6.11.2003
The foremost reason I write might at first seem petty. I write for revenge - that time-honored but somewhat cliched motivation. Living well isn't the best revenge. Writing well, on the other hand, is. Revenge against apathy, against those who are not interested in listening to the voices that surround them - wife, husband, brother, friend or nameless traveler. Revenge against the bullets of assassins, against the wild forces that trample the earth, against the terror and tragedy that is in every day life. Revenge against the devil and revenge against God, for slaughtering us in the crossfire of their eternal quarrel. I write for revenge against the silence, revenge against the endless silence that seems to erupt, right beyond the tips of humanity's fingers, into infinity; revenge against the silence into which we fall. Against the silence, we move, we create. We breathe. Exhale.

6.10.2003
"The poem intends another, needs another, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it. For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading."

6.4.2003
"Let your mind go reeling out and let the breezes blow you, / And maybe when we meet then suddenly I will know you. / If all the things you see ain't quite what they seem, / Then don't mind me 'cos I ain't nothin' but a dream. / And you can follow ... and you can follow ... follow."

6.3.2003
Night after night, the dense geography of my dreams is becoming increasingly familiar, scarily so. I know these places, I know these people, I know what this must be.

6.2.2003
Trying to understand human behavior is like trying to understand gravity; we know it exists but we really don't know why. We say person behaves a certain way because he or she is driven by unconscious motives, but a century after Freud we still can't pinpoint exactly why human beings cut each other off in traffic or talk too loudly on cell phones in public or break off the side-view mirror on your car or become a dictator or fall in love. Is it because the serial killer that all his neighbors say was such a nice, quiet young man wasn't breast-fed or is it because the chemicals in his brain just happened to issue the command to kill? I've been observing my cat, who has taken lately to peeing on the bed. She does not not have a urinary tract infection. She is not under any sort of new stress. The litter in her box is the brand I've been using. So, why does she leave her mess where I sleep? She does it because she can.

5.30.2003
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. -Flannery O'Connor

5.29.2003
The Boston Phoenix has run my review of Zero 7's "Simple Things: Remixes."

5.28.2003
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

5.26.2003
"On Armistice Day the philharmonic will play, but the songs that they sing will be sad."

5.23.2003
Listen, just bring me a mint, coffee and a pillow, and I'll relax. Do you have any Dramamine? I think I'm out of my depths. You see, my problem is whenever I go to a funeral I don't know whether to laugh, cry or demonstrate floral arrangements. I've failed to adopt a point of view over Palestine. The shrines, the fossils, the history, the sheer incoherence of it all is a form of amnesia, like being trapped in a burning temple wearing a pair of shorts and suspenders and performing a traditional folk dance, thinking: Help me ... save me ... catalog me ... look me up in books to find out who I am ... what I've done ... and I'll say, "Thank you. Thank you very much. Very nice of you. I appreciate it. I really do. You have a kind heart. A good soul. I won't forget this. Ever again."

5.21.2003
"I'll play whatever you want me to play, or I won't play at all if you don't want me to play. Whatever it is that'll please you, I'll do it."

5.20.2003
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews. -Auden

5.19.2003
Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the walls, the bonds and its very self.

5.16.2003
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves / And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. -Wallace Stevens

5.13.2003
More history regained. While researching my grandfather, I uncovered information about my dad's brother, who went by the name Macklin Hall. He played the character Porky in the "Our Gang" comedies and later he worked as a special-effects pyrotechnician, setting fire to Atlanta in "Gone With the Wind." He was also a union organizer and in 1945 he was badly injured at a picket line in front of Warner Bros. From the New York Times: "Mr. Hall was roughed up by pickets as he parked his car a block from the studio. Apparently either confused or angered by his treatment, Mr. Hall walked quickly to the street fronting the entrance to the studio, put his head down like a charging halfback and charged into the hundreds of pickets barring the gates. He was set upon instantly by dozens of helmet-wielding pockets and finally beaten into insensibility."

5.12.2003
Here's a version of my grandfather's song "When You Wore a Tulip" as sung by Gene Kelly and Judy Garland from the soundtrack "For Me and My Gal."

5.8.2003
I've found my own naked lunch, "that frozen moment when you see what's on the end of every fork."

5.7.2003
In my broken chair, my wings are broken and so is my hair.

5.5.2003
The question remains, What's behind the door?

5.2.2003
Waitress: You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
Dupea: I want you to hold it between your knees.

