The Israeli state's U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse. 

I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present. — Anne Boyer         

We began to imagine another tree, one which had to struggle toward its growth in a complex environment.  This tree, having survived drought and flood, woodpeckers, nests of owlets, wind and erosion, competitors, parasites and plagues, had a much different look than the untroubled tree.  Yet this tree, too, possessed unity. It was only that this unity had greater complexity than that of the “ideal” tree: disrupted patterns, tender or calloused boundaries. The unity of this tree reflected not only its internal movement, its self-generated becoming through time, but revealed the imprint of the energies, investments, dissipations, and aggressions of all that is external to it.  The unity of the second tree is a raggedy unity, absorbing and reflecting the nature of the world. 

This, I said, is like the literary work, which in composition is driven toward a kind of ideal unity, but in the process of form finding, of actualizing, becomes imprinted by life: partial, composite, "interesting," articulated, and individuated. 

These two energies – the internal drive of each thing toward formal unity, the external vicissitudes of history, natural forces, accident, and so on as they act on it – shape all that can be shaped, but especially shape our novels, essays, and poems. 

This account is not sufficient or complete. Even in the internal movement toward becoming, the acorn bears the death of the oak tree. That is, there is within even the most robustly unified work the germ of doom, the thing-moving-through-to-its-opposite-ness. Even literary work that seeks to conceal its own doom, bury its contradictions, never can. 

Somewhere, then, in the inner motion toward becoming, in the external motions imprinting and shaping, and the ongoingness of this work's burgeoning end or undoing, is much of what a writer needs to know about literary form. 

Everything is instruction in this: Beethoven's late string quartets, the moss on the path, the cagey vulture, the shape of an hour or a season, an Emily Dickinson poem, the relationship between generations. 

This was the penultimate class. At the end of it I asked the writers to please continue to study the entire world.

o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable ! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays — and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls— our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure ! Imagine the monster project of the moment : Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none. Imagine the sensation it will cause. First we shall kill them and then they, us. 

"Imagine the sensation it will cause" knows its own Americanism, all that ultimately became inscribed into decades of news cycles, with hair-sprayed, flack jacketed reporters gushing over the enthusiastic glow of bombs in the Baghdad night. Later, "Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place." 

"Most of my life," writes Williams,""has been lived in a hell." 

Kill, kill, writes Williams, as his poem destroys the world. Smiles, cars, and war: our monster project. American crassness oozes from the coming wound of the century that the United States subsequently named after itself.  

*

As children, many Americans met Williams through The Red Wheelbarrow. Our teachers instructed us to study its imagery. We were invited to write our own imitations. We might have understood that the poem was surrounded by absences – the "so much" that "depends" left carefully unstated, suggesting the social space surrounding the humility of an ordinary object of use. No one told us, as children, that this spare poem had been fished from the gnarly stew of prose and poetry that constitutes the 1923 book Spring and All.  No one told us that before the wheelbarrow was glazed with rainwater that "children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth," or that there was, already, among "the pure products of America," 

​​No one 

to witness 

and adjust, no one to drive the car 

It was as if someone had shown us, in an attempt to define "cinema," a clip of a family eating a wholesome Sunday dinner, never letting on that this was a scene from an apocalyptic film, and that the zombie invasion / deadly viral epidemic / nuclear holocaust  was happening just outside the family's door. 

*

Spring and All  came later for those of us who would be poets, often as a revelation. About the nature of poetry, we had been misled.  It was published in France in 1923 in an edition of 300.  No one in America, Williams said, would print it. He was forty, then, and TS Eliot had published The Waste Land the year prior, about which Williams writes:

…all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned into dust. 

As a total work, the 1923 Spring and All was not available to general readers until 1970 when collected in Imaginations.  Instead, Spring and All was the name given to the initial poem [beginning "On the road to the contagious hospital…"] and the following twenty six sections of verse extracted from this work and arranged as a lyric sequence, one which included The Red Wheelbarrow. This editorial decision was William's own. 

The 1923 Spring and All begins with Williams' attempts to address the critics of modernist poetry, giving their objections voice: "Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent." 

Williams pleads guilty, then sets off into an energetic over-performance of his guilty plea. William Carlos Williams destroys the world: a grimly gleeful, "creative" annihilation of every human, a "final and self-inflicted holocaust" brought about by the imagination:

"Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvelous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere"

Spring and All's apocalypse is a hyper-enactment of this anti-poetry, the so-called destructive tendencies that readers objected to in his modernist project.  Those readers weren't exactly wrong – this poetry did not seek to repair the human soul, nor to offer it a respite, but instead to shake it as the world, too, was shaking. Williams understood: 

"they mean that when I have suffered (provided I have not done so as yet) I too shall run for cover ; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age."

Perhaps Williams does, later, with his removals – "to decorate my age" – but in the 1923 Spring and All, poetry is not refuge or repair.  This is poetry as an oppositional force, not a consoling or a compliant one.  "I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life's inanity;" writes Williams in a near parody of Whitman,  "the formality of its boredom ; the orthodoxy of its stupidity." 

It is only after the world has been destroyed in its initial orgy of art and war and the earth has had sufficient sabbatical from frantic human activity, does spring arrive. Time itself is one of the poet's materials: the imagination is capacious enough to hold geologic time, with its eviscerations, evolution, and returns. When spring arrives, the grand prose dilation of Williams' apocalyptic time narrows into the precise lyric accounting of days. Springtime is an accrual of instances and juxtapositions — the greening of twigs, of opening of buds, of horny, defiant boy workers in the streets with stolen lilacs tucked in their caps. 

*

Spring and All and its (dis)contents: the disciplined spareness of its imagistic poems; the derangements of its prose (a mix of philosophy and nonsense, said Williams); its sweaty wrestling between the two; its impassioned – and often failing – attempt to explain itself; its holocausts, prophecies, and tendernesses.  None of this happens in some smooth, clever, integrated way, but arrives in rough-hewn chunks, heaved together.

The lyric of Spring and All is that of the exoteric, public Williams – a folksy, seemingly apolitical doctor and a tidy, line-disciplined imagist. The esoteric Williams of the total work, however, is the one of the poets, cantankerous and wild, brimming with scandalizing difficulty and beauty, flagrant nastiness, bearing and expressing (however ambivalently and painfully) the prejudices of his age.  

The Red Wheelbarrow does indeed also exist as some of us were once taught it as children, isolate and simple, precious in its  humility, but this poem's existence as single, articulate instance does not negate the wheelbarrow as it also stands in the weird slew of history, violence, and time.  So much depends on the red wheelbarrow as an emergent organism from Spring and All's thick matrix of murky wonder and bright rage. 

*

This exoteric/esoteric Williams is, I think, indicative of the nature of most contemporary poetry itself, in that the discrete object of the single poem halfway betrays, rather than ideally encapsulating, the work of any poet, for whom the work is often more ongoing, messy, antagonistic, unfinished. I am working now as a poetry editor picking out single "poems' for publication, so I am aware of the betrayals involved in the specimen approach demanded by the method of publication. On my own, I read as much as possible the works of my contemporaries as they are developed across years, complexioned by the changing moods and conditions of the world. Then, fully aware of the losses involved in the editorial  project, I pin a single example of a single species onto a board for the consideration of readers. That specimen is never quite enough – often a mere invitation. 

