title: my evening - instead of an essay on context.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A brush with inspiration
Gives away to drawn out thought
Wherein careful calculation
Precedes over what ought
A collection of anxieties,
Kept in case of an emergency,
Emerge as quiet cautious strokes
Begin to justify their apathy
A hand blurs beneath the rush,
Tracing smaller all that comes
Until the world is little enough
To sit above, and command my arms
From there it whispers,
Almost in whimpers,
That it’s too much mine
To be anyone else’s –
All my works are a stencil
Only sharp through a lens
I blame the blunt of the pencil
And leave pretence to make amends
Monday, May 29, 2006
Sunday, April 09, 2006
meh. i've decided to turn this into a half-normal blog, for the sake of getting SOME writing done, albeit lamezors.
i'm still in post-examen joy, hopefully it will extend into Tuesday at least. Yesterday, between 3:50 and 7:30 was great. Today i woke up and organised my schoolwork, started some extension two, fiddled around with the MIDI device in the vain hope that i might begin recording some songs today, and upon its stupid stupidness decided instead to catch up on Questionable Content whilst listening to bloc party. when the day comes that i once again care nought about the horrors of perpetual debt, i'll get to some more live music. or forget about the world. they amount to the same.
although it's nice now, i feel almost horrible that my moods are dictated by school. i seem to have finally decided that it's important, but it's so numbing. what i like less is that there has to be the trade-off between feeling in touch with what i would tentatively think of as true, and pursuing a life that adheres to it. what made me feel like i didn't exist before was the fact that i always seem to interpret my position in such paradoxical terms. That’s what I was on about with the writhing worms post last year, Rach, if you remember. I suppose it makes sense that paradox is inevitable in our situation. For any thought to be verified, it must be thought to be true, and so on. So, this age where we destabilise truth --> destabilisation of thought --> destabilisation of identity, also, of logic --> madness --> Cakeocracy, wherein carbohydrates subjugate nations and collective humanity’s threadbare reality justifies survival based solely on devouring concepts. *eats a scone to celebrate the rise of all-resolving Paradoxism/ anti-Atkinsism*. hmm! Some thought for food...
afternoon
i'm still in post-examen joy, hopefully it will extend into Tuesday at least. Yesterday, between 3:50 and 7:30 was great. Today i woke up and organised my schoolwork, started some extension two, fiddled around with the MIDI device in the vain hope that i might begin recording some songs today, and upon its stupid stupidness decided instead to catch up on Questionable Content whilst listening to bloc party. when the day comes that i once again care nought about the horrors of perpetual debt, i'll get to some more live music. or forget about the world. they amount to the same.
although it's nice now, i feel almost horrible that my moods are dictated by school. i seem to have finally decided that it's important, but it's so numbing. what i like less is that there has to be the trade-off between feeling in touch with what i would tentatively think of as true, and pursuing a life that adheres to it. what made me feel like i didn't exist before was the fact that i always seem to interpret my position in such paradoxical terms. That’s what I was on about with the writhing worms post last year, Rach, if you remember. I suppose it makes sense that paradox is inevitable in our situation. For any thought to be verified, it must be thought to be true, and so on. So, this age where we destabilise truth --> destabilisation of thought --> destabilisation of identity, also, of logic --> madness --> Cakeocracy, wherein carbohydrates subjugate nations and collective humanity’s threadbare reality justifies survival based solely on devouring concepts. *eats a scone to celebrate the rise of all-resolving Paradoxism/ anti-Atkinsism*. hmm! Some thought for food...
afternoon
Sunday, April 02, 2006
well, here's one of the fragments that might make more sense than any of the others :). it follows on from what i first posted.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Awake… my eyes leap open and almost fall out. I blink widely. Something about something red…
“Awake are you, Stella?” A familiar tattoo sounds at the doorway and I groan an assent, pulling myself out of bed and whispering appreciation for a long-standing habit of falling asleep fully clothed. I face him at the door.
