The Argonauts

When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing.

Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough. Some might read in this a recipe for the classic ungratefulness of children—after everything I’ve done for you, and so on.

Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much?

As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me.

I wonder if I’ll recognize it, when I see it again.

i never wanted it to end. i have never wanted infinity to open up under an instant like i wanted that then.

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

Over the years I’ve had to train myself to wipe the sorry off almost every work e-mail I write; otherwise, each might begin, Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion, Sorry for whatever.

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

And I wondered if, instead of working to fulfill the dream of worldwide enforced childbearing, abortion foes could instead get excited about all the innocent, unborn souls going straight from the abortion table to Paradise, no detour necessary into this den of iniquity, which eventually makes whores of us all (not to mention Social Security recipients). Could that get them off our backs once and for all?

But for the most part those people were pathological prior to having a baby. They would have had a pathological relation to carrot juice.