I'm not going to mention Babylove last night too much. I had fun dancing for the first part of the night, but there weren't enough hot people there so I weighed the odds and just decided to leave.
I'm over my daytime drinking/spiritual crisis/Death-Cab-for-Cutie-on-iPod-on-repeat fetishes now and am feeling pretty darn fine. A conversation with the Devil Himself sorted me out (figuratively).
Party coming up, so that should be good. Tonight is LGBT Film Night so I think I'ma show 'Transamerica', which promises to be a hit; I might buy popcorn. I realised that I looked really good last night which is good, because it was really important that I did. I bought some new clothes and wearing them also picks up my mood. I met this really attractive girl yesterday, and I plan to find her again and ask her if she's going out that night (Kukui, Bridge, Lava/Ignite?). I realise that all the dead weights I have clung to in the past are just that: lifeless, soulless, not quite monstrous or detestable but certainly not worthy of any profound affection. I have a massive Virginia Woolf essay approaching, but I love her so it should be vaguely enjoyable. OH, and I got an email from Spilt Ink this morning and my poem "Silent Love Song" (which debuted on this very blog) got accepted for the anthology of the best poetry at Oxford University, which I'm happy about.
Life will be good. I make it so.
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Saturday 24 January 2009
Today I went to a faith healer
Last night, Tim suggests to me, I go to a faith healer. Implicit in this, maybe I'm broken, I don't know. I don't feel right, but I'm not sick and I'm quite sane (which at times I'm afraid is precisely the problem).
After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.
I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'
Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.
Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.
I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.
On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.
The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.
After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.
I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'
Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.
Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.
I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.
On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.
The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.
Saturday 10 January 2009
The Pursuer
This relates more to the past than the present, I should think. I write and publish as testimony and expulsion of the things I have thought, may continue to think, but hope to be rid of one day.
Why do I have to work so hard for so little reward? Why don't people think "Ah, that Liam's a catch, let me show him I'm interested." Where's the nightingale to press her heart against the rosebush thorn, and sing for her faith in love? Why does that faith immediately prove as much vanity as religious faith: fear-based, consolatory, mythical? I watched a cartoon of the Wilde short story that goes with it and was like, wow, love sucks. So I then went up to my room and read it - "The Nightingale and the Rose" - and in all I went about doing, thought about it, all day. Why am I the pursuer, and not the pursued? What distinguishes me from those catches, those elusive beauties and non-beauties whose hearts men like me pine for? And if I sit and think about THAT, I start to worry. It all becomes painfully clear why this happens to me again and again. Why men crush my heart to dust. Because these are the qualities of the pursued:
Beauty. I can't begin to start explaining how many ways I fall short of this by any objective measure, but I can safely assure myself - especially in mind of worry and whatnot - that clearly no one in the world finds me attractive enough to want to keep around.
Grace. From casual clumsiness, to not being au fait with the ways of romance (all I know, I know from books and failed romances), to a stupified understanding of the workings of the world. The pursued appear like angels in the wind, delicate and elusive but as if they might be carried away at any moment.
Mystery. There is nothing mysterious about a man who is honest. Every aspect of my personality is exposed either casually, in confidence or in fact of sight. I don't believe in harbouring secrets, in lying to casual strangers about whether or not they're fat or making pleasantry on the phone where I have no pleasant sentiment. Truly, the pursued are naturally of a countenance which implies there is something to be discovered!
Wealth. Of so many respects. The wealth of money, of knowledge, of experience. I have none. I have little to my name, I have aptitutdes that are unexpressed but no true wisdom, and no experience in tender age or in life lived. My life is hollow with absences which pervade its fragile structure. The pursued give off a charm of limitless potential, of such interesting facts and memories and so much to share. What do I have?
Irreverence. The most important one, and within it, all of the above. They don't care about anything but in this is the illusion that they might harbour some deep-abiding passion, or potential for change which as experience (what little I have) had told me will always fail to materialise. And it's always apparent from the beginning. I have none: I express motivation in my calculated apathy, I express desire in my every glance and inquisition, I express hope in my every sorrow that all is lost.
