Creativity is not merely

...the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death. --Rollo May

Walt Whitman once wrote of the pain

... of unreturned love, saying, "Now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay's certain one way or another. (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd, yet out of that I have written these songs.)"

The quest for certainty

blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
--Erich Fromm

Creativity is, foremost,

being in the world soulfully, for the only thing we truly make, whether in the arts, in culture, or at home, is soul.
--Thomas Moore

The greatest thing about religious practice

is it makes life large--and literature did the same thing for me.
--Robert Haas

Every Honest Man...

is a prophet. --William Blake

If I were pure...

...never could I taste the sweets
Of the Forgiveneess of Sins. --William Blake

I AM

John Clare (1793-1864):

I AM -- yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes --
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live -- like vapors tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange -- nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.

Poetry is the Ultimate Mythology

Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
(-- Poet Stanley Kunitz, quoted in NYTimes, 16 May 2006, on his death 5/14/06 at age 100)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



And yet one finds to one's dismay that the poetic imagination resists being made the tool of causes, even the noblest of causes. The imagination lives by its contradictions and disdains any form of oppression, including the oppression of the mind by a single idea.

Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul's passage through the valley of this life-that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn. The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence. What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

In an age defined by its modes of production, where everybody tends to be a specialist of sorts, the artist ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing. Poetry, it cannot be denied, requires a mastery of craft, but it is more than a playground for technicians. The craft that I admire most manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity. It disturbs me that twentieth century American poets seem largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom-practically the only habitat in which most of us are conditioned to feel secure. It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.

Poets are always ready to talk about the difficulties of their art. I want to say something about its rewards and joys. The poem comes in the form of a blessing-"like rapture breaking on the mind," as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.

S.K.
1995

From the Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of
haste. It's what everything else isn't.

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing -- a good
poem, that is.

Journey Into The Interior

In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places ...
--Theodore Roethke

Angelus Silesius: Rose-wounds

You paradise reopened,
Grant me this supplication:
Let my soul be a little bee
Dwelling on your rose-wounds.

...

My heart, my mouth--
They kiss them a thousand times.
Let me rejoice at all hours
In your honey juice;
Let my soul be a little bee
Dwelling on your rose-wounds.

animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize

Unlike most of his prominent-poet peers, Roethke sought a kind of salvation and surrender of the individual self in the physical world. While the others were agonizing over their social status, Roethke was attempting to "animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize" himself-to borrow a phrase from a Galway Kinnell elegy to James Wright-and hurl himself headlong, on the momentum of his poems, from agony to ecstasy. There was something truly atavistic and primal in his impulse, because "going back to nature" wasn't quite yet the thing to do.

Hence the Wound

Edvard Munch, #32

The word became flesh--
Isn't Christ--
a spark of the Ur-light
the Ur-warmth the electricity
--the divinity--
--power of the word
--Hasn't a mighty
spark, mighty spark
from the kingdom--the
pealing crystallizations
struck down into Christ's
soul--hence the wound
of divinity--the power
was concentration
in time
like a concentrated
discharge his word brought
vibrations
in the airwaves--
peal in the air--
which in the course of
2,000 years have spread
themselves over
the planet earth

Things Decompose

Edvard Munch, #29 (partial)

One doesn't paint
after nature--
one takes from it
or scoops out of its
rich vat

--Things decompose
in nature in order to
take shape later--

Harbinger

Edvard Munch, # 30

Spring's writer's
herald
spring writer's
birth
the birth of death
harbinger-
death is entry into
life

Hidden Powers

Edvard Munch, #19

I intend to collect these
journal entries into one. These are in part
experiences, in part fabrications. I do not
intend just to give my
experiences. It will
intimately search out the hidden
powers and bring them forth--
to give them imaginative life
to turn them into poetry
reinforce them in order to body forth
these powers most clearly in the
machinery which is called
human life and its conflicts with
other human life. When I finally
gather these they will bear
the mark of my
present psychic standpoint.

Matthew Arnold thought that only art could address his society's widespread loss of confidence in religion, fostered by the rise of modern science. Humankind needed art and especially poetry "to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us."

