Hints for Don J — which appears to me a soliloquy upon his own ill-luck — Ungraceful & selfish — like a beggar hawking his own sores about and which create disgust instead of Pity.
—Claire Claremont, journals, 1 February 1820
sweating like Judas
tired of dying
tired of policemen
feet in marmalade
perspiring profusely
heart in marmalade
—Samuel Beckett, “Enueg II”
I wondered for a long time about the marmalade, thinking he must have felt some cloy packed under his breastbone, a sticky runoff from what the world calls happiness; but finally someone pointed out the French en marmelade: “crushed to a pulp, smashed up.”
Young poets, and poets who refuse to grow up, insist on a principle of possibility or unreality out of fear of pressing on the lever of the real world. Not because they think the lever won’t move. The fear is that it will move just barely, opening the narrowest of cracks. They would then be forced to claim that crack—it’s what you’ve made, the best that was in you—and slide their narrow hearts inside, to beat sideways the rest of their days.
