perkaraperkara

sometimes i see no point in writing anymore. the fact that i have to start working tomorrow horrifies me. today i am here sitting eating yesterday’s bought banana where i think i bumped into one of those ahmad deedat’s disciples, having no thought of the present yet where my mind blank where the desire to sleep overrides the desire to sleep, like everyone else you meet, on airport floors, on chairs in sleeping bags waiting for the next morning flight while you hide yourself in some obscure corner and start congregating about ayats and the present, three in malaysia, one in new zealand, one australia another korea, all out of place and worn out for the week. a syllable isn’t heard, except from the loudest of them all, who speaks of integrity honesty and cars colliding and money burned and belts churning. so in the next five hours i have to board two flights back home. the bus first, where i have to haul the disconnected contents of my life and dump it into the comfort of my home, and finally return to the womb.

the mind is no longer in the state of aggravation. either dumbed down atrophied distracted sealed off, i grieve.

so we erase every single conversation we had for these past few weeks, leaving not a single trace, as if to permanently relinquish everything, and start anew as if nothing ever happened, this pretense built upon refrain and disdain. but the subject remains deeply imbued. it creeps and creeps and crawls over every word,  lingers in each moment of silence, so it speaks still without being spoken of, until finally it becomes unbearable to forego and let go.

what then?

there is nothing important to say anyway, aspirations wane when the belly grumbles with pain. the mother calls for her return, the brother laments of her absence, the sister already bored with life proceeds to shelf, at last. and we keep on moving from one room to another, lifting books and pages after torrents of headaches that seized us for days without, our minds bodies spent and tired from sitting in cars gazing at waters and waterfalls and beaches and rivers and creeks, watching the after-commotion of the man who tried to jump from the lighthouse, spraining his neck strapped and sent to the hospital all accompanied by orange balloons and sirens. so you sit enjoying the breeze eavesdropping people’s sparse conversation and they you as you speak of the cosmos and big bang and space and the ever absurd theories and assumption of cosmology. you have impeccable english, they say, but deep down you know all is just a front to see how loud people can cackle and maintain a steady stream of words. a pause is required, a day of sobriety, of pure unadulterated rest, after endless sleepless days and nights just roaming around exploring the different bodies of the world, exhausting every little detail, naming and marking each territory on maps, losing ourselves in the way, only to gain insight and new resolutions in the end. so we learn. we learn not to turn into different paths where we shall be tolled for our mistakes, or whenever we already have, to head back and start again, open again our books and pinpoint our exact goal.

the twentieth email from you.
has almost added up to 8000 words.
you could’ve written a third of a book.

because i am too lazy to study equations at this particular moment, i’m googling cheap affordable fun stuff to do during the break.

• Walk around Glebe/Newtown/Surry Hills and visit all the bookshops (without buying any, of course). Ampersand, Gleebooks, Gouldbooks, De Capo, Elizabeth.
• Bring the bicycle to Sydney and cycle at Manly beach (also lepak at the Sydney Harbour National Park).
• Carrington Falls, Fitzroy, Saddleback Mountain, Jervis Bay. – with the girls. 
• Cycle further than Bulli this time (north). and also Lake Illawara (south) 
• Stanwell Park, or Waterfall-Helensburgh.
• this (how ambitious)  close enough

the choice of words, between want and need.

i don’t know whether i should just empty you entirely and begin shedding every bit of our conversation and shove them all into the wastebasket. because truthfully this is all beginning to take a toll on me, slowly i am disintegrate into nothing and becoming deathlike in each my movement. yesterday i call it hunger but now i realize it is only the clamor of the heart towards something i am unable to find in you. or the fact you are unfounded yourself. of course you might read this and think of the multitudes of reasons behind my endless permutation of words that mean nothing; you try to put my face and my words side by side yet fail to coalesce them together.

sometimes i think of you and how utterly bounded i am, destined (or rather deliberately torturing myself) to carry each thought of you in my head at every single despondent moment i seem to encounter, those dark days inside the room, wrapping myself with my blanket, where i spend hours in isolation in entrapment, not knowing what to do, no, not wanting to do anything, although i must get up and face the terrible trials and tribulations of the world . this unable-to-get-up-feeling where i must, each, every day, remind myself how grateful i am to be alive even though i just wish i could do away with everything and stopped caring about anything, anyone. i want to be unearthly. i only want the singular, the most particular single singular, the singularity, the ever pervading one, to merge and submerge where i can sing praises and cry laments to. but then you came in and have me by the heart. you who dragged me back down, to the ground to where i would sink and lie in filth and dirt, cutting off everything leave me all bent and distorted in different contortions.

as you charade your blood at the parade
alive at being a lifeless being
a pirate a ghoul or a silhouette of bones
dancing to heads will roll
i sit at my home and witness
you proclaiming your throne
as the (t)horns on your head
shoot through vertically dead

from Jacob’s Room. I don’t have time to read any books now. 😦
*
The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as she had stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversion towards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics; and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashioned life thus.

Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee.

After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.

But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding, apologizing perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, “It’s none of my fault,” straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within its cap, then he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. The problem is insoluble. “

*

“He left everything just as it was,” Bonamy marvelled. “Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?” he mused, standing in the middle of Jacob’s room.

The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorways a rose or a ram’s skull is carved in the wood. Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction.

Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.

“That seems to be paid,” he said.

There were Sandra’s letters.

Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.

Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure….

Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.

Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford’s van swung down the street. The omnibuses were locked together at Mudie’s corner. Engines throbbed, and carters, jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves.

“Jacob! Jacob!” cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again.

“Such confusion everywhere!” exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door.

Bonamy turned away from the window.

“What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”

She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.

*

Let us consider letters–how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark–for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner’s at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated–speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

Life would split asunder without them. “Come to tea, come to dinner, what’s the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers….” These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet … when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us–drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. “Try to penetrate,” for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps–who knows?–we might talk by the way.

*
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

*
Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty-two. She is shabby. She crosses the road and looks at the daffodils and the red tulips in the florist’s window. She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. She walks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, and now to notice nothing.