Short Thoughts on a Long Subject:

The beauty and agony of mind is its ability to take something and transform it, even for a second, and then present to itself a possibility never imagined. All that can be asked of literature is the ability to do this and all the writer can ask of himself is the patience to learn the art of weaving his transformations out of the agony and struggle with things.

The mind makes preparations/for its ascension/and builds on ten thought things of/former ingenuity

Created and lost through the crack of time.

Standing low to the eagle eye is an obelisk/of raging blackness and silence a tone of progress/

As haunted voices leave the cave of bats/and pictures are left on the ochre walls /where light has wept.

When we contact ourselves directly what do we find? Do we find the noble self that calls to our dreams and to a higher nature? Or, do we find the dwarf which cackles like wild Loki when we waste ourselves in some useless fantasy?

The abyss is powerful and must be fought with powerful means.

Isn't it good to divest ourselves of our sentimental nature and to feel the urgings of the planet and space? And to make them our own?

We are suspended in a hellish world now because of two startling developments. One is that we have lost all concept of heaven and hell. These seem ridiculous when you perceive the physical planet. Yet, we know that for trillions of light years in all directions there is nothing. There is nothing but the constituent matter of space and our vast instruments and study of cosmology cannot make the fact any less cruel.

So, we are in a suspended state of sorts. The hardware of our brain stops the eternal flow and turns it back to some historical past and, yet, the hardened brain revolts at the thought of vast loneliness in the void of space.

There are only three (I think) things one can do about this particular dilemma. 1- renew the basis of religion 2- surrender to creativity 3- dedicate oneself to “improving society.”

But how does one do these if the essential vision of the time is that of empty black space and of the pristine planet poised on the abyss, rotating leisurely without a care of the creatures attempting to figure things out?

Perhaps one attempts all three at different stages of life. Religion is removed the moment you realize that its purpose is not to describe the reality in front of us and that we are brought into contact with richness and substantiality in contact with authentic spirituality. But self-interest demands that we be absorbed in our duties and our work, creative or otherwise, until it becomes an obsession and, finally, the American conscience catches up with it and we seek to improve the lot of society in some fashion. Or, at least, allow some of its problems to tumble through and disturb us for some bit of time.

Short Thoughts on a Long Subject:

California is a state of dissipation. Vital energy flows in and then it’s wasted on a specious freedom. The ‘dream’ languishing in the minds of mid-westerners is formed in Californians so you get all kinds of grotesqueries. And what one doesn’t get is an air of freedom, of creative vitality and the rest. People will say with wide-eyes and with ample, considerable enthusiasm that they are ‘creative’ or embarked on some creative project and then will go about producing some nausea of their own fantasy. If they looked through those wide-eyes they’d see that the fantasy – all of them – are being played out in the life in front of them.

Everyone, literally everyone is uprooted, scattered through each other by the speed of escape, crawling through each other for some ideas. California can be a perverse hunting ground.

1987

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