Poetry is as world-building as science fiction, I am always telling my students, and the richness of its experience as a reader often comes from immersion in and surrender to the poet's total work. For the casual reader, however, a single poem – or single book – might be all there is.   There seems to be no way to get around this: a poem appears as a closed form in isolation, but in fact it exists as an ongoing and open form in the actuality of practice. The rewarding, complex projects of contemporary poets, often made of both verse and prose, sometimes of images, performance, experiment, criticism, and ritual, are so often held and judged in the page length example or single volume. A few words, then, are made to distill a lifetime of poetry, which is not impossible, of course – and I, like other poets, seek to make both the small and the large thing, an object and a world. But the specimen poem, in its way, is a deprivation of the ground of complexity and duration in which the poem figures. 

That worlds are built by poetry is true. It is also not enough.  Worlds are also, as Spring and All makes evident, annihilated.  Poetry, too, radiates with violence, performs, at times, the theater of rage, of self-abolition.  Poetry bears not just the soft imagination, but also the cruel one, the hard and the shitty. The existent world – the "unreal city" –  realizes itself as real  again in the face of this opposition, shakes, shifts, and amends. 

  Writes Williams: 

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science

depends for its reality — Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the

emplacement of knowledge into a living current —

which it has always sought —

In other times — men counted it a tragedy to be

dislocated from sense — Today boys are sent with

dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts —broken,

bruised

few escape whole —slaughter. This is not civilization

but stupidity — 

"Someone," writes Williams, "has written a poem."  But, writes Williams later, "To hell with you and your poems." 

Decades later,  Adrienne Rich writes an essay – "Someone is writing a poem." I am not certain that Rich is responding to Williams in her essay, but it doesn't seem impossible that Spring and All was on her desk.

Williams writes about "the galvanic category" of imagination, "a force, an electricity or a medium, a place. It is immaterial which : for whether it is the condition of a place or a dynamization its effect is the same." Rich, too, writes of the magnetic force of words, the electrical currents of language, of poetry as an energetic counter-force to the brutalizing technologies of modernity:

"In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode."

The spectacles created by the means of what Rich calls "high technology” carry the messages of capitalist social relations: "that our conditions are inevitable, that randomness prevails, that the only possible response is passive absorption and identification."

Someone has written a poem, as Williams says, but also, as Rich says: "Someone is writing." The work goes on – the world, as ever, is unfinished. The apocalypse is being written and  unwritten, each season an undoing, spring – and all – as yet, undone.  There is something very tempting and necessary in Rich's account of poetry's stubborn counter response to the world, but there is also something incomplete and nearly self-congratulatory about it.

A poem (as "any" poem) is not merely a fungible unit of social "otherwise." If each poem were so genetically imbued with this quality of "lapse,"  had such a regularity in its rift-making social function, there would be little reason for poems to exist in their particularity, no need for them to do anything other than repeat the existent patterns and forms clearly recognizable in a historical period  as poetry. 

To think of a poem as such is to sentimentalize it: to replace the specificity of anything (say, a particular woman, with all the experience of one) with a glistening generality (a beloved grandmother, for example) often obscures the truth of the social relations which surround it (an older woman, left lonely and destitute in a patriarchal, productivity-deranged world, who her grandchildren reminisce about fondly and  only remember to call three times a year.)  This is sentimentality’s operation: stripping the complex and spiky particulars, leaving only the vacuous category.

But more than this misty-eyed error we can be tempted to make about poetry, that each instance of it is the same, it is often the case that poetry as such – that which most easily fulfills the set expectations of  poetry – is that which, as Williams suggests, "decorates" the era. There is, and must be, a difference between the poem that "decorates" and those poems which seek to do anything but. Even as we are hungry for poetry's anti-spectacularizing force (a force I, like Rich, believe poetry possesses and believe the world needs), it is a mistake to think of poems with such ease, to mistake the potential of a poem's oppositional nature as an ongoing actualization of it. This is why, I suppose, the revelation of Spring and All after a childhood of Red Wheelbarrow was so startling: Someone (in hell) had written a poem. 

Charles Demuth, detail from Spring, 1921

We had lost the key to purgatory. "This is for A." the motorbike driver said to the man at the reception desk who then called everyone with his name, but A. was not yet there. The driver left to return the key to A.'s apartment, but T., his partner, was giving their baby a bath. It was all irreconcilable: knowing the keys were at the door, knowing that the door cannot be answered. "I miss you" said everyone to the keys, the driver, the motorbike, Dante, his dust. 

We rode the cage elevator to a middle floor of purgatory and walked down the long pale hallway to the office which we could not enter. I looked through the textured glass window of the door and could only see a subtle light. A. said he did not believe in ghosts until he was in the Danteum at night. We knocked on the door of his neighbor, who announced, first in Spanish, then in English, that we were, despite being in purgatory, also always in hell. 

I’d been praying to the saint of motorbikes and keys as I was walking toward the Palacio Barolo. I had boarded the plane in winter, woke up in summer. The buses rolling past, sighing exhaust fumes. The men strode past, too, in tailored pants crisp white shirts, stubs of cigarettes between their elegant fingers. The artist, the son of a poet who was in the circle of Borges, made pictures in his office in the Danteum: all of the pictures were poetry – Dante's hell. 

Welcome to Buenos Aires said the drawer awaiting Dante's ashes, said the over warm office air of purgatory as we sat on its broken chairs, said the artist drawing hell, said the stories of the dead poets, said the missing objects, said the vanished motorbike driver, said the heat, said the restaurant later, where we drank beer in the sweltering un-airconditioning while men played billiards in the basement 

The men played billiards in the basement. We talked about Rousseau. Which would you rather have, I asked A., philosophy or astrology?  A. had blamed something about the transit of the moon and planets for the lost keys to purgatory, and I had looked up at the moon above the city. It looked innocent. I objected. The moon didn't know anything about keys. That we have them, and lose them, is our own business. And besides, like the empty drawer that called to Dante's ashes, the office of a literary press I couldn't see was probably more evocative. As for me, I would rather have philosophy.  To be a lover of the heavenly bodies in themselves and not their uses. A. would not commit to an answer to the insult of my either/or, but at least, we agreed, poetry was off the table. 

With the artist, we had spoken about why it was that Paradise, in Dante, is so boring. I said it was because Dante had never really known Beatrice, only laid eyes on her and run back to his room for the hot flush of fantasy. She was an absence, not a person, as contentless as every other abstracted desire – "and betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room, I fell to thinking." The artist disagreed, then told us about Marta, his Beatrice, with whom he fell in love and for whom he wrote eight poems, after which she moved to Patagonia and he forgot her.  He couldn't remember her last name. 