And Slept Soundly

From the diary of Edvard Munch:

One evening I came to have a discussion with my father on the subject of how long unbelievers are tormented in Hell. I maintained that no sinner could be so guilty that God would let him suffer longer than a thousand years. Father said that they would suffer for a thousand times a thousand years. We would not give up the argument. I became so irritated that I finally left the house, slamming the door behind me. After I had walked the streets a bit my anger subsided and I returned home to make my peace with him. He had gone to bed so I quietly opened his bedroom door. He was on his knees in front of the bed, praying...I closed the door and went to my own room but I could not get to sleep; all I could do was toss and turn. Eventually I took out my drawing block and started to draw. I drew my father kneeling by his bed, with the light from the bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over his nightshirt. I fetched my paint box and coloured it in. Finally I achieved the right pictorial effect, and I was able to go to bed happy and slept soundly.

The Everlasting No

Tersteeg ... would always say, “It is not saleable and saleability must come first now.”

Personally I think he means in plainer terms, “You are a mediocrity and you are arrogant because you don't give in and you make mediocre little things: you are making yourself ridiculous with your so-called seeking, and you do not work.” That is the real meaning of what Tersteeg said to me the year before last, and last year; and he still means it.

I am afraid Tersteeg will always be for me “the everlasting no.”

That is what not only I, but almost everyone who seeks his own way, has behind or beside him as an everlasting discourager. Sometimes one is depressed by it and feels miserable and almost stunned.

But I repeat, it is the everlasting no; in the cases of men of character, on the contrary, one finds an everlasting yes, and discovers in them “la foi du charbonnier.”

--Vincent van Gogh

Art and Meaning: Munch

Munch was chiefly concerned with his own existential drama: 'My art', he declared, 'is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle? Why did I come into the world without any choice?', adding 'My art gives meaning to my life'. Thus he considered his entire work as a single entity: The Frieze of Life. The frieze was manifestly an expression of anxiety (for example, in The Scream) but also of tender pathos: of the 'dance of life.'

Of Hopeless Material

Edvard Munch wrote: I felt like a boat built of hopeless material, of old rotton wood, launched by the shipbuilder onto the stormy sea of life with the words: "If you sink it'll be your own fault, and you'll burn in hell for your failure, burn forever in the eternal flames."

From Roethke's notebooks

It’s the poet’s business to be more, not less, than a man.

A poet: someone who is never satisfied with saying one thing at a
time.

Poetry: a sense of the doubleness in life.

Poet: a constant selectivity; a refusal to elucidate with a mass of
detail.

A poet must be a good reporter; but he must be something a
good deal more.

Literalness is the devil’s weapon.

The eye, of course, is not enough. But the outer eye serves the
inner, that’s the point.

For there is a God.

For there is a God, and He’s here, immediate, accessible. I don’t
hold with those thinkers who believe in this time He is farther away
—that in the Middle Ages, for instance, He was closer. He is equally
accessible now, not only in works of art or in the glories of a particular
religious service, or in the light, the aftermath that follows
the dark night of the soul, but in the lowest forms of life, He moves
and has His being. --Theodore Roethke

...think of a poem as a three-act play, where you
move from one impulse to the next, and then there is a final breath,
which is the summation of the action of the whole. He [Roethke] had picked up that wonderful phrase from Sir John Davies which he used in a
poem: “She taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand.” Which
is the essence of dramatic structure. It’s what a long poem has to do.
It doesn’t require physical action, but there has to be some mental
or emotional action that carries through in the poem. (Kizer)

Poem Excerpt (Eli Siegel)

The world is waiting to be known;
Earth, what it has in it! The past is in it;
All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls,
trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it;
and all are to be known;
Afternoons have to do with the whole world;
And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!

