X --Marks the Spot

[Guest guest]

It was the day before Christmas

and all through my-room,

not a creature was stiring,

not even a terrorist, wir-ing

his big ba-ba Boom!

This morning I feel some strange kind of energy in the air,

like an intense intimacy is compacting within my person;

I had been writing poetry last night & I felt like I had made a

important break-through, & that produced a kind of euphoria.

Although my physical body is always the same size & shape

more or less, my 'mental body' seemed to expand into a vauge,

diffused cloud & then contract until it became a glowing ball of

intensity.

I think it was A.E. Housman who wrote that the true test of poetry

is when it makes the hair prickle; and Sartre describes it in his

novel 'Nausea.' " I felt my body harden and nausea vanish; He also

said, " I feel my body at rest like a precision machine. "

This is the first step towards what Shaw calls, 'the seventh degree

of concentration.' This is what Proust experienced when he tasted

the madeleine dipped in tea and suddenly ceased to feel 'mediocre,

accidental, and mortal.' This feeling was not an illusion. He had

accidentally stumbled upon a perfectly normal power of the human

soul: Faculty X. We are not 'mediocre, accidental, or mortal,' even

though most of the time we feel we are.

And that is, indeed, the most fundimental problem of human existence.

Why does it? Why do our certainties, our ectasies and intensities,

evaporate so easily, leaving us to feel like having a hangover.?

Perhaps, this brief taste of the exquisite, is the promise of a better life

to come, one that we could not possibily endure in our present vehical.

And as addresses the 'spirit of beauty' and asks.----

" Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim, vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? "

Take care my friends, have a Merry Ole Christmas, and may all your

pleasant dreams become manifest.

Love

S.C.