This is why heaven is boring: there is nothing substantial in it, only a ghost of a hope. Marta ?, aging in Patagonia. I wish I knew her. "I fell to thinking" — a morbid diversion of lust. It is so perverse: poetry, poets, and edging. Everyone else just wants what they wants and sets out to possess it, but the poet bends, veers, falls to thinking, and in the La Vita Nuova, at least, the height of romance, when the spotty glamor of surface desire has dissipated into the brighter light, is to explain the shape of stanzas, poetic technique. My Danteum would always  be in the shape of La Vita Nuova, not the Divine Comedy. It would be all basements, tents, canopy beds, and closets, in which there was always a deranged poetics lecture being broadcast from a loudspeaker and the shards of the real were pulsating, sanctified, in heart shape valentine boxes. “Is being left ‘forever panting’ forever held at bay from bliss, actually ideal?” writes Anahid Nersessian in Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, about Ode on a Grecian Urn. And then I blushed, because I am a poet, and I had mistaken the universal answer for “yes.” (And if you haven’t read it — the correct answer, as far as I could tell -- was supposed to be “no.”)

But in this Danteum, the highest point of heaven was a cocktail bar. It was empty that night, and closed. A few days later, at a bookstore, helpful friends put Sergio Raimondi's book, Lexicon, in my hands. From his poem,  Danteum, my quick translation:

"Although it is possible to ascend a ladder 
whose number of rungs is an equation 
of the total number of verses of the poem 
the suspicion that these are not the times 
for a strenuous pilgrimage most favored 
the placement of elevators
that allow one to rise to the fourteenth floor
 like someone who quickly turns the pages:
the exact point at which the latin poet and father 
can not continue." 

The  "lyric essay" is  in Plato and Augustine and Novalis and Pascal and Genet and Derrida, and definitely in Kierkegaard and Lukacs and Rilke and Moten, but also, it's nowhere to be found there. It's also in Nietzsche, but have you noticed that no one ever talks about him as a lyric essayist?  We could call him that, but people would laugh. They would laugh because they know the open secret of the term: it is a term by which so-called "feminine" writing is gathered up together, regardless of the actual preoccupations and formal strategies of that writing, and its intellectual and critical content dismissed as 1) unserious 2) too serious 3) self-serious, etc. It's a perfect term for those who mistake list-making for criticism. They can collect names of writers and attempt to flatten them into the dismissibility of tendency, evade the responsibility of analysis of the questions raised by the work itself: for example, what social and material conditions have inspired the new use of the page in prose writing? etc. I would like to see the literature I care about  liberated from the term, though I am aware that program-grammar has a power greater than mine. I am aware, too, that literature can and does overcome the banality of its terms. Besides, I have no term to offer in its place. 

I am writing about this term, "lyric essay," because I am aware that this would be a convenient moment to finally surrender to it: I am a visiting writer this semester teaching a workshop on the intersection of the essayistic and the poetic. I have failed to surrender. 

Instead, I, like many people, am still waiting to know what distinguishes an essay from anything else, and what qualities of a work – a poem, novel, film, memoir – could be understood to be essayistic. Brian Dillon, in Essayism, writes, "Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very names should be something like an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure." It is not just the "lyric essay" that baffles.  It is the essay itself. 

It is generally true that an essay poses a question, or a set of them, which it ventures to answer.  It is also generally true that an essay has an object and an occasion. As Lukacs writes in Soul and Form, his book of essays about, among other things, essays, "the title of every essay is preceded in visible letters by the words 'thoughts occasioned by…'" Lukacs claims, for example, that Plato is the greatest essayist whoever lived, who gave form to his object, the life of Socrates, which is the sort of life perfect for essays. The essayist, suggests Lukacs, is always a kind of John the Baptist who preaches in the wilderness of another, greater one to come. 

If the essayist is, to Lukacs, forever John the Baptist, the poet, I am afraid to say, is rather more like Jesus.  That is, it is generally true to say that the lyric – in the sense of the poetical – has a subject.  And it is the lyric against which the essay has often imagined itself to be defined. Again, from Lukacs: "Poetry gives us the illusion of the life of the person it represents" and "The poet always speaks about himself, no matter of what he sings." In this understanding of poetry, the lyric gives the feeling, mood, or semblance of a kind of subject creation through expression, though it does this in myriad and often subtle ways. Sometimes the lyrical subject emerges as blatantly as a cloud in trousers, sometimes more slyly in kenotic – self-emptying – processes. In fragments, understatements, omissions, elisions, and so on, the absence becomes presence.  Whatever a lyric  appears to be about, it is really "about" nothing, or at least no more "about" something than a tree or dog or person is about. A poem's "aboutness'  is widely considered an inescapable insult to its is-ness.  

The lyric, then, presents itself as a first order experience, always seeking to break from referentiality. The essay makes humbler claims as experience. The essay possesses a tender dependence on referral and citation.  But these are mostly Lukacs' distinctions, not necessarily mine, and besides, Soul and Form itself in turn creates and eviscerates and founders against the boundaries between essay and poetry, form and life. Lukacs had, after all, been reading Plato and Novalis and Hegel and Kierkegaard when he wrote it and was moved to write it via his own aborted imitation of the loves of desperate, unrequiting poets. 

In Soul and Form the heartbroken lyric sings, repeats, weeps, and threatens to fly off into a Jena-tinged ether — “there was something rather heinous about the whole thing.” The essayistic then attempts to use something like reason, fixation, erudition, and focus to ground the lyric impulse, to moor the modern in what it has received from romanticism: “the sea of moody, untamed individualisms.” Both the lyric and the essayistic, in Soul and Form, perform, as a troubadour might, and that the work was initially conceived of as a Decameron, written during the hard times of the flu epidemic, meant to be reflect the shape of a failed love affair, but taking the very modern form of "essay" while doing so, gives the project the swoon of poetry and the heft of essay and something else, too: the heavy wrestling of the dialectical, rather than the smooth superficiality of hybridity. This is a book that struggles, as literature should. 

This is why the "lyric essay" as  a term won't work. As soon as these provisionally useful distinctions (the poetic, the essayistic) are identified, it is immediately the case they are set in motion, begin to alter or dissolve. It is perhaps better to think of the lyric and the essayistic in tense, passionate, ruinous relationship, sometimes hostile, sometimes, intimate, meeting and accruing and upsetting and renewing and decaying. This is how a poem can ask a question, how an essay can sing a self.  In truth, a subject and an object are always at any time either. That is the sketchy corner on which poetry and essay meet.

To be from a place where slowness unfurls in all its cinematic extremity and loneliness is lit by the single stoplight hanging over the town's only meaningful intersection is to have always arrived from near-nil, that is, to have become something from nearly nothing, unlike all of those who were born something and somewhere and therefore display no superiority of character. One-horsers can brag, that they, like Adam, were formed by the lord's own hands from the naked dirt. To rise up from the rural slowness, as if it were primordial ooze, is, if not heroic, at the least mythopoetical enough for a night at the bar.   

