"Oh, let the rain fall down and wash this world away..."

"It begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing."
-William Faulkner, "As I Lay Dying" (Chatto and Windus, 1970), p72

This quote is exceptionally expressive and reeks of the essence of life.

I think that after a prolonged spell of being sick it really takes a lot of motivation to be as pro-active as one once was. Today I woke just after ten o'clock and drank some fresh coffee, had a cigarette and then watched a film with my friend & flatmate, all the while occasionally reading this wonderful novel by Faulkner.

The rain started almost an hour ago and my intention to clean the flat to the most minute detail has dissolved with the rainfall. Now I am sitting on a pile of blankets and pillows with stacks of literature and unattended notebooks and journals around me wondering just how to gather myself up and roll myself towards a satisfying conclusion to the day.

I love reading Faulkner and there is a wonderful description of his style on the reverse of a collected works I own:

"If you imagine Hucklberry Finn living in the House of Usher and telling stories while the walls crumble about him, that will give you the double quality of Faulkner's work at its best."
- Malcolm Cowley

This may be the most personal update I have made on this journal so far; I believe it is because I've recognised something, that perhaps a man only loses his life without expressing his thinking. Maybe in writing a man does not die, but rather offers himself into eternity, and the universe around him. It's not that I am phased or put out by death; I just think it can be overcome.

I am listening to The Freewheelin' by Bob Dylan. This has to be the record closest to my heart; even the frontispiece has a warm, free-spirited manner about it. With close reference to Woodie Guthrie and a strange mixture of blues and folk music, and Dylan's own sentimental view of humanity... it's just the epitomy of a rainy day afternoon album. It recalls to me a moment several months ago last year when I was down in Dorset, England at the End of the Road festival... It reminds me of soft, sweet memories.

That was a time in my life I would rather prolong, would like to never forget. I am so content with the stuttering and unpredictable nature of life. The frustrations and regrets dissolve if you let them, and the bliss and the sweetness remain; saccharine, but not too saccharine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Delirium and Drift

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”  - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star It is so unnatural to even return here, after so much. One might question returning to an old haunt, where everything has been so long dead, but there is a debt which cannot be forfeited, a collapsing star back then that went unnoticed. These past years have passed by in such an unclear manner that I may even have forgotten that I was living, merely existing in this loose fabric of time, stuttering out the minor parts of a much longer story. Ever since I can remember it was this way; losing footing, losing my way because of some underlying suffering that I could never resolve. It expressed itself uncannily, through a high bound empathy with all suffering, it brought me down, it dictated the terms of a reality that was incompatible with actual reality. Two worlds; that of the impossible dream and the actual realities where emotional resilience is not so commonplace. So let me be v...
Read more about it »

Memory

An exquisite memory, elegant in how even it remembers its tangents, its dreams upon waking. Just as in literature there are not only words on the page but words between words, tiny effervescences and ruptures as an unlikely pairing signifies deeper inwards. Foster Wallace on the novelist Marcel Proust: "Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets." - Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley , David Foster Wallace This caught my eye, n...
Read more about it »

"Are All Humans Hedonists?"

Before I settle into something different, read some Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and hope from the same or similar experience as when I read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, there's a question to be answered which sent me to sleep the other night with the question: Why speak? I had written elusively on this epiphany the other night whilst watching Oldboy, a film about repressed desire, desire repressed from the outside, through hypnosis and through diminishing the reality of the prisoner, this constant repetition of two dimensional television avatars suggesting escape, but actually reinforcing the repression, actually offering a sort of imprisonment.  And why speak? was a question that seemed so significant, though it fades through thinking, especially with set vocabularies, rhythms of speech, even stylings that permeate the way the written word presents itself. But loosening its meaning is of incomparable value: before we speak, we think. We think and...
Read more about it »