“The point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.”  Susan Sontag

     One unforgettable afternoon, as a young university student lingering in museum, I found myself standing before an incomprehensible painting lost in thought when I became aware of someone very close behind me, out of sight, also silent.

     Several minutes must have passed before the presence spoke, asking “What do you see?”  I forget how I answered, but as I moved to turn away and find something easier to behold (it may have been I need something easier) hands delicately lighted on my shoulders, almost not there, but fixing me in place, pinioned before my subject.

    And she said, “Look again”.

    This was Susan Sontag, who remained the afternoon to discuss art and other subjects, shifting topics without warning to unrelated fields, epigrammatic statements, bizarre quotations, and somehow bringing it all together in devastating insights, a dazzling and bewildering conversation, with eyes that could see right through a thing to its heart, intimate and not a little terrifying.

     She spoke as if she were a hyperdimensional being, unbounded by time and space and assembling collages of meaning from disparate realms. I’m not surprised people had difficulty following her narratives, but it was always worth the effort to understand.

     For she will always be with us, a presence just out of sight, saying “Look again”.

     This, the moment of our first encounter, occurred sometime after her 1980 publication of Under the Sign of Saturn, by some measure a final and apex achievement of her revisioning of humankind, and before my September 1982 conversations over strawberry crepes at breakfast with Jean Genet, in Beirut after my summer of gourmet travel became a summer of resistance to the Israeli invasion and siege.

       In Susan Sontag I discovered a fellow in the adoration of Wagner and the opera in general but also of David Bowie, and in the uncommon vice of being both a classicist and a radical postmodernist influenced by French theory in apprehension and inclination regarding literature and the arts, academic tribes often siloed and unable to comprehend or discuss works beyond their own specializations. Susan transgressed boundaries, curious about everything as was I, and there never was a better companion with whom to solve unknowns or parse meaning from the shock of the new, whether in art, music, or literature, than Susan Sontag, for unlike Nietzsche she said yes to life, and refused nothing.

         Like the protagonist in her short story The Dummy, referential to Dostoevsky’s The Crocodile, who created a doppelganger to perform all the routine and banal tasks he wishes to escape, only to witness his proxy self offload these duties to other simulacra of his own, Susan Sontag, as with Gertrude Stein before her, sought to escape from the prison of history and the tyranny of other people, to reimagine herself and all mankind as acts of creative liberation.

       She it was who signaled for me a reframing of dialectical struggle in humanistic terms; the self is literally a persona or theatrical mask, and the first revolution in which we all must fight is the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.

     Susan Sontag referred to the differences between a thing and its image as the creative potential between bounded realms, a theme which runs through all her works and accounts for her interest in pop art and photography. I describe this as Chaos or the adaptive range of the system of self and society.

     Could I but wield the power of wishes I would grant us all her transparency of insight and the ability to transform ourselves and our world through imaginative vision, to make of life a work of art. Each of us must find this for ourselves.

     Her collections of essays, which source Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot for her aesthetics and ideology of Art, especially in the reinterpretation of Nietzsche, include Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, Where The Stress Falls, and the monumental On Photography, and her novels The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, are together a superb introduction to American arts & letters, as I think they shall remain for some time.

    The Benefactor is a masterpiece which explores homosexuality as both identity and desire and describes coming out as an escape from a Dream of Mirrors. A deconstruction of Freud by way of Gaston Bachelard and others, it provides a tour of critical theory and applies the methods of Derrida and Foucault, the philosophy of Sartre and de Beauvoir, and the aesthetics and mystical dream quest of Surrealism to issues of gender, sex, and power.

     Death Kit is a metafictional novel of polyphonous layered images, cleaving tightly to the model of Camus, and references Maurice Blanchot as he faced mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 as an existential crisis.

    The Volcano Lover presents literary history as an unfolding of intention through the lives of its characters. Time, memory, history, and the struggle for meaning and self ownership are among the interdependent constellation of themes which echo those of Vladimir Nabokov, and like his explorations of them Susan Sontag’s works can be read as teleological questioning of the nature of being, of the cosmic fate and order of the universe and its meaning, and of our place in it.

     In America explores possible reinventions of ourselves and our nation. Read it together with its companion work, Philip K. Dick’s alternate universe puzzle The Man in the High Tower; they are metaphysical and ideological topologies which Janus-like present very different faces of the same Surrealist quest.

    An icon of the magisterial arbiter of culture as well as the literary rebel and a type of the New York Intellectual, arguably the last of her kind in the latter case as she seems to have overthrown herself and the authority of her own class, Susan Sontag is a universal reference known to all as the woman who monkeywrenched hierarchies of aesthetic value and leveled high art with pop culture, legitimizing Warhol’s Factory among other revolutionary acts.

     And she argues that the historical memory from which identity grows is undergoing a massive transformational change from a literary-linguistic to a photographic-visual basis, from words to images, and represents a shift in human consciousness comparable to the invention of language. She wrote at the dawn of a new humanity as its Pythian seer, and like the original mythic figure was not always understood or believed.

     As to the painting, an abstraction of a classical Japanese koi pond, my answer at second look was “Movement- these forms are in a series of states of transition, with the symbols alongside, not ideograms but where one might expect a poem, acting as time marks like in a musical score. This is an allegory of change.”

     To which she said, “Yes it is!  Who are you? Oh, I’m Susan.”

      I reached out to shake hands during introductions; she took my hand, and did not let it go.

     Such is the legacy of Susan Sontag for all humankind as a civilizing influence in learning to see Beauty; for she is always with us, just out of sight, when we turn away from things beyond our understanding, especially those which provoke revulsion, disgust, horror, abjection and the Uncanny Valley effect, to hold us fast with her talons and whisper; “Look again.”                    

    As I wrote in my post of July 21 2025, I Am A Leaf On the Wind: On Beauty In A Time Of Chaos; “I am a leaf on the wind”; now an iconic line from the telenovela Firefly and film Serenity and pervasive in popular culture, this quote has a unique meaning and history for me; some twenty years before these films I answered a question from a student during a class with this line, quoting the death poem of a kamikaze pilot.

     The question; “What are you?” was in the context of a discussion of national identity and how we construct ourselves through history, what I now refer to along with race and other forms of identity as the flags of our skin.

