psyche

This is the only blog post yet to be mostly copied up from hand-written notes I made while in Venice - so beware! (…)

This is the first time I’ve hand-written something hand-written non-school-related since I wanted to be a writer (excluding birthday cards).

Now I feel like I should properly re-read all the Harry Potter books. They are actually good. Combined with my idealised notion of J K Rowling writing in some quiet cafe (the feeling of which is extended by her well-designed Lightmaker website) the Harry Potter series makes me want to sit at my desk hugging a box set and cry. However, like everyone else, I will reduce this feeling to the sentence “The books are really good” or something, which, in various forms, recurs throughout all descriptions of things too emotionally powerful (for some people) to be expressed properly without seeming demented.

Although the post-modern philosopher in me balks at the idea of millions of people buying merchandise, books and film tickets that are all items with little use (well, books can stop bullets) and attempts to class the entire Potter phenomenon as a disgusting facet of modern consumerism and the commercialisation of “feelings”, some more sentimental part of me is glad that Potter is ubiquitous enough not to be forgotten. As you may know, I fear forgetting about things - usually fleeting feelings - and I think that my recent phase of writing things down is a behavioural manifestation of this. While not a literary type, and having turned my back on English despite it being interesting, I almost regret relinquishing the opportunity to learn more about the way in which people create fiction. I wasn’t so bad it it but my heart wasn’t it int. On a career front, I feel like I want to do something important and helpful - or is that just some artificial conscience speaking? I don’t know. I also want to fence and cook. Nice.

The Harry Potter games on the Game Boy Color were interesting. They also possessed the epic, emotional feeling - it’s in the same vein as nostalgia, I think - that impressed me as an element of the books. They also had some nice music. Unfortunately, they were cut short just after the completion of the second one and the less RPG-like GBA and now DS versions dominated quickly. Economics.

Venice is nice but I hate family holidays and being a tourist. Luckily, the Venetian display an admirable contempt for tourists. They have a dialect but, being in the north, it is similar to normal Italian (one of the few things my unobservant mind has noticed is them saying “ci” for “si” [as in "yes"]).

Harry Potter is tempting because of the fallibility of death it keeps dangling like bait. I could sit here smiling sadly, believing that I will have an eternity to meet people or think things that I did not have time for in life. It is extremely tempting. However, I think I will close this Potter book and shelve the Bloomsbury-bound book one last time and confine JKR to the shelf for now and evermore. Although infinity is reassuring when presented through religion, I find the closure of finiteness (finity?), while much less emotionally satisfying (no tightness in my chest or tears in my eyes), more acerbic but yet more welcome.

The power of people’s emotional response to fantasy and depiction of everlasting life (the Sundering Seas in LotR, tangible “memories” and other manifestations of people in Potter, heaven in religions) is just escapism but it fuels the segment of modern consumer culture dedicated to feel-good fiction.

I don’t know whether I should be praising or ranting at JKR - she created a comfort world that makes me sad. It makes people want to believe it while films like the Matrix scupper their own premise by simply existing as works of fiction (although now I tend to think of the Matrix as a metaphor for consumerism as opposed to a literal depiction of an VR-enslaved future humanity).

I think all the desserts I’ve had here have been alcoholic. My head feels awful.

My life feels quite purposeless but I do feel like I want to prepare for a war that will never happen or an important individual task that will never come. All these stories of heroes have made me acknowledge this as some latent inner desire of mine. I am meaningless. Fencing, video games, academia, chess - anything competitive t hat I am drawn to is a dilution of my Fight Club-esque dissatisfaction with modern consumerism and fascism - or what Mussolini (I wish he were still here, the water taxi’s always fucking late) would call corporatism.

As some video game - Metroid Fusion, I believe - once told me, our experiences delimit our consciousness. This is so true. Especially in the case of seasickness. I don’t get seasick and so I can barely bring myself to believe it exists. It would take a lot of evidence or actually getting the propensity to puke on board sea vessels myself to change my view, although by common sense default I always appear to believe in it.

Why don’t wizards study biology? Healers, surely? The sound of the sea here in Venice reminds me of starting out Myst. The food is good. The canals smell.

There’s a busker in Venice (we’re on the Lido) who plays every evening outside the open restaurants down the main road. He sings international things (”Let it Be”, “La Bamba”, “Baila Morena” [lol]).

It’s so painful to believe that dead people are gone forever. I like it. Are there American wizards?

I seem to read books and such very quickly but I don’t necessarily “speedread” as such - although I sometimes skip paragraphs that seem grossly irrelevant, it is easy for people, myself included, to underestimate the thoroughness of my comprehension of written texts. Take, for instance, the copy of “Guitarist” I’m reading. I feel dissatisfied, like I have read it too quickly out upon re-reading, everything feels uncomfortably familiar and stale because I have in fact read most of it. I find the same thing with moist books I read. This is highly annoying.

I have this recurring thing where I wake up believing I am holding something and my hand is closed and I feel so bad when there’s nothing there. Every time, I genuinely believe I have acquired something - but I haven’t. It makes me extremely upset.

