Thank-you, Professor Ginsberg
I
Infinity or eternity, now that might be a question. Most of us presented with eternal happiness or infinite happiness would choose the latter. Most of us would be mistaken, grossly in error. What is it that we imagine would happen to us if the possibilities presented to us were infinite; wanting infinite anything is a mistaken apprehension. Infinity is an avalanche waiting to bury you. And it eventually will.
Eternity has a door. It opens from now. There is no time to come that will have gotten closer to eternity. Forever never comes. Infinitely far is infinitely far always; a billion and one is no closer than one is to infinity. Eternity and forever are not the same; they are not synonyms. You cannot miss this fact. One and one billion and one are equally far from infinity. I have said this before; I have said this in these and other words; I will say them and others again and again and again, but not forever. Eternity is transcendentally accessible from now; eternity is always right next to now. Infinity is infinitely far from naw perpetually.
II
A pregnant woman gets off the D I am taking on my way back from Park Slope. She walks like a penguin. She’s dressed in black. She walks like a penguin. I have said this already.
Raindrops pepper the landscape window I look out off to the span-towers of the Verrazano Bridge from my seat across from the landscape windows of this D Train. I am taking to Coney Island where a friend will be waiting with her friends Julia and Avis. I am coming from Park Slope where I cash my check.
I’m riding with Frank O’Hara. He is my friend. I had lunch with him at Yamato’s on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. I am also riding with the pen and paper that I always carry with me. It is my discipline, as I say, say since Allen told Giovanni and me that the only discipline a writer needs is to carry pen and paper with him wherever he goes. Since then, I have done so.
Thank-you Allen.
III
If there were a way for me to know exactly what was inside the expansion of the universe, or what was outside the expansion of the universe—and there is an inside the expansion and an outside the expansion—It would be easier for me to determine just what I believe when the decision comes to whether I believe in God or I do not believe in God–and I can say that I do, but just how much faith I carry into facing the times when it is most difficult for me to persist in believing; yes, faith and belief are not the same thing; they do not even have to be contingent; they can remain separate; they can be non-detemining factors on one another, if this latter assertion makes any sense.
All I know is that I carry pen and paper with me wherever I go, whenever I am anywhere, and with that I am able to write anywhere anytime around anybody or any bodies, somebodies and nobodies, each one of us somebody and nobody the same one and two and one again. I know just how I am everybody, and so with pen and paper, I have a firmer grip on me, or so I have been able to say and thus believe because I can say so convincingly. I have learned to manage thinking through writing, by writing as much as I do as often as I do, as I have written; I really do not know what I think until I write. I have also taught myself to speak as one should write, which has gotten me in trouble on too many occasions because most people, even educated people, rarely listen to the inane bullshit we defecate out of our mouths; never mind anything intelligent or articulate–but oh so much less ambiguous.
Knowing now is a lot like believing in God or reading the Bible with seriousness, or believing that Shakespeare is the center of the Canon, or that there is something we could call the Canon, or that there is Truth, absolute and transcendent, or that there are any kind of universals, or that a plurality of selves in the Self does not equal fragmentation.
The Falling Leaf Review 