Within a matter of days, really, I will lose all facsimile of personal security, my only intimacies, those with a monster pig of a man from the Bronx whom I rejected, and with a transsexual I've come to hate with such glittering abandon that there must be more to it, as of course there is. I believed the transsexual's advocacy was once just, however diffident my revulsion of his androgyny. In a Shakespearean comedy, the androgyny is a linguistic tension toward liberation, but in the flesh, despite cellular indifference to personal values, the concrete reality of androgyny is something else, leading for the desire of better disposal of bipedal forms with their own hideousness, affirming in my memory that I probably did finish Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues under the tutelage of Professor Jerry McGuire, and finished it this early Monday once again, annoyed, past the Post-Moderns.
As different as Pynchon and Gardner are, John more driven toward an intrinsic moral veracity, the fireworks in either man's opus fall like tinder in the present era. Gardner couldn't have lived to see the Muslim intransigence he eerily predicted in the mouth of Taggert Hodge's wounded ravings sustained for over 600 pages of human failings. No one, not even Franzen, writes the kind of novel today which Gardner could afford to write as the 20th century would lurch into 9/11 and a black presidency whose initial ebullience invariably gave way to a sense of lack, and all I have as a disabled woman who hasn't achieved much of anything except warfare with statutory demands, is desperation for a different environment which my economic status denies. I speak of hatreds as a kind of shorthand, making it worse than it is, at the bottom, an overwhelming, now self-damning and potentially destructive desire for change, and yet at the end of the day, I am a cripple, basically inert, gainsaid for years by minority abuse, minority insistence, and white indifference, that indifference now capped by family mortality, and an inability to offer support, with an ulcer possibly gnawing my stomach, touch of blood seeping out of my eye, I do actually fear I could get Ebola if I am forced to deal with more African American paraprofessionals, but assume the touch of blood in my watering eye bulb is capillary irritation.
I do not give two shits about my apartment manager Trudy Richardson and her swamp thing from Mississippi Debra Horne. The hate I speak of comes from the psychological toll their constraint places on the most vulnerable and most powerless, and yet this is all Pennsylvania shoves down my throat my entire life, vocational rehabilitation and 500 different black women to keep up the laundry pile, and I thought, in most of my aspirations, that a literary life would offer a kind of triumph, much as Lindsay Lohan makes a cheap bid to toy with her media reputation in the 2007 I Know Who Killed Me. Gaming her audience. Cuttings as an outcry. Prosthetics as a kind of exploit. Stained glass as a more metaphysical threat than a chain saw, tooling religious histrionics. If Gardner wasn't an optimist, Lohan's abrasive edges and dialogue by the numbers certainly evinces the brittleness of the American psyche, white feminine anger for freedom, disarticulated over sexual flaunting, preying on our deepest fears, being clipped by inexorable pressures to succeed instead of getting high or opting out, womanhood itself always hobbled, inextricably damaged.
Erik, in some of the last words we'll ever speak to each other, in lieu of snapping his neck like a twig, asked me who I was to judge him? My answer to you about that is: an honest woman who doesn't destroy the careers of others for the accrual of power. I may sound like a forceful activist in denial, but right there is why I am not. Leaders in the disability movement, want control of the reigns for themselves, until forced to cede to fresher players.
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