There are many sentences of the high aesthetes’ that my spiritual kin and I have categorized as “lasting.” When questioned about the criteria for a lasting sentence, any one of us is incautious with her answer, giving it with an ode to The Waves, The Golden Bowl, The Souls of Black Folk, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Finnegans Wake—and with violence. Yes, often risking disease in still pools of Hemingway lauders’ spit and Forsterphile’s tears, how she vilifies, directly she’s ceased her singing, the critics and reviewers who bow to Phaetons and Stilbons she doesn’t claim. She’d do well to remind herself of the disdain any philosopher bears a sophist, any politician a satirist, any Packers fan a Bears, and, in a defiant act of grace, save a few ears further bloodying by contempt, and herself prescription costs.

But a polite “beautiful,” “brilliant,” or “good” colors sensation the way a Monet vista, if stripped of the master Impressionist’s lines and shadows, would color linen. I.e., unaccompanied by mention of my neck and knees, the way the voices of James Joyce, Henry James, Dubois, Woolf, and Wilde make these parts of me tingle would amount here to an authorial sin, a pastel blob of sentimental syllables. This is the same potential phonetic form of the cravings those voices prompt, cravings I would say can be satisfied with just one sentence that toys insightfully with the ear, if only were my screams, in the flames of bibliophilic lust, ever silenced with just one.

Joyce..would deceive his readers to open their perception to the possibility of their being rendered more alive, and alive again.

For fear of sinning, I won’t sing. I’ll examine, self-restrained, a few sentences I’ve recently grabbed, while enveloped in the smell of blazing hair, from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. First, some clarification on their lastingness. I know they won’t find futures in all worlds yet unborn, and I know that all speculation on their survival into the twenty-second century is dispensable. None of this do I say in any disappointment at a current waning of their influence, knowing anyone suggesting such diminishment to be, at best, delusional. It’s impossible to accurately reason that when set against attestations of the influence of their younger siblings from Ulysses— and then of the Gospels’ sentences, the Torah’s, the Koran’s—theirs in any way becomes the lesser: forgoing trivia, I’ll simply say that so multitudinous are the voices of their progeny I sometimes wonder how a descendant of Mrs. Dalloway’s sentences, A Picture of Dorian Gray’s, even The Sun Also Rises’, discovers itself. Not that more than a comparative few of the aesthetic heirs of the Portrait’s will last for me—for instance, those coming by William H. Gass’ “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s,” Middle C, and On Being Blue; and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (I haven’t yet read Pynchon or Danielewski).

In short, I will, in my own classics-having spirit’s ever-thickening grimoire, preserve the Portrait’s sentences among many born well before and after them—not including Infinite Jest’s, Oliver Twist’s, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’s, nor any of Jack London’s, nor Louis Sachar’s. While those have reinforced, even generated several of my long-running literary predilections and convictions, the Portrait’s have given the door another push, the door nudged open, inches further with each reading, by the mentioned of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, DuBois, Woolf, James, Wilde, and I’ll add Hawthorne and Shakespeare, as, of course, any of the literary must attribute his awareness of the world and of the self, which perceives the world, surrounds it, in part to his very favorite author and to Shakespeare. Right, “awareness” is the word on the door to which I refer, a door only ever cracked enough for anyone’s single metaphysical eye to view a slim speckled slice of the self’s infinitude.

Or am I deluded? Do sentences really throw shadows off any part of an individual’s universe of astres? Perhaps there are things worthier to present these bodies to one’s perception as what they are: virtues, foibles, faults, desires, philosophical aha!’s, potential tomorrows; scriptural, archival, cosmological pasts and nows? Impossible. Don’t the words one retains see to themselves being used to describe and record the movements of all such illuminations? This often in groups that go by the designation heretofore employed but also by “complete thought,” a reference to the very lens through which one’s inner eye receives one’s light, the lens of multiform language. Ardor, avidity, fervor, even vehemence can initiate the process producing that lens—the term for which process, here, is cogitation—yet none of these can sustain it, or so its lexico.com-provided definition moves me to believe. I certainly should, then, attempt to be contemplative and coordinated as I finish this essay, to make neither psalm nor scar.

