Beginnings are so important. On the Sundance channel, Agnes Martin was talking about her work. She said, “I ask what am I going to paint next, and then it comes into my mind.” Many great things came into her mind, and then she died. Other channels are not nearly so informative. They rattle on about health, money and education—three things I can’t make sense of—except to know they are embedded in a defunct system, as are we all. Even Obama has become part of it. And we thought he was different and could wave his wand and change things like overnight. What exactly are the two points between which he is said to be equally positioning himself? And does it matter that instead of using the word terrorists, he uses violent extremists? Are the latter better? Are we better?  When he quotes from the Koran, saying that whenever you kill an innocent it is as if you killed all mankind, is he exempting Americans? What was he doing entertaining a white police officer and a black Harvard scholar over beer on his fancy lawn? Are these his “two points”? But why was the woman who started it all left out? Can’t she drink beer too? I suppose not. Beer is a guy thing. And it would be awkward including a woman not up for appointment. It surpasses belief that the White House without knowledge of the facts arranged this beer entente. The white police officer, one Sgt. Crowley, to squirm out of his embarrassing predicament of arresting a well known Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his own home, turned on the woman, Lucia Whalen, the passer-by who had made the call that started the incident, labeling her a “racial profiler” for identifying the two men she saw at the professor’s door as black, when in reality her report read that one “looked kind of Hispanic,” and she couldn’t see the other. The beginning is so important. Lucia was vilified and left out long before this incident began. Call it one outcome of a “thalassan regression.” Thalassa is a personification of the sea, too early even to be one of the goddesses or wives of the gods or nymphs or muses. By some accounts, she married her brother Oceanus, like her a personification of the waters that surrounded the world. And with him she had more than 3,000 children who were all the rivers thought to exist. Before politics and teachable moments regarding racial issues on famous lawns, Thalassa cum Oceanus had to separate into two sexes. And this took eons and eons to happen. First the waters that covered the globe had to recede—an event called a “catastrophe” for many or most of the fish or amoebic organisms living in parthenogenetic bliss until then. To live on land, a uterine habitat representing the oceans had to be created. Thus one creature fought itself so to speak in order to split in two, making one part carry the aquatic environment, the receptacle or uterus, for harboring and nurturing its future; leaving the other half to develop a fertilizing instrument of penetration. Which half, if either, would you like to be? The political organization that grew up around the penis has reached a nadir, threatening to return us all to the oceans, an outcome with a nice circularity to it. That Agnes Martin program on the Sundance channel is called “With My Back to the World.” Asked what her happiest moment was, she said, “When they go out the door.” By “they” I presume she meant everybody. Married to her painting, her personal thalassan regression was outstanding, even in the 20th century. She was a teachable moment not lost on others of her sex during the 1960s, before she left the city to find her perfect wilderness. We all have our stories. And these are subsumed under Race, a very late development in human phylogenetical engineering. Lucia Whalen of Massachusetts now has a good one. I have one that as it turns out also includes the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., not a man I ever saw or met. But a man who in 1994 wrote a long New Yorker profile about a man who had given me grief in 1983. Reading Gates’s profile, it became easy to see what the man’s problem was. His name was Anatole Broyard, and he was a daily book reviewer for the New York Times. In ’83, Broyard undertook to review my book, published by Knopf, titled “Mother Bound,” for the Sunday Book Review. It’s a book I have long tried to disown, but Broyard got there first. I had written a “humorless analysis of [my] psychological evolution,” and had approached my subject “with an air of almost religious seriousness.” Still, beneath his accurate however unkindly expressed criticism, he had buried the secret, the personal injury, at the heart of my story. Gates’s profile of Broyard, posthumously published and called 

“White Like Me,” outed him as a black man who successfully passed for white. So this black guy operating under a serious secret, must have thought I was crazy to reveal my own.  Or he may easily not have been able to identify it under my ruthlessly industrious prose ministrations. If he did get it however, he would never have seen it on a par with his own. And he would have been right. Race in America has long superseded issues of gender. A black man who felt forced to pose as white is hardly the same as a woman who felt forced to pose as a widow. That’s my mother, the mother of “Mother Bound.” What a strange thing to pose as—a widow!  The beginning as I’ve been so wittily saying, is very important. My mother’s pose was rooted in her thalassan disadvantage. There was fertilization, but that was all there was. And I grew up blissfully, harmfully, unaware of the late political organization that my mother so impertinently ignored. Thalassa was never married to Oceanus. She was Oceanus. I want to move on, but it’s hard. Think of how the QEII must have felt over being left out of the 65th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings in Normandy. The queen served in uniform as an army driver during WWII, and at a time when she was, after all, the heiress apparent. At 83, she is the only living head of state who served in uniform during that war. Objections were issued from the palace, and Prince Charles was sent in his mother’s stead. Obama was there. Couldn’t he have said something? He seemed to enjoy meeting the queen at her palace earlier in the year. But two men, the French and British heads of government, were his peers and authorities over the D-Day situation. He may have known as little of the background—the queen as a girl in wartime uniform?—as he did, we presume, of the part Lucia Whalen played in his lawn beer fest with two other kinds of men. I can tell you this about Agnes Martin. She never felt left out of anything. Any invitation she had was to her own lectures and painting exhibitions. No other invitation would have interested her. Not even to a party so much enjoyed by artists in general. She was so fiercely herself. She never gave herself away. Sanctioned marital rape for instance was for her a thalassan impossibility—never even thought or dreamed of. She made one movie, showing a boy hiking around in mountains and landscapes. A very far cry from two movies that have obsessed me somewhat. They both feature female boxers. I’m not a fan of boxing especially, but since boxing and women have been an oxymoron, I became interested first in  “Girlfight,” released in 2000 and featuring an angry teenager, then “The Million Dollar Baby,” 2005, starring a young waitress. “Girlfight” is a success story—the girl winning and even getting the boy she defeats in a “gender blind” match. The “Baby” movie, its successor of sorts, is a horror story, the girl surviving hideously, paralyzed from the neck down, after some equipment pierces her in the ring, then dying in a mercy killing at the hands of her trainer and manager. He is of course none other than Clint Eastwood who produced and directed the film besides acting in it. I have to think that Eastwood saw “Girlfight,” took great exception to it, and found a Hollywood way of getting even, i.e. returning girls to their proper element at ringside if not at home, proving that role-crossing can end in death, and a terrifying one at that. Resurrected, Eastwood’s boxing heroine won an Oscar for playing the part!—Tennis or baseball anyone? I’m having a good year as a Yankee fan. I’m a fickle fan, only cheering them on if they’re winning. For tennis, I don’t much look at the girls who must try to compete in makeup and earrings and tutus. Amongst the boys, I have a new hero in Andy Murray who grew up in Dunblane, Scotland, site of that tragedy 13 years ago when 16 children aged 5-6 were gunned down in their schoolroom. Murray was himself a child in the school at the time of the shooting. Suddenly I saw Murray fighting with rackets and balls to avenge his school and his town. I read that the queen is sending him fan mail. Upon seeing him lose to Roddick at Wimbledon, I stopped looking. I have no patriotism over sports, or much of anything else really. I wasn’t born here, and the country where I was born never properly recognized me. I should write to the queen about this. But if I was fertilized over the thalassan deep, i.e. the Atlantic ocean, as I believe I was, I may be perfect the way I am, a citizen as they say of the world. I had a waking-up dream the other morning that I was swimming—in a wide lane, doing the crawl very energetically, at Olympian speeds. It’s the best way to wake up. Beginnings are so important.