I acquired Merrill's A Different Person: A Memoir last August, began to read it then tucked it away on my shelf for future reference. Yesterday, determined to stay in bed and rest away an incipient cold, I plucked the book for something to keep my mind from going crazy. What a crazy inspiration!
I resumed reading the book today. It inspired me to rethink what I had recently concluded was a false love for words. How could I ever have thought I loved words? If I ever did, where the hell did it go? Merrill resurrected that sweet inebriation. How I've missed it. A gift sometimes becomes a slave's collar that keeps getting heavier until we tear it off our flesh that we can walk off the slave boat a free man again. But then sometimes we miss what we had so violently discarded. We'd extirpated a vital something in us; we'd reduced ourselves to becoming a stranger even to ourselves, treading water in an even more alien sea.
I found Merrill on Facebook. Nothing written there on the wall but I joined the 117 fans. I learned from Wikipedia that the poet had died in 1995. His memoirs were published a year earlier. They comprised the main text he must have written closer to the trip to Europe he undertook in 1950, and updates in italic from the "different person" he felt he'd become. The memoir may be the last thing he published while alive, a final statement on his sixty-nine years.
Among the fans of his faux Facebook account was a young man who blogged about the 142 books he'd read in 2009. Erudite, sensitive, intelligent, possessed of a way with words I used to think I too had, he added to the feeling that took over this otherwise dismal, drizzly day in Indiana. It's a day to ignite belief in resurrection and the afterlife. I have been bemoaning my sad estate while being obnoxiously ungrateful for my advantages. I can turn this ship around. I am not Merrill nor the unnamed prodigious young reader but I can do a bit more than what I thought I could.
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