Sanctuary

"As a boy I would hide in the closet when the older brothers and sisters came with their families to mama's apartment for the Sunday afternoon dinner visit. I felt safe. Hearing their talk about illnesses, marriages, and the problems of making a living, I felt my remoteness in the closet with the single light bulb. I read and drew in this private box. Some Sundays I even painted. I had given my dear Mama passionate instructions to lie.... 'Where is Philip?' I could hear them.... 'Oh, he is away, with friends'....I was happy in my sanctuary. After a lifetime, I still have never been able to escape....It is still a struggle to be hidden and feel strange--my favorite mood." --Philip Guston

Making one of opposites

PHILIP GUSTON: THE MAN, HIS LIFE, AND HIS WORK
by Dorothy Koppelman

I have been greatly affected by the work of Philip Guston and I think his drawings, his paintings, and what he says about himself can be a means of understanding some of the largest questions artists, and all people have about ourselves. As I look at the complexity, the changes, and to me, the most moving late works I see how true Aesthetic Realism is about the searching man, Philip Guston, and the depth of what he was after in his work; both are explained by the great principle, stated by the founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

Longing After Death, by Novalis

Into the bosom of the earth!
Out of the Light's dominions!
Death's pains are but the bursting forth
Of glad Departure's pinions!
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float!

Agee at 25

...I am in the most possible kinds of pain, mental and spiritual, that is...and the trouble revolves chiefly around the simple-sounding problem of how to become what I wish I could when I can't. --James Agee

Roethke's list

List included in Roethke's teaching notes, headed: "DEVICES FOR HEIGHTENING INTENSITY":

1. Use of symbolism
Intense feeling is important, but it is not enough
2. Use of simplicity: bald statement
Monosyllables: movement and rush
3. Repetition
4. Use of constant antithesis, word against word, phrase against phrase
5. Paradox: sense transfer.
6. Deliberate use of ambiguity (pun)

Creative Impulse

The creative impulse in the world, so far as we are aware of it, appears upon ultimate analysis to be free and original, not bound and mechanical: to express itself, in defiance of the determinists, with a certain artistic spontaneity.

--Evelyn Underhill, from Mysticism, a book read by Theodore Roethke.

Cherry Trees

The Cherry Trees

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding,
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Edward Thomas

Trickster

Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

God Felt As a Terrible Absence

For Roethke, often, God was felt as a terrible absence:

Wait. Watch. Listen. Meditate. He'll come. When? No, I know He won't come. He doesn't care about me any more. No, I mean Him, the Big He, that great big three-cornered Papa.

On Nov. 12

On this day in 1935, 27-year-old Theodore Roethke was hospitalized for the first of the manic-depressive breakdowns that would recur throughout his life. Roethke had just begun a teaching post at Michigan State University and, according to colleagues, had been drinking heavily all semester, dozens of cups of coffee and bottles of cola a day as well as alcohol. On the previous evening, a cold one, he had taken a long walk in the woods without a coat and eventually with only one shoe; the next morning, after deciding "to cut my eight o'clock class deliberately just to see how long they would stick around," Roethke took another walk in the woods, also coatless. He was shivering and delirious when he arrived at the dean's office, where he planned "to explain one or two things about this experiment"; the dean, trained as a mathematician, called for the doctors. Roethke later told friends that while on his first walk he had had a mystical experience with a tree -- even pointed out the tree, while retrieving his shoe. The tree taught him "the secret of Nijinsky," he said, perhaps referring to that passage in Nijinsky's diary -- written while Nijinsky was a mental patient -- that describes learning from a tree that "human beings do not understand feelings."

"I am the railing by the rushing torrent - grasp me if you can; your crutch I am not!"--Friedrich Nietzche

Energy, Intensity, Speed Movement

Roethke:

"Energy is the soul of poetry. Explosive active language"

"A poem is an extra--it announces itself by its rhythmical energy: that energy proceeds from the mind, the psyche of the person writing--or his unconsciousness"

"What is the most important element: energy."

"Style: What is style but matter in motion?"

Speed

From Blessing...

To be "beyond" or "outside" was the key, and geting there required more speed, a quicker rhythm than the staid, "sensible" consciousness was able to manage. Speed is almost always "wonderful" for Roethke. "The energy of the nursery rhyme!" he exclaims. "How wonderful the short line is!"

Roethke and Mythology

Between 1938 and 1948 Roethe showed an increasing interest in myths. He began jotting down summaries of myths, and he cited a definition of "myth" as "a story--a symbolical figure--as simple as it is striking--which sums up an infinite number of more or less analogous situations."

