THE RED HEART
THE MAN WHOSE PATH WAS ON FIRE
James
Reaney
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INTRODUCTION:
The world, finally, is a world founded on facts, no matter how far the
dream will take us into ourselves. One wants to be useful, otherwise survival
is empty. One takes a job, a wife or a task only at the possible cost
of honesty. They are not, as we had assumed, simple facts, but bring with
them consequences, also facts, the accumulated conditions of history.
Thus, willy-nilly, we are put to uses, becoming
first this, then that, and again something else. Looking back, I find
no simple means to bring these various selves coherence. Their only common
element is change, and their issue, bankruptcy. Finally, even novelty
is boredom, a random and irritable groping for alternatives to a life
which literally exists. At any rate, no substitute for freedom, or what
is loosely called meaning.
The sands on which a life is founded, shift. Everything
is water, air, or as my title suggests, fire, which is never spontaneous
but always a product of the earthly conditions of which it is the issue.
The fire does not ask why it burns.
My madness is not unique though it is a specific
instance with specific form. I hesitate to offer it as warning, since
the recognition of madness can qualify the perfection of acts undertaken
in all innocence.
Although some of these poems flatly contradict
each other, I make no defense except to say they rise from a condition
which can only be called confusion. I really thought it might be possible
to see actual angels, or failing that, to see them by divine hallucination.
After all, hallucinations too, are facts. A label can't detract from their
occurrence.
Something (if it is possible to say that a process
has gone wrong) HAS gone wrong. A context in which various elements cohere
seems missing. One waits with varying degrees of patience for a pattern
to emerge, when all that seemed relation was fantasy, the hopeful product
of education or something equally spurious. The last poem, and some others,
despite their tone of surrender, suggest directions which might be followed
for a time in the future. Whether or not they bear any relation in reality,
I am obviously in no position to say, although I have my guesses. The
effort of making them I recognize as fact, but the measure of effort is
not necessarily the measure of value.
If they do anything at all, these poems describe
a condition of mind, some useful hopes, some crazy wishes, some outright
lies. Let them lie.
- Jamie Reid
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