A Place to Grope to

There is no voice that approaches bone as close as the voice of the disembodied ghost, who has not yet learned to live.

In learning to live, we break with the written record, which is a record of failures to act, and march in the footsteps of Jesus, who wrote nothing, or the Emperor, whose speech occasioned a condition of emergency. We are like a crying baby, which is supposed to make one of the sounds most discomforting to the human ear.

More from the philosopher: "It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future."

Isn't it helpful as a stylist to be able to stipulate, "in the fresh sense of the word"? Writing should be taken fresh by someone with fresh starry eyes, like the lovers in Frank O'Hara's poem "A Pleasant Thought From Whitehead," about how awesome it is to love writing poetry.

In desperation, we look over pages of print. Nothing "pops out," like a magazine pull-quote, nothing "rings a bell," like a helpful prompt from an acquaintance. Only this, in an old essay on T.S. Eliot's mature poetry: "Imagining characters whose feelings are insubstantial or puzzling to themselves, the poet moves swiftly--and often too swiftly--from asking what these feelings are worth on the plane of personal living to asking what their status is in relation to the absolute. In the long run the feelings are left even emptier than at first."

Presently, everyone is allowed to choose the dissipation that suits him best. If it wasn't for art, I'd just be a fucked-up person who was in other respects regular. Since I did discover a while back that there is indeed a written record, it has been weighing me down and forcing me into unusual contortions of spirit. I have felt grateful for the tragedies and disillusionments in my private life because they made me a better reader. 'Help me build this o so exquisite bridge.' In a letter to his newly-divorced wife on May 26, 1973, Lowell wrote "It's a desolate thought that all I have from the past is grandpa's gold watch and some fifteen books." That is super-desolate, and his grandfather thought he was an embarassment to the family. Charles Altieri wrote on "Skunk Hour" that "[the narrator] encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity." That's super-desolate, too! But during a phone chat, when my friend and I decided that this was the result, it was more like a piece of badinage and we recuperated easily. It depends on whether one is using 'lucidity' in the 'fresh' sense. Everyone is allowed to choose the dissipation, the exculpation, the disability, that gets him past this result and back on the phone or back in the restaurant, a little out of breath, to resume the chat.