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.

On Sex

I am unhappy. Why am I unhappy? I am considering that there is some pleasure which I am not experiencing which I could be experiencing if I only ardently pursued after it. I am considering that the entire world exists outside of me and that my being extends toward it the way in a which a flame extends toward the sky -- but there is no consummation; I am not it and it is not me. Reaching too far, I dissipate into a column of smoke; I would consume everything, and miffed that I consume only the little bit I do, and considering my nature, which is to burn, and considering the extension of that nature, which is a complete holocaust, I feel impotent in those faculties which I do possess while feeling capable of those things which are impossible to any man!

I would have my life be accomplished and also enjoyable. I would take happiness as the measure of whether or not a thing is worthwhile -- if it produces pleasure, then it is a worthy activity; if it produces pain, then it is an unworthy activity. But how can this be the case when pursuing after pleasures produces pain and activities that are sometimes painful can yield pleasure in the long run?

The problem is compounded because some pleasures are only readily available and hence, it would seem, appropriate to youth, whereas other pleasures are available eternally, until the end of life. The pleasures that are associated with youth, namely beauty and sex, seem to me to be stronger than the pleasures that are eternal, such as music, serenity, literature, philosophy, art, conversation, and so forth, no matter how ardently our nature would desire the opposite to be the case.

Sex seems the brightest and most powerful, the most fiery pleasure that one can pursue. But it is so particular! Because I don't want to have sex with anybody, or just in any way, but rather I want to have sex with very particular people whom some faculty in my body, I would suppose, selects at the moment of apprehension. To have sex with them is the brightest and most pleasurable activity, that leaves the vestiges of a complete and utter satisfaction in the body, I should say in the being; whereas having sex with someone who I would not desire is the most painful and utterly demoralizing experience, that mingles traces of despair and worthlessness in the soul.

But sex extends -- the desire for pleasure is a desire for constant and regular pleasure, for a state of ecstasy that extends as far as my time. It is a pleasure that is very complicated, because it is so related to physical beauty and yet so dependent upon a certain mental connection; there is a certain social sensibility in sex -- it is the culmination of all social relationships, it would seem, the ready demarcation and symbol of not only certain individual privileges but evident superiorities: as a token in some colorfully described "savage" society, one would say, that the alpha-male has sex more often than the others.

It makes me think of how weak and pitiful my condition is, that I am obliged to want something that I have no reason to want, and that I have furthermore been told from my first birth through all subsequent observations of society to want, and yet I cannot imagine, cannot think even for a moment, of living without it, since abstinence seems more of an absurd capitulation and failure than the extravagant indulgence of merely natural desires.

The all-seeing eye is consumed by flames –
Like a pike-shaft driving deep in the heart
A vision of poetry right from the start;
These red and green shadows lick yellow walls,
This fire consumes, sputters and stalls
Woods, burning trees, forests and falls
Where butterflies clatter their gem-spreading wings,
Where bird-calls clap, and sounds soaring things
Into the heart (the nub) of the pen, that vents and vends,
Like "un pauvre vermicellier" in icy winds,
These words, snowflakes, fluttering down
That glisten with light and utter each crowns.

To Whitman

I’m sitting on Descarte’s
Rock. A few fleeting impressions strike
My being like ringing bells.
Where is this music that flows
From celestial spheres? Sometimes a burden
Is transformed into the cool ardor
Of water; streams flowing down across
The splitting paths of rock: among the trees
Nothing is lost; the green arbor
Of boughs is like a thousand limbs,
A thousand hands, each by chime extending
The little tinkle of luminous
Silver – a thousand keys are pulsing
In my soul.

You are the mother of all loves, and I,
To all your joys the son; therefore have for yourself
This sparkling cry, remembering nuptial pleasures
That burn in the moon on that darkling night,
When empty embraces held my sight:
And these murmuring whispers are all that remain
Of an immanent vision, deep in the brain.

What is this thing called love that makes me burn? Is it a burn? Like waves ebbing over the chest, or as if the cavities of the heart no longer pumped blood but some bitter and acrid sewage; static, stagnant, stinking filth. And yet how it longs – how the dikes of the heart overflow and pour raging rapids into the stomach, creeping into my entire being as easily as water runs down a gutter. Apart of the liquids in my veins, is there some part of which I can say, this is pure? For neither in my hands any the less to tingle; perhaps only the extremities of my feet, like the tips of sterile mountains stabbing at the gaping blue sky, capped with cold, remain untouched.

