http://www.angelfire.comblues/sascha/

http://www.angelfire.comblues/sascha/

Wednesday 1/5/2 Work

Paragraphing in last entry incorrect but what's to do?

I was reassured by humanity this morning, but not my own. I'd lost my weekly travelpass and come to the gates and penniless and panicked. Stressed in general for some reason this induced hysteria strawed the camel's back. Any way the nice man in uniform came over ready no doubt to council me on my lost child my father's death the verdict: cancer. No, says I, I lost my ticket, panic. Promised to pay. Probably slightly amused very sympathetic he took me through the gate out to the sun he said "you're all right take it easy."

What a great world, enduring me!

*

VOXBOX

*

There's nothing quite like realising you've been wrong or narrow about something. It's revelatory and clarifying in the most irritating possible way. I was thinking about how a while ago I thought about that "If a tree falls alone in a forest does it make a sound?" and how I thought in reply "Well that depends if you define a sound as a wave/vibration in the air, or how that vibration registers on the ear drum." Christ.

And how in Year 8 I think it was I wrote that dreadful play 'the Art' that incorporated Eliot's Prufrock which I then loved (and still do) but not until yesterday did I really understand it. That happens all the time. PRECOTENTIOUS. Today's accusatory neologism.

*

I love menial work that negates me. I mean that.

Wednesday 1/5/2 Way to Work

Undirected passion. You can't say these things to noone! I am locked, left unsaid.

Penance

I want your rough name in my mouth

I want your setence in my head

Tuesday 30/4/2

I noticed a pattern today when I got my law mark back. From the very first first year assignment to this one, the mark awarded for each assignment has gone down a few percent. There are no exceptions to this descent.

Nonetheless my mark relieved and pleased me. The genius of my english paper went well-rewarded thank god (laugh laugh). I had two oral presentations today. And I'm sure they were genius too. The extent o which I care? My scholarship was revised the other day. I only need 75s now. Pffffft.

Tuesday 30/4/2

At uni...

I'm queueing at the library catalogue but everyone is checking their email. All that relentless sound on the keys, it sounds like machine gun fire.

*

Every little word, every letter a little death?

My sterile life its sterile places their sterile lives.

*

The fatboy in law asked to borrow my notes. His words kept choking and swallowing themselves. His request didn't invite a reply because it could never be finished - it kept circling back into itself rabbiting on about how he was sick and he had the papers to prove it I had to believe him. Finally I smilingly interrupted him and said "What kind of Nazi do you think I am? Like 'give me your papers!' or something? Of course I'll?" But already he was off again, "No, I don't I really don't think you're a nazi please don't think that you have to believe me it's just because in my other classes..."

Tongue-tied bloody bore didn't have a lighthearted bone in his body. I wonder what somebody did to him.

*

My dream the night before last. Sister and I were easter egg hunting under some cliffs on a grey day near a haunted radiotionsick shed and we were finding way too much it was disturbing how much horrible chocolate rabbits we kept finding yet we kept taking them loading up we couldn't have carried it all. Then we were interrupted by my grandfather and my mother and my mother said, sounding kind of depressed and irritable about having to tell us, "i'm sorry is gone." I said, "What, dead?" And she said, "He won't understand things anymore."

Monday 29/4/2

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Monday 29/4/2

Speaking of parables, I know a great one. I read it in Borges last year and recalled it to my father last night.

There are two neighbouring Kings. They're always fighting, they're rivals, and one decides to eliminate the other one for good. So he builds an incredibly complex, convoluted, amazing, impossible labrynth, then invites the other King over and challenges him to get through it. So the other King accepts the challenge and starts going through the labrynth. He is getting nowhere and can't get back, and eventually he's starving and dehydrated and feels like he can't go on. So he appeals to his goddess to help him out. And lo and behold, the goddess appears, and shows him the way out.

When he is free again, this King gets some of his men and captures the other King. He drives the other King out into the middle of the desert and abandons him there and drives off. There is no escape for the abandoned King. And so wandering finding just a vast nothing, he learns that the very bald simplicity of this landscape makes it labrynthine. And he dies.

It's called 'the two kings and their two labrynths.'

Last night we watched Zulu, and the previous night we watched 'The Blue Lagoon' (no comment).

Monday 29/4/2

I hate capital letters.

