I'm currently rereading Bob Dylan's autobigraphy and it's inspiring me more than any philosophy book I've read in years. Inspiring me to write, to play music, to get up and leave, and just generally making me restless.
You get this great sense out of reading Dylan’s autobiography that he had an insatiable thirst for learning. In some way, you sense that to him, living life to its fullest potential meant creating as diverse and colourful an identity as one possibly could, by observing, imitating, absorbing everything you encounter that’s of any interest to you, anything you find original and fascinating, and then toying with it, shaping it some more, pounding it like dough, really getting your knuckles stuck in there until you’ve managed to turn it into something, well… Your own. Although precisely what “your own” means, I don’t really know.
But Dylan, clearly driven into momentum by reading On The Road, wanted to go into every big city out there like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything in his path, drinking the Mississippi dry. If something was happening out there or if someone had a new trick up their sleeve, he wanted to know about it, wanted to be there when the trick was being invented, if he could, wanted to be present in the moment and then move on as fast as he could, like some hungry monster devouring town after town and needing a metropolis to satiate his hunger now. I can almost see him with fire in his eyes as he grows bloated with life, shoving more into his mouth when it’s already crammed full of building and shacks and people with juice running in purple streams all down his chin and way down his shirt, which is itself already bursting like the Incredible Hulk.
Monday, 3 November 2008
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
On sexism
What sick impulse is it in me that makes these lost causes into lost souls in need of salvation? And salvation – is that really what I want to give them? After all, what would this salvation consist of? Would it mean bringing them back into this world? Back onto the path from which they’ve strayed? No. No, this isn’t it, even if I tell myself that’s what I would like to do. For do I not at the same time contradict myself by wishing to keep them away from the path, away from this world, which I come to see as too callous, cold and cruel for these souls? These souls I exalt as being too good, too pure not to be overwhelmed by this world and the monsters that inhabit it. As though most people were corrupt! Ha! As though it is they that have strayed from the path! As though it is they who are lost! But in my perverse, absurd and infinitely sexist little mind do I not convince myself (How?! How do I convince myself of such absurdities?!!) do I not convince myself that humans are not corrupt, contaminated, but are merely naturally malicious, and that it is the lost souls that are corrupt, those young girls (and it is always young, vulnerable girls) are not whole – they are pure through an inverse corruption, their goodness emanates from a lack: they lack the maliciousness of most people. Their goodness is a form of impurity. Oh, and how by doing so I do them a disservice. How I rob them of any agency, of any face and will of their own. They are there, not to live in this world, but to be sheltered by me in perpetual fear and active blindness.
What scum I am. What a confused, mislead and ridiculous cretin. But don’t worry, I haven’t the power to make things worse. For in the end the joke is always on me. When you try to help these lost souls ward off this cruel world you are being cruel to them tenfold; and besides, the pure, lost, innocent, virginal and angelic lost souls are the ones most liable to hurt you. “For they know not what they do…”.
And you can’t blame them, as you created them that way.
What scum I am. What a confused, mislead and ridiculous cretin. But don’t worry, I haven’t the power to make things worse. For in the end the joke is always on me. When you try to help these lost souls ward off this cruel world you are being cruel to them tenfold; and besides, the pure, lost, innocent, virginal and angelic lost souls are the ones most liable to hurt you. “For they know not what they do…”.
And you can’t blame them, as you created them that way.
Sunday, 12 October 2008
#
Lessons learnt this summer:
A) Escape from oneself is the best one can hope for in this world. Philosophy is self-indulgent, all philosophers are self-indulgent, and excessive exposure to philosophy breeds nothing but harmful self-absorption.
B) The only cures for the self-absorption bred by philosophy are as follows: alcohol; drugs - not depressants; incessant immersion in the company of others, to the point where you no longer remember how to be with yourself - you have to reach the point where you feel scared of your own company, and see this as a blessing; dancing; seemingly superficial music; stop reading anything "profound" or "intense". If possible, stop reading altogethe; take up a manual/physical occupation - this helps you to forget yourself and forget thinking altogether.
C) A and B build up your confidence; they allow you to get on with things without having to make recourse to writing. You no longer need to ask yourself why it is that anyone would even bother talking to you.
