>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: crashing and hart crane
>>Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000

Well, the brief manic period has certainly passed. I got back from my tests, and I was flying in my own head. I couldn't keep up with my thoughts at all. I think I brought it on with the thought of dropping out of school and leaving the south, and when I realized that I could actually do that, it set off this reaction. When I got home, all I could do was pace around my apartment fast as hell, so to slow it down I ended up drinking the last of that whiskey, and boy did that ever do the fucking trick. I've been lying on the couch for the last 45 minutes or so on the border of sleep, but I made myself get up. I guess manic is really the wrong word for it; it was more like a brief super-hyperactive spell.

I keep having these bizarre flashes in my mind of what I think was a dream I had last night. It's been bothering me all day because it'll start to come and when I try to focus on it, it goes away. I've only just now been able to catch some sort of hold on it, and I can't make any fucking sense out of it. It's just really weird. I'm really sorry your day was so bad Thursday. I'm sorry your whole week was bad for that matter. The more I try to think about leaving school, the more sense it makes, because I know I'm not going to be around long enough to get any sort of degree that will do me any good, and even if I did, I'd end up in a job I hate. All I can think about is you and being with you, and those are the only thoughts that give me any sort of comfort at all...aahh...damn internal struggles without resolutions.

I mentioned Hart Crane on the phone with you, and I don't know if you've ever read him or not, but I know I didn't put him in that packet I sent you because I never understood him before. So, I figured I'd provide a little sample for you. This is called "My Grandmother's Love Letters":

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

There's another spectacular one I'll include in another e-mail, but I also wanted to show you the poem I wrote tonight, "Homage to Hart Crane," and that poem borrows a few things from "My Grandmother's Love Letters," so I figured having the two together would be cool.

Emotions coursed through you
Like the whiskey in your blood.
Love was never a four-letter word
But rather an earth-darkening catastrophe
That rattled your teeth like tambourines
Shooting light from your fingertips.

I can see you on that final ship
Tossed by fiery water's fury:
They nailed you into your cell.
A coffin wouldn't suit you
As you regally ascended the rail.
Your sandals flapped first wildly
Before you slipped under mercurial waves.

Junkie for beauty, emotional sponge,
I feel the endless ocean's slap
On our face as our arms pump
Themselves dry. The ship circles
Searching for your body as it tumbles
Like old loveletters in the wind.

Oh, the figure of the poete maudit...that's the only thing that makes me wonder about universal archetypes. When I bought that Hart Crane book, it didn't make any sense to me in the store, but I KNEW there was something in it for me. I could feel something moving below the words that I just couldn't quite see yet. Last night it just snapped into focus. Being able to feel the full power of love for you coursing through my body and being able to see that same intensity in the words on the page...oh hell. I have to type out my other favorite Crane poem. It's called "Chaplinesque":

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

His vocabulary and strange arrangement of words really trips me up sometimes, but I feel like I get what he's saying more now. I don't understand every single word of it, but I know what he means. And that's what I think poetry is all about. I felt his feeling. “11:58 am, Wednesday, April 27, 1932. Hart Crane, at the age of 32, commits suicide by jumping overboard the Orizaba, 275 miles north of Havana, Cuba,” and I know why he did it, and that's amazing.

It was so nice to be able to hear your voice tonight. Even when it's just silence on the line, it's so comforting to know you're on the other end of the phone. You're the only thing that matters anymore. I hope your Friday goes well.

I love you, Perdita.
Belacqua

---

>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: crashing and hart crane
>Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000

Belacqua,

I'm so empty today. I suppose empty is better than overflowing with pain, but it hurts nonetheless. The world no longer makes sense to me. I used to wander around feeling as though I was all-powerful and omniscient, but now I feel like I've been destroyed. I feel like that power and that knowledge have taken my will and crunched it, then twisted it up between two giant and very angry hands. The worthlessness rather amused me for a very long time, as I could laugh at it and do my thing and all was relatively well in the midst of my pain. Now, the pain has overtaken the amusement and stepped on the laughter, leaving only this feeling of complete and total emptiness. I hate it, and I want it dead. I want to shoot it in the head and rip out its eyes and chew up its heart while its still beating because that's what I feel like it's doing to me right now.

The people around me are making me sick simply by existing. Of course, at the moment, there are no people in here, and I'm left with nothing but my computer and my thoughts. This is never a good combination. I've had a knot in the bottom of my stomach ever since I stepped on the plane to come back home after last weekend. I feel sick. I feel like someone is fucking with me just for the hell of it. I keep getting these goddamn shots of complete silence right through the center of my head. I'll be sitting here doing nothing but typing and all of a sudden, I'll get this random shot of silence from one ear across to the other inside my head, and then my head jerks away involuntarily trying to separate itself from the silence. Then everything is back to being normal: sick and empty.

I noticed this morning that I'm having a serious problem putting myself together. I can make absolutely NO connection between who I was yesterday, last year, before that, and now. It's like I'm just a body with some form of a person inside, but that person keeps on becoming something different. And every time it changes, it loses track of who it was before. I feel like I don't know who I am. I read over things I wrote a few years ago or a few days ago, and every time, I can't remember having written it. I can't think about anything except what's right in front of me at any given moment, and it's KILLING me. I swear to god, I'm gonna spontaneously combust. There's all this goddamn pressure built up inside of me that just wants to fuck someone up badly and then throw them in a giant bonfire and listen to them as their dying body tries to scream out in pain. At least then I MIGHT feel something other than this goddamn emptiness.

I can't decide if I'm gonna buy some alcohol to have for the weekend or not. I ran out last night, and I want to give my new drug a chance. It's probably gonna fuck me up enough, anyway. Plus, if I don't buy the alcohol on the way home, chances are I'll be too lazy for the rest of the weekend to even consider going out to get some. That'll sure as hell keep me from drinking while starting the new medication. My doctor told me to "be patient" with it because it could take up to four weeks before it helps at all. Maybe I should take Christmas break as an opportunity to just quit my drugs. I'm so used to being in withdrawal over Christmas anyway. I don't think I'd be able to do it, though. I'd miss one dose, then flip out because I can actually FEEL my brain slipping. It's the weirdest thing. I'll feel like my brain is literally gonna slide out the back of my head, and I'll be forced to start taking the drugs again. This is where I scrunch up my nose and sigh in frustration.

Theoretically, I should go out this weekend to do all of my Christmas shopping. Maybe I'll get someone to drive me to a mall, if I decide I'm able to move at any point. Ah, whatever. I'm so unconcerned about it. Fuck Christmas.

I'm just getting increasingly bitter as I write. I think it's time for another smoke break. I hope your day is going well. I miss you so much that I just don't know what to do with myself.

I love you.
Perdita