The real disappointment, however, is to leave the the next over, too, and its relative abundance of horses. To leave the two-or-more horse town means the relevant site of memorialization is lost.  No one cares, in the faraway crowded places, whether your town had one or two horses. That it had horses at all is the weird thing. In the faraway, all origin is a great blur of indistinction met with a great blur of indifference. No one cares about the lord or slowness or mythopoesis or dirt. 

A one horse town is a fine thing to feel like you are missing, but it is a bad thing to try to go back to. You feel like you don't belong elsewhere, but the place you belong to is a slow nothing in the slower nowhere. And there is, while living, no true belonging to that.

A poem is no employment handbook with beige heartlessness, either, nor are most poems effective guides to etiquette. Poetry is not even like natural law, unless it is the low-down law of nature in its ironic moods like that time someone I know saw a snake eating a frog and believed they had seen a frog with a very long, snake-shaped tail. 

Poetry is not like the law of the mother – no single commandment: "survive." Instead, the words of poems lemming-rush into the air of oblivion, perfectly willing to be lost with all the others. When a poem survives, that's trouble for the gods and hell for the mortal-immortal binary. Each discovery of a poem that lives beyond its maker is still, to me, imbued with a warm feeling for the perversity of its endurance. I still cannot believe that we have, for example, Praxilla's ancient cucumbers and stars, or Li Bae's 8th century heartbreaker:

I met Tu Fu on a mountaintop

in August when the sun was hot.

Under the shade of his big straw hat

his face was sad--

in the years since we last parted,

he'd grown wan, exhausted.

Poor old Tu Fu, I thought then,

he must be agonizing over poetry again.

Even the most chilly and oracular poetry fails splendidly at its legislations.  It is impossible to do what the poems tell us, at least in so many words. Poems are instructions that can never be followed, forms that can never be filled. Poetry is a rival government, says William Carlos Williams, always in opposition to its cruder replicas. How can it be that poems do all this and yet we do not everything for them?

Every watercolor painting is on the precipice of ruin, right from the very beginning, and the only way to not ruin it is to know how and where to stop.  The best watercolorist might be the one who grows bored easily and wanders away, but I am a sorry animal who must lose a game until I win, which means every victory contains universes of failure. Mostly I paint past the painting itself, into the degraded territory of the post-painting, the real painting six feet under my fixations. I have lost a lot of poems for the same reason, obliviated by curlicues, thinking that more work makes things better when more work obviously makes almost everything everywhere worse.  

I do not remember who said "there are two types of poetry: the raw and the cooked" but I know the truth is "there are two types of watercolor: the raw and the burnt."  A watercolor is a poem I remain bad at, but secretly I am certain life is a total art, neither bad nor good. One should no more condemn your own "bad" poem or painting than one would condemn a step because it is at the bottom of the flight of stairs you need to climb. 

Besides, I find it more interesting to be bad at something than to be good. Beginnerism might be like any other preference for annihilation: things that are always reducing us to the beginner’s nought?  Love, intoxication, divinity, beauty, and revolt.  Kierkegaard wrote "wherever there is love, it is the oldest thing." I answered him in the margins:  "wherever there is freedom, it is the newest." This is what a passion for beginnerism might also be: a longing for that ubiquitously misplaced word, freedom, to finally attach itself to the correct location. 

Every material practice is a phd in having hands.  The raccoons prove the excellent scholarship of fingers; they themselves are the rooftop-trashbin artists of the night. They come from the sewer across the street, and one can imagine them traveling under the streets of the city on a burglary routine, stopping by to disassemble my trash. They are cooler and less obsessive than me.  I need to quit painting all the time.  All the time, I need to quit painting. It is easier to draw and paint and dream than to write in times of eviscerating fatigue, and plus, once success threatened it, writing became a haunted house. The problem with watercolor is that it happens so quickly while it is happening, even if there is waiting time in between. In this it is like a poem, which takes a thousand years to brew and an instant to pour.  

It is better when I merely have ideas about paintings, like a fantasy of turning the grass into a knife drawer, or then into an alphabet.  That's when I discover how to write landscapes, translating lines in the garden to the lines of unreadable script. I write in these alphabets of the ether and the bee balm, like how the feather reed grass is an alphabet of IIIIIVVVVVVV.  I do not believe my plant alphabets are impressive, but they are a good way of taking notes. Someone else reads one: I have, when writing nothing, actually written N I GHTEN GALE.  "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/  I have been half in love with easeful Death," Keats said to one about the embarrassment of being a morbid and depressed human being in a universe of singing birds. 

Mainly what happens is that the garden demands more and more extravagant forms of worship, and all I have done in it and for it and of it is not enough.  Now I worship it via frustration and Windsor & Newton, even if what I make isn't really that bad, at least not if I don't look at it for a long time and then look at it again, freshly, as if it weren't mine and were untrivialized: 10x bigger, in oil, expensive, on a large canvas on a white wall in a luxury expanse. But if what I made now ended up that way I would have lost my own point, which was always one of the amateur and the intimate -- small scraps of painted paper posted to the wall over the unmade bed of thrift store velvets in which we dream, at night, of the dead, of philosophers, of eternal hallways and sub-terrestrial bridges. The point was not to be legitimated. It was to begin. It was to make the governing grass of a dream language, gnomic and slight. 

Job, I thought, was a book of anti-epiphany, an undoing of the theory that everyone leaves events wiser.  In order to teach writing  I should take my students to the top of a mountain and then roll a boulder down it.  That, I would point downhill, is the course of every plot, whether the writer knows it or not.  Job didn't leave wiser, he left smaller and quieter.

Job is also about who has a GPS for the cosmos, and how it isn't us. We as a species almost never know where it's at, or even what it is.  Science is another sedimentary myth on top of the other layers of sediment, which didn't mean that as a set of disciplines it lacked useful knowledge, only that whatever wisdom  it suggested was marginal and drifting. Science is real, proclaimed a multitude of yard signs, ignoring that science is also fake. I have not seen a yard sign against reification. 

Of my complaints about the present, one is its limited palette of miracles. Or more likely, the miracles are many and often and everywhere but as we are trained in seeing patterns, we lack adequate perception to catch the one-off, except perhaps in the periphery of our vision, after a long day and too tired to discipline ourselves.  If angels show up at all, it is fleetingly and in the corners of our eyes. 

I have a different discipline: I draw angels with my eyes closed.  De Kooning drew with his eyes closed.  Allan Kaprow called what Jackson Pollock did "ecstatic blindness."  But blindness is the wrong word, as this seeing does not entirely belong to normative sight. The inner eye so often has an unmatched power of synthesis, motion, generated light -- it composes, in part, by analogy, so it is able to see cumulatively and generatively from what we have only experienced in the sideways. Helen Keller wrote about this, "I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grape-fruit," and "My hand has its share in this multiple knowledge, but it must never be forgotten that with the fingers I see only a very small portion of a surface... my imagination is not tethered to certain points, locations, and distances. It puts all the parts together simultaneously as if it saw or knew instead of feeling them."

