Self Note -2 from Ivan Khayiats Quest by Day, Vigil by Night It is a most pleasant scene: a nature of birds hops

joyously on plush winter greenery - shadowed by palm, pine and fir -all so calm, unfettered, and unmarshalled waving in the noiseless afternoon wind. It is so pleasant to sit alone and yet not experience aloneness for deep within I feel the pulse of sympathies between myself and the calm greenery stretching from the tip of my touch and prancing out with my eyes up the distant slopes. I see the lantern posts stringing their wires from stump to stump - (all caught between the musical greenery)- and though at times these signal the sad furious mechanism of the modern age, now it matters not; the calm pins and holds me firm to her breast. I have not read all morning. Nothing compares with a life of unified passion, vigour and being. Our deepest moments of joy are sensed they bring a kinaesthetic quality with them. Only when the serum glides and ebbs with the stream of blood and thought and bone does my spirit experiences this lulling sense of pure belonging kinship. It is this feeling deepened in a dank stillness I crave for in all my endeavours ... yea that I yearned for from childhood memories - old distant streams that still gently ripple, though faint, within my breast. I sit and wonder what the days ahead hold for me. I would it were nothing but 'being' ... sure and true, and however turbulent the waves of passion are that gust on unknown sea, let there be times like this, now, stillness. I cannot escape the albatross that has been chained about my neck. No matter what I do, it is and will be there - always to haunt and goad me on in the quest. I am a teething babe who will spend its days giving form and shape to a mysterious wor(l)d [sic.] within - my drama, my own passional wor(l)d [sic.] of pure beauty - my soul's verdure whereof when a man has drunk but a sip, he shall never thirst again, for therein, stretched out in rolling glory is the bread of life and golden manna. Such is my cross, that whether or not any man may know of it, I must bear with a brutal joy, even in the face of hell and outer despair. This cross I have not chosen, but by virtue of me - my humanity and the strange warbles within - it has chosen me. Whether I return home or stay abroad, it shall rest complacently on my shoulders, for this ghost would not be hied hence at dawn by the rooster's crow, trumpeting the arrival of light. Always it will be there, staring me, with horrid silence. If I flee earth, it will be there. If by night I dwell in the sea, by day it - a ghastly spectre - it will rear its head once again to witch me right between my eyes. And oh how oft I have wondered what it is ... and I cannot tell. Sometimes

it oppresses me so strongly that I identify my craving a creative outlet with its flow ... as if my song will be the strumming of its forgers within my stringed head. And so what can I do or say to another man. If I am, it is. Then please ask me not why I am this in my strange actions, thoughts, words and deeds. Ask me not, for my intellectual despair and abject disappointment with my slow progress is an offspring of this unknown thing. I have observed my growing despair with the abstractions I proposed to Explain or understand it. Alas this is not enough tis a mere sliver too faint a shade, a shade, a firefly flickering faintly, a glowless glowworm failing to do justice to a lucient radiance that moves dark in the nether pitch regions of Psyche. Yes, all abstractions fall short- abysmally. And yet, how fearful I am of the alternative - as if madness would possess me. Then if because I am, it is; then if I am to be, it is to be; and if I am to quest me, then I am yoked to quest and discover it. This is my secret. The man who knows this knows knows me. I have withheld it from my best and most respected friends for fear of desecration. And yet, this I hate for I have need of them and their company, and above all their intellectual steel to nub and buttress my own fibre. O how lonely and uncertain is the road ahead. In my mythic ramblings and rovings, one friend I have met Pasquel. Only to him, who knows it all my dreams, frustrations, fears of demise, and hope to attain - can and do I turn to when I am caught in the grappling doldrum and grasping rigors of feelings of abandonment and thereby my total self-destruction. Time and years and years wear on. Hold my hand and lead the way; Rugged, winding, Dark stumblings, Momently Flashing findings After the dents of fear and labour Grant a tooth and tongue to tell.

QUEST BY DAY, VIGIL BY NIGHT

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