"There are miracles nobody survives." --Bill Knott, Becos
(1983)

"How is it I'm so exhausted by what I once believed that
the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison
was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the
art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity
died immediately, without protest." --Steve Erickson, Rubicon
Beach (1986)

'The difference between us and the Etruscans...is the following:
whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the
collision of clouds, they believe clouds collide so as to release
lightning.' --Seneca, Quaestiones naturales II.32.2, in: Rika
Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)

"But it was also Auden who, later in his life, told a friend that
he had never understood a word Ashbery had written." -- J D
McClatchy, White Paper (1989)

"Until well into the Middle Ages the relative values of the two noble
metals [gold & silver] was determined by the relationship of the
rotation times of the two heavenly bodies [the Sun & Moon]."
--Titus Burckhardt

   "Snow

If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue,

Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip
Through the spiked branches and snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs. '

--Charles Wright

Someone i knew asked me last night if i was going to
read; i said i thought not, "--my old poems bore me & my
new ones are no good." I should stay home when i'm in that
kind of mood. It's like having the tigers in your circus act
turn on you--better in solitude, than with an audience & the
lights.

"pain passes for sunlight at some depths" --Bill Knott

    "Still ist sein Zeichen
Am donnernden Himmel. Und Einer stehet darunter
Sein Leben lang." --Holderlin ('In the thundering sky/
His sign is silent. And one/ Stands underneath it all/
His life long.')

Good novelists can describe personality types so exactly
i can recognize them. Does this prove typology is real,
or unnecessary?

Ego is a theory of the introvert in isolation, the extravert
in conflict.

Possession by the Shadow: the desire to punish; the Avenger.
Identification with the Shadow: the Anti-Hero; the Condemned
One. Both are wrong. You must affirm the midpoint of
balance...

"...We are alone
until the times change
and those who have been betrayed
come back like pilgrims to this moment
when we did not yield
and call the darkness poetry" --Leonard Cohen