Poetry lives to the left of the ellipsis, behind the silence of the unsaid, behind the jaded comment, the conventional opinion, the armor of performative intellectualism.
Some mornings happiness doesn't come. But—there's the tremulous light of spring. The sound of construction across from my apartment on the upper floors. The light catches the curtains, and is carried, under its own momentum, across the mirrored door of the bathroom. Two wine bottles are unopened on the old and ornate cabinet that we found for free downstairs. The bed is unmade. I'm wearing a flannel shirt. Happiness doesn't come, but that's okay. It will.
In many ways—life in New York has largely hidden a certain sweetness in my nature from the naked eye, buried it in sand; I think people see that I'm patient and rational—a little cold and analytical—but they don’t notice (and how would they?) the real tenderness with which I experience the world.
I don't go to confession or psychoanalysis, I keep a public journal and I'm a public playwright, both of which contain elements of confession and psychoanalysis.1
I'm hungry but I don't want to eat. I just want to drink coffee with milk and feel the presence of the sun.
I think a lot of younger male writers can only conceive of themselves as market functions (but the market just isn't interested in a certain kind of masculine point of view at this juncture in American history). And without that commercial validation, or the possibility of it, all that's left to do is to fret—and a creative death spiral commences… unless…
An artistic gift is just a gate within which lets God and grace arrive for very, very brief moments which we call paintings or books or movies or songs. An artist is someone who can feel a state of grace without feeling the consolation of salvation or expecting it (without expecting life after death or to see all your pets or your grandparents or your friend from childhood who committed suicide, again).
The grace of the artist is that of finding a form for death that allows you to experience something other than anger and denial and fear of death (and age, disappointment, poverty).
What holds people back, always, in the pursuit of literature is a fear of suffering.
That's what holds me back sometimes.
But with suffering comes light, and suddenly you can see the road ahead.
It's strange.
Of course our anesthetized world struggles to feel love. Might even be afraid of it. Mistake it for something else.
I've spent a long time, I think without realizing it, trying to recover my belief in magic. Recover it as an adult, as a man. In terms that a man can understand.
We can mark these moments in our life.
This is when I stopped being a boy.
This is when I stopped being a teenager.
This is when I stopped being a romantic.
This is when I stopped being a bastard.
This is when I stopped being a coward.
This is when I stopped being a seducer.
You can also mark when these things started up again—when the cycle ratcheted back.
Because neither progress or devolution are linear.
I think what's been killed most in our culture is the pagan sensuality, and sense of love and poetry as a man's vocation. The intuitions and the concepts that produce and support this belief, this faith, the social structures that make them possible, are completely gone.
Losing attention and focus means the forgetting of a whole human world, the forgetting of the tool of self-cultivation, as well, paradoxically, of animal innocence.
As books and traditions go away, so do the buried traces of the ancient and the medieval, the peasant and the lord, the old relations and the old vestigial structures of feeling. All of that is dying or dead now: the troubadour and the flaneur and the priest and the magician and the goddess, even the whore, the prophet, the shepherd.
All of these archetypes and possibilities are collapsing into the functional, the optimized, the gray, the anxious, the affluent, the permanently lonely.
I guess I'm only able to carry out weird synthetic concoctions. I can't follow directions or inhabit old forms, traditional forms. I can only cook if I invent the meal out of the ingredients in the kitchen and in the fridge, from thin air.
Absolutely gorgeous.