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Vidal's Muse


Pictures of the lovely Jimmie Trimble are coming soon (in about a week; when i get access to a scanner) but for now, here's the best I could find on line.
 


 
 
 
Gore on Jimmie:

"...We were friends immediately. I was one week older than he. We were the same height and weight. He had pale blue eyes; mine were pale brown. He had the hunter-athelete's far-sightedness; I had the writer-reader's myopic vision. I was blond, with straight hair. He was blond, with curly hair. His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the great... Jimmie overflowed with animal energy, not to mention magnetism for both the sexes...

"...we simply came together, reconstituting the original male that Zeus had split in two. Yet 'sexual pleasure could hardly account for the huge delight we took in one another's company.' There was no guilt, no sense of taboo. But then again we were in Arcadia, not diabolical Eden... I not only never again encountered the other half, but by the time i was twenty-five, I had given up all pursuit, settling for a thousand brief anonymous adhesions, as Walt Whitman would put it, where wholeness seems, for an instant, to be achieved. Quite enough, I think, if the real thing has happened. At least, in Platonic terms, I had completed myself once...

"Two vivid images of Jimmie. One came back to me while I was smoking ganja in Katmandu... as I gasped my way into a sort of trance, Jimmie materialized beside me on the bed. He wore blue pajamas. He was asleep. He was completely present, as he had been at the bedroom at Merrywood. I tickled his foot. The callused sole was like sandpaper. It was a shock to touch him again. The simalcrum opened its blue eyes and yawned and put his hand alongside my neck; he was, for an instant, real in a hotel room in Katmandu. But only for an instant. Then he rejoined Achilles and all the other shadowy dead in war.

"My second memory: I am lying on top of him, after sex, eyes shut; then I open them and see his eyes staring up into mine. The expression is like that of his sad-looking photographs rather than of the actual smiling boy whom I recall, or think that I do. In his last photographs, the marine private of nineteen looks to be a powerfully built man of thirty, in a rage because he knows that what's next is nothing."

--from "The Desire and the Successful Pursuitof the Whole," Palimpsest: A Memoir

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