THE CURSE OF LIVING LONG

Is to see the wheel turn twice. In the sixties we at once took off our clothes and a deadening morality. It was, as we saw, not moral. We thought, what’s truly moral comes from love, the ability to see another’s body as our own, to feel it’s violations, as it bares itself, to know how the mind is bone-caged and wants something larger than itself. We were not perfect and could not yet clearly articulate these things. But what if eros was life itself and not an insipid child with a bow? Not simply fucking? We know this now because it’s threatened, from every direction, as if freedom could be won by becoming a sphincter. I find it hard to live in this world. I find the inner torsion painful. The enemy scares me as do some erstwhile friends. The bearded god of judgment has found his way home from his long exile. One statue takes a cudgel to the other, so back and forth; something once called a dialectic is not yet grown into a synthesis. That may never come. The cudgel is too satisfying. I want to sing but am afraid to do so with gusto, with the whole unedited self, with eros. Is becoming old growing into silence? To stand by and watch the same farce repeat, without being heard, without an invitation to speak. What happens when even dust is gone? I see Hitler and Stalin once more dancing cheek to cheek.