And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.
It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.
The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.
For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as the library might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.
Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience.
What would happen if we spoke the truth?
My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me........
Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.
In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly. Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had. It was not her fault. And it was therefore not my fault that I was unable...
Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?
My research was stimulating but solitary
My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesise so thorough and so convincing I saw no reason not to share it immediately.
Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishi...
But how could he admire Joyce’s lengthy, libidinal ‘yes’ so fervently and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life? I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renuncia...
The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.
Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother.There is a lack, a gap, a void.How's that?But in it's place, she has given me something else.Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable....
Whatever was going on between my parents, I suppose that my fantasy of self-sufficiency, my heavy investment in my own mind, is also a kind of narcissistic cathexis.