Dear Letters to the Editor:
“A man’s life is a series of trials that women often figure in,” Hot Type columnist Michael Miner notes, musing on the O.J. Simpson case, and on the amorous wreckage of his own past, after the Kyprian’s gaze had fallen upon him, and led a much younger incarnation to wander off of his life’s path. (“When a Man Slugs a Woman,” June 24. With apologies to Sappho, of course.)
“We recall sitting cross-legged in a park at dawn, chewing the grass while reading Thoreau and desperately trying to make ourself worthy,” Miner continued. “Our anguish then was a hair’s width from fury. Who was she to change her mind about how worthy we’d been in the first place?”
Yes indeed. Who was she?
For my part, I can still recall the terrible beauty, an artist, no less, who once told me that she wanted to “destroy” herself–a la Arthur Rimbaud’s “disorder of all the senses,” was my hope. “I came to regard the disorder of my mind as sacred,” the seer explained. But when last I ever heard of her, several light-years ago, this artist’s search of herself for all the forms of love, suffering, and madness, known or unknown, had led her straight to the altar and, who knows–maybe even a suburban home with the requisite little ones, folding chairs, and an outdoor jacuzzi.
Tempus est ut pretermictantur simulacra nostra, as Love was to mock the young and foolish Dante, who had retired to his bedroom to lament where nobody would be able to overhear him.
Get real, pal, Love’s advice to Dante loosely translates into the modern vernacular.
Incipit nausea.
David Peterson
Evergreen Park