"You Can No Longer Move, I Can No Longer Be Still"
There are things I still do, despite knowing that I don't want to. It was strange to encounter BS's solemn French friend who stayed with us over the weekend. I had forgotten how I must have been after MP and I split up. This French friend, O, kept his head down. He seemed to want to look sometimes, and you know, sometimes I want to touch people just to see if it makes any difference to them. AM and I lay in her bed and talked last night, I would have touched her even if I didn't want to, because it is what I do when there is nothing to say. It is that awfully sad time of year, where to me everything seems either depressingly mundane, or extravagantly sad. I have been thinking of all the things I can do to make myself feel better, good things like intense exercise and flooding myself with light, but then I think that perhaps somehow this seasonal malaise is right. It is fitting, I know, and yet I find it so difficult to understand how people can be happy in winter. I miss the quality of light in Tasmania. It is specific, and perhaps only I notice it, but notice it I really do. Maybe it is a light memory rather than a tangible quality, but being one who is so obsessed with light, I feel that I am talking about something very real.
This time is muted. I often think about time. I don't know if I ended up writing anything about my recent feelings about time (oh time, how I love you, and and and and and hate your ways), but I know I meant to. After reading The Outsider (Camus) recently, I started thinking about how bound by time (its pieces, passing, significance, restrictions) we are, and how perhaps the reason we don't do certain things is because we are by nature incredibly anticipatory. We think about the next piece of time, and perhaps in The Outsider Mersault didn't? I also thought about Bataille's ideas about death. And the reason we don't kill people for the pleasure of it, is that because we consider what happens in the time post-killing? Of course it is simply the ability to understand repercussions, which is (obviously) contingent on some understanding of time. So I was wondering if there could be a moment of absolute pleasure and freedom where we don't think about time, where we are unaware of what comes next. Perhaps orgasm provides this to some extent? It is a powerful moment of losing your self, losing physical control and losing time. The petit mort.
posted by ida gasp @ 9:02 pm
4 Comments:
If the skin of your hands melts into someone elses - until the borders between what's yours and his dissolves - that... what was the question? That is indeed a distraction from time.
Tasmanian light.
It is special, celebrated. It is a southern thing, that clear, crisp light. Nothing ever seems so sharply in focus as it does in Tasmania, the edges never so clear.
I miss it too. It is one thing that can make me extravagantly, deliciously homesick. That and the quality of the air in general. Especially the Hobart wind blowing off the mountain in winter.
Winter in Melbourne has no strength. It is a bit cold, a bit wet, a bit windy, a bit dark. In Hobart the days start dark and overcast but are then split by bright blue bursts of light, the clouds part to let light shine in fingers on individual trees or houses. Great, immutable searchlights shining down from high above the clouds. The wind blows off the mountain and it is properly cutting and cold. We scuttle about the windy streets heading for warm pubs and wood fires at home. It is properly winter. The misery that comes with winter darkness feels proper and right. Here the winter never seems to actually arrive – it is a dark, lumbering threat that by the first sunny days in August has failed to materialize. The moment for creaning-in never arrives. No extreme of weather is offered to justify the bleakness of the winter months.
SLL
Touch is so important. It proves we exist to those other than our own selves. Without this, we shrink back into our shells.
Orgasm is a definite release, from the pains of this world. Transient and temporary like life itself.
We would exchange the tyrrany of the future for the tyrrany of the present. No longer fearing consequences, but subject to them constantly.
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