Just a mirror for the sun
scribbles about a commonplace existence.Archive for Uncategorized
mobius strips.
I will not pretend that another year is ending. it is in fact the same year that dies repeatedly. and sets itself in the shape of infinity in death. would it be the same year if it was the year’s offspring? dates make no sense anyway.
November 28, 1947.
Anticipation is…
a cigarette on a cold morning.
[to quote lal who was quoting someone else?]
procrastination and restlessness. a body without organs and the nomad lives in the intermezzo. and there is no movement but the movement from thinking to writing.
the haecceity of discourse
“If we only ever dance around the object of our thought, and never actually think it, then we only ever think about thinking “it”. But something else happens in that insufficiency of philosophy…We move. We move and this is not a metaphor, but its choreography is uncertain. Dance it may not be, but it is an actually existing and knowable movement in the world. We know it because we know the movement from thought into words. We know the movement from poetics to poiesis, and from poiesis to praxis and the subsumption of each into the other”
“Statements are already removed from the ideas they purport to express. We remain separated from the objects of our analysis, and yet we must make use, we must make sense, of the unknowable object of our thought, of the haecceity of discourse and we must therefore make sense and make use of void and the null set. We must think without philosophy”
–lal.
ever since my house burnt down, i can see the moon more clearly.
all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses – that’s what I loved the most, connecting with the people.
- from Waking Life.
drugs and soul
Shaped as frozen flowers the
Light fell on her face
I watch the dust shift
Under my gaze
Each shade shadowed a different plane
Of her quiet self in repose
And I felt that I must shatter
So sharp and brittle was it
That I choose instead to write this
In an attempt to explain
How cold and clear the morning was
And how golden soft the light
How stunning each inch of her skin
In the dawn of our lives.
Today I buried her in the yielding ground
The light remained unchanged
But so different is the world now
That I can no longer see the same
Already memory shifts into
Little sepia dots
And I can no longer tell
If she meant as much as I believed
But how I hope she did.
The world moves faster now
And I cannot see the lines
Because they blur into one
Long endless day and time
Means little to me today
But later perhaps I’ll find my soul
And you can ask me again.
–
To sit and listen to the wind
Is something of an art
Because you never know
What it might say
And if it is to whisper
So quietly that you doubt
Its very existence
You risk your sanity
But then again, it might
Wail in such sorrow that
You long to cradle her
Like a lost child in pain
But I listen to you talk with
Your words that lead me astray
So I’m almost glad of the wind
And her canny ways.
–
Reams of paper have been
Spent on describing
A love that fills the heart and
Spills into the air
Wrapping one in its flavour
But I would like to tell you
About a love so quiet
As to almost not be there
A love that made me
Wonder about its
Honesty and
search for proof
But now I would like to think
That I’ve found such a love
Though you’d probably disagree
Because it does not flaunt itself
Or keep my face aglow
And I often ask myself
If love could have any other use
But then again, why must
Love have any use?
changed.
And I am a bad poet
With no aspirations of grandeur
Only the recurring embarassment
Of wanting to create.
dream a little dream of me
this is by far the strangest dream i’ve had.
so in the dream, the colours are really, really bright. its purple and maroon that I most remember. first I’m going to someone with special powers who makes my hair long and straight and flowy. I walk down the road and it looks like the earth is bald and red with a few violently green shrubs. I meet little children dressed up for a fancy dress party. My brother is dressed as one of them and some of his classmates are dressed as batman and robin and police inspectors. i continue further down the road which keeps changing and moving and finally go to the person who makes my hair long and my hair looks like a black rapunzel. I go back home and admire it in the mirror and plait it but it becomes too heavy and i have to pull it off my head and it goes back to its normal length. and then i’m walking down the road again and i move toward this collection of people. and they seem to grow into this huge mass of people… millions and millions of them. and my mom calls me and asks me how much my course at cardiff will cost and i say 40,000 dollars, i think and she says we can’t afford that and that some university here has given me admission and that i should go there. all this is happening in some musical way. everyone is speaking in rhyme and everyone looks like strange pod people kind of like the teletubbies but a bit more evil so i assume i look like that too. and everyone starts singing instead of talking. and then there’s this really, really tall pillar, about 40 storeys high, and suddenly i seem to be able to see into the top of it in which there’s a little man in a pool of water and he seems really frightening for some reason and the sky is changing colour violently and he says i should stay here in this course and that i should cover my hair and they put this rainbow coloured cloth over my face that seems to be made with some kind of rubber because it stretches to the contours of my face and i remember thinking that i look like some comic book hero. and then i imagine all the ways in which i could look nice with a purple face, so i turn into a bug finally and look kind of like the caricature of gregor samsa from kafka’s metamorphosis and then the millions of people start climbing up the pillar singing a song about how they’ve been taught to think in a specific way and i join them too and turn into an angry purple insectand we’re climbing up the pillar and the sky is gorgeous… it looks like a cubist painting with blocks moving about and its all in a lovely shade of aquamarine and turquoise and i remember feeling SO angry as i walk towards it which is when i woke up, i think.
