'
The sermon for May. 05, 2004 is: "the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." 2:36 a.m. Crap; there's a new Magentic Fields album? I can't be about haemorrhaging money on disposable consumer items such as books, albums and films; I need to save money for, um, children and... um, my trip to Sweden. At any road: today was truly a glorious day. I decided this around lunch time, when I looked up from my book (Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat, always a smile) to note the shadow that this length of cord hanging from an umbrella was casting upon the woodgrain of the table before me. I had looked up from my book because I thought Jerome's prose eerily brilliant (it's the bit where he talks about not being able to enjoy graveyards and skulls and things like that; and how much he enjoys his "beautiful and noble thoughts about beautiful and noble things"); and I needed something prosaic and shopworn and ordinary to ground myself (otherwise I'd be liable to fluttter-by away, like a Mary Poppins popping poppers). Instead, I found myself grinning stupidly at this prettily composed bit of rope and its shadow. How pretty, I marvelled to myself. How marvelous. Because I also realised: bubbling within me, like some oilwell or artesian spring, there was something happy. I realised as well that I feel guilty for being happy. Happiness, I once thought, was an overdose of dopamine and serotonin; happiness was the exclusive province of the domesticated, the unadventurous, the dulled and the dumb; true happiness belonged to those lucky enough to be born with Down's Syndrome. (I really believed the latter: the developmentally disabled are some of the happiest people I've ever have had the fortune to have met.) To be a thinking, rational citizen of our post-enlightenment demesne, one must worry: one must be informed; and information necessarily leads to entropy (viz thermodynamics and Bell's theorem) and strife (viz the Idea in Hegel, and les damn�es de la terre). Norman V. Peale had no appeal, nor Francis Poulenc: give me Herbert Marcuse, gentlemen, and Shostakovich. It was grand being young and grandiose. And then I turned 17. When I was 17, I had the great misfortune of reading several playwrights who fucked my shit up but good: Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico Garcia Lorca, GB Shaw. Oscar Wilde. I was such a Goth: I listened only to Saint-Sa�ns and Mozart and Bernstein and Verdi and Gounod and Faur�. (Guess which pieces.) I was reading the playwrights for an identity -- a personna -- to adapt, to adopt: a political, sexual, isometric, sensual, self-sensible mask to claim as my own. Unfortunately (as I keep saying), what I found by using literature as experience (secondary sources cum primary ones, one might say) was a fatuousness on my part for the mediated life -- a preference for l'esprit d'escalier over the immediate (as well as for eccentric spelling [thanks, GB!] and le mot de cambremer). What I'm trying to say is that I modelled myself after some fucked-up object choices. The sociopathic homosexual side of me is lifted entirely from Wilde and Orton. The Communist side of me is Neruda, Mayakovsky, Prokofiev. And everything else I learned from life, I learned from Aristophanes. ....this is strange: I meant to write about something entirely different. I initially wanted to write about the weather (I'll write it about tomorrow), and note down completion of my first draft of the tango I wrote for Max, Consolidation Therapy, Op. 3: scherzo, for cello, bandoneon and piano. Then I wanted to write about how Diaryland (or, to be fair, the internet) has replaced my interior life, and the possibility that Generation Jonathan+1 (i.e., you young kids) may never have had an interior life. Finally -- after reading Guy's emails, leafing through my notebooks to find a suitable scribbled down poem, giving up, wondering about sex in a hammock (I bought a hammock today, to read Three Men In A Boat in -- I've never had sex in a hammock, I sadly realise; nor have had sex in a larch) and whether people have sex in hammocks, watching godless amounts of television (like Kieslowski's entire "Trois Coleurs" -- an ostensibly political work: but, like all artistic political work [except Lysistrata], an abject failure; maybe that's why I like Kieslowski so much), leafing through the internet listlessly and discovering --- crap, there's a new Magnetic Fields album with which to prick my impoverished conscience with tantalus hooks thereupon. All I wanted to say was, "I'm happy." I'm happy. And the weather, oh, the weather was glorious.
 
|
