Your wrist could erase worlds,
a flick of this and
your fist could close around the breath
of so many stayings.
There is no space to dwell
where your fingertips eclipse
every other happening.
Someone else
Thursday 30 April 2015
Traduttore Tradittore
Odd that I scheduled two posts on the same day. Also, I've noticed that the times I was scheduling them at tend to be at midnight, which I guess is the default, but then the recent ones have fluctuated a lot. 20:08, that's 8 minutes past 8. No idea what that's about.
Again, I don't know the source of that quote. Usually I keep them in speech marks like this " not 'inverted commas' like I did there. The 'every breath a death' thing reminds me of something I said in an earlier post, but I can't find it right now. I do remember thinking with a sudden clarity about inkblot patterns - or at least what I thought was a clarity. Something about the pattern of an open book looking like a Rorschach page. It's weird that some of these got so romantic, really, because I know I didn't have anyone in mind when I wrote them. And a 'Rorschached face' is what, make up and tears? My own sight being clouded by my own tears? Something else? I don't know what I'm looking at.
Again, I don't know the source of that quote. Usually I keep them in speech marks like this " not 'inverted commas' like I did there. The 'every breath a death' thing reminds me of something I said in an earlier post, but I can't find it right now. I do remember thinking with a sudden clarity about inkblot patterns - or at least what I thought was a clarity. Something about the pattern of an open book looking like a Rorschach page. It's weird that some of these got so romantic, really, because I know I didn't have anyone in mind when I wrote them. And a 'Rorschached face' is what, make up and tears? My own sight being clouded by my own tears? Something else? I don't know what I'm looking at.
Wednesday 29 April 2015
[Deluge ['[...]my life | Is every breath a death: and thus, unknown'
The sky is clear as any November cataract,
Scorching blue haze over the streets.
But it begins, with no creeping of cloud
To rain
From the empty sky.
Icy prickles crane heads upward
And no answer falls with the water.
And do clouds obscure our eyes as we rain fears,
Or are we then, weeping, more than ever,
A taste of that great clarity
That cavernous sky?
Sunday 26 April 2015
Sorry about the lack of response, I was caught up with a surprise bit of coursework that had slipped my mind. I don't remember the actual writing of this last post, but I do recognise a lot of it. The words in the title come from Philip Larkin's poem 'Mr Bleaney'. Despite its sort of nursery rhyme sounding name, like all of Larkin's work it has a lot of depth to it.
As for the rest of the post, I'm pretty sure that's my writing. The phrase "vast abrupt" sounds familiar though, but I couldn't find anything by googling it. Maybe it's just familiar because I half-remember writing it.
My room was a mess back during my episode. I'd broke the latch on my window and rainwater kept falling in, seeping into the nearby wallpaper until it got distended and colourless. I'd stopped showering and I couldn't tell if the stink was from myself or the room and all the shitty food I'd left festering in the bin. I didn't really have much of an appetite, even less the desire to go out and get food or order it by phone, so what little I did had mostly ended up there.
Eventually I got tired of shivering and taped the window shut, but the heater's over-active in my room, and it gets really stuffy once the sun starts beating down on the room through the glass. I spent hazy patches of time asleep, day and night. It didn't really matter when. It's amazing how much you can sleep if you get into the habit of it. I was happier not to be conscious anyways.
"From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow"
Don't worry, I have a source for that one; it's one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets.
As for the rest of the post, I'm pretty sure that's my writing. The phrase "vast abrupt" sounds familiar though, but I couldn't find anything by googling it. Maybe it's just familiar because I half-remember writing it.
My room was a mess back during my episode. I'd broke the latch on my window and rainwater kept falling in, seeping into the nearby wallpaper until it got distended and colourless. I'd stopped showering and I couldn't tell if the stink was from myself or the room and all the shitty food I'd left festering in the bin. I didn't really have much of an appetite, even less the desire to go out and get food or order it by phone, so what little I did had mostly ended up there.
