I am an egocentric predicament (and love it!).

I find arrows shooting, rockets streaming spaceward, most fascinating—no doubt because I am a sex maniac.

NEEDED: “A General Theory of Anarchism” outlining aims, methods, metaphysical justification and teleological value (Principle of Evolutionary Differentiation). Try H. Read [Sir Herbert], Bakunin, Geronimo, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Tolstoy.

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE—another significant polarity. What influence does or can a certain landscape have over a person? Should the great desert (for example) provoke moods, feelings and finally permanent traits of expansive openness, broadness, universality, oneness with the natural world, a cosmic (subspecies eternitatis) outlook? Or would it result in an analogous aridity, sterility, death-dealing and stalking? The mountain…the great space…what happens there to the human spirit?

The human world of artifice and imagination can never equal the richness and variety and wonder of the real natural nonhuman world. But man belongs to the world; he is no more enemy or alien than the saguaro, the jaguar or the spinning spider.

Science can tell us what is happening, and how, but surely not why. And even then, scientific explanations are always hypothetical, of limited certitude and subject to change without notice.

In other words, there is no good reason to assume that the world was constructed, or constructs itself, to fit an a priori mathematical scheme. Rather, we construct mathematical schemes to fit the world. (This looks like an unabashed nominalism.) An important question following this, then, is: What limitations does this place upon science and upon our knowledge in general?

If the world is irrational, we can never know it (either it or its irrationality)?

THE ABBEY CURSE: In my opinion all Abbeys suffer from a family blood curse, invoked somewhere in the dim past by unknown Enemies and as malignant and powerful in its operations today as ever it might have been in the past. Its prevailing effects are (1) miserable loneliness (2) constant disunity and friction, disintegration (3) heartbreaking aspirations (4) social failure and trouble.

THE PROMETHEAN GESTURE:

“This is the glory of earthborn men and women

not to cringe, never to yield, but standing,

take defeat implacable and defiant

die unsubmitting.”

NOT BABY-KILLERS, these latter-day Papists, but mother-killers. (What a monstrous “morality” it is that would let good mothers die for the sake of one more digit in the number of souls in Heaven! “Let the known and loved personality die; we must baptize that embryo!”) The spiritual life.

ABOUT TIME, my friend, about time to think about the book, the first spasmodic effort of the reluctant soul harrowing itself for something to say; do I have something to say? Your goddamned ass I have something to say!

What?

You call me, sir, a rank materialist—sir, I accept the appellation and I accept with pride, sir, and glory. Never shall this flower of the spirit reject the good earth from which it grows—never shall I live in an alabaster spirit-city, separated from my mother by concrete or gold, by white robes, ineffables, or multicolored sewage and communication systems, not this nigger, no sir!