“Good – seems you artists don’t know night from day, I swear. I said I was coming around today”
“I remember. You know, it’s hard to tell night from day with that light”
“Hah, the dinge of creativity, eh”. I wait for the self-satisfied little laugh, though not bitterly. With luck I’ll be gone soon. “You’ll be gone soon, anyway. Eh? I’ve got the lease here,” He stares at me with tired eyes. I’ve never asked his age, though I suppose it to lounge at around forty-nine, an estimation mostly based on the fact that he talks to me as though I’m wearing a frilly dress with gigantic polka dots. “do you know where you’re going yet?”
“Maybe Melbourne. I just need something to inspire me, you know?”
He answers quietly with his eyebrows, reminding me that my fantastic escape from listlessness probably seems instead fantastically mad. Perhaps it is. I’ve been alone with that cockroach too long.
“What is it that you paint?” He asks, casting an eye to the canvass.
“Landscapes, mostly.” There are a dozen postcards and photographs of various places, dusty outbacks to metropolitan outlines, tacked about my newest of artistic endeavours. Some of them have been sent halfway across Australia, I think enviously to myself.
* * *
Stupid universe.
Stack stack stack.
Stupid lonesomeness.
Stack stack stack.
There has to be something nicer and warmer than vexatious infinity.
* * *
A month passes slowly when you’re counting down to something. I’ve spent the last three days of it economising my belongings – deciding what I do and don’t need. Since childhood my process of deciding such things has been to place myself in a desert, and from there decide what I could live without. This seems particularly appropriate now that I head forth into the red centre of Australia. I’ve now divided my belongings across three looming bedroom corners; one for storage, one for getting rid of, and one to take with me.
In the first pile: a table, chairs (etc)
In the second pile: two thirds of my clothes, a quaint little toy piano that I found at the market, a garden gnome, some prints (etc)
And finally, the third: clothes, camera, easel, brushes, bandaids (etc)
The train is tedious as always, rattling on methodically as a fanatic preacher. The blueness and the brightness of the sky outside plays off the small open window that rests parallel to my knees. I once had a friend who told me they’d love me forever if I taught them to fly. I think of them now, as I stare at my knees in the sky, and I wish I had a welding torch so I could take the window and the moment with me instead of having the two remain glued to side of these cycling carriages forever.
It’s tremendously difficult to draw people on the train, not because the page moves about, but because the people do. Either that or they stare at you suspiciously, almost daring you to lower your Progresso to the page once more. My quiet revenge is later filling in whatever amount of form they deprived me of with that of a lizard. Silly lizard people.
A woman to my far right clutches a fly net in one hand and a cigarette in the other, tapping the cylinder irritably against a pile of papers now and again, probably asking things like what has the law ever done for me? And so anarchism is born, I muse.
I find myself being jostled into slumber, and scramble for puzzles in order to keep myself awake. I finish a crossword and move onto god, which seems to develop into a kind of soul searching interview, the train carriage becoming an elaborate Orpheum as red warmth beams down from a billion windows camouflaged by light. A voice behind a curtain speaks to me in twisted middle English.
Godhede: well well.
Stella: no purpose for the visit.
Godhede: I see. No one likes to be drawn. Foolish abasshen folk, yours.
Stella: they what?
Godhede: fool of a creation!
Stella: ... apologies.
Godhede: that be god.
Stella: [sighs]. Apologies, God.
Godhede: [pauses]. You know, I hate this vexatious curtain.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
night
(i don't know about the middle enlgish, i simply need something stylistic and appropriate to differentiate god from the others.)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Awake… my eyes leap open and almost fall out. I blink widely. Something about something red…
“Awake are you, Stella?” A familiar tattoo sounds at the doorway and I groan an assent, pulling myself out of bed and whispering appreciation for a long-standing habit of falling asleep fully clothed. I face him at the door.
“Good – seems you artists don’t know night from day, I swear. I said I was coming around today”
“I remember. You know, it’s hard to tell night from day with that light”
“Hah, the dinge of creativity, eh”. I wait for the self-satisfied little laugh, though not bitterly. With luck I’ll be gone soon. “You’ll be gone soon, anyway. Eh? I’ve got the lease here,” He stares at me with tired eyes. I’ve never asked his age, though I suppose it to lounge at around forty-nine, an estimation mostly based on the fact that he talks to me as though I’m wearing a frilly dress with gigantic polka dots. “do you know where you’re going yet?”
