"Books are for the scholar's idle times"

So many times have books changed my life: so many writers with whom I've been obsessed/am obsessed...you'd think after 23 years I'd have gotten over Nietzsche, but when I was young he (and the Sex Pistols) convinced me that life was worth living after all, and still I taste the blackstrap kindness of those words...

now, with Laura's way of knowing, books are becoming less important, and it's a hard adjustment. I used to buy a book for one scrap of wisdom, one word even, and used to scour shelves (stores, libraries, my own) for that one right book whose words, preordain'd, would crystallize it all: the chaos of my experience, the emotion and wayward intellection...

and I still fetishize books...got a couple signed by a Preeminent Poet just the other day...my mouth watered over a first of The Stones of Summer in a bookstore yesterday, and it physically hurt me that the guy who owns the store keeps it in a glass case exposed to nearly direct sunlight...I wanted to rescue it...and during the recent floods I fretted over the possible fate of my copy of Dachy's The Dada Movement...(it's safe)...

but now I open books, wise books, books by people I'll never, ever be as smart as, and mostly their words leave me cold--I know this, or, I don't need to know this, or--this is nothing but word games...I'm not complaining, and not bragging, though it may sound that way...I still revere Nietzsche, and Woolf, and Whitman and Sappho and so many others, but I don't need them now, don't need a substitute vision for the waxing light of my own intuition...

and so, nostalgically, I invoke Richard Wright, who, far more than even me, had that East Jesus, pine-stump ignorati upbringin' that left him hungry for the magick of words, and so he writes in Black Boy of the occult name of H. L. Mencken and the demoniac ring of that name in the Jim Crow South, how whites shuddered and so Wright wondered...

and so he forged (à la Frederick Douglass) a pass and took it to a library, and the pass said: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" And the books were more than he could have hoped for--naturally, for that is the entire purpose of a work of art, to be more than we could know or hope to know. And so Wright wrote:

"I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority....Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club....I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it."

This is how It begins. This is how the juvenile self imbibes the foreign poison/cure that makes it cocoon, pupate, burst forth as unthinkable winged life--vulture wings, eagle wings, dragonfly iridescence on shimmery summer air of greening consciousness...one tastes the ancestral word-blood of the soul, senses the rhythm beyond self or heartbeat...divines the dim Dark Matter behind appearance, behind words' black and white.