Sodom and Gomorrah

Charm is something definitively absent, which also seems to be the case for Henry Miller. Looking at this glum old fellow in the Wiki photo makes The Tropic of Cancer a bit difficult to square. The closest I can enter into the charm of Proust's voice that so soothes me, is the small ceramic Madonna grandmother Pauline gave me when my pelvic ligaments were being butchered in my first year as an adolescent, and a nervous British nurse broke the statuette. I never forgave her for that, ever. It is a cue I can recall as clear as day. I am busy writing a letter to a paying editor on my 1987 Smith Corona PWP6. Much like Sean Connery doing Salinger, I like returning to electric word processors now and again, but charm, joy, love? These feelings were never mine to truly experience. I wrote earlier in the year that perhaps I was in love with Jerry's memory, and suggested, then, that this was a pathway to defeat. I quarrel even with my own outreach for sentiment, however, because I do not know what this means.

I do know that nakedness strips off veneer, that sexual contact is a vulnerable exchange, even in the most romantic circumstances, and that was never mine either, not even the so so exposures to married male impotence. Swann's Way is my only hard copy edition of Proust in translation, and it is Marcel's segue way into the girl with her masochistic tendencies for the reward of a kiss that I am thinking of, whether it is in the Sodom & Gomorrah section, or before. I pulled the text out of my shelf, always fond of the vinyl feel. It would not be remiss to review and refresh as I journey slowly through Budding Grove, for I do understand abasement, unfortunately, as a tool to gain a sought reward. Not to be another woman's lover, however, so much as to feel necessary. Is it even conceivable that I can still meet a good man without a lesbian like Josie Byzek to do her unfathomable damage to my anticipation of desire? Do I still have the ability to derive pleasure from desire? Shakespeare had his own somewhat subversive take about passion, and we do not need scholars to remind us about Othello, or that Romeo and Juliet were victims of "a smoke raised with the fume of sighs". I go to lie down awhile, fearing my stability is loosening, my lone submission finished, of which there used to be so many more.