Earlier today, it was the heat

bearing down on us . . . the heat like a thousand rattlesnakes hissing in the continuous burn of the sun. I slept well past noon, I shouldn't have, but when I awoke and went outside, it didn't seem to matter that I was unconscious, possessed by dreams I don't remember.

Much of my life is fixated on the missing things, what I don't have. As if projected on a screen in front of me, everywhere I go, I see what I am not, I see what I do not have.

I believe that if life is ironic in any way, it is ironic in how the things we deeply want, the things we pine for, are withheld from us at about an arm's length. What I mean by this is, in any moment your life can change, and that which you desire could easily stand before you. Not many times, but sometimes this happens, when our wishes come true and the world seems like a dream.

But for the remainder, we are nomads in the desert, experiencing mirages daily.

The heat effects the senses by a wrinkle, creasing the air until it feels like a blanket were wrapped over my head.

I have searched for objects far and near to hold my attention. Could this be related to the irony of life? That nothing ultimately holds our attention?

There is, however, a singular devotion that each of us can call our own. We become it over a lifetime, and this must be how a human soul can take on a definite form, and that form can be embedded in history.

The heat crawls, it moves across stunned windowpanes, and thick asphalt. And nothing is like the silence in summer, where the heat settles on parks and baseball diamonds, in suburban backyards, and fields of crops extending to the highway.

The heat waits, it lingers, and as it lingers, it grows, layer upon layer . . .

I'm easily distracted by the sun. It makes me want to go inside after a short while. I take refuge in the air conditioning of the hopeless cafe. Maybe I will see some more beautiful women who will avert their eyes when I look at them . . .

We remember our lives in a certain kind of narrative. That narrative proceeds from a point and moves forward. And then it drops off at the present and seems to hold that note forever, and we hear the monotonous note again and again, and that is the present.

The irony is that, as humans, we are condemned to living this incomplete dream. One part of the dream is real and the other part, unfinished. For the unfinished part, we busy ourselves with imagining new endings in countless ways. Summer abides in these moods of sweltering languor, when desire is shunned by the heat and souls are forced to move inside--

It is there I find my singular devotion. Where hours are abundant and empty, and every room reminds me of the bedroom I grew up in.

True splendor lies in recognizing the thing you've always had. All the longings, cravings, and wishes fall off like scales . . .

And while the heat is stirring outside the window, and the fields shimmering in the sun, I'm liberated inside my house, the dullest place in the land, a container of restless boredom on most days . . .

Ecstatic--because for the first time I am in possession of the part of the dream that is real.

When I'm at the library

I write nonsense poetry in my journal, and several hours later, try to make sense of it . . . the only way of course, is to create something, a form, a pattern of allusions and metaphors that fit the foundation no matter how small or inconsequent that structure appears to be . . .

We start with nothing and build cities, empires, or just a treehouse with your name engraved on the trap door that opens when you want to jump out of your dreams . . .

I'll go to the college library today and sit in the cool wooden cubicles for awhile, and then I'll find a chair with velvet arms and a cushion to sink into . . .

It's here that I do my writing, my contemplating, here that I get my respite from whatever it is that preoccupies me . . .

I've been coming to this library for five years now--it reminds me of the library where I went to school in upstate New York . . .

Hardly in the summer do you find anyone in here. With the exception of a tiny murmur from the students by the computers, or a door to one of the study rooms, opening and closing, the library feeds on its own silence . . .

It's almost like a church, in its effect and the way I use this building . . . I come here to be saved. Saved from the tedium of life, saved from outlandishness and isolation, saved from my own recursive folly, saved from modern self-consciousness bearing down on the soul, saved from listlessness and anxiety, saved from noise and chaos, saved from . . .

I read literature also, but the books are not entertainments, they are like an assortment of maps I collect and refer to repeatedly, hoping to locate some miserable lost treasure inside of myself . . . I read verse, fragments, essays, entering the silence, brushing against a voice here and there that I can honestly relate to . . . something that echoes

The echoes in the library are continuous whorls, projected out of the ventilating system. But it is in these echoes and between them that I can hear my thoughts padding to and fro like busy workmen on a construction site, unsure whether to begin something or just wait for the boss to arrive . . .

I'm tempted by the line I haven't written yet, it lingers just ahead and I want to meet it with something worthwhile, something worth saying . . . ah, there it goes, into emptiness.

It's easy to despair!

The Book of Disquiet names every single version of the story of despair. Many of them are wrapped around a set of daily observations . . . How could this book be my holy word? Its pages are saturated in hopelessness, every movement to every act is quivering with a deep melancholy . . . but nothing sounds more true, nothing has the flavor of this life I am living except Pessoa . . .

Innocence may then seem like an angel that has come to save me from Pessoa's waking nightmare of endless banality, ongoing tedium. If only because innocence captures the spirit before it descends into these morbid fascinations and cynical spirals . . .

An objective eye can see the soul is lit by purpose. The animating force of the limbs--the activity of the mind--stirs with a single purpose.

Mine is to write in my journal, and then to transform these awkward ramblings into a page of clarity, to turn the nonsense into sense; it's all nonsense in our heads, but with reflection and serious study, we can create a form of expression . . .

If I could extract a story out of this, I would . . . my interactions today have been minimal. Threads of narrative stretch back to infancy, and we can pick them up wherever we like, but sometimes it's best to leave the stories where they're at, and build little garden walls around them.

I get my inspiration from these shut books demanding to be opened by the soul who needs them the most. I buy these books in used-bookstores, or I take them out of the library and return them when I'm done. I collect books compulsively, and many of them just sit on a shelf until the time comes to open them and see whether they'll do me any good as maps. My library at home reaches up to the ceiling . . .

I always have two or three books in my company, like good mentors. Even if my mentors are cranky old men, like Pessoa, I cherish them. They are the keys to my expression, my innocence.

What surprises me is . . .

the mass of caring I have toward an object,

any object--it can be big or small . . .

emotion clings to it--I need it

must have it

it defines me--

and then, after a period of time . . .

it can be three months, a day, or a half-hour

the object

does not hold the mysteries to my desires anymore.

What a strange feeling!

to go from a state of anxiety, of constant worry over a thing

to not wanting it at all--

seeming indifference, nonchalance . . .

what happened?

what happened in the mind?

I'm reading Eugenio Montale's Cuttlefish Bones, translated by William Arrowsmith. Here is the first poem in the volume:

Rejoice when the breeze that enters the orchard

brings you back the tidal rush of life:

here, where dead memories

mesh and founder,

was no garden, but a reliquary.

That surge you hear is no whir of wings,

but the stirring of the eternal womb.

Look how this strip of lonely coast

has been transformed: a crucible.

All is furor within the sheer wall.

Advance, and you may chance upon

the phantasm who might save you:

here are the tales composed and deeds

annulled, for the future to enact.

Find a break in the meshes of the net

that tightens around us, leap out, flee!

Go, I have prayed for your escape--now my thirst

will be slaked, my rancor less bitter . . .