On The Last Day Of The World

We Are Asleep With Compasses In Our Hands.

To Succeed [,] Consider What Is As Though It Were Past, Deem Yourself Inevitable And Take Credit For It. If You No Longer Believe, Enlarge The Temple.

The Divine Comedy Is A Political Poem And When You Say Poetry Is Not About - He's Always Quoted Out Of Context, That "poetry Makes Nothing Happen," That Doesn't Mean You Shrug Your Shoulders And Don't Try To Make Anything Happen. And Dante Felt That Poetry Was Engaged, There Was A Point Of View; It's Not My Point Of View, It's Orthodox Medieval Christianity, And I Have My Troubles With That. He Didn't Feel That You Could Just Rule Out So Important A Section Of Life - We Care About These Things, And It's Out Of Caring About Them That We Write Poetry.

There Is Part Of A Structure In Which Every Species Is Related To Every Other Species. And They're Built Up On Species, Like A Pyramid. The Simpler Cell Organisms, And Then The More Complicated Ones, All The Way Up To The Mammals And Birds And So Forth. We Call It 'developing Upward'... The Whole Thing Depends On Every Part Of It. And We're Taking Out The Stones From The Pyramid.

To Say What Or Where We Came From Has Nothing To Do With What Or Where We Came From. We Do Not Come From There Any More, But Only From Each Word That Proceeds Out Of The Mouth Of The Unnamed. And Yet Sometimes It Is Our Only Way Of Pointing To Who We Are.