But even then, like lightning striking a peak, when I see others holding hands, embracing each other amorously. I cannot stand their happiness – a happiness that is always greater than my own, even when I am with the one I love, the passing object of my desire. Life, to me, that is, the life of other people, is a parade of lovers, a parade down the hallways holding hands, and has always been from the beginnings of those star-struck matches (ill-fated) in middle school, whereon I gazed but took no part, to the ends of time and pale skeletal hands, clasping each other even unto death shall you part.

Death is the thing – when the final eyes close, when the final darkness comes on, which is not a darkness of the eyes, but a darkness (we might as well think) of the ears for not seeing, of the heart for not hearing, of the fingers for not smelling – when this sensory deprivation encloses me, I shall be alone. Will a spark of love, even from the Platonic fire, encase my colding body, my soul freezing in the exhalation of collapsed lungs and escaping like some foul odor from the dirt? I will rot, I will rot, I will rot, and where will be love then? I want an embrace of sex which is death.

But even when I’m kneeling on my knees, or even when I’m kissing ripe, young lips, I can’t escape the passage of time, the passage of a transitory moment, and I only want to hold in my arms, clasp onto forever, feel the tingle running in all my body, through all the extremities, like a mountain caught in blazes, a brown and red-burning, earthly sun. And then when that is done, and liquids are being cleaned, and a weariness overtakes the body, that little death should be a death held with the other in clasping arms. Bones and sinew and muscle joining each other, the mutual admiration of beauty in reciprocal faces, almost as if we were a tesselation, a pattern stretching off into eternity, completing and extending each other indefinitely. Then there would be the intercourse of words, and then love would be called, recalled, and we would speak of it like observers of uncharted territory, comparing measurements, drawing figures, arguing, sometimes, about a position or most rational explanation, but always extending our hold, always claiming more for the Kingdom of Life, planting flags, erecting walls, establishing laws.

How glorious, for instance, traveling through Antarctica, to spend the day in frigid winds and endless cold-stretching fields of white, only upon the nights to sojourn together in a red-walled tent and to sleep in the same sleeping bag, a candle flicker for light, the embrace against the cold of one warm chest upon another, and the murmur of lips on the lover’s neck, fading and strengthening into the penetration of bodies, heightened ecstasy of confined movement, until you can feel something of the other person entering your being?

But my loves are so transitory. They walk in and out of my life like men walk into and out of a bathroom, sometimes without even pausing to wash their hands, doubtless forgetting to flush the toilet. And thus this gunk within me, this foul corruption of raw sewage, this raw air that bubbles in my boiling veins, flowing all to my extremities, even like vats of boiling laundry. And when I see others, I can see only my conception, only the perfect love that they enjoy, and only stretching white horizons. Then I envy them. How is that for every attempt on my apart, I cannot ever mount the summit? And yet there they are, gazing down from the top, happily among frosted peaks, and planting flags!

I am going to raise an agonized cry: who spoke to you
The first drops of silence, the slight tips
Of dew upon the grassy stubs
Of green that crowns the hill’s soft
Down-flowing streams? I want
Streams, I want golden sunset
To embrace me and violate me in a soft
Pink-red pulse. Flowing pastels, and nature
Like the whisper of a chest, and like a gripping
Push and ahh. Everything comes together
In real, and words are like violets, spreading out
Over the hill, the little pink-dabbed paint, creation
Out of me, true and incandescent expression
Of a voice very like the wind: the chill wind
That a rabbit feels, upon the burrow, and dives
Into the thick-mossed earth, the thick stumped earth, the earth lined round about
With trees, pulsing out; trees, drinking; trees cupping
The vision of a crystallized globe, a little container
Of dreams:

Criticism is vile. Criticism is black muck. Criticism
Asking all the questions why and how
That drip like tar, or oil, or black nicotine
Flowing in lethe streams; a smoky wind
Blows across the silos and the barren dirt
That arid berth cannot behold in light
Which, scattered, drifts about
Like a hazy mist, a desert mirage:

Light could pore into the ground,
Light could burrow and grow
Into violets, little plucks of pink, blue-
Gold mixed in by painter’s flecks
With dots of red like globes; or growing ripples
Hitting the lake-stormed stream, the wind
That bristles in the willow’s dripping green:
Poetry should speak and be a dream.

