Three women who lived so definitely. Writer, character, reader. I don’t know who I’d rather be. I am compromising myself and everything I feel in favour of timing. I hate time and I don’t believe it, so I don’t enjoy being dictated by it. It’s not knowing the significance of the little things, and you know I’m losing faith in words, but then again I found those letters of Ted Hughes completely mesmerising. Love letters. I need a better way than just words even though abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is everything we have said or ever will say, and that’s magnificent and it does stun me. Maybe I’m not good with words. Maybe I just don’t know how to use them properly. Maybe that’s why music with no words nudges at my soul more than a lot of things I have read. Maybe I read the wrong things sometimes. There’s someone whose writing cuts through all my anxieties and pessimism and makes me wish it was written for me, and sometimes it is. She writes for free and is the most beautiful person I have ever known. Thinking more about different things is so fucking necessary. I just want to be music, dive into the sea, climb through the roof like the boy on tv, eat grass like the winner. ‘So when the ghosts find you, be careful but be graceful’ is one of my favourite examples of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. Careful. Graceful. Happen.
It bugs me that we can experience something for the first time only once. I know this is obvious, but it really does get to me because there can be so much joy in experiencing something wonderful for the first time, but then it can never happen like that again; the first time is completely ephemeral and unexpected, but the mystery is lost after that, even though the experience can be repeated. First times are so crucial. I’m mainly thinking about books and film when I’m talking about this. Less so poetry and music because I think they’re meant to be repeated and explored, whereas, for me, films and novels and their impact comes in one big hit. And I know they can be repeated and explored too, but I think the effect they have on their audience is much more instant. I’m not a huge film person at all, but I watched Changeling the other day, and it moved me and threw my brain and my heart around the living room. I can definitely be affected by films, but just the once. I can enjoy the same film more than once, but only the ones I enjoy on a superficial and comic level, not the ones I become enveloped and engrossed in. I love not knowing, but the moment we know, we’ll never not know again. I’m not so keen on that.
For free, thanks to the lovely people at my old job and the gift cards they got me as a leaving present.
Passive Boredom-Nihilism
There is a passive and an active state of boredom-nihilism. The passive state consists in a complete loss of faith in any values, in a lack of the zest for living or for constructive living, in the ability to take anything, even the search for happiness, seriously or to seek for anything consistently except distraction- distraction from the sense of nothingness.
Philip Leon.
