I saw a busker on midsummer commons today. dressed in a traditional costume, he played folk tunes on a violin while standing on one leg, balanced on a rope tied between two trees. quite spectacular.
there are situations that I now know I handle recognizably better than I did in the past. decorum dictates silence on the details, but rest assured. my demons are coming closer, hovering in the flickering periphery of the campfire. I feed them scraps from the evening meal, and some of them have started licking my hand. cautiously. as they do, the haze lifts and I see other people more clearly.
things that rise like black beasts out of the psyche and take control of people's lives. I'm starting to build a bestiary of these. most often their substance is fear - it may be fear of harming others, fear of consequences, fear of foreclosing the possible for the actual, fear of boredom. always fear of yourself, in one guise or the other. fear of the tortures inflicted by your own conscience; fear of your possible future regrets; fear of suffering the restlessness; fear that you will make yourself eat yourself alive, trapped in a small closed room.
of course, everyone has urges, impulses, things in the mind that lead their own lives and refuse to obey. in psychological terms, I guess what I am talking about is the relationship between these and the conscious self- between id and ego. which of the two is in charge, which one yields? when you make your decisions, are you afraid of your own mind, of what it will do to you? I'm starting to wonder just to what degree everyone out there has this problem, of psychological forces that rise up in the mind but - this is the key - over which they exercise no control.
the nature of my involvement with my ex-liaison had this character - of an exalting, overwhelming magnetic force that I exercised no control over. as far as I'm concerned it was a one-off however - it was also something that I opted to go along with, at an early stage and despite initial reluctance: for its sheer unfamiliarity, and I do not repeat do not intend to permit something like that to happen again. as good ol' aleister said, 'love is the law, love under will'.
more generally, I'll hazard two of my regularly occurring fearful bugbears. one is anger: I fear myself when I am angry, I fear giving in to anger because it can be overwhelming. I see red, through a haze of red fumes, and I act to hurt others. the other one may be loneliness - oddly enough, some of you will think. I am profoundly drawn to solitude, but I also fear what my mind can do to me when I am lonely for too long.
neither of these two controls my life though, or determines it. I am on speaking terms with both and in time I impose my will on them. neither structures my life decisions, and neither hinders my exercise of what I consider my own free will. neither paralyzes me, or causes me serious problems. in short, I feel that I have the upper ground - I may not have them constantly by the tail but the terms of the situation are clear, I hold the whip and they are being driven into the cage. I'll listen to them, consider what they say, but in the end I make my own mind up and live with it.
you make your own choices, you take on the responsibility, and - insofar as at all possible - you do not permit yourself the indulgence of living in fear of yourself. to live otherwise - quoth nietzsche - is to live subject to the tiger that you ride in your sleep. of course this is laborious, not easy. still, to me it is a question of freedom - and it is beginning to surprise me how many people are willing to remain in the shadow of the fearful bugbears that structure their lives.
particularly in the light of my recent love-life, I wonder what it is: does everyone feel like this, yielding to their own subconscious on a regular basis? do I bring it out in people? am I subliminally attracted to women who experience this?
so for an hour or so, we sat and talked in starbucks. it flowed painlessly, she was in good form - articulate, witty. we talked about my work, her visa problems, family, her recent graduation, movies and books. joked, shared frames of reference. afterwards she thanked me, and said if I was around she'd love to do it again, catch a movie or something. perfectly pleasant.
still, I have to recognize that this may well be the single most difficult thing I have ever forced myself to do. not at all for being painful, or requiring effort - but I just did not want to do it. I can't explain to myself exactly what it was - fragile pride, vengeance, wounded, eye for an eye. I did not want to let her off the hook. clinging perhaps to some basic childlike sense of justice - if not delivered, created. if they are nasty to me they should suffer; nobody treats me like that and gets away with it. mommy, daddy, punish them. if not I will do it myself.
but why? I walked her to her bike. on the way back I was amused by a minor coincidence.
a few days ago, I was pondering precisely how things had turned out with her. this was after I had the chance to talk to her and didn't. walking through town, at the time I had this feeling - as if someone was trying to tell me something but I couldn't quite hear them. in a back alley, a man sat on a porch shouting about the degradation of the amazon, the war in iraq, corrupt politicians. outside a bookstore, two sweet homeless hoodies - a girl and a boy - offered me a beer and asked me if I wanted to go to a party. I was on my way to the cinema, so I had to decline.
today, on the way back into town from walking her to her bike, I bumped into the same man, the hoodie, again. 'yo my man' he said, 'brother!' we knocked fists and struck up a chat. he was trying to scrounge together two pounds 'to buy a pipe'. I reached into my pocket for some change - and fished out exactly £2 in small silver. 10s, 20s and 5s.
when I gave it to him, he said he didn't want to skin me. it's ok, I said. and I meant it.
there is a dream that has been haunting the corner of my eye for over a year now. at the time it did not come unbidden, though I'll leave out here the how or why of the invitation. I don't like the dream, I never liked it - I come from vengeful stock, bitter blood clamors for retaliation: the currency of teeth and gouged eyeballs.