I do not think the inner vision is any less material than the outer, but it might be deceptively cohesive, which can make the outer world, by comparison, appear bereft and fractured. This might be why, so often, the world looks wrong. I've had a difficult time believing I could share my writing, interested in wanting nothing and in the walled complexities of gardens and libraries, feeling exhausted, semi-sick, and lost.  I did not know how the lost could write, or what we could say, or if we should say anything, until walking down the stairs from the attic, I had a revelation: how the lost can write is for the lost.  And so we who draw angels with our eyes closed should not be bereft of our own literature, even as making it is a fragile activity, having only an embarrassed relation to capitalism's dire opinionating from platforms of carbon-economies and blood.  The boulder rolled down hill is also it: all epic negationists, each Homer of nought, to write into an anti-history gold dust and undoing, litanies and laments, cantos of unwilling and unwant.

They the state, They the oil companies, They the institutions by which the present arrangement reproduces itself -- these are not the Theys I prefer, not like They the lavender asters in September, or They the clouds, or They the bats who adorn the attic. To leave any of it out: the clouds or the state or the bats or the institutions would, however, be a lie. To write only of an I without a We just because the We we have is not yet sufficient would be a lie, too, because the I of the moment is even shakier than a We -- if the We is a dance party with the ghost of a memory of a promise in it, the I is a daybed with the same.  

And yet this is it, this life — the only party we got invited to. Marx told us as much about not getting to make our history under conditions of our choosing.  If I'd chosen, it would be whenever a person could sit in a grove doing dialectics as an acolyte of the religion of Don Quixote, a religion which has only two commandments:

1. be a shepherd

2. live mad, die sane 

That time would probably be communism. And as this is not yet the case, I write about literature at all or to you today because I am saving my own soul by remembering that  even in the grim times, what each of us has is each other. At least there is that You, which is every beloved, which constitutes itself across difference and species and the whole of life. You is eros and caritas all mixed up in a word. It is also the stranger who any of us might be, and in that the only law is probably love, and that the violation of life anywhere is the violation of life everywhere, and in that no one is free until everyone is, You is what everything in the world is staked on, including yourself. 

Brecht, of course, wrote "In the dark times there will be singing / singing about the dark times."  And I always want to add, to save my own soul, "just check that you aren't singing a lullaby!" despite how much I someday hope to be singing one in a grove to the dialectical sheep.  The other reason for this newsletter, is because some mornings you can't fall back asleep because the force of death keeps on its fatal march, and you open Amiri Baraka and find this:

ANCIENT MUSIC

The main thing

to be against

  is Death!

Everything Else

is a 

Chump!

If needed, other possible sacraments: 1) sitting under trees, inspecting the veins of leaves, followed by a session of inspecting the branching of branches 2) destroying precious furniture because it is believed that a more precious piece of furniture might be locked within 3) confronting dust, trying to re-engineer it into marble statues of lost gods, and confronting splinters, too, that were once the substance of crosses, and confronting gold coins, that once lived better as rocks 4) holding a seminar, at least every few years, about the shells left behind by cicadas 5) a global conference on a seed.

As Hegel writes, "a regret arises, and this is the sensing of this separation, this contradiction, like the sadness accompanying the idea of living forces and the incompatibility between them and the corpse." There would probably be a lot of sadness of the incompatibility of life forces and corpses, which is a very sad thing. At this particular moment there would be some sadness, too, of the incompatibility of life forces and living beings (all? many?) who the present arrangement of the world has made to live without access to life's fullness, as all that is life is always being transformed into instruments not of love, but of profit, in which our very thoughts often take on the bitter forms of this relation, whether we consented to this or not. 

The sadness of the present would be bearable, however, because not only would the congregation never have to eat alone, but because all these lessons in eating dinner, cleaning it up, sitting under the trees, contemplating dust, wrecking furniture, conferring on a seed, would indicate that the way things are now could only remain this way forever if the absolute nature of "the world" or "life" or "the universe"-- that it changes -- was totally annihilated. Any force that could annihilate all of this would be one to which I would easily defer, for it would probably  be divine, and that would be an interesting revelation. I can, however, guarantee the force that annihilates the changing nature of the universe, the always becoming that constitutes life, won't be capitalism, which will not last forever, so there is, at least, that. 

I read in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year about the inexplicable rise in astrology and fortune telling in the year before the plague.  This was matched to by an outbreak of prayer and piety. I, too, already accidentally telling fortunes, also began to believe in God. Perhaps to know with illogical urgency that a pandemic is on the way is like how a cat can sense another cat who is slinking outside the closed door.  This is probably also the way we know God (as a cat who is slinking outside the closed door). To believe in the divine cat slinking outside the closed door is also to be certain at once of our species worth and our species weakness. Perhaps there’s a note taped on the outside of that door, too, that says, “the only law is love,” but we will never know for certain and believe ourselves half-mad that we believe as we do, only being able to offer the atmosphere for evidence.

Along with the mask making supplies I also got some copper tape and copper mesh in the hopes of using copper's virus resistant nature to create a better re-usable mask. Apparently the ion's in the copper are like wee powerful anti-viral explosives. I wish the world were covered in copper or that someone had been clever enough to make copper masks before we needed them. If I could, I would be a Midas of copper. Along with being less infectious, a copper-clad world would be better looking. As I made supply kits for friends, I put in lengths of copper tape, the mad person telling them to wrap it around their doorknobs. I also cleaned the high touch surfaces at work every time I entered the building. I had tried to tell everyone that they needed to get ready for history, but it is normal to think that we are exempt from history until, of course, we aren't.

There are a lot of different patterns online now for mask making, and mask drives forming in every community. The ones I have been making are four layers of tightly woven fabric (at least one of them reinforced with iron-on interfacing) cut in 6x9 inch rectangles, pleated three times, with a tuck in the chin, floral wire sewn in across the nose bridge, and a layer of two of non-woven polypropylene filter material tucked between the fabric.  Some have a pocket sewn into the interior in which more filter material can be placed. I've experimented with ribbon ties, ear loop elastic, and around-the-head elastic. The advantage of the ribbons is they will last longer in high heat washes. The advantage of the elastic is that it is easier to take on and off. You ought to just use what is on hand -- old clothes, sheets, whatever else -- and use a pattern you think fits your skill level and available equipment. Some just require scissors.  If you are making masks, which I hope you are, your primary concern should be that they can be sterilized by boiling or washing/ drying on high heat. You must make certain, too, that you sterilize them before donating them to others. 

Homemade masks won't offer medical-grade protection, but it sure beats the CDC suggestion that health care workers tie bandanas and dishtowels around their faces. Despite the futile anti-mask propaganda campaign run by western governments who could not yet admit to their criminal lack of planning, anyone who is still working in the public or caring for the sick, even at home, needs to cover their nose and mouth. Any facial recognition software trying to spot me must now admit that if I am anywhere where people are, half my face will be covered in vintage calico. I don't think much of literary activity at this minute, so I am also expanding the garden to make more room for food, thinking that people might need it or at least enjoy it. I have to anticipate what to do about garden pests in past years I patiently indulged, once so laissez-faire about beetles on peaches. I spent a lot of time, too, worrying, being heartbroken about border shut downs, worrying about my daughter who home from New York, is self-quarantining and too-often coughing in the attic room where I usually write.  

