How can I concentrate on anything when love so burns through my veins? I am taken with the object of my desires and can think only of his embraces, only of his company, so that everything I enjoyed before seems odious to me and everything that interrupts my mind from the perception of my life, every barrier and all scorn, become detestable lashes and whips against my soul. My soul! Moved by a great passion, I believe in everything that Passion spoke about in books, and I can only rail against the Academics who argue that the soul cannot exist, that there is some order and rhythm to be perceived behind human affairs -- how can there be a great thing Known when I am embraced by madness? How can you not desire to plunge into these turbid waters and drown; how can you sit and read and think? Think! Thinking is the most detestable practice, to close oneself up in one's meditations, to regard the world with a solemn air, and then to pronounce with chapped lips, "I understand what I do not understand." Life revolts against you, you marble-eyed statues, you stone-cold guardians of knowledge. Life and all that serves it revolts against you and continually denounces you.

We have so focused on words that we begin to believe the words are the things themselves. Or at least that words are things at all -- that somehow they can be understood, even if they have no existence outside of the maze of our souls. But what of words as expression, as pointers, to the inner movements of feeling in concert with being, all being, Great Being? The whole of the world could be appropriated to express a sentiment, and yet the whole world, is it not at the same time an expression of that sentiment? When I say that I burn with love, is there no resemblance between my burning and the raging of a great fire? Will you hurl against me proofs, logical conundrums, or will you sidle up to me and look into my eyes, tell me, "I do not understand, please explain what you mean when you say..." No! I will have none of it! I push you away, I can consume you, the sword against Socrates -- against his puzzlement there is still blood.

Everything is blooming and then shadows fall across the sky. Petals fall and flowers fade while green life bursts. My impatience conceives my happiness, a great happiness in having loved, and yet a love eternally absent, and strengthened by that distance. This is the plight of the romantics: to be consumed in strong emotions that can never be consummated, and to love that consumption while dying from it. Is there another way of existence, will you suggest another habitation for my soul? My soul hates you for your arrogance, that you think you can understand me, that you would dare approach me and tell me I am consumed in folly. Is it folly to love? Is it folly to desire the touch of another at every moment? Is it folly to exist on every plane of being? Then life is folly -- either the folly of tragedy or comedy. Forget your distinctions, your gilded words, your crowned emoluments from much memorization and debate. Feel, feel, feel and be consumed!

The Sibyl

Everywhere men were hurrying.
Where are they going, I asked.
To their deaths. The reply blew
Like a foul wind, and rankled
The grey-green reeds. The slimy swamp
Caked my ankles and I thought I felt,
Just brushing the slight of my skin,
The curve of blood-red talons.
I screamed and ran, but a restraining hand
Held me back, a bar of ice as white
As all the air was dark with shadows, black
As the gaping maws, the grinning caverns,
The skeletal hands stretched and groaning
On crude and tortured iron racks,
Struck me at my height, and held me back.
By the creatures of day, by lakes
That glimmer with crystal light
And the tidy waves and those that graze
On green shoots of fresh grass;
By the blue, blue flowers that dance
In the flowing rays, and listen to the slight murmur
Of wind that plays the clinking brass, I beg you
By whatever love and sentiment you feel,
Burning deep in your soul, dispel these shadows,
Give me heat, the licking tongues of yellow flames:
If only to consume this darkness, if only to plunge
Headlong into light like a moth into a bright
Burning candle; the white splits
Like love into its lovely lays.
But icy fingers gripped me, my shoulders, and caressed
My stomach; I felt the creeping locks
Shiver on my chest. The dripping drool of want
Dribbled from my breast, and convulsed my stomach,
Paralyzed my legs. Then a strong wind came,
The reeds, like bacchantes in a frenzy, rose and fell
Like hairs that clench and shiver with the cold
Of first snows on brazen flesh. I heard the chains
Whispering sorrows, clacking iron on the rock,
And grasping round my ankles, pulling, tugging
In the dark and loneliness the wrapping limbs.
You will never escape. This pit
Is sordid darkness. You and all you know
Are cursed with blackness ‘til your last
And feeble breath. Try as you might, these weakling arms
Will never spread fresh wings, and never will you gleam
In sun-drenched skies, and drink in perfumed days.

I just read the Book of Job -- a very confusing book. Probably, textually, very mangled, because sometimes passages stray off-topic and it feels like their are extracts from the psalms and various other material (possibly prophetic?) jumbled in. But the overarching structure is somewhat troubling -- Job keeps asking for a hearing from God, charging God of injustice, contending that the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Meanwhile his friends can only answer that God is just, putting forth all the usual arguments -- that the wealth of the wicked amounts to nothing, that they lose everything by God's hand, that suffering is visited upon their children. Job rebuts them -- what is it to the wicked if their children suffer? Death visits everyone, both wicked and righteous, and life seems in some ways to be the result of the arbitrary visitations of fortune. At this his friends can only accuse Job of iniquity and Job can do nothing more than defend himself -- the battle becomes one of words, but wisdom is lost, wisdom is that man must "fear God"...and the book leaves off there. God and his boisterous young supporter are alternately mystic and bully; God created the immense and flesh-rending behemoth, but is he just or merely all powerful? God created the luminaries, the heavens, and the earth, but what is this order if the world of human affairs is possessed by moral uncertainty and chaos? What piqued me most was this notion of wisdom -- something men cannot know, something God himself has measured and plumbed -- but beyond God, existing independently of him. God's contention that he creates order resolves into chaos, wisdom is unknowable, and although Job's fortunes are restored twofold for his suffering, we are left in desolation.

