No surprises please

I watched the film Adaptation the other day and it had quite and effect on me from literally the first ten seconds. The voice over of Charlie Kaufman's thoughts with only the black screen and little credits at the bottom reminded me so much of Fitter Happier. It was that same morning that I had listened to OK Computor the whole way through for the first time, because I never really liked Radiohead before. That song in particular used ot make me so mad because it seemed to be the sort of nihilistic social criticism that wasn't actually helpful in anyway but only looked at valid human experience and said 'man this shit is fucked up, full stop!' But this time it struck me so much. It seems to be kind of freeing me more from a way of thinking that is a series of cliches that have lost their real meaning and worth. Some of the things in Fitter Happier and Adaptation are worthwhile things, like exercise for example. But when they become nothing but empty statements like "maybe I should start jogging again, yeah, five miles a day from now on, yeah"...fitter, happier, more productive...empty nothings that fill up head room and sap actual possibility.

Instead, somehow, I feel like it's possible to interrupt that inane chatter and actually do something zomg! ... as I try to say it it seems elusive...I think I should watch the movie again or lsiten to the song again...but it wouldn't have the same effect, you can't just listen to it trying to get the smae thing out of it again, trying ot get the same feeling, it doesn't wokr that way...it feels like there's some possibility here, but I don't know how to sieze it so actual change takes place, rather than just letting this idea drift away and be forgotten. I don't want that. But the feeling seems to be going the more I think about it. There's stuff to be got at, but it's so hard to get at it!

I really like Katherine Mansfield. She is impressive to me. In her stories, there is always this feeling of being on the brink of some revelation. That's what I feel like so much of the time. Like if one little thing would just click into place then the puzzle would be solved and I would be there. It's amazing to have something so personally experienced and never to have talked about it with anyone, and then suddenly to find it perfectly expressed by someone else. It makes me wonder (amazement) at things. It feels like that's something to challenge the constructivists, the materialists etc. and point towards some sort of common characteristic of human experience that defies strict materialism. It of course does not have to mean this, but it one possibility of many, and one that feels to me like it might have some element of truth to it. You could say that humans are just wired so that they feel that way, and that's fair enough, but both conculsions are really a matter of assumption to a large degree, rather than empirical evidence, are they not?

Writing like this as oppossed to thinking directly about the problem of trying to learn the lesson that seems to be there to learn actually makes the lesson seem less elusive. I've never noticed that before. Maybe that's because I've always shied away from this sort of discussion. But now I am being pushed :D

It reminds me of something Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Visible and the Invisible...I'll go find it...He writes about what he calls 'the intertwining' or 'the chiasm' in relation to our experience of the world, elaborating on the idea that you cannot create a sort of serparation between self and other, inner and outer etc. because they fundamentally overlap. This is a familiar enough concept. One thing that particularly struck me in his work, though...I can't find the exact part, but his point was that when trying to know something (not a mathematical priciple kind of thing but rather lived, intuited experience things) you cannot think of it in terms of a 'me' trying to understand an 'it'. This mode of inquiry will not work because the 'it' cannot be separated from the 'me'. This is kind of hard to write, a bit like the elusive things i'm trying to talk about, but do you get a bit of what I'm trying to say? Does this make sense? I cannot approach this elusive lesson as a something else to be incorporated into me because it is already part of me.

It's like poetry or music or abstract art, which must be 'intuited' in part to be understood (I mean intuited in the way poets love to use it - not some extra sensory perception but something that's understood partly by feeling it).

This might be getting pretty boring and a little inscrutable? I don't find it boring, but I'm the one writing it and experiencing it so...

But in short I shall say that the way you understand art and poetry is also, I think, the way you understand life - it's subtle, felt, intuited, combined with rationally thought and comprehended. Niether is more important because each needs the other for understanding. This seems to be what a number of philosophers (such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy) and, of course, poets have thought. They use both intuition and intellect to try and reveal something of truth. It's easy, at least for me, to just go for rational thought and think you don't have time for the subtle and complex process of intuiting meaning and piecing things together. It is also easy to do neither properly and just kind of hover in the superficial. A delicious metaphor for this: sitting on the outside of a giant thing of jelly and only getting to lick it rather than diving in and eating it! See kids, academic things aren't just dry and boring - they can be fun and delicious!! Ahem, anyway. The patience and effort is always worth it. Easier said than done. But worth it.

That's more than enough from me tonight! Lovelove

if you always get up late you'll never be on time...good advice

Here is a story I wrote for my writing class (and am going ot hand in today - last assessment woooooo!). I'd really love to hear thoughts on it (except maybe from one tall skinny black man who'll just say that it's bad...unless he has some constructive criticism to add...I'm talking to you Rishi! [in case you hadn't picked up on my incredible subtlety]).