“Maybe Melbourne. I just need something to inspire me, you know?”
He answers quietly with his eyebrows, reminding me that my fantastic escape from listlessness probably seems instead fantastically mad. Perhaps it is. I’ve been alone with that cockroach too long.
“What is it that you paint?” He asks, casting an eye to the canvass.
“Landscapes, mostly.” There are a dozen postcards and photographs of various places, dusty outbacks to metropolitan outlines, tacked about my newest of artistic endeavours. Some of them have been sent halfway across Australia, I think enviously to myself.
* * *
Stupid universe.
Stack stack stack.
Stupid lonesomeness.
Stack stack stack.
There has to be something nicer and warmer than vexatious infinity.
* * *
A month passes slowly when you’re counting down to something. I’ve spent the last three days of it economising my belongings – deciding what I do and don’t need. Since childhood my process of deciding such things has been to place myself in a desert, and from there decide what I could live without. This seems particularly appropriate now that I head forth into the red centre of Australia. I’ve now divided my belongings across three looming bedroom corners; one for storage, one for getting rid of, and one to take with me.
In the first pile: a table, chairs (etc)
In the second pile: two thirds of my clothes, a quaint little toy piano that I found at the market, a garden gnome, some prints (etc)
And finally, the third: clothes, camera, easel, brushes, bandaids (etc)
The train is tedious as always, rattling on methodically as a fanatic preacher. The blueness and the brightness of the sky outside plays off the small open window that rests parallel to my knees. I once had a friend who told me they’d love me forever if I taught them to fly. I think of them now, as I stare at my knees in the sky, and I wish I had a welding torch so I could take the window and the moment with me instead of having the two remain glued to side of these cycling carriages forever.
It’s tremendously difficult to draw people on the train, not because the page moves about, but because the people do. Either that or they stare at you suspiciously, almost daring you to lower your Progresso to the page once more. My quiet revenge is later filling in whatever amount of form they deprived me of with that of a lizard. Silly lizard people.
A woman to my far right clutches a fly net in one hand and a cigarette in the other, tapping the cylinder irritably against a pile of papers now and again, probably asking things like what has the law ever done for me? And so anarchism is born, I muse.
I find myself being jostled into slumber, and scramble for puzzles in order to keep myself awake. I finish a crossword and move onto god, which seems to develop into a kind of soul searching interview, the train carriage becoming an elaborate Orpheum as red warmth beams down from a billion windows camouflaged by light. A voice behind a curtain speaks to me in twisted middle English.
Godhede: well well.
Stella: no purpose for the visit.
Godhede: I see. No one likes to be drawn. Foolish abasshen folk, yours.
Stella: they what?
Godhede: fool of a creation!
Stella: ... apologies.
Godhede: that be god.
Stella: [sighs]. Apologies, God.
Godhede: [pauses]. You know, I hate this vexatious curtain.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
night
(i don't know about the middle enlgish, i simply need something stylistic and appropriate to differentiate god from the others.)
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
(This is not part of the major work... when I have the urge to write in third person i'll continue writing this... )
>>>>>>>>
There’s no one at home. The niece is away on a music camp of sorts – the kind where an absence is noticed but not noted, where the goodbyes are appropriate, but not the meaning it. I suppose he loved her, but it didn’t really seem so at the time. Anyway, the girl was having an enjoyable enough existence regardless – she began to think of herself as an investment, of which the camp was a part of and to which few others would be participant. She breathed in, pleased that no one had yet reprimanded her for disappearing so often to the estuary, often an oboe or a boy in hand . The wind rustled through the reeds there, rather than screamed like it did through those of the new players.
The girlfriend, the little woman, or “Therese” as she would probably prefer to be introduced, isn’t around. Joseph notices a particularly tattered pink book out of the corner of his eye and flicks to the front page –
“Name your baby. Published in 1984”. He would prefer to say it than write it, and write it than think it, but sometimes there was no say in the matter.
