P.S.

A PROBLEM, hypothetical, in the form of a piercing dilemma:
Surrender may be cheap, but life costs too much.

A SOLUTION, hypothetical, in the form of a cornucopia spilling
queries like random streams of lethal particles from which there
is no shelter (except to exist in the salt mines).

AFTER SWITCHING the light out, but before dropping
onto bed (why not make this your setting-down exercise
for mind and heart and senses?), stand chilling awhile
at the window, contemplate the darkness visible
of that moving universe you are glad to escape once more
for your personal, uncontrollable slumber, and consider
what it asks: Why is it there? When will you be
there? How can you get there? And, where (should you
miraculously be the very one to guess the right answers,
1,2,3!), and where will you be when you are there?
COULD YOU, perhaps, have been studying the wrong subjects
all along? And were you, friends, inevitably
and necessarily misled by malicious gods (or ghosts)?
Or was it your ancestors’ accidentally accumulated
and capriciously edited tables of law, of latitude,
logarithm and organization, which both propelled
and misguided you on this course? In any case, given
the right chance, if such there be, can the antique
weapons of the foundering vessel somehow be turned
against the strangers in our midst, that is, against
our heirs? Will you try? Would it be any use
to you to do so?

BUT, MY FRIENDS, after having devoted yourselves with such
intensity to your lonely regimen of daily jogging
and pushups, or, alternatively, to mastering the intricate
systems of progressive jujitsu, which afford security
against superior antagonists, what can you accomplish
in the face-to-face, one-to-one contest
eternity demands?

OR, NOT LOOKING THAT FAR AHEAD, what will account for
the liveliness of some old men and the stupidity of others?
Their glands? Is it money, diet, programmed-exercises
and regular check-ups? Is it meditation, character,
fate, or a subtle definite proportion of each combined
in a certain way? Is it maybe climate,
or even race? Can it depend on the quality
of the disciples who attend them? Perhaps it is merely
an illusion fostered by the imbecile selfishness
of the rest of us, who are all just the same
quite as human although we never realize it?
Was there, in other words, a woman to be searched for?
Or, possibly, which amounts to the same thing in the end,
a woman to be destroyed?

LOOK, TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY, Suppose The Revolution
is coming? If so, from what direction? And who is to
be executed? And is there never any possibility
for an honest reprieve? And when The Revolution comes,
what will it bring to the surface, extended monstrously
over the undulant dim waters, like the Great Pacific
Squid basking in the starlight, more unreal than were
the scattered and hearsay reports of its existence?
Furthermore, which one of you will be imaginative
enough in his inescapable despair and sufficiently
brutalized by events to prepare The Counterrevolution,
and afterward The Counter-counterrevolution, and so on?
And meanwhile strong enough to endure forever
the plangent echoes of the bursting bomb clusters
and the howitzers firing in rotation, the muted, vibrant,
thunderous idling of the enormous jets and the regular
convoys of trucks and tanks, and the printing presses
day and night pounding and rolling, the staccato
of loudspeakers shouting over them, amplified unbearably,
and indeed the peaceful rumbling of the diesels
of the field-turbines, and of the tractors, the bulldozers,
the graders and the shovels and cranes and riveters
and pavers, and then the busses and keyboards and
printers and computers and copierss and
air conditioners and, mingled with it all, always,
roocoocooing here and there like courting mourning doves,
the machine guns, the machine guns...?
Is there any substitute for the sound of the human voice?

THEREFORE, NOT TO ANTICIPATE FOR YOU the unknown
pleasures of white hair in retirement to the paradise
of patriarchal irresponsibility, let me ask you what is
bound to occur to you sometime, somewhere: in the satiny,
stainless-steel, fluorescent-lit and automatic
elevator rising and sinking morning or evening with
that sickening glide in the sealed shaft, or when,
after jerking to a stop in the tunnel, the engineless
commuters’ train waits, stale, then jerks creeping
ahead, or as the car is sidling forward in suffocating
endless traffic on the hazy parkways, or sometime
while you are manipulating the dials and punching
the keys in their marvelous sequences, or while listening
patiently to the minutes of the previous meeting and
jotting down notes for the minutes of the present
meeting which will be read at the next meeting (and
glancing frequently, furtively, at the self-winding
wristwatch), during the sorting and filing of the week’s
correspondence, or at the weighing-in of the luggage
when en route to conference sessions that will it is hoped
occasion an even greater flow of correspondence,
or perhaps with the anxious yet fearfully excited and
curious intake of breath as you unfold the morning’s
incredible newspaper, or later yank hurriedly at
the recalcitrant cigarette machine in the lobby for
the necessary second pack, or even while, in one of those rare
free hours, dialing the right number (you know this dear
number by heart!) but hanging up after the first buzz,
your palms moist and cold, or, in the dentist’s
waiting room, staring fascinated at the full page
four color photographs and wondering with envy and
stultifying dismay just where on earth those models
were posed with such insouciantly hieratic and
meaningless attitudes — was it Alexandria, Cuzco,
Pompeii? under the Sphinx, in Bombay, Rio de Janeiro,
Teheran, Odessa, St. Peter’s Square, at the Lincoln
Memorial, or Nassau, under St. Paul’s dome, in
Bangkok, Nome, Alaska, on Hawaii’s black sand
beach, Wall Street or San Diego or the Free Market
of Hong Kong, Singapore, Montreal, Copenhagen, the Midsummer
Fjords, and so forth...places, places, perpetual
recollections of the geography of advertising! or
are they actually only facsimiles
of sunlight faked up against the studio wall with
artificial architecture and the false luxury of
the patina of ancient props which makes anything authentic —
or, some other time altogether, between the lockerroom
and the barbecue pit, maybe while bemusedly
shaking the last two spoons of Bromo Seltzer out
of the famous blue-glass bottle, or, late again for the
party and rummaging for the missing cufflink, or
while waxing the fishline in the springtime (in autumn
greasing the heavy boots, also sorting cartridges),
or, it might well be, slumping dazed in the barber’s
chair without your glasses and unable to see what’s
been done, or mulling the odds changing constantly
up there on the board as the line moves up too
easily towards the betting window, or, after
the last drink, fumbling for the elusive hat check, or
sometime between the fantastic hors d’oeuvres and
the terrified glances of hostess and host as the
evening is chewed relentlessly and swallowed down
in boredom boredom boredom! during, if it may be
suggested, that inevitable prolonged moment when
your life ascends irretrievably to the outer cold and
falls into the fixed trajectory of the permanent
orbit, and reality retreats whirling below and
behind, its weight dragging at you with a force of
5 to 15 G’s and pressing the multiplied tons of your
own existence against your chest like the final remorse,
and, as you thence become separated once and forever
from your own old self, able to view it all and yet
unable to distinguish anything whatsoever in its particular
homely details, which in any case always revealed far too
much: when, in short, in short it is finally too late and
history is all there is left to you and illumination
comes out of the infinite black depth and you know
that there was no way to have known that what
you somehow knew, somehow knew, was really accurate
and true...and then it is that appalling dream
suddenly comes back, that dream which woke you
even from the heavy sleeping arms of your beloved...

BLUE AND RED AND WHITE FLAMES glinting
and glaring on the midnight’s horizon like silent
slow explosions: a couple of old dolls flung
seeming grotesquely alive in the corner
of the dusty room, words and phrases uttered
in the air, raucous wild syllables breaking out
from the cackles and growls, sentences spilling
into threats and moans and futile supplications —
as if one had suddenly but irrevocably abandoned
the world one had made ... do you comprehend this?
one’s own created world!

which had seemed so bad, so ugly and untrue — but,
perhaps, only because it was one’s own?