i am torn between -- wanting to be -- gentle? -- to help put this together -- in some lasting form -- to give you what i think you need, even if that's just space and time to find yourself -- and being angry that you are asking this of me -- at this time -- and you are asking it, for all that you say you expect nothing -- (you are frighteningly brittle; i do not want to break you) -- and some kind of -- regret? -- not that i regret the past month -- sadness, perhaps? something duller, heavier. not incapacitating. but uglier than grief. i know it had to end. and i had not expected to take it this badly. (winterson: why is the measure of love loss?) but -- you see -- this complicates matters -- straightforward grief might have been -- simpler -- to deal with --

minz sends me katherine's lines from the english patient, that i was trying to quote: most of the time i cannot bear not to touch you. the rest of the time i feel it doesn't matter if i never see you again. it isn't the morality, it's how much you can bear. it is always -- how much you can bear. the limits of our endurance and our fidelity. not our capacity to love -- so much -- as what we can bear of it --

found it.

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

you say i taught you to be honest about what you feel -- well this is the other lesson -- that it seldom pays off -- it just is, like love, what we are compelled into -- and what we will do again and again (what's the rilke?)

i do resent, however, being pressured into being alright -- into getting my act together so that you can feel better about this -- into being the one to pick up the pieces --

(now comes anger, resentment, bitterness. you made me a CD with beck saying he was tired of fighting a lost cause. i am not a fucking lost cause.)

what's the line from The English Patient? It's not the morality, it's how much you can bear. The limits of endurance. Now I'm thinking of the sides of nature will not hold or whatever the line was, but the truth is that the sides of nature don't even notice. We have a far more limited capacity for endurance. Is it terrible to be talking about endurance, as if love were something to be endured, to be borne, to bear up against?

please.

(help.)

you see --

well.

the last time i could be awfully sensible about it and cry for a couple of days and then go get cookies and flowers which do really help --

and this time (it's been, what, a couple of weeks? this is ridiculous) i want to --

well. i was going to say, kill myself (look, I'm listening to Spiritualized, alright?) but to be honest, i don't actually. i want to sleep. and wake up somewhere else. preferably somewhere with better weather. and have a long time to indulge myself in crying. i would do it now but it seems faintly irresponsible and terribly adolescent when i really really should read something so i can go throw myself at the mercy of my professors tomorrow (today -- is it today already? fuck).

This is the knife-edge of madness.

No, not even that; madness would be too easy a way out. A much more sober -- grief? Like I'm being hit by waves of -- something. Not sadness; that implies feeling something, and the only thing I feel now is battered. And I haven't even started missing you yet.

Of course, I knew this would happen. No, that's disingenuous; I knew it would be bad, and I was beginning to realise it would be far worse than either of us had imagined. I did not know -- it had not occurred to me -- how bad it had been for you. I say bad like the word makes any sense. I knew I would grieve for you -- I wanted to be able to grieve for you. To say, at the end: I loved him, and he's gone now. (To say: I love him.) This would be the time wouldn't it -- to test all the fucking theories I derive from scraps of words and poems and life -- to test the faith I profess to have.

Of course, I'll get over it. You'll get over it. Which is, in some ways, the last betrayal, isn't it? To be able to forget. Or if not to forget, then to let go. How do you let go of love, how do you stop loving someone -- it shouldn't be possible, and in a way it isn't -- but that already gives the game away: and in a way it isn't. And in a way it is. We stop loving people all the time. (I don't want to stop loving you.)

I don't regret. I can say that much. Is that -- going to be -- enough? (Enough for what?)

I want so badly not to have to cry. Of course I'm strong enough, I'm just so fucking tired of having to be.

Conversation without Walt Whitman

After one glass of red wine I think I'm Allen Ginsberg,
walking through West Side looking for poets behind the cabbages
or bananas or watermelons or whatever the hell vegetable it was
Ginsberg found people behind, except even my demons have deserted
and it's just the vegetables and the cleaning people looking at me
while I pretend not to think about where you might be now,
instead of walking through a supermarket looking for the ghosts
of poets -- of poems -- words -- that used to come more easily,
from stranger more familiar places, even from behind cabbages bananas watermelons,
and intoxicating without the wine.