D) Ultimately, you are something of a social retard, and cannot help but inevitably fall back into the same vicious loops of self-doubt and paranoia which you have only been staving off; meaning, no matter how hard you try to distance yourself, remove yourself from yourself, to have no regard and even forget yourself, you are only putting something off, and you will eventually be sucked back into yourself and your own despair like some shitty black hole. Certain fundamental insecurities, phobias and paranoias are permanent, and you will never, ever, remove them. Do not be fooled by power trips. Do not fool yourself into believing that you can in any way have control over yourself or that you can make your life better at all, as you'll only be disappointed. The harder you fight it, the more painful it'll be when you are crushed, as will inevitably be the case. And yet, not fighting is simply not an option.
Conclusions:
There's still hope. I don't know why, but some masochistic drive in me keeps me believing, struggling, and refusing to give up hope. It's all a lie, of course, and we are doomed to nothing but self-contempt. You can never fully break out of yourself, and that's why we're all doomed to go around in circles till the day we die. I recognise my being fucked up, but am powerless to do anything about it.
A) Escape from oneself is the best one can hope for in this world. Philosophy is self-indulgent, all philosophers are self-indulgent, and excessive exposure to philosophy breeds nothing but harmful self-absorption.
B) The only cures for the self-absorption bred by philosophy are as follows: alcohol; drugs - not depressants; incessant immersion in the company of others, to the point where you no longer remember how to be with yourself - you have to reach the point where you feel scared of your own company, and see this as a blessing; dancing; seemingly superficial music; stop reading anything "profound" or "intense". If possible, stop reading altogethe; take up a manual/physical occupation - this helps you to forget yourself and forget thinking altogether.
C) A and B build up your confidence; they allow you to get on with things without having to make recourse to writing. You no longer need to ask yourself why it is that anyone would even bother talking to you.
D) Ultimately, you are something of a social retard, and cannot help but inevitably fall back into the same vicious loops of self-doubt and paranoia which you have only been staving off; meaning, no matter how hard you try to distance yourself, remove yourself from yourself, to have no regard and even forget yourself, you are only putting something off, and you will eventually be sucked back into yourself and your own despair like some shitty black hole. Certain fundamental insecurities, phobias and paranoias are permanent, and you will never, ever, remove them. Do not be fooled by power trips. Do not fool yourself into believing that you can in any way have control over yourself or that you can make your life better at all, as you'll only be disappointed. The harder you fight it, the more painful it'll be when you are crushed, as will inevitably be the case. And yet, not fighting is simply not an option.
Conclusions:
There's still hope. I don't know why, but some masochistic drive in me keeps me believing, struggling, and refusing to give up hope. It's all a lie, of course, and we are doomed to nothing but self-contempt. You can never fully break out of yourself, and that's why we're all doomed to go around in circles till the day we die. I recognise my being fucked up, but am powerless to do anything about it.
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Pffft...
Is it coming back to what it was before? Another round of the same old shit. Something you begin to notice when you write regularly over a long period of time is how the focus of your writing changes and shifts from certain vectors and carries along new ones, and even returning to old one’s every now and then, trying to find a footing, some stability, a certainty. I felt like I was on to something interesting last year, at least for me, when I began to write about nothing in particular, writing about wasting time, wasting whole days, weeks at a time – wasting my life away in inescapable inertia, trapped inside myself, wanting desperately to change that self, for no particular reason, really; not because I don’t like myself or because my life is particularly horrible, nor because I wasn’t happy with the way things were going… On second thought, it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, I just wasn’t satisfied. Always restless, but never quite sure why. Looking and groping, slowly, hesitantly, tentatively, reaching out in the dark, and knowing all the while that some veil is right before my eyes, but I didn’t know how to remove it. Or maybe it wasn’t a veil; maybe it was a prism, distorting the view and disorienting me. I had no good reason to be restless. All I knew was that I wanted out, anyway, anyhow, shatter myself and smash my life to pieces, just so I could remove myself from myself, look outside the senseless, confused and paralysed mess that is my consciousness; I’d forgotten how to breathe.
What’s happened since? Too much. So the writing has changed; stopped, really. Too many things, too hectic a year.