I stand, frozen in fear
What are these cold winds that blow about me?
The snow comes falling down like a trickle
Of water as only glass:
Only, a word that echoes through long hallways,
Long stone corridors, long stone
In the witch’s castle: “Come to me,” she whispers with crackling lips,
“Come to me” a soft hiss
Of smoke, burning charcoal. I saw him scratching
Paintings on the walls, I stopped to take his hand, and when we clasped
He vanished like a smoke – smoke hanging on the glittering icy faces
Of the frozen walls, smoke that drifted like a lazy haze throughout the halls:
“Wait,” I whispered, “Stop,” but it was the crackle of the air,
Or the emptiness of the room, or the only whispered quiet
Of a voice like chalky snow.

The witch dances round-about these halls; she raises her hand
And the moon bawls. “Why cry, my sweet,” she whispers, caressing
Her lovely neck, her swan-like body, frozen cheeks,
“For you are gliding through the waters, gliding in among the valleys,
Gliding through my heart.” In the murky dark
I despise her pinched up nose, her cracking lips, that very smooth-like guise;
‘Give back the moon,’ I think, ‘Redeem her from her suffering’
– How many times to embrace her delicate wrists,
How many times to clasp her little fist
Into my heart? I have gazed up at the darkness, stealing her away,
While the clouds engulfed her in a thick and heady fog.

A fog is clouds on earth. I walk through the dark ways, the piers, the water
Stays about the lapping shore. Angles, odd angles, and paintings
Score the music whispering through my mind: it is golden ages, Greece,
The faint sap of silver trees that I gather in my palms
Like melting snow; I rescue dripping time. My dripping tears
Murmur like the waves and freeze with my fears – a long call
Echoes back and forth across the empty place, and the street-signs
Are tattered and the neon-lights
Are going dim. The passers-by have stopped their meandering,
And the avenue is like a bed-rock stream: it was all a dream,
These little shops, this lapping dock, and beyond, from far and away,
Across the waters, a little, percolating scream.

The hiss of making tea.
At dawn.
The sterile door, chipped plaster
White and heady like
My white and heady mind;
The water boils in little macerated clops
And chops my lips; my hands hiss
Where errant flecks of steam
Scream across my skin. I add the leaves
And watch the thick spread ink-stain
Spread across the time. The line
Of purity is broken, a concoction mixed
Speaks poison to my lips, and I grip
In ready hands, conspiring
Sugar and the lime.

Rivers, raging rivers, dams bursting
In wild symphonies of clattering foam; white spray
Decks the shores, and leaping water
Plays upon the trees, strokes the idle banks,
Seduced, reflects the tattered sky:

A gleam of sunlight streaks
Through the heavens, like an arrow
Drawn to Hades’ breast:
Lest infinite gleaming surge the deep waters and flame
The fleeting fumes of life so like a breath, the red
Begins to crawl and creep; it slides in snakes
-- Hissing, slithering, coagulating en masse, a giant mass
Of a thousand snakes.

Now a cry rings out through the air
And a solitary phantom glides upon the waters:
The master of men’s making, he dips the streams
A brush of blue and lushes blaze upon her eyes
To make men blush and dream --

The soft, white, steady face
Flames on all the bannisters of memory,
And tattered balconies, the smoking edifice of rock
Strikes shadows on the earth;

Her white white skin
Traces the curve of voluptuous pears – she bites
And glittering juice peaches down her lips, below
The turmoil fights, the turmoil

Of nature unfurling from trumpets like a symphony
And clashing in the weary dawn, while the sky
Stretches out across her face, stretches out
Like a long rash or a sore or some burst
Of ecstatic creation, wounding and ebbing, gleaming
In the rivers of dark-flowing blood, and eating
Lotus-lips of wine:

The river flows to Hades, down to ebb and end.

I burn with love, and I can’t write a
Word, fluttering vaguely down like crumpled
Pastel paper, upon which is scrawled,
In a hurried and voluminous hand
Glittering lakes of pink and saffron, tinged
With soft embraces and sweet douceurs
As lately fallen, crimson leaves.

Communication.

My goals for this week are to find a job, start being more social, *sigh* go out on another date with *someone* or at least have sex (that's a goal?!) OH and start volunteering. Yes, I am going to change the world. My face will appear on minted coins. There will be general rejoicing and celebration and...champagne for all!

Where would you seek the purity of silence?
Would you plunge for it into the depths of your soul,
The deepest recesses of your mind,
Where the water's dark as wine?
You'd find a cavern winding
Down into the depths of the earth,
Where the eventual dearth
Of light becomes the flash of crystal and the bright
Burning of the pressure smoothed rock,
The deep and intense core of being
Beyond control, and floating in the hot
Lava islands of cracking metal,
Sinking, from submersion rising, hissing with a moan
and a shot into the icy dark, the spinning globe of night.

