The bile backs up its ducts pouring out into the streams of anger and misplaced love. Seeking for an object, seeking a love of self which has been abandoned, the vanity jealousy throws this surge of feeling out into the world’s view, landing upon…

Who I am, at war with who I am-not; the am-not, another person, different from the me I’m supposed to be, yet still me. Push, kick, hurt, kill. And why? But, why? Is it a question of rights, of deserving?

Do I not have enough, what I was promised, what I tell my self I was told? Like the snake or spider or thing of wrong shape, impinging; is it simple, the hate? Kick, stomp, squash, squish, reach out from the fright like falling off into ledge’s abyss?

Having to be part of a situation, unpleasant with little hope for improvement, I feel caught. Caught, partly because it is of my own making; caught, partly because I think of my self as more powerful than I am in this situation; caught, partly because the situation takes energy from my attempts to extricate my self from it; caught, partly because I cannot decide what I contribute to a bad situation and I have no place to take my guilt.

When I was away from here a few years ago, I found my self in a similar situation: it was hateful, spiteful, tense, with little sense of direction but spinning its wheels continuously. But it wasn’t my fault, and I could look at it with no sense of culpability.

I asked myself why it was that way: hateful, spiteful – so familiar to me, but not my doing? How did its participants feel? Poor management had for years driven each person into one’s own little wedge of work, pulling in the boundaries behind to cover and to protect. By now it was difficult to say what there was since everyone dealt with and through the protective devices.

What I think I learned: that each person, seeking a personal measure of fame and importance had created a shell around themselves which was at once transparent and impenetrable. Not her fault, not his fault, not my fault, I was caught.

Now I know more: its causes, its impossibilities; and feel less guilty. What to do, how to get out, how to protect my self without becoming totally like them? Caught!

Knowing, seeing what there is, knowing how it works, in just the right proportions, with the exactitude to make it happen. In order to do, in order to be, there is a…a level of detail, a set of techniques, without which nothing much will occur. The trouble, the complication, the difficulty, is in knowing; in accomplishing technique without dwelling full-time in the how-to’s. Detail can expand to fill the mind’s dwelling just as it contracts to ever-diminishing portions. At one time, knowledge; at another, a comfort to tell my self that I know what I think I know.

The world likes detail because it is trustworthy, and it wants me seduced into being an aspect of its particles. Detail, technique, is praiseworthy, virtuosity. But, at some point in growing, enough is enough and it is there to be used, utilized to do. It is difficult to know always what there is to do, or to trust my self once I have left the realm of detail to enter into…into what?  Detail and the contexts of knowing what there is: at battle.