Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, Aug 23, 1950:

What can be pushed—the exact & bitter knowing of what kind of egoism it takes—that it refuses even the slightest wish: to be of service—how can I say that, that I would, that I want, to be of service—when I only want to make this thing: true. I cant trust the reality of these people, I can’t believe that is much more than what they’ve, unwittingly, taken out of possibility, an unwilling surprise. Possibility: is, say, what happened, even last night? Like, sitting on the couch, Ann by the window, in a chair, reading, the light coming down on her book, herself, the yellow, somewhat hard there. Then, as it grows just beyond the window, outside, a lilac tree, with the deep green of the leaves, its own (from how may goddamn cold distant & echoing miles … as one could walk them?) the moon, with its own light catching the leaves, making two lights, two kinds. Two, two: worlds. I used to read, then, of these things beyond, beyond—like fairy lands. And here there are nights, when the mist comes up early from the river, and before the sun has gone down, it rides still over the edge of the hills to the south, catches on these rises of the mist, as they come up/ makes for all of it—something that can be believed?

I don’t know. To ride each thing, to go, to move—to be ready for it, to go. The simple biz, perhaps, of having a bag packed. Cannot, cannot, stay anywhere.

From an Introduction to the stories of Robert Walser:

Among Immanuel Kant’s many important distinctions is the one he made between willing something to happen and wishing for it to occur. When we will an end, he said, we must also necessarily will some means which will be effective in obtaining it. If you hear me speaking of my love of boating and the sea, of my dream one day of owning my own yacht and sailing the Chesapeake as if it were my own private lake, you will be quite properly disabused of your belief in my desire when you notice that I subscribe to not a single boating magazine; that I do not follow the cup races in the papers; that I have not set aside any sums towards the purchase of so much as a jaunty cap; that, in fact, I spend my vacations with my family in the desert Southwest. In short, I may wish for such a luxury, but I have never willed it. When I wish, my means are dreams. Each evening, before sleep and in place of love, I imagine my vessel parting the waves: I cry to the sky the salty orders of a shipmaster and eat heartily without any fear of sickness from the sea that lies around me like my cool, uninhabited sheets. As a people, as a race, Kant observed, we will always War; we only wish for peace.

And when the circumstances of my life—my six children and my fruitful but frigid wife, perhaps, my boringly repetitive work as an insurance adjuster, my rascally relatives and harsh climate, the painfully pushed-forward designs of those who would exploit me—when I see these force me (as I think) to give up my aims altogether, then I shall find myself in a classical state of powerless resentment, aggrieved because existence has become a broken promise; and my head shall fill with willing women, my yacht will always find the best breeze, I shall dream of flames while I stir my ashes, and my soul will swell like a balloon to float over the world, touching it only as a shadow.

If I were to try to save myself through writing, how difficult it would be for me to maintain the posture of a realist, for I should have had little acquaintance with the real (indeed, less and less), rather more with the subjects of my wishes than the objects of will. In order to confer the blessings of Being upon the small hollow dreams of my soul, these harmlessly private elaborations will have to somehow achieve the heartless powers of the page; yet my characters must be inventions, and how quickly these inventions will feel my disdain. What value could they have if they remain so utterly in power? So much for the story, too, which can be pushed and pulled this way and that, or dropped, suddenly, like a weighted sack in a lake.