Absolute rage of blood today. Blame it on the weather, perhaps: clear sky, infinite sunlight, cold and insistent wind. Every woman seems beautiful, or most of them at least; the soul bubbles up from its uncanny depths and drags me in at least thirty directions. The soul as it occupies physical forms and gestures: woman scribbling in notebook, another with lips always on the verge of speech. I resist, as I have always resisted. I resist, knowing, as I have not always known, that speech and action are the only solutions to this misery of external forms.

If there is a tension that makes it possible for me to write it is almost wholly sexual. Desire, and the inadequacy of desire, have found their way into more words than I recall, words I find congealed on papers stuffed into drawers and envelopes, stored on computers. Helpless there: I find them from time to time, I lose them. They have done nothing I asked of them, except to surprise me: but they do not explain or justify or even remind me of what it was to construct their fragile and incomplete kingdoms. But to call the chief traction of my life sexual is perhaps to invite the wrong connotations, to imply somehow that what has been at stake is my identity—that ridiculous construct of the last thirty years that involves all too much physiology and anatomy—or some belated struggle against the puritanical ideas of my upbringing. Instead my self-spinning dynamo runs on the sort of sexuality that is common to any creature cursed by a division between thought and action—man, of course, and we hope that there are no other beings in the universe so fallen from Eden. A sexual dynamic directed toward all women: a desire to possess what is not seen.

This is the torment: the physical forms of things have, to me, always connoted, demanded, implied, and vindicated the existence of a deeper reality. To the modern mind such a notion is totally obsolete. We are expected to find, at base, purely materialistic or economic explanations; we have been educated enough at this point by Hume and Berkeley to find no soul in the self, much less in sense-impressions, in the material world of which we are at best only abstractly aware. This education has not, I fear, stuck at all, and I am manifestly unsuited for life in the modern world as a result. But this is not the tension. The problem is that as much as I am aware of the soul of things I know, by instinct and some experience, that the only routes by which the metaphysical world can be accessed are at best tainted. What one finds upon examination is not what seemed to be there at a distance. This through no fault of the person or the tree; it is only that climbing a tree and speaking are too dependent on the self, and once the self becomes involved the miraculous visions disappear.

My battery is dying. Something must change: this is all I can be certain of right now. The creature, the sensitive core of my heart, is dying, and I do not know if I can expect to find it in three or four months.