Joyce, like Dedalus, was not a poet.

But if I am wrong concerning a sentence’s power, I accuse the high aesthetes of deceit. Joyce, in particular, would certainly deceive his readers to open their perception to the possibility of their being rendered more alive, and alive again. He’s arranged the Portrait’s sentences on annuli according to his cyclical development of the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, on a Shakespearean line of progression. At the line’s end he’s set Dedalus’ decidedly un-Shakespearean awakening to psychospiritual maturity, and tied it with a formula for transcendence, of which expansion and regeneration are the factors.

Not that expansion or transcendence or regeneration were immediate thoughts as I began devouring the Portrait’s prose for the first time; irrationally, after having already finished Ulysses, then consumed nearly half of Finnegans Wake, I attempted fresh eyes. The truth of a claim to fresh eyes, for the span of even a single phrase, is ne’er entire in the passionate reader’s case, but he’ll use any pretensions to amplify first ecstasy, as if the value of a second, third, or subsequent reading is only to be determined by how much of that ecstasy it recalls. I wondered, while flipping pages between the sunrise of Dedalus’ adolescence and his recognition, at adolescence’s twilight, of first love, whether he might end up a suicide; in my understanding, warped along with my memory by misguided intention, every phrase slouched toward his gambling his fate away in the Liffey. Only after I reached the midpoint of the novel’s development did I regain the Dedalus of Ulysses and become conscious of the Portrait’s core energy, which, as it generates metamorphoses of all things it powers, rendering nothing ephemeral, swallows the possibility of Dedalus’ self-murder—well before he arrives at the novel’s famous final epiphany.

This energy is paterian aestheticism. It separates Lord Henry from Dorian Gray, Orlando from Ophelia and Hamlet. It’s the distinguishing life force of what I will call fiction’s Sia-ite Apollonians—of these rarities the poetic Hamlet, sweating and weeping Platonic salt, is among the ancestors—who, while they may find truth, never entirely yield themselves to it and, like Plato, never really need it: only half their cells replicate with Poetry’s DNA. Her purest progeny in prose, children with Colloquy, are the dramatis personae of the novel in its standard form—likewise the cast of nearly every major film, every television series, every video streaming service’s “Original”—to whose psychology truth is as essential as it is to her will. Could they think, therefore act, if she didn’t dig for them wandering paths, set for them at the ends of those paths truths of her invention, then say, Go? Toward their truths they plunge or climb, accepting, thus finding defeat or triumph by, those truth’s illusory power.

The factual and inevitable outcome for all characters in standard, poetic, fiction is emotional and philosophical complacency. For some, its attainment demands renunciation: Iago must declare his own tongue ash; Prospero need send his magic and his demon over the South Pacific with a sweet adieu. Others find it in death: to that end, Hamlet, Gray, Lady Macbeth, Dimmesdale, and Dubois’ John become casualties of sudden-onset awareness—Gray of his sins, Lady Macbeth of her guilt, Hamlet of his world’s corruption, Dimmesdale of his hypocrisy, John of his life’s futility. In romantic comedy, those arrive at it who confirm carnal bliss with a contract of legally undisputable union (and, on the part of the women, critically undisputable compromise): among others, Beatrice is married, Petruchio married, Viola married, Portia married, Elizabeth Bennet married, Dorothea Brooke married, their signatures hampering their expansion.

The waves in all the above tragic and comedic characters’ lines of development measure higher and lower at different points, but any one of these lines slants either up (comedically) or down (tragically) toward idleness. On it, a reader persistently bobs alongside its subject to the sound of such prose as follows the rhythms, by turns, of the Mediterranean’s swells and the ripples on the Ross. The development of a Sia-ite Apollonian follows a similar trajectory, but the reader who travels with such a figure never quite feels the sensations of dipping and rising; rather, of spinning, being that the reader is sent, on coils, series of rebirths, over oceans of histories and metaphysical conceits toward the shores on which the Sia-ite Apollonian arrives completed, filled with the shine of great literature’s every element and form. Each clings to the diamond needle—the core idea of their author’s, invariably an aesthete’s, opus—around which their filiations are wrapped, an idea bent, without exception, by analysts, but always a scintillating sliver of a hypnotic entirety—always, to the critics and scholars with eyes wide open, itself.

