An apple scented candle is gradually immolating as I'm typing away at this midpoint, fridaynightsaturdaymorning. I guess that's what you would call a recurring theme, apple candles and how the appley fumes stimulate waves and waves of neurological activity.
Earlier on the road:
There are three lanes but everything is deserted apart from the little green car I'm thinking away in. Peculiar but on the opposite side of the road: streams and streams of cars reflecting neon and gold and myriad shapes and colors which seem to blend into a hue I cannot discern. It is all at once stunningly beautiful and utterly captivating how they meander, bored but with purpose, linearly to one destination or another. Cold and cozied from the strangely humid night outside, preoccupied and unoccupied, these strangers in their air-conditioned comforts meshing and sticking and blurring and blending to gleam with such unnoticed beauty. Unnoticed beauty, that's all it is as their lights perforate the mildly tinted glass on my windshield, my cheeks glowing in the rearview. All of this stitched in with one line from one song, and the dusty gravel ridges of bixby canyon bridges swirl like pancake mixture with the lights and the night and the images burn bright bright bright. Zipped by. Five seconds. The glint of Christmas lights on October cars. Waving goodbye to strangers hoping they can't see you, hoping they can.
-
both sides now - rachael yamagata
somersault - decoder ring
measurements - james blake
unspoken - four tet
new year's eve - the walkmen
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
the blind boy
You said, "I love you"
I said, "Wait"
I was going to say "Take me"
You said, "Go away"
-
A quote, from one of my favorite films of all time. Love is intangible, love fails to materialize in an understandable way outside of a given context. Maybe that's why I feel the need to rely on other lovers to inform my own experience. Maybe that's why I fall so easily in love with the narratives of Jules and Jim and Catherine, or Jesse and Celine. If only it were so easy to fall in love at twenty-one, if only it were so easy to love at twenty two, if only love came easy at twenty-three, if we're both not lovers by twenty four, would you pass me those knee pads and i'll get on the floor (familiar impatience).
-
The title at the top of the page, "The blind boy" is an apt description of the writer's attempt at articulating his feelings on the subject of "love". Both in the intrinsic sense of the experience one goes through as well as the difficulties faced when writing about it.
blindness /blind·ness/ (blīnd´nes) lack or loss of ability to see; lack of perception of visual stimuli.
Love is touching souls. An alternative deconstruction of this word/feeling/discourse leads to the following realization: Love is blindness. A realization implies that some form of meaning has been excavated, but realizing that one is blind does not have the same comforting effect.
The blind boy thinks that he loves. After all, why should he not? He has done all the things that he's been told lovers do (but it's only touching what they do). He has waited, much like the other has waited. He has been consumed, that all encompassing, logic-subverting first fall when the neurons explode but the brain doesn't think, doesn't want to. The magnetic inclination that all of us have felt at one point or another in time. He has been kept in agony, agitated by the unknowns, the combinations and permutations of a mathematics major, hoping half deliriously and half morbidly that the other smarts as much as he does. And he discovers that it is true, there is a shared mutuality that justifies all prior worrying and the jitters and the unsleeping. For one brief, shiny moment there is contentment and comfort, because any lover would testify to the beauty of knowing little, but of liking what you know. The placidity of emotion only lasts for so long because the blind boy thinks of himself as a fearless seafarer when it comes to love, all wonder in his eyes, honest and temperamental eagerness get him over the moodiest weather and the deepest waters. And the assumption that the other sees exactly as he sees, feels exactly as he feels, loves in the same pinpoint way that he loves. Two lovers, but the capacity only to write the discourse of one. A book half-written and half imagined. The blind boy's first attempt at love, he buys gifts and he surprises and he rubs against the skin of his lover leaving behind bruises but what else? He takes the other's hand and sets off at full speed, but soon he is so far around the bend that his lover is nowhere in sight when he looks over his shoulder. But it's only touching what they do, he says to himself as he catches his breath. Love is too complex for a boy so blind, love is too big for a boy who leaves half himself behind.
-
The coda ends on a hopeful note, but perhaps I am too eager to balance the two extremes out. I really don't think love is self-serving. There. I said it. I really cannot elaborate because I feel my narrative is still in the "exposition" stage. There is still so much that refuses to reveal easily (hoping against hope that all future revelations are made with you). So what is love? Well, right now in the most offhand way: Love is you. Ask me later and I promise I'll have charts and graphs to explain what I can't right now.
I said, "Wait"
I was going to say "Take me"
You said, "Go away"
-
A quote, from one of my favorite films of all time. Love is intangible, love fails to materialize in an understandable way outside of a given context. Maybe that's why I feel the need to rely on other lovers to inform my own experience. Maybe that's why I fall so easily in love with the narratives of Jules and Jim and Catherine, or Jesse and Celine. If only it were so easy to fall in love at twenty-one, if only it were so easy to love at twenty two, if only love came easy at twenty-three, if we're both not lovers by twenty four, would you pass me those knee pads and i'll get on the floor (familiar impatience).
-
The title at the top of the page, "The blind boy" is an apt description of the writer's attempt at articulating his feelings on the subject of "love". Both in the intrinsic sense of the experience one goes through as well as the difficulties faced when writing about it.
blindness /blind·ness/ (blīnd´nes) lack or loss of ability to see; lack of perception of visual stimuli.
Love is touching souls. An alternative deconstruction of this word/feeling/discourse leads to the following realization: Love is blindness. A realization implies that some form of meaning has been excavated, but realizing that one is blind does not have the same comforting effect.
The blind boy thinks that he loves. After all, why should he not? He has done all the things that he's been told lovers do (but it's only touching what they do). He has waited, much like the other has waited. He has been consumed, that all encompassing, logic-subverting first fall when the neurons explode but the brain doesn't think, doesn't want to. The magnetic inclination that all of us have felt at one point or another in time. He has been kept in agony, agitated by the unknowns, the combinations and permutations of a mathematics major, hoping half deliriously and half morbidly that the other smarts as much as he does. And he discovers that it is true, there is a shared mutuality that justifies all prior worrying and the jitters and the unsleeping. For one brief, shiny moment there is contentment and comfort, because any lover would testify to the beauty of knowing little, but of liking what you know. The placidity of emotion only lasts for so long because the blind boy thinks of himself as a fearless seafarer when it comes to love, all wonder in his eyes, honest and temperamental eagerness get him over the moodiest weather and the deepest waters. And the assumption that the other sees exactly as he sees, feels exactly as he feels, loves in the same pinpoint way that he loves. Two lovers, but the capacity only to write the discourse of one. A book half-written and half imagined. The blind boy's first attempt at love, he buys gifts and he surprises and he rubs against the skin of his lover leaving behind bruises but what else? He takes the other's hand and sets off at full speed, but soon he is so far around the bend that his lover is nowhere in sight when he looks over his shoulder. But it's only touching what they do, he says to himself as he catches his breath. Love is too complex for a boy so blind, love is too big for a boy who leaves half himself behind.
-
The coda ends on a hopeful note, but perhaps I am too eager to balance the two extremes out. I really don't think love is self-serving. There. I said it. I really cannot elaborate because I feel my narrative is still in the "exposition" stage. There is still so much that refuses to reveal easily (hoping against hope that all future revelations are made with you). So what is love? Well, right now in the most offhand way: Love is you. Ask me later and I promise I'll have charts and graphs to explain what I can't right now.
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