At home on the porch
To kill time I read Bookslut's interview with Camille Paglia:
. . . the way I was trained to read literature by Milton Kessler, who was a student of Theodore Roethke, he believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature. And, oh, did I believe in that! Probably from my Italian background — that’s the way we respond to things, with our body. From Michelangelo, Bernini, there’s this whole florid physicality leading right down to the Grand Opera.
Which reminded me of Counterpleasures again, which quotes Susan Farr's "Art of Discipline:
Thoughts are censored; some things are simply unthinkable. But a body that is freed to do whatever feels right will do the undoable.
Indifference to death is an "unthinkable thought." It cannot be believed, only performed. But, if Eric Cohen and Yuval Levin at The New Atlantis are to be believed, it must be performed:
. . . if the fight against disease writ large — indeed the fight against natural death — is an emergency, and if . . . it is a struggle we can never expect fully to win, then we must always live in a state of emergency. We should be always in a crisis mode, always pulling out all stops, always suspending the rules for the sake of a critical goal. And that means, in effect, that there should be no stops and no rules; only crisis management and triage. . .
The trouble is that in this war against disease and death, we risk undermining the ideals we profess to hold most dear. . .
After reading "In Whose Image Shall We Die?" I tried thinking of ways I might perform an acceptance of my own mortality. If I were a man I suppose I could join a Fight Club, or join the military. Not having access to either of these, I took up cigarettes.
And as performative thanatos, smoking works very well.
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