Wine (Part XVIII)

It gets really tiring. Tiring and spinny. And it gets frustrating, being inert, the big obelisk in the center of the room, unmoveable, the central tendency of my personal plot. The protagonist. What kind of protagonist am I? I already know the question involves the phrase "modern anti-hero", or "introvert-driven plotline", or something like "oversensitivity sensationalism." The kind of situation where every colour is oversaturated and all phrases, gestures, facial expressions, poetentious broods or storms up or down stairs tied together with this slack but unbreakable thread, and I lift and wind the thread for hours, trying to see it all in line, in relief, in explicable terms. Of course, doomed to failure, I content myself to wander the streets muttering what seem like insane ramblings but are actually the strophes of Howl which I memorized. Last few weeks have not seen a broadening of my literary horizons: instead we get re-treading of familiar terrain, which is still deep and moist and ripe for picking. The Beats, Gunter Grass, old textbooks, a few loved passages of Nietzsche or neo-Jungians or William Carlos Williams, each a pointer in a hundred other directions, up to the point where the sheer literary possibilities, the picaresque denizens of America in Howl (fro example), make me want to cry, or create, or kill myself, or proclaim to the world from atop a soapbox, or make mock religions, or get off my ass and act. There is an unknowable soft spot in my head at the moment, and it is not to be healed by confession. You will see what I am thinking. But first I must distance myself from the world of rooftop reveries (though we have one of the finest roofs in the city--stars and flashing lights and clouds), or gatherings (though the cast of characters is favoured by The Gods), or the endless chase of the hip, and especially colours which to my eyes are distraction. There are those to whom colour speaks. To me it only yells. Perhaps I am pathological. I've considered the possibilities of OCD, or borderline personality disorder, or proto-schizophrenia (known long ago by the more terrifying name of dementia praecox); or alternately just the influence of some two dozen teachers--children of the 60s, and a village slumbering on the endless plains of Eastern Europe, ECGs in the gutters and rabid dogs on the streets, army men and birds' nests shattered.

Consider: "Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality."