{What Do I Know continued...}

Truth.

Do I know truth? Truth is that the smile I wear

is only surface deep,

and inside where it hurts

I am weeping oceans.

Truth.

Yes I know truth..

The truth is I can lie

to everyone but you, because in the end you might realize that it is not true,

I am still alone, and still searching.

--Alice L. Gallant

Just Like That

I’ve always wanted to be a skateboarder

And a windsurfer, a biker and a drummer

A lover and a loner and see the difference

A beach bum and a street kid or maybe someone who would only smoke two cigarettes a day

I’ve always wanted to sing the blues and be happy Enjoy nature and hitchhike all over it while

all the time not caring if anyone missed me

I wanted to be a writer and never be phoney

or maybe avoid all of that altogether

I’ve always wanted to dig jazz and understand classical,

learn to appreciate dance music and dive into the crowd at

a punk concert then not be scared to walk home or maybe just not have any music and save some money so I could buy some Top Siders

I’ve always wanted to grow my hair long and not look like you and play the guitar unless I heard a good bass line then I’d just learn something new and possibly get fed up with being talented and just be humble driving around in my Volvo and maybe not drink alcohol and be proud of that

I’ve always wanted to feel comfortable around sports fans and not be scared of being lazy and play pool at an open table then study hard for about an hour and pray for awhile and not have people be disappointed in me and wake up with a new idea or maybe just be content waking up.

--Dan MacCormac

One Small Voice

editors: Andrew Walsh and Josh Weale

Unconcious ‘Recollections’

George Anderson once again has surprised the literary community with his latest work; ‘Recollection’. Inthis poem George exhibits a maturity beyond his tender age as, in a lucid manner, he deals with some of the themes that have plagued the majority of the 20th century’s great writers. George brings fresh insight and a unique perspective to such issues as feminism, marxism, the deficit, and the deconstruction of the mind-body dichotomy.

George’s style is reminiscent of the past great stream-of-conscious- ness writers (notably Woolfe and Stein), yet he transcends the past masters in his primordial rejection of Western logocentrism. His unconscious flow is tempered with a probing intellect which does not let his goal elude him. George has escaped the sexist language which has chained these past greats to the era in which they wrote. To say ‘Recollection’ is timeless would be no exaggeration.

From the beginning, with his germane allusions to classical mythol- ogy, and the ageless beauty of his craft, George has become the latest poet in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. But George breaks away from the weighty intellectualism which has dulled the effect of the great writings of the past. George asks us to leave our intellect at the door and to experience his poem only with our senses. He wishes to escape the application of context and category to sensation. To read ‘Recollection’ is a journey into the unconscious, and George has facilitated this exploration of the human id in a manner astonishing for someone who must feel the pressure to conform to established defini- tions of ‘good writing’.

What gives ‘Recollection’ a distinct niche in the contemporary scene is its insurgent, militant usurping of conventional use of syntax. Sweetness or sweet-ness. The simple addition of a hyphen has added layers of meaning to this banal word. This is the act of poetic creation or, if you will, the radical forging of new definition. George’s Heideggerian influence is here most evident. The new meaning con- cocted by the separation of sweetness into its elementary units indicates to us the fusion of the essential and the non-essential. Sweetness is the essential character whereas sweet is a quality predicated on a more fundamental substance. Can this ‘mythical aphrodite’ be one or the other? We must accept, as George so painfully does, that she is the symbol of beauty in its essence but at the same time must have beauty predicated on her, otherwise we would speak of her as a beauty rather than as a mythical goddess. How does George overcome this paradox? By separating himself from any kind ofa law of identity or rule of non- contradiction. Something can be itself and another at the same time. Aphrodite is both the essential and the non-essential in the most radical (fundamental and revolutionary) and thus paradoxical manner. If A is A and non-A simultaneously, how can George place her, or more importantly, know that she exists? But George refuses to answer this question for us. Rather, he leaves us his ambiguous term sweet-ness and the fundamental epistemological question,’’ How will leverknow?’’.

Balph Eubanks, subjective idealist

November 11, 1993/X-Press/15