I'd like to know how common it is among humans to get this feeling of presence, physical presence, of somebody whom it's quite impossible to really get close to. The presence so material that you keep looking over your shoulder and every time you feel as if you have just touched, smelled, heard... but it's a split second too late. You missed it again.
I get this sensation after a complex of occurrences. First, I accumulate images, sounds, and emotions. Then I have a dream. Last, I replay the dream in my head and I start feeling it. It has pervaded my senses and I cannot get rid of it no matter how exhausting it becomes after a while. It is so easy to lose connection with reality then, so easy to get confused, so hard to come back. I learnt how to induce this although it does not work every time and often not the way you expected or hoped so I tend to avoid it. Unless it's one of these days when I just cannot control myself. One of my weak days when I succumb, letting myself be exposed to things that do not make my life easier, not easier at all .
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Friday, March 28, 2008
Insomnia
I have been suffering from insomnia for the last few nights. I had trouble with sleep before but this was unusually long and left me exhausted. Now I dread going to bed. I'm trying to find a reason or rather reasons for this but there are so many... I don't even want to start. Maybe I just need to slow down if it's at all possible in this crazy world of mine. Would I even be able to really relax, stop worrying, stop rushing, stop trying to do everything for everybody, and for myself? I used to criticise people who cannot rest, who lost this ability to just let go and do something for fun. Now I think I don't have time to do something like this. Or do I just feel that I would waste this precious commodity that my time has been transformed into... Waste and not do something important, something that would make a difference, something that would be an investment in the future... What would I be worth if I turned myself off for a while? I could disappear. But then... if I wanted to come back, would there be something to come back to? Would I be able to put everything in order again, make it work?
I made my decision about my graduate school. I think I made a good and practical choice. But the world is full of other possibilities, maybe less practical, maybe ones that look less practical but would actually make me happier, more fulfilled? Silly dreams. How can you ever tell what would make you happy, what would be "the life" for you. Most of the time we simply grope around in darkness trying to avoid a major crash, happiness seems to be pure luck. Can we really think we have any power to control our life? Some people maybe can, or it just looks like they can, maybe they have only learnt how to disregard the trips and falls better than others have. At my age I should know better than letting myself speculate like that. What good is it? Just brings you insomnia. That would be one of the reasons for it, I guess.
I made my decision about my graduate school. I think I made a good and practical choice. But the world is full of other possibilities, maybe less practical, maybe ones that look less practical but would actually make me happier, more fulfilled? Silly dreams. How can you ever tell what would make you happy, what would be "the life" for you. Most of the time we simply grope around in darkness trying to avoid a major crash, happiness seems to be pure luck. Can we really think we have any power to control our life? Some people maybe can, or it just looks like they can, maybe they have only learnt how to disregard the trips and falls better than others have. At my age I should know better than letting myself speculate like that. What good is it? Just brings you insomnia. That would be one of the reasons for it, I guess.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Monday, March 3, 2008
Very short music commentary...
Some people may think I'm too old to listen to Linkin Park. I guess it is a fact that on average LP fans are at least 10 years younger than me. Does it really matter? Does it say anything about me? Does it have to say anything? What can I say.... I feel this music flow through me like I haven't for a long time, I hear the lyrics as if the words were conceived in my own mind, it makes me experience, touch, taste, not just hear. I don't like all of their songs, some I dislike, but many of the ones I do like will most probably never leave me. I own them now.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Words
Words have failed me so many times. They are a constant source of disappointment. They sound in my head so harmoniously for a short moment, but then become more and more ephemeral, flooded by all the fleeting perceptions crowded in my mind. When I want to transform them into their corporeal form of signs on paper (or rather on my computer's screen....) they look so crude and awkward. Hardly ever am I satisfied with my words. Maybe this is one of the reasons I started this blog. To make them behave, to master them, control them finally. I doubt I'll meet with much success in this endeavor.
Sometimes words carry me away to places I never wanted to go. They whisper to me "this sounds so good, so interesting... this must be what you want to say, what you feel..." This inevitably leads to trouble. You cannot let them take over your actual feeling and ideas. You may find that the road back to where you started does not exist anymore.
Sometimes I hear or read a few words, a short phrase, and lose my breath. I am struck with awe, with total amazement how these few words expressed so much for me at this very moment. Maybe a few days later or earlier I wouldn't get it, I would miss it completely but this is the time for me to attach meaning to it, possibly very different from the meaning or meanings that the author had in mind... And this is the true power of words, how they speak to us in many tongues though expressed in one language, as contradictory as it may sound.
Example. I've been haunted by a certain state of mind that would come back to torture me, usually triggered by something different each time, yet I never found words to describe the feeling. Then.... "when this began I had nothing to say and I got lost in the nothingness inside of me... When all the vacancy the words revealed is the only real thing that I've got left to feel." There is a part of me that never recovered from the times that I felt like this. And now I have a name for it. Is an experience more real, easier to deal with when you have words to describe it? Or does it gain power to stay with you forever, invincible, always lurking in the shadows of your mind to attack when you lower your defences?
I have just come across a statement that sounds relevant to what I said before:"The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been established, but are a means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world."Kerényi, Carl; translated from the German by Ralph Manheim (1996). Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, xxxi.
Sometimes words carry me away to places I never wanted to go. They whisper to me "this sounds so good, so interesting... this must be what you want to say, what you feel..." This inevitably leads to trouble. You cannot let them take over your actual feeling and ideas. You may find that the road back to where you started does not exist anymore.
Sometimes I hear or read a few words, a short phrase, and lose my breath. I am struck with awe, with total amazement how these few words expressed so much for me at this very moment. Maybe a few days later or earlier I wouldn't get it, I would miss it completely but this is the time for me to attach meaning to it, possibly very different from the meaning or meanings that the author had in mind... And this is the true power of words, how they speak to us in many tongues though expressed in one language, as contradictory as it may sound.
Example. I've been haunted by a certain state of mind that would come back to torture me, usually triggered by something different each time, yet I never found words to describe the feeling. Then.... "when this began I had nothing to say and I got lost in the nothingness inside of me... When all the vacancy the words revealed is the only real thing that I've got left to feel." There is a part of me that never recovered from the times that I felt like this. And now I have a name for it. Is an experience more real, easier to deal with when you have words to describe it? Or does it gain power to stay with you forever, invincible, always lurking in the shadows of your mind to attack when you lower your defences?
I have just come across a statement that sounds relevant to what I said before:"The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been established, but are a means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world."Kerényi, Carl; translated from the German by Ralph Manheim (1996). Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, xxxi.
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