O yes, we think we know why he wrote: Proust, Mann, Mad Meg, Lawrence, Rilke. The Parisian needed the security of absorbent walls and heavy blinds, the warmth of cottons, quilts, and flattery, the way the bed bent at the edges of his body, rose like pastry dough to swaddle him; and as his nervy sickness drew him through its fist his backbone grew soft, eventually, as old rags. Go ahead. Call upon Apollo. See if the mouse-god can cure you. Holla. Holla. So of the flatterous Frenchman we say we know why: to make some sense of what would otherwise have been a life of almost suffocating triviality, a round of parties as predictable in its undulating course and frozen forms as a platter of painted horses (a bloodless ring o’roses, ring-a-lievio), huge heavy wooden and plaster creatures, yet they slide on shimmering pins which fix them through the belly like butterflies . . . we know why: to justify those visits, the calling cards which snowed the silver trays of the socially fortunate, the customary country/seaside/mountain trips, resorts, those spas, the sojourns in enchanting Venice where the sun was seen to sink as Ruskin had arranged it must, from orange to purple, past to present, not omitting pink, in the square where pigeons feed like falling dust, where the Titians, Caravaggios, are coveted, where I felt the need to keep my pornographic NSDAP books concealed near my penis, though they caused the coverlet to swell there like bulbs left burning between seasons (what do they do down there in the dirt, down there?) (is not the work a pardon for a misspent life? a rescue? the creation of substance from shadow? for value occurs only in order, only in art and mathematics, science and the Third Reich, the work of bureaucrats like me and Alfred Jarry, Rosenberg and Ike).

O sure, we know why Proust wrote: to justify one man’s sordid sadomado ways to the interested asses of other men. And that, as we also know, requires an endless book.

To say—see— Weep you no more, sad fountains;

Why need you flow so fast?

Look how the snowy mountains

what I have written; Heaven’s sun cloth gently waste!

To hear—feel— But my Sun’s heavenly eyes

View not your weeping.

what I have said: That now lies sleeping

Softly, now softly lies

Sleeping

And because I have dithered musically for nine lines (and shall venture but one verse and nine lines more in my life), and because John Dowland, has set me to such sweet and docile measures, I expect my soul to be redeemed; I expect I shall forever be remembered, and eternally esteemed.