ANSWER TO A CRYPTIC MESSAGE

Dear Sir,

Knowing you as little as I do, you did not strike me as a man of such capacities of succintness. However, your message belied such an assumption and made me once again confirm that one should never assume.

Your answer!---is that what it was? How extraordinarily cryptic and prodigiously concise---never mind that I didn’t get it, how could I, I am after all, just a lil’ curvy blonde woman…just lil’ ole me…nevertheless (amo esa palabra) I believe that:

We convince by our presence.
Walt Whitman

Speaking of whom, I believe we have done no more than that--

I Sing the Body Electric—mi favorito:

…"...the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face; It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists; It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him; The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more; You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side..."

"...The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,

The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees…"

Si, Whitman es de los mas sabios, pero gustan también: Keats, Baudelaire, Rilke y Rimbaud (Y Montaigne [Alas, I have done nothing this day…What, have you not lived? It is by far the most fundamental of occupations] y Emerson en prosa, especialmente On Self Reliance, y Emily Dickinson—aunque me duele la nariz tratando de entenderla, igual que Milton y Wordsworth, now that’ s a name for a poet, WORDSWORTH, Words worth speaking, Words worth reading… y Blake, Blake me fascina--y tantos mas que, por prudencia ¿?-- no menciono---voice en off: no te hagas, no te acuerdas—)

Anyway, he aquí otro experto en Carpe Diem

Be Drunk

-Charles Baudelaire

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

And I would add: be grateful.