Although I'm supposed to be working this weekend on the papers for a new degree program, and the woman I'm working with wants to know when we'll be finished, I'm having an avoidant day – not disastrous, there's a whole three-day weekend to figure out all this stuff.
I still feel a bit guilty and harried, though. In any case, I have been spending the day reading ghost stories by M. R. James – although it's true that I don't generally like horror stories, and detective fiction doesn't interest me much (it all seems too end-driven and therefore predictable), these stories are wonderful – the great original writer of ghost stories as entertainment, all gracious and old-fashioned in wording, intelligent in detail and imagination, and short (which is good, as I don't enjoy being tortured by the unhappiness or uncertainty of characters, at least not for more than a page or two).
This kind of imaginative world – ghosts, the dead, revenge, curses: I have occasionally, obliquely, wondered if the downward trends of my career and aspects of my personal life result from someone having, once, wished them on me. Although, as I have often admitted here and elsewhere, I can be irritable, severe, and make other people angry – as Susan once politely said: I don't suffer fools gladly – I have only rarely been the direct recipient of rage, malice, anger. There was the realization that the poisonous Amy, who had treated her greedy investment broker husband with such viciousness, had done her best to ruin my relationship with some of my teachers, in the late 1980s (she would certainly be imaginable as a witch, and one that would enjoy cursing people). Then there was that enraged five-page letter from Harvey, a tirade against my being gay, and his hysterical certainty that it was a blatant temptation of his heterosexuality (fortunately we later made friends again; it was so sad when he later died, and under such ridiculous circumstances – hit by a car while jogging, his mother told me – perhaps someone else cursed him).
There have, certainly, been others who decided I wasn't worth their time, or was annoying, or dislikable. But what is the chance that someone, some time, decided I had gotten in their way – or deeply offended them – and put a curse, not perhaps a very large one, on my life? Just the kind of malevolance that demands that things go wrong for someone: just a small if unpleasant spell, but one that is hard to shake, one that makes small and unpleasant things happen, endlessly.
And: how would you make such a thing go away?...
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