the colours.
o fortuna
Change. it.
I want to scream. I want to jump into the ocean. I want to run forever. The limitations of time and space are irritating the fuck out of me. Everyday I go out and spend time with people I love, there’s the easy comfort of familiarity and lots of laughter but a half second distraction and its back in pieces again. I want to paint my heart out but I don’t know where to begin. This stasis is probably the easy way out but it feels like I’m so full of life that I want to burst and instead of finding something constructive to do with it, I’m spending my life self-destructing. Words feel completely cliche. Someone said boredom with one’s life is actually boredom with one’s self. Perhaps that’s true; I’ve been the same person for a while now. I need to be someone brand new. I want to throw off this face and body. I want to disappear into a seething mass of people. I want to be someone you never knew. I hate these insecurities. I want to mean something else.
I want to be able to use words well enough to shape a thought in someone’s head and take me to a new place. I want to see colour everywhere. I want violins to constantly reach a crescendo. I want that breathless joy and then an endless silence.
I look at all the lonely people
life in staccato bursts of activity. the word ‘random’ thrown about too many times. the absolute inability to speak coherent english. all the shady laughter and unending tears… i feel like the year is ending and it’s just begun. this constant self-analysis is a bit self-obsessive and unnecessary, don’t you think?
in discussing trees, apparently they have to be cut down in their prime and shrivel and die. all those thoughts in a pure jumble of emotion. the constant obsession with the opposite. society based on physics and returning to the mothership. i want that intelligence, i need the conversation. won’t someone inspire me? what does the term honesty mean anymore? judgement is my only comfort.
hardly any time has passed and it feels like change is lurking around the corner. i miss easier times, but perhaps they never existed. the word love is being abused on a daily basis. it’s too early to say goodbye but i’m SO tired of saying hello.
Just a mirror for the sun
A mirror.
Even as I begin to write, I’m questioning my need for this exercise. Again, I’m fitting a mould, albeit one less known. The world is full of stories and we find holes shaped like us in them and we jump in and go for a ride. Everyday, I’m living a new cliché – today the drama queen, tomorrow the hippie and yesterday I was the lost child. I’m everything you need me to be. I’m a compilation of everything I’ve ever read, seen and heard so when I look at myself, all I see is a new arrangement of old things. All the arguments about originality, uniqueness… everything is just an exercise in repetition. We follow the patterns that our feet already knew existed. It’s all just an age-old dance. So why such angst over something so small? Constantly re-arranging ourselves to suit the people around us, we’re just mirrors for the entire world… Little shards of insignificant glass throw sunlight back in the air in all the colours of the rainbow. So easily caught in the net of hopes and expectations and belief. Such blind faith in your own reality. Do you really think you matter at all in the life someone else? It is so easy to move on. Nothing really matters so take joy in it all. Why the sorrow at your own life? How easy it is to forget one’s own insignificance. Do you really believe that what you do will have any permanence? It happens to the best of us. Filled with our self-importance we roam the streets, at each level thinking of the ones below and how much further we need to reach. We create our own hierarchies by creating our Ideal selves and then moving towards them. Why loathe the need to classify? It’s really all that we do anyway. That’s how we understand things. Everybody I meet wants to stand out from the crowd but never does anything about it. Constantly forcing people to look beyond their boundaries but never daring to peek out ourselves… we’ve had it easy, we’re already two steps ahead of everyone else on that front. I refuse to be you. You can go fuck yourself. And I can’t help but thinking that it’s your fault for that thought.