Sunday 28/4/2

There's been this glorious effulgent yellow moon the last couple of nights. Not one of those cold hard moons. The trees are drenched.

Sunday 28/4/2

(I couldn't help but feel strangely affectionate towards her).

Sunday 28/4/2

On Saturday we were parked at Rozelle hospital and Callan park looking out at the water. I was entertaining my sister through the car window spelling out the words "Pigeon of Pleasure" cheerleader style. A woman got out of the car behind us. According to Kit, she sneered at me. I turned around, indignant, to watch her walking away. After all, all I was doing was entertaining my poor sick sister, it's not like I actually fancy myself a cheerleader or anything. Anyway as she walked away, this pictureof superiority crammed her hands inside her pants and started wrestling to get her undies out of her arse. Evidently they'd slid up between her buttocks. She was really groping around in there. She was at it for a while.

Utterly disgusted by her presumptuous inferiority, I waited til she'd gone a little way off for my revenge, then got out my spare P plates, and fitted them to her stupid car. We drove off hurriedly. I hope she didn't notice when she came back - I like to think she drove around all day wearing them until her hubby saw her coming home and yelled "Myra, did you lose your licence?

Now whose the loser? Bitch.

Sunday 28/4/2 Wyle. E. Narcissus Parable

Wrote this while brushing my teeth before the bathroom mirror.

Two plagues had long afflicted an ancient land. The first was a sevenheaded dragon who with minimal effort eliminated all those who strived to destroy it. The other was a woman called Narcissa.

Narcissa was excessively beautiful and, like the challenge of the dragon but far more sweetly dangerous, had led many young men away from their homes, their parents, responsibilities, their wives and families to try to win her heart. But she seemed to love only herself, for she was well aware of her beauty, and like the dragon's victims, most died of heartbreak upon being turned away by Narcissa.

Thus the population of the land was being decimated.

So one day the god decided to bring an end to Narcissa's capricious evils. The God led Narcissa to a nearby pool where she could see her reflection, meaning to leave her trapped forever in admiration of her own beauty until she starved to death - or died pining for the untouchable image. But when Narcissa saw herself in the water, something else happened entirely.

Not knowing that what she saw was her own reflection, she flew into a jealous rage that someone else could be so beautiful, and dashed her hands into the water meaning to strangle it, destroy it.

She felt great satisfaction as she watched the beautiful image explode, destroyed... but then another, more wondrous, more frightening feeling overtook her, for before her very eyes, the water stilled and the image reformed itself again in the water, alive and whole.

From this Narcissa learned that death it not forever, but that she might die many deaths, and return alive to continue on the path of life.

She realised that with this knowledge, her life must be transformed. Suddenly she had a new ambition in life than destroying young men's hearts - she wanted instead to destroy the dragon, as so many young men had failed to do. So she made her way to the outskirts of the land, full of immortality and confidence.

The dragon was fierce and firebloodbreathing but Narcissa stood before it with stealth amid the skulls and hulls and others and said "strike me, if you will, for i will surely return to strike back, until you are destroyed!"

So the dragon attacked her, and like the image in the pond she was utterly shattered, but unlike that reflection, she did not reform.

A possible postscript would be that the dragon, like the young men, had also fallen in love with her beauty, and was so heartbroken by her death that it too died - thus eliminating both great evils from the land.

But anyway, morals, morals.

Something about idolatry? Vanity?

That reincarnation is not so, that death is forever?

That we do not reform again like cartoon animals?

Friday 26/4/2

I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto ad absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time but that you may forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

Faulkner.

Thursday 25/4/2

Listening to George thanks to a friend whom I must also thank for inconveniencing himself and giving up his time all for the sake of my bus-stop idiocy last night.

Feeling squizz. My sister's face is very swollen. Woke late today, first time in a long time. Could have gone back for more. Self indulgent.

How strange the emotions look pressed into shape - an imitation of life.

I watched Pride and Prejudice (greer garson version) for about the 20 millionth time when I woke up despite having work to do. I don't have much time for Jane Austen so why I watch that film, I do not know.

I'm told I had the date right after all.

Wenesday 24/4/2

Anyway, better impacted wisdom teeth than having to suffer from impacted wisdom.