Born in 1985, Joseph likes the what if. He pictures the chemical composition momentarily suspended above page 34, a predilection of which he was in part the product, and imagines it shifting slightly. It instead takes a liking to
[He writes down the name Finn.]
Joseph, who could have been Finn, also used to write down dates, and pretend they were the end of the world. Or to be precise, one date, again and again, in the back of every journal that was ever kept, the fading pencil tracing an ever sharpening peril: 16th September 2071. When the innocuous curves finally translated to reality, Joseph would drive off a cliff. Death, he figures, is a certain enough thing to believe in.
“Mm!” he remembers, picking up the pencil again:
Must Get License.
“I like the sounds here” she says.
“It’s nice”
“Except the insects”
Lily pokes the new boy’s head, separating the strands of hair from the sand, the two almost indistinguishable in colour. They laugh, not quite nervously. Dusting her hand on her pocket, Lily notices a threadbare red ribbon caught in the zipper. She ties it around his forehead, in anticipation of a wound. The reaction is quizzical, but the glimmer of a riddle in his eyes is so reflective of the sky that Lily can almost gaze straight through his head. And, she thinks, as though the rest of him were barely there either, the wind takes his newest of decorations. The pair watch the ribbon fold effortlessly into a laced curtain of blue.
“That was kind of cool” he says finally.
>>>>>>>>
There’s no one at home. The niece is away on a music camp of sorts – the kind where an absence is noticed but not noted, where the goodbyes are appropriate, but not the meaning it. I suppose he loved her, but it didn’t really seem so at the time. Anyway, the girl was having an enjoyable enough existence regardless – she began to think of herself as an investment, of which the camp was a part of and to which few others would be participant. She breathed in, pleased that no one had yet reprimanded her for disappearing so often to the estuary, often an oboe or a boy in hand . The wind rustled through the reeds there, rather than screamed like it did through those of the new players.
The girlfriend, the little woman, or “Therese” as she would probably prefer to be introduced, isn’t around. Joseph notices a particularly tattered pink book out of the corner of his eye and flicks to the front page –
“Name your baby. Published in 1984”. He would prefer to say it than write it, and write it than think it, but sometimes there was no say in the matter.
Born in 1985, Joseph likes the what if. He pictures the chemical composition momentarily suspended above page 34, a predilection of which he was in part the product, and imagines it shifting slightly. It instead takes a liking to
[He writes down the name Finn.]
Joseph, who could have been Finn, also used to write down dates, and pretend they were the end of the world. Or to be precise, one date, again and again, in the back of every journal that was ever kept, the fading pencil tracing an ever sharpening peril: 16th September 2071. When the innocuous curves finally translated to reality, Joseph would drive off a cliff. Death, he figures, is a certain enough thing to believe in.
“Mm!” he remembers, picking up the pencil again:
Must Get License.
“I like the sounds here” she says.
“It’s nice”
“Except the insects”
Lily pokes the new boy’s head, separating the strands of hair from the sand, the two almost indistinguishable in colour. They laugh, not quite nervously. Dusting her hand on her pocket, Lily notices a threadbare red ribbon caught in the zipper. She ties it around his forehead, in anticipation of a wound. The reaction is quizzical, but the glimmer of a riddle in his eyes is so reflective of the sky that Lily can almost gaze straight through his head. And, she thinks, as though the rest of him were barely there either, the wind takes his newest of decorations. The pair watch the ribbon fold effortlessly into a laced curtain of blue.
“That was kind of cool” he says finally.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Things have been more intense today than any other day I’ve had in a while. Hopefully today will therefore act to reassure my belief in the superpowers of sleep, though it's also brought me tot hat stage of night where I really enjoy listening to Tatu. I like them. Gah... if only being gay was so contagiously tragic.