I had tried to gently prepare my students, too, and had them think in advance about ways they could help others if things got bad, knowing that a reliable way to cope with disaster is to find a way to be helpful and good. It is only in that morbid state of doing nothing, helping no one or not believing we can, that we are ruined. Early in the semester I had said to them: "Please be prepared that despite everything seeming like it will go on the same way forever, anything that happened to any human being at any point in history could also happen to you."

In the meantime, the world's eugenicists-in-chiefs appear to lick their lips at the prospect of the deaths of the elderly, sick, and poor. The vicious denialism of Trump, Johnson, and Bolsanaro is the logic that also governed yesterday's every day misery, made grand to fit today's catastrophe.  For a certain class, the death of what they consider "the unproductive" comes as a messy but not unwelcome event. This is why you see that cadaverous look in these guys’ eyes at the press conferences in which they stand in their bloated suits, mumbling administrative deceptions about the flu, about testing. We know to believe what they do, not what they say: finance gets emergency aid and the hospitals don't.  In the meantime, CPAC itself might have become a polo-shirt-and-pepe version of the Masque of the Red Death. 

These are the same types who say the only thing to fear is fear, which of course is not true, because fear educates our care for each other -- we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person's life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves.  I am not the least bit afraid of this kind of fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of love. And this fear, which I love, is right now particularly justified, because we have a pernicious virus that travels inside the healthy to sicken and kill the already fragile, and therefore requires that the healthy and strong deepen their moral commitments for the benefit of the sick and weak. We must learn to do good for the good of the stranger now. We now have to live as daily evidence that we believe there is value in the lives of the cancer patient, the elderly person, the disabled one, the ones in unthinkable living conditions, crowded and at risk.  

Total misery in the coming days is not a total inevitability: we have a capacity to respond today.  We can practice excellent hygiene, stop leaving messes for cleaners, disinfect our common spaces. We can try our best to get what we need to get by for a while.  We can -- today, right now -- organize mutual aid networks among our existing social contacts, make plans to care for the vulnerable, prepare supplies for those who will get sick.  We can provide shelter for the people who don't have it, offer to be a support for anyone feeling crazy from the news, promise to take care of someone's pets or kids if they get sick. We can provide important information to those who have been deceived or ignored.  We can protect those who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against. We can sew masks and make disinfection kits to give to those who will be caring for the sick at home. 

We can also go on a general strike, which now has a double purpose-- stay at home, refuse to work, refuse to go to school, refuse to shop, refuse as much as possible to get sick or make others so. We can shout at the top of our lungs and demonstrate in our every action that the lives of the vulnerable matter, that the deaths of the sick and the elderly and the poor and imprisoned from this virus are unacceptable. The prisoners must be freed.  The elderly must be cared for. Everyone must have safe housing. The sick must be supported without fear of losing jobs or being bankrupt by medical costs. The cleaners, health care workers, and other carers on the front line must have everything they need to stay safe.  This virus makes what has always been the case even more emphatically so.

We also must engage in large scale social distancing. The way social distancing works requires faith: we must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don't do is also brilliant and full of love.  We face such a strange task, here, to come together in spirit and keep a distance in body at the same time. We can do it. I am writing this because I want the good in us to break through the layers of hateful nonsense we've been drowning in. I think we can be good, but we also must prepare for an amplification of evil’s evil. The time when the invisible becomes visible is at hand.

A garden is perhaps the only human art that can be made for the pleasure of the other animals. Neither my poetry nor my prose has ever satisfied a finch or monarch, yet even the messiest patches of echinacea do. The motto of this garden, if it were to have one, would be Adorno's there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand that, of course, no one should go hungry anymore. A secondary motto: to call a flower garden ornamental is to neglect the appetites of bees. 

I like even the most disorderly garden, but I am against the sense-vacated world of the screen. In screen life, a certain kind of visuality (straight-ahead looking) has been distorted into a primary means of knowing: our eyes to see clearly should see with distance and peripherality, and every other sense, too, given the richest possibility to develop, rather than atrophying for profit, fed only the addictive, dulling, input of the marketplace. I hate, too, information mapped onto a schema of personalities. My social media feeds before I left them were a flood of names (celebrities, politicians, subcultural figures, strangers) or images, mostly of disasters or consumer goods. I hated all these things: the intaking and acquiescing, the paltriness of our century's circuses and the magnitude of the staleness of its bread. I hated, also that we had let the tech billionaires profit from such manipulation, loss, and misery, that so much human good (the desires to be social, to create, to converse) was made into the data to be used against us and for the profits of so much human bad. 

The garden requires all senses, but that doesn't make me good at gardening. My plants walk five feet the wrong direction and I can't deliver a neat design in normative human terms -- it doesn't matter that I am not the best gardener. A garden is a system of vital souls, every creature in it pushing and pulling, growing and receding, taking and contributing, beginning and ending, and myself, in that system, is both important and not, doing all the same things, respirating as the cats and the cardinals and soil microbes do. Even at its peak reckless chaos, or perhaps even most at its peak reckless chaos, the garden instructs through a series of multi-sensory inputs all of the living souls inside of it and in its way, harmonizes them, whispering into our glandular aspects instructions soon transmitted to our cells.  The potatoes and barberry and the slugs and the gardener bask in the same, all-coordinating light. 

A better part of being a gardener, too, is that plants don't care who you are. A more disappointing part of being a person is a world that does, rather than allowing each to exist loved and cared for as a generally existing being generally existing. I am against brittle, needy forms of selfhood, and really over "anne boyer" as a concept I am supposed to be attached to, which is not the same as not appreciating the life which gathers inside my memories and senses. But what we have handed to us as selves at the moment are often desperate, burdensome subjectivities mauled into competition and produced by this frantic, sputtering phase of capitalism and information-damaged life. It's like these people we are told we are have nothing to do with us at all.  It's so exhausting, what they did to us in elementary school, and then every day after, filling out the paperwork again and again, getting notifications, everything saying "this is you" when we all suspect that there is really something else.

There is no volunteering out of this situation, but there is a dialectical relationship to it and with this, opportunities for resistance. You can at least began to make a path by which your atrophied senses return to shape. There is a lesson in attempting (carefully) the flourishing of your sensitivity even among the brutality. There is a lesson also in observing the current social construction of yourself with the same productive inquiry in which you observe a passing Tesla or a passing cloud.

