Ken Morrill

Ginsburg: “I meant again if you place 2 images, 2 visual images side by side and let the mind connect them, the gap between the 2 images the lightening in the mind illuminates. It is the Sunyata” (Craft 57).

Paul Portuges: “The idea is to ‘reach different parts of the mind’ that exist simultaneously and force them together to create a temporary suspension of habitual thought. The result is the gap that stops mind-flow, arrests normal consciousness, and creates a temporary void” (”Ginsberg & Cezanne,” Contemporary Literature [Summer 1980]).

I have a feeling it’s all what we make it–nothing, at rest, but something coming–already invisibly arriving. I’m not hip relaxed enough to chat with funky strangers–it’s not pleasant for me–not rewarding enough.

The problem is: I think there is everything to loving with the body–and I have nobody to love. I have spanned oceans, continents–really been there, and am more alone than I was. I love the Italian pink-shorted lilt of a girl who just passed here where I work at Galilee State Beach; girls fascinate me–but they also elude me–don’t come to me–as in Brazil they did. But here the gulfs are deep between people, and there is a mash of competition and idealism which swamps even the best impulses–with fatigue, bitterness, and finally loneliness.

It will soon rain again where I am. The sky has been gray and the air is wet–pregnant with rain.

This wind, this wild creation, this sight–burning insight, is just words–but–how dim dies the tapered wick when the curl of comfortable rooms comes best blasting. Lazy fast the flickering wandering light. In night, and cover of darkness. Eat the peaches blur blasts main harbor still while hope turns into.

If I could, not like a prophet, mistake, all I read: art and magic doors, that I, and travel, roads, and forest paths, to places, wonderful and clear, and music, for a charm–spaces for the heart to play in–well I wonder and I want this and nothing more. Today, when the wind blows gray, below the canopy of sky on which these vagaries are strong.

Constantly my heart should capture distant harmonies and glittering reveries not only the drummed up medicines and spells of relief but the ever opening teeth of this sunken belief. Tender, tenderly the monstrous vengeance dispenses justice with truth, nonsense with solidity–questioning ever.

Nada but the eternal delegation of consciousness, each for a space in this freedom of air. Brazilian insects whizzing and floating.

Why do I keep trying to write when it is so hard? Each word now is heavy and the going is slow. Heavy and hopeless except for the eyes of that woman. The idea that writing is a consciousness-changing process.

Journal

I had a dream that studying literature is not for me.  I remember what John Tagliabue said (but I think of Hepburn and Diamon and what I’ve seen of King)–How they seem to enjoy the life (even if not every lecture).  Why discouraged by John Tagliabue–is that an end all?  And then the dream [But maybe I'm not good enough?  Is that it?  Even what JT meant?]  But he’s no god–he mainly saw my Freshman work.  I’ve got other models and superior styles and still I could write clearly–obviously.

I want to be a reader–a tutor at a University–in England–a lecturer in the Fine Arts–to discourse with wit–to point out beauty.

Our age rates action so high.  But what is action: dreadful sports, money-making.  Action in the practical sphere is so dreadful and degrading, so bungled, imperfect, marring.

Like Berryman–a poet busy writing I would be aware in the wake of all I have read–reading and feeling more each hour–tasting my dreams and fingering the sticky web of them–drawing closer to the upright flame which perishes when it is addressed–the night in awful silence.

But my problem is I can’t seem to produce what I most admire–I can only copy it down–and mark it well–but my own field seems so boring and limited–I feel I am second rate and not nearly prodigious enough.  I long for scope and content, for an audience and for a friend, for the new emotions which are just beyond me.  Must I surrender control to feel them?  Become yet someone else?

In Swan Point Cemetery/Clove Cigarette/barren nature

What do I know of anything?  Less than nothing.  Death which surrounds me, poison in the air, Indonesia I dreamed of on a map while I smoked, the banana trees of the Tropics, people I’ve hated and hate still.  The nothing I do when the day is done but go to sleep.

I feel I should take drugs because poetry is not enough to distill this boredom into new emotion.

But I don’t because I’m afraid of all I contain without the drugs–the dreams of death are enough for me in poems of another, silent age, wherever man is, has been, will be, under the aging chestnut tree.