I've done a little bit of writing for my major work, but this post is mostly so that Rachael doesn't stop visiting the page. i was planning to turn this into one of the horrible late-night ramblings that i used to write for my “national-socialist” Russian of a net buddy to snigger at before getting me to rate the hotness of various girls, but i won't. i'm going to go to sleep, and pull together my ghastly ext2 fragments tomorrow from 2ish onward. hmmm
night
I've done a little bit of writing for my major work, but this post is mostly so that Rachael doesn't stop visiting the page. i was planning to turn this into one of the horrible late-night ramblings that i used to write for my “national-socialist” Russian of a net buddy to snigger at before getting me to rate the hotness of various girls, but i won't. i'm going to go to sleep, and pull together my ghastly ext2 fragments tomorrow from 2ish onward. hmmm
night
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
well... it seems having an afternoon nap means i don't get tired all night afterward. which might be terrible, but it has meant that i have made a pretty blog, of which i might be proud. this will be mostly postings of what i'm writing for extension two english - the background is a photo of my actual logbook! how clever! :)
sleep well!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A masochistic mahogany cockroach charging at the wall and a lifeless brush in my right hand battle for concern. The insect’s disgusting thorax beats ecstatically against the ceiling now, possessed by some ill-fitted light – the dinge of creativity, the landlord laughs, every time I mention it. It’s not all so bad. I don’t mean the direction of my life is in darkness, or something. Though I suppose everyone’s is. I like to think of it like those spiky sticks that used to fall around my front garden when I was younger, the sticks that I would spend hours breaking and reassembling when devastatingly bored. There would be only two identical parts, but I could make them draw upward falsely forever through stacking and stacking. Then I would paint them orange and stick googly eyes on them or something. But that’s how I see myself living one stage to the next – stacking in mid air. And I with my grubby fingers was god.
I turn off the light and imagine the cockroach drop from the buzz of my light bulb and fall against the skirting board, scuttling into some forgotten stria, and clacking. I close my eyes for the warmer kind of darkness – the darkness of circling mystery, before again opening my eyes to a clacking threat and instinctively switching the light back on. So, it seems the cockroach wins the battle for my concern. I eventually get bored of caring that I might never find inspiration again, and fall asleep.
* * *
A dragon. An exhilarating ride through something cavernous and ancient, until this thing that I ride breaks through the surface and follows instead the caverns of a prehistory, seeming to see the rock that existed high up here before the wind and rain rendered it sky. I don’t know where I am, but I propel the beast forward into this confusing blue. Finally we stop, and if I look down I can see a trails of where we’ve been, translucently spiralling just over a small town and a vast warm red.
* * *
Awake… my eyes leap open and almost fall out. I blink widely.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
more to come... *withdraws ominously*
sleep well!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A masochistic mahogany cockroach charging at the wall and a lifeless brush in my right hand battle for concern. The insect’s disgusting thorax beats ecstatically against the ceiling now, possessed by some ill-fitted light – the dinge of creativity, the landlord laughs, every time I mention it. It’s not all so bad. I don’t mean the direction of my life is in darkness, or something. Though I suppose everyone’s is. I like to think of it like those spiky sticks that used to fall around my front garden when I was younger, the sticks that I would spend hours breaking and reassembling when devastatingly bored. There would be only two identical parts, but I could make them draw upward falsely forever through stacking and stacking. Then I would paint them orange and stick googly eyes on them or something. But that’s how I see myself living one stage to the next – stacking in mid air. And I with my grubby fingers was god.
I turn off the light and imagine the cockroach drop from the buzz of my light bulb and fall against the skirting board, scuttling into some forgotten stria, and clacking. I close my eyes for the warmer kind of darkness – the darkness of circling mystery, before again opening my eyes to a clacking threat and instinctively switching the light back on. So, it seems the cockroach wins the battle for my concern. I eventually get bored of caring that I might never find inspiration again, and fall asleep.
* * *
A dragon. An exhilarating ride through something cavernous and ancient, until this thing that I ride breaks through the surface and follows instead the caverns of a prehistory, seeming to see the rock that existed high up here before the wind and rain rendered it sky. I don’t know where I am, but I propel the beast forward into this confusing blue. Finally we stop, and if I look down I can see a trails of where we’ve been, translucently spiralling just over a small town and a vast warm red.
* * *
Awake… my eyes leap open and almost fall out. I blink widely.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
more to come... *withdraws ominously*
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