Outtake

Negation won't
Actuate desire

One can't
Compel an
Other's love

*

I've been meditating on friendship, literary friendships in particular. Why? Well, on the one hand, an important friendship with a poet whose name would be recognized here recently ended. And, on the proverbial other hand, I just this morning finished reading the last installment of The Grand Piano.

There's a section of the Ohio Basic Building Code which maintains that the tenant of a building must have access to his disconnect. In the parlance of the Building Code "disconnect" means fuse box or breaker box. It is, like they say, a term of art.

I've from an early age been a socially ill-at-ease person. This always seems to contribute to making friendships somewhat problematic.

A lot of things are swirling in me now. Dark constellations. Don't know if any of this will out intelligibly. Feeling compelled to quote this passage from Stanley Cavell's recent memoir:

"Learning by drowning was something I was familiar with when the river of hours was somewhat balanced out by an active contribution of performance and analysis and discussion. Here the drowning felt unprotectedly like gorging bears filling themselves for a time of unconsciousness, of exhausted expressiveness and impressionableness, except perhaps for the talent of dreaming.

I had already found that there are things to be learned only in this way of random extravagance, of being overwhelmed by the knowledge of what there is to know, of what cannot be mastered, of the necessity of developing an instinct and memory for reserves and hints and fragments of tendency, for trusting something like those glimpses or flashes of light across the mind so dear to Emerson. But allowing the inscape to be populated and colored by the impressions and expressions of countless crossing lights, exacts the wager that when the time comes you will find your directions of attraction and repugnance among and across those that are so far, some perhaps forever, sourceless and nameless."

*

I am required to have access to my disconnect keeps looping through my sore head.