I really, really need to start fencing again. There is a picture of an ancestor of the sciabola (sabre), taken in the Venice Naval Museum. Note my greatness. (link soon)

Today (this is post-Venice now) I went to my grandma’s old house with my uncle to pick up some of his guitars (he’s my dad’s brother and thus the grandma in question’s other son). He has an old Telecaster that I like the sound of, a nice Yamaha 12-string (the top three pairs of strings are tuned in unison and the bottom three in octaves, standard tuning) and an Ovation acoustic. I’ll probably put the strings we picked up for the busker in Venice on the Ovation if I can be bothered.

Pax

I have realised something else. I want this melancholia. I want my eyes to hurt from staring at the computer and my brain to shrink from dehydration as I stay up until my my shrill alarm goes off to signal the start of the next day. I do not want to smile and talk to people; I would rather they understood and despised me or chose their cosmetics and laughed at my face or something.

HA HA HA. Computer science. I will scrape the web clean. Trust me!

Pax

Yes, I have an annoying pain in my head after watching Harry Potter (and the Order of the Phoenix, for the record) and then playing on the Wii with Elliot, Vivan and alternate siblings for many, many hours yesterday. Elliot also complains of brain pain having had multiple injections. I thought Harry Potter was okay. I didn’t like it but that doesn’t mean it’s not good, right? I’m just pissed off that all films can’t be like The Matrix! Vivan didn’t seem to understand why I preferred it over V for Vendetta which is, incidentally, also one of my favourites. I think the reason is that The Matrix is full of little details and ironies. The way Neo is “plugged in” to his headphones and sleeping and is later in a small cubicle representing the pods and works for a software company and the way Smith tells him that one of his lives has a future without specifying which one and it turns out to be the other life and all the stuff that people have found - it’s just a much more interesting and well thought-out experience, even if there are goofs and stuff. Its metaphorical functions became stretched with the sequels so I can’t properly defend them. For some reason Psyche doesn’t render at all in Internet Explorer - there must be something wrong with my CSS. My life seems to be full of extremes. What I know will either mean a lot or nothing. I don’t want it to mean nothing! I DON’T!

Pax

I don’t know what to do. I am immersed in advertising and propaganda. I don’t know who I am. Everyone around me seems the same. There is something slightly askew. It is grating. I see shadows moving around my room but there is nothing to cast them; I leave my door open but when I look it is closed. I need help!

Pax

That feeling is recurring more frequently now. The feeling that the entire world has to be fought. For most of my life I’ve generally believed that there are more good or at least neutral people than there are “bad” people but there are moments - for example, while witnessing acts of police brutality or watching a news report which is not-so-subtly relaying the cheery announcement that the machine is slightly more fascist than it was yesterday. I feel like I am so saturated with the false connotation of “good” and “government” that I might as well be a complete idiot.

There won’t really be anyone to turn to in the end. In the long term, things can only get worse; it is the way of the world! I’d better shape up and find a nuke bunker or a batcave or something. I am not going to think “That’d be paranoid” and end up dead in however many years.

Pax

Terminal.app, how I’ve missed you. UNIX commands, how I’ve missed you too.

Pax

Source

Pax

I can’t guarantee you’ll have any idea what I’m talking about but I’ll still try. Basically, a recurring thing I’ve noticed in my life is that of the bathroom mirror. It’s always there. My face hurts - something about my diet maybe. It is pockmarked and doesn’t heal well and while the inside of my head becomes numb, my face is stung by the air that surrounds it. Sorry, random tangent. Basically, whenever I am sick or have a headache or am pulling an all-nighter, I tend to repeatedly visit the bathroom to splash cold water into my face and ask myself who I am. Also, when I’m in hospital or at the doctor or the dentist I’m there cringing with pain or embarrassment or horror and the walls are white and sterile and everything is plastic and disposable except the mirror and I stare at it.

I look into my own eyes and I know that whatever strange changes happen to me, and if later later my teeth are white and my nose is plastic and my hair is a different colour and similarly are my eyes tinted by lenses sitting on them I will still see into myself that way as my knuckles whiten around whatever sink there is and my brain cries out.

Failure - it’s like an old friend.

Pax

I had my Guitar-X assessment and masked my lack of talent sufficiently to secure a place on the Intermediate 1 part-time course. Hopefully I will actually understand things after this. My instructor guy, whose name I didn’t catch because I’m bad at asking questions, while unwilling to make eye contact, knew a whole load of awesome stuff and could play really, really well. Inspiring (well, not enough to make me stop being so lazy but yeah) stuff.

Pax

It’s easy to experience something brilliant and want secretly to dedicate your life to it. I’ve phased through a lot of things. However, I’ve realised that to take on the world, real or fake, I’m going to have to call upon everything I am and ever was!

I am every Wikipedia article I’ve ever read, every film I’ve seen and every obscure book I’ve tried to digest. I’m every corny TV show that has flashed before me and every piece of profound poetry that has lain before me. I haven’t forgotten. I am every point I’ve ever lost, grinding my teeth and sweating as people lunge into my unprepared torso, and every checkmate - and there have been many - I have grudgingly accepted. Every wrong note I’ve played in front of so many people, every extra session I stayed for at the gym! Every volley I muffed with my unlucky tennis coach, every computer I’ve crashed, every person who’s laughed at me and every person I’ve laughed at. Every plant I watered, pair of eyes I looked into, regret I’ve had, experiment I’ve botched.

I am surprisingly inadequate as a middle-class person but feel enriched in some way. Everything I have witnessed - mistakes and all - I carry forth into the world. When whatever I have to do makes itself known, … boy will I do it!

Pax