proximoception

Hadn't noticed till recently that the child's drawing in Bishop's Sestina is similar to that game Crowley uses in Love and Sleep and that I tried out myself a few years ago:

http://proximoception.livejournal.com/133459.html

Perhaps a variation on Crowley's cup and key - or some original he gnosticized? Something like, "Picture a house. Now picture a path to the house. Now picture a man. [...] That's where you came from; that's what your life will be like; that's how it'll feel." I could never convince my thesis advisors how bleak Bishop is. Loveliest possible bleakness. She must have found it lovely too, or striven to find angles from which to. I think they must have thought I meant despairing? That's something different. That's an absence of hope you spray on people.

"As if the story of a house were told or ever could be." Houses that don't quite exist and don't quite not are central in Crowley, Bishop, Stevens, Frost, Robinson, Thoreau. Whitman, by negation - a carpenter taking the wall down. Must be part of that American thing, that solitude. Former American thing? Pre-cellphone & internet? This mania for full disclosure, which I'd say has done a lot of undeniable good as well as undeniable stupid, might only be possible in the wake of a long, consuming solitariness.

But when people talk about America they usually just mean the world. Sometimes it's chauvinism and sometimes it's a polite hesitancy. "Perhaps they order these things differently in China..." Probably not.