5.1.2003
As I emerged from the valley out of the fog into the sunshine ... the fire at the edge of the pasture ... the potatoes in the ashes ... the boat-house far off at the lake ... the Southern Cross, the Far East, the High North, the Wild West, the Great Bear Lake! The Isles of Tristan de Cunha. The Mississippi Delta. Stromboli. The old houses of Charlottenburg. Albert Camus. The morning light. The child's eyes. Swimming at the waterfall ... the first raindrop spots. The sun. Bread and wine. Skipping. Easter. The veins of leaves. The waving grass. The colors of the stones. The pebbles on the creek bed. The white table cloth in the open air. The dream of the house in the house. The person asleep in the next room. Sunday's peacefulness. The horizon. The light from the room ... in the garden. The night plane. Biking with no hands. The beautiful stranger.

4.29.2003
Mein herz brennt.

4.28.2003
History regained. I talked to my mom yesterday and somehow we got on the subject of my father's father, who was a vaudeville song and dance man and someone whom I've known nothing about. Mom said he penned a tune called "When You Wore a Tulip," so I looked for it on the Web and here is what I found. It's co-written by Jack Mahoney, which I recall Dad saying was one of his father's nom de plumes. A recording of it can be found on the soundtrack to "For Me and My Gal," sung by Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. I also uncovered this bio: Jack Mahoney was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1882 and died in New York City in 1945. Mahoney's greatest hit was "When You Wore a Tulip," with Percy Wenrich, but as one of the early 20th century's more popular lyricists he also wrote a number of other popular (at that time) works including, "Kentucky Days" (1912), "A Ring on the Finger Is Worth Two on the Phone" (1911), "On a Monkey Honeymoon" (1909), "While Others Are Building Castles in the Air" (1919), "The Girl I Left Behind Before," with Bob Miller (1937), "The Statue of Liberty Is Smiling," with Halsey K. Mohr (1918), "Goodbye Betty Brown," with Theodore Morse (1910) and "The Ghost of the Terrible Blues," with Harry Von Tilzer (1916).

4.25.2003
All my life there have been days of sadness, vast plains of it, like what Vasquez de Coronado saw when he first traversed what is now Texas. His men drove stakes into the buffalo grass so that they could make their way back. I am not so well equipped.

4.23.2003
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.

4.22.2003
Although altruism claims to be based on love for mankind, in practice altruism leads to suffering. On a personal level, altruism leads to unearned guilt. Personal achievement requires you to concentrate on yourself to the exclusion of others. If you accept altruism as the "good,'' then to the extent that you achieve, you are left with the nagging feeling that you should be doing more to help others. On an interpersonal level, altruism leads to suspicion and ill will. Since any person's need is a blank check drawn against the lives of others, each person knows that any stranger may cash this check at any time, and conversely each person feels that every stranger owes him something.

4.18.2003
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -C.S. Lewis

4.17.2003
The question is, is she acting out of the kindness of her heart? Perhaps in part, but only part. My gut tells me that her real motivation is her unwavering need to be in control. And who is more easily controlled than someone who has never been able or willing to manager her own affairs, someone who is basically helpless? The child is mother to the woman.

4.16.2003
The angel, for Rilke, is that creature in whom the actual and the ideal are one. For Rilke, being in the angel's presence meant being able to give the highest possible significance to our moments as they pass. And works of art, he further testifies, "are always products of having been in danger. Of having gone to the very end of an experience, to where one can go no further."

4.14.2003




Tiger, tiger, burning bright, / In the forest of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? -William Blake

4.11.2003
Voluntary memory gives us only imprecise facsimilies of the past that no more resemble it than a picture by a bad painter resembles the spring. So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

4.5.2003
The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgments, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images that we preserve nothing of life - and there we judge it disparagingly.

4.4.2003
My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.

4.3.2003
The most perfect person in the world has a certain defect that shocks us or makes us angry. One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from the loftiest viewpoints, never speaks ill of anyone, but will pocket and forget letters of supreme importance that he himself asked you to let him mail for you, and so makes you miss a vital engagement without offering you any excuse, with a smile, because he prides himself on not knowing the time. Another is so refined, so gentle in his conduct that he never says anything to you about yourself that you would not be glad to hear, but you feel that he supresses, that he keeps buried in his heart, where they turn sour, other, quite different opinions.

