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AT WHAT COST: PART ONE
What does a writer do when he is in psychological pain, devastating hurt? Agony is the better name, and suffering is its coverlet. He makes up a song for himself, an air to play over and over again until the pain is extinguished and he is soothed. It is a fabricated ritual to slake the immediacy of the anguish. By telling himself about himself there is a measure of the repetition in all that and this very repetition can alleviate the outrageous hurt, the attack upon the self. In this expression I just want to cut through and get to core truths, reflections, or generalizations…
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PLATO’S CAVE, from my memoir
PLATO’S CAVE In March of 1968 I was sitting in my apartment on Ash Avenue watching a black-and-white TV when President Lyndon Johnson spoke to the American people. I recall vaguely his reiterating that he would not accept a nomination to run for president again and repeated that he would step down at the end of his present term. The police riot at the Chicago Democratic convention was months away. Since I was self-absorbed in the disastrous relationship with my estranged wife and with the ongoing passion of an affair with a married woman, Marlene, I had no…
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FROM A NEW MEMOIR: “Naomi”
ON NAOMI I’m Naomi and this part will be mine as Matt is uncomfortable with it after all these decades because what he did was to blame the victim: me. When I met him I was 24 and in a loose relationship with a pharmacist in Queens. I was gorgeous, no doubt about it. I slithered into pants as I did not have much of an ass, and I had a small chest, but I was wide in the beam and had a stunning face, or so I heard from many men at the time. How can…
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A CHAPTER FROM A NEW MEMOIR IN THE MAKING
AN ABUNDANCE OF AWARENESS When I consider the amount of time I have lived and the abundance of memories I have accrued, I think of all that history that will vanish when I disappear. Which is the greater loss, the absence of me or the absence of all I have experienced? I vote against me. I choose for office the history I have made. I cannot capture Woodstock in words. ( I cannot describe in words the last strong feeling I had.) I can only glimpse the times in Woodstock indirectly, through a glass darkly. Whatever awareness I…