Five years ago I was between my first and second chemotherapy infusions. My friend Laura was about to arrive from Oakland. Together we would see a snake skin on a dappled path, and with Cara we would cut off my hair and leave little bundles of it all over the city. We invented a new ritual of intersections and strip-mall-bar mailboxes, a spell for whatever, a spell for laughing together and that the world could be more than this, cast it while I was newly shorn and aching from Neulasta and wearing a silk leopard print dress from Goodwill.  I wrote in my journal about nurses in American flag scrubs, wrote "I don't want to die of the mortal stupidity of my native land." And I didn't. I knew I wanted this thing -- life -- and knew I would not ignore this thing -- death. I also wrote "I want to think about death outside of the cage of statistics." And I did, and I didn't die, but to live cost a lot. I once had breasts, hair, sex hormones, a quick mind, vitality, a body I experienced as pleasure. Now I don't. To die, however, would have cost a lot, too, cost poems and books and adventures, cost my daughter her mother. It was a toss up. Then the coin landed on the side where the dishes must still be done. 

Because I know that people who have been through cancer often know this and people who have not had cancer often don't know this, I will write it down plainly : I've survived five years, almost all of it disabled with exhaustion and mental fog, and most of it in pain, mutilated. Opportunities drifted past me, too tired to reach out for many of them, and friends drifted past and away from me, too, me too exhausted to explain how exhausted. Also in that pain and exhaustion and grief and disfigurement, and also among all the parts of life like going to work and raising a child and falling in love and out of love and getting on airplanes and dealing with bureaucrats and losing my parents and planting a garden and having some strokes of luck and disappointing 83% of anyone who writes me an email, I wrote a book called The Undying, which is finally in the world.

The Undying is a book about being upset by the world, and it is a book that is possibly itself upsetting. I worry that the people who need and want all the pink-ribbon platitudes might hate it, might hate what they perceive as my ingratitude. I know, for some people, I didn’t have cancer in the right way. But even the wrong can write, and so we often do. If you think you might need something agreeable, maybe don't look beyond the book’s cover. But if you don't need or want that, if you get angry at the way this world is when you know there are other ways it could be, this book might be okay for you. 

I'm done. I want to peel cancer off me like cicadas peel off their old paper suits, to leave it on a tree branch and take off singing into the dusk.  If you know anything about cicadas, you might think this is a double-edged fantasy. You also, though, might know this story from Socrates:

When the Muses were born and song was created for the first time, some of the people of that time were so overwhelmed with the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat or drink; so they died without even realizing it.

It is from them that the race of the cicadas came into being; and, as a gift from the Muses, they have no need of nourishment once they are born. Instead, they immediately burst into song, without food or drink, until it is time for them to die. After they die, they go to the Muses and tell each one of them which mortals have honored her. 

If I could join any club, it would be one for those on this earth who sing until death -- Cicadas, Violetta, John Donne.  To sing until death is a form of life in which all remembering is forward-facing: we can never forget what should exist -- art’s collective "and yet" to the world.  The thing we always remember is there is so much left to be done. 

I would rather have written anything else, but I wrote this book instead.  I wrote from a debt of love and rage, thinking if I wrote a book with as much truth as I could get in it as beautifully as I could and doing all I could to make it available to the most people, I might be able to start paying back the world. So I lived, in data's dreams and cancer's nightmare and my own, dreamed of life and dreamed up a book and dreamed of a time when I could leave that book and write all the others. Already my wildest dreams are having their wildest dreams -- last week a snake left its skin on the pavement near my house, making, when it did so, both a finality and a promise.

Unhappy love, said Kierkegaard, is "love's collision with the horror of circumstances."  If circumstances had a collective noun -- like "a rookery of albatross" or "a whisp of snipes" -- it would be "a horror." A horror of circumstances. This is not intended to be an insult to circumstances, but it probably is. Circumstances are the stage on which agency performs, thinking itself the show. Mostly I've lived according to circumstances, but lately my life has been upgraded in agency.  In other words, I chose this solitude. Then I chose to call it lonely.  

It is probably not lack of love but lack of books. I didn't even bring the ones I've written. Now I recall the appearance of certain pages I can't read in the same way I long for a face, wanting only particular editions. I luck into some books as I move through the days: The Consolations of Philosophy at a library sale, Benjamin's Origins of German Tragic Drama  at a charity shop. Each cost a pound.

In Consolations, Boethius wrote a book for our times, which is probably why no one reads it. Boethius has experienced a sudden reversal.  He's in prison, now, when once he had power, and because of this he has turned to poetry. Philosophy does not like this. The muses of poetry, she says, "do not expel the disease from men's minds, but merely inure them to its presence."  Called out, the muses, shame-faced, leave the cell. Fortune does not abandon us, Boethius learns, but instead, what has been abandoned is not "good fortune" but our knowledge of the true nature of fortune. Her wheel, definitively, turns, and it is a mistake to believe we were ever born for anything but being crushed by it.

So empires fall.  The earth warms. Species grow extinct. The storms come. The body fails. Capitalism tightens its bullshit screws. You get used to your whole life lived one way -- unlucky, poor, unrecognized, free -- then find yourself a FELLOW locked behind medieval walls.  Or I do. Or all those men whose names are on lists write outraged self-defenses in the pages of magazines seem to be ones that never learned the lessons of unhappiness long enough to distrust happiness, too. I, on the other hand, will never forget to distrust happiness, having been a student of misery's long and thorough instruction. That’s a common education.

Philosophy eventually gets very confused in Boethius, trying to cram herself into Christianity, introduces fate and providence into a world ruled by fortune and drifts into a soft, unconvincing neoplatonism.  She tried. The muses may have left the prison cell, but Consolations never gives up poetry. The book's secret is in its form.  

Form is, of course, where all books keep their secrets.  The “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of the Benjamin book is practically like Boethius in that while making an argument for philosophy (of a type), in form it makes an argument against it, mooring and unmooring, drifting in and out of clouds of fog, offering up a vivid thing and then swaddling it in obfuscation for protection.  "The continual pausing for breath," he writes, "is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation."

If you are going to have only a few books, it is better to have unstable ones, and better, still, if they are unaware of their instability, but it probably the best not to ever mistake books for love in the first place. I've been obsessed with this thing Wordsworth wrote about Cambridge in the Preludes:

When, in forlorn and naked chamber cooped

and crowded, o'er the ponderous books they hung

like caterpillars eating out their way

in silence

And it doesn't matter. Once in a while you can actually hear the cows from here, and sometimes that weird, ugly sound that swans make. I'm supposed to be writing books, not collecting them.

The unguardedness and portability of books is a real disadvantage:  it makes them prone to ending up in the wrong hands. Anyone who knows how to read a book can just pick up a book and read it, even if that book is the entirely incorrect one for them, even if it is in fact the case that the book was written to spite whoever is now reading it, or written as a behind the back insult of that particular reader which now is unfortunately an insult in their face, or written in hopes of for whatever reason finding any other person to read it except for the person who happens to be reading it right now.