Eventually I got tired of shivering and taped the window shut, but the heater's over-active in my room, and it gets really stuffy once the sun starts beating down on the room through the glass. I spent hazy patches of time asleep, day and night. It didn't really matter when. It's amazing how much you can sleep if you get into the habit of it. I was happier not to be conscious anyways.
"From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow"
Don't worry, I have a source for that one; it's one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets.
Sunday 19 April 2015
"But if he stood and watched the frigid wind | Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed | Telling himself that this was home, and grinned, | And shivered, without shaking off the dread | That how we live measures our own nature, | And at his age having no more to show | Than one hired box"]
I seem to see my shadow stretch in yellowing light, and all my breath departs without even one deliquescent cloud.
No, the air in this room is warm and stale. No wind has disturbed it for decades. No other face has stained the dust on the windows.
A vast abrupt turns my stomach.
No, the air in this room is warm and stale. No wind has disturbed it for decades. No other face has stained the dust on the windows.
A vast abrupt turns my stomach.
Tuesday 14 April 2015
I think I figured out what happened.
Back when I was at my worst I found I could schedule posts to auto-post in the future, i.e. after my planned death. So that's basically what that's doing lying around there. I remember my fingers hitting against the keys, but I'm a little hazy on the details, so your guess is as good as mine on the post. There are a few references to Nordic myth in it, and I do remember having some airy, empyreal concept I wanted to realise about knowing and not-knowing. At any rate I must've wrote it up in about five minutes with no editing so don't expect some deep subtext.
It looks like I have quite a few more posts lined up. Again, I don't remember much of the details of writing them, so I'll put up what explanations I can as they come rather than read them all up now. Like a conversation with myself. But then, that's all this blog is, right?
Back when I was at my worst I found I could schedule posts to auto-post in the future, i.e. after my planned death. So that's basically what that's doing lying around there. I remember my fingers hitting against the keys, but I'm a little hazy on the details, so your guess is as good as mine on the post. There are a few references to Nordic myth in it, and I do remember having some airy, empyreal concept I wanted to realise about knowing and not-knowing. At any rate I must've wrote it up in about five minutes with no editing so don't expect some deep subtext.
It looks like I have quite a few more posts lined up. Again, I don't remember much of the details of writing them, so I'll put up what explanations I can as they come rather than read them all up now. Like a conversation with myself. But then, that's all this blog is, right?
Monday 13 April 2015
Sunday 12 April 2015
[Mímisbrunnr] [ ] [] ["myself to myself, | On the tree that none may know | What root beneath it runs.] Downwards I peered; I took up the runes, screaming I took them, then I fell"] InhaleExhaleInhaleExhaleInhaleExhalenihilExhale
Life
Death's price.
Knowledge
Death's release.
Eternity wakes.
The eyelid of all opens
Like a wound
And bleeds absence.
Death's price.
Knowledge
Death's release.
Eternity wakes.
The eyelid of all opens
Like a wound
And bleeds absence.
Monday 6 April 2015
Ichor Left on a Forest Rock
I caught a glimpse
Of a nymph
And her boyfriend.
Spent a while
Damming bile
While I envied.
For her touch
Not so much
Do I crave her -
But her space,
Pagan grace
To be bloodless.
To inhale above the reaches
Of a single tethered coda
Coiled about a gnarled
Finger
Of dead bark,
That one day will be
Again.
Of a nymph
And her boyfriend.
Spent a while
Damming bile
While I envied.
For her touch
Not so much
Do I crave her -
But her space,
Pagan grace
To be bloodless.
To inhale above the reaches
Of a single tethered coda
Coiled about a gnarled
Finger
Of dead bark,
That one day will be
Again.
Sunday 5 April 2015
Eight Months
It's been a long time since I've felt so lucid. Or at least, ready to explain all this.
In a few [less] words.
