The place of being - Chap 3: Depression

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One m0rning the girl woke up and the Place was gone. It couldn't really have been gone but the feel of it was gone. The world persisted and classes occurred, even classes in poetry, but the subject matter, or again the feel of the subject, had fled. The thing talked about was not to be known. And she walked the wooded area adjacent to the campus and felt herself bereaved again. Something had been taken away, although it still was there.

Her life continued, her grades were good, her friends thought of her as happy. Her professor saw great promise in her as he followed her with his eyes.

On the path to the creek, the elite girls stood and complained. This place has grown common, they said. People have invaded this place who don't *understand* it. It isn't the way it was before. Nothing is as before.

What has poetry stooped to become? A bunch of nobodies taking the mike for their own and reciting their hip-hop *jingles*.

Mere therapy. Poetry has lost its outward motive.

We were seeking grace and clarity. A world whose lines were pure. Comprehension circulating lucidly in motes of light.

The rich girls complained with a sing-song lilt, making the poetry of regret with their mouths. But no one wanted to hear it. They were the evicted nymphs of the Place. Their soft membranes were tearing in this new harsh air. Poetry is weak, poetry is dying. It cannot survive the bustle of the world.

The girl stood beneath the bleak buckeyes and wondered whether the feel would ever return, the feel that expressed the world. God's beautiful world with its soft colors and torn hornsounds, its flute-thin outlines shivering like thistle fluff, the undersurface of a world not meant to be simply used but to be -- what? What exactly was this world for? What was the mission of this place that was more than a place, this haunted domain with its surrounding echo, its abiding sense of purpose, its providential push? Reality rhymed and rhymed. There was someone intending and someone hearing -- someone objective but not human -- someone standing in the place waiting for her, this was the deity she was unable to engage. The Place of Poetry was like a place of assignation, she had had an appointment there with God and had missed the appointment, now nothing to do but wait and wait. What else could be the purpose of this *place* with her in its middle?

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