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"The narcissist returns to the dream of perfection"

The other day someone said to me, as a casual jab at my supposed insufferable self-importance, "the problem with academics is that they're in their own dreamworld". Well, yes, I thought of replying: do you expect them to be in your dreamworld. Of course, I'm largely exempted from such withering remarks because I'm not really an academic and so I have to make do with my non-academic insufferable self-importance. The serious point-yes, you just knew this was coming, didn't you- why must we put up with a reality devoid of imagination?

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A discussion with F.B., whose gentleness is almost Buddha-esque. Why is the burqa banned? Give it a rest, bro'. I'll agree with you as long as you bring me a copy of the selected poems of Howard Nemerov. Deal?

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'Every individual is born with a mill-stone of ideals around  his neck...The great lesson is to learn to break all the fixed ideals, to allow all the soul's own deep desires to come direct, spontaneously into consciousness'.

--D.H.L.

Gosh, does seem a bit extreme that! Are all our 'deep' desires always and exclusively our 'own'? What's wrong with making space for our frivolous desires? And to say 'direct' means what, exactly: unlearning, letting go? As if spontaneity is necessarily opposed to the world, a sort of animal instinct against reason, learning, all that stuffiness that inhibits us, dries up the well-spring of our natural, creative selves, the 'vivid quick'?

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My heart's all out of time...

then a tear in the clouds,

the land brightening in its lantern,

of sun and rain

the sudden rainbow

then all of it, inverted, miniscule, in each speck

of rain in her black hair

And I let it slip away again.

---D. P.?