So I'm sitting here....

on the sofa bed that my inlaws sleep in when they are here and my son, home sick from school, s sleeping next to me. He's been sleeping on and off all morning and now into the afternoon, catching up on the sleep he missed last week before he went to his friend's house and also on the sleep he missed when he was there. And he has a fever, a small one, though I think it's getting worse, which means I will have to give him some medicine when he wakes up, but he has insisted that I sit next to him while he sleeps. This is one of his things lately, he doesn't want to be alone. He was telling me yesterday how he gets this "me feeling" when he's at school and even though he's among people, he feels completely alone, like there's no one else in the world but him--and he is articulating this at six years of age--and so we talked about how everyone feels that way sometimes. Then he said that he felt most alone when he was with more people and less alone when he was with fewer people, and I don't remember what I said to that or what the rest of the conversation was like, but as I write this and I think about what I've been reading all morning, the biography and poetry of the Chinese poet Huang Xiang, who lives here in exile, and about his experience in China, which was pretty horiffic, I am thinking about how we are all tested in different ways and at different times of our lives. He was tested and he emerged a writer whose work burns with a passion for life and for love and for justice. And I am thinking about what it takes for a writer to have access to language in a way that allows him or her to cut through bullshit--and I don't care what kind of poetry or prose the person writes. There is something in a writer that allows him or her, gives him or her, access to language, something in the mind, a habit of mind, a way of seeing, a kind of courage and fearlessness, or at least a willing to be afraid, to live openly with fear and not to hide from it, and maybe that's what feaelessness really is. Anyway, my son is now awake, and what I was thinking is that maybe this "me feeling" he talks about is a kind of test for him, and I wonder what it will mean for him to come out on the other side of it.