I think I have an illness. It's called, if I'm not mistaken, nostalgia. You know that nostalgia originally attributed to the Swiss merchants who sold their goods on the French plains? In a lesser form, this disease is the overly mercantile glamor of the golden age transferred from the brilliant future of the idealists to the glittering past of the cynics – that is, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub Regno Cynarae. The idea that the Golden Age is somewhere distant from the now is as dangerous as the desire for philosophically abstract perfection. Plato's theory of forms, for example, holds that there is an abstraction called "form" that is the true reality. It's unattainable and unknowable, but it's there. We cannot approach this flaming world of perfect forms and create only mere imitations. When I hear this argument about the perfect abstract world, I often wonder what person can conceive of the perfect form. I try to reject the idea, internally arguing that there is no way to conceive of this perfect form, that this golden double of this world does not exist. In the most honesty I can imagine, the whole Theory of Forms topic confuses and angers me. I have written this paragraph several times in an attempt to explain my disdain; I still feel like my explanation is weak at best. But, despite my emotional rejection of the idea of ​​this world's golden double, I find myself stricken with that disease: nostalgia. My daydreams and ghosts take on the hazy quality of a Norman Rockwell poster, and too often I find myself contemplating a Levittown of longing, or a Puritan country house where you can barely see and barely hear between passages winding and dinners carefully illuminated by lights. Dutch masters. The poem... in the center of the paper... this now. And it's not that bad of a motivating force, if we use it to change towards the ideal. What ideal? The question comes to me now like the teasing questions in William's "The Portrait of a Lady." "The sky where Watteau hung a lady's slipper." The golden paintings of heaven come again and torment me with Nostalgia! The disease! The theory of forms. Who decides how the world will improve? The answer used to come quick, quick, strong and sure: I could decide. But now my refrain becomes, as if I were waiting for a crack in the ground to open, a test of water scio me nihil scire. This brings me into the white, like Daffy Duck lashing out at his creator-god in “Duck Amuck,” a void of vision. But most of my mind pushes me to think "here's the paper to draw on, here's a non-idealized possibility." So I take the blank sheet of paper and draw.