Ken Morrill

This brave new blue topped day. My leg is still hurt from the cruel & stupid ride man in Campos do Jordan. I am still angry with him and will not forget his cruelty–how he took the seat and knocked people down with it. I am still angry because my leg still hurts.

I don’t feel like anything today–it’s past the day I should have left–There is not less tension yet–The matter must be resolutely made known–I can’t stay with these people.

Journal

When the plane was landing in Rio–I saw Brazil appear to my eyes–not the jungle hills and muddy rivers I had seen from high up, but the broken houses, the trees close up, the people working in the field–and I was afraid of them.

The sun came across the ocean from Africa–perhaps it is setting there now.

Afraid of the chaos of Brazil, the poverty, the danger. There is a society in Sao Jose–which keeps people calm–but in places and even here there is also no law–just the law of each individual–and each does what he can of what he wants–whether Brazilians are closer to the earth than other people I don’t know–I think that in basic ways they are apart from the earth–they are abstractly human–and human is not part of the earth–in a big way–they take it upon themselves to conquer the earth as quickly as possible–if it will make them richer or more comfortable–it is just because their earth is vast that it has survived till now–and their tools are not as numerous and widespread.

I am not sure why I am so afraid of Brazil–I think I feel rejected by it now that I’m not with Helena–just as I think Oxford rejected me through its women–I would like to try Dublin still–Perhaps it is not impossible that I should study there someday–And yet Dublin is still a European city–tied to the rest//but the people are so lovely–the girls beautiful and close to me–they flirt like Brazilian girls but I trust them more.

Journal

There is so much to say about Brazilian People–today I saw hundreds, maybe thousands in Sâo Paulo, at the big appliance fair and in Shopping Center Norte. It was a modern swirl of sound and color–fashion and delicious faces–a blank future look on many girls in casual wonder–a detached awe–a mysterious gentleness from the Japanese woman who operated the massaging chair–a clear soft suffusing beauty–the instress of care and devotion.

If it is only a dream I will laugh at it, as long as it is only a dream and even though I am full of fear–as I was last night through I didn’t laugh–I just hoped for a different reality to supplant the nightmare.

The girl was below and she knew I was watching her and she became too intense (angry perhaps)–but overwhelming to me.

I behave because I have a delicate temperament and like to feel calm in my chest.

The words are the words of the mind.

That was anxiety–a state of unhealth–temporary angst.

I am shaken up but I need fluent vision.

In my dream I flew back and carried her. My love made me swift and I was afraid. Other men ran up the hill to help her. One called her–I kicked him till he was hurt badly; the truck we were in sunk in the water; I helped save her; she said she knew what was going to happen–and most memorable of all is when she said she loved a girl romantically.

keen-scented

How low do I have to go to know that a good thing is over.

Long have I wandered, thought-quenched, through Assyrian tombs in the British Museum. My time will be spent dreaming on the pathless sea of poetry, gathering beauty from the stones carved so long ago.

I want my memories to be beautiful because of love and passion.

A new idea is this: that I should keep encouraged and even try to be a great poet, a great writer–a seer of art–one who learns the secrets from forms of Italian Architecture, one who wonders on the sculpture of the world and wanders through her narrow streets, gazing with love at the people who pass by–being a dark lover of this world–understanding but not understood–only trying to make the world understood–being the mirror, and I think it’s a matter on energy and devotion–praising and playing, sound and symbol and sense, rhythm and cadence and rhyme, logic argument and dialectic–rhetoric, theory, and explanation–but lyricism most of all–silver-luted lyricism, riding the swell of a just-cresting wave, a tumbling sage of a wave–I think I’ll fall asleep before the song gets sung–If I could write the poems they would appear, but I get tired and need sleep.

I have what I have seen and felt to say–what I have imagined and what I can imagine when I am saying it.

Journal