So am I "special" this time, or any time? Time will tell. My enemy, time. That word: inevitability, haunts me from before I knew what I was writing about when I wrote about the boy at the window those days and days ago. The boy I had never conceptualised as one (and was, inspired by one in the past). The boy I do not know and will never know, every one of them.
Why do I have to work so hard for so little reward? Why don't people think "Ah, that Liam's a catch, let me show him I'm interested." Where's the nightingale to press her heart against the rosebush thorn, and sing for her faith in love? Why does that faith immediately prove as much vanity as religious faith: fear-based, consolatory, mythical? I watched a cartoon of the Wilde short story that goes with it and was like, wow, love sucks. So I then went up to my room and read it - "The Nightingale and the Rose" - and in all I went about doing, thought about it, all day. Why am I the pursuer, and not the pursued? What distinguishes me from those catches, those elusive beauties and non-beauties whose hearts men like me pine for? And if I sit and think about THAT, I start to worry. It all becomes painfully clear why this happens to me again and again. Why men crush my heart to dust. Because these are the qualities of the pursued:
Beauty. I can't begin to start explaining how many ways I fall short of this by any objective measure, but I can safely assure myself - especially in mind of worry and whatnot - that clearly no one in the world finds me attractive enough to want to keep around.
Grace. From casual clumsiness, to not being au fait with the ways of romance (all I know, I know from books and failed romances), to a stupified understanding of the workings of the world. The pursued appear like angels in the wind, delicate and elusive but as if they might be carried away at any moment.
Mystery. There is nothing mysterious about a man who is honest. Every aspect of my personality is exposed either casually, in confidence or in fact of sight. I don't believe in harbouring secrets, in lying to casual strangers about whether or not they're fat or making pleasantry on the phone where I have no pleasant sentiment. Truly, the pursued are naturally of a countenance which implies there is something to be discovered!
Wealth. Of so many respects. The wealth of money, of knowledge, of experience. I have none. I have little to my name, I have aptitutdes that are unexpressed but no true wisdom, and no experience in tender age or in life lived. My life is hollow with absences which pervade its fragile structure. The pursued give off a charm of limitless potential, of such interesting facts and memories and so much to share. What do I have?
Irreverence. The most important one, and within it, all of the above. They don't care about anything but in this is the illusion that they might harbour some deep-abiding passion, or potential for change which as experience (what little I have) had told me will always fail to materialise. And it's always apparent from the beginning. I have none: I express motivation in my calculated apathy, I express desire in my every glance and inquisition, I express hope in my every sorrow that all is lost.
So am I "special" this time, or any time? Time will tell. My enemy, time. That word: inevitability, haunts me from before I knew what I was writing about when I wrote about the boy at the window those days and days ago. The boy I had never conceptualised as one (and was, inspired by one in the past). The boy I do not know and will never know, every one of them.
Wednesday 7 January 2009
Why do I do what I do when I do the things I do
I can't now conceal my thoughts in verse. Which I can never do very well, anyway. It's exactly 2.30 as I begin writing this and I'm awake for no good reason. Well, the reason was good. But no, but yes, but let me continue. Ulysses is beside me, still lodged on page sixty-six. I have to reach page seven-one-eight by Tuesday. I was supposed to be reading it, but I let myself get distracted. I turned to face away, and the song I set to play, spun me down the stairs, and cast me unawares. I returned to this chair and sat and spoke.
The silent words we say in fingers against a keyboard. Why do I say them here when I wouldn't say them if I had to press them through my lips? Lips. I long for lips. That is part of the problem. I sit and am stirred ("for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"), and should learn to quell the tell-tale beat. Because games are played by the few, but still there are rules to life which transcend toying. I define my life by trying to break its fourth wall. I was told this once, in my mock-Oxford-interview. And it has stuck with me. I'm pushing reality as if I were a fictional character and I am simply toying with its meanings and its words. I am the product of an internal struggle to get the things I want in 'reality', the safe way, and this other timeless desire to make everything mean nothing by pressing upon meaning.
