good morning, winter solstice.
But whatever extends the day loses us the dark.
I need in the dream to discuss this with John.
Or was it even a dream?
Who is the director of dreams, would he care?
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let go.
The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occured to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.
Patti
I was trying to prove something to myself, too. It was like, “Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?” “What am I made of? What’s left when you drain the pool?”
for the soul.
Toward that intolerable country
The Banner floats along,
And the rattle of the drum is stifled
By our rough backcountry shouting…
In the metropolis we will feed
The most cynical whoring.
We will destroy all logical revolt.
On to the languid scented lands!
Let us implement industrial
And military exploitations.
Goodbye to all this, and never mind where
Conscripts of good intention,
We will have policies unnameable and animal.
Knowing nothing of science, depraved in our pleasures,
To hell with the world around us rolling…
This is the real advance!
Forward…
March!
blonde people in my house. xo, haywood twins.
dark afternoons.
(if it’s not beautiful, it probably isn’t true).
Patricia Highsmith’s notebooks are at the National Swiss Library. They really are.
“Yes, perhaps sex is my theme in literature – being the most profound influence on me – manifesting itself in repressions and negatives, perhaps, but the most profound influence.”
“When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I had no way to interpret my feeling of prescience. I could never have predicted that I would one day walk in their path. At that moment I was still a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems.
On that night, too excited to sleep, infinite possibilities seemed to swirl above me. I stared up at the plaster ceiling as I had done as a child. It seemed to me that the vibrating patterns overhead were sliding into place.
The mandala of my life.”
