Anger

Well, it's pathetic I know, but I hate to be a scapegoat. Or, according to Milan Kundera, I probably love it. At least it gives me a role in the world.

I just get so angry sometimes I could . . . But of course I can't. I'm just not brave enough to do the Taxi Driver thing. So I'm listening to Pink Floyd instead. Which one's Pink?

So, how to create some Beauty out of this? (Ed.: that's exactly what an angry person would say, when they couldn't handle their anger.)

I dreamt, two days ago, that I was viewing a perfect world, from many miles above. The world was not in this universe: we couldn't get there, yet we got there - at least, we got to be a million miles above it, to see how perfect the architecture is, how gracefully everything intertwined to make almost a golden age. But we cosmonauts were so high above, looking at sheer walls a thousand metres high, with no chance to climb. The only way we could get to the perfect world was to fall, endlessly fall, to give up to the gentle wind of gravity.

Maybe tomorrow I'll look up the Latin for anger. Meanwhile, I just want to put on the White Stripes and turn the volume up to 11. (Actually, Robert Plant does quite nicely.)

In the end, the thing is to be brave enough to wear the tee-shirt of your own creation. Maybe tomorrow.

Find a City, Find a City to Live In . . .

Last night I dreamed. Or the night before: no matter. A perfect city, a perfect universe. Seen from afar: no place we could ever reach - too far away beyond the 11th dimension. But somehow we'd got there: we could see it all before us; and in the classic falling dream, the only way to get there was to let go: to comprehend the immense distance between 'up' here and 'down' there, and to accept that, whilst it would take one hundred years of expert rock climbing to descend to this perfect plane, and that's once you'd done five years in vertigo basecamp, that acceptance might lead you straight there. But when you got there, you just might not feel so important, in your shiny space suit and all, as you do up here. But what other choice do we have? Eventually, sooner or later, we must choose to fall - to trust in the process of falling, and in its arrival.

Shame

We all experience shame. When we see it in young people: that startling blush, indicating an area of thought or feeling that the wearer is suddenly confronted with, we remember how torturous it was to us, in those early days, to be so affected by the desire to conform, and the fear of not knowing how to conform. And now, when we're old, fat and ugly, all our dreams have been converted into the manure of destiny: how proud we are that nothing makes us blush any more. Try this: list all the things you care about. Then list all the things you used to care about, but now, well, they just ain't so important. See what I mean? Time to go for a good long walk. Then I can try to figure out why ScribeFire won't do the business for me . . .

Prince of Gloom Survives

Well, how about that? I survived to see the Millennium out, lived to see so many smarter, cuter and richer people than myself turned into compost. And still, in a Graham Greene kinda way, I preserve some species of hope. I've been reading about Fermat recently, and about prime numbers.
And 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' by Milan Kundera. Ian McEwan called it "a dark and brilliant achievement".
I feel as if, if I read it in fifty years' time, I still wouldn't understand it, but it would still lift my spirit, and make me seek to bury my ancestors where they could get some breathing space.
Anyway, if you need a quick laugh, try this: http://www.seeqpod.com/music/?plid=d60339e06e

And, Imshallah, I'll see you tomorrow . . .

"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men" - Roald Dahl