Where did I go in the darkness of the night? I wandered down one alleyway, out into an opening of grime and soot, through the black streets, to another; trash-cans and alleycats, the smell of dirty laundry and waste, feces.

Hoodlums on the walks, traveling in sometimes small groups, chains clanging and reflecting lamp-light like steel sparks on a grindstone. At one point I emerged into a clearing of glittering lights. An old man, black, was playing a guitar, stubbly faced, head half covered by a dirty, tight-knit cap. He was jammed up against a brick wall, legs arching to meet the cement, feet protruding from it like a natural edifice of
stone. I walked over, listened to him sing for awhile, a few bars of a song even the streets had forgotten, or it was so raspy that no one could have recognized it. The air was getting cold, wind roving through the clogged up skies -- the grey clouds had disappeared with the last choking embers of twilight, but their dull residue suffocated whatever star-light might have gauzed the purple sky. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a dirty nickel, threw it in his cap.

"Thanks," he called. A rich baritone voice, like in an Arby's commercial. He seemed entirely carved out of the wall, out of the walk, out of the rock, strumming his guitar, like some small monument to a lonely past. I walked on. A theater opened its doors. A crowd of hats, suits, blue, navy-blue, dark-blue, purple, black, grey, dark-grey, mahogony streamed past me with the sound of their voices; a high buzzing, the low conspiracy of whispered tones, the drone of matrons, the chitter of young ladies, laughter, the occasional twitter of a yawn, a sigh, a loud voice arguing yes, a dull trombone dissenting. I couldn't make any of it out.

The theater-lobby was a bright long space of polished gold, marble, carpet in a light tan, red banisters, curving and circling stair-cases, and sleepy attendants tasseled, polished, but sagging and frumpy, sweeping and collapsing into a darkened ante-chamber; beyond it a sarcophagus, a tomb. I imagined the stage and the long rows of empty seats, spreading diagonally, vertically, and across like a vision of the empty sweep; the wood, the hidden canisters of paint, the tables in storage, the shop, the props and the propped up scenery -- long, vibrant valleys, trees shivering in the wind, turned out of fashion to face the walls: far climbing brick. Only the ghosts of shadows shiver across the stage, only the occasional belch of a radiator or a fan or the hum of an emergency light; the stage is a thing of darkness, like the world before God.

The lights in the lobby switch-off, and the shadows invade the ante-chamber like soft streaks of blue paint. The last of the attendants leaves, props the door open with his left foot, cranes his neck, looking backwards, searching for some final sign. Then he fumbles in his right pocket, extracts a pack of cigarettes, stamps it with his left hand against the palm of his right; three, four, six times, like the stamping of hooves, an impatient gelding, a night-carriage; he flips the top, extracts it so small I can't make it out, puckers it in his lips, cradles it against the wind and cold with his left hand, flicks the lighter with his right. The clapping sound of metal, sparks. It infuses hot, dark-burning, a little signal light. I turn away from him, afraid he might notice me, staring; large buildings towering like monsters, the sky is clearing just a bit and through the dull conglomeration of clouds, I can make out an occasional star like a lamp shining through fog. There are beggars sleeping in the alleyways. I'll stay with Max tonight. Sleepiness is settling on me like a mist.

The rain came down in torrents. The whole city was flooded in streams and the roads swirled into eddies, flowing rapidly back from some source in the teary-eyed horizon. I ran down Garden Avenue, to the gothic brick building, up the steps, and knocked on the door to my professor's apartment.

"Come in," he said.

I opened the door and was engulfed in a radiant heat; the dusty smell of old books, a fire. He was sitting in a chair, staring out at the rain. From his window I could see the pattering drops striking the little pools on the walk below and spreading out: dripping off of doused concrete, spreading into the thirsty brown grass that dotted the lots. Frail trees quivered with the cold and invisible motion of atmosphere.

"I'm withdrawing from my classes," I told him. He looked up, as if coming out of a spell. He got up and went to the stove, where he retrieved a little brass teapot engraved with the Chinese symbol for peace. He filled it with water, lit the stove, and set it down to boil. He handled the whole affair with an exceeding care, an attention to detail down to his pared and polished fingernails -- their placement in relation to the brass.

"Where will you go?" He turned and looked me straight in the eyes. I shrugged, looked at the floor, at a rug, at a dance of Persian patterns.

"I'll work. I'll get a job. I'll volunteer somewhere. I'll go out into the city. I'm going to live. Somehow."

