At The Temple Door

There’s a line that’s an image in a Creeley poem—if you look at anything long enough it turns into water—that I read once and couldn’t forget but now can’t find anywhere. And so I can’t be sure it was Creeley, though I know it was, not having his Collected Poems around, the big volume with the index of Titles and First Lines. Knowing Creeley, he probably broke the line like this—if you look at anything long enough/it turns into water, or even like this, if you look/at anything long enough/it turns into/water.

Ted Gioia published a disturbing piece this morning on his site, The Honest Broker: ’14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture.’ Gioia told the ‘story’ in 14 tweets he gathered from independent sources—blockbuster movies (‘This Year’s Movies Look a Lot Like Last Year’s Movies’); the disappearance of alt weeklies; the consolidation of US news outlets and book publishing into conglomerate controlled business operations; a marginalized indie and alt music scene; the experts who explain culture as ‘insiders’ and who have almost identical educational backgrounds and therefore institutional cultural cred (an unintentionally, I think though I could be wrong, hilarious tweet from a fellow named Daniel Stone who’s examining the clique-ish world of The New York Review of Books)…

 I don’t tweet but if I did I would question the timing of the release of the blockbuster movie Top Gun Maverick, not that it would keep one person out of the theatre.

Supplication as a form of obedience. Photo by author, June 2, 2022.