The Confession to End All Confessions

A while back I started reading “On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World,” which seems to be about four different things at once. I originally picked it up because I thought it was about writers and their insomnia, then was swayed to buy it due to the blurb on the back cover:

“In these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers – Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath – have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography? Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furtherest, hallucinatory reaches of the mind.”

Totally up my alley, eh? Hard to pass up. I\’ve therefore been spending my time pondering Plath, Sexton, Rossetti, and Adrienne Rich, and their individual relationships to shame. Shame and writing. Shame and exposure. Shame and self exposure, and shame and public humiliation.

I can\’t tell you what I\’ve learned because I haven\’t learned anything new. More fodder for old fires, yes, but no new sparks.

I\’ve never read anything by Plath or her other female contemporaries. Fear. From an early start my style of writing was compared to her self-depreciation. My arguments for not reading those classics of feminist literature are those: I cannot be accused of imitating what I haven\’t read, nor will I start to imitate out of exposure. A comment once made to me, that perhaps my writing would be appreciated as my Plath\’s was – only posthumously – set in me the staunch resolution to never have that be the case with me. If I die an untimely death, promise me – my friends – that you will hack my computers and destroy the evidence of the years of work. Nothing is to be printed or left to remain on the web for the dead. Please promise me that. I want no virtual memorials

The pills have started to kick in and I have already gone off in an entirely different direction that the one I had initially decided to undertake. It is hard, however, to take any direction, when your bed becomes a water bed and your laptop is made of rubber.

The words are floating in 3D and my computer seems like it is my nicest little fried iwith its tale waggig behing the USB plug. S now we\’re all going to go reliv trh 70d=s which most of ius never had, THEE 70sa, Partys. Fun. I got the drinkd the drug, the mudivv, snf yjod tpp,od big enouh to mske ud fly. No on here want t o plsy, though, tired of being on my born with boredo=m
time to invent the new typical gil who just gets hersel;f