       I had just returned from the Siege of Beirut where Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance, the second of my many Last Stands, and in no way wished to align myself with identity politics or identitarian nationalism by claiming any ancestral homeland, nation, or people in the sense of die Volk as the Nazis used it, as remains true now.

     Especially in this moment wherein the spectre of fascisms of blood and soil have once again been raised from the abyssal chasms of darkness by Trump and his regime of white supremacist terror in the pogrom of ICE now ongoing throughout Vichy America.

      My solution to the question What am I was to reply “I am a leaf on the wind.” In the shadows of Beirut and becoming involved in liberation struggle and solidarity in Guatemala versus the Mayan Genocide, Central America generally, Angola and South Africa versus Apartheid, and other places, I felt a deep kinship with that kamikaze pilot. Because I am forever a Last Stand, as I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon dubbed The Wretched of the Earth. This is who I am and shall always be, and it is the only identity that matters.

      This remains my reply now, to any attempt to define me not by my actions but by condition of being.

       To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.

        As I wrote of my last wishes in a poem entitled Final Thoughts;

      Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world

Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived

     Not silent but incandescent in the night

An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself.

      This is my answer to the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world; to embrace the darkness and live with grandeur in refusal to submit.                  

      As Genet wrote in Miracle of the Rose; ‘A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.’

     There remains the question of how to find beauty, joy, hope, faith in our humanity, and love by which to transcend ourselves and the limits of our skin, to balance the terror and horror of our imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle under systems of oppression, to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.

     As I wrote in my post of March 22 2025, Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park; In this time of shared public trauma as our nation and our civilization begin to collapse and fall, and the Age of Democracy passes into the Age of Tyrants, and as our values and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice are violated and inverted and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and our universal human rights are stolen from us, resilience becomes key to our survival.

    While solidarity of action and refusal to submit to authority remain fundamental to our humanity and becoming human, we must also find joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

     Such safe spaces of play and means of returning to ourselves under imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle designed to inflict despair, abjection, and submission through learned helplessness will be as unique as we are, but herein I wish to share an example from my own life, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about anyone else.”

     Though I greatly relish and glory in my own aesthetics of total transparency regarding my lived truths, in which I am inspired by that of Kenzaburo Oe whose public display of his private life is regarded as terrifying in Japan and part of his personal legend, my offering and example of finding joy as a survival and adaptive strategy today involves nothing more transgressive than gardening.

     One can often measure the burden of moral harm and disfigurement of the soul a human being bears by the quietude of their hobbies; for Nietzsche’s warning that the Abyss begins to look back at you remains horrifically true.

     What is important about my gardens at Dollhouse Park, so named because my partner Theresa whose childhood nickname was Dolly wanted a park, is that it is an act of love offered to my partner; that I designed and created an idyll of serenity and reflection meticulously constructed to appear natural from a deep personal need for a retreat from the world is secondary.

     Relationships are primary because the modern pathology of disconnectedness makes us vulnerable to despair, crushing loneliness, compulsive and self destructive behaviors, and harms our capacity to adapt to change and heal from harm.

     Despair and submission is what the enemy wants from us, and this we must Resist.

      Find or create spaces of your own, bracketed off from your ordinary life and sandboxed from your public identity and the roles you must play, and you will find it easier to rise from the ashes once again.

     So, here is a tour of the world I have made in which to recover between adventures; yours will be different, but you must find or build one of your own if you must fight monsters without becoming one. I tell you this in recognition that it is a mission in which I have failed like so many others, for I am a monster who hunts other monsters, and after forty years of living so there is very little humanity left to me. 

      I am without pity, fear, or remorse, and this is not who you wish to become.

      Find your joy, my friends.

     My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, leaning toward David Austin varieties, clematis of blues, purple, and wine red climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea.

    A long curving boundary line of softly rounded granite boulders spaced at eight feet and mountain ash full of white flowers and red berries in their season at sixteen feet defines the Park along a dirt road in the cliffside view direction, mixed with bristling evergreens of mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, ferns brooding in their darkness, and aromatic shrub juniper, color spots of burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush festooned with white pom poms, rose glow barberry,  goldflame spirea, vivid carnival colours of lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses.

     A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside terraces behind my cottage into a secret valley. Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands and the frog pond where the blue heron reign to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”

      Our Park is a highly controlled, purpose built, and artificial paradise which I designed to look like a natural landscape, with curving lines of sight to make it seem endless though it is only two acres of gardens among the true wilderness.

     Dollhouse Park did not begin this way, as a private park and nature preserve nestled among alpine forest, but as a bare and rocky hill with a view, and shared ideas of home from childhood enthusiasms for fantasies of gothic romance like the Addams Family house, and in Dolly’s case the European grand hotels, castles, musical theatres, and cruise ships she spent twenty years playing piano and living in; museums and theatrical stages for the performance of our relationship full of curiosities, antiquities, and wonders. Dolly sat in a chair watching the sun set from different views for several days, and the one she liked the best was where we sited and built the house, with the front toward the setting sun and the city lights, and the back toward the rising moon,  our secret valley, and the hills beyond.

      I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.

      A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving Rose Walk, planted with roses at both sides under dark pink Montana Rose stone and in high summer flanked by walls of hollyhocks with their dinner plate size flowers, which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces. Yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage and to the Tiki Bar deck overlooking the terraces and secret valley with a forested stream at the rear of the house, where we can watch the moon rise. There in the Cat Tower Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos. 

     He has four new companions in his posse this year; Oscar Wild, so named because he is beautifully striped but wild and very strong and will run all the way up walls, Biscuit who is named for being sweet though I also call her Pwetty Pwincess, the elegant and regal Fluffy who prefers her own company unless her brother Oscar is on hand as guard, and Socks who showed up a couple weeks ago, greeted me on the front porch by putting his paws on my shoulders and head butting me, and now lives in the garage; his fur is morning-coat dove grey. There is also Beebo but like nephews he only shows up for dinner and then goes walkabout.

      We also have an enormous German Shepherd named Mala we inherited from her father; it means garland in Hindi, possibly an artifact of a job he had in India as a young engineer, building their national irrigation system. Mala thinks the cats are her herd and follows them protectively, nosing them apart when they wrestle, and they snuggle up with her in front of the fire in the evening. She’s with us always, and patrols the territory with us on our nightly two and a half mile walks; our primary line of defense should something choose to hunt us.

