A SUON DI SCALPELLO

To the Persian Faerie Queene, Fifth Descendant of the Shah, HB, Ever-Faithful Constant, Whom I Met as the Odyssey Took Form, & Hope to See Soon — [Are we not writing a book of our own, a book within a book — a book within the Book of Life?]

But how do beings become more existent, or also more nonexistent? That depends on being itself and on how being sends itself to the human.

Heidegger 

This book was originally entitled the Egypt Journal. My plan was to have a series of sequential paragraphs, or constructions, orbit around time spent at the pyramids, in Alexandria, the Cave of St. Anthony, before a nocturnal voyage to Jerusalem, and beyond. Unfortunately, extreme heat and border issues (things which of themselves never dissuaded me) were symbolically amplified by a crisis at the Port Authority, something perfectly Homeric which transpired in all of two seconds, and forced my Egyptian and Israeli co-revolutionists and I to reschedule. Perhaps this autumn, perhaps the next. 

The plan is to have a complete draft of my second volume of poetry, radically unlike the first, conclude as my wanderings themselves conclude, all the while philosophizing and poetizing as global flaneur. More on the second volume of poetry soon — I am presently writing on a bus in Leipzig, both keyboard and Wi-Fi shaking, though the time to delay the unfolding journal has passed. 

The poetry is all coming into fruition without issue. Good, then, for there is more time-sensitive material on the horizon, which must commence this autumn. 

An integral part of the odyssey is to commence what I have been over the past two months contemplating as the beginning of the “second wave” of my work. I think a line can be traced from my first published works to drafts from spring 2024 which, of course, can also go on indefinitely and be considered the line or golden thread of one’s life … but the work from this point forth is part of a critical departure from the aura of proceeding work. Time will tell to what extent this inference was, is, salient. 

Together, the second wave and its inaugural wandering seek the task of overcoming not others but myself on the way to an artistic, mental, and experiential cultivation without limits, or gloves off. Such is the philosophical life as spiritual exercise, philosophical poetizing as the overcoming of the self. 

And so in the midst of dark sacred wood gone up in smoke, Egypt and Jerusalem less nearer and nearer than temporarily albeit hermetically sealed off from me, I knew not what to do, standing there in the revolting puzzle of pedestrians that is the Port Authority, at the mercy of the unthinking torrent, I knew not what to do with the A train all but seven minutes away. I considered panicking and cancelling; but life is too long for all of that. 

But the odyssey only begins there to one extent. To another, it begins in the Firestone Library, having earlier that day spent some fruitful hours with some papers of Ezra Pound at the Kislak Center, before heading into New Jersey, annotating Eliot’s Four Quartets along the way, for a meeting of the volcanologists. 

Is the wandering a means by which to remove oneself from one’s study from time to time, to be out in the world in order to return to the one that one is creating in isolation, like the author-god of Joyce and Flaubert? Today a library is technically portable, though the key word here is neither library nor portable. One goes out into the world, perhaps, in order to see how little one is missing out on; how repellent everything is that is not one’s work. Nothing has caused more needless suffering amongst beings than confident optimism. How can we gauge the spirit of the age? I remember asking out on Nassau, now peering down the tunnel for a train light, —— responding, Its glacial decay may be considered thusly: when we learn that a book which interests us “could never be written today”, or “does not abide by today’s scholarly method”, then at once we know the book is worth reading. I think of this, watching three rats navigate the polluted tracks. 

As for wandering, its own sort of lectio divina, if one is lucky one finds a place to his liking, and someday returns, either for a spell or indefinitely. One may also meet a person, or persons, to one’s liking, and relations flourish from there. Though I do not suspect anything of the sort happening during this sojourn. And yet what I suspect has nothing to do with what is in store. Nevertheless, my capacity for small talk is at wits end. I recall the nocturnal conversation in Berlin, with ——-, the eye doctor, my anti-Tolstoyan nymph. I do not care to discuss the weather, having realized that the weather arises when someone would rather be saying something else. And what else would one rather say? 

The crux of it lies in concealed and to-be-unconcealed works of literary art. I am no longer sure what to do with the mystical prose poem, and while I think the second collection of poetry could easily be in polished form by the end of the year, I cannot decide whether to construct limited runs of pearl-cloth hardcovers, or do something else with it, them. 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. 

Such was my first stop-point in the annotations. I revisited it in crisis, as I realized that my encounter with the Father of Terror, the Sphinx, would really be postponed. Consciousness of despair, desolation, is consciousness of things as they are. Such is less a matter for the medicinal than it is the linguistic. 

The narrative is no doubt jagged. Polish, like stillness, comes later. 

Thus all of this being the case, I set out at once for Greece, the acquiescence of sanity too onerous a burden. Let one walk with masters, in order to overcome the paralyzing mediocrity, the criminal stupidity, the puritanical psychosis of one’s age. For it is nobler, I thought, getting into the train, to seek out the long dead who endure with a spirit greater than life itself, than it is to suffer the living dead, so that one may be in good company as one does nothing of significance on the way to death. A leap of faith is thus in its barest bones a moment of lucid, long-term thinking: should one turn out deluded, with hopes merely unrealistically grandiose, well, then at least we can say that one tried to do something interesting. 

Begin, then, priests of the muses, at the Temple of Apollo, where light still shines in the darkness, and contrary to popular belief, the oracle still speaks, to the etherized disciple willing to not only overcome one’s age, but oneself. 

Because there is no inherent purpose, no intrinsic meaning: such is the purpose and meaning behind giving one’s life a meaning of its own. 

It is doubtful that any mystical ascent is to be acquired through prayer or psychedelics. Rather, one must take the overcoming of the self to the threshold of ascension, with an utter indifference toward acknowledging or even knowing — let the cloud of unknowing be pierced by the ladder of ascent: do not try to alter it or comprehend it, but instead, climb it, until the end of the world.

I have but one reader:

Fate.