Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Arts 

Why am I, bookworm since the age of 6, doing an Arts degree without studying English? Mind you, I'm wary of the whole lit-crit business, the over-analysis and under-feeling.

But.

I want my fun and work reading to be one and the same. Instead, I drag myself through case law and political journal articles, eyes crossing, counting the number of pages to go. I read fiction in guilty binges and midnight snacks.

I've decided one of my goals in life is to...understand. Humanity, that is. I feel the urgent need to swot up, having such a monotonous and grey everyday. I read an article once in which different professionals gave advice about living a balanced life. The nutritionist said what to eat. The sportswoman what exercises to do. But the one I remember was the psychologist, who advised that one should try to experience all the great themes of humanity. I only access one sliver, one slice of the human experience and I know, from observation, that it is possible to go through life thinking that's all there is. Look at my mother, for whom the world is shopping and housework and work, TV and petty family gossip and sports. Resistant to any learning or self-knowledge. Sometimes I think my goal is to be the anti-her. I am too cruel; she is a decent woman. But sad, and poor in the things that matter.

I too am reined in. Conservative, too easily appalled, afraid of taking risks. Think too much. Afraid of dancing, caring, vulnerability. Self-centred and bad-faithed. Nothing I say is ever completely true.

There's more isn't there; passion, ideals, war, heroism, despair, love. Love, which I'm told exists, but see so rarely. Divorces a-plenty, marriages of convenience, of habit, for money or children or parental wishes. But love? Not up close. My mum's old Australian boss and his wife, perhaps. A twinkly blue-eyed joking man, a sharp but kind woman, fifty years of marriage, ten children. Why is it in some families wisdom is passed on? I see couples necking in front of the library, nuzzling and rocking on the bus. Foreign. I can't ever imagine myself there, on someone's lap, holding someone's hand, the kick galvanic. I believe we've been sold a romantic dream, these films and books and fairy tales. All I hope for is a quiet love, no incandescence, but a quiet companionship, over years. Affection.

I've decided to note beautiful things every day. Today, a flower whose name I do not know. Purple and white and velvety although I did not touch. Friday, a tiny-far plane creeping across the blue tablecloth sky. The light thrown on a woman looking out the bus window, her little girl asleep on her lap, straddling her. Portrait of motherly love on a urban bus. I seem obsessed by light and windows. My friend, the other day, transparent in the light. I sat transfixed. An academic, the kindly lines of woman worry on her face. I need to stop looking for obvious beauty. Flowers in their prostitute-like finery, their whorish cries for attention. Nature is rare here in suburban Sydney, though out this window I have my river, whom I have never touched either. I went searching for it last week, could not find a way down to it. So close, I came, climbing down and down, but the road stopped and I feared to trespass. A man saw me. To the point: I need to find beauty in nooks and crannies and in the concrete and shopfronts and squat brown institutional buildings.

Am I writing in a sort of heightened poetic tone? It's that stage of insomnia. Insomnia is the wrong word. Self-forced insomnia. 75 pages of Security weighs on my conscience. 75 unread pages, that is. It builds and snowballs.

I identify with Roland and Maud, sifting through the minutiae of another's life. I identify, in fact, with Beatrice Nest, the voluminous failure of a woman devoting her life to the fabricated diary of a woman living a lie. I once recognised myself in a book, I forget the title. A woman - a teacher perhaps? an academic - drops her work to pursue her Great Novel. I saw myself in her. The similarities were uncanny, the pretention and self-deceit and mediocrity. Mediocrity, that's it.

I am sleepy and must wake up at an obscene hour tomorrow but this is addictive, this semi-automatic writing in my own skull.

To press publish or not? Oh, why not. Only three people read this rubbish after all, and all but one are strangers.

# posted at 1:19 am

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