Ok so this is my second post, just minutes after the first one. I can only hope that my updates will always be so fast and forthcoming.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer. I loved books, I loved the feelings they made me feel. But as I grew up and came to university, I realised that I don’t have a narrative inside me; I am not a story teller. I am a feeler of feelings and a thinker of thoughts. So I fell in love with philosophy instead.
I’ve always written in a style that expects to be read; I am a self-aware narrator. I write as if it is to You, to Someone. Like in a diary. I think.
For a while now I have been trying to read the Artist’s Way… or trying to DO it. But it hasn’t been going very well. I wanted to tap into that which might be inside me – life, art, beauty, nothing, anything. The words seemed hollow and they left no impression on me. The instructions felt forced. I now realise that I was myself hollow and forced. I’ve been forcing myself to live since I was 16. And I’ve misplaced everything that I once carried inside myself. My opinions have come from a place slightly to the left of my heart or my soul or myself.
Years ago, 2009 to be exact, I read “The Time Traveller’s Wife” and this poem was part of it:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
- Derek Walcott
And I thought it was the most beautiful thing I could ever have found.
But I didn’t really Know how beautifulandtrue it was.
Now, suddenly I understand – because I have actually never loved myself. And never known myself. And I have been looking and looking without knowing what I lost or didn’t have in the first place.
I’ve realised we are all little unfathomable bubbles unto ourselves. Like, we try to translate ourselves – connect. But our inner space can never be shared. “Loneliness is the human condition” (White Oleander).
We fall in love – with anything – and it is as if suddenly this space is validated or filled or forgotten. Some people think of this inner space as the domain of Religion. “Only the Lord can fill you up!”. Maybe this space is God. But that is for no one to decide. It just isn’t that kind of thing.
Like good old Keanu said in the movie Thumbsucker: “That's 'cause we all wanna be problemless. To fix ourselves. We look for some magic solution to make us all better, but none of us really know what we're doing. And why is that so bad? That's all we humans can do. Guess. Try. Hope. But, Justin, just pray you don't fool yourself into thinking you've got the answer. Because that's bullshit. The trick is living without an answer. I think.
I think that I’ve been fooling myself all my life. I’ve held on to the religion of Myself, never realising that there was nothing to begin with.
But whatever. Those are just some thoughts about lifetheuniverseandeverything.
I'm not always so sooper serial. I can be funny too. Eventually.
