I am in labor of my vision. I lie locked in a distress spherical, moveless. My room moves through time, time filters into it, so I can mark the days. But time does not live in this passionate whirling Sphere that is the immobile body of my meditation. Or if time, not thrice seven days but all the years of my life and all the ages of my roots ere I lived. All the pain of my years and their joys were this great coil about me: were the bedded soil of my distress. And all my loves and dreams lived in it like the solved minerals in earth. But this spheric stuff about me is not my love nor my hate, not memory nor dream, not pain nor joy: is all of these and mysteriously more.... * * * * * I am a child in my mother’s arms, and I am grown and from my lips harsh words berate this passionate woman who is my mother and who has withdrawn from life, finding it in her pride too painful to be borne. I am a boy striding with awkward steps beside the magnificence of my father, and at school facing alone a crisis where he has failed to follow ... too selfish, too dry to share in my emotion. Thoughts in serried troops invest my mind, and I live and sleep in a clamor of science, philosophy and dream. Fragments of verse tinkle in the stream of studious hours: bones of dissected bodies and sprays of Spring float together down my youthful way. I am a lover, bringing to the bed of my beloved nosegays of books and notes. Words rise like birds from the margin of my mind, and blacken the sky and scream and sink again, suddenly become the stones of an exploded city crashing to the ground. Here is a bower redolent of dusk: my hands clasp the waist of a girl and touch her breast. And in the limpid shadow of the trees, there is a grave and I must enter it, and study bones: and count the countless cells that a girl’s breast has moved to ecstasy within me. I sit with a story book in the old house and watch my father rustle the evening paper while my mother plays languorous music at the piano. My own hand rises menacing from my little body: grows: grows immense: crushes father and mother: shatters the walls of our house. I walk upon a field that glitters underneath a scarlet sky. Sudden my beloved parents and the field and all the things of earth, and all the things that live, lift into sound! The Universe was music! Pulsant, polyphonous and vast, it slept like the western plain, it rose like the mountains, it tided like the sea, it sang like the stars. My heart was music. Life swelled in myriad atoms, and every one a separate song, and all one voice, rounding, embodying me.... But once more there is time and I am moving within it. Once more there is this shut, expanding phase which men call life, and I am bounded by it. * * * * *