by Eurydice (c) 1999

Upon Returning to Ithaca

     Once upon a time I liked drugs and rock, techno and every eccentric creature I met. I was attracted to 'Do It Yourself' thriftshop dressers, avant-garders, name-droppers, bad sex maniacs, obsessive night prowlers, anyone truly young. I have seen flushed clubgoers and trendy hoppers too easily become tomorrow's corporate office minions (a suit by any other name..), and I have been too often surprised by how much conformism hides in the neoterisms of the fashionable ones, in their insensate mating games, their ephemeral competition. I have loved show and derided substance and kept my cool.
     Yes, I can't live without an abundance of beauty around, and in a city like New York the only outdoors beauty to be found is young human flesh. But all of a sudden mere beauty doesn't inebriate me. I hereby proclaim the unheralded unceremonious end of my love affair with the beautiful people?my abrupt and I could say ugly break-up with the clones of the urban night, Madison Ave, shows, parties, and events. I'd rather listen to Mozart's Requiem at breakfast, or lie on my couch and watch the stars. Last night, around 4am, a metaphysical drama was enacted in my presence: the full moon washed the scrawny, still elm trees on my street and the suddenly empty New York blended in hue and substance with the Hudson river as I drank Pellegrino and thought of de Chirico. Nights like this, I know I am a silver shadow, a breath of the world, a passing ray, like the shadows left on the walls by the people who were exterminated in Hiroshima or Dachau, and I live in my skin more palpably than I did when I worshipped the 'new'. Now 'new' is anything that ridicules my sense that I've seen it all. The night sky, the lit surface of moving water, the smell of anything growing, are always new. Now I suddenly know that the cliché is a handy revelatory metaphor, a recognizable face for a fathomless, ageold truth. I know I haven't seen anything yet.
     My generation grew up indifferent and bored, seduced by its own act of exhaustion, by artificiality of any kind, by narcissism under any name. We can produce information much faster than we can process it. We are drowning in choices and distractions, afloat in one big endless ad. We need hyberbole and histrionics to get attention and be visible to the world. We turn up the heat and so our numbness. We retreat to our special interests, our stress aches, our memory overload, our attention-deficits, our depressions, compulsions, differences, splinterings. We are tired already. Life is not tiring. Only disease, bad blood, fear, are tiring. The moment I shed the hide of style, like a seethrough dress, I understood the miracle that I am. I understood how vividly the blood runs and boils inside my arteries, how sexily the drip of serotonin electrifies my nerves, how fulfillingly surprising most things are.  I opened my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my mouth, my legs, my arms, and stood still and silent, waiting. And life rushed my way from all directions with inexorable savage beauty. It turns out I am terribly young, and a virgin, I am pious and overwhelmed and unashamed, and I will live to be 200.