A war…around this Joyce forms the Portrait’s world, the orbit of which doesn’t circle, but can be followed in its entirety from any point within, a moment

This is not to say the conclusions of the blind should be dismissed, certainly not as uninteresting. For their own part, the Sia-ite Apollonians, endlessly fascinating, rarely see any object exactly as it is. They stand on their final pages’ stones, cinders, or sands with their gazes fixed on future skies, ready to capture and become the forever expanding and changing colors therein burning, and thus transcend the deaths, the renunciations, the contracts, all details, that cement their histories—while failing to apprehend even the true reasons for their having acted, predisposed as they are to their creators’ pretensions and delusions, which they never shatter for themselves, but absorb completely. For Joyce’s and Dedalus’ pretensions, as well as for the sweet zephyr of prose that oxygenates the latter’s revolutions, the Portrait’s core idea appears, to the blind critic, poetic. But Joyce, like Dedalus, was not a poet.

As Poetry’s only real limitations are plot-related, I allow the weeping Forsterphiles and spitting Hemingway lauders, so well as my fellow Whitman and Pope cultists—even the devout Stephen King apologists—this charge against Joyce with great pain. The choice is almost as painful as the decision I made years ago not to throw my copy of Robert Frost’s “Complete Poems” to the cats that continue to haunt the parking area of my apartment building (if I hadn’t given the tomato- stain-colored volume the time to wink an ‘o’ on its spine to remind me it was a gift…). But several of Joyce’s truths oppose the poetic impression he leaves on his first-time readers. On the truth I’ve already given, in accordance with this assertion, another expands: Joyce never loved nor hated anything as he loved and hated Poetry. How else to begin to explain the following verse from the only finished product to be seen of Stephen Dedalus’ recorded career as an “artist”:

                                                 While sacrificing hands upraise

                                                 The chalice flowing to the brim

                                                 Tell no more of enchanted days.

A middling melody to accompany the movements of Joyce’s beloved Parsifal on the Bayreuth stage. With this sentence-in-verse from “Villanelle of the Temptress,” Stephen Dedalus addresses no one and nothing but the “wild woman,” Kundry, who, at the moment Dedalus refers to from Richard Wagner’s final drama—while the chorus gathers around Parsifal and his sacred cup for a sublime recitation of prayers—lies dead, unable to tell of anything, at the “pure fool’s” feet. The lines coalesce into the shape of a classic Joycean irony only in the mind of the reader who throws the surrounding verses, like further Kundries, to the floor. The moment the reader helps them up again—

Yet as encouraging as is irony’s absence from all of Joyce’s meter, more invigorating is his refrain, “Are you not weary of ardent ways?” Because what a thrill it is to glimpse the bite marks on a master’s pen. How many dozen did Joyce chew into his in anxiety over Poetry? Lacking the minutest trace of his power, the line in question stands eyeless, boneless, skinless before a heap of alternatives from Tennyson’s juvenilia, making it obvious that, in Joyce’s case, anxiety has bred such ambivalence as devours every tangible cell in a talent for poetic invention. I readily acknowledge that talent in him, conscionably inept to do otherwise after having contrasted each line of his poetry with a line of his prose. For instance, this descriptive fragment from “Simples,” first appearing in Joyce’s verse collection, Pomes Penyeach—:

                                               A moondew stars her hanging hair

                                               And moonlight kisses her young brow

—with this thought, equally brief, from late in the Portrait:

The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield.

Stephen Dedalus’ trees, rain, and lake might kindle the love of reading within anybody, but what devotee could the nameless girl in “Simples” possibly win with her “hanging hair” and “young brow?” In fact, the girl shares what little meaning she has with the lake, but while behind the water’s beholder Joyce whispers a necromantic spell, he’s left the task to every poet next to him of helping a reader to assemble the child’s head from glowing, nondescript parts. Her sentimental lines—they read like wind-stripped Shelley—exist without any of her creator’s signature effects: a first-glance weirdness of structure, a deliberate-seeming range of vowels and consonants, a high-lying sardonicism of tone. Like the “Villanelle’s” Kundry, she has no context, no life, of her own.

