I haven't thought about you in so long. How long, you ask. Today I was counting in my head and I forgot about you. For a moment in time, you were simply a number. "The fifth". The unnamed. It's like you fell off the edge of my brain for a second. And this was deeply unsettling. Because between you and me, you were my favorite.
But maybe now the colors of that nostalgia is somehow whitewashed. fading in spots, like a picture taken in the sun. Maybe the brighter something is, the more quickly the exposure washes it out.
Let it be what it is, I always thought about us. Because deep down I always knew you would never be mine. I was always aware of how high I was to never reach.
Determined to learn from Icarus, me and my waxed wings weren't going to suffer the same fate.
**
Friday, April 30, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
real and wonderful
Everything you can imagine is real.
-Pablo Picasso
Isn’t this something wonderful? It’s wonderful because the things I imagine can be quite wonderful. It’s wonderful because the possibility of something other than reality is wonderful. It’s also wonderful because it validates our most buried thoughts, which we don't think are quite so wonderful. But maybe, like Picasso says, we are not as crazy as we’d judge ourselves to be.
At the same time, I hate to think that these not-so-wonderful things are real too. Sometimes, when I’m not so careful or controlled with my thoughts, when they go on autopilot, I have this recurring strand that pops up without prompting, it goes something like: i love you, don’t go. And I have no idea whom I am saying this to. Everything in my ‘real’ life is in order and no one is going as far as I know. Yet it always manages to break the surface from time to time. This probably sounds a little crazy, but I (though maybe I’m just desperately clinging to strings here) honestly think that everyone has these kind of thoughts once in a while, floating around and unattached to any sort of justification, which we use to tie around so many silly things--in any case, it could just be that some people (intentionally or not) don’t quite catch them as they fly by.
Because have you ever tried to really pay attention to how much you think in a given minute? It goes lightening fast. If you typed it all up the words would run down the street before you could see the commas, Is it so impossible that in those infinite thoughts, that one or two are churned out as ‘defective’, so to speak? And by ‘defective’ I mean irrational, not built on rhymes--though whether they are any less real…
is really a question for Mr. Picasso.
**
-Pablo Picasso
Isn’t this something wonderful? It’s wonderful because the things I imagine can be quite wonderful. It’s wonderful because the possibility of something other than reality is wonderful. It’s also wonderful because it validates our most buried thoughts, which we don't think are quite so wonderful. But maybe, like Picasso says, we are not as crazy as we’d judge ourselves to be.
At the same time, I hate to think that these not-so-wonderful things are real too. Sometimes, when I’m not so careful or controlled with my thoughts, when they go on autopilot, I have this recurring strand that pops up without prompting, it goes something like: i love you, don’t go. And I have no idea whom I am saying this to. Everything in my ‘real’ life is in order and no one is going as far as I know. Yet it always manages to break the surface from time to time. This probably sounds a little crazy, but I (though maybe I’m just desperately clinging to strings here) honestly think that everyone has these kind of thoughts once in a while, floating around and unattached to any sort of justification, which we use to tie around so many silly things--in any case, it could just be that some people (intentionally or not) don’t quite catch them as they fly by.
Because have you ever tried to really pay attention to how much you think in a given minute? It goes lightening fast. If you typed it all up the words would run down the street before you could see the commas, Is it so impossible that in those infinite thoughts, that one or two are churned out as ‘defective’, so to speak? And by ‘defective’ I mean irrational, not built on rhymes--though whether they are any less real…
is really a question for Mr. Picasso.
**
Thursday, April 15, 2010
redefine
Today my professor talked of this concept of love, how there are different ones across times and cultures. Of our own, she said: "we have this notion of love that must necessarily contain reciprocity." Essentially, we cannot understand a love that isn't reciprocated. We think it isn't love. An unrequited crush, maybe. A mistake, definitely. But a love, never.
Then I saw this Bollywood where the man who reciprocates his love's love dies and passes her on to another man. The girl said: you love so much that you were going to leave love for me even after you die? Even if it's a love that isn't yours?
Later her mother told her: Make a mistake today, it's a girl's decision. Realize it tomorrow, it's a woman's regret.
There's all this time constraint almost, on choosing from a pool that doesn't include the ideal. In Chinese there's a word that comes up repeatedly with the talk of love, 缘分. It can be translated to something like 'fate' or 'destiny' or 'compatibility', specifically relating to two lovers. Usually, it's used in longing utterances, loaded with unfulfillment, perhaps from a star-crossed heroine's mouth: there isn't enough 缘分 between us.
I've always rejected that idea. What is this about some arbitrary, intangible force having a say in such an important part of my life? How can something other than myself prevent me from living my ideal life?
But I think now the better question should be, why should I even define love to be significant part of an ideal life? Isn't it possible to only possess it a short time, or only as an incomplete, one-sided ghost of a thing--or, horror of horrors, not at all?