Impacted wisdom. What a wit! It's like I say - everyone belongs somewhere else. Why, I'm such a card I probably belong on a graveyard shift on some obscure cable comedy channel in the orkneys.

I'm at work today. I love work. It always makes me feel so warmly rational and enthusiastic and dry-eyed and tired and incompetent.

*

I said to my father yesterday "daddy I have a Theory of the Soul". I said it in this deliberately hifalutin way but also in a kind of bimbovoice. He chuckled and said "good, I think all 18 year old girls should have a theory of the soul - I used to when I was your age."

'I used to,' he said. I found that sad. I used to bother thinking. Thank god I don't think anymore. What a precocious little shit I was.

Wenesday 24/4/2

Good luck to my beautiful sister who today is having her wisdom teeth extracted under general anaesthetic.

I bet I still have the date wrong on here. It's funny how I'm obsessed with clock time but never know the date. I used to be obsessed with watches. I didn't used to own one, and every two seconds I'd tick "what's the time, what's the time?" to whoever was around to humour me. Then I got a watch. Every two second those hands were encircling my eyes "oh no, it's already four." Now i don't really need to wear a watch because I'm old enough to have a very accurate internal clock.

Wednesday 24/4/2

Structurally this site is becoming such a disorganised ramble a rough stream. In its way it seems so fitting. Consonance between form and content right. Or the author's head and the html body.

The strangest thing happened Sunday night. My grandmother was supposed to check in to say she got to Turkey OK but she hadn't called. Then simultaneously (on 2 phones) we recieved a call from my grandmother, saying she was OK (found) and my aunt saying my cousin was missing, had been for a coupla days (lost). Anyway, we have them both dogtagged now, thankfully. Oughta keep that wily cousin of mine on a leash.

I wonder if I would've been a different person if I'd been a leash child.

Monday 22/4/2

But then of course the pressure would be on to find/create meaning and I would lose the excuse.

Anyway like the Odyssey in Ulysses perhaps our game world is a way to create an order for the meaningless anarchy of our lives (shared).

Is it pretensious to believe that your own life could be more complex, more important than Ulysses?

Monday 22/4/2

Of course, I shouldn't allow myself to succumb to absolute objectivism. That's what it is I'm doing with this nihilist shit. If I'd just sit down and be a bit more subjective about things, focalise existence through myself rather than from outside myself, and use my own perspective, rather than that of some cold eternity, I'd feel a whole lot more meaning was coming out of the whole experience/life thing.

Monday 22/4/2

On Saturday I stepped on a sharp object on the beach and thought GOOD now I'll have an excuse.

Why would I think that?

Monday 22/4/2

I thought today at uni - maybe this is a better expression of my 'theory' of the soul:

The soul is itself not capable of any thought or opinion, it is (merely) the voice of each of the minds separate parts. It merely voices them.

I also thought, maybe, more like a connecting thread, on which the parts are beaded/networked and therefore able to interact and make the person function.

Or perhaps like that little animated ball that bounces on each word of song lyrics onscreen for a children's singalong - bouncing from part to part (activating them) as the needs of each situation dictate.

Thus while it is a unifying force, its own substance is essentially insignificant - the main point of the soul is its function, practically.

Maybe it's just the spark that ignites the whole disgusting mass - but that's another story.

Monday 22/4/2

This mouth ulcer is shocker. I'm still procrastinating - in all things. And once again my friends and I have proved inadequate to the task of orchestrating a physical meeting - let alone a meeting of minds.

I had a 'meeting of bodies' written there but it sounded a tad sick.

Our psychotic game world a la Byatt was really back on track last night with D and A heading down to Christchurch and much more interaction, realism and fun than usual. I talked myself to sleep.

I've realised I have to write about characters I don't believe in. Too often my characters become these automatons, empty bolts of colour against landscapes because that's what they are and must be to me. Idiotic empty dancers my puppets. Characterless in the scheme of things. But once you've read it, you've read it. So I need to press myself. And write about people who believe in their own meaning and believe in things. One of my more tolerable recent stories is the untitled story about Anzac Day and Egypt and reincarnation because the people have such complex beliefs about themselves and others. Not just the endless dull thud of action juxtaposed against the knowledge of its unmeaning in the protagonists atomised mind. Autobiography a dumbly limited approach to things. So numb dumb. Noone else involved.

