Arrogance
It's a gray day outside and yesterday it rained in huge drops that could knock birds from the sky. If I were Gabriel Garcia Marquez I would say that it did knock them from the sky, killing thousands on the sidewalks and roads, and that all over the city birds walked with us on the streets among their dead.
I want you to know these things:
I have written a chapter for my book, and it was impossible and true and it ripped out of me like a second heart, and it was the most fulfilling thing I've felt since I found happiness for a few brief weeks many years ago. I have been trying for my whole life to get back to that feeling, which was mysterious and impossible to trace, and with my book I am succeeding. And in other ways I am feeling success, too. My professors, including the head of the writing department, beleive in me and my goals. They are impressed, and are taking particular interest in me. They think I will be what I hope I will be. In a way all my other writing means very little to me anymore, this is the beginning of something else. It may not show in the writing as much as in my mind, but I know what it means and I know where it will fit into a larger whole that, at the moment, means everything to me.
Tobias and I are having a rebirth in our relationship. It is like we are falling in love again. It is like he is loving himself again. (a minor victory: he has decided, on his own!, to take more interest in his appearance, ie:no longer turning his t-shirts inside out so that no one can see he has any personality whatsoever. habbit formed in NY. It makes you into something else for a while.) We took a nap this morning and he was smiling when he fell asleep. Smiling when you sleep takes so much trust- it is ultimate vulnerablity. It is in trusting that the blackness you enter will not be a hole that will swallow you. We slept in the gray sunlight and I couldn't sleep because all I wanted was to watch him. I feel like I have been trying so hard to make him happy for the past few months (he has been depressed) that I inadvertently made myself much happier (at moments bordering on pure bliss), and that that, in the end, was what worked to help make him happy. Though I know most of it came from himself.
I am at complete peace with all parts of myself. The other day on the subway, when I was in a particular state (right after my chapter got critiqued) I heard a man yelling at subway advertisements, and because I was not preoccupied with anything or upset about anything at all, I was entirely receptive to what he was saying, and I understood what he meant. It is a wonderful thing to understand what a man screaming at an ad for whiskey means. Instead of hating him for scaring me and losing control of himself, I listened to what he was saying, and understood that he was actually sort of making a joke, and that the joke made the kind of ridiculous sense that is so great at certain times.
There is a weird feeling you get when you know you will succeed. It is like being egotistical, but not really, because you know that you will succeed because you beleive you can and love the work and will not turn from it. Because you know that the struggle is the beauty, and the two together elate you and give you strength for everything you never had strength for before. Success is in realizing that you are not working persay, but digging into yourself until you get to that thing that you have to give the world, and delicately, like a surgeon, lifting it out. And it makes you so so happy. That is what people don't understand. That there is happiness and it is not fleeting and it is not unfathomable, and that it takes work but that the work does not hurt and doesn't exhaust, it is just a matter of loving it and letting yourself succumb to the dirtiest of dreams: self-importance, arrogance- whatever you want to call "hope" so that you don't have to have it, because you are afraid of what trying might do to you.
I don't want to say I am getting smarter than I was before, or that I've had a revelation and that I am better than I was before, and that I understand things now that I barely have the ability to explain yet- I don't want to say these things because they are arrogant, because they suppose that I am "better" than some people. On the other hand, living by the low standards of accepted humanity has gotten me nothing but pain. When I left the hopeful idealism of my earlier teen years and went into the world I allowed myself to do things that the world permitted, and I lived for a while in a self-excusing stupor. (ie: laziness, speed addiction, not reading anymore, etc) I lived by "well at least I'm not doing this.." or "People still like me.." or even, when the speed thing got really bad "Some people still don't know about it.."