      Dollhouse Park is situated in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, in an alpine forest region home to bear, mountain lion, wolf, coyote, fox, porcupine, racoon, hawk, Great Horned Owl, Blue Heron, and the American Bald Eagle; full of predators who would be formidable opponents. A mountain lion, for example, can jump fifteen feet up and forty feet out, and carry five times its body weight in its jaws, and will attack exactly like an African lion. When asked what I would do if a bear, symbol here of near-unstoppable force, took an unhealthy interest in me, I say “I shall sing the Bear Song, and we will dance the Bear Dance.”

     But as someone who has lived alone in the bush by subsistence hunting all over the world, I follow a rule of my own invention, the principle of three plus three; having three contact and three distance weapons on my person at all times. Mala counts as a distance weapon and alarm system, and my walking stick counts as a contact weapon as I can use it like a saber, katana, jian, assegai, or escrima fighting stick. In the bush my primary weapon is the Winchester Model 70 Safari Express in 375 Holland & Holland, my backup is a Ruger Redhawk, and as a final resort I carry a kukri with which I can field dress a moose or behead rascals. Beyond the boundaries of my hill the imposed conditions of struggle determine who I can be and how I must meet the moment, but on my own ground I am untouchable and can dream better dreams.

      This is why democracies throughout the world are falling to tyrannies; the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force operates the same on personal and national levels, especially when overwhelming and generalized fear is created and weaponized by authority in service to power, birthing carceral states of force and control and imperial wars of conquest and dominion as consequences of identitarian nationalism.

     Beware always those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism, and the next step in the tyrant’s process of subjugation is to commit unforgiveable acts in which you are complicit as a forge of identities of blood, faith, and soil.

      Hence Modi’s conquest of Kashmir, Putin’s of Ukraine, and countless other atrocity exhibits and failures of humanity throughout history, including Netanyahu’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in the conquest of Palestine in which both Biden and Trump have made all of us Americans complicit as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians.

      As my father taught me, politics is the Art of Fear.

      Subjugation to authority is an escalating spiral of commitment through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.

      And it always collapses in ruin because of a simple truth; security is an illusion. Systems of oppression entrap us in the Ring of Power and its recursive forces to create false security from existential threats by the siren call of becoming so powerful we can not be threatened, and I know all too well the seduction of power and of becoming the arbiter of virtue.

     As a Freshman in high school, during my first political action in which I staged a student walkout because the local Reformed Church tried to close our Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, I actually told I my fellow students; “I am your Sheriff, and when we are trespassed against come to me and we will settle it together.” And then I quoted an unforgettable line from a comic book which for years was my guiding principle, spoken by Dr Doom, a villain I had mistaken for the hero; “Only I can bring order to this world of chaos.” When we won and our classes were reinstated, nearly the whole student body carried me on their shoulders through the hallways in triumph.

     But these things cannot free us from systems of oppression which perpetuate themselves; only love can do that, as Wagner teaches us in his great opera. I did not see the entire Ring cycle performed until I had graduated high school, and only much later did I begin to understand.

      Love, solidarity of action, community, interdependence, mutual aid, and our stewardship and duty of care for each other; these things can free us from the yoke of fear by which elites have stolen our power since the rise of mass slave agriculture and the priest-kings who harnessed us to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.

      To paraphrase Freud; Civilization begins when we cast words instead of stones. So if I meet a bear in the forest, I will sing the Bear Song if I can.

      If the fear between us, which divides us and binds us together in the Ring of Power and mutual violence, can be transcended by the love which animates all living beings and makes of us partners in the struggle to become and allies in the struggle to free ourselves from the systems of oppression which seek to enslave us as the raw material of engines of power and destruction.

    If we can escape the fate chosen for us by the legacies of our history and those who would subjugate us to meet in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves, but instead meet in solidarity of action to dismantle those systems of unequal power which are our true and mutual enemy.

     If we can see beyond the flags of our skin and the limits of ourselves and embrace the truths and uniqueness of others no matter how different from ourselves.

     If we can imagine and discover and create among the limitless possibilities of becoming human truths and uniqueness which exalts that of others in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and co-owners of the state and as human beings.

     If, brother bear, we can come together without fear and do the Bear Dance not as each other’s destroyers, but as each other’s liberators.

     If, if, if.

      As I wrote in my post of September 29 2025, Epicurean Delights at Dollhouse Park: Culinary Arts As a Practice of Joy and a Pursuit of Beauty; Herein I offer entrance into my private world of epicurean delights here at my cottage, Dollhouse Park.

      Someone has asked me to share my recipes, and like a genie of the lamp I hear and manifest the truths of our wishes.

      Recipes are wonderful things, prescriptive and descriptive stories which anchor us in history, across vast gulfs of time and space within the lives of other people and other versions of ourselves, and most usefully across cultures. As such they can provide insight into other ways of being human different from our own, one of the most interesting riddles of culture being the idea of Good To Eat.

      Like travel, reading the national literatures of peoples beyond our own, and learning languages, culinary arts allow us a chance to perform otherness, interrogate belonging, test normalities, and escape the legacies of our history.  

      I have used cooking as a coping strategy for trauma and a reset activity to sandbox personal time from work since my years at university and throughout my fourfold career teaching English and Forensics and coaching the debate team at Sonoma Valley High School, as a teacher and business owner of Lale’s Kung Fu Academy of Sonoma which was how I put myself through university entirely with my own money, as a private counselor mainly with angry boys, and as a maker of mischief for tyrants and ally in global democracy and liberation struggle.

      There is nothing like chopping things up, setting fire to them, and eating them to restore one’s serenity in a world of madness and horrors, especially when one works in a museum of private holocausts.

     The culinary arts as I practice them are about control of inchoate and incomprehensible forces of passion which are vast and unstoppable as the tides, forces which include systems of oppression and imposed conditions of struggle including truths written in our flesh and not of our own making, which we must wrestle with not to conquer, when they are unimaginably more ancient and powerful than ourselves, but like Jacob wrestling the angel to remain unconquered by, and as with all things not by sealing ourselves off from our monstrosity and the flaws of our humanity but by embracing them and dancing with our demons, for such are sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.