However, Dedalus’ description—not his strongest, by any estimate—of the park perfectly if subliminally outlines the Portrait’s core idea. Indeed, we can easily take the shield—its surface here a landscape’s constituent shimmering with a single polished shade, its still appearance resisting the rhythms of the rain—as representing, first, the purity Joyce believed Poetry to possess, a purity that absorbed all the pessimism and vulgarity, falling on her as monumental liquid orbs of critical thought, that had already begun to drown the world by the time of Joyce’s birth. She was an amalgam of Desdemona and the Shakespearean Venus. She was a goddess pure and free in every moral, aesthetic, political sense, a goddess “feeling regretfully her own hinder parts,” (the words are Joyce’s own, on a topic not altogether unrelated) to whom he, in perfect irony, attached himself as Shakespearean man to Shakespearean woman, criticizing, caressing, worshipping, “bowing his mind to” her, thus attempting to do the impossible, wholly master her.

Then, was not the shield a part, once, of the warrior pulled by Joyce from oblivion, the warrior who, before his absorption by the processes collected under the scientific designation, Time, dropped the protective article amid the park trees for Dedalus to find? A war within an individual against the individual’s gradually acquired nature, which leans consistently toward quick-yield hedonism, stripped-down pragmatism, all-consuming philistinism—a war the prize of which is the true soul; a war the individual wins only with the pure Poetry’s tools—around this idea Joyce forms the Portrait’s world, the orbit of which doesn’t circle, but can be followed in its entirety from any point within, a moment.

And the Kunstlerroman plot of The Portrait cannot be described better than as a collection of moments: a mind’s childhood moments in academy, at dinner; its adolescent moments at church, in an alleyway with a prostitute; at a desk, pen in hand, beam of light in chest. Each of these moments is crafted like a dream in which starts swallow ends and ends become distance—and then what else is distance in a dream…?—so that nebulae become new suns. The Emerson of “The Over-Soul” appears: “the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time.” 

Joyce, in a letter to his brother, Stanislaus, acknowledged his failure to become one with Poetry through rhymes and jingles. “I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself,” he wrote, “but I think I must have a talent for journalism.” At last, rather than give Poetry any of his idiosyncrasies—an impossible thing, apparently, to ask—he decided to make her a ghost, a twin to the one his poetry collections carry, by tearing off her features and attaching them to an alternative form. Maybe Sia’s was the diviner heaven than Apollo’s, and a key (presumably her boon) to her heaven would be the greater gift than the title of “Sonhusband,” bestowed by the wrong “Daughterwife” sublime?

Those two of the many marvelous portmanteaus in Finnegans Wake hint at the problem that nonetheless persisted: the problem of purity, at the core of which was irony. An element of successful art, irony, in order to become a cell of a composition existing within and for, and surrounding, the true soul, required purification by cancellation. It must be turned around on, folded into, itself: irony must be made an irony. Tedious and ridiculous as the idea appears when thus worded, it finds, I think, exquisite life—albeit incomplete life—in Joyce’s literary oeuvre, modernism’s most exuberant, the twentieth century’s most aesthetically significant.

The Portrait’s author, wittingly or unwittingly, agreed more with Emerson than he ever agreed with another…

I mention all this to emphasize Joyce’s seriousness as a writer, because a reader who takes him without it—many take him as clever, pompous, pretentious, brilliant, or impish, but not as serious—diminishes him. If my reading of his letters is accurate, it nearly lost him, once, his substantial wife, Nora Barnacle, and with Nora his substantial children; it severed him a few friendly ties—but I don’t think anyone could have moved him to amend his creative process, thus bring second-rate (of course they’d be second-rate) books into being, to his own social or familial benefit. No argument against that process could have held power enough in his mind, not even one as compelling as pointed out his more than adequate achievement of coming to wholly embody the work of transcendentalism’s founder.

