Etymology (Repetition/Mysticism/Hysteria/Tension)
The tension is drawn. A rope loops around the chest, once, once again. The body trembles.
Tossing and turning again. How such situations occur I'll never know, but they keep on repeating themselves. When the mind quits, there is always something else. A word.
At each and of the rope there is a slight pull. The naked skin finds momentary pleasure as the rope scratches at it.
You tear a word apart and you find new meanings through Greek, Latin, Roman, French origins. You see their journey, their history unfold. That is a general 'you' that is a 'one'. You break a word into pieces and you find your own interpretation. Now it is you that I am addressing. A history.
A repetition. A pattern. A something on the tip of your tongue that will never pass the lips.
The scratches start to pinch. The breath that leaves the body has become more difficult to find.
It is not the rope causing this difficulty. It is panic. Now the body begins to sway.
The word sits on your tongue and you begin to kick out like an addict. The sweat down your back is thick thick thick. Another kick. Turn. Breathe. History and the repetition of it caused a momentary attack. Not everyone is a predator. I am not a predator. Yet the heart beats like it has ran as prey. It is not adrenaline, it is not blood. It beats vomit. And it is hot. And it burns.
The pinch is on fire now. It glows redness. Soreness. The earth beneath the feet is shaking with tension. As the rope tightens the legs become unstable, then they go, unable to balance on the unsteady ground. The body slumps, supported only by the rope. And it hurts.
Why the repetition has occurred is unknown. It slips out occasionally, the guard is down, honesty is up.
There is an explosion, like an emotional time bomb. It releases an anthrax of vocabulary which attacks it's audience and poisons their response. Their infected response then becomes another form of the repetition. That was when it happened again.
Now is when the breath really starts to struggle. The heart pounds irregularly, but that is panic associated with, but not directly caused by, the rope. The body twists but the rope ceases not. The fire breaks the skin.
Anxiety is perhaps to blame for the restlessness. For the forced attempt at sleep.
Once again it seems sleep is a fortress from reality. Then it is the turn of the subconscious to bite. Dreams are nightmares, and nightmares, in one form or another, are of the repetition.
A rib breaks and the body turns blind. A fuzz of warmth caresses the retina. "You don't need to see anymore," it whispers. The warmth travels down the body and tingles at it the arms.
It is now only the head that aches. All that is heard is a slow, irregular, heart beat. And it kicks.
There is not much more that can be done. Waking up bruised and ill is another repetition. The thoughts will not be leaving you today. It seems in a permanent residency. The world is still shaking. The heart is still swollen with sick. Distraction is necessary and is sought. Though the word still sits on the tip of your tongue, you are distracted, and the biggest challenge is making sure that you do not accidentally spit it out. Then there are those words that help to keep it concealed, the ones that hide it's true meaning, those uttered with delight, as a brief respite, in repetition. But the world still trembles. The heart remains swollen, the legs still kick, and sweat still lines your back.
The hands at either end of the rope rest. Gentlemen stand at either end. One marked lust, one marked desire, another marked despair, and the last marked time. No one has won this tug-a-war, but the still and contorted body in the center proves that something has been lost.
It remains in a painful stasis, until the rope once again becomes taut.
Reading Crisis
What to do with all this time. How to fill it. How to remain distracted.
There is an impossibility in remaining focused due to the amount to focus on.
All these distractions, but what is there to distract from distraction.
That would be distractions close cousin, procrastination.
How to prioritise:
Earn money so you can survive here
Do not let earning money interfere with studying - the reason for being here
Do not study so hard that you forget to live and experience - inform all you think and work on
Do not experience and live so much that you forget to study/skip earning money
Have fun but don't get too carried away, so that you spend all your money on living, experience and intoxication... you need that money to live here
"This is such a fantastic city," Oh really? I haven't had the chance to look around yet. I only leave the east to go to work or school.
However very complicated everything is somehow fitting together. There is a definite balance starting to occur. This photo illustrates my biggest problem. Between reading what I want to read for fun and what I want to read for work. The lines between fun and work keep blurring, but I can't help feeling sorry for everything that keeps getting placed on the bottom of the pile (books and otherwise) acknowledged, but never quite getting round to. The list is inevitably growing. Adrian Rifkin handed us a reading list and told us not to worry about reading everything on there right away. Told us the pressing matters, a passage from Homer's Iliad, a chpter from Nietzsche's Human All too Human, and Roland Barhte's A Lovers Discourse (utter beauty). Everything else is for us to read between now and 2050. That advise will roll over....