Another interesting one was 'Things that do not matter' where a person sharing my beliefs forces another into them only to discover too late that he was wrong. Even though I still think he was right.

Fooling yourself or misrepresenting yourself is sometimes the only way. In all things.

Sunday 21/4/2

Wallace Stevens:

She determined by experiment that on a diet of words, water and sunlight she could stay fat and happy as a cornfed chook.

Sunday 21/4/2

My grandmother told me her dream. She dreamt that she heard a terrible crash, and then a voice said "I'll get that." She said, that was what Bob always used to say (Bob is her nickname for her husband) and then she thought 'but Bob's dead' and she thought 'but bob's dead, how can he be talking' and she got out of bed (actually, and in the dream) and started to walk toward the door.

a cat had knocked the coffee pot. Knocked. What is with that silent K?

Anyway, I love that. Crash. I'll get that. But Bob's dead!?

Sunday 21/4/2 Malaika

We all belong somewhere else, but we'll never find out.

But that's OK.

beach, friends, family. nanna set for turkey. happy, happily procrastinating. comfortable bovine. busy

But I wish we knew.

Friday 19/4/2

Zoo. Baby Australian fur seal. This seal that kept floating-reclining holding its hand between its feet up in the air like a sail. Very peaceful. Many improvements. Many crowds. Echidnas and platypuses much happier now I suspect. Heard the green and golden bellfrog for the first time.

Thursday, 18 April 2002

Would it be foolish to say that i disagree with the teachings of buddha simply because I disagree with all teachings, because nothing can be taught? I'm not saying I won't participate in them, play them out, follow and accept them. Acceptance is the automatic way of my mindbody. But. Unhappy with that.

Im adding more. But it doesn't add much:

He lay bellyup, enjoying the car?s dull thrum under his buckskin butt. The sun was icybright and icycold ? it crept in at odd angles around the edges of his sunglasses?how he did not know. Perhaps it reflected off the top of the car. He was becoming sunburnt. The whole thing reminded him of how once he had worn a large very cheap sombrero to the beach and had nonetheless got a burnt face from the light bouncing up at him off the sand. He had freckles around his nostrils to prove it. Seemed bizarre. Had a fascination with reflections?for example, the way his own personality was reflected back at him when he communicated it to others ? it bounced back as off a rubber mirror. Boing. Petrol was low. His petrol, the car. All day he hadn?t eaten. And when he?d started the engine, the petrol guage had already been pointing to empty. What an empty dream life suddenly seemed. The car surviving without petrol. His own breathing, shallow, lack of bloodsugar.

There are bits of me that do not need to be fed. Sometimes when I don?t eat for a long while and grow weak, its hard for me to think, to remember to do things, to concentrate on certain things. But as for that unitary "soul" or force or "self" or whatever it is that I?m arguing against the existence of, that is untouched, that seems as strong and uninterrupted as anything. Shouldn?t I have moments of blackout, dissipation, incoherence when it too is deprived of sugar? Why is it alone so free to function, free from the necessities of food and water that the other cells require.

See how we look for hope. Construct hope, out of our nothings. It?s so pathetic ? so energetic!

Thursday 18/4/2

Is the word really unworthy? Is meaning always subtracted from by its expression through the necessarily unworthy word? Or does meaning exist only in words, in the context of words? Are there unseen, unheard worthy words that words (garden variety) cannot hope to imitate? Or is all this random action, on which the word imposes patterns, patterns through which meaning is applied and from which it stems?for nothing has meaning in itself, and meaning has no meaning aside from the ?meaning? word ? a separate universe of words in which meaning exists only relative to other words, this arbitrary nomenclature floating above what it uses words to insist that its words describe? I am an animal. I don?t believe in what I?m saying. Words are used to communicate. Sometimes they are inadequate. So many of us are communicating all the time about things that have nothing to do with our simple, animal survival. Why do we talk about these things? And guard our own survival, as if it too mattered. All relative. Everything relative. Meaning, matter, what matter? It?s so frightening (frightening, frightened, the relative feeling of fear in its own floating context). NO. With every line I add I understand myself less. This is what I?m starting to wonder: I?ve often asked how my ?self? as a unitary being can possibly exist, can have been formed out of atoms, chemicals, as something that moves and thinks through the flow of time, memories, thoughts, learning, unchanged and connecting all these things into the "me" the "I" that experiences them. I also wonder what the hell I?m like anyway, since most of the time I have no idea and so often I am speaking writing words that have no seeming meaning for me prior to their utterance. And this is what I suspect: the answer is that there is no I, no me, no self uniting all compartments, no thread weaving through them all. Simply a skull providing a rudimantary kind of unity, where like colleagues sitting adjacent the parts of mind cooperate (at times) but do not really know each other, and from which there stems no self knowledge, no resolution, no actual final ?opinion? to be passed on things, the world. Just a functioning bunch of biological crap which conveniently uses the consciousness as a means to sew together the blobbybits required to preserve the biologicalbody. So its not "I think therefore I am." I CANT EXPRESS THIS, CANTEXPRESSIT. It?s like, do I think? Is this actually thought. Is there actually "I"? It feels like we. No, less certain even than that. Sometimes it feels like THEY.

