Yes, flu's gone, to be replaced by a full-on head-cold. But it looks like the cold is losing out to the Great 'phfina.
So now all I have to conquer is this bleakness and depression that I have for what reason? No reason, so why is it so hard to see? Well, no reason, really, and lots of reasons. I am a sensitive person, so when you say things to me, well, ...
I take everything said me me to heart. And if you say, 'why are you riding me so hard?' because none of your 'friendies' do that, and I try to point out something in love ...? Well, it hurts. It stings, and this little honeybee, well, I'm a weird little one: I have feelings, too. And when I write, oh, I don't know six thousand words, and then five thousand words to answer your question: 'Oh, I've met a girl just like you, and oh, what do I do?' And then you go and read those words and do exactly what I said leads to my ruin not to my salvation because you're a 'thoughtful' person and you're 'scared.' Well, guess what?
The guess what is I'm done. Not with you, because I love you, even as you're done with me, I will always ALWAYS love you and wait for you to come back, and reach out, even as I know I'll get hurt again.
No, I'm done giving free advice that you won't listen to anyway. It hurt me to write those words, and what did they accomplish?
Now "I'm" abandoned by you. All my efforts to guide you to save me have run up against the wall of you telling yourself you're not up to saving me, because it involves risk, and, yes, it involves you extending you beyond yourself.
So that phase of my life is over for now. 'phfina, the doctor, is gone fishing.
Now I have to work on myself and in working on myself, I have to be with people who ... love me, you know? Who see me for what I am and what I'm not, and still love me. And still are cheering for me. You want to ask my advice and ignore it? You want to test me and tease me about my drinking or my fucked up life? Fine, do that. You will, anyway. I just now have to be with people who are open to me as I am, and I have to be that person, too: open to myself, and open to the people around me just as they are. And love them.
Okay?
So, now my entry.
House of Leaves
No, I haven't read it yet. Thinking about it. Which means: I will read it, or I won't.
But this was too good to pass up (and isn't it so for us trapped in our own worlds that our house's inside is so much bigger than that of the rest of the world?), so I'll lift the quote directly (emphasis mine):
According to Wallace, "fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being," and he expressed a desire to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help readers "become less alone inside." In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, he describes the human condition of daily crises and chronic disillusionment and rejects solipsism, invoking compassion, mindfulness, and existentialism:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.
I came across Wallace after reading a review of House of Leaves on Amazon saying the footnotes in the book are like Wallace's footnote-y style of writing.
And I'm like: scared ... a little bit ... or, okay, a lot. I mean I've been accused of writing like bb, but that makes sense. I mean, I don't but I do, but he's family: we have the same literary background with the towering influence of our father and mothers and aunties and uncles.
So what if I read House of Leaves and find myself there? Am I just a shadow? A walking shadow? Do I think like I think and write like I write because I'm in the generation that does? Are we, me, bb, Wallace, Danielewski, Gaiman, Pulahnuik, Salinger, DeWitt trapped in this style of writing, ... in this style of living, because we are the grandchildren of Husserl and Heidigger, and Sartre's and Wittgenstein's protégées?
I don't know.
I do know that I read myself in these writings and these books, and I'm scared.
Are we fated to live the lives we live, and our free choice is only maya that only draws us further and faster into our sealed doom?
This is my thought for today. And I don't know if I'll read House of Leaves ... reading Last Samurai and Fight Club was so hard, but so true. What will I find if I read House of Leaves?
I think I'm afraid I'll find myself. And I'm afraid when I find her ... she'll kill me.
No comments:
Post a Comment