About to sleep

Couldn't sleep and I checked the blog to find all these new scheduled posts.

They're kind of creeping me out. The Everlasting Whims & Everlasting Loss is of course a quote from Only Revolutions. Page 180, Sam's side. I actually prefer, having read and reread the book several times, Sam's writing. I feel like Danielewski wrote him first, but who knows. I'll have to try reading it in reverse order, see if it makes a difference. I just love some of his phrases moments.
"

Because I am too soon.
Because without You, I am only revolutions
Of ruin.

I'm the prophecy prophecies pass.
Why need dies at last.
How oceans dry. Islands drown.
And skies of salt crash to the ground.
I turn the powerful. Defy the weak.
Only Grass grows down abandoned streets.

 "
The August 14th post is [an]other quote(s) from The Fifty Year Sword, also by Mark Z Danielewski. I didn't read the rest. I'm sorry. My eyes just float over the words.


I think I'm getting worse again.

It was a sunny day, but it doesn't feel like summer. It hasn't ever felt like summer. A spring, followed by a premature fall into something morose and grey. Old cobbled streets, coated in dust. Never seen. I stayed in my room all day. Remember that dissertation I started way too early, or at least tried to? Well I actually need to work on it this year. Reasons burn need sometimes. I just feel hollow. Like an empty jug, with no handle, no clay, nothing, unsculpted.

Lost sensations still have my fingertips tingling. My throat aches. I don't know if I can continue. I don't know why I want to. Or if I want to.

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.

Back to Uni

Term at Manchester Uni starts in two days. In this time I might be less active, not that you'd notice.

To make up for it, I'll tell you a story from last week.

I woke up in my garden.

It was 6AM, which is unusual for itself, considering that I usually am going to sleep a few hours before then, and waking up in the morning would usually be entirely out of the question. The sun was glaring softly¹ on my face. I'd gone to bed earlier than usual. Around 1 in the mourning, after doing nothing much when I could have gone to bed hours before. Nothing's All. I just got carried away.

I think I was studying the etymology of 'Ash', as in 'Ash Tree'. Spear.

And when I woke up I was lying with soaked clothes on dew-cleansed grass. I've been known to sleep walk. The odd thing is that I haven't done so since the age of 10. I might have left the back door open, which would have explained how I got so far. What was odder though was that I was fully dressed, with shoes and even a coat on.

So I guess I'd just gone through my wardrobe before I left my bedroom in my somnambulist haze

Except there's one more thing. All the trees in my garden were burnt down, and my hands reeked of gasoline, and had charcoal beneath the nails.

If I were to look out of the window now - and if it weren't 2:45 - I'd see them. Black, spiteful stumps, slouching sternly, black dust radiating from their trunks like shadows that learned to be tangible.


^1. Somehow.