infinite return

hello. i'm back. the silence has been deafening, i'm sure, but inspiration obeys no man's beckoning, least of all mine. especially when pieces of myself have broken free and are wandering this worn world. it is hard to write with holes in your soul.

tonight, i again borrow an idea from milan, simply because it is an idea that i have been turning round and round in the windmills of my mind until i think it may, finally, have unwound itself like a tight spool of thread unravelling.

the idea of infinite return is one that a certain philosopher muses over, and one that milan borrows.

the idea is essentially this. every event, every occurrence in history has weight (again this theme of weight) simply and only because it happens once. if world war two were to happen again and again, it would lose its horror. if the french revolution were to incessantly recur, year in year out, it would no long have any weight. who could revere robespierre if he persisted in beheading people for all eternity? the latter example is one i struggled with. how could an event so large, so important, with such consequences fail to be important? even if repeated? how could the loss of life in world war two fail to matter if it persisted in occurring again and again and again? and so i took it in smaller chunks.

why do we make such a fuss of the end of the week? can you explain that to me? because the end of the week will come again. 52 weeks in a year, on average about 70 years in a lifetime...so why the fuss? it happens again and again and again.
i suppose, if it were to be The Last Week, much like, The Last Supper, then yes, the fuss would be justified, but we are people rushing about in our scrambled lives, and not many of us stop to think that this could very well be the last week and therefore it is actually valuable. but why is it valuable? why is time money? because of the way we experience time. the perceptions and experiences packed like sardines into every second. its not the actual minutes that matter, it's what happens in those minutes. but if those experiences are repeated again and again, well, how valuable would they be? if you ate the same chocolate cake every day, you'd get sick of it. if you saw the same sunrise (cliched, i know) every single day, it would cease to take your breath away.

so, by looking at the smaller things, i think i now understand how an event as 'big' as the french revolution would cease to be so if it recurred every year in history. it would become old news, no one would care. and thus the idea of infinite return comes into play. infinite return robs an event, an experience, of its weight. it makes it light, ephemeral, meaningless. it is because something happens once, and only once, that it is heavy, has meaning. but does this mean i now equate the idea of burdens, or heaviness, with value? i don't know.

a poem for those missed

tears have been flooding from my soul;
a sweet poignant spring rain
that drowns my universe
unstoppable

a sweet release
a beautiful outpouring
of melodic melancholy;
of grief

i miss you

spark-less

i remain uninspired. as much as i wish for a bolt of lightning to brilliantly illuminate my life, and to jumpstart my soul (or brain), the lightning persists in its absence and i remain a lost and lone traveller sitting in my corner drawing angel after angel in the dark, blinded by the repetition of my ever continuing circle of mundane actions.

i long for a vacuum in which to be allowed to simply rattle about in my cluttered head, to unpick the threaded knots and to decide what i actually think. i have a desire to KNOW everything and yet i lack the will to learn. The Unbearable Lightness sits unfinished alongside countless other half-read and discarded books despite the fact the i yearn to read each and every page of each and every book in the growing pile next to my bed.

all i want right now is to quit my job, to retreat into my room and to hibernate until my mind can catch up with me. the life of a hermit beckons with an intensity unlike any other. although i must admit that once james has left, i will feel bereaved and abandoned; of this i am entirely certain.

i suppose i must simply plod along and have faith that the lightning will strike. please please please may it strike.

She bounces
frolics.
She
dances
on the axis
of a world spun too fast
upside-down.
Symmetry a b a n doned
crashes and BANGS
into colours iridescent
topsyturvybright
that sing like birds
in gilded gold cages sing.
She is
the hiss
of bacon fried
in a too-hot pan,
roars like rain
drumming droplets
on a red tin roof,
rises like heat from tar
on a still stifling summer’s night.
She is
a jazz tune
waltzing – onetwothree – down a jetty,
a girl soaring on a swing.
J O Y.


Vertigo

I find it fitting to start my first blog with Milan Kundera and a little Nietsche.

'Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.'-Milan Kundera, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'

'When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.' -Friedrich Nietzsche

I have been pondering these quotations recently largely because of their growing relevance, the way they speak to me. I decided long ago to live my life in such a way that i would never rely or depend too heavily on anyone...never have burdens, in other words, to be as light as a feather. and i thought that it would be easier than living with burdens and connections. well, as far as i was concerned, living the opposite way didn't work, and though loyal i have this overwhelming desire to be free and thus retreat rapidly from any potentially claustrophobic situation. as you can imagine, it can be rather damaging to relationships. However, recently there has been a beckoning from below to fall from my perch.

In the opening pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera ponders the complexity of the two extremes, living a burdened life, or living a light, carefree one, and he questions the notion that lightness would be truly be best, for surely a life without any burden becomes meaningless, and in this emptiness, unbearable.

I, for one, have always had problems with strong emotions. i have a tendency to bottle them up and then to release them in one explosive BANG. Intimacy, and the trust that necessarily comes with it, has always been an issue. As soon as the chances of intimacy become too great, i pick up and ship off.

However, even birds need to come to the ground sometimes, and it was only a matter of time before i would look into the abyss below and feel the desire to fall fall fall into it - vertigo (see Kundera's quote above). And i have, and that dark billowing darkness is beckoning to me. And the more i stare at it, the more it stares at me and so we are locked in a fierce battle of wills and forces, or to be precise, i am locked in a fierce battle of wills...to fall or not to fall. To jump or not to jump. even more existentially, to be or not to be.