January 23, 2015

Winter rain.

Dream that I had discovered some descendants of Caesar, and was trying to be their agent, thinking they must have great potential for leadership. Others were trying to kill them and so we kept having to escape in a subway train without side panels. One woman in particular, who always dressed in purple, seemed to possess great potential, as a spy or as an opera singer.

Woke in the middle of this because Circe clawed my arm; I startled her somehow and she was curled against me and launched away in a panic, back claws slashing. I heard myself, half-asleep, bellowing in rage and sadness. I’d seldom felt such betrayal. Remembered it when the scratch stung again in the shower.

Discussion of “The Rape of the Lock.” I was presenting it as a mock-heroic deflating the pettiness of the leisure class, when one serious young woman raised her hand and said she hated Pope and the poem because Belinda had been objectified and violated and nobody was taking her outrage seriously. I’d never considered such a reading, and now that I have, I don’t know what response to give. How to say, “You’re exactly the sort of person that this poem ridicules”? I can’t say that, partially because I don’t think my student is wrong, exactly; rather that she illustrates the urge to make a moment judgmental and tragic, whereas Pope illustrates the urge to make it forgiving and comic, and individuals who lie at the extremes of that division will probably never understand one another. I don’t know what to say to a person who insists that everyone regard her emotions with the same sanctity and tone as she does herself. How can you insist that one laugh at–or even tolerate laughter at-- what she holds sacred? I have never been good at accepting “because that’s the way I feel” as justification for an action or a viewpoint. I have certainly never used, “because that’s the way I feel” in an argument. I would laugh myself out of the room. But is this a male or an Ohio or a personal prejudice? It does keep things from hanging up on un-investigated, too-sacred-to-discuss  personal convictions every two seconds.

Feeling better every day. Two nights now without medication.