You touched me Delphic and acute and then took it right back and I wondered if it was some small retribution or peculiar rebuke because it had that kind of feel or I’m prone to that kind of thought. I was about to say my wall went right back up, thicker and taller than before, that what had finally become a low split-rail fence turned overnight—no, overmoment—to a steel and concrete barricade. But that’s not right because that’s over, those overglorifications and overtragicisms; it has always been that same rickety split-rail fence dividing me, nothing more, and the wind blows right through it, just as it should.

I’m on the other side, the inside, my side, sometimes far from the fenceline, deep within and deep at work in my workish way, arranging, building, transcending, fucking up, picking up the pieces and doing it all again, each time a little closer, each time moving farther away. Ah, to go, to go, I dream to go and go to dream because I’m just that goddamn clever. To go away and find more pieces to throw in this pile, more material with which to work, more sublime sublimities to build, more ardor poked through with new holes by new ironies (just windows, those—thanks Adam[1]), new heights to reach, new lows to plumb, but always surrounded by that same fence, that same simple marker of where I end and the rest of everything begins. How could it be anything but open?

Yes, I’ve gone deep back and away in there to hide, of course I have. To hide and pretend I wasn’t me or to hide me from the pretending I was doing on the outside where everyone could see even though most weren’t looking anyway, anyway, no matter. But I’m no longer so afraid of looking out, or of having someone, anyone, look in. I don’t much care, so long as they can truly see, so long as they don’t think they can “fix” me, so long as they don’t think I need to be assuaged or placated or distracted, so long as they don’t think themselves the antidote to a problem in a quandaric sense rather than a sense mathematic or philosophical. Or any sense, for that matter. I don’t need antidotes, equations, or precepts. I need answers, some, and questions, more, and more ways of asking.

Arrange, build, transcend. Arrange, build, transcend. Arrange, build, transcend. There’s nothing here to fix, don’t you see, only pieces to arrange, only building to do, only transcendence to achieve. More pieces, more building, always transcendence and dream. And falls, because the sun melts, singes, and warps. But the dream remains, as the real ones do. The dream remains and I go.

You could come along with me on this, but I’m afraid I’ll end up being the one carrying the bags. And that’s not interesting right now anymore ever because their contents have already—always already—been arranged and built, some prefabricated, some at random, and lugging them around would be to submit to the ghosts inside, to roll over and say you got me, that’s it, here we are, let’s call it a day, call it a lifetime.

You don’t got me, no one does, but I do, and I’m arranging for some more getting, building up to go, transcending out to be, to give, to have, to find, to make … what. Well, meaning, of course, well-meant and true to and beyond itself. To make it mean, because that is everything and that is love, with fury, a “love so strong that its passion [is] only curbed by the strength of hatred.”[2]  That’s what I am and that’s what I’m after.

[1] Adam Zagajewski, “A Defense of Ardor,” from, wait for it, A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanaugh, p12 and shit.

[2] Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, trans. Alison Entrekin, p53, year 1900 and something.