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I'm appalled that a mere two weeks after the triumph of my scarce---and rapidly depleting---optimism, I’ve retreated into my asphyxiated stasis.
I fear that I’ve become a purveyor of vacant, though ostensibly urbane, content.
I’m afraid that I can draw only from the dross I’ve deluged myself with in my nervous evasion—-fluid, dulcet forms without substance.
I fear that---vindication aside--- I've become irrelevant. (And I’m so terrified that my revered audience won’t be remotely amused by my frivolity, nor at all sympathetic to my endeavor to repudiate it.)
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I want to sleep forever. |
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Yesterday, I was gleefully ensnared by the nervine, somnolent rites of enfleurage. |
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I. I admit: I've been possessed by an unrelenting resolve, to articulate--and with replicative precision (this treacherous notion of primordial rigor evokes a subtle trepidation; *note: it was indeed, such a bold enterprise, that inveigled me into my present discipline (or rather, my lack thereof))-- that which substantiates and defines, my recent illumination, of sorts. (Such hackneyed diction--which, I warn: will, in brief, resurface--betrays the lamentable dearth of signifiers for this resplendently coupled perceptive and paradigmatic shift!). I stand firmly convinced, that by careful delineation, a rapt immersion in the constitutive principles, mood, and vagaries of this cognizance, and a fastidious attunement to its underlying humor, I can, and shall, evoke the disposition once more, and myriad times thereafter. In such candied disposition, two weeks ago: I set out to elucidate. . . Finding my depiction almost immediately inadequate, I dismally deferred bringing my hopes to fruition (O could there be a more stellar correspondence? The pulsatingly curious retrogression of inducing candied hopes to fruition! Hah!) til a later twinkling of inspiration. A short time later--succumbing to the latent wisdom wisdom that unsatisfying initial efforts are seldom conducive to persistence on my part, I decided to seek out the vivid sketches of others-- in the hopes of, at very least, mounting the cynosure of this transfiguration before me, and keeping its effulgence under incessant watch, and perpetual awe. * Within a day, Hawthorne--while not quite offering the anticipated sketch-- provided a fitting predication, as well as an encouraging affirmation of the necessity of disillusion: Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it, until after it is gone. But sometimes--always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate--there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart's joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This bemoaning of one's self (as you do now) over the first careless, shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regained,--so much deeper and richer than that we lost,--are essential to the soul's development. In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion. {The House of the Seven Gables} Closely preceding, was a statement from Henry Miller on its (most implausible) entirety, and on the largely impalpable correlation, which I've long instinctively sensed, between one's theistic inclination/renderings, and the coherence of the immanent (--as in the subjective personal experience; not the evidently correlated 'immanence' of the theological 'transcendent'): (He foreshadows, I believe, the ruminations of Kierkegaard on existential angst, the consequential prevalence of dread, the ubiquity of the absurd, and the experience of inexorable anxiety--all of which I discovered in the literature, surprisingly belatedly, and agonizingly long after I had viscerally internalized these repercussions to the ornate genesis of my own, insufferable, hell.) A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and rightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow men, about the right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. {Sexus}
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In the wake of the unheralded--and so fervently desired--reemergence of an infinitely lucid, egoless engrossment--an absorption I had once known simply to be of ontological necessity--I immediately resolved to willfully procure the altered cognizance (now that I'd ascertained it to be an extant possibility). My recipe for invocation so far comprises: An untiring faith in the proclivity of all toward the just, the beautiful--an inexorable naivete, an artless idealism of sorts, and further redundant, potently whimsical, dulcet, Platonisms. It was the first-- the most comprehensive and elusive-- element that I, in desperate measure, attempted to purchase this Saturday-- in the form of chocolate chip cookie ingredients and various holiday teas, by resilient struggle with the noxious weather (--note that this stubborn insistence is really what best qualifies the endeavor). While I--evidently--did not expect to reap an ascendancy nearly as wholesome and exquisite as my recent encounter, I had succumbed to the the fancy that evoking the moving image of purer times might bestow upon me a propitious affectation. I concede, my spirits were greatly lifted by the winsome distraction. But-- for my proper consciousness, I still uneasily wait--like a missing child, a misplaced sacrament, a forlorn lover. * P.S. --And yes, I resorted to the notoriously disdained amatory cliche. Only the excessive, unreasonable, libidinous, contradictory, vehemence connotated with devotion can render, with the faintest semblance, the primal, all-consuming nature of this trespass! But, I again surrender: this composition's strangely inanimate. It's like an endearing--but plaster--replica of the (--If a replica of the Barberini Faun is idling on a wooden table along Broadway, or curiously available for less than twenty--we needn't even speak of the overlapping of the two improbabilities-- it deserves a bit more than 'endearing'.) |
