Cowardice

Written upon discovering that the majority of one's fellow online poll-takers in a particular Florida Congressional district answered "Yes, he should get the harshest sentence possible" to the question "Does Bergdahl deserve life in prison after pleading guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy?"

Isn’t it amazing –

This feast of Bergdahl hating?

Isn’t it astounding

This compensatory hounding

From those brave from impregnable safety

Of ten thousand thousand feet

Doing Nothing

It's funny how as soon as one has bested any of one's inner demons, another arrives to take its place, as if they were taking turns in a relay. These days, having conquered more or less my adolescent need for identity and selfhood, i.e. having become a bog that is perfectly contoured to the sink of earth it inhabits, I have found a new demon to follow it. "Beyond the crisis of identity there are other crises," says Erik Erikson, or something like it, someplace in Young Man Luther (and probably in many other places too).

The hag that is currently astride me is the abject terror of wasting time. It's bad enough to have to eat and sleep. (Nabokov writes of the agony of having to abandon precious hours of consciousness every night -- a feeling shared by his insomniac creation Van-- and, to a somewhat less involved extent, by me.) One then also needs to deal with the problem of transporting oneself from place to place, none of which actively contributes to satisfying the inner obsessions.

Four Horsemen in Yemen

Four horsemen in Yemen

War, Death, Famine, Pestilence

U.S., Saudi Arabia, Omar Bashir, Cholera

Four horsemen in Yemen

Soltero

"My life's work... requires autonomy like oxygen." (Anzaldúa) One finds similar ideas, as we will see later in this post, in D.H. Lawrence, in Sylvia Townsend Warner, in Samuel Butler, in Marina Tsvetaeva, in lord knows how many others. The desperate quest for solitude and autonomy runs as a persistent enough theme through all known literature (-- or, perhaps, it is just consistent enough in my own life that it always lifts itself off the page, unsolicited, of whatever I am reading) that one might be tempted to credit it with being the fundamental human struggle -- the meaning of life.

I've always been a little skeptical, however. Perhaps autonomy has been granted an outsized significance in the written word, since that written word, in order to get written, must have been created by people who fought for and won sufficient autonomy and solitude to be able to write it -- people who have, that is, spent a good bulk of their waking hours slashing like machete-wielders at the foliage of human companionship and solicitude, which I know from experience is forever threatening to encroach upon the precious few free days and nights one has in which to wring words, stories -- hence meaning -- out of the struggle.