Shades

So I'm working on a potential Hopkins essay, and apart from dwelling on the fact that I can never write in that style (although, I think imitating Tennyson or Milton is quite achievable), I am annoyed, impressed by and startled by what he (cos he thinks he's SO great) calls 'inscape'. Inscape is apparently the thingyness that things have, but is also in other things (like 'God'), yet is particularly particular to each particular thing somehow too. That is probably the most specific but also the least accurate way one can describe it without being Gerard Manley Hopkins (who himself didn't put it in very comprehensible terms). I don't think it's entirely justified, the idea suggested in his poetry of a binding energy within all living things, connected by their innate uniqueness, but it does put my head in a certain state of contemplation.

As a consequence of staying up late and writing very little of relevence to anything - perhaps imagining some poetic verse in my head and then failing to write it down before I forget it - I am a very tired person. Pro Plus, tea, Relentless and Coca Cola together make an approximate subsitute for a decent sleep until about 10 in the evening, when I really ought to think about winding down anyway. I sit in the Balliol bar today totally spaced out. I look depressed, and it attracts bizarre (although appreciated) inquiry as to my mood. I'm just totally not thinking in a normal way. My eyes are scaling the painted walls and trying to discern where paint brushes fell in the original application, in what way, and how many times on a particular spot. How big is the brush? There is no way of actually telling, but I am fascinated with the power given to everything superficial in my life. Strip everything away, and I don't quite know what's left. There's just me, but not my clothes or my hair or skin or any part of my body. Just whatever atheist approximation of a soul I can render: my consciousness, my memories, my sentience, something else? Outside of me are other people but I am particularly odd in that I don't feel any warmth most of the time, at least, not in the way or people do.

I am shapeless and obtuse and abstract, but definitely warm. Like a burning glowing nicey thing. Warm at least after the first Double Soco+Coke, but by the second more of a sitting blue flame which is uncommonly icy. This is the fundamental me, sat amongst other people's warm glowy things. Embers scatter back and forth in the natural flow of conversation of those around me, and there is a general warmth. I don't see the flames with my eyes, because my eyes start to contemplate the jukebox and the CDs and the encoded music and I also contemplate how many other places in the world are playing this song right now, and how many to the same precise second. I'm noticeably colder than them, but I don't see why. When a small, inquisitive but kind flame is passed to me it just flickers out and try pass one back but it's basically like whenever my body tries to blow into a peakflow chart: my soul is like my lungs; athsmatic ,and can't expell anything necessary to life from it.

My eyes are layers of glass and each one holds a different print of the spectrum. The outermost sees and reflects forms, and shapes, and light and physicality and time and the universe. It is contemplating this one that lets me slip deeper, to the others, to the despondence of the innermost glass panels. Others see people in terms of flames with temperatures and colours and intensities known immediately to my innermost mind (the one not in my head, but one might say 'heart') but not necessarily to whichever part of me processes things rationally. But it never lies. Others see when I'm being lied to, or focus sharply on minor movements - hair being tucked behind ears, eyes darting to the left for a split second, a finger which taps on a belt with impatience - and reads from that not the image but the meaning. All this is immensely confounding, and I just sit dazed and like the movie, confused.

I came here to write a poem about something which I saw tonight with a different, more salmon or amber lens in my eye, but I can't. I feel I need only hoard these inoffensive words, whenever I write them, even if only to burn them. Jealous greens and self-pitying blues which illuminate my own flame; the desire for something nice to happen to me, and me especially. But I find even I can't relate to my emotions most of the time, and indefinitely nor will anyone else.

Currently listening to:
The Glass Passenger by Jack's Mannequin

Currently reading:
Who knows