That just anyone can read a book has always been top of my list of the reasons to never write one.  Every time I fail to not write a book, or do what is much worse, which is fail to not publish one, I punish myself with the thought that the book will end up in the wrong person's hands. (In that I decided to make my life writing and publishing books I will just go ahead and confess to being that specific sort of failure that is a failed not-writer. Now I barely even fail to resist.)  What if, for example, something I have made brings comfort to the enemies of all that is good? What if something I have written delights a Silicon Valley tech-lord or a cruel and boorish person or a narrow, suspicious, puritanical adherent to self-improvement or someone who believes that literature is for some elite class of people to whom they themselves belong?

It is  ridiculous, also, to spill out one's secrets about oneself, to compulsively offer one's thoughts up to an unvouched for anyone, ridiculous, too, to have left a record behind of having lived so that even death itself will not relieve you of the burden of exposure.  Is there ever an instance in which a permanent record has been good for the person on whom it is kept? That's what employers, schools, data-miners, and governments do to us. Spies do this, too, and to write a book is as if to just go ahead and offer to spy on oneself. I would much rather be a mysterious person, but instead, I am a writer.

My favorite books tend announce from the start who shouldn't read them.  Rousseau's Julie: The New Heloise is a hilarious novel for intellectuals and women that mostly argues that no one should read novels, particularly not intellectuals and women. It promises that a book like itself can only have a terrible effect and that readers should bail out while they can.  Stendhal's book On Love is, I think, the best book ever written, not for the least of reasons that Stendhal writes this in one of his prefaces:

"I beg not to open this book every man who has not been unhappy for imaginary reasons"

Along with those who have never been unhappy for imaginary reasons, Stendhal also does not want the book read by positive thinkers or rich business people or people who are his era’s equivalents of grad students, and he admits that only four of one hundred people who have read Corinne (another good book, even if he is having a little fun at its expense) will understand the one he has written. As Rousseau so often does in his books, too, Stendhal then goes on to address his own book’s many flaws.

Francophone writers know to lead with repulsion, which is why I love to read them. And perhaps French readers know, too, that to read any further in a book that warns you of itself is your own fault. I want all my books to be such warnings against themselves, not just in their beginnings but completely all the way through, like an airplane made only of emergency exits. But the trick is I also want them to be seductions, because it is not the case that no one at all should read them, just not the wrong people. I want them to be adored by and vital to whoever is supposed to read them and imperceptible or at least offensive to all the rest.

Stendhal states who it is that should be reading his book after he lists who shouldn't:

To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have committed follies through sensibility [and to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes of the salon, but in the eyes of a certain person in the salon; to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as in the first edition)—or even to enter the salon where the woman is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on a love-lorn expression yourself—these are the antecedents I shall ask of my reader.

If only every reader were required to provide evidence that they blush when recollecting certain youthful doings, books would be a lot safer.  As it is, however, they remain as vulnerable as ever, open to any harm that could come to them, capable, too, of causing it, and yet we read and write them anyway, allowing even unblushing tech lords to pick them up.

But failure was big and alluring like nothing else then, failure was boundless and unexplored and vacant-seeming like oceans and space and pages on which we all tried not to write. There was something so evocative in all the emptiness of knowing you would be as erudite as Fugazi but never even that impure, the secret genius of yourself so utter and utterly drowned in the soft weedy hours off in dirty apartments in the middle of nowhere in which everyone agreed that we would rather die than try, and some of us did.  Every diet coke can was stuffed with the butts of cigarettes. Failure was also the sounds of the amps turned too loud at the house parties, all that pleasant muffled ear-ringing afterward of knowing you'd fucked yourself up for life. Our lives were supposed to be made of permanent squander: that was the only redeemable way to be a no-thank-you child of post-Reagan empire. If we had to be a cliche, let it be dissolute. And sometimes I've asked myself in poems "Must we rock til we die?" and the answer has always been an unfailed failing yes.  Once you have gone all in on all that beautiful loser there is never not rocking, even if you promise yourself that every song of your youth was a lie.

And most writers who have any success are actually just winners no matter how they self-present, winners with winning habits in winning places born from winning people educated as winners looking like winners with their winning new yorker profiles about winningly winning, too, even as they win at presenting as losing, but not me, I have lived the shit bottom of the barrel life for more years than I have ever lived any other kind, most of it my own fault, crying in parking lots outside the call centers crying in break rooms crying in cubicles and restaurant kitchens crying without jobs and also crying with them, crying for love and also against it and also because of it and without it, tears always falling down my bloated unhappy face as I insisted that I was prouder than my circumstances but never figured out how.  

Once I worked for and was fired by a company that sold anal thermometers and cadaver hooks for meatpacking plants and stockyards. Or I'd work in call centers smoking ditch weed and crying softly high in my Mercury Tracer during breaks and getting fatter and fatter off the vending machine food until I'd quit by driving away and saying nothing, stay unemployed until my checks would bounce got another call center did the same.   I wept and ate too much and got high and slept with whoever and turned the music too loud in my friend Jeff's broken-windshield Nissan Pulsar and yet could never shake the feeling all during that somehow the hours of our lives were worth more than to be spent in the sheer and total hell of sheer and total hell. Dimly lit unhappiness was the hit of the decade, the one in which I refused to watch any of the movies they tried to make about us.  Oh not true: there was Slackers, there was Drugstore Cowboy, there was everything by Gus Van Zandt. There was that time I got drunk on one of those gallon jugs of Gallo wine and heckled Henry and June.

I remember  clothes only second to how I remember unhappiness, how I wore this faux black fur double breasted vintage coat, high black boots with a silver buckle, vintage silk slips and cheap tea rose perfume. I know I read a lot then, too, but my memories are still of getting dressed, what my friends wore, break room hells and counting out coins, the thrift stores at which we got our garments, getting ready for parties, how to put on the black eyeliner and shoplifted brown lipstick from wet-n-wild.  

Clothes are a better place for girls to keep their histories than stories.  Stories betray girls by saying what we really were according to the rules of some game we had never agreed to play. Stories are about the painful aporia of having to both appear and exist, the things done to us, what we are trying to cover up by getting dressed. But if we kept our histories in clothes, these were the annals  only of our own actualization and no one would put in quotation marks the bad things the world had said our way as we walked by on the streets.

I remember that in my devotion to every minorness of that decade (the one that ended with the birth of my daughter in the last months of its last year), I really loved that book by Melville, The Confidence Man, which also contains this warning:

perhaps you think that Tacitus, like me, is only melancholy; but he's more—he's ugly. A vast difference, young sir, between the melancholy view and the ugly. The one may show the world still beautiful, not so the other. The one may be compatible with benevolence, the other not. The one may deepen insight, the other shallows it. Drop Tacitus. Phrenologically, my young friend, you would seem to have a well-developed head, and large; but cribbed within the ugly view, the Tacitus view, your large brain, like your large ox in the contracted field, will but starve the more. And don't dream, as some of you students may, that, by taking this same ugly view, the deeper meanings of the deeper books will so alone become revealed to you. Drop Tacitus. His subtlety is falsity, To him, in his double-refined anatomy of human nature, is well applied the Scripture saying—'There is a subtle man, and the same is deceived.' Drop Tacitus. Come, now, let me throw the book overboard."