A Waste Land

remember the eyes but not the face

Associating good things with bad things, bad things with good things. It is something that our brains seem to do. That song that you loved might remind you of an ex, whereas you might associate getting humiliated with sexual gratification. Sex is a nice place for depravity.

Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be used by you.

This song reminds me of the 90’s. The 90’s has a flavor, vaguely fruity. How many memories, whiffs of things, ghosts of the past, are real? How can you tell a dream from reality at ten thousand feet? The most dear memories have no context, a free-floating particulate matter. They were part of you, but the surrounding memory needed to place it is lost. Or even maybe, they seem implausible, ridiculous. You want to say that it was a dream. A hard kernel of a dream.

Or how about revisiting a place after several years? I once had occasion to return to Toledo, where I grew up, to visit a fraternity conference at UT. We parked in the same parking lot where I have a vivid memory of throwing up due to motion sickness, from some indeterminate time in my early childhood. It hadn’t changed at all.

What year is it? 2010? I just put on some Smashing Pumpkins. I want 1995 here right now. I can remember my mother’s cassettes, but she had Mellon Collie on CD. She gave me her old Walkman CD player to listen to it.

Night and day is an error. A cycle, which you can ride or ignore. I would like to be flying, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the direction of away. Running away fits me well, says I. Liar. Homeland? My homeland is gone. It was bulldozed by guys in hats. Hats. It’s a good reason that men don’t wear hats anymore, unless they have a job. Or they’re wearing a cap.

In FLCL, she asked, why do you carry that bat around if you don’t play?

Give me surgical gauze, I’ll dress the wound. We’ll operate. Scalpel at 85% percent. Laser eye, check. We’re going to make you better, faster, stronger. If you replace the whole body, are you still the same person?

Before they had pleasure cruises, or Magellan, they had guys in canoes, going to islands where no human has ventured. They’re going to make the silent history.

My mind is scattered. I remember elmers glue, at school. We read a book about a native girl, sinew. The Google tells me the name. Whatever we don’t know, we supplement. Bionic girls, bionic world.

I am such an awful person. It takes me a lot to even fathom it sometimes. Justification is irrelevant. I should be crushed by all the guilt that I only rarely glance at. Being miserable is not really a penance.

And yet…maybe my abandonment of mother is deserved. Oh the nights! When she was holding the knife and she rent and cried. And where was my father? No memory. Where? She tried hard. She wore makeup, taken from a cubical tin. It was a terribly ugly thing. She looked good with makeup on. Or so I thought. But she’s not traditionally beautiful at all, especially when depressed, which she was most of the time.

I remember him. He..had a name. I don’t know. He gave my sister wrapped gifts. I don’t remember his face. He was kind. He was not interested in marriage. What did my mother want? The UT computer lab smelled like what I always will think of computer labs should smell like. I have memories of driving places. And visiting a girl, out in the country. Never saw so many stars. She had a pinky that was missing the end. And when we had that fight in the backyard, when we picked the flowers on the tree and threw them. Oh, the fence.

And when it was behind that house, where that lovely girl lived. my first crush. she was artistic and she cared, and she was strange. she had games and a messy house, she was jewish which meant she ate matzo, and she went to a different school. she was curly haired, kinda fat. her mother watched quincy on a big tv, and babysat kids. they had a big thick couch covered with blankets. she was older than me, her birthday was in march. and i had a crush on her. and who knows who she is now.

actually searching google brings her up, as the first result, still living in toledo. screw you google, for being able to answer all my queries, never allowing me to live in doubt.

somehow, despite not being personal with my mother in a really long time, the thought of her being alone is unbearable. and yet i cannot contact her, i just cannot bring myself to it. almost no memory of her which i have is not painful to me. her birthday is a little over a week away. I could contact her. I haven’t talked to her in three years, and haven’t seen her in more than five. But I really do not like being around her. And I don’t want her to see me the way I am now.

once more with feeling

Feelings suck. For some reason we feel guilt, anger, sadnesss, etc. Surely some of these have evolutionary adaptations. But you’d think that we would be able to avoid feeling guilt over stupid things we can’t change, or feeling angry over things we can’t change, or getting depressed enough to shoot ourselves in the face. No, if there were an invisible hand guiding evolution, it was not concerned with the world of hurt that that would bring. Bring on the mass suicides or something.

