Bill Knott
Coat Upon a Stick
I've lost the exact quote, but there's a note in Nietzsche somewhere about old philosophers and their tendency to issue declarations, assertions, without any supporting arguments or augmentative proofs . . . this practice, he says, always proceeds not from wisdom but from weariness . . . I think I've reached that decrepit state, because I find myself impatient with process; I too want to write things that simply declare, that baldly state conclusions, without my having to create or present a viable context . . . I try to justify it to myself with the excuse of poetry's necessary need for brevity, and I can find quotes from the greats to support that pose-stance, but it's really age that's causing my slack-off . . . I'm 66 years old and I'm exhausted: every poem in my work-folder is a letter of resignation. A plea for early (too late!) retirement.
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When does the President have me scheduled to die from Bird Flu? Not soon enough, I hear some say.
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I don't do it much now, but about 4 years ago I read R. S. Thomas everyday for months on end. You could say I read him religiously, and the pun applies because while I told myself I was reading him for the trenchant style and the tenacities of his craft, inevitably I had to contend with the endless metaphors of Christianity that fill his work: his poems are reiteratively if not exclusively concerned with the spiritual life. . . . as I read him I grew envious over the wealth of tropes, the seemingly limitless inscapes of figuration which Christianity provides for his poems. . . He returns again and again to those traditional interactions and confrontations between human and deity, and somehow brings the old ciphers if not back to life, at least back to line. . . . I'm an atheist, I hate religion, but I understand the appeal of it for poets, i.e. its rich repetoire of associations and subject matter . . . I could see why, in the absence of other intellectual considerations, a poet might convert to any faith for poetical reasons alone, never mind salvation. (The extravagant solidities of the former outweigh the pathetic apparitions of the latter.) If only the choice were that simple.
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Why are there no, or almost no, anthologies of contemporary atheist poetry? Searching google, I found only one listed: " Above Us Only Sky: Atheist Poetry , pub. Incarnate Muse (incarnatemuse at yahoo dot com) POBox 5756 Santa Barbara CA 93150." This book however seems to be available only through the publishers directly: it isn't listed on Amazon.com, where a cursory search found the following anthols, all published within the past decade or so:
Vespers : Contemporary American Poems of Religion and Spirituality eds. Virgil Suarez, Ryan G. Van Cleave, U of Iowa Press 2003
The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry
by Andrew Schelling Wisdom Publications 2005
Upholding Mystery : An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry, ed. by David Impastato Oxford University Press, USA 1996
The Poets' Jesus : Representations at the End of a Millennium
by Peggy Rosenthal Oxford University Press, USA 2001
Odd Angles of Heaven: Contemporary Poetry by People of Faith. Craig, David and Janet McCann, Ed. Harold Shaw 1994.
Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry. Story Line, 2000.
Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. ed. Jane Hirshfield. Harper Perennial, 1995.
The Sacred Place : Witnessing the Holy in the Physical World. Olsen, W. Scott and Scott Cairns. Ed. U of Utah P, 1996.
Atwan, Robert and Laurance Wieder. Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Carbo, Nick and Denise Duhamel, Ed. Sweet Jesus: Poems About the Ultimate Icon. Anthology Editions, 2002.
Curzon, David. Ed. The Gospels in Our Image: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry Based on Biblical Texts. NY: Harcourt, 1995.
Modern Poems on the Bible: An Anthology. NY: Jewish Publication Society, 1993
The Things That Matter: An Anthology of Women's Spiritual Poetry by Julia Neuberger (Editor) St Martins Pr 1995
Cries of The Spirit by Marilyn Sewell (Editor) Beacon Press 2000 ("Marilyn Sewell is a Unitarian minister interested in celebrating the sacredness of women's lives.")
Beneath a Single Moon : Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry ed. by Kent Johnson Shambhala 2000
A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry by Susan McCaslin (Editor) Ekstasis Editions 1998
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And these anthols listed above are of contemporary religious verse, I'm not including the perennial re-issues of poems from the past . . . . What the hell's going on? Why are so few contemporary USA poets writing atheist poetry? Why are so many still tarting themselves up with the tatters of religion? Here's Yeats lamenting the prospect of having to dress up as those old rags:
"How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men's heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times?"