My point is that while living by the lowered standards of the world and trying not to be too proud or too hopefull or too much better than other people (even people you respect), you might miss the only parts of life that actually matter, the things that make you feel like your heart is being ripped out and it hurts until you realize that when something leaves you something else is there and that new thing is bigger and more full of hot blood and someday you will rip it out too and it will keep growing until it is all you are and you will not be yourself anymore because there will be no room left in your for anything small or futile or selfish, just this overpowering feeling of blood pumping from you into everything around you and that it is beautiful and everywhere and you drink it like oceans
I want you to know these things:
I have written a chapter for my book, and it was impossible and true and it ripped out of me like a second heart, and it was the most fulfilling thing I've felt since I found happiness for a few brief weeks many years ago. I have been trying for my whole life to get back to that feeling, which was mysterious and impossible to trace, and with my book I am succeeding. And in other ways I am feeling success, too. My professors, including the head of the writing department, beleive in me and my goals. They are impressed, and are taking particular interest in me. They think I will be what I hope I will be. In a way all my other writing means very little to me anymore, this is the beginning of something else. It may not show in the writing as much as in my mind, but I know what it means and I know where it will fit into a larger whole that, at the moment, means everything to me.
Tobias and I are having a rebirth in our relationship. It is like we are falling in love again. It is like he is loving himself again. (a minor victory: he has decided, on his own!, to take more interest in his appearance, ie:no longer turning his t-shirts inside out so that no one can see he has any personality whatsoever. habbit formed in NY. It makes you into something else for a while.) We took a nap this morning and he was smiling when he fell asleep. Smiling when you sleep takes so much trust- it is ultimate vulnerablity. It is in trusting that the blackness you enter will not be a hole that will swallow you. We slept in the gray sunlight and I couldn't sleep because all I wanted was to watch him. I feel like I have been trying so hard to make him happy for the past few months (he has been depressed) that I inadvertently made myself much happier (at moments bordering on pure bliss), and that that, in the end, was what worked to help make him happy. Though I know most of it came from himself.
I am at complete peace with all parts of myself. The other day on the subway, when I was in a particular state (right after my chapter got critiqued) I heard a man yelling at subway advertisements, and because I was not preoccupied with anything or upset about anything at all, I was entirely receptive to what he was saying, and I understood what he meant. It is a wonderful thing to understand what a man screaming at an ad for whiskey means. Instead of hating him for scaring me and losing control of himself, I listened to what he was saying, and understood that he was actually sort of making a joke, and that the joke made the kind of ridiculous sense that is so great at certain times.
There is a weird feeling you get when you know you will succeed. It is like being egotistical, but not really, because you know that you will succeed because you beleive you can and love the work and will not turn from it. Because you know that the struggle is the beauty, and the two together elate you and give you strength for everything you never had strength for before. Success is in realizing that you are not working persay, but digging into yourself until you get to that thing that you have to give the world, and delicately, like a surgeon, lifting it out. And it makes you so so happy. That is what people don't understand. That there is happiness and it is not fleeting and it is not unfathomable, and that it takes work but that the work does not hurt and doesn't exhaust, it is just a matter of loving it and letting yourself succumb to the dirtiest of dreams: self-importance, arrogance- whatever you want to call "hope" so that you don't have to have it, because you are afraid of what trying might do to you.
I don't want to say I am getting smarter than I was before, or that I've had a revelation and that I am better than I was before, and that I understand things now that I barely have the ability to explain yet- I don't want to say these things because they are arrogant, because they suppose that I am "better" than some people. On the other hand, living by the low standards of accepted humanity has gotten me nothing but pain. When I left the hopeful idealism of my earlier teen years and went into the world I allowed myself to do things that the world permitted, and I lived for a while in a self-excusing stupor. (ie: laziness, speed addiction, not reading anymore, etc) I lived by "well at least I'm not doing this.." or "People still like me.." or even, when the speed thing got really bad "Some people still don't know about it.."
My point is that while living by the lowered standards of the world and trying not to be too proud or too hopefull or too much better than other people (even people you respect), you might miss the only parts of life that actually matter, the things that make you feel like your heart is being ripped out and it hurts until you realize that when something leaves you something else is there and that new thing is bigger and more full of hot blood and someday you will rip it out too and it will keep growing until it is all you are and you will not be yourself anymore because there will be no room left in your for anything small or futile or selfish, just this overpowering feeling of blood pumping from you into everything around you and that it is beautiful and everywhere and you drink it like oceans