EthicalDative

reviews / Monroe

“Most of the important things never get communicated in words anyway.” Robert Wilson.

There seems to have been something fragile or defective in my makeup that has not lent me to enduring love. I look back with grief and embarrassment over much of the recent past; there is the sense of failure. Of course, it wasn’t all black. Perhaps whatever I have gained from it and whatever good I did will become more apparent [in] time.

My writing period: such a flap to connect with so little. It was hyper-earnest play, if such a juxtaposition makes any sense. It has become difficult to say anything on paper that doesn’t sound mannered and false.

Wisdom entails an adjusting downward of one’s expectations. But having lived so much in my head I’m forced to be skeptical about any “adjustments” (increments […]

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Written in the 70s, 70s-13a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Salem 01970
Coutín

Anything too dear in your odd affection spirits toward mirth and issues to air. Your white teeth open, the dear thing dies in laughter. Then your face is whole again.

Washed in the soul-splitting grin of the black-man: “Look at her[,] she won’t wave back. Treat everybody nice. I get on better with you folks [whites] than I do with my own.”

“Surfacing,” Margaret Atwood
“No gods to help me now, they’re questionable once more, theoretical as Jesus. They’ve receded, back to the past, inside the skull, is it the same place. They’ll never appear to me again. I can’t afford it; from now on I’ll have to live in the usual way, defining them by their absence; and love by its failures, power by its loss, its renunciation. I regret them; but they give only one kind of truth, one hand.”

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Written in the 70s, 70s-13. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)