My sanity is collapsing. My thoughts are like boiling water, my mind is like a raging, turbid sea, and words, words come pouring out, words like raining, drizzling hailstones, chunking houses, grounding the plains in fickle ice. The air crackles, incessant static, and all vision is the snow and fuzz of bad reception. Feeling shudders through me, through a beating heart, through air-brushed skin, through hair and cool and itch; the same dull smell, the same clear taste. I feel like I'm floating in an immense space of clearness. The ever pervasive sense is the sense of time passing, time slipping away like minute grains, and everything is calamity.

Devices break -- TV's, DVD players, computers, the world is all one big heap of broken things. Metal upon corroding metal, foil on crinkled foil, broken, brittle pieces crushing the edges of even smaller and more brittle points. A glaring light runs through everything, or the sapping static electric of light, and even the edges of pure forms are dull, brittle, corroded, and bleeding with rust.

My love comes to me from the desert; a harsh desert, a desert of nothings, a desert of throbbing bodies and the scraping away and tearing of skin and the licking, nursing of wounds, and my love comes to me in the desert, from the desert, bearing a book, a cross, a sign, and while the winds blow, he says, "Take the way of peace, the path of the righteous; be happy and drink from the well hallowed wells where all is clear water, where leaves drift about scarlet in the night, where life is a burning of sacred light." And what do I do in the pure blue sky of his eyes? I spit to the winds, I would leave myself cold, I wrap myself in darkness and ashes and dust. My own personality overwhelms him, settles down on him like a thick, suffocating cloak of smoke, and I can't escape this haze, this horrible haze that clouds over everything, makes the rocks blacker, and shrouds the azure sky and makes everything dark.

When darkness falls I wish I could swim a million miles. I wish it were only myself trapped in the cold darkness of the rushing seas, jagged rock islands poking out of the water by my side, far right and left, but myself, storm tossed and freezing, blown by harsh winds and scattered by rains while always the cool stars above, always the quivering libidinous earth-bound mass below, struggling until my over-taut, grinded grunting muscles give way and I collapse, and the cool waters close over my head, invade my brain and still my breathing throat, my gaping gorge. I am heading for my special isle; swimming through the mass of sea back to my country, back to my home-land. There it's always warm and dark, there the breaths come in hot, soft whispers, there there is darkness to cover me, darkness to blanket me, and everywhere just the cool, warm, soft, pliable, wax-like curving edges to curve me into infinity and cover me with nothing. Finally in the dark and eternal night of unconsciousness, of non-consciousness, I slip into all being and all being resolves itself through me; the nothingness has become all and the all nothing.

Until that moment of pulchritude and consummation, there's only the world of colluding and colliding experiences. The fallen world. The world that still believes the consummation of all matter is God. All matter -- the mass of rolling atoms; atoms pushing in the wind, atoms striking in the void, everything, everything separated but just little specks, tiny little dots of infinite mass, separated by vast distances, the distances as vast as the distances between myself and all others, between me and my boyfriend, the widening gap that I can never feel through.

When I'm with him, when I'm lying with him, lying next to him, I wonder -- can I ever please him? Can I ever consummate his desires? I look at myself, the livid piece of meat that I am; I find no peace in his arms, because I'm always quivering, always rotting, always suffocating under the tenderness of his embrace. I think: is this my final chance for love? Is this my final chance for peace? My desires, my wretched ambitions to write, my desire for the consummations and unifications of poetry, and my labors, all of my labors are interrupted by the stretching of days, the stretching of arms, embraces, and the cold fervor of one heart beating next to another. As if I want to be myself, I want to burst out of myself, but I'm afraid if I am myself I'll lose him. So I conceal myself, I go into a deep shell, I go into hiding because the truth is, it's more important to me to keep him, more important to me to stay bound together in his knot -- just never to be lonely and most of all to be loved. So I have no real schedule and I'm quivering to him live like an uncooked piece of meat. I'm an incoherent jumbled mass of words that don't resolve themselves, words that fit like puzzle pieces with the wrong ends, desires that don't quite combine, contradictory desires, contradictory thoughts; how can I offer this tattered, broken, quivering thing, searching everywhere for unity in books, everywhere for unity in poems, everywhere for unity in art, to someone else, a fragmented decaying dropping collapsing colliding overheaping overfilled overstuffed overmade and united bundle of junk into collusion? I can't mix myself when I'm overflowing out of myself. I want only to escape from my life; I want peace.

But peace is far away; but peace is the crackling of fires; but peace is the darkness of death. When I go to the place of death I'll go to a land where all wrongs are righted; where no longer can I hurt anyone I care about, or break to pieces and shatter the objects and ornaments I most hold dear and love. Every walking, every journey, every moment is a subordinate moment -- subordinate to this great darkness that will bear no subordination. I'm ordained to die, and confused with every waking moment, yet so desperately clinging to this quivering, clinking, roaring, collapsing, rising and falling, degrading sea of shadows and darkness, feasts and flesh.

Love is a great light, love is a great heat, love is something to be treasured with the kiss of red like ripe fruit lips, and something that is so rare and so precious it is a little green-glistening gem, a ruby, a good ripe diamond, or the sweetness of bursting in and through the mouth, a grape. Love drenches through the body and soaks the soul like wine; love make everything inebriation, love pines away always a fire against shadows, always like a throbbing sun against the night. Here is quandary: I who have aligned myself most close with death, I who take good kisses from this dark but comely sister, how am I to love? How am I to join my breast with life's hot breast, feel the heat emanating always from his chest and every limb without some plaguing guilt? I wish I could sail far, far down the Nile into the heated pyramidal rising spaces of Egypt, and then be done in the mounds of sand covering every ground, and bury myself with the wind. But life calls me like the hot sun burning the edges of the pyramids, like the broken Sphinx's nose, well seen, and glowering eyes will not recall me from their gaze. Life is the making of choices, the pouring of decisions like the spilling of ink, and every drop of ink must be salvaged, recombined on the page to make something more than music, less than noise. A seeker of silences am I; I join quiet whispers together into sounds, not wondrous but soft and sweet, cooing like death, but always to be joined to unity of life is a throb and a pain, a continual raping and a birth. Jon, this is my love for you; my love is the birth, the dawning of warm blood rushing to my cock spreading like a light over my body, a light I can't dimiss or even flinging myself against the broad and bursting chambers of my heart resist, and the cist of compulsion bursts, emotion washes over me, and I am bathing in a sea.

Someday when the sun is burning down on my skin and the soft waves coo on the edges of my consciousness and my mind is pliable and soft and melted wax, and my lips have the honey-sweet breath of the dew, their due, I'll think of you and your warm body pressed against mine now; I'll think how I was meant to be a crackling mass, a burnt and gooey, roasted sweet, something to melt and sag and collapse. For only by burning, crackling, flaming and puckering in the heat of life can we yield to death; and only then does time collapse to rinds and lees of burnt, ashes of coffee, remnants and weeds and desert sand. Scatter me to the winds; burn me like my poems, my love, and scatter me to the winds. Blow harsh and cold and cool and leave the endless stretching, blue, and moon-reflected sky so calm.

