Diagram of Love

It's best to try imagining things in shapes;
Lets you see the whole world on a page
(Inside your head) and look carefully
At the rougher edges, the obtuse bends...
Where the heart has warped. Emotion sends
Its tiresome delays across wilfully
Mis-managed roofs and a cracking stage
Man, within the shape, is reduced to ape.

But shapes are more complex than at first we imagine
So we delve in deeper, forced to re-examine.
And its lines are far longer than first we thought
And its contours less level, but mismatched:
Declines and dips, and sharper relief was attached
And the battle to connect called "love" was fought
With one of us uphill. And your war brought famine,
To an already pestilent heart, now starved compassion.

So outside the shape the ape makes an Apollo,
But also wise, he would like to think of himself.
And he's never truly out of it, always linked by thread:
If only to perceive from greater distance, detachment.
If only to escape the heart's foul entrapment.
Which would dissolve the dying love, make dying dead...
And poor the adornments once revered for their wealth...
Just an empty shape then, a box. Merely hollow.

Symmetry is preferred when the love is anew,
But calculating love is wont to stew,
And boil over into the unpredictable,
As exciting then as it was delectable,
But again we're in some familiar pattern.
Guided by old verses; love's familiar lantern.
This couple will not do for couplets, alas
Their coupling was illusion, now since passed.

Regain symmetry. Regain control,
I beg of the air, the ground, the sea...
I am asking: make fresh and make whole
What is faint and illusory.
I don't fancy going A-B-A-B,
When I know our love I'm told,
Is beyond the letter C,
Forget what you're told, ma chérie,
Let's just repeat. Let's stay with B.

Break free, break free, disregard this echo
Of acoustics from times past, where memory was allowed
To run free and recall some past day, some nearby stanza...
When love isn't confined so easily, when it is best told in blank.
Except when it's perfect. But love is so much greater than the sonnet
That captures one of its facets: an obsession, a bemusement,
A bewilderment at nature, some new sensation...
All these belong to the power of the rhyme but disregard this a moment
If you want to seek the truth. Seek the truth.
Let's escape this construction. Let's shatter the diagram. Break free.

Set me free. Let me go of this! Fine, fine: let's rhyme.
If that's what you require, cruel muse, whose SMS
Shakes with a rumble and a light, when I haven't the time
To fuck with your metre, to put away bad words, to bless
You all over again with some kind new description.
I'm only a man and this is my prescription:
Take one set of perfect diction and throw it to the wind.
Take every thing you've heard about poetry, and love,
And give it to the air, let it all rescind...
And if we have faith in rhyme and poetry, then above
May come at last its return, its repetition, its relevance
To the world that cannot deny its power or its elegance.
So just write something dear, it's called "catharsis",
Get it out of your system, make a point of two,
Drop a reference to the Bible, name-drop Saul of Tarsus,
That's how a poem's made, isn't that true?

So let's clear our heads a second. Let's cool it down.
Regain the rhyme. Regain the structure. Regain the symmetry.
Step outside the Diagram of Love, and your frown
Might recede if it can perceive the divinity...
Of something not in me or in you (but sometimes in our contrivance)
Some other goddamn web rocking with our connivance...
To pretend there ever was a romance at all.
And from the reliefs to the dips, what a fall might befall
The falling lover... trapped again in ABAB...
Trapped again in those sounds, the conformity.
Text me later, get back to me.

Point, counterpoint. Incomprehensible, I should hope.

So, I'm working on this structure. At first, quite unintentionally.

Lala. Red. lal la. ----------------- Blue. //

Lala. Girls. lal la. ---------------- Boys. //

Lala. Fathers. lal la. ---------------- Mothers. //

Di-di-dum lala. Blue. ------------------ Red. //

...but later, I'm starting to think it's one of my key styles... it's obtuse and quite well-hidden but definitely identifiable.

Rubbish description, but vague enough, for my purposes.

But perhaps life decided this pattern for me. It happens, it always happens.

The standard format is:

La-la. Happiness. happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappy. SAD.

but variations include:

La-la. Love. lovelovelovelovelove. HEARTBREAK.
Di-dum. Girlfriend. girlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirl. SINGLE. (or, perhaps boyboyboySINGLE)
&
Ta-rah. Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes. NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

But then I start to wonder if it's actually a symmetrical event?

Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.------------ > Happiness. ---------> Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.

With the good thing in the middle, obscuring my sight of the bad. Is happiness a tangible emotion, something which can be affected with permanence?

Or need it only ever be the eye of the storm?

Makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, forcemeto... oh there you go?

I'll try this as a poem. Perhaps comprehensible but wilfully obscure is preferable.

Oooooh, something to [blog] about. -- A Happy Blog.

Yeah, lame About a Boy / Badly Drawn Boy reference.
But I guess, it is about one.
Then again isn't it always?

Coming back from holidays, to Oxford, my mood has been soaring continually higher and higher. Here's an episode from Brighton, to illustrate how heart-wrenchingly awful it all is.

