The dedication of 1984 to Orwell’s dystopic vision, the commitment to a kind of paranoia of the spirit, to observing all the world’s deliberations from the bleakness of the Ministry of Truth, the prophecy that we would not see 1984 for what it is in totalitarian terms…this dedication must yield.

1985, a new beginning, an awakening. Perhaps the trick is to take the feelings which I called depressed, which moved me to a wariness just outside of skepticism fed by a cynical stoicism acrobatically toughened, and turn them into some sense of can-do; into an energy which drives itself…on, forward…

Nor to deny Orwell, but to rotate and translate his vision into the time of all of time from the perspectives of now, of then, of once-upon-a-time and always will.

The feelings, self-justifying, the bad conscience of our age, need to be grasped for the power they possess to push, and turn to…

What, now is the question I pose, the query I wish almost to dodge in its doing?

1985, it has arrived; almost in spite of itself, a prophecy well-served, a wish to avoid the rebound which 1984 mirrors in its bouncing.

and “move on out”…

…for what I cannot have, sometimes fill me with a sense of incompleteness which almost screams with its intensity.

…for what I do not have, are different. These seem like envy or jealousy for a life which could have gone some other ways, but didn’t.

…creep into my being, a set of feelings which move in their location, sometimes settle-in and set my thinking in the direction of what keeps those yearnings alive and burning. Yearnings are stories I tell myself to heighten and deepen some internal bodily changes which, in their turn, deepen and heighten.

Where do they derive? From youth’s visions of what might be, or might have been? From some sense of moving beyond whose call must be heeded, no matter what? From some sense of fulfillment of a life whose work and worth have been underrated? From a boredom whose life continues to grow beyond my life, no matter what? From a romanticism native to America’s children who were taught the myths of “forever after,” and the “prince-cess on the Great White Horse” who would rescue and deliver me?

What would halt these yearnings’ burnings? Maybe only death. What could control them that they are not so ready to explode, blurring each moment into a wish for magic and miracles?

Yet…yearnings keep life moving, and provide living its own due.