How can USA poets reach our contemporaries most of whom (the pollsters tell us) believe Jesus Christ is their personal savior and Darwin is the Devil: how can we address them without finding ourselves turned into a moldy flea-vermined vestment? (Speaking of fleas: Lie down with that dogma and you'll get up with its ideas.) Someone who has a better understanding of this insane situation than me is Ira Sadoff, whose essay "Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry" in the July/August 2005 issue of APR is thoughtful and incisive and in my estimation irrefutable: as usual he provides an essential corrective voice of opposition. I especially agree with him in this instance. I would go further than him and say these goddamn poets promoting themselves as "spiritual" are committing evil: they are pandering to the worst elements of political power in this country. They deserve to be forced to attend a White House Prayer Breakfast. What a harsh penance that would be.
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There must be others besides Sadoff who find the "spirituality" of much recent U.S.poetry to be suspiciously opportunistic and obsequious given the current political climate. . . . His account of the waning influence of Marxist poets like Neruda, and the subsequent rising interest in Rilke and his epigones, is correct, I think, unfortunately. And of course poets don't live in a vacuum or an ivorytower, political and social events affect our choices. . . if Hilary Clinton must swerve right to survive or win, then why not poets also. . .
But the horrible thing is that it might be less a matter of the immediately political than a longterm inherent dilemma: I defer to Octavio Paz on this. Here's some thoughts from Children of the Mire : "Poets reacted to the assault on Christianity by [the Enlightenment's] critical philosophy by becoming the channels through which the ancient religious spirit, Christian and pre-Christian, was transmitted. . . . More than once-with irritation but not without true insight-Trotsky pointed out religious elements in the work of the majority of Russian poets and writers of the [1920s]. . . . Trotsky's criticism amounts to a condemnation of poetry. . . . [H]is criticism of poetry . . . takes on the form of the criticism which philosophy and science since the eighteenth century have made of the religion, myths, magic, and other beliefs of the past. Neither philosophers nor revolutionaries can patiently tolerate the ambivalence of poets. . . . Here lies the basis of the misunderstanding between revolutionaries and poets, which no one has been able to unravel. If the poet disowns his magic side, he disowns poetry and becomes a functionary and a propagandist. . . . The opposition between the poetic and the revolutionary spirit is part of a larger contradiction, that of the linear time of the modern age as opposed to the rhythmic time of the poem." Etc etc (all this from Chapter 6, pages 104-onward)....
As much as I would like to second Sadoff and see some reactionary backsliding, some political opportunism, some resurgence of right-wing iniquity in our poetic pasture, I fear that the phenomenon, the "contradiction" is cyclical, and hence unresolvable. Can any of us resist the swing of the pendulum; should we even try? I applaud Sadoff for struggling with the question, for staking a position in the debate. . . contra Eliot's wish in After Strange Gods , every society needs "a large number of free-thinkers" like Sadoff.
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Why can't we poets resist (protest against) religion? We know it leads to endless bloodshed and war. And endless hypocrisy: I can imagine a scenario in which I would use "spirituality" to save not my soul but my ass. If I had to convert or be executed, I would probably convert. (As Homer has Achilles say to Ulysses in Hades, I'd rather be the lowest slave alive than be hailed and honored here.) I don't believe in the afterlife. I don't believe in god, so I can believe in whatever God they force me to. Or maybe I'd be old enough by then not to cling to a hypocritical senescence (maybe I'm in it now), maybe I could heroically and sarcastically "die screaming Viva Stalin ," to quote Parra. If the USA were to devolve into a theocracy, shamefully many of our poets WOULDN'T end up in the concentration camps. Maybe that's why all those anthols above exist, to provide a list for the authorities. (But there must be a market for those anthols, there must be readers buying them; they can't all be secretly funded by the CIA?)
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Even the adamant Marxist Heiner Müller says: "Socialism, communism, or whatever other utopia stands no chance, if it doesn't also offer a theological dimension. This is also a fundamental problem today." This comes from an 1995 interview titled "Auschwitz ad Infinitum," p. 152, A Heiner Müller Reader . Just before the words I've quoted, he says: "It's Dostoyevsky's problem, the Raskolnikov question. Dostoyevsky too can only find one answer in the end and that is Grace. Assuming that Auschwitz is the model for selection, then there is no political answer. There is probably only a religious answer. The problem with this civilization is that it does not have an alternative to Auschwitz." (p. 151)
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"[O]nly one anwer in the end and that is Grace." (Heidegger: "Only a God can save us.")