I feel like I've come to some great cathartic epiphany and write without certainty that I will publish this. The things I never publish are always the best. Do I destroy the quality of the pouring of my soul if it's edited to suit an audience? Could some terrible disaster - worse than the one which awakens my existential crisis - be incited by its genesis? ("Poets are not so scrupulous as you. Nowadays, a broken heart can run to many editions.") I think, I think, I think. I sit and think and think too much but never enough about the things I should be doing but rather I think to analyse the words in ways they were never meant to be. And then, the attached issue, is that I hope the other person can read words as I write them and see in them what I want them to see. The double-meaning, the no-meaning, the differing meaning - and then further still do unlike me and answer with conviction; "Yes! And where these meanings contrast, dissolve and collide, I say yes to all."
What is man if not the product of his fears, his desires, his attempts at being something else and efforts to stifle the thing within. The love that dear/dare not speak it's name, Joyce tells of Wilde's; but none dare speak any name, Wildean or Shakespearian. Never for me, anyway. In the act of naming we do so wrong! Naming takes identity. Naming takes the truth. Naming bubbles the meaning to the surface and adds so much to what was there before. How often a poem is changed by its title to some other twisted meaning not in its text - the title is only to place this thing, this thing (THING! the best word in the English language, I DECLARE!) within a box of glass, at an arm's length, in particular lighting and with tinted spectacles. The distortion does not affect our comprehension of the reality if we focus! But focusing brings us in closer to the reality. REALITY. WHERE DO I STAND? (In reality.) I mean, am I here, toying with words and asking the unaskable and because I wish to change the course of the novel, to make Dharma & Greg of what could be Dickens?
Oh salty, vague, and deliberate. HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.
But here, with your company again, I remember why I was so glad you disappeared from my heart.
This is the blog of pain! Pain I cannot describe.
Pain owed to no particular, no man, no woman, not even myself but certainly mine. Its genesis, my own. GENESIS: said twice before now. Why does this word sit in my skull? WHY DO I ASK IF IT DOES? WHY AM I TAKING MY THOUGHTS AND TRYING TO FIND OUT "WHAT IS LIAM THINKING?" I am thinking my own thoughts but I wish were two people. One on the couch and one in the chair. One to listen and one to speak and then afterwards, make silent.
I am elated with a joy, or was, or can be. I am now not in the throes of time. But now I am, because I glance to the clock; how time has taken my mind to its corner for these constant numbers: 2.53. Where comes the four? Now. As if sensing my expectation of it. Do people think like clocks? So rhythmically yet circular, mechanical and unthinking yet with so much unintended profundity? Do we mean the things we say we mean? Life, brings life, brings life. What of death? What is death?
I need a drink. 2:55.
The silent words we say in fingers against a keyboard. Why do I say them here when I wouldn't say them if I had to press them through my lips? Lips. I long for lips. That is part of the problem. I sit and am stirred ("for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"), and should learn to quell the tell-tale beat. Because games are played by the few, but still there are rules to life which transcend toying. I define my life by trying to break its fourth wall. I was told this once, in my mock-Oxford-interview. And it has stuck with me. I'm pushing reality as if I were a fictional character and I am simply toying with its meanings and its words. I am the product of an internal struggle to get the things I want in 'reality', the safe way, and this other timeless desire to make everything mean nothing by pressing upon meaning.
I feel like I've come to some great cathartic epiphany and write without certainty that I will publish this. The things I never publish are always the best. Do I destroy the quality of the pouring of my soul if it's edited to suit an audience? Could some terrible disaster - worse than the one which awakens my existential crisis - be incited by its genesis? ("Poets are not so scrupulous as you. Nowadays, a broken heart can run to many editions.") I think, I think, I think. I sit and think and think too much but never enough about the things I should be doing but rather I think to analyse the words in ways they were never meant to be. And then, the attached issue, is that I hope the other person can read words as I write them and see in them what I want them to see. The double-meaning, the no-meaning, the differing meaning - and then further still do unlike me and answer with conviction; "Yes! And where these meanings contrast, dissolve and collide, I say yes to all."
