…we are kin to stars

I’ve been reading a book called ‘Ahab’s Wife’ by Sena Jeter Naslund. I’ve been entranced by the language in the book and I can’t seem to put the thing down. Here’s a passage from p558 of my copy, and you’ll see what I mean about the language. The whole book is line one giant poem. I bought it on a whim, because I am a fan of Melville’s Moby Dick and I wanted to see what this woman had done with a character that is mentioned in maybe two lines of Moby. I am not disappointed.

     There is a great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.
     Where is my place before this whirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty -that gilt frame - burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It’s no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in thier turning, marches them always outward in thier fiery parade.
     That I can see thier glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive - and surely they are alive in some other way. Perhaps it is only being that we share. But something is shared between me on the rooftop and them flung wideand myriad up there. What was the golden motto emroidered on the hem of my baby’s silk dress? We are kin to stars.
I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black v’s between my fanning fingers. To think I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. it is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Thier light is on my hands.
     Thier light is in my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright - I lower my hands - why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call thier names, but htey are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.
     Little scrap, little morsel, the stars sing to me, we are the same.

I’m sad I’m almost done!

Posted in Quotations, Reading | 2 Comments » | Tags: Books, quotes, Reading, thinky

your silence hides you from the inside

Sometimes I wish I smoked. Then I would have an excuse to go out and just sit, staring into nothing. Thinking.

I feel sometimes like my entire universe is contracting inside my head, like a prelude to a massive explosion. I’m overcome with nostalgia, with anxiety, stress… things I used to think myself free of. Things I used to disregard as something for weaker people. Bit of a wake up call to realise that these things are breaking me down, piece by piece.  I suppose this is the kind of thing people mean when they talk about existential crises. I mean what the hell am I doing here? Sometimes I feel like everything is so fucking pointless and that we’re all running around like chickens throwing out emotions and fucking up with no idea what the big idea is. Heh… ok, that’s exactly what’s happening, but it’s frightening to think that no one on this planet has any self-assurance, or any idea at all that there is actually a direction to go in. Maybe I just feel like that because I’ve lost what self-assurance, confidence or conviction that I once had. I know what I would like to believe. I would like to believe that every thing happens for a reason. Not in the sense that everything is predetermined, because that’s the opposite of chaos in that there is no room for chance, change, art or individuality in that vision of the universe… and that is almost as terrifying as there being too much of that. I suppose we all want to feel like there is order in the universe, and even more so when there feels like there is none in our lives. But it would be nice to feel that and not feel so fucking adrift.

I find myself holding on to the walls, walking slower, laying on the floor, anything, to make things less likely to slip away from me. It’s a little like vertigo in reverse: I’m not falling down, everything else is threatening to fly up and away out of my reach. WHOOSH.

I keep thinking to myself: if only I had some time to think about things, to sort them out in my head… and then I think, even if I make time I’m going to get distracted with all the pieces that fit in, or should fit in and don’t. There really is no way for me to lay everything out and take a good look at it. In other words, I do not have the luxury of falling apart. By that I mean that life makes its demands on me. Rather, I let life make demands. I don’t have control of it, in other words. What I’m not sure of is whether other people feel the other way, like they do have control or if they know it’s an illusion and that they are just holding on to the pretense that everything is just fine. Wearing the mask, doing the dance.

Well, it’s not fine. I’m not fine, I’m overwhelmed. I’m managing, but I’m overwhelmed. The world is not fine: people are rude, ignorant, self-centered, and obsessive to the point that the pretense of society, of communities are stretched into incoherence. Everyone is disconnected and don’t know how to communicate; giving too little or too much of themselves and struggling to find a balance. Playing mind games when there’s no reason to second-guess thier opponent, who is in fact not an opponent but a fellow in the insane rat-race in the first place, someone who should be counted on, not suspected or mistreated or held at arms length. Imagined enemies, tangled intrigues from one level of society to the next - is any of it even real in the face of the fact that people go home every night and have to look at themselves in the mirror? How many people can do that and be reasonably happy with what they see there, literally and metaphorically?

whoosh…. I close my eyes and wait for the spinning to stop just long enough so I can take a deep breath.

I’ve stopped reading the news or watching TV, again. I stopped for a while before and then felt I should be more informed for whatever reason, but I don’t want to know about the killing and dying and general douchebaggery that seems to make up “the news” these days. I want to find something in there that makes sense. I want to see people getting something good because they deserve it. I want to read about someone rescuing someone from some nasty fate, I want to know that people, somewhere, are not self-absorbed assholes. I want to know that my fight to remain sane in this insane world is not futile or even unique. I want a damn success story.

But I say nothing. I can’t tell that story. Not yet. I have a long way to go, on many levels. Right now I’m workin on this reverse vertigo. I just need to sort my personal pile of crap into more manageable pieces. So if I seem a little strange to you people in the next little while that’s what’s up. My head’s in pieces in a way it’s not been for nigh on ten years, though there is no single thing that has caused this particular mass of little black rainclouds. They just seemed to blow in on me all at once and in a great hurry. Now I’m just waiting for the storm to break so I can let the rain wash my brain clean.

listening to: Kosheen - Cover
reading: A complicated kindness - Miriam Toews

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I’m spinning it tight…

I was going to write a blog about how I detest some of the programming that’s on TV – how I think reality TV is watchable only in a train wreck sense: how it’s impossible to tear your eyes away even though you know that some television network is exploiting people for money, and that those same people are allowing themselves to be exploited for money and or whatever dubious fame they can achieve. It’s sick. And it’s a symptom of just how sick our world is. What’s next? A reality TV show following the next teen gunman? How far is too far? How desensitised can we be to violence, mistreatment and exploitation before we lose our core humanity?

