Tuesday, October 21, 2008
excerpts
Inspired by The Golden Notebook, and partly obliged to update worldsuponwords more often, here are recent slips of writing from my notebook dated since end September.Nowadays I hate to dream. Most of my dreams are manifestations of crude non-reality. Irksome and disturbing. Sometimes I get meaning and ideas from my dreams, but not lately. When I am awake these dreams are even scarier, like hallucinations waiting to happen. I lie down, unasleep, and they happen. While I am wide awake.
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"Ultimately, the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation."
Oscar Wilde.
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Everyone has a string of failed loves in their lives. I'm glad to know I am not the only one, an anomaly in the human trend.
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I find myself having a lack of expression: where description should form, I am vague. Momentous pleasures become plain. Poetry disappears. Street language suffices -- I feel like fuck, damn.
With a lack of expression writing becomes boring for my potential reader, therefore I ache when I write. I foresee what I write here will be boring to the end. How I wish I were a filmmaker, it would be easier to convey in the instant what I mean to express.
I think of constantly reading - and I try to improve my fluidity of word-expression. It hardly helps. I fanatically assume that the books I read will sublimate naturally into improved writing of my own.
A writer probably ought to be a far deeper examiner of what she reads - or experiences - than that. I skim through my reading the same way I skim through how I feel. For years I suffered the self-tyranny of repressing my emotions, allowing them little audience in my life. Thus I fall sick with depression.
Right now I realise this, and so constantly try to allow myself to feel. I ask myself, How do I feel? Oftentimes it is nothing, as I am not used to this exercise. But when I really try to release the stranglehold of my will upon my feelings, I realise the emotions I feel.
Like right now:
I feel anger, one that transcends into sadness. And then since holding on to these feelings is unfruitful, I try to let them go.
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