For we are ether

Coming across this bit amused me:

An excerpt from George Eliot's "Silly Novels by Lady Noveslists", which A.S. Byatt quotes in her book, Passions of the Mind:

"Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph and reads the Bible in the original tongues... Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs; indeed there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty."

George Eliot was laughing at the archetypal heroine much written about in her day, and Byatt did well in quoting this passage.

Plus, the term/phrase mind-and-millinery.

Now, back to reading.

Ennui, 2

There are no unwashed dishes in the sink, no garbage to be thrown out. The floor is clean, the bed is made. I am staring at the day.

Pygmalion, on my mind

Recent events in my friends' lives (and, for the longest time, mine) have made me start thinking of Pygmalion: he of the famed myth, he who inspired Bernard Shaw's play, he who made the creation and popularity of "My Fair Lady" possible, he who found love in a stone-filled place.

We are all Pygmalions, in one way, or another, at some point in our lives, or another, at certain hours and days of the week, the year, or others, with certain variations to the story.

We sculpt ideals in our minds, often make resolute plans to redo, and undo, and end up with feeble attempts at justifying these sketches' likeness (or lack, thereof) to the blueprint we had so painstakingly labored at, in the beginning.

We sculpted and stared, tried to breathe life into our work, only to find out, way before the end, that our fantasy of a being, could never be what we dreamed for them to become. Our expectations slip away from their fingertips like invisible dust; their eyes, their stare, seldom end up frozen exactly where we intended for them to. Our recourse is to alter, to rearrange, to cut--until all we're left with are scraps, shards, pieces. We cut ourselves as we fumble, to look for what is no longer there, to reassess our thoughts and actions, to rebuild the dreams of wholeness, both ours and the beloved's.

Even the flowers from our mouths are illusions. We have to begin with, and love, what's already there, to begin with.

Ennui

The cloud formations I was trying to read before the afternoon started drawing to its close have already fallen to the ground, a grand cacophony of intermittent downpours and whipping winds. In between, an indeterminate stretch of minutes, bouts of calm and expectation, static conversation, a reel of shut windows, jolts of weariness. After the rain, a drowsy stillness: the eyes giving in before the mind shuts to various shades of darkness. 

I don't know what this is. I only know that I am about to fall into (another) slumber.

But how to keep at imagery, and how to fill a page?

There's anguish in this state.
There's anguish in this state.

Yesterday,

I missed the sunrise and didn't feel sorry for it. I looked up and saw cobwebs in the ceiling's corners. The sunlight did nothing except sting my eyes. My cup of coffee went cold, barely touched. I forgot to put Bill Withers on. I stared at a blinking cursor for thirteen minutes, and then closed the page. I read a write-up on Kierkegaard and felt too lazy to bookmark. It took me an eternity to get out of bed. A memory of yellow butterflies crossed my mind, but I shooed it away. I cringed at a mental picture of my list of to-dos. Not even the prospect of seeing "The Great Gatsby" blurred the blues. The results of the recently-concluded elections depressed me. I could smell the dust. I wanted some pasta, but decided I'd rather heat the previous evening's left-overs. I knew I shouldn't talk to anyone, otherwise I'd end up barking at them. I thought about today and felt compelled to shut my eyes.

Forgiveness

Most of the time, I make a decision to not judge you.

What you have done to me, you must have done unwittingly. What you have taken, you must have needed more than I did. Was your father good to you, I wonder. It dawns on me that you know no more about yourself than I do.

Of this, I am certain: you had your reasons. The things you saw, I did not see; my hours are different from yours. The places I've been, you might not have; your pains are unknown to me.

Perhaps you were as lost as I used to be: wading in pools of doubt, clutching at forgotten lights. Perhaps we both still haven't been found. The world is too big for certainty.

I wish you lucidity, I wish you inner peace.

Because this, too, is true: Stranger, you are my sister.

Appearances

At least three people have told me I remind them of a hippie.

Maybe it's the stuff in my wardrobe; maybe it's my hair. Or, maybe it's all the 60's and 70's music I've  assimilated into my system, and, consequently, am emanating.

Maybe their eyes are fooling them. Maybe it's all in their minds.

Far more people have called me Matet, though.