It is my humor to be melancholy so.  I would have loved this summer, but the woman (Kim) took the chance from me.  I would have loved–and do love still–except I am not intoxicated as I long to be.

The words are the bitter extracts of my melancholy–a man condemned to live alone for a space–despite my need for company.

I am extremely disappointed with nature.  She offers so little to me.  Haphazard effects sometimes please me, but they are just that, and hardly worth the effort to obtain.  I regret my utter faith in nature, which kept me benighted, and I swim a mad vortex to the sea of art to reclaim what in my youth I had regarded as only secondary–as the real and foremost thing.

It is painful for me to even look at natural landscapes now–they are usually eyesores.  I should like emendation–and I seek it in the appearance of a wonderful personality.

It isn’t that men weren’t able to see beauty in nature; it’s that they were more aware of our true source of form–which comes from art and her central splendid mystery.

Journal

With one month left before Virginia I want to become a writer.  I had a dream of Michael, with marvelous mechanisms of transportation, inventive tinkering: he created a motorcycle, a jet ski that could go across an ocean bay.  I had a glimpse of what a sea voyage would be: a changing grey, clouds and water, how water behaves: churning, slopping in its basin, a grey slopping and tumbling loneliness and salty bitterness.  And I forsook the idea of long sea voyages or circumnavigation of the globe.  Because of Melville I realize I am missing the calms, good breezes, and sky colors–but what myth could entangle me in Melville’s fantasy–rich and varied characters formed that.  The sea from the shore has been rendered by Camus in his lyrical essays, and as a field for the human spirit by Whitman.

Action and Rest–the beautiful sleepiness of an animal–with good things happening in the blood.  My fresh-squeezed orange-juice on Nelson D’Avelli in Sâo Jose–in my Kitchen there–Reading Shakespeare and looking out over the tangled green–Voluptuous women–almost all of them–any Brazilian woman voluptuous, alert to love and beauty, to sensuous pleasure, to warm good things like motherhood and making meals.

A writer to draw on his past must relive it–and he must, I think, draw on his past–but to get a mask–what would that be?  To make a shift so that what is known isn’t needed and new things are formed from a different point of view–is this possible?

I have been waiting for these days of my development because I know I would be rich with what I had persisted in obtaining.  I continue that way–with persistence–for the future–as I have done that, and the future in relation to the past–is always arriving; I am always now reaping the corn I have sown–even as I am always sowing more, and superior, corn.  This image of ascending development sustains my instinct against decay: alcohol abuse, tobacco and drug use, lack of sleep, poor diet–these are vices which are meager barriers to my ongoing conception of development.

I have the urge to read more Nietzsche today and probably I will.

Last night there was a vortex of emotion and strange consciousness.  I felt drugged and wondered whether I had been slipped something.  It must have been my sleep chemicals–dream chemicals–in a higher concentration mixed with being a little wakeful to notice the effect.

Tracy, the girl I waited forever for at the Italian festival last week–will be giving me a call about going out on a double date with her and her friends and maybe her brother.  I flirted with her at the beach.  She has nice breasts and a tall tanned strong body and wild sun-bleached hair and a marvelous face with soft-brown eyes.

I want to keep constant journals at Virginia–of thought and experience–though I want to talked to people of course, as I have been doing.  All of myself on the line with active alert conversation.

I want to increase my mass–what I have to talk about–and I always want to talk about (just) what I know about.  However this seems awfully un-Wildesque–he advocates lying–however–his reviews all betray familiarity with the work in question.  I believe it’s largely a question of style–for which fancy is the wings and speculation the delight.

Listening to others will often hold me in good stead–but it is never enough–an active dialogue, one bright idea suggesting another is the best.  Let me always strive to encourage bright dialogues.

Let me do my work for long and well–keeping up with the reading–and doing more–forming notes constantly–like Philip did at Oxford, by page and line, by verse–hard work it is and sometimes tedious–but ultimately great–because it puts one in the air of 1st rate creations–to breath there and peer into golden secrets of art.

I want to read Huckleberry Finn this summer and every summer (today?).

