The post today is an extract from the opening lines of 'Tropic of Capricon' by Henry Miller. Am putting this up for no particular reason except that its one of my most favorite pieces of writing in the whole world and i re-discovered it in the morning today. And also there is the other reason, which is that i have not put up anything for some time now!
"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: It was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped anyone expecting it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of the heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in his face."
As i said before, no particular reason for putting up this extract, but there are times when one does feel a certain emotion and looks for something relevant to relate it to. Henry Miller has seldom failed to provide that relevance for me!
Have lately been in this mood to extract and share. So in keeping with that feeling of bonhomie, a short piece written in 2001 by Dana Gioia- ‘Unsaid’. I have always found this to be a very interesting piece. Notwithstanding the fact that the poet, in his previous avatar, was a vice-president in General Food Corporation, USA, and was part of the team that invented the staple dessert of American cuisine- Jello !! If anything, this fact just lends hope and promise that something aesthetic, something stimulating, is yet possible in the midst of all this mundaness! 
