Literature entry week 9
These last couple of days have been pretty tumultuous. So many things have been happening, and I keep forgetting what day it is because I skipped uni on Monday (ooah, naughty me). One good thing is that I've discovered Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. It is exactly what I want to read right now in my life, being very excited about my trip next year to Paris and other places, and the imagery is spectacular. He describes tastes, sounds and feelings so intricately and yet so simply. I want to be just like Hemingway, he's my new hero. Funny though, I didn't like The Old Man and The Sea much a few years ago. Maybe because I'm all hyped about going to Paris, maybe my tastes are changing.
Anyway, we're still on the Tempest, but I feel like I want to be creative, and prove that I’m not one of those logico-academico / enlightenment-era empirically measuring dictionary people. NOT SO!
So here is some writing from my commonplace book…
I sat next to a prostitute. I didn’t mind that she was. She had a dirty white furry coat on, even though the carriage was sweltering, and most of the office workers had taken off their jackets. She smelled like that RSL smell- stale booze and smoke. If she had’ve talked to me I probably would have got up. But she didn’t. She was drinking a can of coke. It’s just a job, right?
I’m reading Hemingway and I’m eating his words and loving it and I want to be just like him, living in Paris and writing in cafes. It’s more that I could ever want. And the train flies out of the tunnel and everything’s a midnight blue, but it’s not midnight. It’s that strange time of year that’s dark very early but not cold enough for coats. I want it to be that cold but I know once it is I will be craving the sun. Right now it has dropped behind a quartz of clouds, throwing orange and vermillion and pink behind the trees. And I can’t write quick enough and it’s yellow now, a pale watery sherbet orange yellow. I want to be sucking down oysters and crisp wine in a Paris café and feel complete. But though the sun has gone down, it will come back again.
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And this is a bit of a story I started writing, inspired by Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle and I realise now it’s a bit Lolita-ish, too. Not intended though. It’s from the first person perspective of a male character with no name as yet. Language warning…
February
As I get up from the couch I realise my foot has gone to sleep. Too much daytime TV will do that. I leave my flat and lock the door to go downstairs. I reach for the mail in my box and lo and behold, another bill. “That’s fucking great” I say out loud to no one in particular. As I’ve been standing here my foot has become more painful and I decide to walk it off.
The midday heat creates beads of sweat on my forehead but the afternoon breeze will soon get up. I cross one of the four main roads that boxes me into this hole and already feel better. I walk down to the park and calm down. I notice a young girl sitting reading a book on a graffiti-ed rock under the overpass bridge, her legs dangling into the no doubt cool water of the creek. It’s probably polluted like hell with dog shit and heavy metal particles from the chemical spills a few years ago upstream, but she doesn’t seem to care. This girl must be about fifteen; thin, with light brown hair that looks like it would smell like sunlight, and she wears a white singlet and jeans she has rolled up to keep dry. She looks up at me. “Hi.” And smiles. I wonder why she isn’t at school. Classes must have resumed at least a week ago. I never notice things like that anymore really, but it is February. I realise I’m staring and haven’t said anything in response.
“Hi, sorry, I was walking, and… I don’t usually see anyone down here this time of day.” She looks back down at the water rushing over her perfect feet.
“That’s why I’m here,” she says, “I don’t want to talk to anyone either. Want to sit down? The water is so cool. They say your veins come to the surface on a hot day to cool your blood, so I figure, why not give them a head start?” She laughs. A musical laugh and it echoes around the concrete overpass. She closes her book and puts it between us. I don’t recognise the author’s name.
She tells me her name is Janet and I find out that yes, she should be at school but she can’t handle it there. I ask why, is the work too hard? And she snorts at me. We sit quietly for a while and I listen to cars and trucks driving over our heads and the sound of the water bubbling. If it weren’t for the cars and the graffiti and the creepy twenty-something guy sitting with the young girl she could be a figure in a pre-Raphelite painting. I decide not to ask any more questions.
A few minutes like this and suddenly, “so why aren’t you at work?” I think about this for a second. I have no real reason for not working, I just hated it. Why, she asks? And I explain.
It’s because of the void. The shallowness of it all. The pretending, the status symbols, the emptiness of the people all around me. In the city every day I watched them get off the train, the women shouldering their designer bags, the men adjusting their designer ties. They all looked the same. They all wanted the same thing. And they were empty. No matter how much they filled their lives with stuffing, they would always be hollow. I am generalising, of course, but overall, it seemed to me that everyone I knew in that life was dead. Without any creativity or passion. Just eat, sleep, exercise, work-work-work, buy-buy-buy. I didn’t want to turn out like them. I didn’t want that life. So I quit.
“Same with me.” She says simply. I feel a cool breeze on the back of my t-shirt and realise that my body has cooled down since sitting here in the shade with Janet. And that breeze is the southerly that has showed up. I’ve been talking longer than I realised. She says she has to go, but tomorrow she plans to sit under the jacaranda trees over the other side of the park. She likes to watch the mynah birds argue. “If you’ll visit me tomorrow, I’ll have some jam sandwiches,” she says. I tell her I’d like that, and get up to go. My bare feet get dirty with the dust I’m walking on, trying to avoid bits of glass, and I think tonight I will be able to sleep much better than I have in weeks.
I realise none of this has very much to do with The Tempest, but my comment is...
Comment at http://0001230185288.livejournal.com/15254.html?mode=reply
I think you are right in not trusting Prospero. Maybe being the Duke of Milan and having so many people wait upon him and then being cast away on a desert island, he has been so spoiled with attention that he has turned into a bit of a prick. That said, his attitude towards slavery might just be a contextual thing, that he is a product of his time. I mean, George Washington had slaves, didn't he? And that was in the late 1700s. So it was acceptable. And also, when you mentioned that he is supposed to be a white magician, there is a part in the play that suggests this is otherwise. In act 5 scene 1 lines 48-49 he says "graves at my command have waked their sleepers". Apparently only black magicians could raise the dead. So maybe he isn't as kindly as we thought.
GeebusD