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The Nation gave their big-money poetry prize to Mark Jarman: The Nation , which is theoretically so Leftist, Liberal, Humanist, Secular, and they award someone who sells himself as a Christian poet? How schizophrenic can you get? But they're not the only "progressive" journal with a split personality. The Boston Review features sociopolitical essays and articles from a Leftist perspective, but the poems it publishes are mostly elitist and nonpolitical.
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The Nation wouldn't give their Statesperson of the Year award to the Reverend Pat Robertson, would they?
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One big difference between R. S. Thomas and our current USA gospelpoets: As an ordained Anglican priest he served for forty years in rural parishes in Wales. . . . doesn't the fact that Thomas was a priest validate and justify and authenicate the spiritual concerns of his poetry- Am I suggesting that those poets whose careers are benefiting from the current political power of conservative religious forces, should put their sanctimony where their mouth is and take the cloth, mount the pulpit. . . I disesteem these poets, but is it because I question their sincerity and commitment compared to that of Thomas?-
Here's Philip Larkin, from an interview: "I suppose I always try to write the truth and I wouldn't want to write a poem which suggested that I was different from what I am. . . . For instance, take love poems. I should feel it false to write a poem going overboard about someone if you weren't at the same time marrying them and setting up house with them. . . . I think one of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another-a false relation between art and life. I always try to avoid this."
If you're going to go overboard about god, marry him. Her. It.
(Criticize me: all the poems I wrote about suicide, why didn't I do it?)
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Rilkemilky pietistic pap.
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It's not just Christer po's, Buddhist-bards aren't any better in this regard. Hiroaki Sato in his introduction to One Hundred Frogs: From Tanka to Renga to Haiku rejects the position of those Western devotees who look on the haiku as being inextricably bound to Zen Buddhism, who insist that the haiku can only be appreciated and understood (and practised) within the context of Zen. . . .
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Here's a stanza in English translation from a long poem called "Recycling" by the Polish master Rozewicz (from the eponymous book pubbed by Arc in 2001; trans. by Barbara Plebanek and Tony Howard):
Joaquin Navarro-Valls
press spokesman
for the Holy See
would not confirm
reports
broadcast on the American
T.V. network A & E
that the Vatican secreted
200 million swiss francs
principally gold coins
looted by croatian
fascists during the second
world war
croatian fascists who
mass murdered
Serbs Jews and Gypsies
carried 350 million swiss francs
out of Yugoslavia
before the end of the war
the British managed to intercept
about 150 million swiss
francs the rest
reached the Vatican whence
rumours suggested
it was transferred
to Spain and Argentina
....end quote. As he says toward the end of this section of the poem, "zlote bylo milczenie swiata": gold was the world's silence
(. . . gold can certainly buy the silence of most of us, but fortunately there always some like Rozewicz who won't bargain)
.... but my question about these lines is: is this religious poetry? It's certainly about one important aspect of religion which normative religio-poets don't dwell on, except in speciously abstract mea culpas (we're all sinners etcet) . . . .
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One of my faves from R.S. Thomas:
TRAMP
A knock at the door
And he stands there,
A tramp with his can
Asking for tea,
Strong for a poor man
On his way-where?
He looks at his feet,
I look at the sky;
Over us the planes build
The shifting rafters
Of the new world
We have sworn by.
I sleep in my bed,
He sleeps in the old,
Dead leaves of a ditch.
My dreams are haunted;
Are his dreams rich?
If I wake early,
He wakes cold.
-This poem (okay-I know you probably hate it) seems valuable to me as a poem of "witness," however one would define that.
