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.

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.

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.

Train journey drawing

:)

Alone at Christmas

I've never properly had Christmas with a boyfriend or a girlfriend in my life. I came close, one year. Some unyielding force within me yearns to know the closeness of listening to cheesy music, sat beneath mistletoe and slicing into Yule log. I would really like to have this, but I know it won't be this year. I've officially been single for about a year or so, barring the unnamed quantity of four-week distractions here and there, and it sucks so hard. Never does one's mind wander to contemplate loneliness, meaninglessness and the wonder of isolation so much as mine when it knows the sweet chill of rejection, the warm scars of unrequited temptation, or the indifferent numbness of maudlin despondency.

The good news, it won't be entirely in isolation. I will be spending Christmas with this sexy group:







Yeats was sexy in his youth, at least. In a sort of Serverus Snape way. And I know Virginia and I might have had a wonderful time together.

I hope I find someone under the tree this year.