Laws for Creations

Introduction In college, after I gave up modeling myself on Bob Dylan (I had trouble with his conversion to Christianity) and then on Genet (I just wasn't French enough), I decided to try to become as much as possible like Walt Whitman. What propelled me was not the beauty of Whitman's language (I was an undergraduate English maj∨ I was drowning in the beautiful language of the dead) but the following passage, which I read late one night in my dormitory room as Pink Floyd seeped through the wall from the room next to mine: Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here alone together?) It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms. . . . Never before had a writer leaped off the page and touched me like that: directly, personally, erotically. It was my first experience of literature's ability to telescope timeto forcefully remind the living that the no-longer-living were not only once as alive as we are now but were capable of imagining us, and a future with us in it, as vividly as we imagine them in the past. If it didn't quite tear a hole in the fabric of mortality, it stretched it a considerable distance. ... Copyright 2006 by Mare Vaporum CorpCunningham, Michael is the author of 'Laws for Creations ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312426071 and ISBN 0312426070.