Is it more tempting to kill yourself if there were a religious belief you’d get rewarded for it, or simply a worldly imperative and a lack of fear? The “loneliness ” of suicide is mostly combatted by Epicurus: “If I am alive, I am not dead, and if I am dead I do not care”. For that matter, regardless of the hate left behind by those who you abandon by shuffling off the mortal coil, you won’t be haunted by the guilt of it when you’re dead. You just have to get over the guilt of it while alive. Does this make suicide as an impulse reaction a win-win? Maybe, if your ethics are seriously attuned to self-interest. Or maybe if you have a really awful life where your loss would affect no one but yourself. I’m sure people have been, are in situations like that. Maybe some of them die, and some of them live on.

Myself? When I’m in a good mood, I am enjoying too much the stupid vices of life. Masturbating furiously, eating lazy food, sleeping on comfortable beds, getting drunk. Well, these things are all things that one can do. But they provide not the least bit of edification, and it gets boring fast. Life is full of pain though. Mostly psychosomatic. Pains of guilt and pains of regret and pains of anger. Bullshit, all. Curiousity and fear are strong counterindications. Curiousity of the future is somewhat edifying. But the future will probably be too boring or painful. Fear is more permanent.

themes, motifs ‘n shit: the formula to being literary

Telling a story seems to be more than just stringing together plausible events. To some extent, there are rules. Stories should roughly follow the “standard model” of introduction -> rising action -> climax -> falling action -> conclusion, of course, though many stories muddy that a lot by having several different sections. In that respect, it is like the harmonic structure of a symphony: there are multiple movements, which may release or defer the release of tension, though everyone expects a suitably large climax at the end, and possibly fanfare and a lengthy denouement.

But anyway, there is that, but that is not all. There has to cohesive structure, a reason to the rhyme, some unique qualities that make it stand out. The characters must be compelling, the dialog must be realistic (or at least suitably emotive and explicable), and the story itself should be at least somewhat novel. 

But while all this can be found in a non-fiction tale, suitably arranged, there is a lot more freedom in fiction to produce the “accessories” that fashionable novels nowadays have: motifs, themes, easter eggs, and the like. The kind of metadata that Cliffnotes collates for you so that you can get a concentrated just-add-rote-thinking view of the critical aspects of a work so that you can pass tests that are designed to make people think about what they read in a way that pleases literature folk. 

Sometimes these are subtle allusions to previous works that the author expects the learned reader to recognize (something like a secret symbol of the literary cabal). In some modernist works those symbols became necessary for assigning the work any real meaning since the work lacks traditional notions of plot, structure, characters. These themes make the work relevant to reality in the sense of providing the writer a means to express reality through abstraction; or to express inexpressible and clumsy emotions under the steel framework of a taut drama or scathing parody. They can also provide be worked backwards to find insight into the mindset of the writer, or the period in general. The story within the story is more interesting than the story itself, especially for dry historical epic myths like most of the Biblical Old Testament.

But this can be applied to more than just literature; when applied to film and the like it allows for visual themes and styles, with an established field of borrowing. Anime has lots of subgenres which have their own brands of motifs. Sometimes these motifs can cause problems, when a story which is otherwise good seems to draw too many motifs from a well-known story as to seem like a pale imitation. On the other hand, novel additions might make fans too uncomfortable if the additions seem to be at odds with everything around it. Sometimes the feeling or mood is more significant than the actual content. Also with film there is more to worry about outside of the story, like visual design and production quality, which can hamper the best intentions.

So in essence, while the goal of writing something that people would read is to write a story which is engaging and has a sense of forward motion to it, urging the reader to turn the pages, most literature includes a quantity of extra features to pad out the critical side of the work, which even to the unlearned enhance the experience after the initial trial. Some works are lauded enough to merit people actually making a living writing about these aspects. And a decent amount of non-mainstream literature derives its value from these things, a case in point being Infinite Jest, a thoroughly monstrous book that contains neither drama nor comedy, and is usually regurgitated by those lacking intestinal fortitude and a firm desire to take a very slow stroll down literature lane, savoring the intents, the wordplay. These are the delicious undertones in an otherwise gigantic bitter pill, where allusions and imaginations and thinking is far more rewarding.

fading to sleep

I feel strangely tied to this chair, this wretched red recliner that I have mated to. The rest of my head against the cushion seems to be magnetic, implacably fastening it. I cannot lift the head a single degree. The languor that it induces from me must be Pavlovian in nature; it was certainly not instinctive, but only by the relationship of this chair to so many mystical intercourses of mind and body and hopes and back-lit blog postings. And here I sit at this very moment, one foot into the void, half-reading Proust and writing about things that I have forgotten, and that conditioned comfort creeps forth to again draw me away from my vital duties. I have no morale to fight the tides of torpidity, so let them take me. The window I face seems to retreat upon my stare, receding into the dark walls surrounding it like light from outside escaped through a tunnel. Reality funnels in the gap, the exit is trapped, and my fate is pinned.