notebooks extemporisation
It's after the fact and I'm trying to impose a narrative sense on this accumulation of notes from various notebooks used over the last three weeks. The main story seems to be how you stack up all sorts of small ideas and phrases over time that may simply be words, or might represent a genuine insight. Then some catalyst makes a few of them suddenly centrally important. They may even have a profound impact on the way you conduct yourself.
The first step in a new flat, the fun thing, is to familiarise yourself with the space. Get to know those beautiful, fascinating, grimy little corners you'll grow attached to.
Of course the space doesn't exist until you've put your stuff in it. You make the space you explore, and that space influences how you react to it.
Where does the light fall, what's the best time of day, what do you find yourself staring at? How do you occupy the space? How can you change that?
I want to stop writing this same fucking book I've been writing for eight years now. Just relax and stop thinking.
Apathy is the future.
At this stage the reflections on space, the reiteration of a still vague concept, seems to be the most insightful, the most potentially fruitful line of speculation.
I know we're body, I'm happy with body but I taught myself to ignore it. Thought always the mind should be involved but at the same time looking for ways to escape it. I like to be mugged have my body creep up say 'I own you, you do what I want.' Not to remember not to forget only surprise. Yes. Yes. And now. And reaching.
Delicate. No, slight. Legs tucked up under you. I want to reach, touch with your permission. And I want to sit slightly turned sense you stare on my face, slide nearer feet close.
Legs curled up under you. Slight. Slight and strong and adult. You make my muscles want to crawl out of my skin and lounge to your fingers like sleeping cats.
Sex makes me tongueless, throat dry, heartbeat and breathing like wind-shook fur. Legs curled up under you. Slight. Slight and strong. You make my muscles want to crawl out of my skin and lounge to your fingers like sleeping cats.
Nothing especially unusual has happened, these are just in reaction to meeting friends, getting drunk and hanging out with people. With one slight cheat. The third variant of 'slight' (from Green) is written after the visit to Cardiff, after most of the other text here.
A theme has begun to emerge that has nothing to do with definitions of space. It's a theme of body over mind, of mind fretting too much and inhibiting behaviour. Not on the whole very well expressed though.
To be happy just once or twice I need my abusive relationships. Disconnected. So much beauty. I wanted to photograph. No no no, to preserve or memorialise the moment is to kill it. I can't express this, words won't do it. It's wrong to try and hold a moment, you lose it, distance yourself, stop experiencing. It's unfair.
Alternating notebooks we have a jumble of chronology. Some of these notes have been slightly reconstructed or clarified. I was going to describe an act of archaeology, but this is far less scrupulous or scientific. It's not even an attempt at a partisan history. It's a re-imagining using the available evidence and scattered memories. There are many gaps, many things I want to add.
The paragraph "To be happy..." is interesting for this reason. It's written at the point I started to come up on ecstasy, it shows accustomed thought processes disintegrating as a feeling that it's better to be more open and less controlled takes over.
Something that ought to be noted here, a lot of my thought, and nearly all of my speech is a matter of translation and preparation most of the time. I don't experience the world through words though they can be a way of mediating things back to myself over a period of time. I experience the world through sights and sounds and smells and the feeling of things against my skin. If I'm thinking of writing notes or calling someone then I might well be thinking in words but they won't have anything to do with the environment I'm in. Instead they'll be repetitions and rephrasings of simple building blocks. Prefabrications of wordless observations fitted into what seems like the most accurate linguistic simulation available. I'm consciously translating amorphous shapes and colours shifting in my brain into language. When people speak to me I translate their words into something I can feel and formulate a response in the way just described.
She sees and I say. I'm still smart, still articulate, but I'm using it to connect rather than build walls and intimidate. She's smart, I'm articulate to the point I seem smarter than I am. And partly I do that in place of ego-integrity - I feel so porous to other people I manufacture these differences.
The irony in being articulate is some things are inexpressible and best articulated by stumbling nonsense awkward cliche or silence or nothing at all or rubbing your arms for the sheer pleasure of sensation. The more articulate, the more you break down your articulacy. At least if you don't use it to estrange yourself from experience.
"She sees..." is exactly what was written but with names removed and drawn together from notes scattered over more than a day. Whereas the paragraph that follows is exactly as it was. My self-perception has fundamentally shifted. I don't need to worry or prove myself as one of the most intelligent people I know. I've realised that I'm not, I'm simply very articulate.
It's odd on MDMA to think about yourself with clarity and without worry, with nothing at stake.
Ironically, I suppose, the one thing I didn't write down but said a lot during this period is that apathy is my greatest virtue. If I wasn't so apathetic I might well have seriously hurt myself or someone else before now. My apathy is exaggerated on MDMA to a benign passivity that allows me to act and make decisions and talk like I might lose the power of speech if I stopped but also means I've got no interest in defensiveness or aggressive argument or worrying what other people might think.