That bloody cat is in heat, and she’s driving me insane. All I can think of is squashing her fragile little skull in my hand. Just watching her rub up against me, presenting her behind and hearing her constant pleas for some cock, my skin begins to burn, like a horrible itch I can’t scratch and that’s growing worse by the minute. It’s making me restless and horny, and I resent the cat for it. When it comes to the crucial moment, I have no sympathy for anyone. All my purported understanding and compassion – no, fuck that word. I prefer ‘empathy’, though that’s not quite right either. Anyway, whatever it is, it goes out the window; I forget all my lessons and understanding, and lose my temper. My patience fails me. I forget, I forget. I forget all too often. It’s always a disappointment, a failure on my part. I can’t even have sympathy for a cat in heat; how the fuck am I supposed to have sympathy for a human-being? What, just because I’m human too? That’s not the answer. I feel I have a much better understanding of what it’s like to be a cat than to be human. Cat’s are easier to forgive (not this cat, though. I want to squash her fragile skull in my hand).
How can I go back to writing the same stuff as last year? Has my life really changed that much that I can’t bring myself back to that state of mind? No, not really. This year has, in many ways, been one of change. Lots has happened. I started the year writing more than ever, then making the decision to cut down significantly on writing; a conscious decision. ‘Let yourself breathe. Let your ideas breathe.’ And in many ways I feel like I’m breathing again, like I’ve torn down some walls, smashed some mirrors. Not as suffocated as I felt a few months ago. Things, I feel, are going somewhere. But have I not missed the lesson? Things never really go anywhere. Maybe that’s all I meant. Yes, that’s all I meant. Things are becoming just a little bit easier and a little bit lighter every day. Yet here I am again: I have deadlines. I can see opportunities being lost again just on the horizon. ‘Next year, next year, I’ll change. Next year it’s serious’. And once again I’m not stressed about any of it, except for the odd jolt of panic here and then, but those are more like unpleasant farts or trapped wind than a crisis. And now I feel myself going back to writing about nothing and about wasting my life. And, strangely enough, at the same time I’m regaining my will to write. I feel as though there’s much I have to let out of my system, much that I might not have realised was building up. So I’ll go back to writing about wasting my life – it seems to be the only thing I can do at the moment. I’m looking forward to it.
What’s happened since? Too much. So the writing has changed; stopped, really. Too many things, too hectic a year.
That bloody cat is in heat, and she’s driving me insane. All I can think of is squashing her fragile little skull in my hand. Just watching her rub up against me, presenting her behind and hearing her constant pleas for some cock, my skin begins to burn, like a horrible itch I can’t scratch and that’s growing worse by the minute. It’s making me restless and horny, and I resent the cat for it. When it comes to the crucial moment, I have no sympathy for anyone. All my purported understanding and compassion – no, fuck that word. I prefer ‘empathy’, though that’s not quite right either. Anyway, whatever it is, it goes out the window; I forget all my lessons and understanding, and lose my temper. My patience fails me. I forget, I forget. I forget all too often. It’s always a disappointment, a failure on my part. I can’t even have sympathy for a cat in heat; how the fuck am I supposed to have sympathy for a human-being? What, just because I’m human too? That’s not the answer. I feel I have a much better understanding of what it’s like to be a cat than to be human. Cat’s are easier to forgive (not this cat, though. I want to squash her fragile skull in my hand).
How can I go back to writing the same stuff as last year? Has my life really changed that much that I can’t bring myself back to that state of mind? No, not really. This year has, in many ways, been one of change. Lots has happened. I started the year writing more than ever, then making the decision to cut down significantly on writing; a conscious decision. ‘Let yourself breathe. Let your ideas breathe.’ And in many ways I feel like I’m breathing again, like I’ve torn down some walls, smashed some mirrors. Not as suffocated as I felt a few months ago. Things, I feel, are going somewhere. But have I not missed the lesson? Things never really go anywhere. Maybe that’s all I meant. Yes, that’s all I meant. Things are becoming just a little bit easier and a little bit lighter every day. Yet here I am again: I have deadlines. I can see opportunities being lost again just on the horizon. ‘Next year, next year, I’ll change. Next year it’s serious’. And once again I’m not stressed about any of it, except for the odd jolt of panic here and then, but those are more like unpleasant farts or trapped wind than a crisis. And now I feel myself going back to writing about nothing and about wasting my life. And, strangely enough, at the same time I’m regaining my will to write. I feel as though there’s much I have to let out of my system, much that I might not have realised was building up. So I’ll go back to writing about wasting my life – it seems to be the only thing I can do at the moment. I’m looking forward to it.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
A life about nothing
What? What the fuck is life about?! The kind of thoughts that go through my head, I can’t make any sense of them. I feel stuffed after my dinner, and I feel my bloated belly and think about my dad; I think about his slight stature, his bald scalp and his droopy belly. What kind of physique did he have when he was my age? Am I doing well compared to him? I’d like to be fitter than he is when I’m his age. It’s hard to get fit though; I’m not a naturally athletic guy. Or at least, I didn’t have the right habits instilled in me to be more athletic and have more of a tendency towards it. Because potential, that may be in almost anyone, but potential means nothing without the right habits, and without the desire and dedication to achieve something. But first habits, mostly habits.