The sound of bubbling madness; the insanity of a throated pitch; spears heading for enemies' hearts. Meanwhile loud rustling of wind and the quick clash of arms, the thrust of bodies head-long into flight, and far off flowers; a cool hyacinth shudders, curls, and falls by raging streams. The foam flecks the speckled rocks, a butterfly perches on the wetted blossom, licks, takes off. Now leaves rustle, and shrubs weighed down with pregnant berries. Menalcan is playing the pipe, puts down the pans, and with a rugged knife he cuts a fawn from tender bark. The sun is setting near the hills, mixing with the falls in brilliant streams of red and orange and gold, so that the chills are water running down like precious gems, like all silk hems of finely-woven sheens. In the decorated chambers, maidens dance with maidens to the music of the lute that rushes through the rafters and the floors, where hoardes of decorated men all gleaming in their iron mail clink clashing cups and laugh and sup on venison from recent fallen stags, who lay there quivering while the chinking arrow sank into their heavy hide, procuring flowing sighs of fresh and eager blood, while their flesh-stripped bones were left to rot, and the remnants were nourishment for all thick moss.

Virgil, Eclogue II, englished:

For Alexis, beautiful, pastor Corydon was on fire,
-- The darling of their master -- and nor did he get what he'd hoped.
Only in the densest branches, all of shady tips,
He usually came. There these foundless things, alone
Among the hills and forests spewed he forth with studied zeal:
"O crudely Alexis, care you nothing for my songs?
Pity us not at all? For death do you finally think me?
Even now the shadows, and coolness capture flocks,
Now thorny bushes hide even their emerald lizards,
And Thestylis in the rabid (for her reapers) heat
Crushes thyme on dinner with other fragrant herbs.
But with me and raucous (while I lust your steps
Beneath the ardent sun) cicadas resonate the trees.
Amaryllida was not enough for me to bear, bitter rage
And proudly prude? And neither Menalcan,
However black he was, and you as white?
O beautiful boy, exceedingly shouldst never trust to color
White privet blossoms fall, black hyacinths are gathered.
Hateful to you am I, nor do you ask who I am, Alexis,
How rich in flocks, abundant how in snowy milk.
Thousands of my lambs err in Siculian hills;
Milk does not lack for me, neither in the spring or fall, and fresh.
I sing those things as he, habitually, (if ever didst call fields)
Amphion Dircaeus in Actian Aracynthus.
I'm not even so ugly: recently I saw myself on the beach,
When placid by the winds stood seas. Before Daphnin I should not,
In your opinion, quake, if reflections never lie.
Oh! If only it were pleasing for you, with me in found fields,
To live in humble houses, and hunt deer,
And drive their mothers' young with greened mallow!
Along with me in the forests you'll imitate Pan on the pipes
(For Pan first joined together with wax very many reeds
And founded syrinx, Pan who cares for flocks, and of the flocks, their masters),
Nor repent yourself for wearing off by flute your lips:
What would Amyntas fail to do to learn the same?
I have a pan compact of seven different pipes,
Which, as a gift, Damoetas gave me once,
And dying said: "These are your master now";
Damoetas said, while jealous Amyntas watched.
Besides, I have two, unknown in the tucked-away valley,
Fawns, sparse even now with whitened spots,
Who twice a day will dry the teats of sheep; and these I keep for you.
Long since Thestylis begged to lead those off from me,
And will do yet, since you think shit our gifts.
Come hence, beautiful boy, oh! For you lilies in full,
Behold the nymphs bring baskets; for you the shining Nais,
Plucking violets pale and poppies' tips,
Narcissus and flower joins of sweetly odored anise;
Then with wild cinnamon and mixing other suavely herbs
With gentle, little yellow she weaves hyacinth and violet.
I myself will gather white of tender the downy apple
And chestnuts, which my Amaryllis once loved;
I will certainly add waxy plums (for there is also honor in this fruit)
And you, oh laurels, pluck, and you, approximate myrtle,
So placed since you mix sweetly odors.
You are a rustic, Corydon; nor does Alexis care for your gifts,
Nor, if for them most certain, would Iollas concede.
Oh, oh, what did I want for miserable me? With flowers the Austrum
-- Foolish! -- to fight, to cast off wild boars with flowing fountains?
Where do you flee, ah! demented? They live also, gods, in the forests,
And Dardan Paris. Pallas who founded cities
Herself is tenant; to us the trees are more placid than all.
The savage lioness hunts the wolf, the wolf himself the sheep,
And flowering willows sate the lascivious goat,
And Corydon you, o Alexus: whatever floats your boat.
Look, the bulls take up again on yoke the hanging plough,
And the sun doubles rising shadows as it falls;
Nontheless, love burns me: for what bounds hold back love?
Ah, Corydon, Corydon, what dementia has seized you!
Half-shorn your leafy vines grow on the elm:
Might you not something more worthy, of which use needs,
With pliant branch and supple thrush prepare to weave?
You will find -- if this one forebears -- another Alexis."