     As the Roman playwright Terence wrote; “I am human; nothing human is alien to me”, and in the original Latin; “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.”

     So for cooking as a restorative art of finding balance; joy and beauty to answer the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, the terror of our nothingness, and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.

     Culinary arts are a practice of joy and a pursuit of Beauty; herein I mean Beauty as Keats defined it; “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not”, and Joy as in Whitman’s Poem of Joys; “O to have my life henceforth a poem of new joys!

To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on,

To be a sailor of the world, bound for all ports,

A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)

A swift and swelling ship, full of rich words—full of joys.”

    Or as I recall these final lines having been paraphrased somewhere; ““Henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or am,

and deny nothing!.”

      What is the purpose of joy, that we should have adapted to possess such a thing? What evolutionary value does it confer, and how can it help us to survive?

     As T.S. Eliot writes in The Wasteland; “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Or in the words of Rebecca Solnit; “When you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

     My art of cooking unfolds from my history as part of my identity and a prochronism or history expressed in form shaped by the nested set of puzzle boxes of stories I bear; the first of which is the influence of my mother who taught me to cook as I grew up. Primarily this was the French influenced Viennese and Hapsburg court cuisine with which she grew up, like the family German which was Schönbrunner Deutsch mixed with the Viennese dialect of Bavarian, Wienerisch. Mom adored Hungarian spices and her dishes leaned heavily in this direction, possibly an artifact from my parents actions in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, during which she seized a border checkpoint with her beloved Belgian Grip sword as they smuggled out dissidents to the West; by my twenties she also cooked Greek cuisine, an influence from her folk dancing enthusiasm and Sunday afternoons spent at Papa’s Taverna in Petaluma, where some of the finest Greek musicians played when in the Bay Area and a whole community danced and ate exquisite food.

      Thus for my family history as an origin story of my cooking hobby embedded in its ancestral deep time; my other culinary enthusiasms were artifacts of chosen family and a boundless curiosity for what lies beyond the boundaries of the known, in the empty spaces on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons.

      I am become a Tower of Babel, layers of arcologies of human being, meaning, and value gathered from the many places I have traveled and lives I have inhabited; an Atlas of Human Possibillities.

      It was my great good fortune to be situated ideally in time and place as a university student at San Francisco and then UC Berkeley while living and working in Sonoma in the 1980s during the Culinary Revolution, near the James Beard house and a fifteen minute drive from the Culinary Institute of America in Napa. Sonoma was home to iconic businesses like the Sonoma Cheese Company, the Sonoma Bakery, and the Sonoma-Williams flagship store, as well as thirty five wineries and a few four star Michelin Guide restaurants. For many years I made a weekend treat of eating at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where Alice Waters revolutionized French cuisine and from whom I learned much.

      By the time I embarked on a summer tour of the Mediterranean in 1982 to learn to cook I was a serious hobbyist of the art. My itinerary included France,  Italy, Spain, Greece, and finally Lebanon, French-Arabian Riviera of the Levant though it now seems antique to think of it that way, where I was trapped for some time by the Israeli Siege of Beirut and set on my life path with the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet.

      In my Pinterest board entitled Epicurean Delights I have gathered over two thousand recipes for your delectation; but here I wish to share some simple daily standby dishes anyone can make without anything unusual required, quickly. These are my staple dishes. In so doing I have also provided my usual daily routine when at home; Morning Plate, Breakfast or Lunch, and Dinner.

     One consequence of living alone in the wild by hunting all over the world is that I prefer not to eat fellow sentient beings unless I must, so these recipes skew vegetarian; you are warned.

     Herein I wish to explicitly state my own personal idea of Good To Eat, in accord with the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about others”, an idea shaped by my travels and a history of living both as a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Kathmandu Nepal and as a scholar of Islam and Sufi poetry of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Srinagar Kashmir, and in formal study of Zen Buddhism for ten years from the age of nine.

      Don’t eat sentient beings. It’s evil. But there is an exception; do whatever you must to survive.

      So while I don’t eat according to the Eight Precepts as written by Nagarjuna in his Treatise on the Ten Bodhisattva Grounds, I do follow a modified and conditional version of the first one when I can; to abstain from killing living beings like ourselves. This means that I eat fish, chicken, eggs, and dairy, which many vegetarians do not, and while I only eat what is halal that leaves many things which I by preference do not though by necessity may, including beef or the carcass of any being which like ourselves loves, fears, and dreams.

     Bon appetit.

       For my final exhibit in the Art of Seeing Beauty from my personal history I offer the case of perfume. Fragrance can be an art which brings Beauty to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world. I like fragrance because it asks nothing of us other than breath to behold and live its conjured dreams, being a thing of the Invisible and unbound from of the limits of form. So also may it take us up into the gaps as it ascends to the heavens, opening passages to the Infinite as vision, exaltation. and rapture.

       What I’d like from a fragrance with which to launch the day is something to wear while defending the Bridge at San Luis Rey; “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

      There is a truth to perform in being alive, in never staying down and refusal to submit regardless of the cost and becoming Unconquered, in living with grandeur as Jean Genet once advised me to do, in embracing both the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom which balances it; for each moment of our lives is a victory no matter the horrors that may come with it, the grief and loneliness of our disconnectedness, the pain and flaws of our humanity which like sacred wounds open us to the pain of others as compassion.

     Each day is a Last Stand, as I have now made more times than I can remember, as I did in recent years at Mariupol in Ukraine, Panjshir in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul, throughout Palestine and in the Red Sea Campaign to counter blockade the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza where both Biden and Trump tried and failed to kill me in bombing our positions in Yemen. As I said to Genet when we met in Beirut, after my morning dash across a sniper alley to reach a marvelous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world, in reply to his asking me “I’m told you do this every morning, steal breakfast from death”; Such moments stolen from death are all we truly own, and which make us real.

     I have lived for forty four years now in the places beyond all laws and all limits, where human being, meaning, and value are forged from nothing, in the unknown spaces marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, where we can claw back something of our humanity from the darkness and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and I say to you that we must live our lives as if every day were a Last Stand. Live boldly, on your own terms and by your own rules, and love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner.

      Live with grandeur, friends.

