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone. And there were several long passages from a book on the enclosure movement in England, about the one village that had the good sense never to enclose its common, a town called Laxton, which survives into the present: I remember it was described as a proud village, a happy one, and a prosperous one. This led to a discussion or more accurately an impassioned lecturette by Nelson on the enclosure movement. He was against the enclosure movement! What manner of man is this! was all I could think. The enclosure movement is hardly something you can still be against in any personal, burning sense, you would think. But he was!