(no subject)

[proximoception]

3. Assuming he'd have changed the poem to finish and publish it, in one sense we have not the fragment before us but, for once, the non-fragment. We do get those questions, time and again. Some, though, are answered...the movie/model train table/mixed metaphor that is the poem may as a whole be answering all of them. But the accent of personal crisis and crossroads does seem present, and centered in the questions. Just prior to what should have been midway through the voyage of his life, Shelley sees a vision of last things that is blurry and unfinished. Or perhaps the last things themselves are blurry and unfinished.

But this isn't how one gives up. You give up like Wordsworth, by taking a slightly different line (quickly becoming much different) and pretending it's the same. Or like Blake, by deferring whatever didn't work and waving the confused away. Noise or silence. Or you find some Jesus or other. You don't repeat horrible, eloquent what-ifs at yourself all day. Frankly, I don't even think that counts as a dark season of the soul. The worse you let yourself grill yourself the better planted your feet must be. Maybe not in specific hopes, but in hope; or maybe not in hope, but in something. An ideology-cum-aesthetic. A project. A personality, in Wilde's sense.