I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.

O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I have seen eternity and it is like this,
a man and woman dancing in a bar
in a poor street on an unswept floor.

It clings and plots and is desperate,
at a point between violence and abjection,
between warmth and agoraphobic fear.

Let me reverse this and accept the fear.
Let me drop all objections to abjection,
since life itself  is desperate

and has to tread the unswept floor
carefully, lovingly, while the bar
hovers in eternity. Like this.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

oh, you meant so much,
have you given up?
does it feel like a trial?
does it trouble your mind
the way you trouble mine?
does it feel like a trial?
now, you’re thinkin’ too fast
you’re like marbles on glass.

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don’t, streets that are friendly, streets that aren’t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I never shall be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don’t, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won’t, and so on.