A page from my diary
What am I really afraid of? I am fake. No excuses now. Double 800s on the GRE, professors backing me, 3.7 at Stanford, African experiences. This is all shit.
My cigarette is beautiful. The crepuscular glow is slowly buried beneath flakes of ash. After it burns, you can read the pattern of leaves that made this cigarette unique. The ashes trace tobacco that whorled and wrapped and held itself in, secret. In the progressing burn it releases her energy, smoke, and toxins, and in the ash you see from what is dead what was alive.
Every Sunday I quit smoking. Thursdays I prefer to take a cigarette with my beer.
Today I finished a five-hour playlist called “travel.” A bit more than half are selections of world music I’ve compiled, from Latin America, Africa, and France. Maybe half of the remainder are English songs that explicitly invoke travel or places. The rest for whatever reason I associate with travel—at least I thought that was the criterion I was using, until I realized they were all the songs that actually I associate with my current or past loves. That was when I realized that travel and love are the same phenomenon. Or that travel is a substitute for love, and music is a substitute for both.
I am attracted to the novel and the new, to that which promises to be different and somewhat epic. The moth does not want to reach the fire, knowing it would burn, but trusts the glass bulb to hold it back. That way it can pursue the light with exuberance and innocent disregard, and this is the most heroic and transcendent experience a moth can have.
This is when I want to resign. This is when I want to say: You can do this without me. I can work all day and night in a fantasy, but when I turn to bed it will not matter. But this is all there is. I’m not going to get another chance, another world more meaningful. This place has no color, which is to say, it is whatever color we see.
Thus Byron cut a path through Europe of boy-lovers, and came home defeated.
This ugly world.
Could I revive within me…
May I do work tomorrow. May I find the quotidian matter.
It will come as love.
My cigarette is beautiful. The crepuscular glow is slowly buried beneath flakes of ash. After it burns, you can read the pattern of leaves that made this cigarette unique. The ashes trace tobacco that whorled and wrapped and held itself in, secret. In the progressing burn it releases her energy, smoke, and toxins, and in the ash you see from what is dead what was alive.
Every Sunday I quit smoking. Thursdays I prefer to take a cigarette with my beer.
Today I finished a five-hour playlist called “travel.” A bit more than half are selections of world music I’ve compiled, from Latin America, Africa, and France. Maybe half of the remainder are English songs that explicitly invoke travel or places. The rest for whatever reason I associate with travel—at least I thought that was the criterion I was using, until I realized they were all the songs that actually I associate with my current or past loves. That was when I realized that travel and love are the same phenomenon. Or that travel is a substitute for love, and music is a substitute for both.
I am attracted to the novel and the new, to that which promises to be different and somewhat epic. The moth does not want to reach the fire, knowing it would burn, but trusts the glass bulb to hold it back. That way it can pursue the light with exuberance and innocent disregard, and this is the most heroic and transcendent experience a moth can have.
Dreamt-of love, not even love,I am not jaded, because I can not work. To be naïve is to believe in the beauty of what you would. To be mature is to accept that this is as good as it gets, to stop waiting for or holding out for some other beauty, something to transcend this dust. It is jaded to find meaning in this life, and it is idealistic to hold it as immaterial. I am idealistic; I can not work. I find it immaterial.
Just hope for love
Is more fantastic than fantasy,
More Edenic than Eden.
When God created us, all He could do
Was replicate the beauty that is
Our dreams of love.
This is when I want to resign. This is when I want to say: You can do this without me. I can work all day and night in a fantasy, but when I turn to bed it will not matter. But this is all there is. I’m not going to get another chance, another world more meaningful. This place has no color, which is to say, it is whatever color we see.
A damsel with a dulcimerColeridge died unhappy. He could never regain that song. And may I search though weeks of music, may I sleep with how many women, may I move from continent to continent, may I descend a thousand bottles, I will never find that song, either.
In a vision once I saw:
She was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That pleasure dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Thus Byron cut a path through Europe of boy-lovers, and came home defeated.
This ugly world.
Could I revive within me…
May I do work tomorrow. May I find the quotidian matter.
It will come as love.
posted by Nate at 1:43 AM
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