This year, nearly at its end, has been like a caesura in my life, the gap between the saying of one line and the next unsaid line; a caesura of 365 days. At the end of the previous year, you see, I felt that I had the world in the palm of my hand, everything was sewed up, all the plans were falling into place, my Titanic was pointed exactly towards that compass’s quadrant, in whose direction various New Worlds (of new work, new place of living, new life entwined emotionally, artistically, and intellectually with the other’s) awaited my arrival.

But things started going seriously wrong with this package deal (which I had so ardently desired, and cheered for at the end of the previous year on getting it) right from the beginning with the soul registering the first signs of the seismic disturbances to come, right about in January. And by the middle of the year, as winter gave way to spring, and spring to summer, the sinking was done. One needs more than a paper boat of dreams to sail the sea of time; the kneel and the nave of such a boat requires true bones and real sinew. So I kneeled over, I fell down, air and shit beaten out of me, a foolish Icarus somersaulting from the stage of his imagination, mainly set up as a quite room with two people in it reading and writing amiably, beating on his flaming wax wings, into a messy dump of books and blankness.

Meanwhile, I have watched the days wheel past by me like a nearly comatose fish in a fishbowl from which nearly all oxygen has been sucked out, which stares with a glassy eye at the passerby, and the days with their cargo of changing light as it comes through the trees, marriages and divorces of friends, births and deaths, the static crackling of distant wars (geographical, political, and personal), the unbearable kindnesses received from near strangers, and the acts that one must do to simply live starting with wheezed breathing. These were in the words of a Joan Baez’s song, the days of poisoned memory, of diamonds and rust, mainly rust. But they are now done.

Now the morning’s drizzle has turned into a hard rain, the sound of water masking the rush of thoughts and ruminations. Now I must sit quietly for an hour or so, eyes closed, simply breathing. And soon it will be time, under a new numeral, with new ground under my feet, to begin again, to say the still unsaid lines I have been given to say, after this long caesura of a year.

You eat Chinese with a close friend, discuss the modalities of his purchase of a townhouse, and end the meal by breaking open a fortune cookie which gives you this forecast (for the year ahead hopefully, for you do need all the friends you have got and some):

"You will have many friends when you need them"

Meanwhile, an ex-dictator (and the former best friend of a (now only) superpower) is being readied for execution elsewhere, all of which is breathlessly covered live on network TV (you wonder if the same thing would have happened at the Numerberg Trials?). Death as a spectacle is the default state of the air waves; it now happens all the time, and if they can show it live, they will.

Approximately, 53,000 bodies are piling up there and here as you write this; in this pile of bodies, one can only be sure of those last 3000 or so bodies because they belong to "US", and one can only be sure that most of these will be buried with tears, bluges, pomp, flags and quick forgetting; the rest 50,000 bodies are, well, collateral damage, or offerings to Mars, the god of war, or loose change, or something like that. Let's not bother you with the details of each of those lives.

So in such a dark time, in which you open a fortune cookie to the music of executions, even the eye should find it hard to see as it becomes hard to tell who is a hero, who a fool, who an innocent, who a judge, who an executionr, who sane, and who mad:

"What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have."*

*From Theodore Roethke’s "In A Dark Time"