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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
---T.S. Eliot

No-one knows what lies beyond the curve. The ancients have said that all truth moves in a circle; but would it not have been better to say a spiral, a broken circle? Something that returns and departs. Without the brokenness can we even see the circle? Mirrors darken, let in so much darkness. We see through a glass darkly. Tell me, the curve of the hand, does it give or withhold?

The fanaticism of the human soul: my space, my country, my tribe, my life. Crows and stones are better, recognizing their imperfection, their ugliness; they do not lunge out at the emptiness, do not try to re-create it in outward forms, but sit still and wonder at the passing spiral of time

The sure, strong curve, the rise and run
are as though to contain us, are right, are what we want.
Where does it go?

Does the curve contain us? It does more than that.
It offers to hold more than we were, more
than we ask-it asks of us, and asking gives.
We are enlarged.

Where do we go? Nowhere, nowhere. Live
on the stairs? No, not that...But anyway, the stairs
As though they might take us. As though they might.

--W. Bronk.


Larkin: apart from the east and west coast a "desert full of bigots". You said it our lad. You crossed the dark sea and brought those fears, that annihilating blackness with you. As if the desert-sea was part of you now. But even if you come to own the whole world, even if the whole world is America, still much will escape you. That's the way it works. For you, who follow linear time, will not know the first place or the first time. Or second spaces, second thoughts. Only by getting out of the curve of one's own existence can we understand what might have been, what might be.