Leviathan

This round of uni has been bad. There's so much work, and I'm already feeling guilty about not planning for my dissertation. It was meant to be on House of Leaves, which of course is always stunning, immense, sublime, but with all the essays and lectures I already have - and there's so many, it's like a Kafkan fever dream or something, every second that the second hand of a clock crawls across it's circle is an eternity that I feel guilt about not having done enough work: until it all soars up like so many droplets of water, enough to form a Weight, a wave looming above, over me - but with all that I don't know how I can manage to fit the time in to work on the plan. Decoding it's a nightmare. I like that sentence. Decoding it's a nightmare. It is. But you have to suffer for your passions, right?

It doesn't help with all this that there's something in my girlfriend's expression these days. I couldn't describe it but here's my try: like a cargo ship laden with islanders migrating across the Atlantic, heavy, metal creaking below metal, maybe even sinking. Fated to sink. I do believe she's going to break up with me.

"They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong."

I can't help but be grateful to the Mancunian rain. The heady smell of all that charred bark in the back yard - and the rich tang of gasoline - has been wiped away by successive downpours. I can bear to look out of my windows now.

Hah.

I'm reminded of another ^House of Leaves quote. "Through all the windows I only see infinity."
 Originating somewhere else, too, because I know that it was referencing another author's work.

But all that's beyond me right now. Speaking of that book though, I've been reading The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard. ^House of Leaves draws a lot of inspiration from it - especially in the Echo chapter. It's pretty good reading, though I can't say I've gotten that far into it yet. But we never get far into much, do we?

At a Pub with Friends

Tea-leaf stains in tobacco
strings, littered on a
scratched table we depart from.

Conversations overheard but not-
understood.
Words placed on table counters,
or fastened up in leather books,
flesh-packed murmurings,
music-deafened whisperings

Still, we try, to speak,

'O My friends, there is no friend.'