From Blessing

Roethke and God

From Theodore Roethke's Dynamic Vision, by Richard Blessing:

Roethke seems to have invented a God according to his need, a God especially for poets; and, having created God, the poet began to live by Him and found Him, at least on occasion, to be there. By 1952 Roethke's faith in faith had yielded the experience of which he speaks in "On Identity":

Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem "The Dance" started, and finished itself in a very short time--say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I KNEW, I had hit it. I walked around, and I wept; and I knelt down--I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness, the actual sense of a Presence--as if Yeats himself were IN that room. ...That house, I repeat, was changed with a psychic presence: the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy. At last I was somebody again. He, they--the poets dead--were with me.

Love me

Roethke seemed to be saying this, "Love me, love me. I worked in a pickle factory. I labored in greenhouses, I know business deals and "scratch." I've been there. I'm great, but I'm helpless and afraid." The Glass House (281)

Blood and Sweat and Anguish

"My poems were written in blood and sweat and anguish. How many of you can understand that? I have spent the torments of a life working free of the libidinous muck of worm and bat and lust to a ringing vision of God. How can anyone who has lived safely, suffered less, know this terror or this joy? It's too hard, too much to ask. So all right. If you can't love my poems, love me." --Theodore Roethke

Paul Cox, film maker, Nijinsky

Sometimes he fell asleep at the editing desk and didn't wake again until the early morning. But he acknowledges this was the process that he had to follow. “It was like being a priest – no, an altar boy – working in front of the Steenbeck, and the Steenbeck was the altar …” Then he added with a smile, “sometimes I became the priest.”

--Paul Cox, film maker, Nijinsky

The Little Clock

The Little Clock
by Elinor Wylie

Half-past-four and the first bird waking,
Falling on my heart like a thin green leaf.
If you are alive, your heart is breaking,
If you are dead, you are done with grief.

Half-past-five and the birds singing sweetly,
World washed silver with the rain and the wind.
If you are a saint, you have lived discreetly,
If you are a sinner, you have surely sinned.

Half-past-seven and the birds singing madly;
Sun flames up in the sky like a lark,
If there are things to remember sadly,
Wait and remember them after dark.

Pretty Words

Poem by Elinor Wylie: Pretty Words

Poets make pets of pretty, docile words: I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish Which circle slowly with a silken swish, And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds, Come to my hand, and playful if I wish, Or purring softly at a silver dish, Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.

I love bright words, words up and singing early; Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing; Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees; I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly, Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees, Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

Elinor Wylie

An Inscription

by Oscar Wilde:

Go, little book,
To him who, on a lute with horns of
pearl,
Sang of the white feet of the Golden
Girl:
And bid him look
Into thy pages: it may hap that he
May find that golden maidens dance
through thee.

A good book

We don't believe in relaxing with a
good book. You can only relax with
a mediocre book; a good book can make
you so happy you want to scream or so
mad you want to kill.
Literary Kicks

Memory

"Time makes fiction out of our memories. We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic -- selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." --Allan Seager

Spiritually dwarfed

Theodore Roethke wrote in a paper for one of his Rhetoric classes at college:

"I am influenced too much, perhaps, by natural objects. I seem bound by the very room I'm in. I've associated so long with prosaic people that I've dwarfed myself spiritually. When I get alone under an open sky where man isn't too evident--then I'm tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness." (This excerpt is from The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, by his friend and colleague, Allan Seager).

Seeds not Twigs

It was Ezra Pound who advised Merwin to "read the seeds, not the twigs of poetry."

Pilgrimage

O you who have set out on the pilgrimage
Where are you going? --Rumi

Where is the Angel?

By Denise Levertov:

...Where is the angel

to wrestle with me and wound
not my thigh but my throat,
so curses and blessings flow storming out

and the glass shatters, and the iron sunders?