Virgil, Eclogue 1

M. Tityrus, reclining 'neath the shade of a spreading beech
With tenuous oat you meditate the sylvan Muse;
We flee the edges of our country and leave the dulcet fields;
We are fleeing our homeland -- you, Tityrus, light in the shadows
Instruct the woods to resonate your lovely Amaryllis.
T. O Melibeoeus, a god granted us this peace
For ever will he be a god to me, and ever will a lamb,
Tender from our flocks, his altar stain.
He, as you see, allows my cows to wander, and myself
To play those things I wish on rugged pipe.
M. I do not even envy, more admire; everywhere, wherever I go
The entire country quakes. What's more, I prod my flock
Forward for ills; and her, Tityrus, I lead with aches:
For here among the dense hazels, just now twins,
The hope of a flock, ah! -- she left them on the naked rock.
Often this evil to us -- if not for a wandering mind --
I recall had predicted an oak, heavenly struck.
But nevertheless this god, who he is, give, Tityrus, to us.
T. That city which they call Rome, Meliboeus, I once believed
-- foolish I! -- alike to this our own, to which we are often accustomed,
Pastors all, to dispatch tender kids from our flock.
So dogs are like to cats, so mothers their young
Thought I -- to confound great things with small, this was my fault;
Truly Rome raises her head as much above cities
As cypresses will turn their nose up at the fragile guelder-rose.
M. And what was, for you, the so great cause of seeing Rome?
T. Liberty, who late though she was, respected a laggard;
After the beard fell from the razor more whitely,
She paid respect all the same and, long overdue, she came
After Amaryllis had us, and Galatea left us.
For this I will admit: as long as Galatea held me
Neither hope of liberty was nor care for savings.
How ever many victims you wish came out from my holdings,
However much rich cheese was pressed for our ungrateful town,
Not ever weighed down with copper would my palm come home.
M. Amaryllis, I had wondered why, grieving, you would call the gods,
For whom you left his apples to hang on the tree;
Tityrus had left. The pines themselves, Tityrus,
Even the fountains, yes verily these trees would call your name.
T. What could I do? Neither could I loose my yoke
Otherwise nor elsewhere come to know such present gods.
There I saw him in the resplendence of his youth, Meliboeus,
To whom our altars fume each year for twice six days.
There he gave this answer first to my request:
"Pasture your oxen as before, my sons, and raise your bulls."
M. Fortunate old man, so the fields will remain yours
And however much you need, whatever you want of bedrock
And all this chalky pasture overgrown with slimy thrush;
Nor will unaccustomed fodder tempt those laden with birth,
Neither will the ills of neighboring flocks infect them.
Happy elder, here among well known streams
And sacred fountains you will capture the coolness of shade;
Here for you, as always, from the neighboring limits
Hedges that feed with salictian flower the Hyblean bees
Will often coax you to sleep with soft whispers;
There below the high cliff the hedge-trimmer cries to the heavens,
Nor meanwhile will the shrill wood-pigeons, your delight,
Nor the turtle-dove cease to moan on airy elms.
T Therefore first will winged deer graze in the clouds
And channels abandon fresh fish on the beach,
First overwandering both of their boundaries either the exiled
Parthian will drink from the Arar or the German from Tiger,
Before the god's face is forgotten from our heart.
M. As for us, others, from hence, will reach thirsty Africa,
And some will call Scythia and the rapid clay's Oaxen home,
or dwell in Britannia, deeply divided from all the globe.
How will I ever again, long from now, seeing the pauperish edge
Of my homeland, and the sod gathered roof of my hut
After so many years admire my kingdom, my crop?
A good for nothing soldier will keep these sweat-grown fields,
A hawk will tend this turf. Behold how civil war incites
Civillians' cares: for this we sowed the fields!
Plant, Meliboeus, your pears, now place your vines in line.
Come, oh mine, once happy flock of sheep, let's go.
Nor will I, after this, couched away in a green-grown cave
Watch you hang far away on the thorny rocks; no,
I will sing no songs; nor where I lead, my flock
Will you pluck the flowering clover or feed on weeping willows.
T. Nonetheless here, with me, you could stay this night
Above the ripening green: for us there are succulent pears,
Chestnuts soft, an extravagance of pressured cheese;
But look, far off the highest city tops already fume
And greater shadows glide down from the hills.

I started "Being and Time" this evening. Utterly senseless -- it makes me want to cry. I thought I knew something, that I could understand things if I read them, that I was moderately educated -- there was barely a sentence that made real sense to me and I can only claim a single section honestly interested me. And yet -- Heidigger is trying to figure out what *being* *is*. I *am* -- this concerns *me* -- I should be fascinated. But I can't help but think -- it's unanswerable, it's too obscure, it's...

I've been trying to figure out what being is my whole life. I mean, what existence means, and what it means to me, and whether it means (that is to say, communicates?) at all. But...did he solve the problem? Did he give a definition for being? More words to throw around at parties, I suppose -- impress people: "I'm reading Heidigger" -- "Will you fuck me?" The utter frustration of it! To think that you can apprehend and not know what you're apprehending -- perhaps it challenges me. It definitely challenges me. It challenges me like very few things I've ever encountered; like, in fact, nothing I've ever encountered. There's always a basis for any other question, always some point to claw at, to grasp, but nothing for the question of being except being itself. I'll keep you posted. Part of me wants to put it down and never take it back up ever again. And then there will be a major work of philosophy that influenced everybody in the 20th century that I don't understand. Whatever my carreer, I am a foreigner in my own time, to my own people, well read in ancient sources but ultimately outside of the loop.

This brings me to another question that I often ask: is there anything to be gained by all this study? Beyong pleasure? Is pleasure itself reason enough? Should it bother me that I don't understand how trees work, what a tree essentially is? When a moment passes I don't know what that passing is. I am, but I don't comprehend myself. The utter exhaustion of it. And whatever I write, whatever I think, is an unformed and unthought thought, misunderstand and misapprehended, lost to all comprehension like a quick flash of light in the dark, a raging spark that burns and sputters out, or some thing -- a meaningless nothing. It distances me further from religion, from poetry, from any validation -- how can I validate anything when I understand none of it? How can I, confronted with this nothing, affirm "O youth perspicuous in bloom" when these are images in my mind, but the source, the I, is beyond me? And yet it is comforting to think I enter the illusory world of knowledge, like a dream, like a mist, and through the comparison of one thing to another, I begin to understand this nothing by dividing it, splitting it into smaller infinities, smaller nothings, and rearranging each in a pattern of nothing, and affirming, "be". So I know that bloom is the growth of a flower, a flower the growth of the spring, and spring the growth of life, which is the opposite of fall and winter, death and nothing, being that springs from the absence of being. Youth too, is life, and perspicuous is a clear and firm affirmation, one of absolute existence, and I mean an eternal existence in bloom, in becoming which is not yet nothing but the apex of a movement away from it. My experiences collaborate with each other to give me no ultimate knowing but a prediction of what knowing this being might be.

Again and again it's the same thing -- I want to write something but I have nothing to write. Every time I sit down to write something the only things that I want to write are old and pretentious -- I started writing something in the vein of the Bible and it's interesting, but perfectly awful. It cripples me. I tried to begin, "Kevin was in trouble. He had three thousand dollars in gambling debts due by the end of the month..." but I couldn't finish it. How do gambling debts work? I haven't the slightest clue. Every time I sit down to write something, I feel like everybody is glaring at me. It's the awful comments I get from posting on this site, partly, and partly it's just the immense pressure of the past. That's cliche, but I just hate modern literature. Everything is trying to be...interesting; writers trying so hard to be interesting. I just want to follow a formula.

Another thing that I don't want to do when I write is research. I hate the idea of having to summarize facts and places and other people's ideas in my writing. I just want it to come from me -- I want to be able to produce the world and never be questioned on a single detail. That's why I couldn't start writing about Kevin -- because someone was bound to complain that it was unrealistic -- I hate realism! Realism has ruined literature. But so has fantasy; fantasy narratives are awful -- it's pure escapism. And what's wrong with that? Everything is about the quest to save the world, the brink of destruction, descriptions of fights and battles in the most ludicrous and cliche style to no purpose. Writing has to be redeemed. There has to be some quality about the words that make them worth it, otherwise I can't help but feel like I've been wasting my time. Like I'm just dying.

That's how I've felt, sometimes, about brushing my teeth, washing my face, showering. All these little, annoying things that aren't worth the time it takes to do them; but that's life. I don't like to think that I'm disintegrating. But at the same time, I don't really like being here. I said that last time I wrote, and I'm sorry if that is naive, pretentious, and etc. but...I feel impotent. I feel like I want to do something but I can't. Everything is a struggle. I lay awake nights worrying; I keep the fan on to provide white noise, just so I can go to sleep without hearing other people talking in the hall, keeping me up; ear-plugs in my ears, but still I keep turning familiar concerns over and over again in my mind and I just can't sleep.