       With all of this written into my flesh like a living brand, I find myself like Schopenhauer increasingly reliant in my sixth decade of life on Beauty to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

        So I look herein to fragrance as a kind of Beauty which is unbound from the limits of form as conceptual art.

       As I wrote in my post of May 18 2024, What Is a Man? A Taxonomy in Perfume; Why perfume? Because it is an art free from the limits of our form, in one dimension, that of time, which relies on memories and imagination wholly; as we grow up and learn to create ourselves and become human, how we see is crucially important, as Rorschach argues, and we each of us bear the sacred calling of Picasso; “I want to see in a new way”, but how we remember and construe ourselves and our Defining Moments as events of which we are made and as human being, meaning, and value is equally important.

     Chemistry as an art of memories and references in which we ourselves are the artifact and not an image in three dimensions, like music, also transports us immediately beyond the flags of our skin and the forms in which we are trapped and possibly realized. Pure abstraction, which allows us to speak in terms of poetic truths, of metaphors, allegories, symbols, archetypal figures, myths and histories, makes of our interrogations of ourselves a project of Surrealism, of rapture and exaltation, and liberation from the material basis of existence.

    Fragrances create interior structures of memories in time, in ways which reflect the construction of identity as mimesis.

    Mine is a path of immersion in the Infinite as ecstatic or poetic vision and as revolutionary struggle, what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, ibn Arabi the alam al mythal, the Bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Logos in the Gospel of John and Plotinus, and C.G. Jung called the Collective Unconscious. Herein I pursue those truths written in our flesh, and those beyond. 

    Our bodies are an imposed condition of struggle, and our choices about what we do with them seizures of power and autonomy, but can also become marvelous windows into other ways of being human.

     Dare to dream, friends, and to perform your truths upon the stage of the world.

     As I wrote in my post of July 10 2021, Idealizations of Masculine and Feminine Beauty and the Struggle Between Authenticity and Authorized Identities: the Case of Chanel’s Paris-Edimbourg; Chanel Paris-Edimbourg is a new masculine fougere and luxury shaving paraphernalia which transports one to a fantasy Scotland of dark forests redolent of earthy wildness.

     It comes in a bottle shaped like a huntsman’s flask, a reference to Guerlain’s iconic Habit Rouge and the role of man as hunter, and smells of sharp tangy juniper, peaty smoky Islay Scotch, and the leathery musk of furs.

     Edimbourg conjures memories and images of riding to hounds, tweed jacketed estate hunts, midnight campfires, the sorrowful voices of bagpipes. Ah, but the stories it tells; ghosts, witches, monsters, vendettas, rebellions, lost causes and forlorn hopes, and the divine madness of love, like those of Scotland herself as typified in Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor and its source in the novel by Sir Walter Scott, which reimagines the iconic story of an ancestor of my partner Dolly.

    More importantly, Edimbourg sets out to define what a man is today, and authorized identities of sex and gender and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty reside at the heart of becoming human, the one problem we must all solve as we grow up and seize our power of self-ownership and self creation; who do we want to become?

   In this quest to sculpt a form of iconic manliness which like Michelangelo’s David can both inspire awe and invite intimacy, Chanel’s auteur Olivier Polge has abandoned the recent enthusiasm for unisex fragrances and reimagined the art of perfume’s roots in classic fougeres. These references include the original aristocratic Houbigant Fougere Royale, and its imperial successor Guerlain Mouchoir de Monsieur, which encode the values of the conservative Bourbon Restoration and the revolutionary Napoleonic Second Empire respectively, both now august with tradition.

     Polge is a master of balance, chiaroscuro, suggestion, and implied gesture, and Edimbourg is an evocation of dark forests and moonlit paths where Red Hot Riding Hoods and their wolves may hunt each other with impunity and the delicious frisson of incandescent secrets and glorious desires beyond all boundaries of the Forbidden. Here transgression is distilled in a fragrance hung with signs of desire as an inherently uncontrollable force of nature, which can liberate us and restore us to our true selves as Sartrean freedom and authenticity. 

     Chanel has offered us in Edimbourg a fragrance which beckons to those we desire with the words written by Franz Kafka to his lover in Letters to Milena; “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.”

     As I once said to Jean Genet upon first meeting him after a mad dash across a sniper alley to reach a café that served the best strawberry crepes in the world, in reply to his observation “I hear you do this every day, steal breakfast from Death”, it’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.

     Perfumes tell stories composed of invisible molecules borne on the winds, conjured to life by the magician’s art of chemistry. This particular story reimagines masculinity and femininity in terms of Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, with secondary intertexts and references including Angela Carter’s version of Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves and its film starring Amanda Seyfried as linked myths, and Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake as reimagined in terms of Freudian horror in the Aronofsky film Black Swan starring Natalie Portman.

    Edimbourg opens with a bracing alpine Juniper which bears a mentholated Fernet- Branca amaro character as a sign of its barbershop heritage, tangy citrus undertones which sing its chorus, paired with a smoky resinous cypress which recalls both campfires and the monastic cleanliness of incense, made beautiful and strange by its supporting cast of frankincense and cloves.

    Remote apothecary spices linger at the edge of awareness through the progression of Edimbourg’s unfolding of intention structured in time as a song of wildness and triumphant love.

    Next unfold the sumptuous midnotes; cedar with its cues of cleanliness and hope of hidden treasures to be found within its bearer, associations from wardrobe trunks and closets, which extends the forest references of the initial cypress, paired with a smoky, peaty vetiver of brooding green darkness which plays the same role for the juniper, which dance to the tune of an evanescent dry lavender, another cleanliness cue and a soap reference, which recalls the windswept heaths overlooking trackless wilderness.

     As the curtain of the third act rises we are offered the spectacle of a gorgeous pas de deux of vanilla and musk, like the White and Black Swans freed from the limits of their forms as abstract ideas of dyadic performative roles and identities, which each contain the other as well as define their limits and interfaces, a transposition of the male-female dialectic to an interior space within the same flesh. The vanilla is a thing of light, home, safety, femininity as mother and nurturer, which recalls childhood smells of baked confections; the musk a thing of darkness, wildness, transgression, femininity as hunter and protector like the Sekhmet or lioness aspect of the Eqyptian cat goddess who is also a mother figure as Maat, as interrogated by Margaret Atwood brilliantly in her novel Cat’s Eye, but is also typified as figural masculinity as a point of gender convergence. Transposed to the masculine sphere the White and Black Swans form identifications with the Huntsman and the Wolf of Red Riding Hood; parallel gendered representations of domesticity as provider and protector and of wildness.

