WEBVTT

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Lately I've been a little
nostalgic for earlier periods

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of my life.

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And-- but-- and but--

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I'm not certain about sex.

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The sense that one has
of sex at 15 or 16,

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when I think there may
be two minutes in a year

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when it's not on
your mind, you know?

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And it's really true.

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I mean, I was completely
obsessed with it.

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And I went through a
period where I thought

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everything, everything--

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pig iron had a lot to do
with special sexual actions

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that I didn't yet understand.

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I suspected this.

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And I was talking on the
way over with a friend.

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And she was saying, is it true
that people, as they get older

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you know, get conservative?

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And I thought, yes,
that's definitely true.

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But I believe it
was Montesquieu.

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He's got an essay on repentance.

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And he talks about how
people my age suddenly

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tend to become moral,
as though we have made

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wise decisions at that point.

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And he said, if you're going to
repent, repent when you're 17.

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It'll mean something.

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Otherwise, don't bother.

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So, "Sex."

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It was when I read
Lawrence that I first

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saw the world as a prime
lushness, an opening

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not to be refused.

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Wonderful hairs, wonderful
mysterious equations,

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each hedge dripping,
each clock breathlessly

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ticking in the heat
of that transcendent,

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pollinating clarity.

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Not a rock or tree that
was not suffused with it.

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Every bug-ratty spider
web a doppelganger

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for the flimsy, verbal
chiffon that revealed it.

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Each sermon, each
lecture, a wire

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that carried it to
where I lay studying it,

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if I studied anything more
resonant than the tiles

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on the ceiling.

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For, even as I smudged
real numbers on a grid

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or traced vectors to a
nexus of force and speed,

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my mind kept struggling
manfully to represent

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its infinitely compelling
budding and lubricity.

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And one morning,
Professor Nielsen

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said, with regard to
my heroic inability

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to accept what was
given, try to imagine

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a circle whose circumference
is inside a proton

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and whose center is everywhere.

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I have thought of it long
as a figure for desire,

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a patent for the ridiculous.

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One of the paradoxes,
the need for grace

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conjures up from
lassitude and greed

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like a logical boulder
or a Latin-speaking frog.

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Often it takes the form
of a vulva or a nipple,

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when it is not moonlighting
with a physicist as a black hole

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in one of those
Baroque cosmologies

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that leads us, like a big
head, through blinding insights

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until we end up bodiless
in a mathematical field.

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But as the boy I
was grows distant,

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he seems not me but some
antiquated piece of fiction,

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expurgated from the years
and quoted by testosterone.

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Beef and ambition,
fluttering under damp sheets,

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he hums his soulful ditty
to the sixth dimension.

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And for a while, the
god in his britches

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brings him the ambiguous
miscellanies and et ceteras

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of pleasure, like
bisque that comes

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on a flounder-shaped platter
at La Lastra in Puebla,

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a deep and pungent gruel,
alive in black olives,

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the crab leg indistinguishable
from the eye of the octopus.

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And all of it compounded
in many spices,

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like those prayers of penitence
the young Baptists weep

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onto the altar cloth,
less because they

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are admissions of guilt
than because they are

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truly elegies for promiscuity.

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Wonderful hairs, wonderful
mysterious equations.

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I could confess too,
now as my early lust

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began ossifying into greed.

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I could counsel abstinence.

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I know the sorry old man
is sorry for something.

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One night, a woman came to
me, not as a tree or a rock,

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but in the one fire
of her true life.

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What's that got to
do with anything

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naked in the naked
faces of children?

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This afternoon, I'm barely
aware of the young women,

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as they jog over the
bridge into Thompson Woods.

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But someone must stand
very still in the shadows,

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listening to the gusts that
come just behind them, as

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though the veil of matter had
been ripped all the way back

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to the light of the beginning.

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I hear it too, fainter and
fainter, then darkness comes.

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Why should I praise the
exemplary life possible only

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in age or failing health?

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All that I love was founded on
the same premises as heaven,

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that pleasure lasts
longer than death.

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[APPLAUSE]

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