My pain is real, it's a sadness that'll always be there, a dog trailing my footprints. Hers is different. It's a loneliness, a deep sad fierce loneliness that comes of being the smartest person in the room. I never heard her dog howling because my own was muttering so loud.
Our sadness is we think when we can't feel. I can't keep all these fragments together, can't control it to make sense and that's good.
So a genuine expression of something I noticed or conjectured filtered through imagery borrowed from Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. *A quick thought, unrelated, but prompted by the last sentence and important. My writing comes from exposure to new ideas and experience, which is why it's difficult to discipline and always comes in concentrated bursts centered around a few ideas. That's why it's best suited to poems, and short stories and essays at a stretch. Actually that is related to the overall structure I'm trying to give this piece - the story of small ideas building up until they boil over.* The paragraph "Our sadness..." that follows is yet more drug-induced losing the plot even as a development of the theme of thinking less seems about to unfurl.
Promising. Perfumed fruit tea. Idleness lasting out forever. Bookspines promising knowledge, places, times. A holiday. The good regard of other people.
Pure emotion - those overwhelming waves - a clean, innocent sadness. It doesn't have those selfish motivations. It's sadness - not me being sad or my sadness, it's just sadness that happens to wash through me.
A reverse chronology for no good reason. Just how it happened. Promising is a tiny fragment I thought was a failure, one of my extemporisations without meta-commentary as detailed in writing practice. Now although it's slight I'm much more well-disposed towards it. The other, a transcription after the fact of something I experienced, is what it is. I found myself crying, but it was a release and a good thing, that seemed to have no selfish cause. Can you enjoy sadness in a way that isn't masochistic, just for the sheer pleasure of sensation? I think I did.
Tension come sneaking back shoulders and back, "You gotta drop your flowers now", fight everything and myself again. It doesn't matter but I can't let go till you dose me. The analogy is Milligan and McCarthy's Rogan Josh, where the laddish character achieves enlightenment and several heads that he loses as he goes back to his life although he carries out a lotus flower. The whole an ecstasy metaphor I never noticed until recently. But the tension "I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot". Because of course someone said it better before you. Which brings us back to Nightwood.
And long long after coming home and going back to work comes a self-consciously 'literary', 'clever' retrospective reading of things I genuinely experienced but now I've falsified. We dirty our own experiences.
And yet it's a good illustration of the narrative 'point'. Apathy and unconsciousness, not trying too hard, is productive for me. But when the ecstasy wears off and the worklife world comes back you're estranged from the experience, and the revelations are as distant as ever.
The first step in a new flat, the fun thing, is to familiarise yourself with the space. Get to know those beautiful, fascinating, grimy little corners you'll grow attached to.
Of course the space doesn't exist until you've put your stuff in it. You make the space you explore, and that space influences how you react to it.
Where does the light fall, what's the best time of day, what do you find yourself staring at? How do you occupy the space? How can you change that?
I want to stop writing this same fucking book I've been writing for eight years now. Just relax and stop thinking.
Apathy is the future.
At this stage the reflections on space, the reiteration of a still vague concept, seems to be the most insightful, the most potentially fruitful line of speculation.
I know we're body, I'm happy with body but I taught myself to ignore it. Thought always the mind should be involved but at the same time looking for ways to escape it. I like to be mugged have my body creep up say 'I own you, you do what I want.' Not to remember not to forget only surprise. Yes. Yes. And now. And reaching.
Delicate. No, slight. Legs tucked up under you. I want to reach, touch with your permission. And I want to sit slightly turned sense you stare on my face, slide nearer feet close.
Legs curled up under you. Slight. Slight and strong and adult. You make my muscles want to crawl out of my skin and lounge to your fingers like sleeping cats.
Sex makes me tongueless, throat dry, heartbeat and breathing like wind-shook fur. Legs curled up under you. Slight. Slight and strong. You make my muscles want to crawl out of my skin and lounge to your fingers like sleeping cats.
Nothing especially unusual has happened, these are just in reaction to meeting friends, getting drunk and hanging out with people. With one slight cheat. The third variant of 'slight' (from Green) is written after the visit to Cardiff, after most of the other text here.
A theme has begun to emerge that has nothing to do with definitions of space. It's a theme of body over mind, of mind fretting too much and inhibiting behaviour. Not on the whole very well expressed though.
To be happy just once or twice I need my abusive relationships. Disconnected. So much beauty. I wanted to photograph. No no no, to preserve or memorialise the moment is to kill it. I can't express this, words won't do it. It's wrong to try and hold a moment, you lose it, distance yourself, stop experiencing. It's unfair.
Alternating notebooks we have a jumble of chronology. Some of these notes have been slightly reconstructed or clarified. I was going to describe an act of archaeology, but this is far less scrupulous or scientific. It's not even an attempt at a partisan history. It's a re-imagining using the available evidence and scattered memories. There are many gaps, many things I want to add.