Where am I going to find a job this summer? I haven't started looking. Why haven't I started looking? Because I have papers to write. But surely I could call places -- it just feels useless, and I give up before I've even started. And writing these papers, when I begin, I often feel like I have nothing to say. I'm afraid that I don't have anything to say, and that's why I spend so much time trying to write something, anything, because I desperately want to have something worthwhile to say. I know that I'm a good writer, in that I have some facility in constructing sentences and some appreciation for the play of language, so all I need is something, anything to write about.

I really hate all you people who read my journal, because you do nothing but mock me. If you don't have something nice to say, you should keep your big dumb mouths shut. There was that one girl who complimented me, said that I was well read, and that was nice. You know, folks, it isn't a competition. You don't have to prove that you're smarter than me and I don't have to prove that I'm smarter than you. Who cares who's read the most books, who can write the best, who is the most logical, who is the most poetic? All of these things are barriers to our expression of ourselves. I try and I try to please you, but this is getting me nowhere. It would be better to just attempt to please myself.

But how do I please myself? And if I please myself, am I done? The only thing that resolves the constant conflict of life is, of course, death, because the human mind is so unstable that it will always find some new anxiety to land upon as long as we are alive. Perhaps it's a survival strategy -- this has just been my experience; I've never been content for any long period of time. Of course, there have been times, right when I meet a new group of people or after some calamitous or amazing experience, when the whole world seems wider, when I'm constantly discovering new things. But eventually I return to my rut, and my anxieties, and always the pettiest things, so that, looking back, I can't even remember what I was so worried about before.

I spent the early part of this semester trying desperately to find a boyfriend, and now I don't even want sex. I thought that perhaps a man was the thing that was missing from my life, but I don't anymore. I mean, it's just too simple. Or maybe I've given up. It leaves me in a difficult position, because -- you're supposed to have someone to love, but I don't know if I care anymore.

I remember once I criticized a poem someone wrote about self immolation and he told me that I was immature and that I needed to work at soup kitchens. This is the kind of crap that bothers me about people -- why does everybody else have suggestions for me about how I should live my life? Why can't you people all just live your own lives? It's not that I don't care about you, but I generate enough negativity myself, and I don't need yours as well.

I was thinking about how life degenerates into conflict today; about King Lear, in fact, as an expression of people pitted in struggle, one against another. That's tragedy, when community collapses, and when things go to dog eat dog. I hate corporate executives, I hate people who pretend to be nice to you only to get what they want. I especially hate it when what they want from you is your body -- something so close to who you actually are, and yet so far. I'm not under the foolish assumption that my body is anything to want. I'm a very bad lay, I'll admit, when I don't like the person I'm sleeping with, and that's the case only too often.

I was considering becoming a hedonist, and doing only those things which gave me pleasure. But i don't really know what gives me pleasure. For instance, I don't take much pleasure in the company of others, but it's something that I need every once in awhile to avoid going crazy. If I spend too much time alone, in my room, I feel as if the entire world is passing me by. The only time I really feel at peace is during the night, when everything is dark, when you can't feel the world turning (because the stars are always obscured) and when everybody else is sleeping. Then I have time to think -- and if I don't stay awake and worry, I have time to sleep and dream.

I love to dream; there's something so soothing and peaceful about a good dream. Bad dreams are always terrible, of course, and if you don't dream, I think that's the worst of all, because the night passes in a flash in that case, and you have no extension of time in which to enjoy the sensation of being asleep. I hate it especially when you awake at 6 am and have to get up at, say, 8 o'clock, and you have this pleasant sleepiness hanging on your eyelids and you coax yourself back to sleep only to wake up, an instant later, to the feelings of dead exhaustion and an alarm clock. That click of the alarm clock sounding, which has tormented me ever since middle school, is the worst sound in the world. The mind fastens upon it, it is instantly recognizable, and it begins the whole day, along with the drudgery of brushing one's teeth, washing the face, staring sleepy-eyed into mirror, wondering how attractive one really is, showering (which is moderately pleasant if you've slept well, but not stimulating enough to cure insomnia's hangover), getting something to eat, and then rushing headlong into all the petty calamities, all the stresses, all the idle moments of another day wasted.

I used to feel that if I was reading, I was doing something useful, but lately I feel so little inspired or diverted by the things I read, and so slow to comprehend any particular passage, that I just seem to have wasted more time. One is never satisfied with a book; its either too long or too short, and it passes right over my head. If it's poetry, then the play of language darts in front of me, scampers off, but I can never quite grasp -- what's actually being said. Novels are too long, they degenerate into merely their plot. Analysis I never understand, although it fills my head with strange ideas. History is repetitive and disconcerting, biography is a dooms-day prediction, the news is the fulfillment of the prophecy, and what else is there to read? Gossip, jokes, humor. Every social interaction, you might notice, involves laughter. Or at least most of them. Whenever I hear people talking in the halls or at a distance, they're always laughing. Why is that?

Oh How I Longed

How I wanted embraces then, and how far I was from embraces
Then; embraces were far distant, lying on the grass,
Stroking caressing a well-scratched
Head of a dear one, eyes of a dear one, and oh how lips met
In embraces. The tenderness flooding through hearts
Beats only mine, like raw, an organ hung
To the wettened flaps, the flopping meat,
Much moistened veal. But oh how I long to
Feel every tenderness, every touch of finger-tips,
Warm when hot, and irksome with sweat, and how I lived
Through embraces – embraces with words, scattering across
The ear like the sweet, smooth sliding fingertips, and how I longed
To either join in or write it all down, distant and alone in embraces
Of only sound. Oh how I longed for embraces, either to run my hand
Across a well-worn, flat-skinned belly or else, to, touching pink and tender skin,
Be touched in turn; and oh how I longed for embraces – the whisper of grass
On the glands, the press of moving legs, and hands, yes, hands
Yes, how I longed for embraces.

There comes a point when a man can no more read than he can write, and when every word seems equal to every other word, and every experience, composed of mere words, is ready to collapse under his grasp as if it were made of no finer stuff than sand, and even metaphors slip away, being somehow irrelevant and useless, and entirely without shame. When I look around me, I am struck by the sheer inadequacy of things, places, and people, an inadequacy that redounds back always to myself. It is I, sleepless and alone, who am inadequate; my straining ambitions cannot be contained in a body, and yet I am bound to limbs, bound to words, bound to flesh. There is something endlessly unsatisfying about being human, which, if we would only allow ourselves time to think about it instead of running in every which direction, might strike us wholly and in the very core of our being. That all sounds, all sights, and all smells, not to mention memory, knowledge, and the very stuff of thought itself, are all composed and only made of singular atoms, convulsing and repulsed in an infinite void, is a thought to chill the spine and freeze the mind. What is this wide space of being? Where every atom, alone in its isolate, penultimate self strikes the final chord that moves the whole line, domino by domino, into being and touch and sight? Can this cruel world, infinitely large and infinitely distant, be endured?