I think about my dad, and how he didn’t instil the right habits in me. And why not? Because he didn’t have those habits himself, and it seemed he never learnt their importance, or if he did, then he never managed to instil them in himself. Was it a question of strength? Was my dad just not strong enough to overcome himself? Would I be strong enough to overcome myself? Oh, but that’s surely not all it comes down to. To say that a man is or is not strong enough to overcome himself – is that not to answer the question with its own presuppositions? If we say a man is strong enough to change himself, then we are not talking about true overcoming, but about a gift he’d been endowed with by nature. Overcoming always appeared to me to consist of cultivating strength in oneself. How, then, may we ask whether a man can be strong enough to make himself strong? How are we to even phrase the question? Where are we to find this strength that precedes strength?
Then I think about my future children. Do I have the right habits to instil in them? God, no, I’m a mess. What kind of person thinks they’re ready to have kids? People who don’t feel any trepidation about the possibility of offspring horrify me; to become a parent is to be guilty of the greatest arrogance, and the greatest harm towards one’s children. Our origin sin was against our Father, when we ate from the tree of knowledge. But we commit another original sin, an original sin against our children the moment we bring them to life; did not God himself commit the original sin when he planted the tree’s seed in the ground?
To return to your question, no, I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. When will I get there? Have I not been striving for this my whole life? To reach that point where I can finally say – I am fine, I am complete, I don’t need to change anymore. But that point will never come, and I’ve accepted it long ago; so why can’t I just live with it? Why do I keep racking my brains about what it is I’m doing with my life? My life, my life; what does it come down to? Philosophy is great, but sometimes I wonder if my life goes beyond this kind of meaningless, sporadic thoughts, these little niggling anxieties and uncertainties that go almost unnoticed through my mind in never-ending loops, unable to break out of their own vicious cycles; breakthroughs come when these cycles exhaust and spend themselves. And I wonder if my preoccupation with philosophy doesn’t miss the point sometimes? Is there not something behind philosophical questions which is obscured by those very questions? Does my life not consist in precisely those little anxieties and niggling uncertainties, regrets and accusations, that are so common-place we do not even bother to consign them to our memory? I will sooner remember a trip to the local corner shop than give a second thought to the thought I had about my dad earlier.
If this was a story, a ‘proper’ narrative, would I not be recounting to you my trip to the shop, how I bought a pack of tobacco and the huge Asian man behind the till who looked ready to crush me for interrupting while a game of football was being shown on television? Some people call this kind of story ‘stories about nothing’, and tell us that those stories are about real life, as though the role of literature was to be as true to real life as possible, and as though life could be ascertained or pinned down to one quality or tendency, as though is was the tendency of life? So is life about nothing? It seems to me that this nothing, even in the most banal and repetitive of daily tasks, is a loud, noisy grind, an endless stream of thoughts and struggles, always taking form, shaping up, looking like culminating, but always disappointing, always failing.
So what is potential? Potential is nothing without actualisation. Potential can only be claimed in retrospect, after one has exerted one’s potential.
I think about my dad, and how he didn’t instil the right habits in me. And why not? Because he didn’t have those habits himself, and it seemed he never learnt their importance, or if he did, then he never managed to instil them in himself. Was it a question of strength? Was my dad just not strong enough to overcome himself? Would I be strong enough to overcome myself? Oh, but that’s surely not all it comes down to. To say that a man is or is not strong enough to overcome himself – is that not to answer the question with its own presuppositions? If we say a man is strong enough to change himself, then we are not talking about true overcoming, but about a gift he’d been endowed with by nature. Overcoming always appeared to me to consist of cultivating strength in oneself. How, then, may we ask whether a man can be strong enough to make himself strong? How are we to even phrase the question? Where are we to find this strength that precedes strength?