What is man if not the product of his fears, his desires, his attempts at being something else and efforts to stifle the thing within. The love that dear/dare not speak it's name, Joyce tells of Wilde's; but none dare speak any name, Wildean or Shakespearian. Never for me, anyway. In the act of naming we do so wrong! Naming takes identity. Naming takes the truth. Naming bubbles the meaning to the surface and adds so much to what was there before. How often a poem is changed by its title to some other twisted meaning not in its text - the title is only to place this thing, this thing (THING! the best word in the English language, I DECLARE!) within a box of glass, at an arm's length, in particular lighting and with tinted spectacles. The distortion does not affect our comprehension of the reality if we focus! But focusing brings us in closer to the reality. REALITY. WHERE DO I STAND? (In reality.) I mean, am I here, toying with words and asking the unaskable and because I wish to change the course of the novel, to make Dharma & Greg of what could be Dickens?
Oh salty, vague, and deliberate. HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.
But here, with your company again, I remember why I was so glad you disappeared from my heart.
This is the blog of pain! Pain I cannot describe.
Pain owed to no particular, no man, no woman, not even myself but certainly mine. Its genesis, my own. GENESIS: said twice before now. Why does this word sit in my skull? WHY DO I ASK IF IT DOES? WHY AM I TAKING MY THOUGHTS AND TRYING TO FIND OUT "WHAT IS LIAM THINKING?" I am thinking my own thoughts but I wish were two people. One on the couch and one in the chair. One to listen and one to speak and then afterwards, make silent.
I am elated with a joy, or was, or can be. I am now not in the throes of time. But now I am, because I glance to the clock; how time has taken my mind to its corner for these constant numbers: 2.53. Where comes the four? Now. As if sensing my expectation of it. Do people think like clocks? So rhythmically yet circular, mechanical and unthinking yet with so much unintended profundity? Do we mean the things we say we mean? Life, brings life, brings life. What of death? What is death?
I need a drink. 2:55.
Sunday 4 January 2009
"Write about me instead"
A darkling thrush says not too much,
About the rhymes of life,
Nor whitish pages on loss, and love,
Of those who liked to write.
Woman much loved, you I wonder
How did he make you feel?
Could you see his eyes, and big cracked lips
And know they make him real?
Oh bugler boy at first communion, I say
The smartest boy in Wales,
If only you were sat beside me
My heart might seem impaled...
For what was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this boy?
Libido drained yet not asleep
I played, I touched, I toyed
It little profits that an idle king
Should sit upon a throne
When sat on princely poof beside him
Is not a poof to call his own?
Alas! for this grey shadow, once a man-
The unsightly son of souls
Could do a deed with you in hand
And do it till grown old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
Your voice will be the same
I will kiss each and every bit
Be you blind or deaf or lame
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
So let's not talk of age
Let's talk of bright and happy things
So we might set the stage
The night is darkening round me
But at least your lamp is on
Toucha-toucha-touch me
Before the night is gone
I know not how it falls on me
This feeling of transcendent grace
But when it falls away from me
I long to see your face
Fra Pandolf's hands would work busily a day
Should you they have to paint
I'm running out of quotes to bring
My manner losing quaint
I hunt the house through,
And here I find, this final, final rhyme
So let's not delay, let's just smile
I'm seeing you in nine days time
About the rhymes of life,
Nor whitish pages on loss, and love,
Of those who liked to write.
Woman much loved, you I wonder
How did he make you feel?
Could you see his eyes, and big cracked lips
And know they make him real?
Oh bugler boy at first communion, I say
The smartest boy in Wales,
If only you were sat beside me
My heart might seem impaled...
For what was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this boy?
Libido drained yet not asleep
I played, I touched, I toyed
It little profits that an idle king
Should sit upon a throne
When sat on princely poof beside him
Is not a poof to call his own?
Alas! for this grey shadow, once a man-
The unsightly son of souls
Could do a deed with you in hand
And do it till grown old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
Your voice will be the same
I will kiss each and every bit
Be you blind or deaf or lame
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
So let's not talk of age
Let's talk of bright and happy things
So we might set the stage
The night is darkening round me
But at least your lamp is on
Toucha-toucha-touch me
Before the night is gone
I know not how it falls on me
This feeling of transcendent grace
But when it falls away from me
I long to see your face
Fra Pandolf's hands would work busily a day
Should you they have to paint
I'm running out of quotes to bring
My manner losing quaint
I hunt the house through,
And here I find, this final, final rhyme
So let's not delay, let's just smile
I'm seeing you in nine days time
Thursday 1 January 2009
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