All I know is that I am hated; I am hated and derided, disliked and disapproved. By whom? Faces, faces of the mass down below, faces labeled with words, faces always beyond and yet always flickering in the cold vision of my mind. Meanwhile I sit like a little crutch on the smooth chair, caught up in the expansiveness of it all; sleepless, timeless, collapsing into nothing when all I want is being. But not this being; that is the irony of death - we fear life. We want - a life, a particular life - not ours, but not death. Are these the only alternatives, to live or to die? Non-being seems scarcely worse than being, but scarcely better.

When I write, Im haunted round by many authors. Their whispering voices, as if craving the immortality they lack or the mortality I have, surround me as if I were slaying beasts for blood on the edge of Acheron, and each brings his toll to the resounding upper steel. It is a steel earth, it is a steel ground, all metal; the things springing out of it, little green things, can hardly hold our attention.

And yet what an amazing thing man is. I am not surprised that people worshipped him long after and before he was a god, the God. Is it less blasphemous that we should raise the creature of infinite complexity whom we do not understand, even to this day, in every department of every university - long lines of men accustomed to study! - to the status and level of a god, the God, than that we should lower him to our standard, lower him to our breath? But God is something like him, God breathes him into the air, breathes the wind into his body; he forges steel, he bends the earth, the dominion, that is domination, of all creatures winged or flying, earth-bound or crawling, swimming or circumscribed to sea, these are all his. And yet with a body like Narcissus' and a beauty like Appollo's, has he no justice? Am I infinitely alone? And yet I too am a statue - as he is - a lonely statue. Life devolves into ruins. Are you ever afraid that we are nothing more than a group of statues, or - true to the earth, true to death - that the statues we see lying round in broken columns round cracking temples are the truest portrait, most faithful invocation of our souls?

I like a certain rhythm in language. When I write, I like the phrases to come together in way that is pleasing to my ear, that flows; so much so that I forget all about meaning - I will repeat myself endlessly, just to hear something again that I like. When I was a youth, I would say, "Hello" out loud to myself, on a sunny day in the middle of the playground, just to hear my voice, to check that I could still speak. How fresh everything was then. And how good to be alone. I created entire worlds for myself, manufactured them, returned day after day. Always I was in the center of a vast cosmos to be saved, always threatened with the temerity of timorous danger. Now I create worlds in words; but they are somewhat more lonely, somewhat more empty; always I am caught by the rhythm like the smooth rising and falling of waves, and left on shore by the sea, waiting out, as if I were trapped on an island, abandoned, beached.

And for all that, what a curious thing it is, solitude. Because solitude cures nothing. To wander around on one's own is to be in pain. But I can't find a way not to - I cant find a way to connect with others. I try desperately - but it is not a simple matter, I think, of being with other people. One can be lonely, as they say, in the middle of a crowd. Because the crowd doesn't turn towards you, the crowd doesn't notice you, and I think that if a pike came through your heart and your blood bled all over the floor, they would hardly think but for fear of themselves and it would always be their loss. But it cannot be my loss, not my loss to them.

What ridiculous creatures we are, or want to be. For love of one another we would go so far as to put each other inside ourselves - the intimacy of a surrounding embrace, being contained like being wombed, returning to birth in making life - and yet, for all the effort, if we could have it that one skin enter another, if we could crawl into the deep folds of another human being, but for his own pleasure, I scarcely think he would know we were there. Or his pain. Wars, loves, sorrows - everything is communicated but incommunicable, and in the space of this I can only feel awe or emptiness. If it is awe, then I immediately turn to God, some feeble recollection of a substance, the thing that makes all things; if it is emptiness - well death is hardly more bitter, and hardly less rewarding - or it couldn't be less rewarding. Couldn't possibly be. I have heard it said that there is a certain providence in the fall of a sparrow - but I think it is my providence, it is my own mind, rambling and turning in on itself, and consuming everything in its wake - or it is a metaphor of the dying sparrow or it is just the collision of atoms in a world colliding with atoms, by which I mean my mind.

Give me whatever excuses for withholding your love. I can take them. I have embraced a world of pain before, and I can do so again, and I even expect that it will get worse, for all things degrade with time. This expectation, this bitterness I can bear - for there is always in becoming accustomed to such things the chance and hope of a still heat that still, nonetheless, is heat; passion is hardly less consuming, but much more sweet to be a burning, smoking forest of rage and pain than to be left cold and alone. Serenity is akin to solitude, but much more precious and more rare. It is repose in oneself. I wish I could rest without my hatred of the wide world, the wide world in front of eyes I can't efface, and the wide sound behind ears I can't tear, and the wide touch behind feelings I can't dismiss, and a love and a need that will not go away.

Send grieving word to Aurea, first, most splendid daughter of the dawn,
For it was she who rose with rosy cheeks and full, moist lips
To turn the seething tips of poisoned shaft from Aragon, her own late love;
Just as a dove flies through the sweeping meadows where thressyla grows
In powdery white tufts extending with a purple vibrance like the setting sun
At dawn of death, so she crowns the pallid corpse with flowing tears
Like flowing Phlegython to burn his cheeks and prays for Lethe’s sweet
Waters; for there is a hill deep in Acheron, secluded in among
Numberless hills in ghostly procession – Taramount, the highest of the giants
Leads them in procession and they chant a sullen song that mixes
With the groaning brook. No lack of lotus here, and corpses mix
With lazy drift-wood ‘til they tumble off the cliffs where forgetfulness
Mixes with that river of burning pain. If you see a corpse wandering here
In full array, still garmed with tattered clothes, his hollow sunken eyes
Will take you with his longing, rape you from your life, and it is enough
To make you jump into the waters, cool and flowing to the neck, – Oh virgin!
Such was the coldness of your gaze like ice that blazes
Across the fields with harsh winds, in the winter when snow like a thousand mosquitos
Buzzing round sucks out the bloom of youthful life. Flowers fell like garments,
Purple roses cut by errant breezes, and your tears would neither cease
Nor yet did your face dry, like one of those crags, endlessly in torment
By clashing shores. Still I have seen you when the light of the rising sun
Crowns your pallid features, and your long locks tumble down
Upon the youth you mourn.

Iliad 1.1 - 7

The rage, sing goddess, of Peliadan Achilleus,
Wrathful, that set thousands of Achaians into pain,
Hurled to Hades many brave souls
Of heroes, and made them prey for dogs
And all fierce birds, while the will of God was done
When first they stood apart in strife:
Atreides, king of men, and god-like Achilleus.