Then I think about my future children. Do I have the right habits to instil in them? God, no, I’m a mess. What kind of person thinks they’re ready to have kids? People who don’t feel any trepidation about the possibility of offspring horrify me; to become a parent is to be guilty of the greatest arrogance, and the greatest harm towards one’s children. Our origin sin was against our Father, when we ate from the tree of knowledge. But we commit another original sin, an original sin against our children the moment we bring them to life; did not God himself commit the original sin when he planted the tree’s seed in the ground?
To return to your question, no, I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. When will I get there? Have I not been striving for this my whole life? To reach that point where I can finally say – I am fine, I am complete, I don’t need to change anymore. But that point will never come, and I’ve accepted it long ago; so why can’t I just live with it? Why do I keep racking my brains about what it is I’m doing with my life? My life, my life; what does it come down to? Philosophy is great, but sometimes I wonder if my life goes beyond this kind of meaningless, sporadic thoughts, these little niggling anxieties and uncertainties that go almost unnoticed through my mind in never-ending loops, unable to break out of their own vicious cycles; breakthroughs come when these cycles exhaust and spend themselves. And I wonder if my preoccupation with philosophy doesn’t miss the point sometimes? Is there not something behind philosophical questions which is obscured by those very questions? Does my life not consist in precisely those little anxieties and niggling uncertainties, regrets and accusations, that are so common-place we do not even bother to consign them to our memory? I will sooner remember a trip to the local corner shop than give a second thought to the thought I had about my dad earlier.
If this was a story, a ‘proper’ narrative, would I not be recounting to you my trip to the shop, how I bought a pack of tobacco and the huge Asian man behind the till who looked ready to crush me for interrupting while a game of football was being shown on television? Some people call this kind of story ‘stories about nothing’, and tell us that those stories are about real life, as though the role of literature was to be as true to real life as possible, and as though life could be ascertained or pinned down to one quality or tendency, as though is was the tendency of life? So is life about nothing? It seems to me that this nothing, even in the most banal and repetitive of daily tasks, is a loud, noisy grind, an endless stream of thoughts and struggles, always taking form, shaping up, looking like culminating, but always disappointing, always failing.
So what is potential? Potential is nothing without actualisation. Potential can only be claimed in retrospect, after one has exerted one’s potential.
Thursday, 1 May 2008
The badass
We walk the streets at a sluggish pace
taking the long way home
A drunken detour at the end of a day’s drinking
and drunken ramblings
It’s still light outside
and the night is only starting for most people
With arms hanging limply around one another
we reassure each-other that we’re ok
when really we only want each-other because we
both know we can’t do any better
and we laugh desperately
drunkenly
ugly
She sees me as a consolation
because I remind her that there are people just
as pathetic as her in this world
She has to be a mess
and so must I
it wouldn’t work any other way because I am the last authentic gutter poet
I AM CHARLES BUKOWSKI
all those other kids are impostors
but I’m real
I live the hard life
and we’ll probably go back to mine
and have another three bottles of red wine
and then we’ll fuck like animals
I’ll comment on her chunky manly thighs
and slap her on the back and call her a whore
and she’ll say something about my big hairy belly
and huge ugly balls
and then when it’s done I’ll turn cold and tell her to go home
(‘cos that’s the kind of guy I am)
and then I’ll sit in my poorly lit room
and write poems about it
referring to her as ‘that dirty whore’
while chain-smoking over my typewriter
and I’ll write these simple beastly poems
that every man can read
because I am everyman
I’m just like you and the next guy along
and I hate people
not because I think I’m better than them
but because I’m an arsehole and I know I am
that’s just the kind of guy I am
I live rough
I look bad
I’m scruffy
I don’t shave for days
even weeks
and I’m always in a mood
I have no time for people
and I scratch my arse when I wake up in the morning and have a beer
BECAUSE I’M THE REAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The next day I might go to the racetrack and make some money
and maybe drive my car around some bars for the day
and get into a fight
or a conversation with some whore
except I don’t know where the track is in this city
or if there even is one
and besides I don't even drive
