"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

--Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 198.

Beautiful Dreamer

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away!

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea
Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie;
Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.

Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

--Stephen Foster

When you are weary with age,
and the hearth is cooling with the dying embers of the evening fire,
remember, my darling: you were loved.
Oh, how you were loved.

When the kettle whistles for an era gone
as you shuffle a waltz to the stove. When
the wind clutches at your bones with an ice impenetrable.
Pause. Consider.

You were loved, through and through. And I was too. I was too.

12th May, 2.30am
Moon-talk. I wake to a ferment of ideas. Is this what Laura means when she talks about the excesses of her premenstrual state? She tells me that women can have heightened states of awareness and wild proliferations of ideas, hormonally, just before menstruation. In my premenstrual migraine I usually feel clumsy and inept and want to shut the world out. But tonight it is full moon, I am bleeding, my belly aches with menstrual cramps and I feel like squatting and baying at the moon. I surrender to the flow of ideas--patterns rather than words. It is a wild connectedness where images merge and fire off each other and my mind explodes. What is this other kind of thinking that happens in the night?

--From Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals

...Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

--From Philip Levine, 'The Simple Truth'