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the proof that things fall apart:
it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.
I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening,
whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.
haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains,
Every voice seems a scream.
the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress
“We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future.
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.
It is the trail of an intention gone haywire,
Like so much of this country, Banyan suggests something curious and unnatural.
pink carnations.
in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story.
where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed.
the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.
a woman who perhaps wanted too much.
“I couldn’t create sympathy for her.”
he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.
Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship’s a little truer That’s where the West begins.
with an air of bewildered determination,
until she found Carmel, she did not really come from anywhere.
“House of the Rising Sun”
Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not,
Institute for the Study of Nonviolence,
less refugees from it than children who do not quite apprehend it.
“responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,”
followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow.
“Everybody says I’m politically naive, and I am,” she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. “So are the people running politics, or we wouldn’t be in wars, would we.”
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes.
The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to live!”
whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
that life is indeed a scenario,
Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes,
haunted millionaire
the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
“the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.”
“The Arts in a Democratic Society.”
how to do it “right.”
“When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever,”
peculiar beauty of this political potential,
against the culture which had produced Saran-Wrap and the Vietnam War.
people are starving to death on Haight Street, a scale model of Vietnam.
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.
Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.
1966 Hunter’s Point riots,
if you don’t know, by august haight street will be a cemetery.
“Five years old,” Otto says. “On acid.”
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember?
inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally,