still. acting with reference to this dream, and to reflections in the previous entry, I opted just now to attempt a self-overcoming of sorts. I wrote a civil email to the ex-liaison, suggesting we meet up for a coffee and a chat.
this probably does not look like much, on paper. but figuratively speaking, it is perhaps best represented by the eruption of the ethics of the Crucified onto the world stage. oddly, I believe zarathustra might have approved.
yesterday was a good night. people, unexpected events, interactions. twice over the course of the evening I had opportunity to walk up to an ex-liaison of mine and converse her. I felt no urge to do this, instead I left for elsewhere.
it has been put to me that this expresses a lack of closure on my part. the implication, I guess, is that once closure is achieved I will converse with her freely. I am not at all sure I understand this. is it part of closure that I will feel like talking to her, consider her in some sense a friend? what if to my mind she does not deserve my friendship - does this make me bitter and judgemental?
I am no longer angry with her, I understand the issues that led, at the time, to something I can only describe as carnage; still, in what she said and did she exposed herself as something far different from what I thought she was, something far short of the standards to which I hold myself and those I consider friends.
to me at least, the calculation - she is not someone I want as a friend - now seems cerebral, as does the decision not to walk up to her and talk to her. is this a bitterness, a shortcoming on my part? this is not at all intended as a rhetorical question.
witness, the countercase presented.
girl meets boy, together they are magical, on fire, made to be together. after a month he blanks her, cuts out, disappears without explanation. she is deeply hurt. something like a year and a half later, he gets in touch to ask her if she is still angry. she says no, they resume contact. she says now that if she saw him in the street she would be pleased to see him.
on some very basic level I do not understand this. at all. perhaps it is that I descend from an unforgiving breed, prone to grievance. perhaps I do not forget things as readily as others. perhaps it is the stress of my current mode of life, that darkens my perceptions. perhaps I need to practise forgiveness.
but how does forgiveness come into it? people are what they do; I may understand what she did and why, but this makes her no more dear to me: she would do it again, just as unreflexively, because this is who she is and who she wants to be. if someone hurts me deeply, why I should subsequently allow them into my life? certainly, if there is no indication of change or regret on their part... surely such inclusion is something that is deserved, and granted neither freely nor automatically?
or is this a beastly and endarkened thing to say, a failure to let go? perhaps the question answers itself by the fact that I pose it.
at the moment, the work of editing is literally making me angry - like a despondent child, forced to do homework. no doubt in part due to the marathon sessions. I sleep rarely before 5am, never before 4.
much of the work is cosmetic, nitty-gritty: cleaning up the bibliography, standardizing styles and image captions, sorting out headers, automating the content tables. yesterday I finally shifted my working draft into submission format - 1.5 line-spacing, 11pt type - and inserted the bibliography. the day before, I spent five hours manually removing 2 000 superfluous quotation marks - the bane of overly cautious anthropological writing.
the aim is to have a submissible manuscript to hand, preferably within short order. then there is the business of pimp-my-thesis: my supervisor urges me to expand the thematic of sacrificial violence, for example. this is strictly for the babes and groupies.
submission?! I don't think I'll believe that even when I walk out of the board of graduate studies, receipt in hand to prove it. in my mind I'll still be in that field, somewhere in Cambodia, gunning imaginary chinamen.
cambridge is cold, gray and miserable. outside it snows irregularly, and despite cranking up the heating in my room, the tip of my nose is cold as I sit there, in the half-dark, labouring over my laptop.
I'm rewriting chapter 7, trying to condense the threads of the third section - an incredibly convoluted discussion of bare life, necropolitics, everyday violence, animal agency, sacrificial affinities and industrial stockrearing - into something that passes muster, illuminates my argument so far and yet still looks sufficiently simple that a lay expert / viva examiner might grasp the contours without quibbling.
the process is giving me the rare urge to get blind drunk.
figuratively, the situation is comparable to a hungry tiger trapped in a small cage with a large, highly unappetizing piece of spearmint tofu sitting in one corner. every so often I pad over to it, sample the corners, gag, then return to pace the perimeter and nibble my own tail or the bars of the cage until the next approach.
really, this needs to be over soon. this thesis has had its time enough and more.
just for the hell of it, here's a guest account link to my external statcounter. kids: don't forget to check out the navigation links in the left column! see if you can find yourself! supervision fun for the whole family!
the current baktun of the mayan long count finishes on december 21 2012. with it ends the age of the fifth and final sun, the sun of movement. this world will be destroyed by 'earthquakes'.
parallel to this, according to mckenna's decoding of the 'fractal timewave' concealed in the I Ching, december 22 will also mark the arrival of the 'transcendental object at the end of time' - an immense acceleration of the 'ingression of novelty into spacetime' that will see fundamental change take place at a vertiginously spiralling rate. in the last 135 minutes of the cosmic cycle, 18 'barriers' comparable to the emergence of life or the invention of language will be crossed - 13 of these in the last second.
pragmatically, that gives us just about time for the fifth and final sun to set on arnold schwarzenegger as the last president of the United States. maybe I could finish off another PhD in the meantime, too.
bring on the geomagnetic flip, I say.