In One Sense I Feel That My

Telling A Story Of Illness, One Pulls A Thread Through A Narrow Opening Flanked On One Side By Shame And The Other By Trivia.

The Hope You Feel When You Are In Love Is Not Necessarily For Anything In Particular. Love Brings Something Inside You To Life. Perhaps It Is Just The Full Dimensionality Of Your Own Capacity To Feel That Returns. In This State You Think No Impediment Can Be Large Enough To Interrupt Your Passion. The Feeling Spills Beyond The Object Of Your Love To Color The Whole World. The Mood Is Not Unlike The Mood Of Revolutionaries In The First Blush Of Victory, At The Dawn Of Hope. Anything Seems Possible. And In The Event Of Failure, It Will Be This Taste Of Possibility That Makes Disillusion Bitter.

Each Time I Write, Each Time The Authentic Words Break Through, I Am Changed. The Older Order That I Was Collapses And Dies. I Lose Control. I Do Not Know Exactly What Words Will Appear On The Page. I Follow Language. I Follow The Sound Of The Words, And I Am Surprised And Transformed By What I Record.

Is It A Coincidence That Stories From The Private Life Became More Popular Just As The Grand Hope For Public Redemption Through Revolution Was Beginning To Sour? I Witnessed A Similar Shift In Taste In My Own Time. In The 1960s, While A Hopeful Vision Of A Just Society Arose Again, Countless Poems And Plays Concerning Politics And Public Life Were Written, Read, And Performed. But After The Hope Diminished And Public Life Seemed Less And Less Trustworthy, This Subject Was Less In Style.

I Love That Moment In Writing When Language Falls Short. There Is Something More There. A Larger Body. Even By The Failure Of Words I Begin To Detect Its Dimensions. As I Work The Prose, Shift The Verbs, Look For New Adjectives, A Different Rhythm, Syntax, Something New Begins To Come To The Surface.