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This song sounds like a moment of insidious, amorous upheaval on this typically frigid island. (If its eponymous city sounds like this, I cannot wait to visit.) //I've just noticed that my salted chocolate bar is distinctly lacking in aroma. Lucid, terse delivery; no anticipation, no suspense. --Chocolate sans bedevilling, insubstantial intoxication? A lost cause. ______ [Some part of me wishes that I could sit here, nose buried in wisps of spearmint-tea-steam, placid to Electrelane, for days.] (11.23.08) P.S. To Further Indulge: --I've just come upon Eliot's faithful rendering of my soulless place of residence: His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At four and five and six o'clock; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties, The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. |
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(Upon being prompted by my father to seek some engrossing novelty for the coming days, I dismally peruse my options and remark: ) It appears that my map of the Upper East Side is laden only with various confectioners, patisseries, and chocolatiers. This simply cannot be all there is to do. (!) Naturally--I've the option of going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and merrily relishing collections of 19th century art, and perhaps languishing over exquisitely (and lamentably) pristine Hellenistic pieces. But--No. I won't go to the Met. Why?-- Because I've unconsummated affairs here, on the Upper West Side-- in my perpetually excoriating cerebrum. And, until I've ushered in a splendidly gratifying denouement to the fury, I can go absolutely no where. * * * * (O the pangs of unknowingly uttering immensely relevant metaphorical truths in petty, fretful discontent.) * In Ret: I'm afraid this entry did an unsatisfactory job of translating asphyxiation. |
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Alas--I've disturbed the pleasing chronological order of my previous posts. [--If you hadn't gaily noticed, each of the first three times (date included) featured at least three ones, two fives, and a single four (with the exception of the last date, which might be contested to contain a four and additional five--to complement the preceding trios of fives-- implicit in the nine); and--if we wish to dismiss our contrived interpretation of the nine--we may note the sequence of a prominent seven, eight, and then nine accompanying our integral triple-ones and double-fives.] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (HEAVENS TO RILKE! Where's the damn PATHOS, the PANACHE?!?) (Is this what I get for an extended departure from writing to sample mathematical analysis?) |
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Like most nights on which I minimally indulge my penchant for the comely, I am now overzealously impatient to prolong the disturbance... |
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(11/09/08)
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How endearing(ly quixotic), that I have "seized this moment--the truncated infancy of an erubescent spring--florid, and ornamental; voraciously excised the First of April (*our gracious procurer of a rubicund, amorous cruelty--engrossing, enthralling and raw*); despairingly clutched 11:55, the ceremonious conclusion of that symmetrical hour--pouring forth into the nascence of another axis--a new line of symmetry, upon which the day is reflected, (rather than the mere digits of the humble aforementioned) and reflected, and reflected, and reflected, again. . . in persistent and unending iteration, to render us, this elusive distance, only transgressed by the LJ editing feature --An omission, most rancorously lamented, in the actual course of human events. . ." . {Reconsidered. 09. 13. 2008.} . . . The thought--mellifluous, The cadence: All wrong. . . . |
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2. The intellectual conscience.— I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time, I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil; nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight—nor do people feel outraged: they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward—the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower! Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that: for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience! But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors ["Discordant concord of things": Horace, Epistles, I.12.19.] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody:—some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice. |
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