(I know, my alcohol tolerance is shot to hell. And I still need to read on cosmopolitan democracy, how?)

I miss the parks. I know, there's Central Park just a couple of blocks away, but it's all brown and dry and bare still. And you can't walk around at night. Not that one could walk around University Parks at night. But at least they were always green and pretty, and you could walk right up to the river; here you have to stand near the wall along Riverside Drive -- but not too close or you'll see the highway running right next to the Hudson -- to see the lights glinting off the black waters. I miss the river. I'd say, I miss the sea, and I kinda do, for all that I haven't really seen it for -- what, three, four years now? It's strange how being near moving water makes you feel better, somehow.

I swear I'll play by the rules. I'll do my best. And I hope this is working for you, because it's not for me -- but then there was no way out -- no painless way out, that is -- for me. And I knew that from the start. How do you unlove someone? How do you decide, wilfully, not to love them? How can any end -- detract from, take away the value of, reduce -- the love that you did have? This is just rubbish. But my hands are tied, and I swear I'll play by the rules.

The room is suddenly lonelier without you. In a way that books and daisies and music cannot remedy. I told you I'd rather take the hurt with the happiness than not have either. But I had not expected to cry for you this soon.

I think -- I'm going to go out and buy flowers and then come back and put on The White Stripes and eat ice-cream. Alright I should really work; but I think I get to do that much. You'd think -- you'd think happiness shouldn't be that fragile, wouldn't you? I'm thinking of Winterson -- was it Art and Lies? -- and the emotional extravagance needed to stay in one place. Or perhaps Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, saying he would regret the tears but never the love. It seems to be that perhaps I should not live my life through books.

I was going to say -- life's too short to sit in your room listening for familiar footsteps down the hall. But perhaps life's too short not to do that; perhaps life's too short not to rue loneliness, at least, if one can't not be alone. (I've forgotten -- I keep on forgetting -- that no-one can create a safe place for you. That you have to find it -- to make it, rather -- for yourself. That your centre has to be something of your own making.)

Have only just started reading for papers and realise that I have about three weeks to fumble around for three paper topics and write the damn things and do finals so I can graduate at the end of this semester. What have I been doing with my life? Also realise that I don't want to read Hannah Arendt anymore because I am going to scream but it can't be helped because the one paper I have a vague idea about has to do with her and like Macbeth I am in blood steeped so far that were I to go back, returning were tedious as going over. Or words to that effect. I do hate writing papers. Grad school forsooth.

I feel as if I should talk about the war. And I have been -- and I will -- but for now I wanted to say -- however incongruous (to put it mildly) it seems to speak of this now, in New York City, with CNN on every television set in every corner of the university every day -- I want to say to you: I didn't think I'd find a safe place in this city. You bring me back to words and music and laughter. To hope. Not to peace -- or perhaps a kind of peace, a delicate balancing of -- restlessnesses? of all my demons. Peace not as the dry and arid place I thought it might be, but something else, something more. A safe place. A place for love. I'm writing this now with your words and your music still in my mind, writing this -- as I have been living, these few days, these few weeks -- with a sense of amazement. The possibility of happiness is an immense thing. You bring me a breath of hope. I wrote to a friend, who said would you not want something to hold on to, at the end -- wrote with 5 a.m. lucidity that if we end this with friendship and hope -- and poetry and music -- then what more can one ask for?

Addendum: it's not that you learn that you will not -- might not -- be hurt. It's that you learn that although there is no-one you love who will not hurt you at some point, betray you at some point -- and you them -- precisely because you love each other. What you learn is not to be afraid of that. To give and hazard all, as Shakespeare says. Throw away the lights, the definitions / And say of what you see in the dark. Not to fear the darkness. You learn to be alone, and to trust yourself -- and then to trust others, despite, because. To face the possibility of betrayal -- of betraying and of being betrayed -- and not to flinch. I know you'll break my heart, if not now then at the end, which is a matter of weeks rather than months. I said -- it seems a long time ago now -- that I'd rather be the more loving one (-- 'If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.' Have you forgotten your Auden?). I'm here anyway, beyond my own expectations, beyond my own imagining.