Stupid White Man

Two hundred fifty years ago today, William Blake was born in London. Here is his poem about the city.

London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Like so many before and since, he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the youthful Harlot. I guess he had some mind-forg'd manacles of his own.

It's fine, everything is fine.

This evening I write from the rocky cliffs and murky bogs of premenstrual grumpiness. That long time friend of mine is calling me from the depths of my mind and telling me not to accept things as they are, no, life certainly is NOT good enough as it is. I remember telling you about it a few years ago - I wish I could remember now what you said. Here is a fantasto-historical re-enactment of our conversation:

L: So I'm going along every day and everything's fine, and then - BAM!- there's this voice in my head. She whispers seductively to me, she says, "Lenya, I know you better than the rest...GET OUT OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP NOW!!"

Z: I see...and how do you feel when you hear this voice?

L: Well, I feel like everything I thought was good enough suddenly isn't anymore, like I've made a horrible mistake and I'm trapped.

Z: Do you think you should get out of your relationship?

L: Well, I don't know...maybe because the Voice visits me around my period, it is actually my inner voice of wisdom, uncompromising in dignity and refusing to let me go astray - you know, my INSTINCTS.

Z: Len, baby, listen up and listen good. Your instincts are with you all the time. Yes, befriend this shrew if you must, but all of your other guiding voices are just as wise as her. What does the voice REALLY need? Does she need you to end your relationship or is it something ELSE, something entirely more important than that, something that has nothing, nothing at all, to do with anyone but YOU?

L: (sigh) Oh, Zoe, your wisdom speaks to me so directly that I feel as if its been with me all along, unacknowledged.

Z: You're beautiful, baby - remember that. I love you, kid.

Stay tuned for my psychoanalytic deconstruction of The Departed!

"I never wear this into East Hampton. This is my Revolutionary Attire."

Robert, my African dance teacher, does not celebrate Thanksgiving. "The music is my Thanksgiving," he says. My gentleman friend Siyavash does not celebrate Thanksgiving, either. "The math is my Thanksgiving," says he. Lenya, for one, is looking forward to cranberry sauce and delicata pie.

As I look out the window here in Bloomsburg, great, terrible flakes of snow are falling down from the sky. Its a sea of snow - I've dropped things, scarves and things, you know, out there and I know I'm never going to find them again. Its a beautiful sea today, but I know I'll go mad if I stay here in Bloomsburg. My darling friend Rosa Nilpferd came for a visit and we had just a terrible time. It was the most atrocious thing ever to happen in America.

Lately it occurs to me how lovely it would have been if, at the end of Return of the King, Frodo and Gandalf and Galadriel and Elrond had boarded their elven bark and sailed across Long Island Sound to Grey Gardens instead of Grey Havens. I would have been waiting for them with lembas bread and a can of liver pate.

At night, alone, she marries the bed.

Today is poet Sharon Olds' birthday, and last week would have been a birthday for Anne Sexton. She was a teenaged runaway turned suburban housewife who started writing poetry after a nervous breakdown.
I read her poem "In Celebration of My Uterus" as a high-school student and it inspired in me a great wave of essentialist solidarity with all women. It is a long poem, too long to include here, and too unified to segment, but I would like for you to read it. It is a beautiful poem. You can find it here.

Pictured above is not Anne Sexton nor Sharon Olds, but another artist. One whose poetry is shaved eyebrows and flag dances. She sees herself as a little girl. Edie Beale is like a mother to Lenya.

Expecto Patronum!

Well, I ended up in the emergency room last night because I had a UTI and my kidneys were throbbing with pain. Now I am on a long course of Ciprofloxacin, the powerful antibiotic often criticized by my friends and colleagues in the world of natural medicine for being like a bomb that wipes out all of the good intestinal and vaginal flora along with the "bad". Each time I get a UTI it progresses faster and faster.

Being sick is always so utterly shocking, because it makes me think about death. Last night, walking home from town, I thought about the people who died from e-coli in their spinach. What if I have some sort of antibiotic resistant infection, I thought, and it spreads into my bloodstream, and they put me on an IV but it doesn't work and my kidneys fail and I die? Well, Lenya, you'll just have to be at peace with the life you have lived. Don't ask for anything more. "When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to Lenya as it is - infinite." William Blake said that. Its good to reflect on death.

Yes, its good to reflect on death. I even had a dream last night in which Death came to me in the form of a person. He was skinny and blonde, quite polite and a pleasure to be around. I was given the task of showing him around Montreal. We went to the theater. Thank goodness for dreams.