The mid morning sun slipped into the perfect position for its white light to strike the shining metal of a taxi below, and be thrown up again, directly onto the closed eyelids of Dominic Andreas. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with his head lulling awkwardly to the side of the head rest, slightly-too-long brown hair looking like it hadn’t been combed in a week, slow, heavy breaths passing through his gaping mouth. He screwed up his face as if in pain when the bright beam hit his eyelids, and, in a series of half movements, attempted to shift in his seat. When this proved too difficult, Dominic’s mouth closed and his eyes opened slightly.
“Shit,” and he closed his eyes again.
This wasn’t the first time Dominic had fallen asleep here, on the driver’s seat of this taxi, out the front of this rented home. He had been working nights for almost two and a half years now; two and a half years ago, it was only supposed to be a Temporary Job, for a bit of Extra Money. There had been a Plan. But the plan had collapsed over two years ago.
With a weak groan, Dominic forced himself from the seat and out into the strangeness of the glaring sun. The last couple of years had been dominated by the artificial lights of the city and the occasional glow of the moon that seemed to have no rhythm to its appearance. The sun was only hinted at by a faint glow low in the sky at the beginning and end of his shift.
Over this time, the front door of his house had become increasingly difficult to open. To get inside required an awkward action involving inserting the key (which had never quite fit the lock anyway), pulling it out to a specific point, and then turning with an upward push until it clicked. Even then, the door would not give until persuaded by a sharp shove of the shoulder, an act that used to hurt Dominic, but with which he now become so familiar that he barely noticed it. The effort was marked only by the constant presence of a murky blue bruise on the point of his shoulder, which was usually hidden under the light blue synthetic shirt of his uniform.
This house had been part of the Plan too. Like the Job, it was supposed to be Temporary, until they had enough money for a Mortgage in a Nice Suburb. It was a single storey cube of dark red bricks, separated from the concrete footpath only by a squat dark red brick fence and a metre wide patch of grass. Dominic made his way down the short hallway that led straight from the front door to his room at the back of the house, slowly, as his eyes tried to adjust to the shadow. There was a constant lack of light in this place. These old houses that shared both side walls with the neighbours were not built with natural light in mind, and the sixty watt globes they used at night provided only a dim yellow glow.
Dominic unbuttoned his shirt that had become soft from wear, much softer than he had ever planned it to become. He remembered the night when, slipping the top button through the final small slit, he realised how easy this motion was, when once it had once been a struggle. With a heavy breath, he climbed into the old off-white sheets of his bed and closed his eyes.
“Goodnight Marie,” he whispered. Goodnight, he felt her breathe in his ear.

Dominic could see the sky when he opened his eyes, although the dingy glass of the window by his bed dimmed the colours. Light emanated from somewhere below the roofs of the houses on the other side of the alley behind his house. It glowed in a line along the fake horizon, and, higher in the sky, faded eventually to darkness. Dominic looked at his clock. Ten to six. There was a movement in the corner of his eye and he turned his head back to the window. Nothing. Then a streetlamp flickered, and became a globe of white light. The other lamps lining the road responded. Each flickered in its own time and became solid, until the street was dotted with silent sentinels that illuminated the dark. Dominic smiled to them, before pulling the blind closed and switching on his own dim yellow light to get ready to go back to the taxi it seemed he had only just left.
In the night, it was impossible to see the drivers of the other cars on the road. Their faces were obscured by the darkness and tinted windows so that it was easy to forget they existed, that the cars weren’t just empty machines passing by. Even when Dominic picked up passengers, the bubble of protective perspex surrounding him did little to change this sense. And so he had developed a habit that unsettled the people on the other side of that bubble.
“Dom,” he mumbled. This was the name She used to call him. “Dom, look over there. Someone’s waving you down.” He pulled up to the curb beside a woman who got into the car, told him where she wanted to go, and then pulled a mirror from her purse.
“Where is she going, Dom? Looks like a date, doesn’t it.” Marie used to look at herself like that before they went out, after putting the thick dark lines around her eyes, wearing her tight black top that showed the tops of her breasts, the bottom of her belly, the sides of her hips above tight black jeans that sat so nicely under the firm round bulge of her stomach. Then she would look at him with her brow drawn and ask if she looked like a pregnant teenage tart. He would smile, move towards her, touch her cheek, run his hand down the long red of her hair, and, resting it on her belly, say that she looked beautiful. For a moment, her brow would knit up tighter as though someone had pulled the end of a thread hidden behind her forehead.
“I guess that’s what I am, though, baby, eh?”
“You’re not.”
Then she would laugh and her forehead would smooth away, and she would kiss him.
The woman paid Dominic without looking at him and got out of the taxi a little too quickly so that she had to pause on the footpath to smooth her hair.
A string of trips not much different from this made up most of Dominic’s nights. He would take a break at around two o’clock and pick up a sausage roll from some other man who was just working and didn’t care to speak to a stranger at this time of the night. Then he would have half and hour to find a place to sit that wasn’t already occupied by a hobo or a drunk couple. His favourite place was the bench closest to the road in the path that led through Hyde Park. It was brown and weatherworn, and often occupied by a man in rags who yelled at any Asians who passed and had once tried to come on to Dominic. Tonight, though, it was not taken. He sat down on one end of it, looking towards the other.
“Isn’t she beautiful, Dom.”
This was where he had met Marie. It was the same time of night, overcast and cold like winter although it was only April. Dominic’s long black trench coat did little to protect him from the wind as he made his way home after a date with some girl he had known in high school, a few years before. He couldn’t remember her name now.
His shoelace had come undone and was flicking against the ground as he had walked, so he wandered over to this bench, which was then freshly painted. He had paused when, fiddling with his laces, head bent down over his knees, there was a sudden burst of sobbing from the other end of the bench. He pulled his head up and looked around to see a girl who was sitting with her legs pulled up to her chest and her forehead on her knees. Her long black skirt had slid down to her hips, revealing white legs. Her face was hidden behind a sheet of red hair and her black-clothed body disappeared into the dark around it, leaving only the flow of white and red, and the sound of broken moans.
“Do you need help?”
She raised her head slightly and looked at him around her hair.
“I lost my bag and the guy I was with at the same time. Bit of a coincidence, eh?” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing dark make up across her cheek. “You could walk me home.” And so they walked, but not to her house.
It wasn’t until the next day he found out how old she was. “Fifteen,” she said with a grin as she looked up from where she had slept nestled in his arm. He kissed her forehead and stroked the small of her back and couldn’t bring himself to care about her age.
Looking over at the bench, Dominic smiled, then went back to work, leaving the dinner’s plastic wrapping on the seat behind him.