and even if there was one I wouldn’t go
because I get bored at those places
and I wouldn’t know what to do
and don’t like betting on horses anyway
I much prefer card games
I’d probably feel out of place
and wouldn’t make small chat with anyone
because I don’t have anything to do with these people
I’m not a working-man
or an everyman
or any-man
I’m more of a no-man
a simple
boring
no-one
But that doesn’t matter
‘cos I’m still the real thing
and I’m dirty
and I’m mean
got no time for in-between
I’m the real deal
I’ll smash your skull
and then I’ll write about it
BECAUSE I AM THE REAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI
taking the long way home
A drunken detour at the end of a day’s drinking
and drunken ramblings
It’s still light outside
and the night is only starting for most people
With arms hanging limply around one another
we reassure each-other that we’re ok
when really we only want each-other because we
both know we can’t do any better
and we laugh desperately
drunkenly
ugly
She sees me as a consolation
because I remind her that there are people just
as pathetic as her in this world
She has to be a mess
and so must I
it wouldn’t work any other way because I am the last authentic gutter poet
I AM CHARLES BUKOWSKI
all those other kids are impostors
but I’m real
I live the hard life
and we’ll probably go back to mine
and have another three bottles of red wine
and then we’ll fuck like animals
I’ll comment on her chunky manly thighs
and slap her on the back and call her a whore
and she’ll say something about my big hairy belly
and huge ugly balls
and then when it’s done I’ll turn cold and tell her to go home
(‘cos that’s the kind of guy I am)
and then I’ll sit in my poorly lit room
and write poems about it
referring to her as ‘that dirty whore’
while chain-smoking over my typewriter
and I’ll write these simple beastly poems
that every man can read
because I am everyman
I’m just like you and the next guy along
and I hate people
not because I think I’m better than them
but because I’m an arsehole and I know I am
that’s just the kind of guy I am
I live rough
I look bad
I’m scruffy
I don’t shave for days
even weeks
and I’m always in a mood
I have no time for people
and I scratch my arse when I wake up in the morning and have a beer
BECAUSE I’M THE REAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The next day I might go to the racetrack and make some money
and maybe drive my car around some bars for the day
and get into a fight
or a conversation with some whore
except I don’t know where the track is in this city
or if there even is one
and besides I don't even drive
and even if there was one I wouldn’t go
because I get bored at those places
and I wouldn’t know what to do
and don’t like betting on horses anyway
I much prefer card games
I’d probably feel out of place
and wouldn’t make small chat with anyone
because I don’t have anything to do with these people
I’m not a working-man
or an everyman
or any-man
I’m more of a no-man
a simple
boring
no-one
But that doesn’t matter
‘cos I’m still the real thing
and I’m dirty
and I’m mean
got no time for in-between
I’m the real deal
I’ll smash your skull
and then I’ll write about it
BECAUSE I AM THE REAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Thursday, 6 March 2008
The day I sat down and did something, except that something wasn't a productive something, so it was really nothing, and I wasted my time writing a...
"Time is a matter of fact,
and it is gone and it'll never come back,
and mine
is wasted all the time"
-Daniel Johnston
It's not every day one gets to choose how to pass the time, and let us pray it stays that way, for nothing is worse than the guilt incurred upon us by the wasting of valuable, potentially productive time with idleness. God didn't give us hand so we can stick them in our pockets, and he didn't give us pockets without giving us things to fill them with. Fill them with tools if you're a labourer, money if you're a trader, or even stolen goods should you be a thief; whatever you do, don't be idle, and don't put your hands in your pockets!
Alas! I have been cursed with so much spare time! I've have long ago become an idler. It wasn't my fault, but the conditions into which I was brought, you see. Time is to man what food is to a dog: he needs someone to regulate it for him. If a dog is given infinite amounts of food, what's to stop it from stuffing itself to an unhealthy degree? It doesn't know any better. And time, I fear, may be infinite.
I try to fight it, god knows I do. Why do you think I'm writing this pointless... I don't know if I can even call it a story. Shall we say an idle rant? But it doesn't matter how many things you find to fill your time, there'll always be more time. You do your best to keep up with it, you put up a good fight; let no-one call you an idler. But at some point you have to stop (you're only human, for fuck's sake), and while you stop, time just keeps running and slipping through your fingers.
