Most of my life it’s like I’m looking at the ugly underside of all that exists. When I have a little drink, it lifts me above it all, and I can see it shining and beautiful. It is like being above or under the ocean. When you’re above it, the froth-tipped little waves and the light of the sunset on the waters. It’s awe-inspiring, this great machine, “God’s perfect creation.” But when you’re struggling to stay above water and the waves cup over your mouth and fill your lungs with freezing saltwater, it’s harder to appreciate.
I just have to hope that there’s something to all I’m doing somewhere underlying consciousness, but that it isn’t evil.
I don’t remember what you look like. I deleted all the photos I have saved. But I have a pact not to look at them again.
People who are shameless or just have open hearts, are willing to cuddle with anybody, with total strangers. I feel like we could spend a good more ten years before really beginning, but life is too short and thus for the sake of its expediency we have to accelerate.
That general sentiment was once the subject of the poem, although it was put forward wryly, tongue in cheek. Surely he couldn’t guess that some humorless epigone would ever take it seriously.
That’s how it works in history. Actual comedy is too alive to last long. Whereas tragedy is like a black onyx gravestone. Tragedy is the jagged black rock on which comedy runs aground and destroys itself.
Love is like a giant monster which can’t be seen all at once from any angle. It’s covered with plates of flesh which flicker away and disappear at random, revealing strange, grotesque and beautiful organs buried deep within it. And you’re a naturalist gazing up in wonder at this alien creature — full of awe, yet stung by the knowledge that you’ll never even begin to understand it, and that underlying all this goodness, something is deeply imperfect and terribly wrong, these wounds should not exist but to heal them is beyond your power.
Your life is like a perfect circle. Even if it hurts sometimes.
My life is like a heap of shattered pieces. Even if I feel alright. Even if I never truly suffer. The shards are so fine and so sharp. I can’t even touch one of them without hurting myself, without drawing blood.
It’s a terrible awkward mixture. I’m so weak. Nobody can even hear me, it’s like my soul is a huge catacombs and I’m lost within it. Like those French kids who got lost after a night of drinking and ultimately perished.
If we had to depict it allegorically. It’s like there were innumerable little monsters swarming all around the world, and they were banished by some magic spell… but this only led them to regroup in some lonely place and coalesce into a single mass of evil which was far worse than the sum of its parts.
Fascinated by venetian masks, in particular by the black moretta, smaller than the face, only worn by women, held in place by the teeth! So also called the muto.
“This playfulness with the moretta mask was not a momentary extravaganza, but a part of daily life for more than half the year. That is, in the period when the use of Venetian masks was permissible in daily life.”
They wore masks for more than half the year! This is in old Europe! How strange, baroque, and fascinating.
Apparently “Venice” doesn’t really mean “come here,” as fascinating as that would have been.
Note: this was in reference to my friend, who had told me that it comes from a word in old Latin meaning “come here.” The full story was that as the Western Roman Empire fell, people fled to Venice as a kind of enclave for the patricians. “Venice” was a kind of invitation, bidding anyone who heard it to come to the swamps, where it was safe… and struck by the charm of the story and because Venir means “to return” or something in Spanish, I bought it. I’m very sad that it isn’t true, that it’s just something boring and normal.
I guess I expect to understand life as easily as I understand or think I understand some other things.
Dream explanation from within a dream:
There are these mechanisms in the mind, and you have to put things in them at the right moment, so that when the mechanisms get going, the things are crushed, and that’s where dreams come from.
If we look at our own wounds we will feel grief, and they will grow deeper. But if we look at Christ’s wounds we will experience joy, and our own wounds will heal.
