I just can't concentrate on academics now, for obvious reasons. Over the short Thanksgiving vacation, I have experienced intimacy. Compared to this concrete thing that has happened to me, subject to the persuasions of chance and misfortune, all the words in all the books in the world seem to have no more weight than the poignant and weighty proclamations of a Euripides when balanced against Aeschylus' master phrases. I want to live! I want to experience the companionship of men, my fellows, and all varieties tangible and intangible of love eternal and transient. What attention can a book command, why should I listen to the pasty white lips of dead men mutter incoherent lies? And why should I write, adding to this pile of debris and dust, if it will not bring me closer to the people, to those I love and desire? Sex has re-entered the world and shines in such dazzling radiance that my eyes are blinded now to those dank and tenebrous obscurities that so long held my soul in thrall. I want to walk down the streets, I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to do anything that is not inside, that is not subject to the tyrannies of artificial light and strained eyes! What foul humor persuaded me for so long that all goods are insubstantial and intangible? What wicked devil had me sell the world for a stoic God? I believe nothing of those lies that are recorded in the long, thick scrolls of the legislators, the outgrowth of diseased minds impoverished by desert storms and volcanic eruptions! The first man to drink Achaean wine wrote more purely and truly, more freely and exuberantly than perhaps even the supposed Solomon of the Song of Songs! Which must be about a woman, which must be about holding and procreation and orgasm and not about some remote and perfect God and exile! Rashi and Maimonides, even Plato, even Aristotle, what have you done to me? Can I never shake off your shackles? Can't I live and die? It is life that is precious, life! And every moment spent indoors in the confines of those demons is wasted! Study Torah! This is the world, not Torah! There is no God of revelation, there is no God of man, there is only this, the truth of life and the darkness of death.

"I set before you this day a blessing and a curse" : namely, the Bible.

Last night, I met up with my pot-smoking ultra-Christian ultra-liberal friends and we all went to a rave. At first it seemed pretty lame (there were a lot of high-schoolers and, from the looks of it, even middle-schoolers there) but as the night progressed, I got into a kind of groove. I was just there dancing and everybody else was dancing with me; age, gender, race, sexuality, none of it mattered. We were all equal. We were all part of a homogeneous group and we were all dancing and dancing for hours. It was a tribal, cultic, new-age hippie kind of thing, but I enjoyed it immensely.

Afterwards my friends invited me to stay the night and have breakfast with them. Well...I haven't seen them in about three weeks, but I really wanted to go home and get my homework done. I feel kind've bad about that -- I mean, I'm completely obsessive compulsive. Well, anyway, Nick managed to read my mind and offered to take me back home. I'll have breakfast with them some other time...

So I'm here for another month. I haven't found a boyfriend, and at this point, if I do find a boyfriend I'm just gonna have to leave and be in Colorado for six weeks, and that'll be kind've lame. I suppose I'm reaching the point where I realize that I'm just going to be single, if not forever, then at least for the forseeable future. And it isn't that bad. Not having sex ever isn't that bad, not having someone to hold, not having someone to talk to about intimate things you wouldn't tell anyone else. Really. Life is perfectly tolerable without a boyfriend, and I should face it, I am alive. Plus I've decided to make up for my lack of a boyfriend by trying to be more beautiful...okay, so I can't do very much with wardrobe, but I am working out. If I'm gonna be a single, sexless loser (sexless like Nietzsche, not like Macbeth's wife) then I should at least look fabulous doing it.

The Annunciation

I walked by shallow streams at dusk,
Trickling with gleams of light
Fading gold with rays of dust,
The rich red garment of the night
Bent terrible with birdsong.

I gazed on moms’ red-blushing babes,
The crimson stains of fields by rose-
Soft glimmering pools of moonlight:
Groaning, crying, squirming, close-
Held screaming in the night

You Clytemnestra for a mother, burn
Like a flickering torch, burn
Like an ardent bark, and cascade
Through these shallow, dark-bearing streams
To all the sullen reaches

Where the wild wanderer’s call
For all the teeming wretches
Beggared in sleep steeped up in scum
Like some beast’s savage run
Spreads out to all.

From "Epiphanies"

Such is your castigation, and such your insubordination:
That heroes’ myths respond to moral code;
You take upon yourself to judge the men of old.
But what gray whirling slides and slips
Serpent-seamless through the coils of your mind?
What iceberg like an undiscovered country
Floats for conquering even in the vast lips
Of the many-birthing ocean, or sails quietly
In eternal lapping, echoing the calls, the cries
That keen from whence the sirens sigh?
First we gather from the ships,
And then we chunk and height around the breadth,
And beating nature into perfect blocks, and desecrating chaos
Into smoothness, into cubeness, into rounded virtuosity of even keeling cubes
Disciplined from all to each their selfless path, they clink in glass
And great foundations of the mind
Become the pour and rush, and tinkling of heat, they melt in wine.