Calm, indifference or both? I attempted to make the distinction today as I sat with my two friends sipping on coffee and, oddly enough, facing away from the throng of people walking past. I wasn’t in the mood for pseudo-mystical meandering, and I wasn’t in the mood for talk; I find less and less need for it now that I’m back in the thick of things over at the office. That was strange, because I always had something to say.
I wondered why. The news of an imminent announcement didn’t trouble me, and the urgent deadlines that once crowded my head for attention slithered away like an image slowly becoming off-focused. I thought my self-medication contributed this feeling, but then two panadols hardly qualified as a full-on drugged-out head-trip.
It was windy; the intermittent light drizzle brought closure to my first day back on the job as I ticked off the stuff I did off the top of my head. Road trip, more drizzle, friendly client and non-existent work at site. Emails earlier in the day, the occassional newsfeed read and zero’s inaugural post.
I dealt with the my friends’ desire to bitch about work with more indifference, watching one of them empty my supply of cigarettes with apologies. I didn’t feel peeved at all, and it didn’t bother me because I looked on with an empty fascination. One stick after one stick after another and soon the box housed one remaining stick. I fiddled with the light green and plastic, watching how the box bent and crumpled between fingers.
I figured it out as I started back to the office. Everything remained the same, unbending. The situation bent at the edges but wouldn’t give. Nothing changed in the two weeks I was away, but in that world, I felt like an image in the mirror split clean in half and disjointed, halves pushed against each other and sliding away.
It fascinated me, because I felt new.
I sat in my cubicle, bemused. A cubicle, suitable for cloistered monks from which we proceeded to deal with a semi-real world; I imagined work, like prayers, churned out on so much paper for unforgiving godlings. I wanted to laugh, just then, because I really felt cloistered amongst bean-counter clerks and administrators. It was a bureaucracy of servitude; these titular godlings were unforgiving with us because we were far too forgiving with them.
In Feist’s “Magician”, Pug stands up in the middle of a meal, one day and walks over to one of the Tsurani Black Robe overseers. Black Robe says to him “Why have you left the table?” and Pug replies “I do not belong here anymore”. Black Robe leads Pug to a door and Pug senses it is the final test. If Pug concludes that he is no longer an aspirant, he must be willing and able to demonstrate this. He opens the door with his powers. Pug then realizes that opening that door the conventional way is to die painfully.
I packed my things, thinking about that sudden association. It felt innocuous but at the back of my head, I knew it meant something.
Comments (7)
I hope you’ll forgive this out-of-topic comment, but for days, I had wanted to say something in response to one or another of your entries. And about the change, the ‘transition’ (?) from ‘cookie-cutter comments’ to this… ‘reduced and recycled’. But each time I came back to post my thoughts, it’d somehow feel like I was commenting about… well, like water under the bridge :)
Because.
I find it quite remarkable. The copious amount of text you churn out daily, sometimes amid much din. I can barely keep up with the endless flow. Oodles of strands of meaning leading to all sorts of areas of experience and language use. Really, there is much engaging material in these ‘texts’ (as you so aptly call it). It seems to drag me right in, inspite of myself and my tyrant, Mr Time.
Reduced and recycled. Appropriating and re-ordering, customising the things you’ve been reading. Writing yourself, so to speak, into the fabric of the original text. Making your own montage in a renamed, reconstituted, redefined blog.
And I find this significant: Prolific writer that you are, you aren’t wearing that ‘Creative Commons License’ badge so many others have appropriated for their blogs. Or for themsleves, along with all attendant perceptions and meanings :) It reflects, intended or not, the distinction between ‘work’ & ‘text’. How useful and coherent is this distinction? I think texts offer more playful pleasures, symbolic liberation, and are less tied to (embedded in) the old social patterns.
Anonymity. This too seems appropriate, here. Yes, I do agree that the importance we place on an author’s identity is sometimes way overrated. It can be detrimental to the reading experience. In how it elicits preconceptions about the text before the reading experience has even begun. How it builds expectations, which serve to filter out competing elements.
Oh, by the by …
I think pictures (as in photos) are more than snapshots of memories. They don’t just memorialise milestones and/or achievements. They are experience captured. Through them, a family can construct a portrait-chronicle of itself. As ghostly traces, they supply the token of presence of dispersed or deceased relatives.
They are much more than memorablia. They are also RELICS to bridge the sense of discontinuity between the past and the present. They pull the past into the present as a confirmation of personal and collective identity.They establish a sense of continuity and stability over time. Precisely by slicing out a moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Photographs recollect a simplified past. They can recreate for us, our own stories by stimulating childhood recollections - in which resides a hankering for the simpler, carefree days. In the process, they affect us positively or negativley - as memory, using the past in conjunction with the present and as nostalgia, rejecting the present for an imagined past.
Just as you textualise your reflections and personal experience through your writings in this blog, others use photographs to communicate and share their thoughts, their emotions. And to chronicle their lives.
While text is, quite frankly, an interpretation, photographs are pieces of the world - in slices of time and space. They are miniatures of reality. They furish evidence, they justify, certify, incriminate - as proof (while they may distort, there is always a presumption) that something happened, existed.
percolator, xpyred is a very gifted writer and speaker. words come easily to him. he could churn paragraphs and paragraphs of emails - grammatically perfect, with punctuations in the right places, and correct spelling etc - in a matter of minutes. people can make three-minute maggi mee, xpyred can write three-minute essays. the result is always satisfying, tasty and you’ll be back for more. try speaking to him in reallife, funny, excitable yet humble and rational. he’s a a joy to talk to. :) eh, i should stop or lest, people are going to wonder if i have a crush on you or something, xpyred. LOL. and no, i don’t have a crush on you so, stop blushing.
