And it looks like the time hasn't come yet; it's easier for us to consider a plane a sphere.
A postcard in reverse? I knew my Geometry would come in handy someday.
Well, I am mired in this endless pit of self-discovery called solitude and travel, and the major problem with such a journey is that it forces one to pull a Greg Adams and pontificate widely on the nature of self-discovery, solitude, and travel.
It's not that I am particularly lonely, in that I do have friends and people and a(nother) cat, and it's not that I am misunderstood, because I am if anything more capable than usual of expressing the nature of me and mine to others. I think, instead, this new life has made me jealous and guarded, and I take far too much pleasure in dispensing incomplete information to the masses (of questions) I receive. It is as if my haughty little subconscious has decided that once my brain and body resolved to live life, I had become the major representation for the rest of the world on how to do it. Instead of sharing in Greg Adams-like plethora, my petty self has decided to keep my dusty, carbon jewels hidden from the light so that I can stare at them in dimly lit oblivion.
I feel like I am living in a tiny pocket of time. Like I am waiting for the bus. Like I am on a trip, and not in a life. I suppose this had been building for awhile, since I first saw my well-built edifice crumbling into the end of an artificial eternity. And really, of that sort of eternity, my landlord spoke best (in excerpted verse):
To think about eternity... is not to understand that eternity isn't what lasts forever, but what is repeated again and again.
Living in pocket-worlds breeds all sorts of poets and pretty prose and apt analogies, and I hope that the full extent of my distaste for such is evident from these lines. I used to pity the people who carried their ready-made pocket-worlds around with them and lived like that was all there is to any sort existence, as they settled into their evening chairs. As I settle into my evening chair, I think they may have been right, and I am stubbornly proud to have resisted. There was a time, long ago, when I talked about watching my life as if it were a play, or living it as if it were a movie, or shelving it as if it were a book. That's all fine and dandy when one is one's own audience, but when one decides to live life for life's sake, an invisible audience appears in smoke, and life is a performance.
Writing on a journey is like travelling to Ukraine to find a wife. Some may admire your audacity, your foolishness, or the beauty of your results, but there's something strange and something unnatural about it -- as if you bought love and beauty at the supermarket, instead of, say, at the local Barnes & Noble.
Well, Irvanets loved Oklahoma as we are to love Ukraine, but in the midst of all this mature cynicism, my penchant for poems that know me in a country that doesn't turns my doubt into red-crush puppy love.
I don't want to be a poet
I don't want to be an artist
Or even a model
I'd rather be sauerkraut
How many questions would then
automatically
disappear
For instance,
to be or not to be in class
Or
what stockings to wear
Or
how much sugar to put in the tea.
It wouldn't be life, it would be bliss
I'd lie there
without the slightest desire
for example,
to take a shower.
I'd lie there in peace
with little bits of
garlic and carrot
Meditating...
STOP!
But who would be the carrot?
Who's the carrot?
You?
So blissfully apt. I'm not sure how to approach the bold code in pocket-world, neither in theory nor in practice. Isn't this my last, best hope for a rift with eternity? Or will solidity find me and cradle me in its arms? Time tells, not in the way things should be, but in the way they are. I think perhaps later I shall post a perfe(c)tskii poem from Neborak that is perhaps more tangibly appropriate (or at least analagous) to the situation. I wish I could just share them with you, and keep my solitary, guarded self creased up in my fold-out couch. But that would require a writer or an artist, and I only play at pretty prose with my digital camera.
Well, things are great, wish you were here! The weather is beautiful! I'll send more pictures soon! Hope things are going GREAT at home! See you soon!
Well, I am mired in this endless pit of self-discovery called solitude and travel, and the major problem with such a journey is that it forces one to pull a Greg Adams and pontificate widely on the nature of self-discovery, solitude, and travel.
It's not that I am particularly lonely, in that I do have friends and people and a(nother) cat, and it's not that I am misunderstood, because I am if anything more capable than usual of expressing the nature of me and mine to others. I think, instead, this new life has made me jealous and guarded, and I take far too much pleasure in dispensing incomplete information to the masses (of questions) I receive. It is as if my haughty little subconscious has decided that once my brain and body resolved to live life, I had become the major representation for the rest of the world on how to do it. Instead of sharing in Greg Adams-like plethora, my petty self has decided to keep my dusty, carbon jewels hidden from the light so that I can stare at them in dimly lit oblivion.
I feel like I am living in a tiny pocket of time. Like I am waiting for the bus. Like I am on a trip, and not in a life. I suppose this had been building for awhile, since I first saw my well-built edifice crumbling into the end of an artificial eternity. And really, of that sort of eternity, my landlord spoke best (in excerpted verse):
To think about eternity... is not to understand that eternity isn't what lasts forever, but what is repeated again and again.
Living in pocket-worlds breeds all sorts of poets and pretty prose and apt analogies, and I hope that the full extent of my distaste for such is evident from these lines. I used to pity the people who carried their ready-made pocket-worlds around with them and lived like that was all there is to any sort existence, as they settled into their evening chairs. As I settle into my evening chair, I think they may have been right, and I am stubbornly proud to have resisted. There was a time, long ago, when I talked about watching my life as if it were a play, or living it as if it were a movie, or shelving it as if it were a book. That's all fine and dandy when one is one's own audience, but when one decides to live life for life's sake, an invisible audience appears in smoke, and life is a performance.
Writing on a journey is like travelling to Ukraine to find a wife. Some may admire your audacity, your foolishness, or the beauty of your results, but there's something strange and something unnatural about it -- as if you bought love and beauty at the supermarket, instead of, say, at the local Barnes & Noble.
Well, Irvanets loved Oklahoma as we are to love Ukraine, but in the midst of all this mature cynicism, my penchant for poems that know me in a country that doesn't turns my doubt into red-crush puppy love.
I don't want to be a poet
I don't want to be an artist
Or even a model
I'd rather be sauerkraut
How many questions would then
automatically
disappear
For instance,
to be or not to be in class
Or
what stockings to wear
Or
how much sugar to put in the tea.
It wouldn't be life, it would be bliss
I'd lie there
without the slightest desire
for example,
to take a shower.
I'd lie there in peace
with little bits of
garlic and carrot
Meditating...
STOP!
But who would be the carrot?
Who's the carrot?
You?
So blissfully apt. I'm not sure how to approach the bold code in pocket-world, neither in theory nor in practice. Isn't this my last, best hope for a rift with eternity? Or will solidity find me and cradle me in its arms? Time tells, not in the way things should be, but in the way they are. I think perhaps later I shall post a perfe(c)tskii poem from Neborak that is perhaps more tangibly appropriate (or at least analagous) to the situation. I wish I could just share them with you, and keep my solitary, guarded self creased up in my fold-out couch. But that would require a writer or an artist, and I only play at pretty prose with my digital camera.
Well, things are great, wish you were here! The weather is beautiful! I'll send more pictures soon! Hope things are going GREAT at home! See you soon!