4.2.2003
The key to power: withhold information.

4.1.2003
Genius is what man invents when he is looking for a way out.

3.31.2003
The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

3.28.2003
I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a Taj Mahal in the future.

3.27.2003
Lisa: How do you feel? What's inside you right now?
Nelson: Guts ... and black stuff ... and about 50 Slim Jims.

3.25.2003
An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is "Either Caesar or nothing" does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently, he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be Caesar. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself - this is the formula for all despair.

3.24.2003
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

3.20.2003
Slouching toward Bethlehem.

3.19.2003
Friendship is in the end no more than a lie that seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone.

3.18.2003
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.

3.17.2003
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

3.14.2003
The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.

3.13.2003
It's becoming clear to me that no one fully knows what he is saying. In conversation we don't have the luxury of a rough draft. Just take a good look at someone trying to talk: every time he opens his mouth it's an experiment and a gamble, often a minor disaster. His friends are the ones who don't hold it against him. Even if one had unlimited time to word each thought, there is no fact or feeling so obvious, so simple that it would fit perfectly into a sentence.

3.12.2003
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way that was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn't regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man - so far as any of us can be wise - unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached.

3.10.2003
If every problem must be worked through, if it's true I will not be saved by the bell, that death will not release me of a single necessity, then I want to stop, now, putting off what I know must eventually be dealt with.

3.7.2003
The thought of suicide came to me naturally then as the thought of improving my life had come to me before. This thought was such a temptation that I had to use cunning against myself in order not to go through with it too hastily. I did not want to be in a hurry only because I wanted to use all my strength to untangle my thoughts. If I could not get them untangled, I told myself, I could always go ahead with it. And there I was, a fortunate man, carrying a rope from room to room, where I was alone every night as I undressed, so that I would not hang myself from the beam between the closets. I myself did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life, I struggled to get rid of it, and yet I hoped for something from it.
-Tolstoy

3.6.2003
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out the whole of time. -Albert Camus

3.4.2003
One striking peculiarity of senile dementia is that its "sufferers" often suffer less and less as it progresses. Caring for an Alzheimer's patient can be gruelingly repetitious precisely because the patient himself has lost the cerebral equipment to experience anything other than repetition. In his book "The Forgetting," David Shenk writes that patients often speak of "something delicious in oblivion" and who report an enhancement of their sensory pleasures as they come to dwell in an eternal, pastless Now. If your short-term memory is shot, you don't remember, when you stoop to smell a rose, that you've been stooping to smell the same rose all morning.

3.3.2003
Jake Gittes: What can you buy that you already don't have?
Noah Cross: Why, the future, Mr. Gittes. The future!

2.27.2003
Wouldn't it be better to prevent a suicide than not be able to write about not preventing one?

2.25.2003
This is my proof.

2.24.2003
We present ourselves to someone in a certain fashion, and it is that person that the other falls in love with. We make a tacit agreement: I'll stay this way for you if you stay that way for me. But if one or both changes the contract, that's when things fall apart. The center will not hold.

2.21.2003
I continue to have hyper-realistic dreams, most involving my dad. The troubling thing is, despite their detail and clarity, I can't recall what has transpired once I wake up. I just have a sense of having been through something and I can picture certain distinct images for days. What do these dreams mean? Why am I having them now? It could be the Celexa. Or it could be that as my waking life becomes more ephemeral, my dreams are compensating by becoming more vivid.

2.20.2003
You might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can't marshal this creative response in a specific work, so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material. Otto Rank put the difference like this: "It is the very fact of the ideologization of purely psychical conflicts that makes the difference between the productive and the unproductive types, the artist and the neurotic; for the neurotic's creative power, like most primitive artists, is always tied to his own self and exhausts itself in it, whereas the productive type succeeds in changing this purely subjective creative process into an objective one, which means that through ideologizing it he transfers it from his own self to his work."

2.18.2003
Her soul swooned slowly.

2.14.2003
I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning; / You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over / upon me, / And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue / to my barestript heart, / And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet. -Whitman

2.13.2003
Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel so bad anymore.

2.12.2003
It was always about all the things he intended to do. His intentions remained just that. And that became the story of his life.

2.11.2003
Imagine that human existence is defined by an ache: the ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.