treatise on the pursuit of meaning, ending in a kafkan correspondence and a lyric for jackson james

i want should to be valuable
i want a goal to be noble

but want is the operative word
wanting is meaning
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unless the house is empty, i have to read in the bathroom with the door closed and the fan on. a father is in a constant struggle to be alone, not because he deplores his family and struggles against them, but because of his struggle against his own love and his own newly loving self. the lonely man isn’t necessarily selfish, nor the family man at any risk of losing himself. rather, the family man is most at risk of losing the other, the surprise of irony that is alien w/in himself. and at home w/my family, my reading life , the life to unbecome me, is always under assault, is abused by the wife and coveted by the son. i’m not ashamed, but whether i am or no, this age has made it a special kind of perversion—of the reader, swan-man, archaic writer, modern thinker. it means being cornered, not that i’m resentful, just anal-expulsive-cum-literary mole person, anxious (as a copper mushroom cap w/my freudigris patina), and enervated by the non-events in the newspapers and television magazines.

o, to chase the images in front of you, running forward after them though they are really plummeting straight down through all atmosphere, all matter, and into the earth! we should stand under, instead, with our mouths open, like the dead, who have adopted the proper posture of wisdom, only too late. or like a sink or toilet, with the filth of the gods always somewhere above.
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a letter from kafka to milena jesenska (tr., from the german, by p. boehm):

it's a long time since i wrote to you, frau milena, and even today i'm writing only as the result of an incident. actually, i don't have to apologize for not writing, you know after all how i hate letters. all the misfortune of my life--i don't wish to complain, but to make a generally instructive remark--derives, one could say, from letters, or from the possibility of writing letters. people have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always--and as a matter of fact not only those of other people, but my own. in my case this is a special misfortune of which i won't say more, but at the same time also a general one. the easy possibility of letter-writing must--seen merely theoretically--have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. it is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient, but also with one's own ghost, which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. how on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold--all else goes beyond human strength. writing letters, however, means to undress before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. it is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. but it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. the opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. the ghosts won't starve, but we will perish.
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the infant scream of a fascist
who wishes he could run faster than the hound

o, the feral hounds and the well-groomed wolves
the skins he grows into

and out of to become a man
to hunt the genius of the wasps

the mimic wasps that look like winds
that wake up in the fists of flowers like thumbelinas

and break their fast chasing the perpendicular rain
and in the wake of their flight, jackson’s own genius takes form