It's not the most challenging of things to infer that I haven't been well. I've been unwell. For a while. It must've started around September last year. That's when I think I burnt down those trees. I have no idea what triggered it all. Maybe it was the slouch of winter lurching close, and the dimness of the sky. I have a poem I wrote by hand from then:
Frost sets in upon my hair,
as it powders morning grass,
and ice creeps in beneath my nails,
as it thinly adorns the surfaces of lakes,
Winter rumbles closer now,
as it does every year.
It looks like I fucked up the metre on that fourth line. I can't remember if there was a reason for that, or no reason at all.
Or maybe it was just the stress of university work. Weird how stress can corner you into a dark recess or alcove where you never thought you'd end up, a place where you find some strange sickly shell that you never knew was part of you.
I've seen it take a lot of my friends. Well, not a lot. One or two, a long time ago. And maybe that's just what it is. The fact that I didn't or don't exactly have a real relationship with anyone. Because being alone for a long time can fuck you up too. So much nothingness around you. Like being in a vacuum. Eventually you just give in to the emptiness and the outside enters and your within withall becomes a gaping without, until all of you amounts to the opposite of all.[-and you]
So about that time something really rotten began to fester in me, and every insecurity I had suddenly flickered from being fears to beliefs, and every whim or flitting thought I came across just unravelled and it was like I was drunk, I just couldn't stop myself from doing the things I did, thinking the thoughts I thought. I saw a lot of things that scared me.
It's actually kinda funny how much my posts started to imitate
of Leaves, but then, that was all I could think about at times. I suppose it took Johnny's own madness to make me recognise what was happening to me. Maybe that's the secret of why this book has had such an effect on me, even before I knew. Narcissus gazing into a pool that ripples answers even I couldn't extrapolate into a message of vanity.
I don't think I'll delete those posts though. If anything, I'm kind of glad I wrote them. It's like a timeline or a track to see what was happening at those times. I don't remember all of it. I forgot a lot, almost like a dream, where there's only fragments, and you know there's some (unconscious?) thread connecting all the scenes together, but watch as you must, you still cannot locate the absent memories. But then, how could you ever locate nothing? Maybe if it was surrounded by something, but if not. If my very own nothing is surrounded by a much more space of nothing.
I should stop thinking that hard. It's probably part of what got me in such a state to begin with. I always thought the advantage of depression, any mood or psychotic disorder, was being forced into a sort of introspection, a meta-cognisance that others simply never consider, might not even want to. But after all that, what am I really left with? I don't know what I know or what I don't know. It's not worth the cost. And is there even a cost? Is there ever an exchange? So it's just vanus.
And all that isolation, yes it makes you focus on what's here (you, only ever you, and even then that you is faltering, uncertain, uncanny) but that isn't necessarily a good thing. After long enough it just starts to corrode you. All the thoughts and counter-thoughts and reels of flickering frames of emotions being shattered and shards of glass rake the inside of your skull. Extending so far and long. I wanted it to stop. I had to make it stop.
Once I realised that, it might have even been a relief had not my mind been in the same state that triggered the urge, all my doubts and re-doubts and certainties and opinions and hates. That was around the time I wrote my last few posts. I honestly don't remember where I got a lot of the stuff there. Some of it was in quotation marks, but I couldn't find sources for all of the things I said, and a lot of it sounds too much like my own voice. I think the Greek is a passage on Socrates, and there's quite a few quotes from Danielewski lying about, naturally. Figure the rest out yourself if you want. I can't explain it and the best explanation is probably that, or perhaps what I wrote itself.
Looking at the posts just now actually, I recognise all the square brackets. Well, at least, I think I know what inspired me to use such a plethora of them - last summer I was reading translations of Sappho's poetry; Anne Carson wrote an amazing translation of her fragments that is scattered with brackets, she used them to signify where the manuscripts were illegible, torn, missing, or destroyed. "When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line."