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. . . here's a poem I've tried and failed for years to get published, so I' m sticking it in here:
AT THE "FEDERAL CENSORSHIP AND THE ARTS" SYMPOSIUM
Just as the Nazis never proscribed Rilke
(he was no Expressionist, no Degenerate,
no Art-Bolshevik), so most of us poets
are thought no threat by those in authority-
Halfhass, for instance, his books won't get banned:
his Rilkemanqué wins awards, his "spiritual
progress" and "earned words" (-to paraphrase Wilde,
his genius gives good guru Po-Biz style while
his talent brooks those so serious ergo poems)-
what might appease the Right even more is
his patriot's part in The American Poetry Series .
Better silence than that? Better to hide, to write
for one's cabinet? (To paraphrase Benn,
the aristocratic form of publication.)
Note:
This poem was deleted from my collected comic poems by the publisher, BOA, whose chief fund-raiser at the time was Robert Hass. . . .
I've often wondered if the BOA editors censored this poem on their own initiative, or whether they were ordered to do so by Herr Hass.
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I wrote that poem after seeing a piece in APR entitled "The Spiritual Progress of Robert Hass." Yeah, spiritual progress, I mean he's a fucking saint, right? Unfortunately there has been no corresponding poetical progress. All his new poems are pretentious and cliche-riddled; in this they resemble all the old. Even when he tries to write a 'political' poem it turns as usual into maundering piffle.
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Sharon Olds put out a large Selected a couple years ago, and got robbed. That book should have won one of the big prizes, but I can think of two reasons why it didn't. First: jealousy. She writes poems which can be (and are) read by real people as opposed to lit-grads. Her books sell too well to suit the Po-Biz Establishment, she's too popular to please them. Second: sexism. Oh yes, they gave the National Book Award to Jean Valentine (a charming minor poet: all minor poets are charming, except for me), but they gave it to her for the main reason of denying it to Olds, and as a pre-emptive so no one could accuse them of sexism. Neat how they do that. Olds is a major poet and if anybody deserves to take the triple crown a la Ashbery in 1975, it's her.
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If eminent British critic Christopher Ricks wanted to write a book about a living male USA poet, why not Philip Levine? Or James Tate? Or C.K. Williams? Or-you get the point.
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All these rock'n'rollers propped up by publicists with the honorific title of "poet": how many times have you read or heard, 'Oh yeah, he/she's not just a singer-songwriter, he/she's a real poet.' Oh yeah, well make Joni Mitchell and all those other supposed "poets" actually live on the monthly average paycheck budget of even the most successful poem-writing poet, and see how how many days before they start screaming "No, no! I'm not a poet, I'm a popstar! Gimme back my limo! Bring back the maid chauffeur groundskeeper bodyguard cook!"
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From Michael Hamburger's The Truth of Poetry : "It was the ideal of Gottfried Benn to write 'the absolute poem, the poem without faith. The poem without hope, the poem addressed to no one, the poem made of words which you assemble in a fascinating way.' " -The quote comes from a 1930 essay by Benn. Here's another from the same source: 'Works of art are phenomena, historically ineffective, without practical consequences. That is their greatness.'
-What's most admirable there is not Benn's solipsistic, autotelic, elitist, one might say fascist, esthetic: it's his honesty, the modesty of his admission that such "absolute poems" can have no effect on a public consciousness. (Nor should they aspire to, seems to be the implication.)
-But what about poets who deliberately write for a limited audience of acolytes and initiates, who believe, as Benn professes above, in the poem as an end in itself, but who assert that their solipsistic/elitist poems will somehow overthrow the hegemony of bourgeois discourse? That, far from being 'historically ineffective, without practical consequences,' their absolutist/autotelic verse is going to undermine capitalism and bring on a Socialist revolution?
-Would you call such poets dishonest, or deluded?
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Another quote from Hamburger:
Walter Benjamin, who became a Marxist in his later years, once remarked that Fascism 'aestheticizes politics,' whereas Communism 'politicizes art.' He cites the Italian Futurist Marinetti as an instance of the Fascist apocalyptic who finds his satisfaction in war. . . . [A]nd he comments: 'That, clearly, is the consummation of l'art pour l'art.'
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Another possible consummation of l'art pour l'art might be to write poetry from a hermetic/elitist esthetic and then to issue loud proclamations about how revolutionary and political your poetry is. That way you can have it both ways.