What do you think? Who wins?

Lines Composed While Listening to Britten

A light, growing in the east, pours in the window
Tiny slivers, like slightly dripping streams.
The woman in the elaborate dress sits
On the spangled bed, collapsed in colors,
Holding her palm to her weeping mouth;
Mouth turned down like the crescent moon
Suspended above a crystal lake.

Her maid enters, places in the other
Outstretched palm a letter. The writing
Is golden on the vellum page. She reads,
Her eyes coursing, her hand clenched tight
To lips. Tears trickle like the water falling off of
Rocks. She sets down

The letter. The page is stained, the ink runs
In golden pools, gathers itself together
In swirling shades. She draws the shades.

Pouncing through the room like a tigress,
Thrusting her body, forward-foot, into the ground.
A low moan, she lets it come from her throat,
It flies off like a crow, it perches on the walls,
It gazes down at her rippling dress, it flaps
To her desk and looks at her awry, as a blackbird
Taloned to a rock looks on tumbling falls;
Spray of water cascades and slides, squirts
And flecks black wings.

Her energy takes leave of a weak and sorry frame.
She sits down and puts both hands
To leaking eyes, as if by some twist and turn
She would stop the faucet, or tears
At her swollen face. Her mind dances
Like reflections on a mirror, shadows
Extending and creeping with
The creeping light.

The light is creeping down. The long day wasted
Wanes. The slit-open window lets in
The aura of closing night; the low long howl
Of crickets and the chirp of wolves, aloof on distant peaks,
Gazing down on these pooling reflections
Of light and men. The lights sound far and wide,
Flicker on the wooden panels of the walls,
The whitened paint is stained with red and blue and yellow
Glows. Like shades dancing around the room, seizing each other,
Pink gowns that rustle in the breeze of dance and purple suits
That follow and subside, like the waters of a lapping river
Or the sea at tides. The room spins in sleep, and as
The moon ascends to take her place, clothed in regal white
Now regent of the skies, the tumbling folds of her gown
Splash the spangled bed, and reddened eyes rest
On satin cloth, the golden sparkle of the words dying
Down to sleep in the darkening recesses of her mind.

Dreams, dreams, entering by the window, gliding like ghosts!
Dreams, grim visaged death, and sleep dancing round and round,
Vampires in insomnia, tilting forward, tilting back, and romping
Romping the covers, reflecting like lights on a spinning crystal
Globe – red and green and orange dots in her eyes, around the room.
Dance, dance! Lord Cocytus, with his spark-edged whips,
Lashes, lashes the tortured edges of her folding gown.
Like a woman whipped by ghastly winds and rain sleeting
Satin, silk, the dreams besiege her, lightning strike and thunder,
Winds whispering to parasols, Escape.

Out of the middle of the ball he comes, his face
Made long like dripping rocks, falling thunder crowns
His brow, and lightning laurels on his ears. Here
Is the frozen waterfall that pleads her heart. He kneels
Before her, grown suddenly tall, grown mountainous,
And pleads, his voice is the whisper of the wind that tinkles
Leaves during autumn, leaves grown great and gold.
As an autumn tree her silver, gold, and purpled hopes
Hold and ring above his pleas. A cold wind blows, rips,
Tears a single leaf from her hold. She flutters down like a dove
Descending into the pit of a volcano (torn from flight
And nursing injured wings) – the steam
Engulfs her and she spreads herself into
The molten pit. The dark clouds are gathering, the winds of his plea
Are more like raising howls – but stroking howls, still the howls
Of violins; the players raising sharp, yes sharp their hands,
And cutting as if with the edges of swords into their instruments
With bows. A blast of thunder. Rain tumbles down. Lightning
Strikes the Dryad grove. The leaves tinkle like a thousand falling crystals;
Falling, strike. The lover’s plea bursts into a brilliant
Flowing fire.

At a distance the fire gives light
To the pallor of eyelids, the scarlet turning form; she turns
And puckers lips to moan in sleep. The shadows
Dancing round the room subside, and the silence
Of darkest night sighs into dawn. The rising light
Reveals her porcelain features, and the red-red rose
Of disappointed lips. In the bowels of the house, the dirtied maid
Pulls browning logs into the soaring heat, stokes the furnace,
Prepares for cooking eggs. Breakfast while brown coffee
Boils in a tin with just reflecting light, round the faded, crisping streets.
Like a promise of pain, the burning sun rises, robbing the moon
By his ascending height
Of her faint and dreamy light.

La Comedie Humaine

Lords of men, by the broad-benched ships,
Twisting and turning on the fringed shore,
The wine dark waves, inebriated air,
Pregnant with Juno’s storms. The siren sings
A long, low, dulcimer note, that flies
Dove-like through the air, and perches on their hearts;
Enraptured by the music, they strike each other deep,
Breaking, wounding, torturing their clashing corps:
Blood pours from every cut, leaks onto the ground,
Spills in pools and chokes the thirsty earth:
Ranged together, linked each shield to shield,
And as a bed of nails, each sword to sword
They advance in all their pride and slash and cut and work.