From #612, by Emily Dickinson

It would have starved a Gnat --
To live so small as I --
And yet I was a living Child --
With Food's necessity

***
The gnat starved.
The formal feeling came.

***
Feeling encased in sticky gummy spider webbing. I'm not dead. I feel paralyzed. I think of Tony Judt struggling with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), the slow, inexorable corporeal entombment. On Charlie Rose, in his last interview before he died Judt stated that he had found solace in a line of poetry of Emily Dickinson -- "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" -- that spoke to him as a piece of crucial, credible guidance in the face of his catastrophic illness. His body immobilized but mind as ever vividly intact, aided by her gently assuring words that at once acknowledged suffering and promised release, Judt in time came to accept that the only available way for him to tolerably live would be to resolutely be of mind, to dwell within it, to in some sense purposefully transcend the betraying body.

It feels a little improper to make this analogy (I don't wish to sound either presumptuous or self-dramatizing) but in thinking of Mr. Judt and what he endured, these days I've been feeling as though - metaphorically speaking - I have emotional ALS. That is, I feel pricked, straitjacketed, frozen - after the great pain. That's the "formal feeling" I feel - as though vaulted tomb doors have swung closed on me with an echoing thud followed by silence. The great pain, or any more of it, is intolerable. Something shuts down.

I leave. Part of me steps away.

***

He toyed with me for a long time, which I willingly tolerated. I took comfort in his regular page hits (near-daily when he was home and even when he wasn't) and the delusion that he cared about me helped me through the days. Last week in Brooklyn, alone and feeling lonely, and missing his page hits which seemed sporadic that week, in a moment of weakness I emailed him asking for a bit of news and saying that I could use a hug and a kiss. He responded in his nowadays brief and utterly bland fashion, stating that he'd been out of town, here this day, there that, as one might note in a ledger, and that he had checked in on my blog. No hug or kiss, and as usual - since he long ago stopped writing effusive love letters to me - so free of meaningful content (e.g., impressions, anecdote) that what few of his short, dutiful, empty messages there have been in many months have represented a near-total news blackout of his life.

The answer felt so impersonal and inadequate that I replied to express my annoyance, calling him out on the perfunctory nature of his messages. Without a word he instantly dismissed me. I haven't heard from him since.

Petty and vain, it seems to me, considering our long history, and after so many months of his regularly lighting on my blog, about which incidentally he has never said a single word. Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? He's a published author - I'm certain that affirmations of various kinds are vital to him - oxygen for any writer. I could have used an occasional (or just one) warm word about my blog - especially from him.

It's been painful, his summarily cutting me off like that - but there's a sensible part of me (the part that steps away) that is not sorry it happened. It's a reckoning. I've gotten a good glimpse behind the mirror.

At the same time I take a look at myself. Of course I deserve better.

I thought about discontinuing my blog, maybe starting another, but that seemed awkward and why cede it anyway, and most especially because I am very grateful for my steady readers - I don't wish to lose you.

I refuse to succumb to that horrible formal feeling of numb paralysis. This gnat is wresting out of the spider's hardened embalming fluid and breaking herself free.

So all that said, and towards that end: Good Morning Darlings - and pusillanimous bastard.

***
#341, by Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --