There is a rawness and a tangibility to this struggle, asserting itself like a shawl over the spirit and engendering a gradual fading away of the substantial, particular (in)carnation we occupy. Essentially, we become apologists in an oppression we neither deserve nor comprehend but in which we are too lost to realize the extent of our performance in the disservice.

Fortunately for us, there is nothing short-sighted about ambition. It has given us the finest linen to dress our art, to hone it and, from within its walls, we have acquired new eyes akin to the kindness a second sight provides. . .

There is a rawness and a tangibility to this struggle, asserting itself like a shawl over the spirit and engendering a gradual fading away of the substantial, particular (in)carnation we occupy. Essentially, we become apologists in an oppression we neither deserve nor comprehend but in which we are too lost to realize the extent of our performance in the disservice.

To colour is to accept that there are limits and bounds, that freedom is the deep end of a shallow pond and drowning is not a choice. That our liberties are normative and must issue from the collective fiat of convention, the healthy custom of the many against the wily tempest of the one. Liberty then is a prison of accepted conduct, a glazed casket waiting for us to die.

Isn't the poet, in his/her peculiar primacy, a rebel of circumstances? Doesn't the higher nature, that greater calling, allow some room for choice?

As always, I come to you today with a problem: a crisis of thought, the long-term utility of embracing one’s passion on the one hand and the gnawing need for financial independence on the other. We have discussed both extensively enough to allow for a nuanced understanding.

Thus, it is surmisable that whoever will contemplate the past eternity during which the world was not in existence and the future eternity during which it will not exist, will see that it is like a journey, in which the stages represented by years, the leagues by months, the miles by days and the steps by moments.

Hence, while the historian's mind is riddled with events, the poet's is bursting with colour, having memory as its minefield. However, there is no fixity to verse. Not in its fidelity to what was or its facility for what will follow. Both past and future are the canvass upon which imagination subsists. Along the way, it rids itself of all ethical sympathies.