The paragraph "To be happy..." is interesting for this reason. It's written at the point I started to come up on ecstasy, it shows accustomed thought processes disintegrating as a feeling that it's better to be more open and less controlled takes over.
Something that ought to be noted here, a lot of my thought, and nearly all of my speech is a matter of translation and preparation most of the time. I don't experience the world through words though they can be a way of mediating things back to myself over a period of time. I experience the world through sights and sounds and smells and the feeling of things against my skin. If I'm thinking of writing notes or calling someone then I might well be thinking in words but they won't have anything to do with the environment I'm in. Instead they'll be repetitions and rephrasings of simple building blocks. Prefabrications of wordless observations fitted into what seems like the most accurate linguistic simulation available. I'm consciously translating amorphous shapes and colours shifting in my brain into language. When people speak to me I translate their words into something I can feel and formulate a response in the way just described.
She sees and I say. I'm still smart, still articulate, but I'm using it to connect rather than build walls and intimidate. She's smart, I'm articulate to the point I seem smarter than I am. And partly I do that in place of ego-integrity - I feel so porous to other people I manufacture these differences.
The irony in being articulate is some things are inexpressible and best articulated by stumbling nonsense awkward cliche or silence or nothing at all or rubbing your arms for the sheer pleasure of sensation. The more articulate, the more you break down your articulacy. At least if you don't use it to estrange yourself from experience.
"She sees..." is exactly what was written but with names removed and drawn together from notes scattered over more than a day. Whereas the paragraph that follows is exactly as it was. My self-perception has fundamentally shifted. I don't need to worry or prove myself as one of the most intelligent people I know. I've realised that I'm not, I'm simply very articulate.
It's odd on MDMA to think about yourself with clarity and without worry, with nothing at stake.
Ironically, I suppose, the one thing I didn't write down but said a lot during this period is that apathy is my greatest virtue. If I wasn't so apathetic I might well have seriously hurt myself or someone else before now. My apathy is exaggerated on MDMA to a benign passivity that allows me to act and make decisions and talk like I might lose the power of speech if I stopped but also means I've got no interest in defensiveness or aggressive argument or worrying what other people might think.
My pain is real, it's a sadness that'll always be there, a dog trailing my footprints. Hers is different. It's a loneliness, a deep sad fierce loneliness that comes of being the smartest person in the room. I never heard her dog howling because my own was muttering so loud.
Our sadness is we think when we can't feel. I can't keep all these fragments together, can't control it to make sense and that's good.
So a genuine expression of something I noticed or conjectured filtered through imagery borrowed from Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. *A quick thought, unrelated, but prompted by the last sentence and important. My writing comes from exposure to new ideas and experience, which is why it's difficult to discipline and always comes in concentrated bursts centered around a few ideas. That's why it's best suited to poems, and short stories and essays at a stretch. Actually that is related to the overall structure I'm trying to give this piece - the story of small ideas building up until they boil over.* The paragraph "Our sadness..." that follows is yet more drug-induced losing the plot even as a development of the theme of thinking less seems about to unfurl.
Promising. Perfumed fruit tea. Idleness lasting out forever. Bookspines promising knowledge, places, times. A holiday. The good regard of other people.
Pure emotion - those overwhelming waves - a clean, innocent sadness. It doesn't have those selfish motivations. It's sadness - not me being sad or my sadness, it's just sadness that happens to wash through me.
A reverse chronology for no good reason. Just how it happened. Promising is a tiny fragment I thought was a failure, one of my extemporisations without meta-commentary as detailed in writing practice. Now although it's slight I'm much more well-disposed towards it. The other, a transcription after the fact of something I experienced, is what it is. I found myself crying, but it was a release and a good thing, that seemed to have no selfish cause. Can you enjoy sadness in a way that isn't masochistic, just for the sheer pleasure of sensation? I think I did.
Tension come sneaking back shoulders and back, "You gotta drop your flowers now", fight everything and myself again. It doesn't matter but I can't let go till you dose me. The analogy is Milligan and McCarthy's Rogan Josh, where the laddish character achieves enlightenment and several heads that he loses as he goes back to his life although he carries out a lotus flower. The whole an ecstasy metaphor I never noticed until recently. But the tension "I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot". Because of course someone said it better before you. Which brings us back to Nightwood.
And long long after coming home and going back to work comes a self-consciously 'literary', 'clever' retrospective reading of things I genuinely experienced but now I've falsified. We dirty our own experiences.
And yet it's a good illustration of the narrative 'point'. Apathy and unconsciousness, not trying too hard, is productive for me. But when the ecstasy wears off and the worklife world comes back you're estranged from the experience, and the revelations are as distant as ever.
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