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People don't grow--they just change clothes. To grow one must be committed unconditionally to the ideal, so that one's self is never truly possessed but in its pursuit. Which entails an implicit apostasy from the religion of the given, the immediate, the apparent--yea, from the very idea of self-possession--so that what one deeply is cannot be grasped in what one has inherited.

We become, for being hides in potentiality, revealing itself only in retrospect.

Too Much Reading, or, Paging Apostasy

I miss the distance of criticism.

To stand aloof in the slightly pained stance of unutterable uniqueness—that is the faint implication of commentary. The calm gaze of the critic glows forth from the singular abundance of an ossified criterion chiseled to perfection: the honing of the self.

And this distinction, the incommensurable contrast between the individual and his environment, the slow space of brewing between the comprehensive gaze and the crafted response--this I miss in the monolithic lethargy of unpunctuated comprehension, the guilty gluttony of mere knowledge. The protracted inhale must give birth to my sigh, both enraptured and fatigued with the inestimable intricacy of life.

And yet even these verbose exultations ring of over-richness, of a spoiled intellect, the mind's consumerism...

I must speak. And the world, my insatiable interlocutor, both aggravates and enchants as I try to get a word in. To respond to life's ecstatic soliloquy—that is the vanity that shames me into a stutterless silence.

To You

I'm honored that all the omnicompetent world has in some superseded stage of life effortlessly mastered the elementary discipline of being what is the eternally elusive object of my parched becoming; I respect with the utmost solemnity the universally implicit understanding that everyone now has something much more noble to do; and yet, for all this, I'm all the more utterly confused that none have as much passion for life as for pretense.

Thank you, you may resume.

Dancers, Glancers, Lancers

There are dancers and there are glancers. That is, those who perceive your treasure and picture it in their hands, and are therefore willing to perform for you--to flay their personalities in any direction you choose to push, if the prize is enough--and those whose appraisal passes right through you, for you are no means to their end, and therefore you are nothing. Nothing but a waste of energy.

Ah yes, and there are the lancers as well: scar-sucklers looking for a nervous system to assault with verbal tackles and emotional rapes. Here there are artists, though: those subtle sadists who have condensed their vengeance into a seed of patience, manipulating the ascetic virtues of the distant days of spiritual striving to add a scent of style to their torture.

Is there any explanation for this state of affairs? Aye, and it reveals why there is no dance of light in the darkness, no poet's gaze praising every pore--for to do that, to give instead of gobbling up another's emotional resources, to gift grace to the inconsistencies, would require silence. Stillness. Thought.

And we all know that only weirdos and lunatics ask for that.