Scene: Ext. club. Dark, dingey, hazy with cigarette smoke, lit with purple, loud with muffled music.
Me: [spewing out months-old confession] I love you.
Them: I love you too.
Me: Really?
Classical music rises, lighting warms, camera pulls in for closeup.
Them: Yes!
[they kiss]
Music suddenly stops.
Old man drug dealer: Hey.
[other two kiss, and grope]
Black and white.

Anyway. All is well. All is good. Mock exams went smoothly, I think. Real exams are set to go well enough. I am seeing myself positively more often. I haven't actually been sad in a while.

Naturally, when I am writing (not for blogs, but for possibly commercial end) the entire tone is inflected with a sort of wistfulness, which I'm fond of.

I feel like on the horizon of this beautiful lake I'm sailing on, there is something that I really want to happen. Which is set to happen. Which has the possibility to be magnificent. I'm not like, raving about this in person to people, but I feel like everything is about to Go Right For Me.

So, why am I waiting?

I Wish I Was An Eighties Teenager

So, a day later after my "1,920 calories!" freakout I discover that in my food-deprived state I mistook kJ for kcal and got it all wrong. The blog before this one is just an example of my capacity to end the world over nothing. This below is going to be a rant about specific novels and their recent movie adaptations, a stark deviation from my usual emo rants about my life being so terrible, WAH, WAH, WAH.

Finishing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I realise I have never had my heart broken and lifted and broken again quite so many times in one day, all in one novel. I suppose this is probably due to seeing myself in the lead, Art Bechstein, to some extent. And to the other character, Arthur Lecomte. It irritates me wholeheartedly that now, the Hollywood adaptation by Rawson Marshall Thurber of Dodgeball fame complete excises Arthur from the film, compresses his character traits into a supporting character who is brought into the foreground and entirely adds a new love interest, as if to create an excuse to cast the much-overused Sienna Miller. In taking the Cleveland character and making him a bisexual biker kid instead of the devil-may-care straight guy, they destroy the film's message about sexless friendship. In removing Arthur, they make EVERYthing that happens in the novel entirely implausible and impossible. In removing the words of the author for those of the arrogant screenwriter, you alienate the fans of the book. Naturally, what would be (as with the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys), movie gold has been transformed into a dreck forgettable film that from release day onwards cries out for a remake. I will see it, to watch the train wreck.

Also this month in America, is the movie adaptation of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. Due to a combination of backwards American social mores, and (ironically, given Ellis' undeserved controversies) institutionalised Hollywood misogyny, the film we are given is now one about Amber Heard's breasts and soulless debauchery. Thanks to producer mishandling, the film has strayed far from the original premise of the adaptation, while remaining somehow quite similar to the source material. After taking away the director who worked on the script and satirical vision for three years - who had something more like The Rules of Attraction, presumably intended - and replacing him with an Australian director known for boring movies, who has never seen 1980s Los Angeles, they have destroyed this movie beyond recognition. Both movies, while fundamentally very opposed (Ellis' nihilism vs. Chabon's sentimentality), have similarities: pretty American youths fucking around and experimenting in 1980s, and the mutual miscasting of the admittedly delectable Jon Foster. Nevertheless, an Ellis adaptation remains a must-see for me.

I am spurred to read more Michael Chabon by the powerful book, which much like The Informers, has inspired me to no end. Although, I can't imagine the inspirations gained from these two distinct readings as capably coexisting within one attempt at a novel.

A 100g Bag of Mini Eggs

There are 1,920 calories (kcal) in a single 100g, yellow bag of mini eggs. This is precisely the right amount to end my whole world. This is agonising. Let's roll back against the winds of time, let the Earth spin backwards on its axis for a moment, and take ourselves back in time 3¹/₂ weeks. The sky is a brighter shade of whatever ambivalent colour we can conclude this is: greyish, murky, misty blorange, sprinkled with toxic glitter, stagnant like the depressing glitz in carbonated water. My arms and heels are equally tired from taking a long train, carrying all my essential possessions in a suitcase, from the comfort of my green, warm and friend-filled quad in Balliol all the way to my timelost little hicktown of Southwick where no one knows who George Eliot is. My room in Oxford is gutted and bare, and my room in Brighton is by contrast full of the forgotten trappings of youth, and memories of schoolyards and friends who like I did the trapping, forgot about me. It is only when I am nearly at Southwick (catching a connecting train from Southampton to Hove, somewhere on that stretch...) that I begin to realise that my own thoughts on the train have been identical to Neville's hateful inner monologue in The Waves, in a similar scene, and it brings my mood somewhere deep underground to know that I am so easily captured by another's words, unintentionally. I put down Lunar Park, which I have just begun reading, into the bag with The Great Gatsby, which I have just finished on the same journey, and prepare myself for the trudge up Southwick Street, past Southwick Square, back to monotony.

And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.

However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.

I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.

I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.

I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)

I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.

(He relents.) Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.

The beauty of inaction; 2pn

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.

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.