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My body thinks for my brain: exhaustion. It is Monday — but more than that: it is the last Monday before I have a longish Christmas break. I imagine it’s the same for everybody else on the train this morning — as next Monday is Christmas. I pity anyone who does have to work next Christmas — and, because digital-industrial society never ceases, there will be some.
My brain thinks for my body: literature, it says — write literature.
I spent the first four years after I graduated from college working on two novels and writing poetry. When — *almost* — no one read those novels, despite what I felt to be their artistic merit… well, I had to accept that literature could not and would not save me from the fate of a daily grind. Part-time, subsistence, bohemian existence was banished… now literature is snuck into the interstices of time I have between on-the-clock hours.
The toll this takes on my spirit is incalculable, but there’s really no point in actively complaining or rebelling — in American society, literature is a useless passion; certainly, one finds no sympathy in worrying that there is not enough time and leisure for reading and writing poetry.
So I write on the platform at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, waiting for a connection to the G train. This isn’t literature — it’s the shadow cast by literature.
