"nothing you confess, could make me love you less..."

I saw one of those World Wildlife Fund ads last night, you know, the one with the song 'I'll stand by you'. They always make me a bit teary. Now I am sitting here and my face is kind of leaky, and I keep sniffing, and I am paranoid that ** thinks I am crying. Oh god, perhaps I am crying and I haven't realised. I don't think I have ever considered that - crying without realising you are doing it.

Years ago, after I saw The Deer Hunter, I woke up one morning and I was crying. I had been dreaming about Russian Roulette and Vietnam. It was crying fuelled by terrible sadness and fear, and I had been crying in my sleep. I felt horribly sad for the rest of the day.

“There’s nothing I won’t say”

Often I think about why people enjoy watching crime, and the vicarious pleasures we indulge in. When I was reading about detective fiction a few years ago, an article talked about the way different fictional narratives treat homicide. There is such a monumental contrast between the Angela Lansbury (Murder She Wrote)/Agatha Christie homicides and the CSI/Law and Order homicide. How do we understand the quaint murder differently to the visceral putrefying murder? Corpses were clean and unbroken, now tv corpses are in disgusting disarray. Funny as well, the fascination with forensics. Is it just the word forensic that appeals, or is it fuelled by the arcane world of crime and corpses? Do most people think of death and rape when they hear the word?

AC and I talked about these two things; being genuinely bi-lingual, and tone deafness. The capacities and incapacities of the brain are creepy. It makes me wonder if our brains can be completely different from each other. And yet we are always looking for these universal signs of similarity. I looked at a book today about body language, complete with funny photos of people with 80’s hair. The whole thing was about being able to read people through the body (does feminism have a field day???), and I started thinking about our desire to transfer language to things that are non-linguistic, and how strong our urge for interpretation is. So, do these things actually make any sense? When we look for meaning, perhaps our desire to find it eclipses our ability to rationally or adequately interpret or understand.

When you look for these similarities you suddenly feel as if the entire world can perhaps make sense, and that you can make sense of yourself.

And tone deafness. And the fact that we consider things as/in absolutes. AC talked about 'amusia': the inability to perceive music as music. I imagine hearing music as a clump of sounds, and I wonder if I would go mad. Sound eh? That World Wildlife Fund ad, I wonder if I would really feel if not for the music?

A week or so ago, I told ** a great deal of stuff I later regretted. And I think I regretted it because those kinds of confessions situate you very particularly in other people’s minds. It is that shocking moment of disclosure that unnerves me, that "fuck, did I just say that?" feeling.... and......I don't fucking know. I probably need to chill out. But still, as I said it all, my voice wavered, and I wondered if I was about to cry.