I Am A Gazelle

To the Editors of The Crimson:

My thoughts, ordinarily ice, turn to water when I entertain political ideas (which do not entertain me). This is bad enough. But I frown when I must mingle with these unwelcome guests; words impressed into public roles are stained with brutality, lose their invisibilities, and are no longer parts of the actual brain. So I must divert attention from my innocent poem; but then I am hopelessly confused how to accomplish my other purpose.

In fact it was not appropriate that this matter reach the newspaper, but since it has I will explain what only I can explain. I enclosed a copy of a draft of "All Flesh" in a personal letter to Sara Binder, sent to her residence, not her office, for her personal attention. I can of course, in retrospect, understand that, as Poetry Editor of the Advocate, she plausibly (but mistakenly) assumed that I wished it considered for publication. This idea was unequivocally not in my mind at the time. My act was, as it were, a simple "professional gesture" to a good friend whose opinions I respect. At no time was there the slightest duplicity. Indeed, it is the suggestion of duplicity in the tenor of the Crimson article that compels me to respond, at great length, with considerable inconvenience and personal agitation, to what should at most be a minor sub-editorial matter. Obviously my poem, which resides in a sphere surrounded by silence, has been, willy-nilly, invested with political meaning, and my connection to the poem has imposed a legalistic, heteronomous context on a series of my previously unrelated, pure, free acts.

I am acutely conscious with each sentence that I write that I am, with each sentence that I write, providing ever stronger grounds for the assumption that the context in which the article was written is valid. It is not valid. I was never told that "All Flesh" had been "accepted" by the Advocate. Hence I can hardly be labelled "irresponsible" for not telling them it had been accepted by Padan Aram. Och, I did not invite the rivetters in. I am reminded of Richard Nixon's political technique of discrediting opponents by, e.g., asking them to wriggle their way out of implication in the "parking-meter scandal": the more elaborate the proofs offered, the more skeptically are they received, and the more real the fictitious scandal grows.

In the end, of course, I can only stand upon my rectitude as a writer, generally and firmly established may I hope, to reverse this misunderstanding as a public fact. I am simply not the sort of person who does things like this. Anyone who knows me knows that. Oh, I like a good joke, but I do not attempt to cause people considerable inconvenience or, worse, insulting bewilderment. Therefore, although I have done nothing, I apologize to everyone who thought otherwise.

It is essential that I add, as an apophasis that is not an apophasis, the explicit affabulation underlying what I wrote above. It would be nice if both the Advocate and Padam Aram could reduce their heretofore amusing, henceforth sinister rivalries, and pay more attention to the idiocies of writing poems, less to the idiocies of publishing them. In any case, I am a gazelle. Jeffrey Gustavson '76