The possibility is so huge and incomprehensible to me I hardly know what to do with it. It's here like that still still lake in the previous post. Looking at it face to face, I come up a little short of breath.
**
Then I saw this Bollywood where the man who reciprocates his love's love dies and passes her on to another man. The girl said: you love so much that you were going to leave love for me even after you die? Even if it's a love that isn't yours?
Later her mother told her: Make a mistake today, it's a girl's decision. Realize it tomorrow, it's a woman's regret.
There's all this time constraint almost, on choosing from a pool that doesn't include the ideal. In Chinese there's a word that comes up repeatedly with the talk of love, 缘分. It can be translated to something like 'fate' or 'destiny' or 'compatibility', specifically relating to two lovers. Usually, it's used in longing utterances, loaded with unfulfillment, perhaps from a star-crossed heroine's mouth: there isn't enough 缘分 between us.
I've always rejected that idea. What is this about some arbitrary, intangible force having a say in such an important part of my life? How can something other than myself prevent me from living my ideal life?
But I think now the better question should be, why should I even define love to be significant part of an ideal life? Isn't it possible to only possess it a short time, or only as an incomplete, one-sided ghost of a thing--or, horror of horrors, not at all?
The possibility is so huge and incomprehensible to me I hardly know what to do with it. It's here like that still still lake in the previous post. Looking at it face to face, I come up a little short of breath.
**
Sunday, April 11, 2010
aporia
One of my former teachers just posted about something like an existential crisis, when everything that we ever believed in to get to the meaning of life, intellect, learning, academia, philosophy, seem futile to get anywhere at all.
He used the image of a screen door, unhinged and swaying in the wind, coming off slightly and yet still creeking and "making too much noise".
As for me, I always think of that scene in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when Harry and Dumbledore enters the dark cave, and there's this vast, unknown, creepily calm yet oddly inviting lake before them. And for that moment, you feel like you've ventured past the rest only to arrive at something still more frustrating and deeply frightening, feeling like you might have been better off not asking the things we did or thinking the things we did.
It's kind of tortuous to have that mind. Still, everyone goes through it in some way or another. And we all get through fine. And that's enough for now.
Right?
**
He used the image of a screen door, unhinged and swaying in the wind, coming off slightly and yet still creeking and "making too much noise".
As for me, I always think of that scene in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when Harry and Dumbledore enters the dark cave, and there's this vast, unknown, creepily calm yet oddly inviting lake before them. And for that moment, you feel like you've ventured past the rest only to arrive at something still more frustrating and deeply frightening, feeling like you might have been better off not asking the things we did or thinking the things we did.
It's kind of tortuous to have that mind. Still, everyone goes through it in some way or another. And we all get through fine. And that's enough for now.
Right?
**
Thursday, April 1, 2010
allure
My fiction teacher (for an hour of my life) said the best way to get better at writing is to just write. On paper, (pun intended), that sounds like a great idea. But I feel like I go through these dry spells when nothing inspires me, and it's usually periods of happiness. I just realized this means pretty much only angst inspires me. And that is just so cliched...it possibly makes me more angsty.
And then my professor goes: who was that writer who said, to write well, you must first go out and live? Is it within my purvey to assign you guys to go out this quarter...and live?
That sounds like a line out of dead poet society or possibly some retired book from an author trying to make a comeback sequel. But at the moment I felt totally inspired. The trouble with this kind of assignment is I have no idea how to start it. I feel like all my stories come from mistakes, which are fun and inspire a great deal of creativity, but also judgment, disillusionment, and mostly rejection of some sort. (All of which make more interesting topics than contentment and warm spring days)
I suppose anticipation is something of a possibility. But who can write about the unknown? Also, who wants to live their life in anticipation? Its charms only work for the first hour or so, then it becomes dreadfully boring. I suppose that's the problem with goodness in our worlds, they're so positively boring. Nothing God has to offer draws us in like Dante's Hell or Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee...
**
And then my professor goes: who was that writer who said, to write well, you must first go out and live? Is it within my purvey to assign you guys to go out this quarter...and live?
That sounds like a line out of dead poet society or possibly some retired book from an author trying to make a comeback sequel. But at the moment I felt totally inspired. The trouble with this kind of assignment is I have no idea how to start it. I feel like all my stories come from mistakes, which are fun and inspire a great deal of creativity, but also judgment, disillusionment, and mostly rejection of some sort. (All of which make more interesting topics than contentment and warm spring days)
I suppose anticipation is something of a possibility. But who can write about the unknown? Also, who wants to live their life in anticipation? Its charms only work for the first hour or so, then it becomes dreadfully boring. I suppose that's the problem with goodness in our worlds, they're so positively boring. Nothing God has to offer draws us in like Dante's Hell or Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee...
**