To Catch Them

Joan Didion wrote in one of her best essays that "writing has not yet helped me see what it means" ("The White Album").  This, from such a consummate writer, makes me feel a little better.  I love reading all the blog narratives about Don, but I'm afraid I just can't create an expressive statement yet, you know, the kind that will help the tears flow warmly and sweetly?.  To risk offending with a transparent confession:  I feel hot, staticky, dry; hot, staticky, depressed; I don't want to bathe or wash my hair.  Bah


I can say this:  I'll always love Don's range, in the intellectual and humane senses.  With whom else could I enjoy both The Creeping Terror AND Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity?


Don will be credited in the Toni Morrison book for his amazing suggestions.  He gave me two really fundamental ones: the Jonas book for my work on Paradise and  African Diaspora musics.  The project is now grounded in ethnomusicology as much as it is in lit.theory and crit.   Thanks, Don.


Some of you know I have a continual dance with depression.  Don't worry, I'm managing it.  But I just won't hide it, not now.  I've got a mean blues, and it's not going to fly to the other side of the rainbow anytime soon.  


In Beloved, Toni Morrison has her main character, Sethe, think something about a man who walked across 5 states to sit on her front porch that I think best indicates how I feel about Don LaCoss; that this man (Paul D in Beloved ) was the kind of man in front of whom the women could cry.  Because he would be there, in all the figurative senses that that phrase can command, to catch them if they fall.  


sharon j  (I forgot to add this; maybe I can edit it still?)