Circumabulation II.

Sight, Flight, the luck of the draw ...

Somewhere a man existed who made an attempt to raise the human person to the optimum height of divinity. Of course, he met a bad end, but that should not cause us to discolor his work. Never mind. Religious people annoy me.

Eliot, when you wrote: Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the shadow ('The Hollow Men,' V.) ... Where are these hollow men, and the ones who write about them? That is, to me, the most telling critique of your work. [Now keep in mind that the only and BEST way of critiquing Eliot is to talk to him as though he were still existing.] ... But I've no wish to critique Eliot. Instead ...

A day came when I fancied myself a poet ... Not to be! Yet there was an intriguing banter proffered by our Eliot: 'Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season' (Gerontion).

What thoughts! I think I know, my friend ... : When I get sober, I cease to have thoughts worthy of their season. I know no peace. Eliot has failed. Nothing but torment scrapes the dried flesh of our mortal lives. So fuck off, and listen to Mahler.

It is nearly impossible

Yet it is nearly impossible to languish in sorrow when one still has the ability to surround oneself with artifacts of fine minds ... Botticelli on the wall, Bach on the box, volumes of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, on the shelf ... Some fragments of philosophy: only those parts that still speak to the person of this moment; forget about immutable human nature (no such thing!) and recall only the trials and tribulations of THIS DAY. Such is the locus of the human frame, which frames a bit of the All, and calls it Life. So my time as a willing slave to the most beautiful of women -- Was that time a waste of my perennially rejuvenating self? Not at all. As I sit here by my window, tapping out these words, I am painfully aware of waste. Not of self, but of time. The major terror of strife is not the danger of the strife itself, but the inevitable deflation that occurs when the strife has ended. Empedocles seems to have known this, for he brought in Love as a balancing force against Strife. Another comforting fiction, this. When I seek the warmth of my beloved's embrace, Strife must depart, and Love must shine ... Yeah, yeah, sappy poetical notion ... But it is a true feeling, as much as feeling can ring with the piercing clink of truth.

Circumambulation I.

When the past reaches out with dessicated tendrils to draw strength from the moist effluence of Life -- we have a problem. I've been reminded (with handcuffs) of some old traffic tickets going back nineteen years! There is still a warrant for my arrest. My response, addressed with force to those neo-nazi cunts, was simple in its elegance, and is as follows: Go perform a painful biological act with thy subservient self!

Release was gained by the force of physical necessity. Apparently, it is against the law to prevent a severely intoxicated person from going to the hospital. So those uniformed pigs went against their nature and shipped me off safely to a comfy spot, where I ate good food, jerked off to nurses, and slept like an anaesthetized bear.

Home again. Much to ponder ... and destroy.

Needless to say, I am now keeping my face out of the main thoroughfares, and buying my booze (and biding my time) through the agency of a trusted other.

My time is bided. A critical crack to the neck will give me great solace. But this is, of course, all fiction. no one should take my murderous fantasies the least bit seriously.

So!

The slackening and sickening of reflective life ... the drained mood of selfish concern ... the purposeless ones meander through avenues leading only to a silent torpor ... the continual maintenance of a persona (knowing damned well nobody cares!) ... the cradling of one's stillborn brats in slitted arms that show like graceless wounds upon a clumsily tortured slave ... the final cudgeon-blow to the head of one's own loves ... the petty excuses, the terror of Night, the hateful face of the Sun ... the growth of a pattern out of all this! -- and Why? Demons don't just dance in mediaeval forests: they circumbambulate right here, in the sad cast-off terrifyingly fucked-up thing we call the present.