1 Year 9 Days Ago

1. Such a beautiful time, when everything is possible again -- though I am nearly solitary. It pleases me to imagine that I have swapped beauty for beauty, such that the physical charms I've lost through the hard use of age have exchanged themselves somewhere in the aether for older, simpler allures, such as curiosity, spatial awareness, and the contemplative air. How I miss some people, though, B especially, and V, and even the awkward loves who I prized for some attribute or aura. Gone, they are gone. Will there again come into my life spangled streams of light like them? like D, and M, and the gentle nervous inflections of underloves like H? & what of the long impassioned talks, everything at once and each thing the hinge of all value? Then the doors of imagination and love swung open for me (though here I sentimentalize, as always). These small daily tasks, this learning of the basic elements of scientific work and artistic evaluation are difficult for me to attend with the most extreme focus, as Simone says one ought to do, & as I likewise believe. There is such a glory behind them, a rushing of light into which they are all swept as soon as I think outside the present problem, and even that presence itself is a flickering of unspeakable fire, and the flames twist together into such a torrent that I am overwhelmed at every blink or breath. & Now my past sits behind me in the flesh, though aetherially it slips into the pack of silverish pasts like a new set of fins into a school of gleaming fish. How I want to write, and how I love it, so much that I want to make my home forever in the library, or a monastery, and pore over manuscripts, mine writing & others' written, and let the glory of god and the infinitudes of little lightnings its echoes in each fall over me. How can I think of terror when there is such light? And what is that light but utter terror that, as Rilke says, "coolly disdains to destroy us"? And, to quote myself, "how can fire speak to inner terror?" or a spark of fire to the darkness? I see my mind dividing, shading everything into blackness and light, void and immanent presence, and I think, this is the only glory, the ultimate joy of which all other joys only participate like shades of color in varying intensity. Yet this, by all accounts, is mad. I am afraid of myself and of the inner reverberations that I hear when I go there, that overwhelm my whole sight & sense inside so I am rendered dumb and stationary and useless and utterly in bliss. This is the constant state of my "soul" when I stop to breathe, when I slough all the tasks & wanting away. The vapid inscrutable blackness of self (of Weil's gravity), and the rapid inscrutable abundant light that lies veiled behind all plastics & faces & trees. & oh the glory of this madness. How can I bring it down into, as Jarrell says, "the dailiness of life," and live it with grace and attention and as much precision as unsteady humans can muster, with openness, a reconciliatory hand, and peaceful feet? What is there other than the gift, the immanent gift, hand over hand, hand to mouth, in the mouth already, the taste, the golden swallow, the fire in the belly, the satiation, the want fulfilled as soon as it's "wanted," oh, what is there but this? "What a world, and such a world, that we should die," but feel that there is only light, to the point of distraction -- always in danger of illumination, of the swallowing up of either gravity or grace, to borrow terms, but ever more immanent is the light and the light and the light. Nulla dies sine linea, but why write when there are lines of light coursing & creasing & cavorting until we draw up silly, nearly in grief at our joy? And how not to write, when the mercy of god -- the bouncing of this light -- constrains us? I thrash, and cannot sleep, and am one molecule of glory abuzz with grace. O maker of light and setter-into-motion of me and of all things, o sustainer of & at every moment, constrain me to praise you, and teach me to live in the material world, rather than in the spectre of a light that eludes my speaking of it, but is ever present in my simple repentance & accompanying love.