He sighed. He walked to the book-shelf and took out a slim volume of poetry, bound in leather, kept with care. His reading glasses were sitting on the coffee-table, slight metal above the illustrated cover of a book on modern art. He took them, and gnome-like, licking his fingers, flipping through the pages, he found the one he was looking for. His fingernails were pink on cracked yellow, like a tender wound.

"Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother," he closed the book. He put it back in the shelf. The tea kettle hissed. He read like a child reciting the Credo.

"I'm going," I said. He was pouring hot water into a ceramic cup. He took a small bag with a yellow tag that said, "chamomile," and ceremoniously lowered it into the surface. The water took the little bag, it sunk like a submerged vessel and then disappeared below the surface of the luminous sea. Tea stain spread through the cup.

I tapped him on the shoulder, but he didn't respond. I took a book out of my back-pack, a heavy one he had leant me, I don't even remember the title anymore, and I laid it on the coffee-table above the modern art book.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" I walked quietly out of the room and closed the door. When I left it was still raining, but the rain had subdued to a drizzle. I headed down the streets, avoiding the still-flowing pools of water, cold from the long descent.

Conference

A practical entry. Conference is always annoying, but today it was especially so. Now I am going to comment in more detail on my impressions after I write this, so before any of you say, "He's a jerk! What a cad!" -- hear me out with patience, the one necessary.

Whenever I say anything in my conference, I'm sure that people don't listen to what I have to say. I make a speech and by the end everyone is crowding in to contradict me. Otherwise I'll state my opinion and the entire conference will move on, in effect ignoring me.

These are things that have happened. Now we shall take upon ourselves the unhappy task of finding causes. I am writing this because conferences have been, for me, an always rather unpleasant aspect of the Reed experience and because I think, by publishing my concerns along with my conceits, I will be able to improve myself, and we will all be able to begin thinking rationally about improving (if in no way else than self reform) on an aspect of the Reed experience that should be most beneficial but is often most banal.

Now first, I believe that I have a tendency to ramble in conference, as in writing. When I say ramble, I do not necessarily mean that my "monologues" are lacking in direction. I rather mean that I enjoy expanding my point, polishing it, rounding it, adding in unnecessary examples: I like the feeling of authority that comes from giving a lecture, and also the manner in which various possibilities open themselves up in my mind the longer I talk.

Now someone accused me and I have furthermore more than once been accused by others of making extraneous references to unassigned readings. For example today I compared Prospero to Faustus and claimed that Elizabethan playgoers might have been able to recognize Faustus as a prototype for Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest.

So the first thing I'd like to say about this is that it is extremely relevant and interesting to me. I anticipate this objection: "Keep those things to yourself if you like them, but we don't care; if you must, save them for later" -- well yes. Ideally I would keep those references to myself. I wouldn't raise my hand (I hope) to make a completely extraneous point, and especially not in order to be merely extraneous. But, on the other hand, these things occur to me in mid-flight, in mid-monologue, as it were, and I can't help but to say them simply because I'm speaking as I think, so what I think tends to be what I say. And furthermore the parallel is never my main point, but always simply something drawn up to support what I'm really getting at in the first place -- though it does fill me with wonder and happiness to have discovered this parallel, and it deepens my interest. Furthermore, I often explain the parallel in such a way that it does not feel to me knowledge of the original is exceedingly crucial. I am alluding to Faustus, but I am not *analyzing* Faustus.

The problem becomes deeper at this point. Because even though I may be able to understand myself that the reference to Faustus is interesting and relevant, I will never be able to prove it to the conference. Furthermore, to others there, I'm already engaged in a long monologue, which is in its way self-indulgent and conceited, so that to add touches like obscure references to works that not everyone in the conference has read seems, in this person's words, truly rude, and not a little conceited.

Do I mean to be rude? Is there some deeper conceit behind my failings? In high-school, I regarded most of the other students in my class as competitors. There was a teacher whom I wanted to engage, who knew the answers to my questions, and the other students didn't appreciate the subject or else had nothing insightful to say. I consistently dominated discussions and it was always my highest desire to grab at the teacher's attention, to get the teacher interested in me, to, on a low level, be recognized for my "brilliance," but on a higher level to engage in a good conversation about the topic with someone who knew it well.