He was called down by a grey-haired man with wrinkles around his eyes, a gut, and a woman half his age in a tight red dress. They sat in the back seat, cooing and giggling as Dominic drove them out of the city and through suburbs that eventually gave way to a winding road bordered by bush. They got out of the car at a driveway and paid Dominic, laughing and nibbling each other’s necks, and he drove back down the winding road. The headlights reached out in front of him, feeling their way over the limbs of white gums. The trees looked emaciated as shadows hid their full form and left only thin parts of branches brightly lit. Continuing to reach into the darkness, illuminating thousands of new leaves at every moment, the lights began to reveal something else. They panned up white legs, to a sheet of long red hair hanging down the back of a woman. She turned and extended an arm like the branches of the white gums, and Dominic glided to her side.
“Hi Dom.”
She looked just as he remembered. It seemed that the years had not managed to touch her. In fact, she looked so much like the picture in Dominic’s mind, the one he had been sleeping beside for the last couple of years, that he felt as though she had never left him.
“Where do you want to go?”
“We’d better get back to the house. The babysitter’s expecting us.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
The trees gradually began passing the car more quickly as Dominic relaxed his foot on the accelerator, but neither of the passengers noticed.
“Dom, baby, we almost have enough money for you to quit this shitty job. We can get a proper house for the baby, some place nice where we can grow old together.”
Dominic turned his head and smiled at her with such a spark in his eyes it seemed no one could ever be happier than he was. But some of it was borrowed light from a truck that had just appeared around a curve ahead. His face was lit brighter and brighter as they drew closer to the truck, and Marie smiled at how happy she could make him. And as they leaned toward each other the glow grew, until their lips met and they couldn’t hear the long loud note of the truck’s horn as they were engulfed by its headlights.

My weekend: an artist's interpretation

The air is tinged with the subtle chill and deep purple of evening. Light emanates from some place below the distant horizon, generating a blue glow above the darkened land. A breeze touches the back of her neck and she shivers not only from the cold, but from the surprise.
Dark hair lies on the ground like the curls of skin from peeled fruit. Emily placed a hand on her shoulder, softly turned her around and caught her breath.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You look so much like me.”
The other girl softly bent down, nuzzled her head into Emily’s shoulder, and kissed her neck.



In (incomplete?) poem form:



Light blue halo over darkening land
Cold like some lunar landscape
Silver light, a flying fish
In the sun, and
Hair on the ground like ribbon
Or the curled skin of peeled fruit.



You, lucky reader, have just witnessed a momentous occaision: my first poem (in verse...second all up). There is confusion in the poem in terms of light: I say it's dark, but the silver flash also brings light into the piece and so evolves it in a poetry way. See, poetry is allowed to do things that that that regular prose can't. If I had put that in a story I wrote it would be pointed out that it confuses the reader, like if you describe darkness by saying a lack of light in some way - it instantly brings light to it rather than just evoking darkness. But in poetry it can be used nice and symbolically. Gooo poetry! I don't like how there's nobody actually in the poem though. I want the two girls there. But I don't want to write that part right now.
Hidden message of this post: I'm a lesbian (which makes writing a piece with two 'shes' in it a little difficult). Sorry jared :(