Retcons You Won't Notice

Alright, alright.

It was silly of me to delete my blog while in an excessively morbid mood.
Instead of self-harm I moved onto hurting things I can't get back.

Of course I forget that RSS readers hold onto things and so thankyou Blessi for making me realise I wanted it back and Jess for showing me it still existed. There, I've just thanked 100% of my readership so this should be a new period of popularity and harmony, right?

I made changes. I couldn't not make changes. In some places a title is shorter, in some places I dropped off paragraphs that were good to write but not so good to read. Notably absent; the Adventures of Norman. I haven't decided how to move forward with that so I'll hold off on re-posting until I've decided. They still exist, anyway.

It's something of a coincidence that I restored my blog today. I realised as I was forging the dates of the original posts that it's been almost a year since I started up here. It doesn't feel like a year at all, but I don't know if it feels like more or less. I had my last undergraduate lecture on Tuesday. Hilariously, I skipped it. It wasn't actually that hilarious. I often let style re-arrange what I want to say so that it sounds better. I'm a writer, I'm allowed.

I have an essay due on Monday and one due in two weeks, and I have an exam next week and another a few weeks later. After that I can justifiably add B.BSc (Psych) to the end of my name, well, assuming that I pass. I will do honours eventually. I'm partly writing that so that if I look back in the future, having not done honours, I'll get this little pang of regret, like so, 'pang!'

It's odd, I miss uni already. I guess it's because I remember school and I realise how fun and silly it all was, and I didn't realise until afterwards, this time I am anticipating feeling that way already.

I'm reading James Joyce at the moment. I read Dubliners a few years ago, and then recently I bought Ulysses and A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. I was a bit bummed out when I did because I found out that what I was attempting with Norman not only has already been thought of, but was thought of basically a century ago, and resulted in a novel much, much better than anything I can write at the moment. That's partly why I'm disenchanted with Norman for now, I feel as though he was just made into a photocopy even though I didn't know the details of Ulysses until recently. It doesn't mean abandoning it, it just means I need to re-think it and put more of myself in it. Joyce is incredible for infusing his writing with both a great sense of the zeitgeist of Ireland of his era and an amazing ability to get across such nuances of character with such trivial phrases. Stepping back from the writing itself, the structure is amazing. I don't know if he wrote it to a plan or put it together as it went along, but it's really something, it feels like the literature equivalent of singing in harmony.

Enough! Suffice to say that secrets remain claustrophobic.


Peace.

Changes

It's amazing how easy it was, actually. I just removed the bits that were terrible. 

Rain Thoughts

It's raining outside, so heavily it feels like the sheer force of it will batter the house apart.

Maybe it will! That would be exciting for a little while, then after that it'd be cold and wet and somewhat depressing.

I feel like I need to come up with something profound, because if I don't, but I write something anyway, it will just end up being angst-ridden crap.


Well, watching a rainbow through the broken ceiling would be pretty cool.

Is There A Word For That?

Inspired by the tiny but well-formed droplets of beautiful writing at 55 Words I’ve been writing some short stories myself, namely, 35 words. That isn’t intended as any sort of one-upmanship, it’s just that the first one I wrote was 35 words and I ran with that. I don’t think I will post them here because I feel like 35 words is too short for a post, and I wouldn’t want to post them together as that would imply a connectedness that didn’t exist. I like writing small things because it's easier to get down a sentence or two without tearing it apart in my head over and over.

So the normal state of affairs is for me to post when I should be doing something else. Right now I should be preparing a 10 minute oral on the a) methods and results, and b) validity of the methods and results, of a relatively complex study. I need to do this tonight because tomorrow I’m going to Ray’s, in order to combine it with his half in a PowerPoint slide show (If it were up to me I’d rather just stand and gesticulate wildly but the lecturer wants PowerPoint). After presenting that on Monday, I then must prepare another 10 minute oral, this time part of a debate, before Wednesday, when I have to rehearse it with my fellow debaters. Suffice to say I haven’t done any work on either.

I feel really fatigued, at the moment. When you’ve been up for a while and you aren’t drowsy but your body is going “…it’s time to sleep, ok?” or when you play a game or read a book for too long and are zoned out and a little dizzy. It can’t really be because I’m tired though because it’s been around for much of the day. Right now, I would really just like to curl up in a ball and be embraced by darkness.


Peace. 

Shall We?

He was the best of mimes, he was the worst of mimes. A routine he'd learned well as a child was his only act, and he knew it, down to his bones he knew it, but it grew thin in these colder times. Seemed as how he'd always been dancing to his silent tune, but the boy he'd been had cast a different shadow and walked another path. It was the little things, mostly, that he couldn't escape from. No, it wasn't something that a person should be feeling responsible for, just the changes wrought by time, and the influences he didn't know he'd felt. He wasn't the same boy - mind you, none of us are really the same - and his silent little play had modulated, grown wings you might say, or lost its nerve you might say, and neither truer than the other.