Hahaha

While the earth is sister to the sky

I'd forgotten to put pepper on the omelette.

The mind is a convoluted sheet of canvass, with no room for pepper, or for love. Joan Didion once said: Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

And so, I tap away, scrape against the surfaces of things, bringing back twigs and ashes, sentence fragments, footsteps, evenings, memories of rain, a dream of clouds, echoes, a flower. When the edges of days threaten to break, when the fringes from where I stand start to tear, the fumbling starts-- that quiet flutter for solidness, that rouse to consciousness, that jump back to the ground.

So while I was scraping the pan for left-over flakes, I remembered the pepper I'd forgotten to put on the omelette, and made a mental note to write it down.

Let us deconstruct, then, you and I--

And because I thrive on incoherence, I will make an omelette today. The chopped onions and tomatoes should go well with last night's rain, and the eggs should serve the morning right.

Pepper, as signifier, I have yet to mull over.

A bird is chirping from nearby. How near, I cannot tell. My head is full of Derrida and Bradbury. Men are part monsters, part-- I forget what he (Bradbury) said our halves are. I am swimming in theory; there's never enough movement for what's actual.

Love calls for our vulnerability, and not all of us are willing to be so naked.

I refuse to be vulnerable. Stay away.

But what to make of this sudden namelessness, this all-consuming mediocrity, spreading out into this otherwise glorious sunshine?

*getting up to make that omelette*

In case I forget--

"We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us."

-Roland Barthes

Settling takes time. Some things take hours, others take years. It takes spaces between clocks, distances between days, weeks, months--for situations to unravel, hearts to sink into acceptance, losses to be gathered, thoughts to stabilize, memories to take shape, emptiness to lodge.

In retrospect, what you were to me yesterday, no longer is. Though what you were, in the first place, took a while before it became what it was. And it still, at times, catches me by surprise, what you have become. I'm hard-pressed to use the word "finally", because inserting it anywhere here, while I am in this context, would lend it all a semblance of purpose, as if there was a goal to all of it, in the first place, when there was never any, to begin with. It was a transience of sorts, now that I look at it with clearer sight. It did start out with a thunderclap, yes, but it was one that gradually simmered down into a passage of unnumbered days, stretching out into several, blurry rooftops, nameless except for a haze of conversations, unrecognizable except for a few lines, some weak laughter. A brush here, some strains of music there. A drink, maybe two. Some hushed exchange. There were never any tears; the lines were never drawn that way, the dimming never deep enough.

As far as you and I were concerned, distance was never a question. You were never anywhere, anyway. And now that things have settled into what they have become, I realize this: Neither was I.

There isn't much here to unlearn. We could have been mere shadows passing each other by: noiseless and faint, with neither bruises, nor the possibility of them, to remember each other by.

Elsewheres

You tell me you've been walking at night. You've been waking up in the middle of some moonlight-swathed hour, always elsewhere from where you actually are, seeing him in the places you used to go, meeting him in places you've never been. And yet, always, that sense of already having been there, of having lingered everywhere with the memory of him crossing your sight like some persistent ghost.

You've been dreaming in snapshots, you say: chimeric sequences of finding, being, losing. Some stray wind bringing him to you, a standstill keeping him near, a stray wind taking him away. You, wishing haplessly for that breeze to bring him back, to pass your way again and put the shambles back into place. You, standing in the middle of some remembered space and well-cherished time, holding still even as the dream has gone, closing your eyes and wishing wakefulness away, because daylight always seems to change the landscape, pulls you away from where it all is, away from where he is.

Even the memory of dreaming has been elusive, you say. You have had to summon consciousness to paint the pictures, to sew the pieces together, to weave them all into a symmetric whole.

But the end-result is always the same. You are where you are. And he never is.

For C--

Things that stay

During a Booksale hunt this afternoon, I saw a copy of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, dirt-cheap at PhP115, but couldn't find it in myself to buy it because of the tears in some of the pages. And I found it so sadly predictable that, in the middle of my frenzied search for some invaluable find, I suddenly remembered you.

I paused, glancing at the stack of books I had been lugging around for the past half hour.

Is it such a wonder that when I find myself inside a bookstore, it is the titles I used to see in your shelves that I seem to instinctively look for?