In conference, I maintain the same respect for my professors, but I think my central failing, my tragic flaw, is that I don't have any respect for my fellow students. I'm not interested in their opinions on the subject, because I wonder what opinions they could really have. Now to admit this is to admit to being a misanthrope and a bastard, but please see what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to address a shortcoming in my character and make it understandable, make it clear to myself and others why I would do something low and dishonorable and why the action is wrong but the impulse is good. I believe that I don't truly wish myself harm, and because to make others dislike me is to harm myself, by extension I don't truly wish harm to others. That's the most pragmatic way of putting it, but I like to even think that I don't want to hurt others, that I don't want to lord over them, that I don't want to seek my own advantage at the price of another's pain.

The reason, ultimately, that I think I am deficient in conference is that I am not interested in the conversation. I am not apart of it. Is that a failing in myself? Is that a failing in the others? Is that a failing in the professor? I cannot with any justice blame anyone but myself. But how am I supposed to reconcile my own interests with the interests of a group without somewhat giving them up? And especially when those interests are by nature subjective, being intellectual? How can I be happy about pursuing questions that seem to me dead and unimportant? How can I learn something from answers that don't even engage my questions?

Suppose I read the Tempest, and the thing that really strikes me is that its like Faustus -- and this is my sole interest in the entire play, or rather, the only spark that, for me, keeps it alive. Am I supposed to put my insight away as irrelevant and listen to others make dull analysis that doesn't touch me, that doesn't engage me with the play, that ultimately is meaningless to me? This is not an insignificant problem, and I hope to the dear universe that it is not a problem inspired simply by some heinous and Satan-like conceit on my part -- it is rather the basis of a very important question: how in the world can we learn anything during a conference?

I could briefly expand on this by noting that the impressions I have about a work or an author that are interesting to me are often the most frowned upon things in the context of the class. On Shakespeare, today's discussion began with a question I asked, "What is his style?" The reason I asked this question was because, in my opinion, people in our culture sometimes idolize Shakespeare as a stylistic God and I myself simply don't see it -- I see nothing of genius, though some things very good, but I dislike the very idea of genius when it applies to that man, or any. Now this problem interests me, but it is beyond the scope of the conference. But at the same time, those things which are covered by the conference ("How does The Tempest reflect 18th century ideas of rulership?") I find to be either straightforward or obsolete, and they do not strike at my core, and unless someone can convince me that they are more worthy of discussion than my own questions, I think that to learn about these others is to waste my time on merely "scholastic" pursuits.

Or perhaps I should put it in the meannest and most conceited way possible: if we are a bunch of students who know nothing about the text, how in the world are we supposed to learn anything about it or overcome our ignorance of it if we simply discuss it among ourselves for some four odd hours with a teacher? Tremendous amounts of scholarship, commentary, hover over each and every word we read -- do we dare to think that our efforts to explore the text will dig nearly as deep as the hundreds of brilliant men and women who have been exploring the text for as many years, if not more?

So I submit this paper that is nothing more than damning evidence against myself before you, my inquisitors. I ask that you strike at me with the hottest and truest words you can produce from the very back of your throats. But I also ask that if you strike, please tell me who you are and how you know me. I have taken offense at comments in the past that make me feel reprehensible but give me no sense of the occasion wherein I offended (of which I am often most lamentably ignorant -- our errors, which are most glaring to others, are sometimes least obvious to us) and thus no hope of correction. I damn myself knowing full well that experience tempers our imperfections, and hoping to strike against my own. And may I always be the most bitter and acrimonious witness against myself, so that I am ever in conspiracy against my wicked natures that would themselves confer to overthrow me.

A Love Letter (Posted Mainly to Be Kept):

Hey,

I'm just writing to say goodnight. I dunno...I feel lonely, bad for no reason, now that school's started. Just working all day like I used to to depresses me -- I wish I were back home and reading at my leisure, where it's sunny and the days stretch on and there's nothing to do. But here I am. Work is my companion and solitude my most constant comfort.

I wish I weren't a complicated person and I wish that I didn't get interested in people, because I'm afraid those things will make you not like me and will make you not want anything to do with me, especially since now you're having all these troubles. Perhaps you're disturbed and I can feel the ripples of that disturbance gripping me, tossing me, overtaking me.

So I don't ask for anything, except that in asking for nothing, I ask the only something you can give to me, which is, for me, your all: if I tell you that I like you and I think you're nice and I look forward to seeing you and I enjoy being with you, I hope that this will make you happy because you feel the same way about me and because attraction finds greater joy in the company of mutual affection.

What I mean is this: I miss you and I think about you. I'm afraid feeling this way about people I meet, especially people I know only a little, is some crime and the punishment for that crime is longing and loneliness. But a bud has to push hard against the soil to come out of the winter and into the spring. I like your light.

Alex