I have achieve incense, but still have to get white candles. Ideas passed on to me by someone who knows the depths of my dreams, ghosts and their penchant for battling in my sleep.

I lit the incense and MK woke up and looked at me and just started her motor going.

There is something else that Longinus says that I know is important but am still wrapping my brain around, it is, afterall one thing to read something and go “ahhhhhhh” and quite another to get it coming out of the tips of your fingers.

“What wastes the talents of the present generation is the idleness in which all but a few of us pass our lives, only exerting ourselves or showing any enterprise for the sake of getting praise or pleasure out of it, never from the admirable and honorable motive of doing good for the world.”

Now, all this was written way back when …like in the first or third century AD and yet hasn’t it remained a common complaint?

The other comment he has (I have a pages of notes) is that the choice of words should suit the dignity of the subject.

How many of you, when you sit to down to write (and I mean anything) contemplate for any amount of time the “dignity of your subject?’

It is an unusual idea, because suddenly the writing becomes less about you and more about your ability to do something worthy of the topic you have set yourself.

All this is subtly changing my work as I practice it, I have two other books from the same era I am working through...taking notes…writing things on the wall, in books, on scraps of paper as I begin the process of approaching the art of writing poetry, which is different from the role poetry has really played in my life before where it was bent in service to my needs. I want, more than anything, to bend myself to the service of the poem…if that makes sense…

then again, I am still writing about concrete

☺

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