Excerpts from The Volcano Lover

*

To be unaccompanied. To be alone. To lower
yourself into your own feelings.
There to find mists and vapors. The little
protuberances of old angers and longings. Then a large
emptiness. You think of what you have done, done
with brio--great slabs of actions, enterprises.
All that energy has drained away. Everything
becomes an effort.
Surfeited, his appetite for surfeit. Now it's enough.

*

How thin the line between the will to live and the will
to die. How slight the membrane between energy
and torpor. So many more could give way to the temptation
to commit suicide if it were made easy. How about... a hole,
a really deep hole, which you put in a public place, for general
use. In Manhattan, say, at the corner of Seventieth and Fifth.
Where the Frick Collection is. (Or a prole-ier address?)
A sign beside the hole reads: 4 PM -8 PM/ MON WED & FRI/
SUICIDE PERMITTED. Just that. A sign. Why, surely people
would jump who had hardly thought of it before. Any pit
is an abyss, if properly labeled. Coming home from work, out
buying a pack of wicked cigarettes, detouring to pick up the
laundry, scanning the pavement for the red silk scarf the wind
must have sucked off your shoulders, you remember the sign,
you look down, you inhale quickly, exhale slowly, and you say--
like Empedocles at Etna--why not.

Susan Sontag

*******************************************



Mostly sleeping a great deal. In bed around 9 each night.
Up at 6 or so. Molly keeping me busy.

Had a consultation with a different surgeon last week.
He hopes there will not be the need for another surgery.
He hopes some other types of treatments may heal the wound.

Brain fog and indifference still overtaking my faculties
like kudzu. Creating these strange shapes out of things
that were once recognizable but which now seem to be
completely different organisms, beings, elements.

That's all I can muster today.