Month: August 2003

I am very happy also with my animals in danger traveling toothcare kit from the Body Shop in Paris.

I would rather have my books on display in the Body Shop than MOMA.

Before all my friends start sending me emails to cheer me up: I am not sad. NOT sad.

Here’s something happy: orange. I am very happy with my new orange sandals. I even wore them into the house today, which is a no no.

If I think about crying I come to the conclusion that it’s an attention getting device. I mean it gets MY attention. Yesterday, for instance, I woke up and felt like crying before a thought even entered my head. No memory of what I’d dreamt, or of

what I’d been thinking before sleep, or of what I had to do that day. The skin on my face felt tight and the bones of my eyesocket throbbed with pain. And my vision was a little blurry. I think a few drops even rolled down my cheeks. Oh, I was VERY

pathetic.

My first thought was that my period was on the way. But then a slow pang of realization came over me, and I remembered.

I wonder why only some emotions are cathartic? According to Aristotle tears purge the soul of sadness and leave us refreshed. (This is from memory of long ago classes.) But why then can’t laughter purge the soul of frivolity and leave us attentive?

Do tears purge the soul? This makes me think of bulimia: pigging out on tragedy and then vomiting it all back out. Yuck. That’s a bad metaphor. Then what? We cry because our bodies want to help us out when we feel bad? Does this mean that the soul

feels better at the body’s expense?

I am having a lot of trouble with this concept of catharsis, of intensifying a feeling to be done with it.

Actually, that’s not true. I keep a very thick incense of history at all times, for atmosphere. Unfortunately, it covers up all the natural scents and makes it very hard to tell the men from the boys. I mean the boys from the dogs.

If I had to guess, I would say that Ben was a boy that day.

I think if I was a boy I would rather be a dog.

I think I missed my first impression. That happens a lot: too many people and no sense of history.

I just got off the phone with Ben Friedlander. I never realized before, but he sounds just like my cousin Sholom.

We met twenty years ago, and I’m trying to remember my first impression.

Interesting that Nick and Jean assumed that my “My Dilemma” poem with its constant refrain of “no one loves me” was necessarily a personal expression.

In fact it was a formal exercise, an experiment, in emotional manipulation! And it is wholly googled!

It’s not that I don’t sometimes feel that way, or that the occasion of composing (I can’t really say “writing”) the poem did not arise from an attempt to banish that feeling by subli-mocking it in what I thought was a rather amusing fashion. I simply did not mean it as an easy “expression.”

Hence the heading: is this poem emotional or formal. Point being, why, it’s both!!