(no subject)
so I've got absolutely nothing insightful to say right now. This is good because it means my brain is resting. Learning french, writing a play, enjoying the montreal summer and taking an intensive summer school course have sucked everything out of mind, as if with a straw. My brain is stretching, and currently, healing. I find myself not dwelling on the past or future, but oddly not exactly present either. My body scales the sidewalks of this great city on autopilot, always tracing the heels of the pedestrian in front of me. I am able to have conversations, to appear present, to watch lovers sneak admiring glances at their beau while they're not looking, watching them characteristically fumble with keys while making that cartoonish face they do, or I observe homeless people approaching every table at a patio asking politely for change and making amusing small talk, never reproachful in the bright afternoons. It just occured to me that I see life as if I'm watching television. I don't exist here. It's more interactive than television, but it's not real, nothing is happening to me, moments happen to those around me and I catalogue some of them. Is it possible that I'm not a real person, that I too, am a fictional creation of my imagination? The whole world is as I perceive it, there is no fact. Do I mystically summon strangers toward me as I live out my living novel?
I wonder all this with no emotion, I don't feel small or powerful to have this sensation, I don't feel numb or unique. I simply see nothing factual in this world and understand that no one sees what I do. It's an effect of longing and isolation that one begins to feel like a non-entity, but it doesn't feel sorrowful. All I have are my words, but words only refer to that which has been named, symbols, icons. For the time being, I see life this way as well. Revelations or epiphanies are wonderful, but only send us downstream towards more words. I tell you this from the house of words, the library. From this place where printed letters cling effortlessly to vertically stacked pages, I see through them all and feel nothing. No lust, desire, fear or compassion. Any of these feeling that do sometimes stir in me are my nerves reacting to the words. I recognize symbols (pretty girl in a summer skirt, or a glass and steel skyscraper falling down on me) and the corresponding emotion is evoked, but what? It's just more of the processes that rescue my day from boredom. There is nothing there.
I almost feel meditative, minding my own business while my the active part of my brain sleeps. I can treat cynicism, laziness and longing with counteracting words that bring me into another state of being, so isn't it all a trick? I consider that maybe I've seeked out too many potent words in such a short time span that they're all meaningless to me. Certain poetry and philosophy, textual or spoken, can drive me to lucid insanity. I feel neither of those things now as I am entering a stage which may last 20 more minutes or a year where I am simply feeling something for which there is no word. I feel present and absent simultaneously, love and fear as one, ideas and opinions as entertainment, and lastly, that 'I' is a word, a gross oversimplification which I am now instinctively becoming. The word I could never allude to all the elements that make up my person, and maybe this upsets me so much that I am turning myself into something definable by one single letter, because then I will reach a plateau of understanding myself where I can rest and watch buildings crash on I and it won't matter so much.
I wonder all this with no emotion, I don't feel small or powerful to have this sensation, I don't feel numb or unique. I simply see nothing factual in this world and understand that no one sees what I do. It's an effect of longing and isolation that one begins to feel like a non-entity, but it doesn't feel sorrowful. All I have are my words, but words only refer to that which has been named, symbols, icons. For the time being, I see life this way as well. Revelations or epiphanies are wonderful, but only send us downstream towards more words. I tell you this from the house of words, the library. From this place where printed letters cling effortlessly to vertically stacked pages, I see through them all and feel nothing. No lust, desire, fear or compassion. Any of these feeling that do sometimes stir in me are my nerves reacting to the words. I recognize symbols (pretty girl in a summer skirt, or a glass and steel skyscraper falling down on me) and the corresponding emotion is evoked, but what? It's just more of the processes that rescue my day from boredom. There is nothing there.
I almost feel meditative, minding my own business while my the active part of my brain sleeps. I can treat cynicism, laziness and longing with counteracting words that bring me into another state of being, so isn't it all a trick? I consider that maybe I've seeked out too many potent words in such a short time span that they're all meaningless to me. Certain poetry and philosophy, textual or spoken, can drive me to lucid insanity. I feel neither of those things now as I am entering a stage which may last 20 more minutes or a year where I am simply feeling something for which there is no word. I feel present and absent simultaneously, love and fear as one, ideas and opinions as entertainment, and lastly, that 'I' is a word, a gross oversimplification which I am now instinctively becoming. The word I could never allude to all the elements that make up my person, and maybe this upsets me so much that I am turning myself into something definable by one single letter, because then I will reach a plateau of understanding myself where I can rest and watch buildings crash on I and it won't matter so much.