from 'Copy Book Entries' of Robert Duncan

Lately I've been really into reading journal/memoir/non-fiction works of poets. I've had a copy of Robert Duncan's "Copy Book Entries" (Meow Press, 1996), which I found at Gulf of Maine Books, back in 2009.

Here's a copy of an entry from the book "Copy Book Entries" (hahahaha)

Untitled - March/ April 1971 - Notebook 42

The art I work toward is not to find my own language but to find "my aim" in language--but this is not a privacy of speech but a commonality. Hannah Arendt's posing of the crisis of our society as being in the expropriation of private property at first was my assent. But if my true freedom lies in private property--in my owning my library (rather than my free access to any book), in my owning my house, my clothes, my life, then not only the State but fire, earthquakes, thieves--threaten my essential freedom. In every social condition present, it would seem that ownership of the circumstances offers freedom in their use: the owner of the house is free, and every state intrusion upon that freedom of his life within that house is a real tyranny--the expropriation of a life. But, as far as that same "owner" of "private" property understands his life and realm of being as belonging to a commonality, in so far as I imagine my properties as common properties, the volition arises toward a new context of the common good; and there is the release of powers from the sin that is, the powerlessness or bondage of a private occupancy.

This fits into so many things going on in my realm. First, the keyword occupancy and all that it now carries. And secondly, I'm reading a big mammajamma of a book called "Zen and the Art of Making a Living". I'm trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Anyway, the section I just read focused on how work, in the modern era, became a means to gain leisure time.  And that leisure time is translated into consumption of something as opposed to doing something that enriched our lives. All of this loses sight of important ideas, such as all of our time is valuable, and could and should be used to enrich our lives, whether doing work or not doing work. So, to extend, based on the ideas of this entry, if a commonality of-- as opposed to privacy of-- speech, along with private properties re-imagined as common properties and freedom not coming from the State or any Other but from itself as an idea, then there is a release from "the sin that is, the powerlessness or bondage of a private occupancy."