     Behind the mask of its delicious vanilla lies the intoxicating fathomless darkness of its musk, rich and spicy, a fistful of truffles fresh from the earth, dangerous, forbidden, and irresistible. Edimbourg’s vanilla is a game of hide and seek in a formal hedge maze, ravishing beauty and monstrous desire pursuing each other to a place of secret joys at its heart. Edimbourg’s musk balances the scales with a complex and multilayered animality which recalls both the leather of saddles and the cashmere-silk of mink fur; like inhaling a beast one has pursued into its cave or ripping a lovers clothes off to bury ones face in their secrets.

    One notices that with Edimbourg Polge defines masculinity in contrast and complementarity with femininity, in an interrogation of identities of sex and gender in terms of Jungian anima-animus interdependence using the traditional three stages of perfume as a theatrical device to lead his audience along a ritual labyrinth path from thesis to antithesis and finally to synthesis, and using pairs of opposites at every step which reference mythic and archetypal figures, images, and allegories, in a Hegelian dialectics of gendered identities as subversion, reimagination, and transformation. Here is an art of revolution as a mythic and Existential hero’s journey to wholeness.

    As to character and the roles it offers us to play, Edimbourg suggests both Red Hot Riding Hood as a flirtatious and sly trickster goddess who in her theriomorphic form as a fox lures her playmates beyond all hope of rescue to her realm of unknowns where possibilities of becoming human await discovery, and the fierce-bearded and feral huntsman and his form as a wolf of vast hungers who masquerade as each other; wild things of unfettered desires who can match each other’s daring.

     All true art defiles and exalts.

     Herein is bottled the wildness of nature, and the wildness within ourselves.

      What principles of action can be drawn from these examples from my life of how human beings can learn to see Beauty and use it as a power of poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation of our possibilities of being, meaning, and value?

     As I wrote in my post of April 11 2025, Poetry Month: Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human; April 11 2025 Poetry Month: Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human; Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day, with an autobiography in poems, best poetry lists, and an example of my writing process.

      Do write a poem of one’s own to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, every day if possible; it’s a tool for processing the experience of life and for creating meaning and connection.

      Act One

     A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?

      First before all must be the true names of things.

      Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.

     Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power.  We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.

     So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.

     Act Two

     Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.

      Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.

     Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.

     Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?

     We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.

     Act Three

      An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness. 

     Sounds and Echoes

     Once there was a sound

Without a shell to echo it

     Not the vast roar and thunder

Of the sea

     And her moonstruck tides

Chaos and the birth of universes

     Undulating with the splendor of life

In all our thousands of myriads

     Limitless possibilities of becoming

Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror

    Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action

Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness

     And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,

Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in

     A negation which is also a gift

Opening spaces of free creative play

     Such is the embrace of death as liberation

From the limits of our form,

    The flaws of our humanity,

And the brokenness of the world.

     We escape the spirals of our shell

Soar among celestial spheres

     Become exalted and defiled

Free and nameless as wild things

     I am sound and echo

Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from

     Where am I now?

     Act Four

     Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle. 

     As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto;  Why do I write?

    I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.

     Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.

     All true art defiles and exalts.

      Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.

      I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.

     This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.

      As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

     This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.

     If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.

     Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.

     As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.

     Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.

     When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.

     And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.

     Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.

     Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.

     We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.

      The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?

     If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.

     As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

     He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.

     Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.

     And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.

      Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1920 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War,  escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.

     As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.

     The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.

     Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.

     It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.

     From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

     We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

      In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.

     James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.

     All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.

    I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.

     Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.

     We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.

      Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?

     Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?

      Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.

     As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.

     Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.

     Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.

     If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.

      We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge   authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.

     Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.

     Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.

     Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

     As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.

     Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.

     As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.

     During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.

    Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”

    But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”

    To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”

    “Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”

     “That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”

     Just so.

      Act Five

      A benediction

      May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.

     In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.                    

     Act Six

     A coda in the form of Modern American and World Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.

     Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.

       Here also I offer an autobiography in poems, entitled The Grief of Influence, my choices of best poetry of the last couple years, and an explication on my writing process with examples.

                    The Grief of Influence: an autobiography in poems

        We may tell our stories through the works we have cherished and the circumstances we discovered and made them our own, as voices in which we share and which can speak both to and for us; identity is a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation to change across time.

         This is especially true regarding works in which the thoughts of others across vast epochs of time, cultural schema, paradigms and topologies of human being, meaning, and value have become our own through reading, described so deliciously in the title of the foundational book by Heather Clark on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Grief of Influence.   

        First was Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra, a talisman of protective magic sung by my mother and others when police fired on student protestors in the most terrible incident of state terror since the Civil War, Bloody Thursday People’s Park Berkeley 1969. I was nine, holding my mother’s hand, when I was hurled from my body by the concussive force wave of a police grenade and Most Sincerely Dead for moments while I stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible futures. I returned to the sideral universe from my Awakening in my distraught mother’s arms and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”

     Second must be the poem that fired my imagination and anchored how I constructed identity through romantic love with my partner Dolly, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I cast us into the roles of the tragic lovers as a past life when I discovered the poem at the age of twelve, as things began to change in my feelings about our relationship during a sixth grade year mostly devoted to reading the classic study of folklore, Frasier’s Golden Bough. We created an elaborate backstory for our romance of shared lives across centuries from shared dreams and historical research to verify them. Above all was the idea that we transcend our moment in time and the limits of our form, grounded in the discovery that we shared the same dreams.

     Third was a mysterious book which appeared on our doorstep during my seventh grade year, bound in leather and hand written in strange inks in Chinese, Japanese, and English, of classical Taoist and Zen poetry annotated as a book of strategy for a game I later discovered was Go, almost certainly written by my teacher of martial and other arts whom I called Sifu Dragon. I began studying with him when I was nine until 1986 when he went into seclusion at the age of 84, and though I had many other teachers he was a second father to me and the poetry he introduced me to remains a primary influence; that summer I went to Japan to walk Basho’s Narrow Road and see where he wrote his poems.

