Bathysmal: of the depths of the ocean

Cosmotellurian: of both heaven and earth

Crepuscular: of twilight

Eoan: of dawn

Harshness gone. And sudden mitigation
laid upon the field’s uncovered grey.
Little runnels change their intonation.
Tentative caresses stray

round the still earth from immensity.
Roads run far into the land, foretelling.
Unexpectedly you find it, welling
upwards in the empty tree. 

If America were really concerned with the Libyan people’s well being, then couldn’t we offer them shelter from war? Figuratively take them into our homes? Yet we cannot even solve our own domestic problems. So, is our involvement in Libya really to prevent innocent people from being harmed or are there ulterior motives? And if it were an ideological war for Western Democracy, we just jumped at an opportunity during Libyan’s weak moments of civil revolt, to get involved and get a foot in the door, a position of future influence. And now because we have already insulted Gaddafi’s regime when he explicitly said that he would tolerate no foreign interference, this is yet another war we have to fight through to the end.

Lou Andreas-Salome in the center, and that’s Friedrich Nietzsche on the left and Paul Ree, her husband and author on the right. Andreas-Salome was born in 1861, a time I normally associate with Victorian values as chastity and strict codes on sexual pleasures. Yet those codes weren’t for luminaries and revolutionaries such as Andreas-Salome’s friends— Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke was 15 years younger yet they were lovers for several years and lifelong friends. Rilke, author of those ten mysterious and awesome poems in The Duino Elegies, which I was first introduced to in my first poetry class, made an immense impression on me as humanity embodied within poetry embodied within one, shining life. I wondered where his anguish, where his intimate knowledge of dying and old age could come from— because here it was the youthful capture of the mystique of dying, not the mature recording of his life’s reckoning, not the wisdom in looking-backwards. It was more ecstatic. I love ecstatic poets and writers. 

Anais Nin is a literary name I’ve always loved for its short promise of something vast, her last name cannot help to be associated with Nine Inch Nails, but not to either’s detriment. Her writing is dark and erotic, transcendent and rebellious of reality. And she is a great lover, though a jealous lover, of beauty. In her name I see Ana is Nin, two diametrically opposed identities or points of artistic perception, perhaps, that are light and dark, innocent and limpid against sophisticated and mysterious. But joined as by a common connection to a center which is exactly the same distance from each, the elusive inner fulcrum of a human being. 

Henry and June (1990) directed by Philip Kaufman is based off her diaries from the period 1931-1934 and the story was only released after the death of its last survivor, Hugo, her husband. It’s the tale of Anais Nin’s involvement with writer Henry Miller as he’s writing the Tropic of Cancer and his femme fatale wife, June, a taxi dancer from Brooklyn, tall, naturally luxurious and impossible to trust. 

I think humanity has been the struggle between the discovery of sexual pleasure and the jealous guarding of that discovery. We are either jealously holding onto what we know is pleasurable, what provides us with ecstasy and become fearful of its decadence, or we are discovering, reinventing what is beautiful and pleasurable, leaving the standards onto which the jealous clutch to rot in their arms from the turning of time.