There is nothing quite so empowering as the option of doing something, and denying it. From the same hand, there is nothing quite so painful as being denied a choice in one's matters. Perhaps this is where all the angst you were going through originates?
Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.
A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.
The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.
Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?
The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.
Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.
In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.
Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.
Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.
But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.
Thursday 26 March 2009
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Thankful for everything
It's weird. It's not even ironic that I'm saying this. I discussed this with my spiritual counselor (Tom Phipps, ironically) and I think my conclusions were backed up. Essentially, when you're in the throes of an emotional high or meltdown, two things occur to you.
One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.
Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.
I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.
I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."
I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.
One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.
Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.
I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.
I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."
I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.
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