You'd hardly call him a commercial success - not him, not a mime, his only stage the street and his props department conjured with gestures and dismissed with flicks. Yet he still had this feeling, with him for some time now, that he had lost something back there which he wouldn't be able to find again. The crowd liked his show more, now, but he'd left something behind to find that place. It itched in his memory, so much as you'd call it a memory, fragments of a song once heard on a radio. It replayed the same few words, like a misshappen haiku, that seemed to float in the realm just behind his movements. He couldn't quite tell what it was. The shape of it eluded his fingertips.

Only, he had this sensation like it had been something important. 

Fragments

A little bird lands on the path in front of me. Nothing else but a puzzled glance, a few brief hops, and then back into flight. I pause for a moment, but my eye quickly loses the bird in the distance. The breeze ruffles my hair just a little. Or,

Inhale the musty odors of old books, eyes closed. Just for a moment, you understand. I open them, and for a moment my eyes meet hers, dark pebbles framed in brunette curls. A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth and she looks away. I smile faintly myself, my mood lightened, and a little gleam in my memory. The curve of her lips, delicate. The secrets in her eyes leapt between us for just an instant. A darkling gaze that I won't forget. Or,

The discomfort of the seat, the stifled hot atmosphere of the theatre, my senses forget themselves, dwelling only on the figures in the light wrapped in darkness. There's a joy in their tragic motions that I share, a love of the shadows and the nuances and the subreal. They'll dance their slow drama every night, each performance a unique duplicate. For me, this moment alone satisfies. For them, it all lies in the instant, a stumbled line, a missed cue, a stolen glance. The mistakes of an actor lie forever in the performance, inseparable from it.

The fragments that make up memories, the experiences that make up people, are not unique, but they are beautiful. Each person in their own realm of photocopied moments assembles them a new way, putting their own captions on the pictures, creating a whole. Here is where the soul lies, within these fragments.

One of mine:

A soft kiss is beautiful.
In the moment before the kiss, there's nothing else in the world,
only warm breath across your face and a slight tingle.
It feels a little like static electricity, but it's mostly anticipation,
released in a small spark, which like saliva,
moves between you and I.

"Five days, leaving me wanting more."

Moonlight

There always seems to be such a very big gap between the things that I daydream about and my everyday life. I do not have any real fear of the future, or of change, or of dying without achieving anything by which society will supposedly measure what sort of a person I was. My fears swirl around living a life in which my dreams are more pleasant than my reality. Where the what-ifs and the might-have-beens take up more space in my memory than the things I did. So I am afraid of dreaming about things that might never happen. Things like being an author, since it is so easy to imagine never ending up as an author. In some ways the issue is that all I'd have to do is do nothing and my life would end up living itself and being empty and meaningless.

I first realised reality was utterly devoid of objective meaning a little over four years ago. For a little while it would overcome me, until I hit upon the realisation that reality didn't need meaning. The whole concept of meanings, values, representation, is entirely a constructed entity. It stems, I suppose, from the nature of language, and symbols more generally, in their habitual way of assigning order to things. Things isn't a particularly good symbol itself, I should have used a word more like "entities" or "objects", damn. So anyway my point, or my realisation, was that the whole idea of things holding meaning was not a native expectation about the world but was tied up entirely with the construction of symbols and languages. So the objective meaninglessness of reality is just a ground state. Without the minute vibrations and movements of subatomic particles the temperature of the universe could reach absolute zero, or, if the temperature of the universe was absolute zero, subatomic particles would cease moving and perhaps cease existing, or, you know, another interpretation of quantum mechanics along those lines. Likewise without thought the universe can reach a state of absolute meaninglessness, or, without meaning, thought is impossible. So I'm not in a void of meaninglessness, because my thoughts are creating a meaningful reality. It's a subjective reality, and it's not necessarily externally valid, but the upshot of it all is that I can find for myself the ideas that I want to hold, the thoughts that I think are worth thinking, the beautiful moments that I want fragmented through fading memory cells. From here there is no chance at all that I can become permanently unhappy because it only takes sun shining mutely on my face or wind pressing against me like a lonely animal, and I'm back immersed in the pure wonder of it all. This doesn't stop me from being unhappy at times. It doesn't make me feel any better when I am unhappy. In fact existing is pretty much just as beautiful in any mood, it's just that a lot of moods tend to block out the good bits of existence and focus on the ugly ones.

So.

The problem is that I am afraid that I am going to fail to meet my own standards of how I think I should live my life.

It haunts me when I imagine the myriad ways in which things could actually be other than how I think they are, and those ways are always the sorts of things that would hurt terribly.


Peace.