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I don’t long, I don’t die, I don’t await
the departure of those I love. As the origin
of a particular plant is sussed, so too
animals, people, their cities, and smaller things.
When you wonder on what I have become,
be just. No more great songs of satisfaction,
no more wailing upon the hill to the hillside.
Be kind, for trust is not addition and addition
is not acceptance and acceptance is not humility.
Simply put, we are a failed and ruined people
incapable of even silence. We are equal to nothing.
The earth given to us, we have lost even that.
Big eaters of America, I join you in your parade.
Let us be watched and let us be spoken of.
For today fascination is gone and even vanity
is undervalued. I have often misunderstood destiny.
I will misunderstand it no more.

Joshua Beckman, from the book Take It (Wave Books, 2009)

This poem sort of begins with “Simply…” for me, am unsure about what to do with the first half, although I see that it’s necessary…. The second half is fantastic.

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American suffering

“For a long time I have sought the justification for Henry [Miller’s] angers, hostilities and revenges. I believed it was a reaction to unusual suffering. So many American writers show this bitterness and hatred.

"But when I compare their lives and suffering with the lives of European writers (Dostoevsky, or Kafka) I find that the Europeans suffered far more, and all knew greater poverty, greater misery, yet they never turned into angry, hostile men like Edward Dahlberg, or Henry. Suffering became transmuted into works of literature, and into compassion. The asthma of Proust, the Siberia of Dostoevsky, contributed to their compassion for humanity. In some American writers any deprivation, any suffering, turns into mutiny, criminal anger and revenge upon others. There is an almost total absence of emotion. They hold society responsible and writing becomes an act of vengeance.

"It seems to me that the answer lay in the attitude towards suffering. To some American writers anything but paradise was unacceptable. To the European it was part of the human condition, and something shared with other human beings.”

–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume Two