* Blind to See----------------- The Endarkenment

The Stars are Brightly Shining

We are blind to the significance of Yale  Professor Samuel See’s mysterious death in a New Haven jail.  The real significance is not a matter of personal or professional irresponsibility on the part of anyone. 

It is the despair of idealism soured. 

Mr. See was a young Ivy League scholar on the cutting edge of change: Generational ascendancy; sexual liberation; gay marriage, and queer literary theory.

To look too long at our imaginings of his lifeless form in the New Haven Police Department cell is to stare at the new world gone awry; the best and the brightest, living the life of the mind and the life of the body,  careens off the yellow brick road and never gets to find out what Dorothy learned in the magical land of Oz:  that if you can’t find happiness in your own back yard, you can’t find it anywhere.

No, we want to maintain the fantasy that our new world of liberation and revolution is the Emerald City come real, the El Dorado at the end of the rainbow, planted by the Flower Children fifty years ago, and now blossoming  under the aging gaze of those geezer avatars of the Age of Aquarius: a utopia of genderless equality, of neutered dominations.

Professor See’s lifeless hand points instead  to the same choking noose of emotions which has plagued the human heart from Helen of Troy to Oscar Wilde------------------Pride. 

We are blind to the meaning of this lost Yale professor’s secular comet come to naught.

We must instead turn away to other matters lest we see a reality we have preferred to deny with each accumulating era these 2000 years: 
                an emblazoned sky, empty; 
                an enflamed star, cold.