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-In other words, to use Paz's terms, the religious temptation is currently disguising itself as the revolutionary temptation. ("The history of modern poetry is that of the oscillation between revolutionary temptation and religious temptation." -p. 37, Children of the Mire .)
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In a 1952 lecture, Benn asserts that 'lyrical poetry has no other theme than the poet himself.' Around that same time, Philip Larkin says: 'A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about people and poetry is about yourself.' (Both quotes from Hamburger.)
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I don't see anything wrong with writing about one's self, though it seems like there are always those who stand ready to condemn the poets who do it too passionately (see Olds note above). Sadly this type of poem has now fallen into disfavor- not with the larger poetrybook-buying public, but with a growing segment of younger poets. The first-person narrative, the realist-autobiopoem of Olds and Levine, has been subverted and refuted and or ignored by many younger poets. These new poets know they've grown up into a regime where poetry is ruled over by Theory, where the poem is a slave to Poetics. In the ancient quarrel between poets and philosophers, the balance of power has shifted to the latter: "[T]he philosophical critique of poetry is ascendant. In the provinces of literary criticism, Plato's heirs have apparently won out." (Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida / A Defence of Poetry ). These new poets have internalized this cruel critique and sublimate it via the usual strategies of auto-punishment. Snatch the whip from Master and lash yourself. In any case their seemingly-on-the-surface-disparate modes of servile irony have to a certain extent seized the floor. The Confessional poem has been pushed offstage.
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The Olds/Levine/et al Autobiographical-Narrative-Anecdotal poem valorizes the particulars of one's personal history. What's wrong with that, I ask. "Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular," Aristotle answers.
-The rejection of the A-N-A (anal?) poem signals a wide-spread dissatisfaction or impatience with history, with temporal presence, with coherent empirical particulars.
-Take your particulars and squash them flat, ironicize them, place them hodgepodge in a field or frenzy of relationship where none is more important than any other, where their individual significances are subservient to the whole, and theoretically you'll have the "universal," or "poetry."
-So the problem with the A-N-A poem is that it presents inequities, ethical aspirations, hierarchic structures, value judgements (the Barbie your mother gave you means more than an urinal scrawled R. Mutt). In doing so it disobeys Lautreamont's envious Commandment, Poetry must be made by all (or All). In the generalized sloppy tide of miracles none shuns that shore. Unified, harmonized, nothingnouned, who can gainsay the dis-lib of your dunk 'n' drown. The whole must and will prevail. Salvation. Freedom. Flush that Barbie in the duchamp and you'll be One with us. Down the dionysian drain, everybody.
-The Olds/Levine/et al poem defies the law of Aristotle: "One could versify Herodotus, but it wouldn't be poetry, [because] poetry presents not what actually happened, but what might have happened." Not an experienced event, but an imagined one. (I see Eliot's Theory of Impersonality as based on this distinction.)
-Imagination gives us alternatives, equivalents, metaphors. It dislodges the personal, the particular; it levels the house. It leaves nowhere. There's no one to go home to:
R. Mutt=Your Mother.
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a perhaps-prophetic poem by Tadeusz Rozewicz, trans. by Adam Czerniawski:
AN ADDRESS
Not to posterity
that would be senseless
they might all be monsters
the high commission
gives clear warning
the powers military staffs
that monsters will follow
with no brains
therefore not to posterity
but to those who
at this very moment
multiply with their eyes shut
not to posterity
I address these words
I speak to politicians
who won't read me
to bishops
who won't read me
to generals
who won't read me
I speak to the so-called 'ordinary people'
who won't read me
I shall speak to all
who do not read me
nor hear nor know
nor need me
They do not need me
but I need them
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. . . it's not just "the high commission" that gives this warning about the possibility of a post-human future. Add ubiquitous dystopian scifi novels and films. Add Ray Kurzweil and others. -The basic argument of the AvantGarde (or the Postlang or Post-Avant or whatever the heck they're calling themselves this week) is predicated on their ultimate vindication by Posterity. You know the spiel: Yes the easy poets the accessible poets like Collins Olds and Levine are being read and honored now, but in the future they will be forgotten and we, we the AGs will be appreciated then: just as those earlier precursor avantgardistes who were ignored or scorned in their day (Van Gogh, Artaud, Dickinson, Mallarme et al) are now recognized as Greats, so we too will garner the fame we deserve now, and we will have our posthumous revenge on these insipid popularists like Mary Oliver and all the other P-p-pinsky-striped SOQs. . .
