Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0903131046370.6543@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: "smile though your heart is aching"
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:46:57 -0400 (EDT)
"smile though your heart is aching" i realized i was beginning to die when my foot began hurting two years ago; i was teaching at brown university, walking across the pembroke campus, and suddenly was hobbling. second event, when we put our cat boojum down; she had been my companion for eighteen years, and azure's for almost ten. and third, when i noticed a flash in my left eye and went to the opthamologists, knowing something had gone wrong. nothing ends up reversible but early on, the body pains would have been part of a phenom- enology of healing, not disablement. now i'm on the slope towards death and want it like this, suicide when i can't work any longer, when i become a burden to azure. i live in the fear of death, watching my body drop out from under me. buddhism doesn't help in the long run and even lyotard had a fearful cry from the heart towards the very end. the world turns dark and second life is no cure, just diversion from failing senses, failing health. i'm preternaturally scared to the point of disability at times and i wonder why everyone isn't like this, how everyone else manages to get up in the morning and life seemingly goes on productively. i can't live in the morning; i live in fear of the curtain falling rapidly and violently, the curtain falling on nothing, nothing whatsoever. i woke up in tears again; http://www.alansondheim.org/ flubb pngs and find i can barely work through these.