Experience everything, miss no opportunity.
There is an impossibility in remaining focused due to the amount to focus on.
All these distractions, but what is there to distract from distraction.
That would be distractions close cousin, procrastination.
How to prioritise:
Earn money so you can survive here
Do not let earning money interfere with studying - the reason for being here
Do not study so hard that you forget to live and experience - inform all you think and work on
Do not experience and live so much that you forget to study/skip earning money
Have fun but don't get too carried away, so that you spend all your money on living, experience and intoxication... you need that money to live here
"This is such a fantastic city," Oh really? I haven't had the chance to look around yet. I only leave the east to go to work or school.
However very complicated everything is somehow fitting together. There is a definite balance starting to occur. This photo illustrates my biggest problem. Between reading what I want to read for fun and what I want to read for work. The lines between fun and work keep blurring, but I can't help feeling sorry for everything that keeps getting placed on the bottom of the pile (books and otherwise) acknowledged, but never quite getting round to. The list is inevitably growing. Adrian Rifkin handed us a reading list and told us not to worry about reading everything on there right away. Told us the pressing matters, a passage from Homer's Iliad, a chpter from Nietzsche's Human All too Human, and Roland Barhte's A Lovers Discourse (utter beauty). Everything else is for us to read between now and 2050. That advise will roll over....
Experience everything, miss no opportunity.
The Most Livingest Disaster
I was drying my hair one day oblivious to the noise outside. Typically the noise outside was not actually noise like here in London, the occasional airplane flying overhead, the odd car engine, some kids walking by, you could sometimes even hear a push bike passing. Attuned to small town noises, you could imagine my shock when I switch off my hair dryer to the sound of an air-raid siren.
Duck and cover was my first thought. I had seen those public information videos once before in the Imperial War Museum. You know the ones, the ones that are so out dated, the ones where you and your family are advised to live under the dining room table for a few months until the whole nuclear thing 'blows' over. Such preperatory videos and procedures generally make me feel pretty excited towards the prospect of danger. I then tend to be quite dissappointed when nothing even vaguely exciting happens. I remember one winter, as a kid, my mum tucked me up in bed extra tight with some fluffy soft toys and told me that tonight was going to be the coldest on record for fifty years and we had to stay super warm.
I closed my eyes in excitement only to open them the next day in complete disappointment. I didn't feel one bit cold. Not at all (good parenting in retrospect). When I got my fire training at the Odeon a few years back, I took the whole thing very seriously and got very excited about the responsability I would have in a fire situation. I was only there five months and the fire alarms went into first stage, once (there were three stages in total). At first stage you get to push a button in the auditoriums so that the noise doesn't distract the customers ('guests') from their film, and the staff ('cast') get themselves prepared for some evacuating. Nothing happened, the alarms remained in first stage for about twenty minutes. It was a bit like being stuck at a traffic light that is red for so long that the car battery dies as it switches to amber. No one got evacuated. I was bitterly disappointed.
The siren is still buzzing (imagine).
As if people were ever so brain washed to believe that a few splinters will stop your world from ending. I look momentarily in complete perplextion at the small gap under the dressing table. Then inhale. This cannot be it. Nuclear war is a complete paradox of defense. Everyone knows that now. Having nuclear weapons is exactly the same as not having nuclear weapons as nobody actually has the balls to fire.
Complete annihilation. Nash equilibrium. Absolute paranoia. Psychological warfare. To quote wikipedia (we all do it) "tense but stable peace". And by now, 2010, we are all much more at ease with this tense but stable peace. We all know that no one is crazy enough to press that button labeled "complete and utter bloody destruction of everything but cockroaches". So why am I still able to hear an air-raid siren? It can't be. I would have heard something on tv, or an ad would have popped up on facebook or gmail proclaiming "nuclear attack imminent" - such is the information rich society we live in. Surely in this day and age we would not have to rely on something so archaic, something that I just about recognise as an air-raid siren. I slowly and thoughtfully place down my hair dryer. Look to myself in the mirror before me. Ok, so what if this is nuclear war?