Indeed, The Portrait’s author, wittingly or unwittingly, agreed more with Emerson than he ever agreed with another, more than Shakespeare, on whom Joyce drew for some of Dedalus’ story and psychology, and more than the cultivated—and, so far as I’m able to tell, strictly philosophical—hedonist, Walter Pater, who largely informed the Dedalusian aesthetic. Of course, Emerson, while writing “Circles,” “The Over-Soul,” “Experience,” and “Plato: Or, the Philosopher,” had no picture in his mind of a James Joyce—a future child of Emerson’s tradition but also of an age shaped by audacity (the age of Chanel, Dubois, Wittgenstein, Churchill, Selfridge, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the suffragettes), a child who could, in perfect conscience, theorize Shakespeare, through Hamlet, into a genuinely deranged Oedipus—and enjoy a little sex at midday on a park bench.

Or maybe Emerson kept a sketch of just such a face in a bedside drawer. I can only hope to seem a degree flippant here as I fix my gaze on the mystical Joyce proper. Harold Bloom, in his hypnotic “Western Canon” essays on Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and The Portrait, declared Joyce’s mysticism too faint for serious study, in comparison to Marcel Proust’s. And Bloom’s misinterpretation of both authors, evidencing his anxiety (exhilarating in itself, and beautifully unraveled in the magnificent Possessed by Memory) over spirituality, is not altogether a critic’s failure. Indeed, it’s absolutely true that we cannot find the right perspective on the spiritual while only refining the pessimistic instincts of our minds, the instincts from which ever-necessary skepticism and stoicism stem. In concurrence, we have this from Dedalus:

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using as my defence (sic) the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

This delicious epiphany comes at the end of his fittingly-called “religious cycle.” One can take the happening as a commonplace, a simple change of a protagonist’s mind, like Benedick’s in Much Ado About Nothing, or, more accurately, Billy Mack’s in Love, Actually. But here we have two circles—the hermeneutic and a spiritual. Joyce comments on his intentions for his future work and gives readers a bit of related life wisdom—exquisite in its fascination and its uselessness—as a nod in acknowledgement of what they watch for while scanning a page. Having grappled with his satire and conceit, myself, I grant the sensitive any impression of Joyce as a thrower of bones. But, in my view, not many of the literary world’s great mystics have been less subtle about their transcendental intentions. I believe anything Joyce conjures in the form of a significant revelation we rightly take at face value. And not because I am optimistic the same as Dedalus’ narrative line, one of proper geometric infinity, that takes him from spectating, powerless child scarred by common early-life ills: beatings from teachers, beatings from teenage peers, beatings from passions over-felt and misunderstood, beatings from parental ideologies—to Emersonian individual, a perfect example of the human Thomas More’s God created to “serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.”

Well, perhaps optimism does figure as a pillar to my claim, but it is among others, including that triad, “silence, exile, and cunning.” Harold Bloom appears again, this time holding a picture of Dedalus in Hamlet’s tights. Thank you, Bloom, but isn’t there something rather monkish about the phrase that makes it more than a condensing, restyling and possible satirizing of Hamlet’s “the rest is silence” soliloquy? I come back to Joyce’s formula: regeneration x expansion = transcendence. As well as a spiritual and a literary, it is an intendedly musical formula, into which any Bach fugue fits perfectly. Indeed, The Portrait is, stylistically, a loose fugue on the final sentence of Dubliners’ “The Dead” disguised as a Wagnerian tone poem, with the word “maturity” as its theme. No subtle nod, this, to Walter Pater’s belief that all art aspires to the condition of music. What better to represent and to explain the spirit than a musical structure: open, fluid, abstract, unlimited despite the specificity of its mechanical processes? Whatever the piece or song given, it is a cycle of illusory motion in which doing is undone. In the passage above, we see Dedalus’ struggle toward maturity become new effort in stillness. He wins his war by sitting out its second half, sitting silently in front of the door to his Self, trying to more clearly behold fires.

…great sentences and theatrical sounds…are meant to be analyzed, fitted to expression, and rearranged by each of us for the enrichment of our perception…but we learn little about the world, exactly as it is, from them as they are.

