Jun 12, 2021 | General Fiction |
I do not remember my childhood with fondness. Of course, it was not all of a piece. Some pieces were better than the rest and better in different ways. There were moments of delight, moments of sensory discovery, moments of absorbing mystery even before I discovered books. I was immersed in it. In a non-trivial way, too, I have remained immersed in it throughout the course of my life It is a puzzle to me why I do not remember my childhood with fondness. My first thought is that there was so much fear. Unspoken fear was part of the atmosphere. I inhaled it without knowing its name, let alone what it was or why it was. I do not know if the unspoken becomes unspeakable or if the unspeakable permeates as the unspoken. But these are presences. I was permeated by the unspoken fearfulness and so became afraid myself. I was born very shortly after the end of the Second World War into a Jewish family. I was a new hope and a new hazard, What language does fear speak? How does it communicate? How does it infect? Fear speaks in the eyes. It speaks through the eyes. It speaks in a whole range of gazes, some that look penetratingly, some that look away so as not to see what is there to be seen. It speaks in the throat, in the music that the voice composes. It speaks in the jaw, in the neck, in the set of the shoulders, down the arms into the hands and their postures, imploring and deploring. It sneaks...
Jun 12, 2021 | Blank Verse |
late stages of multiple sclerosis we lift the wheelchair up over the stone entry steps ruined queen still on her throne we are her wheelchair bearers who will soon be her pall bearers inside the celebration goes on full of sound… does she open even an eye, mother of the...
Jun 12, 2021 | Blank Verse |
Ambiguous privacy of poem What no one knows is all mine It shines in my quiet night It stars in my inside sky Song is made well before song It pours out found and...
Nov 24, 2019 | General Fiction |
The Problem He was astonished to discover that after he had solved the problem on which he had worked for twenty-seven years, after he had disposed of all the objections to his proof, he missed the problem in its unsolved state. Yes, there had been great satisfaction in completing the proof, even exhilaration. Yes, there had been an access of inner pride, a sense of validation after long years of wandering in what felt like a succession of deserts. Yes, he had enjoyed the discomfiture of rivals who had come close to mocking him and his methods over the years,. All that was true. He had achieved a new degree of eminence and was treated with new respect. But he missed the problem in its raw state, when it was new and tantalizing, when it seemed like it would defeat him countless times, when it allowed him hints as to how to approach and then showed him that those hints were spurious, perhaps deliberate ruses to throw him off. It was not only that he had no idea what to do with himself, how to invest his heart and mind. He was an empty creature and felt lost in his emptiness. All this was the case, indubitably so. However, the real ache was more intimate, nearer his heart, He missed the problem the way you might miss a lover, but not just any lover, rather one who had been everything to you, so that that lover had been all that you really knew of yourself over a very long period of time. While you were so engaged that long...
