The keynote of The Phoenix and the Tortoise is not autistic guilt, but articulate responsibility.

The title poem is a long meditation on "what an essential person must do" in order to deserve the gift of consciousness…. First, one must try to get free of the illusions generated by fear and desire which the state manipulates in order to atomize community into an enslaved collectivity. This can be done by striving to identify and adjust to the abiding patterns, the interlocking rhythms that sustain and transform life without the authorization of the state…. Liberty or autonomy is not the end of responsibility, but rather its beginning.

The first responsibility, perhaps, is to love and to the celebration of love because, "We shall know no further enigma." (pp. 3-4)

The second responsibility is to remembrance and lament, not because of a morbid preoccupation with the past, but because what...