I'm about to run off to class. I have to do 90 pgs. of reading for French tomorrow, read several articles for Latin, finish Paradise Lost...I'm going to go blind! I love the Greek reading we're doing (though I'm ashamed to admit it...loving a rhetor is loving rhetoric); Virgil is done. I'm posting the following poem -- the title is perhaps a bit heavy handed. The diction is archaically paratactic, but I like some of the images...it doesn't go anywhere. If anything, it's ekphrasis. If there's anything I really am trying to get to work, it's the ending images. There should be a sentiment of beauty and loss hanging over the flowers, and colors gradually reveal the blazing sky that shines on Lancelot, just as he catches sight of Gwenevere. Never before did his armor gleam so bright, but it seemed malevolently so, as if God conspired with the sun to make him first among men; his beauty yields to death, and so the flowers to the shades of Hell. Otherwise: I'm not sure if the poem is finished.

Les Fleurs du Mal

Infernal dreams, unearthly triumph, all Hell
Raising hollow cry I sing, that rings and rings
Through long caverns where shady things
Slide across the brittle rock and wasting sludge
Glugs in falls and jets across the burning chalk,
Then delays in marshy bogs that feed
The sword-like reeds among which
Flowers grow: red shining like the ether
First in sunset, when the mournful swallow
Sings her lonely lays; gold growing in among
The sweetened yield of bees; blue like azure sky
That burns across the sullen mid-day sun,
And yellow shining like that sun, and silver
Like a gleaming knight, like Lancelot, when first perceived
White lovely sleeves or peach of Lady’s skin as sweet
As grieves him to behold; and the Lord of all who knows
Makes him shine the brighter, just as leaves become
All colors, rustle in the sapless wind, conspicuous in fall;
And so the rosy clouds dispersed are wider lost than rosy dots
Small among this slight bouquet.

Another busy day: four classes (three conferences and a lecture), therapy, a performance, orchestra rehearsal (so make that five classes) and a rehearsal for the upcoming Bachannalia on Friday (at 4 in Prexy -- if you know where that is, you should come). There will be more rehearsals through the week, plus I have a concert on Sunday (and consequently a dress rehearsal on Saturday). Other than that, I have to find a job and a place to live over the summer; oh, and I have three papers to write. ;-)

Speaking of writing, I'm thinking of paring down my prose -- again. Ok, so I go through this "my prose needs work" thing every few months, and inevitably my complaints are flowery, a surplus of mannerisms and repetitive sound. What I want is something straight-forward and without complication; I want to really speak to people. Perhaps it's because I crave attention -- but I want to describe things and I want people to read them and respond without leaving me sly comments about how stupid I am. At the same time -- I want to like my prose -- I want my prose to be something that's well constructed and not just easy to read, but at the same time worth reading. I'm not writing a newspaper here, to paraphrase Mallarmé.

I suppose that one of the reasons I've tended towards Ciceronian periods and "Chateaubriandisme" (a great adjective -- I never knew it existed until George Sand...it means flowery romantic shit prose, apparently, although I personally like Chateaubriand, despite his "Genius of Christianity") is because I secretly fear that my life is boring, so I try to write about nothings that have nothing to do with me and dress them up in frosting and garnish, my desperate plea always, "Please read me, please...look, I have apodosis and sly allusions".

There's a blog-writer who calls himself Geek-Slut. He writes about his sexual escapades. It seems like every week he has sex with at least three or four different guys. To me, that seems life. I mean, however sordid it is, he actually has adventures -- he has something to talk about -- the "what have you been up to lately?" portion of the conversation doesn't end in, "not much, you?" -- he launches right into a catalogue of lovers that would would make Homer jealous. Now, I don't want a catalogue of lovers; but I do want to be able to say, "I went to the beach and saw something shiny that changed my life; I saw God rolling in with the tide." But I don't have the license to say such extravagant things; that's not the nature of my life. My life is workaholism (hence Reed College), vanity, and dashed expectations; longing and melancholy stained through with pleasure.

One of the reasons I'm so obsessed with writing -- I want to begin a great work. I want to begin my masterpiece...something that will sing to the world (presumptuous yes, vanity -- time will tell); I want to have produced, at the end of my life, one perfect crystal cut to quality. My own Sentimental Education or my own Eclogues. I keep trying to begin, but I keep failing. I read (whilst perusing the biographical note in a volume of Pound's "Cantos") that Ezra tried to begin his Great Poem again and again, but never succeeded until late in life, and then perhaps only marginally. Ezra Pound, whether I like it or not, is my model. I haven't read much of him, but I know who he was -- an amateur linguist who had an obsession with great literature and an ardent desire to connect with the past; in short, a studied romantic. OK -- you lit majors out there, prepare your hate-mail. But that's who I am: an admirer of the past, a collector of dead tongues; dazzled by outmoded styles and cliche, looking for my voice, my vice, a word, the Word.

A Field of Crimson Rose
 
Dieu, faites couler de nos lévres une nouvelle chanson
Long have I suffered, long have I plucked
The stems in vain, and watched the green
Stain ripe my rough, red skin.  Long have I stretched
To the cold winds, and let my voice
Extend across the plains.  Burning flame;
Hear the thunder; I fear the cold, cold rain. 
Une goutte de l’eau
Chancelait au fond de mon abîme,
Et tombait comme éclate la peau
Douce de mon chagrin.
What is this scent of rose, deuce and sweet
That wraps my fevered lips?  My heart
Grows in soft repose beneath the grass,
And the soil rises to the tips
Of my bleeding, blooming fingers: take this,
The harvest of my songs, and bring it
To the airy deep, to the place where shadows
Flicker in the mixing light, where rivers
Quiver and fall the crossing heights, and tumble both
To sticking, gripping pitch.  Feel black
Break with the glowing red, erupt in fire, and dread
The inspiration from above:
A field of crimson rose.

Will you cry for them, soft and subtle tears? You were sitting on the edge of a hill, legs stretched long out over the little tufts of stubbly grass. The city stretched into the land, the land stretched into the sky, and the sky was hanging like a pall, like a mask, like a thin strip of gauze, all across the blanketed earth. The slight shudder of wings clasping liquid, in clouds, and moving among the clouds, and the clouds drifting white and lazy like coagulated drops of cream dispersing through a clear, hot stream, approached your ears. You heard music, just a faint voice, in the distance, like blood trickling down from lips, or a stream poking through the collosal rock of a sandy scrape-and-tear projection, whipped in the extension of air. It is cold in the high reaches, and a wind coming down from the sky shudders you. The voice is not speaking in any language, the world is murmuring and you don't understand what it's saying. Each word is a tremble flowing into the next word and crying into a cacophony of three-hundred sounds that coalesce into a single, strong, imperceptible whine and a buzz. There are little dots of red way down yonder. There will be bees buzzing among the flowers -- the flowers in spring-time, the trees peaked out like bouquets, lovers' hands offering fruit. Teeth sinking into golden apples, races and love. Did you proffer her wine at the banquet? Her hair decorated with pink garlands, and the slight of satin waving across her breast, and falling and scraping the ground. The smooth stone rocks back and forth on sandled feed, impatient whines of conversation, a snatch of a memory whistling through the air that you can't quite tear apart. And then the long tables, the white canopies, and big red bowls of plastic punch. A flimsy plastic ladle pours a glass. This is not the sweetness of wine (which is bitter, but only for poets), and it courses down your chest and leaves a cold cess-pool in your stomach. All these things stretching up like a red eye-sore, or a long and tawny hill, breaking into crops of rock.

