A Plea for Eros

short, hard to do what I had to do. But the worst was that as time wore on, I became more and more afraid of myself, or perhaps more conscious of the fear I have always had—a fear that within me is some danger I can’t name.
    I slowly emerged from the headache and threw myself even more forcefully into my studies the following year. I became obsessed with Russian intellectual history—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was so vivid, so crazed, so horribly sad in the end that I filled myself up with it. I continued to eat books like a starved person. I rejected Jung but was dreaming for Freud every night, making dreams the master would have liked: a twenty-year-old woman going through transference with a dead man. I wrote more poems, composing slowly and carefully—sonnets. I wrote a lot of sonnets.
    It would happen again in 1982. A stupendous headache would arrive after I had fallen in love, after many months of ecstatic feeling had reached an aching zenith when I married the man I wanted. The attack began on our honeymoon in Paris with a seizure, one that to my utter astonishment threw me against a wall in the Galerie Maeght and then ended as quickly as it had begun. Half an hour later, I was walking in the street with my husband and my vision suddenly sharpened, as if every building, object, person, and color had been refocused through a powerful camera lens, and then I heard those words in my head,
I
have never been so happy in my life as I am now.
I was ill for a whole year. Near the end of that period, I landed in the neurology ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. A listless, prone body that had been ground to a halt by the drug Thorazine, I lay in bed plagued by guilt, busily interpreting my sickness. Had I just imagined I was happy? If I didn’t want to be married, why did it seem that I had wanted it so much? I was an enigma to myself, a burden on my new husband, and insane to boot. I have forgiven myself since then. I recognize that migraine can be triggered by any kind of high emotion, be it joy or fear or grief. I am resigned to myself as a jangling, spasmodic, fluttering body that must work to find calm, peace, and rest.
    Sometime during my first week in New York City, the week I started graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1978, I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger. I had left my parents only days before, and when I said good-bye to them at the airport I had felt unexpected tears rise in the corners of my eyes. It seems to me now that in my mirror image I saw a confirmation of my sudden and radical autonomy, a recognition that a cut from home had been made, and I had survived it whole.
    I embraced my solitude. I had left everyone I had known and knew nobody in the city. It wasn’t long before I cut all ties to the boyfriend I had left in Minnesota as well. I threw him off with the town and my childhood, and I did it abruptly. I still feel bad about it, not because it was a mistake but because in some frightened corner of myself I had known that I would never return to him or include him in my future and had hidden that truth from myself. Years later, I was at a dinner party in New York during which the host loudly declared his undying love for his wife. Two weeks later, he left her for another woman. I am as convinced that his declaration was sincere as I am that he was a cipher to himself.
    That fall, I walked into another world. New York City struck me as more brilliant and more alive than anywhere else on earth. My body hummed with the city’s speed, verve, and humor. I acquired the urbanite’s sixth sense, the ability to detect the vague scent of danger in the streets and stiffen oneself against it. I wore out my shoes walking, and as I walked I rejoiced in the city’s massive ugliness, its mysterious ruined blocks, its gorgeous pockets of wealth, its markets, its crowds, its colors. Columbia is in and of the city, and I can’t separate one from the other during those years. Both the city and the school were part of a crazy new rhythm of things, a repetitive beat of excitement and discovery. The graduate department in English where I had come to study teemed with critical