     Fourth is Nietzsche’s beautiful epic poem of rebellion against authority, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I adopted in eighth grade as a counter-text to the Bible. It was an unspeakable joy to discover at long last someone who spoke for me, and in my Dutch Reformed Church town lost in time an hour’s drive from San Francisco, ruled by a church allied with the South African Apartheid regime and where I witnessed what I hope was the last witch burning in America as a child, I used to quote Zarathustra to fellow school children who quoted the Bible to me. No gods and no masters, indeed.

     Fifth was the poem I recited to my peers at as a Freshman in high school, Invictus by William Ernest Henley. At the first assembly of the new school year members of the incoming class were asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle.

     Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.

    Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.

    This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.

     The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.

   “Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 

For my unconquerable soul. 

    In the fell clutch of circumstance

 I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 

My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

     Beyond this place of wrath and tears 

 Looms but the Horror of the shade,

and yet the menace of the years 

 Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

     It matters not how strait the gate, 

 How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.“

     After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.

     Sixth is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind. As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake. In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game. In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One. Languages are a hobby of mine, and I have tried to inhabit the thoughts of others through their languages wherever I go, though like Joyce I have not yet found the code of meaning which unifies humankind and may be able to help us escape the flags of our skin and the legacies of our history.

      If we can call the plain speech of our everyday lives poetry as I learned from my friend Susan Sontag, here I signpost the influence of Shakespeare on my language as I spent most of my Freshman year at university speaking in iambic pentameter, and spent much of the next two summers as an actor at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest half an hour from my home in Sonoma; The Tempest remains my favorite, after Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare I regard now as the Humanist half of modern English with the theocratic tyranny of William Tyndale’s beautiful King James Bible in which I was immersed as a child in a town of people whose mouths were full of thees and thous, and its rhythms and curious turns of phrase have stayed with me.

     Last among my influences I count the visionary poetry of Blake, and then Rumi as reimagined by Coleman Barks which was my gateway to scholarship of Sufi poetry as I turned thirty. In Srinagar, Kashmir that was, where I sailed on the Lake of Dreams and was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision.

        Here follows my very personal lists of best poetry for American and World literatures; but this is an absurd idea, for a poem which is useful to one person may not be useful to another, and will bear a weight of different dreams, meanings, and values.

      Any text, including the stories of our lives, history, memory, identity, is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, ephemeral and in constant and recursive processes of change.

       By what possible criteria, then, can we establish normalities and standards which cross the immense boundaries between us to become interfaces?

      In this I can speak only to what has been useful to myself in the construction of identity over my lifetime.

      Each of us must choose and create such lists of immortal classics and life changing informing and motivating sources.

       One might begin such a search from here, with the works which have become truths written into my flesh.

       May you discover truths of your own. 

     How does Beauty Help Us Survive?

     When the Abyss looks back at me, Beauty can restore the balance. My thanks to Schopenhauer for solving the riddle Nietzsche posed for us in Beyond Good and Evil.

      We cannot know the future, for the possibilities are limitless. But we know this; the universe cares nothing for us, there is no Great Plan, no reward for goodness nor punishment for evil, nor good or evil of any kind, for these are human words and cannot exist without human deeds to make them real.

      This is the terror of our nothingness in a universe without imposed meaning or value, no Authority either beneficent or tyrannical to create and order ourselves and our lives. But the reverse is also true; in such a universe of total freedom, wherein the only human being, meaning, and value are those we ourselves create, we hold the only powers that exist and can make us real and true, of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together, of love to transcend the limits of our form, realize the truths of others, and to liberate us from hierarchies of belonging and otherness, of hope to free us from systems of oppression, from tyranny and terror, and from the state as embodied violence in the primary defining human act of refusal to submit and granting us the will to claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, and of faith in each other as solidarity of action and a United Humankind in a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.

     On this day and for several months now American patriots gathered in mass action and protest at our capitals and palaces of government throughout the nation, against the capture of the state by a fascist regime of tyranny and terror, the subversion of democracy and destruction of its values and institutions, against vote suppression and the theft of citizenship from Black Americans through gerrymandering, against the ethnic cleansing of Latin Americans by the ICE white supremacist terror force, and against the federal Occupation of our sanctuary cities and bastions of democracy.

      This day and for all our days to come, let us reach out to each other and hold fast our line against the darkness. And with each such act of solidarity and refusal to submit to the force and control of an Authority of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, we remain Unconquered.

     This is the beauty of human beings; to refuse to submit and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance goes which Jean Genet sore me to in Beirut 1982, paraphrased in Paris 1940 from the one he had taken as a Legionnaire in 1918 for such allies as he could gather, and I now offer all of you; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.

     Among the last words we exchanged were my question, Now that I know the world is a lie, how am I to live? To which he replied with a line from his great novel Miracle of the Rose; “Live with grandeur”. 

     What shall we do with our lives, whatever may remain of them, and how shall we live if we are to become human?

     Live with grandeur, my friends.

               Susan Sontag, a reading list

Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52374.Against_Interpretation_and_Other_Essays?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9HDBHr83wd&rank=11

On Photography, Susan Sontag

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52372.On_Photography?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9HDBHr83wd&rank=5

Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays, Susan Sontag

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119671.Under_the_Sign_of_Saturn?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9HDBHr83wd&rank=28

Where the Stress Falls: Essays, Susan Sontag

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52379.Where_the_Stress_Falls?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=VY0avgmCbN&rank=33

Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, Jonathan Cott

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17756349-susan-sontag?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9HDBHr83wd&rank=2

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980,

Susan Sontag, David Rieff (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12160851-as-consciousness-is-harnessed-to-flesh?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=VY0avgmCbN&rank=22

In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism, Mena Mitrano

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29200714-in-the-archive-of-longing?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=VY0avgmCbN&rank=61

Sontag: Her Life and Work, Benjamin Moser

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41571085-sontag?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=EL9aFFGbVK&rank=1

Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon,  Carl Rollyson, Lisa Paddock

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119672.Susan_Sontag?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=A5UBBsr5vV&rank=1

          References

March 22 2025 Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park

March 22 2025 Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park

Gardens at Dollhouse Park albums on FaceBook

(there are several years of these albums by month)

June 2024 Gardens at Dollhouse Park

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1401696954558961&type=3

July 2024 Gardens at Dollhouse Park

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1434229447972378&type=3

August 2024 Gardens at Dollhouse Park

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1464114204983902&type=3

September 29 2025 Epicurean Delights at Dollhouse Park: Culinary Arts As a Practice of Joy and a Pursuit of Beauty

September 29 2025 Epicurean Delights at Dollhouse Park: Culinary Arts As a Practice of Joy and a Pursuit of Beauty

Epicurean Delights, my Pinterest board of over two thousand recipes; I make one unique meal every day, when I can, and this is my recipe file for ideas which I personalize.

https://pin.it/3USMxztdh

Serenity “I am a leaf on the wind.”

April 11 2025 Poetry Month: Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human

April 11 2025 Poetry Month: Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human

Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium, my literary blog

https://dollhouseparkconservatory.home.blog/

                   Best World Poetry

                  Germany

The Novices of Sais, Novalis, Paul Klee (Illustrator)

Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke

Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche

The Lost Gold of Exploded Stars: complete poems, Georg Trakl

Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, Paul Celan

Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch

             Britain & Ireland

The King James Bible, William Tyndale

The Tempest, Midsummer Nights Dream, Shakespeare

Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats

Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Khan, Coleridge

Complete William Blake

Lord Byron: The Major Works, McGann ed

John Milton: The Major Works, Goldberg & Orgel eds

Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, James Joyce

Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney

Selected Poems & Three Plays, Yeats, Rosenthal ed.

Selected Poems, Prose Occasions 1951-2006, Thomas Kinsella

Crow, Tales From Ovid, Cave Birds: an Alchemical Romance, Birthday Letters, Howls & Whispers, Gaudette, The Oresteia, Prometheus on his Crag, Ted Hughes

Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith

                           China

Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po, Li Po, J.P. Seaton

 (Translator)

The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Du Fu, David Hinton (Translator)

                     Eastern Europe

Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Tristan Tzara

New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, Czesław Miłosz

                     France

The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire

Rimbaud: complete works, Rimbaud, Schmidt ed

Treasures of the Night: collected poems, Jean Genet

Verlaine: Selected Poems

 Pierre Reverdy, Caws ed

 Selected Writing, Apollonaire

Mallarme: Prose and Poetry, Caws ed

     Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char, René Char, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Translator), The Word as Archipelago The Word as Archipelago, René Char, Robert Baker (Translator), Selected Poems, René Char, Mary Ann Caws (Editor)

               India

Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Mīrābāī, Robert Bly & Jane Hirshfield (Translators)

Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, Miller trans

Collected Poems, Jeet Thayil

Golden Gate, Vikram Seth

              Islamic Peoples

Concerto al-Quds, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, Adonis

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Mahmoud Darwish 

Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks

The Rub’ai yat of Omar Khayyam, Stubb & Avery eds

Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems, Sholeh Wolpé

The Book of Mansur Hallaj: Selected Poems & The Tawasin, Mansur al-Hallaj,

Paul Smith (Translator)

Iraqi: Selected Poems, Iraqi, Paul Smith  (Translator)

Divan of Hafez Shirazi, Hafez, Paul Smith  (Translation)

Divan of Sadi, Saadi, Paul Smith  (Translator)

                         Japan

Basho’s Narrow Road, Sato trans

Matsuo Bashō, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda

The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Sumita Oyama

River of Stars: Selected Poems, Yosano Akiko

I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, Momoko Kuroda, Abigail Friedman (Translator)

                    Jewish People

The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Alter ed

Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Poems 1962-2020, Louise Glück

                  Latin America

Selected Poems, Jorge Borges

Five Decades: 1925-1970, Pablo Neruda

Selected Poems, Octavio Paz

Poems of Cesar Vallejo

Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik

               Russia

Collected Poetry, Alexander Pushkin

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

                Scandinavia

Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma, Artur Lundkvist, Carlos Fuentes (Introduction)

Selected Poems, Tomas Transtromer

             Spain

The Selected Poems, Federico García Lorca

     Best American Poetry exclusive of that on lists by ethnicity and region

     The Language of Life, Bill Moyers ed.

     Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, Jerome Loving

Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Jim Perlman (Editor)

     Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein

Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Lisa Cole Ruddick

Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, James R. Mellow

     The Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Frost, Latham ed

 Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini

     The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson), Emily Dickinson

The Passion of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr

     Complete Poems, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition 8 Volume Set (Ronald Schuchard Editor), T.S. Eliot

Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Thomas Howard

T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom

T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon

    The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop

 Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe

     W.H. Auden; poems selected by John Fuller

W.H. Auden: a commentary, John Fuller

     Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (Bloom’s Major Poets) Harold Bloom ed

     Opus Posthumus, Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom

     Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.

The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan

     The Dream Songs, John Berryman

     A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky

    Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins 

     The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark

Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll

     Selected Poems, 1945–2005, Robert Creely

     Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg

The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed

I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan

     Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima

     Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder

     A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

     Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems,  I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman

     Selected Poems, Michael McClure

     The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook

     The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen

What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud

The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman

      Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems,  Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan

Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor

Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary

On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman

A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff

An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan

     The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Amy Clampitt

     The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 (1955-1977), Volume 2 (1978-2005), Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, A.R. Ammons

     The Collected Poems, New & Selected Essays, Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, Denise Levertov

A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, Donna Hollenberg

     The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism, Steven Frattali

     The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds

     Selected Poems, Robert Bly

     Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich

     The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly 

     Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck                             

     The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane                      

     Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith

May 18 2024 What Is a Man? A Taxonomy in Perfume

May 18 2024 What Is a Man? A Taxonomy in Perfume

My Custom Shelves of favorite perfumes on Fragrantica

https://www.fragrantica.com/member/2192969#customs

November 14 2025 Defining Moments: A Confession, and Some Thoughts on My Birthday Regarding Poetic Vision as the Reimagination and Transformation of Ourselves; How Do We Create Human Being, Meaning, and Value?

November 14 2025 Defining Moments: A Confession, and Some Thoughts on My Birthday Regarding Poetic Vision as the Reimagination and Transformation of Ourselves; How Do We Create Human Being, Meaning, and Value?

October 19 2025 Week Three of the Mad Hatter Festival: Madness As a Faith of Poetic Vision

October 19 2025 Week Three of the Mad Hatter Festival: Madness As a Faith of Poetic Vision