"Visitors are warned not to feed the animals under the penalty of the law." Always their laws! Always their restrictions! Always their damnable shackles! Always this denial of the rights of the individual! For a moment I stood there with the peanut in my hand just simply too angry for anything! And then I cried out, quite loudly: "Curses upon organized society! I will break its laws! I will feed the animals!" Always in times of great crisis I see myself quite plainly as if I were some other person; poets often do, you know; and I could not help thinking of the pose of Ajax defying the lightning. "I WILL break the law!" I cried. "So there!" And with that I flung the peanut right into the cage with all my might, and ran away, laughing mockingly as I ran. I felt that I had crossed the Rubicon, and that night I sat down and wrote my revolutionary poem, "The Defiance." What the Cause needs is men with Vision to see and Courage to perform! This is the age of Virility! THE EXOTIC AND THE UNEMPLOYED WE'VE been taking up the Exotic this week in poetry and painting, you know, and all that sort of thing -- and its influence on our civilization. Really, it's wonderful -- simply WONDERFUL! Quite different from the Erotic, you know, and from the Esoteric, too -- though they'll all mixed up with it sometimes. Odd, isn't it, how all these new movements seem to be connected with one another? One of the chief differences between the Exotic in art and other things -- such as the Esoteric, for instance -- is that nearly everything Exotic seems to have crept into our art from abroad. Don't you think some of those foreign ideas are apt to be -- well, dangerous? That is, to the untrained mind? You can carry them too far, you know -- and if you do they work into your subconsciousness. One of the girls -- she belongs to the same Little Group of Advanced Thinkers that I do -- has been so taken with the Exotic that she wears orchids all the time and just simply CRAVES Chinese food. "My love," she said to me only yesterday, "I feel that I must have chop suey or I'll DIE! The Exotic has worked into her subliminal being, you know. She has an intense and passionate nature, and I'm sure I don't know what would become of her if it were not for the spiritual discipline she gets out of modern thought. Next week we're taking up Syndicalism -- it's frightfully interesting, they say, and awfully advanced. I suppose it's a new kind of philosophy or socialism, or maybe anarchy -- or something like that. [Most of these new things that come along nowadays ARE something like that, aren't they. I'm sure the world owes a debt to its advanced thinking which it can never repay for always keeping abreast of topics like that. Not that I've lost my interest in any of the older forms of sociology, you know, just because I am keeping up with the newer phases of it.