Time is infinite, as I suggested above, but our time most certainly isn't. Maybe that's why we're so concerned with it. I dare say that if I was immortal I'd never get anything done. "What's the rush? I have all the time in the world", I'd say, and mean it. Maybe then I could actually enjoy life?
When did I become like this? All the signs were pointing the other way. I come from a family of doers. Honest, good, hard-working, dumb doers. My grandfather worked in factories for as long as he could remember. He only retired when they finally shut the factory down. For the remaining few years of his life he rotted in idleness, not knowing what to do with himself. He'd sit around all day watching German tv, probaly thinking about working. His wife, on the other hand, never did a thing in her life. For as long as I can recall she watched American soaps, with the occassional interval for sleep, so she could gather more energy to watch some more soaps. I'd almost respect her if she wasn't such a stuck-up princess. She never quite came to terms with marrying a blue collar worker. She would pretend she could speak French and English, throwing random words about, which she'd probably picked up from the soaps. She had a brain like you're still interested in this story.
Time! Won't someone take away my time?! No, don't! What a funny creature we are: we hate having time on our hands and keep looking for ways to avoid it, yet as soon as we get our wish and find a way to kill 8 hours a day we start complaining and asking for more time. We haven't come a long way from being young children, paying no attention toa boring, dispensible toy, but damned if we let anyone else have it!
and it is gone and it'll never come back,
and mine
is wasted all the time"
-Daniel Johnston
It's not every day one gets to choose how to pass the time, and let us pray it stays that way, for nothing is worse than the guilt incurred upon us by the wasting of valuable, potentially productive time with idleness. God didn't give us hand so we can stick them in our pockets, and he didn't give us pockets without giving us things to fill them with. Fill them with tools if you're a labourer, money if you're a trader, or even stolen goods should you be a thief; whatever you do, don't be idle, and don't put your hands in your pockets!
Alas! I have been cursed with so much spare time! I've have long ago become an idler. It wasn't my fault, but the conditions into which I was brought, you see. Time is to man what food is to a dog: he needs someone to regulate it for him. If a dog is given infinite amounts of food, what's to stop it from stuffing itself to an unhealthy degree? It doesn't know any better. And time, I fear, may be infinite.
I try to fight it, god knows I do. Why do you think I'm writing this pointless... I don't know if I can even call it a story. Shall we say an idle rant? But it doesn't matter how many things you find to fill your time, there'll always be more time. You do your best to keep up with it, you put up a good fight; let no-one call you an idler. But at some point you have to stop (you're only human, for fuck's sake), and while you stop, time just keeps running and slipping through your fingers.
Time is infinite, as I suggested above, but our time most certainly isn't. Maybe that's why we're so concerned with it. I dare say that if I was immortal I'd never get anything done. "What's the rush? I have all the time in the world", I'd say, and mean it. Maybe then I could actually enjoy life?
When did I become like this? All the signs were pointing the other way. I come from a family of doers. Honest, good, hard-working, dumb doers. My grandfather worked in factories for as long as he could remember. He only retired when they finally shut the factory down. For the remaining few years of his life he rotted in idleness, not knowing what to do with himself. He'd sit around all day watching German tv, probaly thinking about working. His wife, on the other hand, never did a thing in her life. For as long as I can recall she watched American soaps, with the occassional interval for sleep, so she could gather more energy to watch some more soaps. I'd almost respect her if she wasn't such a stuck-up princess. She never quite came to terms with marrying a blue collar worker. She would pretend she could speak French and English, throwing random words about, which she'd probably picked up from the soaps. She had a brain like you're still interested in this story.
Time! Won't someone take away my time?! No, don't! What a funny creature we are: we hate having time on our hands and keep looking for ways to avoid it, yet as soon as we get our wish and find a way to kill 8 hours a day we start complaining and asking for more time. We haven't come a long way from being young children, paying no attention toa boring, dispensible toy, but damned if we let anyone else have it!
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!! The Romantics? who prove very clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is to say, the idea sung and intended by the singer.
For I is smeone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it..."
Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny, 1871
For I is smeone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it..."
Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny, 1871
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