But I love the bright unclouded symphony of thought that reading brings me to.

Journal

I want the good party, fresh breeze, space, the sky.

Journal

“the white wind rase
All but the bright stones wherein our smiling plays”
(”Possessions,” Hart Crane).

“Where cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.”

“The evening was a spear in the ravine
That throve through very oak.”

“fleeing
Under the constant wonder of your eyes–”

“Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.
A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
–On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.
What fountains did I hear?  what icy speeches?”

Since Jill in Oxford said maybe I have nothing to say I have wondered and believed it–despite my previous faith that each person has all that he can to say–that it depends on style and desire and need.  But I have become more self-evaluative.

Not for me were these buildings created
Or for me, who does not know it?
The dream city I beheld was space for me
the scrolls and pediments–the paradise of art
Individual temperament and genius as light
falls in a room–the fire falls dim and is
covered–what is left–from this smoky furnace
we cast our scraps to purity climbing
star ward holding new senses and flaming
colors and a sense of the day which is
high like the best dream of a city in real
space–timeless–in the dream and wondering
does this shade barely resemble the mind
which quivers and embraces the forms
so vast–ununderstandable & never wanting to
be known–take care of health and the
dreams may come slow and true with joy–

Get as lost in the transport of creation as the bird spinning skyward into new flight, as the sticky green leaf showing in first light.  I know the days can be as great and unafraid as bright words softly and lovely can sing, whiz through the pursed lips human and trembling, as new things appear in the dream–endless like the sweep of the eye down the Arno as it disappears in a wisp of orange smoke reflected on a window never opened by me.

I know weeping patiently you in the bed I can’t lie in are warm and worthwhile–worth loving and hugging.
I have that worth offering to give.
I have that worth receiving to give.

Go away ugly-man-like women I say!
Let’s not theorize during breakfast
or Mozart or Cezanne

I am lean as Cassius–and plotting on a way
to gain happiness and beauty–pleasure that
lasts–lean and thin–not the Jolly type
Active and Alert my temperament plots

Maybe we need to sometimes
You and I between the books

I saw deep deep into your peerless eyes
The love that flattered there was spun
and clouded thick

You could be to me that one worth the
truth to consider–

Or I could love your breasts and your thin wild smile
lean my hungry lips lean on you again

In Europe I can bring that light alive
If you want to see even that which I have not

But in my dreams marvelous
things have happened–
And I think
they could repeat themselves
in this world I wake into
every lazy morning

Nietzsche lived and thought as
I do now an artist–one
who I am sure as D. H. Lawrence
considered himself a poet foremost
and now off to the play.

John Berryman writing poems
all night in Cafe’s after seeing
movies with his wife-to-be.

All night forcing poetry and letting
poetry fly–working and then
reviving with Lear–new poems
other poet friends–who just
decided–attempted poetry.

Myself drinking coffee for the
first time missing sleep to
revive my poetic flow the
high of scribbling new things

the terrible beauty being born in the distance
across the room: Helena Micheletti’s
Near Eastern Syrian high-browed beauty

Journal

“What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum” (Walt Whitman).

Perception of variety is enhanced by sobriety.  The night in this world alone.  How many awful figures could create a tomb for poverty, an end of suffering, awareness of the dark truth of sordid pain, ugliness of evil, the foul fruits of capitalism, the wretched wake of the white man raping the land and the people of the earth, these scars that do not heal, death and the blank spaces left, the mournful wind–her pale dirge scraping this lost continent, once so abundant, teeming with life and health, history, the mad present.

sick of richness sweet with decay
the unclean flavor of an American day
the greatness–the dimensions–the distance

evidence of a mind in good tone
is the tone and logic of the phrasing

I have seen poor people living by the side of the road in Brazil–in the dump and on the city corner–in backyards and waiting on the highway for the bus.

Maybe I saw killers, madmen, saints among the beggars, a woman asking the time though I was eager to peep in at her life in a distant third world country.

I love my body–what if I leave it?
I will–but when will that be?
What is my spirit without my body to take with me?

D. H. Lawrence: “I conceive a man’s body to be an upright flame.”

Journal