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SEVENTEEN.
I remain on dead center. Becalmed, static, anchored. No, that’s a lie, or if not a lie then at the very least a benign misstatement, a faulty cluster of metaphors. I am ebbing. Ebbing all the time. My tide is going out. I am revealed as a bare rocky shore, iron-hard, with trailing streamers of dirty brown seaweed dangling toward the absenting surf. Green crab scuttling about. Yes, I ebb, which is to say I diminish, I attenuate. Do you know, I feel quite calm about it now? Of course my moods fluctuate but
I feel
Quite calm
About it now.
This is the third year since first I began to recede from myself. I think it started in the spring of 1974. Up till then it worked faultlessly, I mean the power, always there when I had occasion to call upon it, always dependable, doing all its customary tricks, serving me in all my dirty needs; and then without warning, without reason, it began dying. Little failures of input. Tiny episodes of psychic impotence. I associate these events with early spring, blackened wisps of late snow still clinging to the streets, and it could not have been ’75 nor was it ’73, which leads me to place the onset of outgo in the intermediate year. I would be snug and smug inside someone’s head, sca
Yes. Of course. And be our pains three parts joy, he might have added. Such joy this morning. And it’s all fleeing from me, all ebbing. Going out of me from every pore.
Silence is coming over me. I will speak to no one after it’s gone. And no one will speak to me.
I stand here over the bowl patiently pissing my power away. Naturally I feel some sorrow over what’s happening, I feel regret, I feel — why crap around? — I feel anger and, frustration, and despair, but also, strangely, I feel shame. My cheeks burn, my eyes will not meet other eyes, I can hardly face my fellow mortals for the shame of it, as if something precious has been entrusted to me and I have failed in my trusteeship. I must say to the world, I’ve wasted my assets, I’ve squandered my patrimony, I’ve let it slip away, going, going, I’m a bankrupt now, a bankrupt. Perhaps this is a family trait, this embarrassment when disaster comes. We Seligs like to tell the world we are orderly people, captains of our souls, and when something external downs us we are abashed. I remember when my parents briefly owned a car, a dark-green 1948 Chevrolet purchased at some absurdly low price in 1950, and we were driving somewhere deep in Queens, perhaps on our way to my grandmother’s grave, the a