Doorway of Devotion

Our culture has forgotten and buried the doorway of devotion, and the lover is often left stranded, not ever knowing the real nature and purpose of the longing that tugs at the heart. --Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

This Water

This water is but a spoonful mid many; it goes forth an in its deep eddies that you can in no wise fathom there be terapin and great turtles, monsters, crocodiles, dragons, fish and crustaceans to make rich whomso will seek with a bold eye into their perils. --Ezra Pound, Tsze Sze's Third Thesis

Kingdoms and families

...kingdoms and families about to decay will give forth signs of ill augury. --Ezra Pound. Tsze Sze's Third Thesis

The Cat in the Kitchen

The Cat in the Kitchen
(For Donald Hall)

Have you heard about the boy who walked by
The black water? I won't say much more.
Let's wait a few years. It wanted to be entered.
Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand
Reaches out and pulls him in.

There was no
Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, or needed
Calcium, bones would do. What happened then?

It was a little like the night wind, which is soft,
And moves slowly, sighing like an old woman
In her kitchen late at night, moving pans
About, lighting a fire, making some food for the cat.

© Robert Bly.

Shape of the mind

Writing= your inward states being reflected.
Learn to trust the innate shapeliness of your mind.

Spiritual

Spiritual=recognition that everything is interrelated. Everything is spiritual

Inner speech

Writing requires one to distill, filter, and edit inner speech...

Early Shamans

...primitive cave paintings depict shamans in meditative trances as they embark on ritualistic journeys to the spiritual realms from which they bring back sacred wisdom and powers to mankind.

Beauty should never be presented explained...

Beauty should never be presented explained. It is Marvel and Wonder and in art we should find first these doors--Marvel and Wonder--and, coming through them, a slow understanding (slow even through it be a succession of lightening understandings and perceptions) as of a figure in mist, that still and ever gives to each one his own right of believing, each after his own creed and fashion.

Always the desire to know and to understand more deeply must precede any reception of beauty. Without holy curiosity and awe none find her and woe to that artist whose work wears its "heart on its sleeve."

--Weston St. Llewmys

Weston St. Llewmys is a playful pseudonym based on two of Ezra Pound's ancestral family names.

Not the finished product

Anything can be elevated to the level of meditation when the goal is not the finished product.

What writing is

An articulation, an encouragement to enter into life.

Real vs. Official Poetry

The real tension, I think, is between official poetry, the kind that we're taught in school and is kept in libraries, and the kind we really believe in...--Philip Whalen

Emptiness

The emptiness is the thing we're full of, and everything that you're seeing here is empty. Literally the word is shunya, something that's swollen up; it's not, as often translated, "void." It's packed, it's full of everything. --Philip Whalen

Stevens said...

"The anima of animals"

To Encounter the Self

Mark Doty: "To travel either outward or inward is to encounter the self, and the voyage in either direction is fraught with the possibilities of transcendence, dissolution, or both."

Theodore Roethke:
In a dark wood I saw—
I saw my several selves
Come running from the leaves,
Lewd, tiny careless lives
That scuttled under stones,
Or broke, but would not go.

Die--then live

Die -- then live
Day and night within the world

--Bankei

Bankei

If you make an attempt
to stop the second thoughts which arise,
then the mind which does the stopping and mind which is stopped become divided,
and there is no occasion for peace of mind.


Bankei 1622 - 1693

Dark time = see

Theodore Roethke's poem "In a Dark Time" has some comparisons to Nick Drake's song "Fruit Tree." Drake:

Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light.


In a Dark Time by Roethke:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Meditative tradition

I understand what is meant by "an interior drama of the mind." The drama is created by "some form of self-address, in which the mind grasps firmly a problem or situation deliberately evoked by the memory, brings it forward toward the full light of consciousness, and conclues with a moment of illumination, where the speaker's self has, for a time found an answer to its condition." (Louis L. Martz, qtd. in Foster 24)

Perpetual Beginner

Writing = creation of the self, a life task.
Self = one. With itself, other human beings, created nature, the supernatural. (Foster 24)

Mysticism is...

According to Roethke's notebooks, mysticism is "just prayer; self-surrender to the author of our being." (Foster 12)

Contemplation is...

According to Foster, contemplation is "the mental attitude which permits one to penetrate the secret life of all things." She says this is how Theodore Roethke achieved what he called a "sacramental view of nature." (12)

Borderlands

A blog is a borderland between the public and private life. My other two blogs on teaching and on the being an author fit this description. I hope this blog will deal more with the interior drama of the mind. It will probably take the form of cryptic notes to myself.