Monday, March 20, 2006

A Scale, A Mirror, and Those Indifferent Clocks

It began, irrational and completely lacking reason. It existed in a single moment, and yet that moment spread itself out over a lifetime.

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names - now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us.

"Every action, thought and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. … In this most profound way, we are held responsible for every action, thought and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention." – Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul

Ethelinde at 8:09 am

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Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Fragment #2

My feelings dismay me. I so rarely control them. They are their own kingdom. Too primitive to be a republic, and when they want to, they send their armies to batter me. My total self should include feeling but I do not know how to make a treaty with that warrior state. When I was growing up I rebelled against feeling and now my feelings rebel against me.

I separated myself from too much hurt. Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically I recognise that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain.

I love badly. That is, too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out of the window. The melodrama of my childhood has located itself in a heroes/villains psyche of He Loves Me He Loves Me Not. The lecherous twirling moustaches, the asexual saintly forehead, my lovers divided into exciting predators and insipid prey.

In this overlit twilight world, the fluorescent compensating for the lack of natural light, my feelings run riot on sadism, masochism, ruthlessness and mutilation. Exactly what you would expect from a barbarian state. I am civilised. My feelings are not. I want to love well. To see you as you are, not as a character in my film noir. I want the unknowableness and intimacy of another human being.

"Her life was imbued with an abiding sadness, a clear-eyed understanding that independence can beget loneliness, that rigorous ideals and raised consciousnesses are not always good company at the dinner table. Yet she shared her compassion among a wide array of characters, those who settled and those who continued to search."

Ethelinde at 8:44 pm

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Fragment #1: Carrie's Poem

His hello was the end of her endings
Her laugh was their first step down the aisle
His hand would be hers to hold forever
His forever was as simple as her smile
He said she was what was missing
She said instantly she knew
She was a question to be answered
And his answer was 'I do'

- Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City

Ethelinde at 8:15 pm

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