Along with all of these newfound feelings, this lovesickness, this heartache and tenderness, this obscene and bitter anger, this utter inability to exclude my most troubling fantasies from my mind

Along with all this I am feeling for the first time in my life what I can only imagine is the artist’s compulsion

The painful but not irrational knowledge that only by escaping my own mind, getting lost in the wild woods of language and the ever less effective attempt to translate emotions felt to words spoken or read

Only in this way will I ever know that I am not alone, not simply pacing the empty halls of solipsism, striving but never able to reach out to another soul

Words are obviously and intuitively the demonstrative sign of love, the stamp of the other on the self, the signifier of our distance but also of our nearness to truth and to our saviors

We save each other, Danny, without each of us there would be none of us, our lives are literally in each other’s hands

No life without love, no love without words, no words without others, no others without self, no self without life and so on in an endless, self sustaining circle of emptiness and fullness, growth and death, beginningless and also without end

And perhaps I am not alone when I am with myself