Thought takes place in language I was taught, no word, the thought in itself, no word itself the thing. I remember the imagists. I remember Pound and H.D. I should say H.D. and Pound. I like her better than I do Pound. I spent some time in imitation, I tried to mean, myself already having discovered something of the Imagists before discovering them. Their mark on 20th century American poetry was profound.
Is there a way to say what I think? I used to believe that I only know what I think when I write; it would be absurd to say that I am going to continue to write to find out what I think about what I think. Maybe not.
To think or not to think has been many a man’s to be or not. How do I make someone feel what I feel. I can’t make someone feel what I feel. I cannot force someone to stand under me, to hold me up. Who would let my weight press down on him her it? She lets this be my weight on her? All understanding is standing under; underlying needs lying under how I have been taught to fall. Falling, falling, I remember last fall the leaves that were falling. All is tumbling down when I fall; the tomb is the final fall; tomb from the French, to fall. I wrote in a poem how the season does what it says, says what it does–English is truly colorful–what does this have to do with what we say when we say it how we say where we do? The same is true for the spring, what nature does in the spring. There is a spring in my step in the spring with life springing back. Spring is life is living renewing itself?
To fall in French, again, is tomber, the origin of our word tomb, as I have said above. It is also the origin of our word ‘tumble.’ When we die, we take the final fall, we tumble into our tomb no matter if we are entombed or not. I recall a song about a room being a tomb. Our rooms are our tombs; how many of us stay indoors, indoors, indoors. We wonder why we get fat. How can we avoid raping the environment when so many of us who assume we should be concerned stay indoors, inside, inside, noting outside, and then we deny objectivity, endorse one overarching subjectivity and wonder how we have become solipsists.
We can’t love Nature because we have no contact with her; it is she, her, hers, this Nature. And the journey in that we should take, the one inside ourselves, we avoid like we think we need to avoid AIDS. Our reclusiveness gives us the illusion we are in contact with our interiority.
I suddenly realize that I can’t help anyone. A person needs to help others help him. You can’t wait for others to help you while you do nothing, and not only nothing, but everything in your power to undermine another’s help. Gravity, gravitas; the gravity of things, of people, of events, of experience, of the earth, of death, of living, of seeing, of remembering, where is this weightlessness I used to seek. Our fascination for speed and flight and violence is one or another breaking out or breaking free. But in the final analysis, no one really helps anyone. A person would have to be able to let go of himself in order to let someone help him; if he could do that, he might not need the help he would have to be able to help in order to receive.
My life sometimes seems as if it has become a falling into the grave, a grave is grave, all about grave matters, I remember my Catechism on Mortal Sins–with these we kill the soul.
The Falling Leaf Review 