I thought this was a nice thing to say to the author of Hurley Gurley:

“…O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity…”

“Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats

_____________________

Ms Jones,

The fact we share a passion for Yeat's mystic poem
speaks very well of you in my book.

And, the origins of your brilliant poem:
"San Pantaleone Sees Anne Sexton On The Corniche" - prompted by
a Professor So-and-Sos' esoterically ridiculous lecture of 1990
- and your Health Professional admonitions to randy Arne - confirm my
suspicions that you grew up in the shadow of the Boomer Generation -
and you saw the contradictions between our actions and our deeds.
We insisted upon our Rights - and we generally overlooked the realm of
Responsibility to society that you're trying to emphasize to him.

Now, you remind me of a young woman from Stanford University whom
I met at an outdoor cafe in Mill Valley circa 1990. She abruptly
sat down opposite me and when I looked up from my book, she gladly
announced "this is one of the happiest days of my life" - as if we
were destined to meet that day and I'd know what to do with this news!

Well, anyway, I couldn't help but feel happy for her and raised my
glass of Iced Tea in a spontaneous toast - and then asked how all of
this auspiciousness came about. She said that she was a filmmaker and
that she'd just received a letter of acceptance for her film project
concept. Okay, now this remembrance may also pertain to you.

This woman whom I want to call "Amelia" because that was either her
name - or she reminded me of 'Amelia Earhart' flying out of the clear
blue sky and dived into my life for a Summer or so. Amelia said that
she'd written a contemporary story of "Persephone, the Greek daughter
of the Earth Mother, Demeter. She proceeded to tell me a story about
her mother and father who had met at a concert in Golden Gate Park in
1967 during the "Summer Of Love." Amelia said that she'd been raised
by her Hippie parents in Mill Valley, which had become 'yuppified' in
the '80s and was now in the hands of greedy Real Estate developers.

Like "Persephone," who had been kidnapped from the endless Summerland
that her mother Demeter had conjured up on Earth by "Hades" and taken
to live in his Hell, Amelia had met the son of a wealthy housing
contractor who had plied her with cocaine and a life of hedonism.
Amelia's parents had had to intercede for her and more or less rescue
her from the rich kid's pleasure pad - and had her hospitalized.

So, I was seeing her a year after all of the foregoing calamities -
and she was returning to Stanford on scholarship to make this
allegorical film imaginatively based on incidents in her life.

And, it occurred to me how much my generation had grown up in the
Summer of our society's cultural cycle - and that we weren't prepared
for the Fall and now the Winter of our society's discontent - and that
my contemporaries didn't really prepare their children like Amelia -
or possibly Randall (Layla) here for the Hades lurking underneath -
which Randall wonderfully invokes in her 1990 image
[of a Hurled Girl whirling upon a ferris wheel in Lunatic Park]

“Oh that divine itch!

The fuel of the fire, man
-the fractional distillation
-the rising to the top
-the sparkling rumination.

Oh that jet fuel!
How it makes us fly!

>

“Our Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park…”