Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and be warned of freaks bearing the 1970s on their inflationary shoulders. Pay due consideration to defaced monuments as to debased coinage.

After Virtue ends by calling for the waiting for Godot to end and waiting for St. Benedict to continue. Doubtless that’s mangled but the point is the waiting and the austerity which which it instructs.

Staring down the incessant run on the prime rate, our forebears in their salubrious American spree waited for Volcker and his pound of cure. Which turned out, in retrospect, to weigh out, in multiples, as spur, then hedge, as taurus looks back toward ursa in its great celestial sparkle.

A terrible beauty is born, we are told, and so we go and search for it, bumping into the calling out of lines unspooling black against white. We strain to see what may come, and in straining come into our strength. Poetry without you equals us, and you don’t like my easy way of claiming “we,” not because it is presumptuous in being wrong, but because in its presumptuousness such wide and consuming shadows are cast.

Do you remember when the anthropologist went down the stairs beneath the tower at the outer edges of the mapped territory and found the wall on which was written so much incantatory gibberish, but the writing was not just a process, but a kind of biological seething, and the anthropologist wanted to hold the gun instead of being held at gunpoint? Maybe some details are wrong, doubtless so - I’m tired and my grasp of the new weird was always tenuous and trending toward unintelligible - but I can still feel the breathing unease that arose alongside the reading of the biological seething that did its own writing, which tended to make agoraphobia look like personality strengths and not just holding off the bughouse at arms’ length.

Sigh. I wouldn’t suppose that

when Achilles with his short sword pierced the breast of Penthesilea
and as usual twisted the blade thrice in the wound, he noticed that

the poles could be translated anew so long as they stood at the axis of creative license and bald, emaciating theft, which created an exile from show trials who could see and hear at least one pole who had traveled back to Ithaca.

I wouldn’t suppose that the honor among thieves is sustenance like flat bread that sours over and over and over, consuming itself and bubbling over.

I think about Bartleby in his copyist’s costume, play acting at refusal until it logically if surprisingly progressed to the sickness unto death.

I think about sleep but bed down with insomnia. Which the 1970s would always understand, for which I am thankful.