South of the South

Before Afterwards “The world has to be dreamed before it is seen.” … “We grow mostly by dying.” Siddhartha Mukherjee, “Runs in the Family” Geezer me, I must be on the verge of knowing everything. Even what knowing is, me the nervous kid who smiled with his mouth open, the cowlick, the nightmares, the unusual gift for imitating what I thought were doctrines and the stories that proved them pertaining. My eye had to learn what I had to untangle or have no life truly my own and then to betray both to something like oblivion. Moreover, does not the Good Book adjure us “if thine ‘I’ offend thee, pluck it out.” I know it doesn’t name the first person pronoun as the likely villain in the adventure of learning, but I know it is, from a lifetime of giving it up in sacrifice, in return for what it tells me to write. What do I care if learning is part spite.