Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in subterranean caves. We’re more scientific now, we know it’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal.

I have been assigned to the team charged with the core function - to keep the heart beating continuously - and my office is a sinecure against the evidently inevitable decay of bodily function. My salary is a negotiable instrument made out to the order of survival.

I used to seek refuge in the library of vaulted gothic ceilings, working through the introductions of James, Conrad, and Vonnegut, then catching the last bus back to a studio apartment to fall asleep reading the blue-collar dry heaving of Charles the postman, a self-portrait composed of rat-fucked destiny and sharp shards from shattered mirrors.

It was not until my second or third date with fate that I succumbed to its charms and relinquished my resolve on the vulnerable floor of the mausoleum, staring up at the stars to wonder what may come. Fate’s fingers numbly fumbled in the sepulcher fumes, and for one pregnant pause it seemed like I might get lucky, but to no avail and we soon both lost interest.

My God function keeps me right-sized and armed against the undisciplined squads of emotion whose raid on the inarticulate persists for so long as the hallucinations hold fast. The mature poet’s knave thievery implicates us all after all.

I return to the quartets at least every harvest moon and every Ash Wednesday. I have found if you listen hard enough, that voice still betrays St Louis, the timbre not so carefully cultivated and syntax not so roughly scrubbed as to entirely escape its provenance. From that scrupulous self-fashioning produced in me at most a didact’s idea of what a sage might sound like. The search continued.

It turns out “breaking down the door behind which sits my sequestered beloved ” is a poor metaphor and an even worse realized act, what with the police being called and the cuffs clapped tightly on all that mislaid pique. At least I made no claim on interrogating assumptions. Facts are not feelings. The world may be indifferent, but we are not.

We luxuriate in the awed silence that follows a comeuppance, like that time Nichols called out Mailer for misquoting Thomas re: the dying of the night - “Actually, it’s ‘gentle. Quietly’ wouldn’t scan, would it?” - and someone picked up the phone to report a murder. But at least then advertisements for myself was a marketing ploy. Now it has evolved into an entrenched identifying trait, like a bicuspid bite or prehensile tail, in obedience to which we all now make and self-publish our accounts.

Like two ships passing in the night, this endless enervating loneliness and this anxious cerebellum syndrome, one supplants the other, redoubtable tag-team and no alleviation in sight. For both ships - let’s just let the cliche breathe for a moment - the differential diagnosis mistakes cause for context and leaves the cure to soothsayers and fire-shouters. A middle path, just now visible in the midway journey of this life, offers otherwise. You may be done with the dialectic but rest assured the dialectic ain’t done with you. And the chattering teeth cannot constrain the climb of the tip of the tongue: not one more word. Truly.