et in Arcadia ego.
I see the word Arcadia and think of that brief week at art school. It materialises as a memory of sparse floorboards and heavy walls that ran to meet the ground, wide white windows, a forest of easels, and a narrow convulsing staircase. Our studio was on the top floor of the cylindrical building encrusted with sandstone, which meant we were closest to the sky and to light, to the fluctuating mood of the heavens, severed from reality by distance. There I found a little haven for dreams, I think. I pinched the phrase 'et in Arcadia ego' from Charles Ryder and his act of emblazoning it across the forehead of a skull. I think it's brilliant. When we finally get out this house with its pretty pastel walls and its tired ceilings I'll decorate my new study with a human skull and sit it in a low bowl of dried rose petals. My mother will detest it as Infinitely Bad Taste to bring Death into our home and I'll protest that it's not Death, but something devoured and spat out by death - rejected and a memoir to the human condition. Beautiful rather than Gruesome - skulls are delicious to draw, their curves and starkness another testament to mortality.
Somehow Latin and skulls and writing letters in calligraphy pens all tie in together. I'm not sure what they have in common though. But it's the same thing as my current preoccupation to buy a leather journal and cart it with me everywhere. You see, I have to begin writing my feelings and thoughts. It doesn't seem to be enough just to experience and dismiss them and it's not enough to type them anymore. I find myself confined in this little acre of cyberspace, wrangling with myself for words and all the while forgetting the first fundamental of writing is to pick up a pen and scratch at paper. Filters also revile me - mostly because I’ve used them before. I had nine at one time, all in operation and looking back I think I was mad. I have three now but I never use them. I rarely bother to use the friend's only option anymore either. If I can't say something for the general public, it's a rare chance I can say it to anyone at all.
But mostly, I've been pining to see something in my own handwriting. Perhaps this instinct is narcissistic then. It's more personalised that way, as though I am actually creating words. But it will be kept separate from livejournal - it will be reserved for thoughts I don't want anyone to see at all - harmless, disinteresting thoughts and whimsies, or possibly malicious feelings dripping with acid that would slowly eat my heart into black soot if I didn't express them somewhere. I read 'she died of a word. A long word.' I will most likely die of many words, a cascading stream of them, silver and sharp and poisoned at the last syllable. Those would be secrets and skeletons that lurk in the recesses of darkness and scrap at your wounds when your back is turned. Perhaps that's what ties writing in elegant script with dead languages and skulls. Our bones and our words live on after the final curtain call - I can't choose the shape or the colour of my bones unearthed from my grave, spat out by Death and other Conclusions, but I can choose the words I leave behind. And words will be the Tombstone. Here she did write.