Sheeba's Dirge

"I seek to root out the phallic mother from her real and imaginary place at the heart of what I call psychoanalytic modernism."-- Marcia Ian in her introduction.

I was fascinated by Milkman as a young girl, and yet, I have turned my back in defiance on the old guard of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker in my old age, and yes, it troubles me, especially as I accept the science of evolution. Our DNA is primarily African. We're all hermaphrodites modified from a basic female template, and embryos go awry, much as I did, but biological explanations are one thing. Social dynamics are another, and I am not predisposed to be optimistic about transhumanism or our future, merging ourselves to technology and robotics. Perhaps I demand too much of Toni Morrison, demand solutions of her that I absolve in Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison. I respect Ellison. Invisible Man is as yet an argument in my psyche, still wrestling in the ring, with little love lost, on my part, for African American contra indicators as Philadelphia and other venues have presented it. Certainly there is a difference between behavior and the equality of opportunity, but equality is a bad thing. It lies about strata. It lies about caste and it lies about difference, dependence, and fails to address what liberty and freedom are in a world burgeoned with a successful species that is toppling under its own weight. The stupidity of how we entertain ourselves, whored to impulse products and mediocrity of content, and by the same token, to dazzle with masterpieces, is at the same time disjunctive with routines, patterns we fall into, aging into risk adversity, sating appetite with culinary ambitions, intensity of erogenous sensation.

The deft cruelty of Baker's character in Prada toward Hathaway's Sachs is something no woman ever truly gets over. She moves on, wises up about sexual motives, but that deflating blow against superlative romantic inclination shows what can be done with a golden boy vanity in the right hands, despite the fact that Baker comes off as vapid and somewhat clueless when lending himself out for interviews, or doing banal move to DVD flicks like S&D 101. Nothing wrong with a light sexual comedy that makes fun of itself, but no idiot would mistake a sick old woman in the dark for a centerfold offering coitus for being a good front. The script and direction could have been slightly more integral, biting, at least sufficient to offer pause. Oversexed as we are, we shield ourselves from the consequences of aging, the inability of the medical model to do anything but contain the decline, offer props. Oxygen, catheters, face lifts. We break, yet epitomize the vanity of perfect chic and the convenience of style, with less fortunate in looks relegated to being lesbian office assistants.

Bill of Margins

We manufacture the affection of domesticated felines and canine companions, to a certain if not perfect extent, gelding them, to use Woolf's charming outlets with gerunds as opposed to participles, off the top of my head I believe I am not in error, though willing to be conditioned a goose of pedagogic density for its distraction; I know arrested development is a major hand in these nurturing attachments. After Joey's first block, I had hoped it was not chronic, and when the pet transporter dropped him off home, when I opened the carrier my pretty love leapt into my lap. "Did you see that Frank?" I asked. Oliver never did anything like that, nor any other cat I assisted to raise; he sat with me for hours, poor Joey, and I coaxed him to try to eat the urinary tract meat, what a mother that, heating it, hiding the medication. Over time I came to believe I had beaten it, believed that the first block was unique to the circumstance of his young adult meddle, because Dr. Andeer yanked my chain a little. "You love this cat," she exclaimed, every time I rushed him in over the least symptom of straining, and no, there was no block, no bladder crystals, just symptoms of spring allergies, but would it have been better to exhaust all my resources now, and when he was eight or nine or ten or twelve, have nothing left to then relieve him? I am watching the Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, slow to fulment myself into Shakespeare's vibrant sense with our youthful modern language, what is he assailing in this comedy? That love has no concrete identity? That virtue has no true reflection? I am stirring an ado, but the event of death has come, has passed, and shall it gladden anyone to know I had a civil discourse with my cousin, whose wife Adele I often imagined as a suitable confidante, even if the need for such a figure, or the desire to confide, is the weakness of my character that Anthony LaPaglia coolly dissects to Matt Craven. I am still not sure how I feel about Bulletproof Heart, not sure that Boyle's necessary quibble, a quibble needed to drive the story, hangs like a justified suit. It is without question that I would have thrived to be paid to mourn with ostentation, but whether I break down, hold it in, whether my vertigo is symptomatic of how hard I have swallowed losses, or the evil of institutional bigotry, losing this feline love is not a put on, I loved the animal, riding around with his remains in my canvas like Morrison's Pilate carried her ancestor's bones. I showed the memory print of Joey's paws to the Little One. "Here is your brother," I said, astonished at his caution. He did not swat, but hid under the bed until I shut off my tears, a consequence of such a marginalized frustration, that I do not know.