Bre was watching Robot Chicken the other night and the disclaimer at the beginning said that it was for 18+ and I said off hand that she should probably not be watching it then and she threw me attitude. She doesn’t even get all the jokes and every other frame has someone being raped, beaten, stabbed or otherwise killed and/or humiliated, albeit in cartoon fashion. I remember when people were upset about the violence in bugs bunny. We have lost our subtlety

Granted I’m not one for censorship; people should be allowed to express their feelings and show how they see the world as they see fit. I’m an advocate of free speech – but at the same time I’m worried about how much is too much. There is a line whether we like it or not and mass media has left it far, far behind because sensation sells.

For instance, the kid who committed suicide on a webcam –what led him to such drastic measures for attention? How can a kid think that shooting everyone in his school will somehow end his pain? How does a man just decide to decapitate the man sitting next to him on a bus? Where did we get so disconnected? (No, I’m not blaming mass media for these behaviours any more than I can blame a violent video game - it’s how people process the input that causes the rift, the disassociation if you please - and there does not seem to be the tools available to help people differentiate and/or make sense of the crap versus the not-crap - or rather the people to teach these differences and supply the tools.)

I can see a prime example in teenagers today. Parents are either too self-absorbed or too busy to pay much more than the cursory attention to thier children. They end up appeasing thier guilt and/or the kids with gifts and bribes and by letting them get away with the most outrageous of behaviour, and now these kids have this sense of entitlement that seems to be a trademark of the generation. That’s oversimplifying, I know but the fault lies in thier upbringing, more than on the state of the universe. Though mass media: the Internet, TV, you name it, feeds the consumer tendency, that doesn’t mean anyone has to buy into it. But because it’s there and it’s so prevalant and, for the most part, unregulated by parents… they watch things they don’t entirely have the capacity to deconstruct in a useful manner and where does that leave them? (And if not regulated, then parents are not taking the time to deconstruct or interpret the content with these kids - I tell you I’ve had some interesting conversations about Robot Chicken recently…)

Why is it so hard to give each other attention? That’s all we really want and need at the end of the day: to feel loved and appreciated by someone. When we don’t get that we feel less than ourselves. Am I wrong? I don’t think so.

So we look outside of ourselves to reinforce the way we feel about ourselves. If we don’t have people to do this for us we turn to food, alcohol, drugs, media, to make us feel better. Food to fill the void, alcohol and drugs to alter our emotional state – though that never lasts for long- media because there’s always some poor sap who’s worse off than we are. It’s a weird kind of one-upmanship.

Whatever happened to those feel-good programs? You know, like ‘on the road again’ and such, where the host would visit these people with extraordinary tales of survival, creativity and accomplishment. I miss those! Where is our pride? We’re a mess, people.

listening to: Tori Amos - Strong Black Vine

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bantha poodoo*

I have long since given up on pretending that I don’t like the things I do to try and fit in with any one group because there is no point in doing so. (So yes, I love Star Wars and I’m a Star Trek nut to the point that I’m going to see the movie this year when it comes out and not just because it does so on my birthday. I also love Harry Potter, Firefly, mass quantities of Sci-fi and fantasy among all my other geeky pursuits. I love history. I love words. Sue me.)

I do, however, have a problem with the way things come out of my mouth. I may no longer make apologies for the things I think are awesome but I’m having a hard time unlearning a habit I picked up in the harshest of times in most people’s life: junior high. I’m not going to lament about how I got teased and whatever, because a lot of us got teased - I just happened to have several things to get teased about rather than just one or two. All I really wanted was for people to like me. And so I’d tell stories. That’s what my mom called it - but really, it was more like embellishing the truth. Blowing things a little out of proportion. Base-line, it was lying. I was not even aware I was doing this anymore it was that much of a habit. Stupid little things too, like saying I’ve read a book that I really haven’t because somewhere in my pea-sized brain I feel that you’ll like me more if I have read that book. It’s bullshit of course and I’ve been getting so much better at catching myself in these little things. I’m sure people have noticed that I do this more than they let on, so if I do it to you kick me, please. It’s a bad habit and it spills over into other stuff and I think that’s lame.

So no, I’ve not watched that one episode of Family Guy, even though I’ve seen several of them. (I’m not a huge fan of the cartoon, though I do think Stewie has his moments. So far as TV goes it’s better than UFC or that show about people who get in insanely huge trucks and then drive them across several inches of ice just to make more than I do in a year. Ok going to stop here because I’m in serious danger of rambling… )

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I want to make myself better than I have been. I’ve said and done things that I’m not proud of, so I’m doing my best now to be better than that. Call it self-improvement, whatever you like, I’m just tired of not liking myself.

Cheers…

*if you are a star wars nut, you’ll know what that means

listening to: Moby - Natural Blues
reading: nothing atm
eating: a cinnamon bun
drinking: chai

Posted in journal | 1 Comment » | Tags: geek, life, my brain, thinky