Where is the tall glass building? A tie hanging from a black-suited chest, and outside are stretching more buildings, and the McDonald's and the vegan who is serving lunch, thick slabs of cow. An eagle perches on the branch, picks, preys at the berries growing in poisonous clusters, stabbing with its beak like piercing, the spoiled juice flows sharply down the crag like drops of rain, slams upon a rat, curious in deception, and wings off. The endless flat tops of the city stretch out like the days and nights. Where was love in the city squares and the stretching lights across and down the streets? You followed her, vague promenades, always through a blue dress or a pink gown, always a tinceled scarlet of beauty hanging gems around her neck (her white neck) always under marble statues stabbing swords into the brazen air. Through great crowds of many vestments, and many heads, and flows of many thoughts. All pulsing, if you could hear the deafening roar like the crashing waves. One judgement attacking, another receding, who knows how many knives they've plunged into how many hearts in the dark of their fantasies? Its amazing that murders happen, not once or twice, but more often, only on paper.

Long vaulted cielings; the vault of the heavens, the sky constrained. She was no great affair. Black already peers through the windows like a ghost or a foreigner; long ranks of zombies, clutching bloody fingers, hungry; constant war is life; is there nothing to love? Not in bloodshot eyes. A scrawling pen. Many scrawling pens. Many fingers moving. A whole deafening valley of fingers moving; the dead dragging the dead dragging the dead.

And sitting by the banks of the river Chebar, I saw the dead come to life. They picked themselves up, they would live; some broke into mausoleums looking for artifacts; old priestly garments they stole from museums; others wore crowns; they stumbled about on the streets, or they stole bones from the graveyard and put together great wings, windless flapping, trying to fly like giant skeletons of old pterodactyls, and with many glittering rubies and emeralds on their fingers, and some wearing parchment and the scabs of Greek letters. Some lit fires and cracked their knuckles over the fires; some clacked their clacking joints in the aching cold. Beggars watched them and followed by example, took of their skins and collapsed in the streets, and stinking piles of flesh were everywhere. On the third night large boils developed under their chins that were no longer chins; deep rings beneath eyes that were no longer eyes; and the whole heap boiled and hissed like a viper, and red as a gardner, ready to strike.

Cry for Lila, cry; she had the folds of beauty like a perfect rose; she grew in a desert wasteland where the waters always trickled and every tree dripped with a dewy honey. There were violettes and lilies everywhere, and all the hills were purple. When she stretched out her hand, the music came to a high lull and everything was frozen; snowflakes drifted down, looped, glided, fell in each other on heaps gathering on heaps of promises, like the white silk folds of her dress that dragged on the ground. The earth is very frozen, black, and very, very deep.

The Soul

Does it exist in the deepest breast? Does it call and feed, both early in the morning when crepuscular dawn lifts her rosy mantle over the veiled and cloudy mountains, under the roaring and raging seas; and at night when the stars, shining in their brilliance, speak memory to the darkened skies?

A slight flame flickers -- or is it a roaring fire? This fire, descended from the sparks above, and yet infernally weaker, suffering, by degrees, its fall, rolls about a vast field of tumble-weeds, sparks forests growing thick with vines, and destroys the fields of flowers where the bees buzz in the heat of summer, swarming now around white lilies, now gathering pollen to make sweet honey, the dripping poetry of men's lips; the roses burn, red and blue with lilacs, green with greenest grass. Stare into these flames, stranger. What do you see? The reflection of your soul, your eyes?

Your eyes are glassy blue; your eyes are deepest black; your eyes are autumn brown. Stranger, who are you, gazing at the destiny of ages? Do you see the tall towers fall and crumble? Do you see the mist settle about the ramparts like ghosts? Do you see once proud man, clutching in skeletal hands (his breast-plate worn upon his chest) his rusted spear? Surely this was a time for stabbing, long ago; surely blood accrued and stained the dirt, stained the grass, stained the blue-decked fields; where once all was grassy space and grains waist-high, now is scuffle and muck and blood, and now is deserted and bones.

A finger, broken off, the slight bone of a thumb. What harp did you hold, what chord did you pluck? Did you sing songs, someday by the tumbling fall, when the ivy cloaked the cave especially thick, or the vine, growing green with new grapes? Did you sing love barely fresh, did you sing wine in a time of harvest? Did you watch strong men stamping across the fields in thick, broad steps, reaping and sowing grains, all kinds, the thick seeds and the small, in autumn and spring? In spring when the snows first melt and trickle in drops, through summer when they fall in rushes and even to winter when they still and clot, hanging a promise on the tapestried ridge?

A world-black space, cracked and speckled, the bottom receding into earth-brown, rising into peaks and promontories, stretching out into legs and hips and reaching arms; on the right, a child, perhaps no more than three years old (but millenia in terms of earth, and he never existed); on the right, the young but ancient mother. Or is it his sister? Swaddled in a cascading cloak that finally tumbles into a stream of vertical lines and ends with the support of two paw-like feet, separated only by two glaring borders from the brown fundament, but poised against the raw, black paint. Her hair is dark, and gathered together like a magnolia just budding from the soil-brown scarf wrapped many times about her temples. An ear, jutting like the handle of a teacup, interrupts her oily mass of hair, and it is interrupted, also, by the mountainous patterns (and stretching plains? -- but in any event, pure triangles) of the scarf, which, by consequence, begins to look (bonnet-like) a boat sailing small on the blackened mass.

Her lips are curved into a slight smile, and the space before nostrils and nose (a diagonal line from the temples (scarf-swarthed), diverging in a little jut) is lightly freckled, spotted with time. Her aubern face is not, in the least, fair by powdered makeup, but a certain natural glaze colors her features by absence of form (i.e. the jutting black). Beneath the cloak is a lined and wrinkled vest and then, her breast -- bare skin. How would you like to touch the voluptuousness of her bare skin? To trace the smooth idea in mind? The pulse quickens in the remembered sight of a lady. She, staring off into space, her empty gaze touching (like empty hands touching in the absence of presence), reaching out for a child.

Who is this child? If not for the gravity of a several squared and curved bench (pluming out into quills and peackock's eyes) she would fall into endless nothing. But she sits, hunched back, falling forward with extended hand, open, not grasping, and meanwhile tender limbs stretch strenuously toward her, across the divide. Is she mother? Is she sister? Is she the latent object of an erotic desire? Would you, small child, like to touch her skin, carress her lips? Do you see the reflection of a child in her eyes, do you see again your face, do you see yourself, multiplied throughout the earth in eternal birth? You see nothing, you think nothing; if a latent desire, then hidden, deep hidden in the smoothness of your skin, hidden like the numbers of dissheveled hair. And yet your eyes look out towards us, gazing as if into a mirror, a reproach. Lips curled into a slight sneer, hands almost like blocks, overlapping; the mother puts a single out with some generous care, but you stretch your entire little body until it might snap, and try to break the confines of your tomb-like chair. You want, and legs bend and push as if striking against a wall of solid black. Trapped out there in that mass; to be a figure; the absurdity of it -- an ancient Greek! Stressed with becoming, and waiting with a laid down burden. Is your tiny springing form, full of receptive, eager life, the cancellation of passive motherhood extending into darkness? The womb is ultimate death? But the edges of the circle are browned, and brown, and cracked with dirt, the solid earth. These shapes, a myriad of triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles; like the architecture of our bones and our bodies; make something of nothing and brew in our minds the bubbling stream of awakening sleep.