Yes, I can think of me as ?them? now. They think, therefore, are they?

No I can?t do it. I can never define things with these unworthy words. There, my own question answered. Instead, an example. Prays it works:

Say I meet John Doe, and think about John Doe a lot, too much maybe, though I can?t pin down what it is about him. And say we date for a while and he proposes and I say I?ll think about it and I continually ask myself, hmm, but do I really love him? The answer is, there is no ME to love him. I became fascinated with him out of a simple biological urge and some indoctrinated aesthetic principles residing in a different part of my brain. I continued with him due to considerations of appearance, survival instincts, communal instincts, all stemming from different brainbits, and as he revealed himself more and more to me I compared him with memories, there was a personal history to be assessed in relation to the proposal. But in terms of finding an ultimate view in these cooperating coexisting cognitive forces, there is no such thing?. And, BUT.

I still can?t express this. I?ll work on it. I find it so frustrating. This is so very frustrating, and now I feel very unfulfilled and angry. Part of me. Part of me.

Why can nothing attract me any more? I look for desire in my mind and I?m just banging on the hollow belly of a puffedup empty cowcorpse.

At the same time I feel sort of fired up, kind of content, incredibly passive and neutral.

Thursday 18/4/2

Today I read Siddhartha. Mixed reaction ? generally unsatisfying, it didn?t tell me anything I didn?t know already. I found this strange. It seemed to say a lot. But at last I understood Hesse?s phrase "He who climbs, without knowing whereto he climbs, shall reach the highest peak." Which gave me a goodfuck damnfinefeeling.

I also discovered something else odd today, in my english lecture. I think I might be a nihilist. I don?t mean the lecture changed my views. My views on the world and existence are pretty well established by now. I could orgasm thinking about the meaninglessness of everything, I really could. But what happened was, he was lecturing on the sound and the fury, title of course drawn from MacBeth?s brilliant speech in Macbeth, and the lecturer said of it "so, nihilism was around a long time ago?" and I was stopped in my tracks. When I first encountered that speech of Macbeth?s, it summed up so completely what I had long and sometimes frustratedly thought and/or known, that it became for me the authoritative definition of life, right up there with Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (see previous posts) on the "magic shadow show." So to hear this view called nihilism, while it seemed a truism, also seemed astonishing, because I?d always thought there was more too nihilism ? like it involved a kind of dogma or something. Do you know, I can actually find nihilism (if that?s what it is) comforting? Distressing sometimes too, but comforting. Particularly when I read it in the words of others. It must be the sense of community. It feels like I?m being touched, blessed.

"Life?s but? signifying nothing." Read.

Had an odd apaocalyptic dream last night, about a flood and a dear but slightly estranged friend, and the dream felt bizarrely incestuous somehow, and disturbed me, but I?m not really sure why.

I was getting so angry about John Howard and politics just now, allowing myself to enjoy the sensual thrill of momentarily holding an angry and onesided view, and I saw the world for a moment as a great galactic ball of dung being rolled around and around rolled on endlessly, disgusting, endlessly disgusting, and thought how though I am caught in its jaws, I feel more distant from it every moment. That moment passed ? a ball, just a ball, not a dung ball, just a rolling ball, if even that much is certain, and in any case why debate it, for the thing is meaningless, there is as much meaning in a cricket ball, spinning as it hits the pitch?even if its bowled wide.