I'm off track. At some point in the night, once I wrote the post of the 12th of March, I swallowed a month's worth of halopleridol and aripiprazole and when I couldn't stand waiting I reached into the draw by my bed, took out the noose I had tied weeks earlier and hung myself off the rail by my window.
Through all the windows I only see infinity.
I don't remember the paramedics who carried me out, but later I learnt it was my girlfriend who cut me loose and called them. Ex-girlfriend, I guess. I'm not exactly sure when things broke off, but when I started to have all those thoughts about her I pretty much cut off all our contact. Strange. That night was the first time she decided to try visiting my apartment. It was late, more like morning, but at the hospital she told me how apparently she'd had a "bad feeling" about me out of the blue. I don't know any more, she won't talk to me now, and I don't blame her. The urge to delete all those posts is back. Some of the things I said are just so strange. I think so. All that spite and suspicion and fear had to have come from somewhere. Some source to some smoke poisoning.
I spent three weeks sectioned while my medication was changed and dosage was fixed and therapist called. I tried a few more times to end it while I was there, but I did not not and I never let anyone know, so I got released fairly soon. I have to see my therapist twice a week now, and my doctor three times a month. I feel about as crap as ever, but at least my thoughts don't stray, and I can step outside of my room without a panic attack. I've spoken with some people at the university and with a note from my psychiatrist I managed to keep my place on the course.
That's about all. I think I'll keep updating the blog, and if things get bad again I might stop. I told my therapist about it - not giving the blog's name of course - and she said it seemed like a good idea. An outlet. Once I thought that the whole idea of repression, of locking away feelings, being stoic, was fine (how English); that it was a myth that the habit only hurt you, only hardened the sediment of anxious habit, only endlessly reiterated the dismay that creeps. But the water-blurred edges of a few breakdowns several years ago fixed that. It's better to talk. Even alone. Even to yourself. To myself. Quiet but for my own [g]rasping. That's easier. Maybe it will even be better.
In a few [less] words.
It's not the most challenging of things to infer that I haven't been well. I've been unwell. For a while. It must've started around September last year. That's when I think I burnt down those trees. I have no idea what triggered it all. Maybe it was the slouch of winter lurching close, and the dimness of the sky. I have a poem I wrote by hand from then:
Frost sets in upon my hair,
as it powders morning grass,
and ice creeps in beneath my nails,
as it thinly adorns the surfaces of lakes,
Winter rumbles closer now,
as it does every year.
It looks like I fucked up the metre on that fourth line. I can't remember if there was a reason for that, or no reason at all.
Or maybe it was just the stress of university work. Weird how stress can corner you into a dark recess or alcove where you never thought you'd end up, a place where you find some strange sickly shell that you never knew was part of you.
I've seen it take a lot of my friends. Well, not a lot. One or two, a long time ago. And maybe that's just what it is. The fact that I didn't or don't exactly have a real relationship with anyone. Because being alone for a long time can fuck you up too. So much nothingness around you. Like being in a vacuum. Eventually you just give in to the emptiness and the outside enters and your within withall becomes a gaping without, until all of you amounts to the opposite of all.[-and you]
So about that time something really rotten began to fester in me, and every insecurity I had suddenly flickered from being fears to beliefs, and every whim or flitting thought I came across just unravelled and it was like I was drunk, I just couldn't stop myself from doing the things I did, thinking the thoughts I thought. I saw a lot of things that scared me.
It's actually kinda funny how much my posts started to imitate
of Leaves, but then, that was all I could think about at times. I suppose it took Johnny's own madness to make me recognise what was happening to me. Maybe that's the secret of why this book has had such an effect on me, even before I knew. Narcissus gazing into a pool that ripples answers even I couldn't extrapolate into a message of vanity.I don't think I'll delete those posts though. If anything, I'm kind of glad I wrote them. It's like a timeline or a track to see what was happening at those times. I don't remember all of it. I forgot a lot, almost like a dream, where there's only fragments, and you know there's some (unconscious?) thread connecting all the scenes together, but watch as you must, you still cannot locate the absent memories. But then, how could you ever locate nothing? Maybe if it was surrounded by something, but if not. If my very own nothing is surrounded by a much more space of nothing.