Today is a catch-up day. My parents have been in Portland this week, so I've been hanging out with them, going to restaurants (eating good food -- Indian, Italian, sea food, coffee, cakes, deserts), driving all over the place (we went up to Canon Beach) and generally enjoying their company.

WARNING: WHAT IS WRITTEN BELOW IS AN EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE BIT OF PERSONAL MUSING ABOUT MY JEWISH HERITAGE. THESE ARE MY THOUGHTS ABOUT MY JUDAISM AT THIS PRESENT MOMENT. I DO NOT (AS IRONIC A THING TO SAY AS IT MIGHT BE) MEAN ANYTHING AGAINST ANY INDIVIDUALS BY WHAT IS WRITTEN BELOW. SINCE JUDAISM IS A VERY TOUCHY SUBJECT FOR MANY PEOPLE, I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU NOT TO READ WHAT IS BELOW UNLESS YOU ALLOW ME MY OWN THOUGHTS AND ARE WILLING TO EXAMINE THEM WITHOUT DECIDING THAT I OUGHT TO BE STUCK ON THE END OF A SHARP STICK. WHY, ON ANOTHER NOTE, SHOULD I PRESENT THESE OPINIONS ON A PUBLIC WEBSITE AT ALL? BECAUSE THEY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND WOULD BEAR MUCH FRUIT FROM PUBLIC SCRUTINY WHEREAS, CONGEALING IN PRIVATE, THEY MIGHT HARDEN INTO A PERMANENT AND REVOLTING MASS OF PREJUDICE.

I offended my sister. Some of my views about Judaism...and I was mad at her. So I said some things I shouldn't have...I called her a Jew. She called me a traitor. I suppose I am a traitor. There is still a sour taste in my mouth from this past summer, the Orthodox Jews...I hate them. I hate their closed in world, I hate their stupid doctrines, I hate their neat lives and their little community enclosed and bound by tradition in which there is no one room for anyone else nor for the real world. And by extension, I hate all Jews who make being Jewish a special part of their identity -- it's the religion I hate, the religion, the whole rotten idea of a chosen people. It is not necessary in the world today; it is deadly.

There are those who think that one can be Jewish without believing in God. I think that's nonsense -- Judaism was born out of the Hebrew Scriptures and the observation of the "commandments"; the Jewish heritage is membership in an exclusive group of xenophobes who fervently believed they were the chosen people of God and who brought (it is a painful thing for me to say, but I think, in some respects, true) the hatred of others upon them through their own intolerance. As a national policy in the Hellenistic period, the Hebrew religion did not work -- diplomacy was, to the Israelites, an unknown art, and hence their downfall. Since then, the Jewish religion (which is, I think, a reaction to rather than the continuation of the Israelite cult, in the same way that Christianity is a reaction to the Israelite cult) has been remarkably succesful at maintaining a series of widespread (diaspora) communities that have taken little direct part in the world around them and have consequently brought upon themselves, through separation in times when separation was not tolerable, much loss of life.

Of course, there have been and are legacies that I identify with, that I do not abhor. The idea of a messiah, of a teleological end in history, of a final justice and perfection in man -- this is not to be taken lightly. Whereas some peoples of the ancient world saw civilization and life as an inevitable decline from resplendent order into rough chaos, a few Israelite thinkers, the prophets, dared to reverse the course of history and projected sorrow into the past with the burning of the temple, joy into the future. They recreated God in the image of time, and it was time that would reveal to them the face of eternity. The idea of a God perpetually present and absent produced much and beautiful literature, and the peculiar virtue of the Jewish people has been an attachment and devotion to the study of that literature. Even more has been produced -- the Jews are perhaps a people of poets; recasting old traditions in new and ever more beautiful conceptions; Sinai gave way to the Torah, the Torah gave way to Kabbalah, Kabbalah gave way to the mystic doctrines of the Hassids...

But I don't like what I've seen of modern Judaism. We are enslaved to the past. Moses has superceded God, the Holocaust has weighed down on our creative spirit, we are perpetually afraid, and we draw into ourselves. The orthodox memorize their scriptures and set them out in great detail in charts, drawings; there is almost a scientific precision -- but purchased at the cost of wisdom! For them there is some joy in their communities and their timeless rituals, frozen perpetually in place, but what is there for the rest of us? Guilt. We are ashamed of our culture, which is easily reduced to caricatures; we are ashamed of our scriptures, which contain much that seems backward and out of this world; we are ashamed that we are not Christians, or that we are not Americans; or we are ashamed that we are too much Americans, too much Christians. We are outraged that we were persecuted; we are outraged at our ancestors for allowing themselves to be persecuted; we are outraged that the world associates us with wealth; we are outraged that we are so wealthy; and yet all our friends are Jews, and yet all we talk about is Judaism, and yet whenever we comes across the word Jew in a book, even when the words are scarlet with revulsion, we feel a secret delight. We love, we have always loved, the spotlight.

I don't like my legacy. Why is it that the biggest quandary for modern Jews is intermarriage and assimilation? Do they think Judaism will disappear? It is historical fact; it can never disappear; or if it disappears it goes the way of all flesh. And what loss if it does disappear? Do things not become irrelevant? Do they not die? Is it responsible to place oneself against the mainstream for the sake of preserving something that drew its identity from its opposition to the mainstream in the first place? Individuality for the sake of individuality? And I have to say, I am angry at the Jews. I am angry at the Orthodox for sticking out like a sore thumb; I am angry at the cultural Jews for sticking out like a sore thumb; I am angry that everybody knows who we are, because we are Jews. That everybody draws attention to us, because we are Jews. And why are we Jews? Because we said we were Jews! And what if I don't want to be a Jew?

Then I am still a Jew.

Once a Jew, always a Jew. Because the rest of my people desire so fervently to preserve their Judaism and are so ardently in the lime-light, Judaism will continue forever. And as long as it continues, my life is in danger. There have been many of us who have tried to separate ourselves from the mass, heading towards destruction. But it is in vain to struggle against a stampede without being swept away! As long as Judaism continues, then, I try to separate myself from it, deny it, get it out of my system. But for the very reason that I must deny it, I am not free from it. And despite my fervent desire to...to assimilate, to become part of the mainstream, to join in with the rest of the world, that very desire brands me, now and forever, a Jew. And what is a Jew?

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?