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Monday, August 29, 2005
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Everyday Epiphanies
The 4 AM drive to the airport. A half moon peering over the night, like a white face above a wall of dark; a red star high up; the big-brushed fox startled into flight across the street; the young couple kissing in the flare of headlights, leaning into each other and against a wheelie bin.
The flat plain of Essex sprinkled with lights in the black; tendrils of mist wavering over the road in the arc of the headlights; a vast white stretch limo on the opposite carriageway, heading back from some London night out; the empty sweep of the motorway under the grainy amber lights.
Night fading up into dawn; the first jet's white lights rising like a bright star against slashes of silhouette clouds; the sky slowly turning milky, grey, blue. A scattering of dew-shiny cars under the car park's towering lamps.
In the terminal, realising how everyone looks so much...better at the airport: how the imminence of departure and separation, and the proximity of sudden, fiery death humanise us, individualise us; make us aware, painfully late, of the fragile envelopes of love we live inside. Sitting alone at a metal-topped table, drinking strong coffee, you think about your loved ones, and about how you'll miss them; and always, always in the stillness and silence, she - the beloved - seeps into life bit by bit, suffusing your consciousness in poignantly vivid memories and untouchable details; the unattainable one who would make it all all right, who would make everything fall into place if only you could be with her for ever.
Sun up. Vast fields of golden light and glare in the sky and on the newly-lit earth; cables of mist spanning the still-shadowed valleys like suspension bridges; smudges of smoke or steam rising from freshly-harvested farms, bakeries, light industrial complexes; the dazzle of the sun in the wing mirror; the sudden cool shadows in the motorway cuttings; fat-bodied aircraft taking off into the vast sky, following each other in a standard climb up into the light, where their curved bellies flash white as they turn into the sunlight.
Slicing past the articulated lorry crabbing along in the inside lane, your body momentarily in tune with your gears, steering wheel, and indicator control stalk; the unconscious consultation of the mirrors, the split-second-perfect judgement of your smooth lane changes. The hills, grain elevators and electricity pylons vivified with early morning light; the sense that life - the whole world of senses, and textures, and contours, and light - could fall together in the right way - slot together with the solidity and rightness of a familiar song's scintillating, soaring chorus.
Regret: thinking back over your life and realising how those vivid times of emotional richness and deep, deep emotional engagement are so few, like jewelled islands of colour and intensity in a dusk-grey sea of habit and drift. And how love - especially love - makes those times glow with potential, and electricity, and hope. And how, even when you're on one of those islands, there's a bit of you that's half-expecting to have to put out to sea again at any moment, back out into that featureless, miserable gloom. And how different life could look if you only ever saw the island, and didn't think about that grey sea.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Monday, August 22, 2005
Friday, August 19, 2005
Thursday, August 18, 2005
coincidence
just moved a load of stuff into my parents' spare room while i'm between rents. looked over at bookstack 15a this evening, and noticed these three books resting serendipitously on top of each other:
* The Plague (Camus)
* Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe)
* Dorian (Self)...a big theme of which (apparently) is AIDS, formerly known as 'the gay plague'
I worry that I might be starting to make weird conspiracy theory connections. Freak.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Signs
Finally, it all starts to make sense. I've been blind - blind. So obvious.
The birds are signalling to me. The gulls.
Last winter, at the reservoir, as the last of the sun pierced the dusk with cold white shafts of light, the gulls wheeled and spun over the water, white breast feathers flickering in and out of the light. Morse code. And I was too stupid to see it.
But now...now they've found me again, and they're speaking more clearly: last night, as I sat in the garden - ten gulls went over, in a vee. Tonight, ten gulls, in a dead straight line astern - the letter 'I'. V. I. Words forming: victim? virgin? virus? victory?
Or is it a number code? V and I. Five and one. Or six? Hmm. Think, think: Ten gulls, twice, is twenty. Plus the figure 'one' from tonight...twenty one. Multiply by the number of nights - two - and you get forty two. Ringing any bells? Forty two: the answer, the ultimate answer, to life, the universe, and...you know the rest. Signs. Signs in the sky.
Tomorrow night will make things clearer. I'll be watching the sky.
Monday, August 15, 2005
the meaning of life
Been reading a book called "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor Frankl. (Too lazy for hyperlinks today...)
Frankl was a prisoner (and doctor) in Auschwitz, and the first - and most substantial - section of the book is about his experiences there, and about his reflections on the psychology of the inmates. This leads on to ruminations about existential meaning. (I don't mean that to sound glib.)
I take two things away from this book: (i) Something relatively 'trivial' - nothing in my life could possibly, possibly be as terrible as what those people experienced. This is sobering and humbling in itself; (ii) You can find meaning in anything if you look at it in the appropriate way - even in terrible suffering. What this means to me - at this stage in my life - is that I should accept that suffering and imperfection are inevitable parts of existence. Once I accept that, everything becomes simpler: I no longer have to battle against my profound disappointment that nothing is perfect, or rage with frustration that I don't get everything (and everyone...) that I want. Simple.
There's a line in Band of Brothers where an officer tells a petrified soldier that what's stopping that soldier functioning is his failure to "accept the fact that you're already dead." There's something analagous here for me. This isn't a counsel of despair - rather, one of realism.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
d r e a m s c a p e
Argh...woke up this morning at three AM, disturbed into wakefulness by my dream: an episode of Six Feet Under directed by David Lynch. I knew it was time to wake up when a CGI baby, sat at a white table on a cafe terrace bleached with cold light, engaged in a discussion about mortality with a pair of wizened 100 year old twins (one male, one female) who spoke in Romanian accents and were being pushed around in a double bath chair by a nurse in Victorian garb.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Is it just me, or...
...does it seem amazing that love - being in love - can still grip you so strongly, and affect you so physically, just as much at 43 as at 16?
It seems pretty amazing to me.
I've been gripped by one of those hopeless unrequited passions for...oh, ages, and it's been affecting my moods in a profound way for months and months. I've only really started to see that really clearly in the last month or so (before that, I'd been distracting myself via various substances and displacement activities).
Now that I see this powerful, hopeless passion for what it is, I find myself wobbling between three interconnected places: (i) incredulity that I'm still emotionally open enough to feel as strongly and all-consumingly as this; (ii) annoyance at myself for not being able to break out of the ridiculous loop of hope/dashed hope; (iii) a strange kind of wistful melancholy - I find myself smiling at myself and shaking my head as I drive around..."how funny that I can feel like this, still...".
In some ways, it's great feeling like I'm 17 again. And perplexing, too. But mostly bitter-sweet and exasperating. It's enough to make one turn back to drink.
Ho hum.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Monday, August 01, 2005
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