The quickest war that will ever be fought. What if this is the end? The end of humanity. What a way to go. Hey, I won't do it. I will not duck under the dressing table. I will leave this world head held high. Yes the end of humanity. Finally, a vaccine. Immunisation for the planet against this human disease that has infected it's surface. It will take time but this planet will restore itself. It was here millions of years before us and it WILL remain millions of years beyond our extinction. The siren has stopped. This is it, finality, the end, see ya. I close my eyes, tilt my head backwards, hold my arms wide, ready to embrace the apocylpse. I remain like that for about five minutes before I my left eye opens, my wrist twists, and I am able to peek at the time displayed on my watch. Shit, best leave I'm going to be late for work.
I never discovered what that siren was for.
When your a kid, the greatest feeling in the world is fear. I guess that why public information adverts are so great. These are a bit before my time...
Why? I suppose it's just easier to control a terrified nation than it is to look after a chill nation.
Duck and cover was my first thought. I had seen those public information videos once before in the Imperial War Museum. You know the ones, the ones that are so out dated, the ones where you and your family are advised to live under the dining room table for a few months until the whole nuclear thing 'blows' over. Such preperatory videos and procedures generally make me feel pretty excited towards the prospect of danger. I then tend to be quite dissappointed when nothing even vaguely exciting happens. I remember one winter, as a kid, my mum tucked me up in bed extra tight with some fluffy soft toys and told me that tonight was going to be the coldest on record for fifty years and we had to stay super warm.
I closed my eyes in excitement only to open them the next day in complete disappointment. I didn't feel one bit cold. Not at all (good parenting in retrospect). When I got my fire training at the Odeon a few years back, I took the whole thing very seriously and got very excited about the responsability I would have in a fire situation. I was only there five months and the fire alarms went into first stage, once (there were three stages in total). At first stage you get to push a button in the auditoriums so that the noise doesn't distract the customers ('guests') from their film, and the staff ('cast') get themselves prepared for some evacuating. Nothing happened, the alarms remained in first stage for about twenty minutes. It was a bit like being stuck at a traffic light that is red for so long that the car battery dies as it switches to amber. No one got evacuated. I was bitterly disappointed.
The siren is still buzzing (imagine).
As if people were ever so brain washed to believe that a few splinters will stop your world from ending. I look momentarily in complete perplextion at the small gap under the dressing table. Then inhale. This cannot be it. Nuclear war is a complete paradox of defense. Everyone knows that now. Having nuclear weapons is exactly the same as not having nuclear weapons as nobody actually has the balls to fire.
Complete annihilation. Nash equilibrium. Absolute paranoia. Psychological warfare. To quote wikipedia (we all do it) "tense but stable peace". And by now, 2010, we are all much more at ease with this tense but stable peace. We all know that no one is crazy enough to press that button labeled "complete and utter bloody destruction of everything but cockroaches". So why am I still able to hear an air-raid siren? It can't be. I would have heard something on tv, or an ad would have popped up on facebook or gmail proclaiming "nuclear attack imminent" - such is the information rich society we live in. Surely in this day and age we would not have to rely on something so archaic, something that I just about recognise as an air-raid siren. I slowly and thoughtfully place down my hair dryer. Look to myself in the mirror before me. Ok, so what if this is nuclear war?
The quickest war that will ever be fought. What if this is the end? The end of humanity. What a way to go. Hey, I won't do it. I will not duck under the dressing table. I will leave this world head held high. Yes the end of humanity. Finally, a vaccine. Immunisation for the planet against this human disease that has infected it's surface. It will take time but this planet will restore itself. It was here millions of years before us and it WILL remain millions of years beyond our extinction. The siren has stopped. This is it, finality, the end, see ya. I close my eyes, tilt my head backwards, hold my arms wide, ready to embrace the apocylpse. I remain like that for about five minutes before I my left eye opens, my wrist twists, and I am able to peek at the time displayed on my watch. Shit, best leave I'm going to be late for work.
I never discovered what that siren was for.
When your a kid, the greatest feeling in the world is fear. I guess that why public information adverts are so great. These are a bit before my time...
Why? I suppose it's just easier to control a terrified nation than it is to look after a chill nation.
I'll stop posting about this next week...
When usual wordy service will be resumed....
In the meantime....
HUMOR ME....
http://silentage.bandcamp.com/
In the meantime....
HUMOR ME....
http://silentage.bandcamp.com/
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