“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”

— by Primo Levi (1919-1987)

We can write the scent of the hour, make old and customary distances into a sublime music, which we may or may not ever have a chance to play or to hear aloud in the shuffle of a too-busy world : we can invent, we can remake, we can inflect and complicate, and travel under and understand, we can breed faultlines or cope with them, soak up seas or venture across their skeptical surfaces, seek the tired idea of elsewhere, or make another life within the same footprint, regardless of place or motivation, or the need to say quite simply anything : mourn the amber freeze of an ear when we heard the great deep dirges sung with the soulful grey-brown leafy air of wisdom, when we knew that sadness was one component of a luminous fabric and that it didn’t erase or endanger the whole, mourn the subtle upward shift in forward roads and voyages, the sliding rank of difficulty as it breaks through into a shallow persistent flood…

Each occasion more expansive, more distant, more sudden-seeming, and yet each more ethereal and filigree, each brief communication a heat-bundle of stolen ideas and leanings, of gazes turned and awakened, of footfalls hushed and hashed out and refined : impossible to name the constant participation in the slippage and retreat of time into its blue otherness, its oblique otherwisdom, impossible to explain the genius by which biology, in the mind, overcomes disappearance, and makes and constructs the world into a new, more angular, direct and significant imitation of itself : surreality, hyperreality, the extrareality of being in the place of roots, of first voices and top-line landscapes, the artifice immune to artifice, the mask that unmasks, the bigger dreaming force of the self, still watching itself be born and come into being…

this mystery belongs to you, as it does to me, as it is mine and in my breath and fundamental to our senses; this mystery is faces that linger, that show a will to eternal knowledge, to eternal and unbinding intertwining of wholeness and interests, the way you can see that I might prefer to explore the lie, or maybe invent a freedom apart, but that I cannot, I refuse, because I taste too much this intractable intimacy, this self-knowledge stored long ago by me in your eyes, this intemperate puzzle always missing a piece or bleeding color or whispering something unhelpful : the story that lives outside of us and so requires that we live within each other, the longing that comes from having permitted the other to see everything, more than we permit ourselves, the need of that, stoked and unabashed by the interference of less robust hours, and so continuing, surviving, urging a kind of quiet and enlivening restoration, the first principle of whole knowledge, whole giving, whole woven betterment…

we only begin to take the first steps when we realize our next moment is an entirely different world…

We can only see so far; our vision is limited in time and space and may be said to be bounded by experience and by the magnetic distortions of circumstance : but, it is false to say we are limited in our ability to perceive or even to invent reality, as it may serve or fall to us, unfair and inflammatory to say that a minimum element of blindness fits by necessity into our character : it is an unfair leap of rhetoric and of reasoning, because by reasoning and by imagination, we can, actually, reach not so much conclusions as beginnings that will lead to more wide-ranging and healthfully inferred understanding; we can communicate the unlikely or the sublime in such ways that it takes on a fabric of living and being lived in the world, among and in contact with the other, harder resources that propel our minds toward an understanding of what and when and by whom…

this is long-fought, hard-won crux and import, this is the place of oracles and simple phrases, the mystic unruly patterning of somethiing we will come to think of as prescribed : to return from great centers of world culture, to return laden with the smoke of winter or an old continent, with the voices and draping melody of two cities in the civil fog, to begin again to know that within this place there is a basic shape of a world not unaware but half-startled by itself : so hard to say what meaning is, or what meaning there might be, or why one face or another appears at the necessary moment, so hard to say we’ve located the link in the chain, or the thread that genuinely reaches into the ether, to recover something vibrating to a pulse no one can discern…