willful destruction

My head is reeling. I feel as if I'm leaking energy from some place between my eyes and the taste in my mouth is expired medicine. When I first decided to engage in "hermetic studies" I thought it was sincerely because I had some thinking to do that could not be done engaged with the surface world. The idea was that there's a harmony with nature, returning to the water, and all the surface sounds blending with the water, resonating and colliding, create an Aum, a peaceful sound. The sound helps with my frustrations sometimes... others, like the past week or so I think it's been, little helps.

After a few days straight of creative work and investigation, I began to lose steam. I felt lost and useless. Every move I made felt meaningless. I was haunted by things about Sylvia I had forgotten - the way she obsessed about her small hands and wanted surgery to make them bigger, her stutter, how once we fell asleep in the woods and she woke up screaming, then cried, and did not speak at all, despite my pressing, for several hours.

It terrifies me to think that no one will know these things, and, according to what she used to tell me, that perhaps I don't even know them. I still don't think I can lie to myself, but every so often I forget what I'm doing, and I don't know if I was thinking something just then, before it - maybe about something terrible but true, or something hideous and untrue which I will someday believe to be true. Great lies are the work of creative analysts. The meaning and subtext of these inventions, accidental or not, are imbedded, imbued from experience and environment. If Sylvia never broke down in the woods, why would I have allowed myself to believe it, and what does it mean? Was her nightmare one of my own?

I've had some time to collect myself from ego paralysis. I read some more of Sylvia's books, some being the critical word. Brothers Karamazov caused me to put it down after the "Grand Inquisitor." I nearly fell back down again. Then I read Notes from the Underground, and was saved, in a sense. It was almost like that scene in the Neverending Story where Bastian discovers that he's not only reading it, but writing it as well - it was eerily familiar, and magic in a way. Sylvia never talked about it, but as I read it myself, and looked at her notes in the margins, I started to well up, and realised two things:

one, that there is only one escape from the crushing weight of existence and metaphysical and emotional suffering.

two, that Sylvia had discovered it.

I start reading Nausea today... and recording more threnodies.

PS, happy birthday to me. 1 april, 1990.

"I could make a career of being blue:
I could dress in black and read Camus,
smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth
like I was 17,
that would be a scream,
but I don't want to get over you."
- stephen merritt