An Emeritus Addresses the School

No one can wish nothing. Even that death wish sophomores are nouveau-glib about reaches for a change of notice. “I’ll have you know,” it will say thirty years later to its son, “I was once widely recognized for the quality of my death wish.” That was before three years of navel-reading with a guru who reluctantly concluded some souls are bank tellers; perhaps more than one would think at the altitude of Intro. Psych., or turned on to a first raga, or joining Polyglots Anonymous. One trouble with this year’s avant-garde is that it has already taken it fifty years to be behind the avant-garde of the twenties with the Crash yet to come. And even free souls buy wives, fall in love with automobiles, and marry a mortgage. At fifty, semisustained by bourbon, you wonder what the kids see in that Galactic Twang they dance the Cosmic Konk to. You will have forgotten such energy, its illusion of violent freedoms. You must suffer memory to understanding in the blare of a music that tires you. There does come a death wish, but you will be trapped by your begetting, love what you have given, be left waiting in a noise for the word that must be whispered. No one can wish nothing. You can learn to wish for so little a word might turn you all the bent ways to love, its mercies practiced, its one day at a time begun and lived and slept on and begun.