I spend a bit of time on what I write because I type fast, so it all comes out in a jumble. There was once a complaint on a blog about bloggers who would write and then deliberate about what they’ve written - as to structure, grammar, composition, etc - and, therefore, spontaneity is lost. I don’t quite agree with that, since editing is such a large part of writing, and it’s fun (I think some writers don’t think so) since it’s in editing that I take a step back and examine my own neuroses in my writing, LOL. This isn’t always true, but it helps that I tell myself so!
Much of my work is spent writing, so I guess that absolves me of my tendency for output - at least a little! Because work takes up so much time in the dead, cardboard caricatures of business writing, filled with ghastly “insofars”, “we conclude thats” and “with respect tos” (grammatical error I am now forced to assume), blogging is the best sort of escapism for me - escapism, at least, in what I want to write rather than how I’m constrained to write…So, therefore, the large output online - if it is large - reflects my real-life preferences quite a bit. :p
I’ve always been fascinated by journals. I used to keep a journal when I was much younger, and have one that I write stuff in, on and off. Sometimes, in a fit of boredom, I’d run through those previous entries, and would always be fascinated by the changes that were going through my life. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to view things in extremes, so finding changes that bled gradually into my way of thinking and life was a surprise, and delightful.
I think I’ve always been in love with words. Once, when I was reading this book and it made me see how the concatenations of “the breath”, “the breath”, “the breath”, or the purposeful repetitions of a noun or a name could, in the context of a passage, really mean something special. I think from that day on, I began reading texts in a different way, or tried to. Sometimes I just don’t care and write what’s on my mind, or read what comes of a page as a first impression, because I guess we share a common relationship with that tyrant, Time.
With pictures.. I love pictures, but I trust them less than I do words. Words have a way of slipping past conventional meanings, I think it’s true, if we have an anti-textual approach, i.e. if we view the text as holding a meaning beyond a superficial exegesis. There’s great fun in disrupting cherished views in a text with our own interpretations - you can be as delightfully wicked as you’d want to, even with your own words.
I think the difference is, pictures express experiences abstractly, maybe inchoately, and require words for communicating that experience - or even an aspect of it. I suppose there’s less control where authorial intent is concerned, and maybe that’s troubling for me. Also, as you have pointed out, pictures have, at least for me, a greater association with nostalgia. I’ve come to trust nostalgia less and less, because I’ve always lived my life one foot in things nostalgic.
Memories of a simpler time, I think, can have the effect of reflecting the worst in present situations - and maybe of the future; I beginning to believe nostalgia arises as a consequence of dissatisfaction. Maybe that’s why I’ve characterized picture-perfect moments as scourges for the future; in memory, I’m starting to believe, lies the seeds of later regret. Maybe pictures capture these memories raw, full-blown and without sympathy.
luthien> yah, and this is me wondering whether “beauracratic” or “bureaucratic” is the right spelling :p and you happen to type faster than I do, so don’t bluff around about 3-minute wonders, hor, speak for yourself! LOL :p
luthien,
hmm… I wonder if he speaks as he writes. I know I certainly don’t - a fact I can’t quite decide, is a good thing or not! ;)
Much as I’m madly in love with words, I can’t seem to hold a thought long enough long enough to capture it. That, or I have ADD. Probably the latter.
Spontaneity in blogging, is sometimes overrated. Never more so than when blogger — having spewed and showered angsty/vitriolic rants so irrational and hostile — abandons (rather spontaneously!) any claim to ‘writing’ or ‘creative works’ and, quite candidly, calls it ‘crap’ or ’shit’.
Seems that nowhere else can (and do) people embrace their neuroses (the way people embrace their children!) more openly and ardently than in blogs. Blogs is where where we can read about the people, places and things fueling those neuroses daily. Are we aware of the ways our private demons or neuroses can inflict themselves on readers? At times, it does feel strangely comforting to be ’surrounded’ by people with the same neuroses and obsessions that I have.
Nostalgia…. Perhaps there is a distinction (oh, hiccups!) to be made between the reassuring memory of happy times and nostalgia.
Memory holds an emotional appeal. It does not depend on disparagement of the present, the hallmark of the nostalgic attitude. Nostalgia OTOH appeals to the feeling that the past offers delights no longer obtainable. As ‘picture-perfect moments’, it idealizes a past that stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. (maybe nostalgia doesn’t entail the exercise of memory at all). Memory too, may idealize, but not so much (I think) in order to condemn the present. Rather, it has the potential to draw hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer. (a bit of stretch for me here).
Oh well, whatever’s going to happen is going to happen, be it human cloning, dirty nukes, global outbreaks of avian flu, home abortion kits or whatever, and all we can do is hold on for the ride :)
Hey what happened to the ‘Preview’ function?
Sometimes watching those neuroses can be fun, though. That and the fact that seeing these neuroses in others sometimes informs me of my own!!! hahahahaha!
The preview function is back, but not as funky as the previous theme’s implementation. Still tweaking away :)
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