Just a thought on the approaching new year...new year...NEW...lovely.
But there is no such thing. Recurrence of the past is inevitable and the involuntary repetition of what once was but a glimpse is the only door to a new stage of perception.
Next year probably I will revise all that I have written around 1990 concerning the American West; having come to a conclusion that endless footnoting is not only okay but necessary. A thematic never really exhausts itself in poetics.
I take up, for example, my old copy of Gary Snyder's MYTHS & TEXTS and suddenly realize that I HAVEN'T READ THIS BOOK. I mean, so much has been eluding me, and still does.
To look at lines like:
San Francisco, "Mulberry Harbor"
eating the speckled sea-bird eggs
of the Farallones
(22)
And I didn't even know what he was talking about untill this past summer when I chanced upon his writing on Petaluma and the town's chicken industry.
Illumination partout.
At one point in life one feels one needs urgently to see old friends. And when they are DEAD one can only see old-friends-as-paper-beings. On the other hand, poets and novelists alike are DEAD the moment their texts take shapes (if provisionary).
Hence the convenience--for the soul--of books as surrogate friends.
So my resolution (already!) for the new year would be:
"Hello, old friends!"