-But what if Rozewicz is right? what if Ray Kurzweil is right and the species of homo sapiens is soon to be replaced by AIs, androids robots cyborgs etc.? will the latter read poetry? if you can download the text of every poem ever published into your braincom in 3.4 seconds, does that constitute "reading?" or will they create their own kind of poetry (digital data / pictovids)? -or will the AvantGarde triumph once more as those numbered clone-syncs pore over the at-last-recognized genius of Bruce Andrews and Susan Howe? or might those AIs prefer the work of Ai? The humanist realism of Ai, or the posthumanist whatever-it-is of Clark Coolidge. . . I prefer the former, but I suspect an android might go for Clarkyanarchy . . . (Indeed some current verse seems to be directed toward and written for the cyborgs of tomorrow, rather than for today's human inferiors.)
(Ps: In 2005, Bill Gates hailed Ray Kurzweil as "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.")
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Heiner Müller, from a 1991 interview: "Bourgeois society is based on differentiation, but when it is no longer able to identify evil it ceases to be able to define its own limits and determine itself. It needs the other for this, the empire of evil. This empire is currently dissolved. The downfall of bourgeois society is this-the future is evil. What remains of bourgeois society is Rimbaud's phrase 'I is someone else.' The dream of the avant garde is now acquiring the quality of a nightmare."
("The Future Is Evil," p. 130, A Heiner Müller Reader .)
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Maybe I'm the one who's trying to be holier-than-thou, who thinks of himself as some sort of saint. (The pen-name I used when young was "Saint Geraud.") Shouldn't I be using this space to excoriate my own failures and shortcomings? I could take on that task of reprimand, but really it's a job best left to experts:
"[Knott's] poems are so naive that the question of their poetic quality hardly arises. . . . Mr. Knott practices a dead language."
-Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books
"Bill Knott . . . is so bad one can only groan in response."
-Peter Stitt, Georgia Review
[Bill Knott's poems are] typically mindless. . . . He produces only the prototaxis of idiocy."
-Charles Molesworth, Poetry
"Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake."
-Ron Loewinsohn, TriQuarterly
"[Bill Knott's books are] filled with venom. . . . Knott seems to hate himself . . . and he seems to hate his readers."
-Kirk Robinson, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine )
"[Bill Knott is] incompetent . . ."
-Alicia Ostriker, Partisan Review
"[Bill Knott is] malignant . . ."
-Calvin Bedient, Massachusetts Review
"Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail."
-Tomaz Salamun, Snow
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Oh hypocrisy me. I've been guilty of what I'm accusing others of: around 1990 or so the shortlived tiny magazine Jack's Mackerel published a little insert chapbook by me called "Five Poems of Spiritual Quest." What the fuck, why didn't I just say 'quest'? I can't remember, but obviously I succumbed to the timely allure of that "sp" word; I hoped to paste its commercial appeal onto my paltrypoems. Mercifully I sobered up and didn't reprint them under that superscription. I pray that all copies of that Jack Mack issue have vanished by now, but the fact remains I committed the same sin I've here condemned others for.
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I assume we waste our time and energy writing that godgarbage so we can dodge having to deal with more difficult subjects such as our (my) complicity in the crimes of capitalism, right?
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Reading back what I've written here, it looks like I'm mostly arguing against Mallarme's dictum:
"Everything that wishes to remain holy must surround itself with mystery."
-Why do we poets wish to remain holy? Whether Religionist or Avantgardist, why do we encloak and cassock ourselves in occult obscurities and difficulties? Why costume our poems with such veils and envestments?
Why this persistent need to "become the garment of religion": -I'm taking Yeats' verb literally here: in our naked thrashing efforts to surround ourselves with it, we become it:
Maybe it's inevitable that the self will be subsumed at last into the swathings it has used to repress and protect itself with:
I began this post with a note on being old:
Yeats called an old man "a coat upon a stick":
Is it too much to hope that I can try to be a coat upon a stick, rather than a cloak upon a cross.
Originally published at billknott.typepad.com in April 2006.
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