And it is obvious that Joyce shares Dedalus’ victory at this moment, when from a third position Joyce unites, on a page, the two hostile sides of his world. In exile he recreates Sia and Apollo—the former the philosopher’s god and the latter the poet’s—more entirely than even Woolf and James did for themselves with Milly Theale and Maggie Verver and Orlando, as a single aesthetic deity, the skeleton (yes, this creature has bones) of which Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits has supplied. And the sound of this unification: music that prompts blind imitation, of which I myself am guilty. It is music that aims to contain—and, in a supremely individual way, vivify—all consciousness, absorb all of time. Very Platonic, if, as I believe, Emerson was right about Plato.

Certainly, this is to say in part that Joyce fully intended immortality for Dedalus. But Dedalus is not the provided idol. The awareness is that goes by his name. Here we come to the best open secret of the Sia-ite Apollonians, that their identities, unlike the identities of poetic figures, extend to all identity. They are whiny, narcissistic, immoral, hypocritical, sympathetic, exasperating, religious, obsessive, tender, vulgar, sentimental, critical, antisocial, captivating, snobbish, engaged, self-doubting, and appreciative—so well as emotionally, intellectually, sexually, and spiritually ravenous—enough for a billion varied minds, ancient and postmodern. I will say they are almost-souls: they mirror all of us, hold all of us, and are in the Emersonian sense bound to none of us.

Among them, Dedalus may be the most complete, because Joyce births him from the coalescence of a greater number of linguistic modes than any aesthete before Joyce has used to produce any single character. The philosopher’s mode, the poet’s, the critic’s, the scholar’s, the scientist’s, the sage’s—these all become the “artist’s” mode, in which Dedalus successfully attempts to realize the completeness of his masterpiece, the very fugue he lives. The mentioned “maturity” theme of this fugue is certainly not the maturity of a poetic character, maturity almost invariably moral or sexual. Pragmatically not, for Dedalus’ eventuality must be a mystic’s. Only an awakening can fulfill his melodic series, as he himself is forced to discover. He experiences his awakening at a moment in which he might well be staring into the regenerated snow of “The Dead.” As feather-like flakes of ruminations fog everything he can externally perceive, he raises his gaze to the ceiling of his silence and hears,

                        To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.       

Sublime whisperings. If ever I saw a good reason to shove an ink-discharging needle into my arm—

An experience he shares with just about every being who has been described as “enlightened,” he finds himself with the answers to all his questions. “A wild angel appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the way of error and glory. On and on and on!”

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—” No, Joyce is not semantically or ideologically Shakespearean at this moment. Aesthetically, yes, but only as a reminder, to himself, of his first fall into Poetry’s arms. Here we get the sentimental Joyce and the Joyce of high taste—Joyce as mystic in the Eugene Fersen and Eckhart Tolle sense. My apologies, on Joyce’s behalf, to Theobald of Langres—but, at least, from the simple count of the Portrait’s sections (five cycles of development), I can safely say that numerology’s intricacies weren’t lost on him, as little ever was.

To understand that the supreme novelist-mystic of the twentieth century manifested his otherworldly interests like a secondhand monk—yet I accept the inevitability of this. Before adapting his early Catholic learning (he returned to the Church in his last years) to a flimsy atheism of his invention, with its own canon of surrogate saints that grouped Wagner and Shakespeare with Emerson Plato and Pater, Joyce developed his understanding of the spirit, which first appeared to him in Poetry’s form, with great sentences and theatrical sounds. Secondhand. Such are meant to be analyzed, fitted to expression, and rearranged by each of us for the enrichment of our perception—but we learn little about the world, exactly as it is, from them as they are; Joyce was misguided to think otherwise.

Truth appears again. The Sia-ite Apollonian has little use for any truth because only imagination, at its most developed, can complete them, can give them the semblance of Self. Having Self already, what, then, do I need more than I need all-inclusive imagination, which is powered by an empathy unique to flesh-and-blood human creatives that collects all people, in order to live most completely? I’ve, thus, paradoxically described the Self as infinite space behind a door but my literary memory as a smaller separate thing, a spell book. Can only one image perfect the concept of the way I keep Joyce and his Dedalus, whose war is my own, whose victory is my own, whose errors I’ve made, whose hypocrisy I carry, whose intergalactic lives I extend and complete, and, along with my own, repeatedly, chanting two or three sentences while staring at my own stars in rare moments of ecstasy, recreate?    

Louis Arevalos

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