I should stop thinking that hard. It's probably part of what got me in such a state to begin with. I always thought the advantage of depression, any mood or psychotic disorder, was being forced into a sort of introspection, a meta-cognisance that others simply never consider, might not even want to. But after all that, what am I really left with? I don't know what I know or what I don't know. It's not worth the cost. And is there even a cost? Is there ever an exchange? So it's just vanus.
And all that isolation, yes it makes you focus on what's here (you, only ever you, and even then that you is faltering, uncertain, uncanny) but that isn't necessarily a good thing. After long enough it just starts to corrode you. All the thoughts and counter-thoughts and reels of flickering frames of emotions being shattered and shards of glass rake the inside of your skull. Extending so far and long. I wanted it to stop. I had to make it stop.
Once I realised that, it might have even been a relief had not my mind been in the same state that triggered the urge, all my doubts and re-doubts and certainties and opinions and hates. That was around the time I wrote my last few posts. I honestly don't remember where I got a lot of the stuff there. Some of it was in quotation marks, but I couldn't find sources for all of the things I said, and a lot of it sounds too much like my own voice. I think the Greek is a passage on Socrates, and there's quite a few quotes from Danielewski lying about, naturally. Figure the rest out yourself if you want. I can't explain it and the best explanation is probably that, or perhaps what I wrote itself.
Looking at the posts just now actually, I recognise all the square brackets. Well, at least, I think I know what inspired me to use such a plethora of them - last summer I was reading translations of Sappho's poetry; Anne Carson wrote an amazing translation of her fragments that is scattered with brackets, she used them to signify where the manuscripts were illegible, torn, missing, or destroyed. "When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line."
I'm off track. At some point in the night, once I wrote the post of the 12th of March, I swallowed a month's worth of halopleridol and aripiprazole and when I couldn't stand waiting I reached into the draw by my bed, took out the noose I had tied weeks earlier and hung myself off the rail by my window.
Through all the windows I only see infinity.
I don't remember the paramedics who carried me out, but later I learnt it was my girlfriend who cut me loose and called them. Ex-girlfriend, I guess. I'm not exactly sure when things broke off, but when I started to have all those thoughts about her I pretty much cut off all our contact. Strange. That night was the first time she decided to try visiting my apartment. It was late, more like morning, but at the hospital she told me how apparently she'd had a "bad feeling" about me out of the blue. I don't know any more, she won't talk to me now, and I don't blame her. The urge to delete all those posts is back. Some of the things I said are just so strange. I think so. All that spite and suspicion and fear had to have come from somewhere. Some source to some smoke poisoning.
I spent three weeks sectioned while my medication was changed and dosage was fixed and therapist called. I tried a few more times to end it while I was there, but I did not not and I never let anyone know, so I got released fairly soon. I have to see my therapist twice a week now, and my doctor three times a month. I feel about as crap as ever, but at least my thoughts don't stray, and I can step outside of my room without a panic attack. I've spoken with some people at the university and with a note from my psychiatrist I managed to keep my place on the course.
That's about all. I think I'll keep updating the blog, and if things get bad again I might stop. I told my therapist about it - not giving the blog's name of course - and she said it seemed like a good idea. An outlet. Once I thought that the whole idea of repression, of locking away feelings, being stoic, was fine (how English); that it was a myth that the habit only hurt you, only hardened the sediment of anxious habit, only endlessly reiterated the dismay that creeps. But the water-blurred edges of a few breakdowns several years ago fixed that. It's better to talk. Even alone. Even to yourself. To myself. Quiet but for my own [g]rasping. That's easier. Maybe it will even be better.
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