Cannot Produce What I Most Admire
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.