DEAR DIARY

11.28.2024 1565

I don’t know how to be human but i don’t know how to be anything else.
I know how to be human and it’s absolutely the only thing I know.
I know how to think about being human because that’s what I’ve learned in school.
I’ve gone to school but i haven’t learned anything.
I’ve gone to school but I don’t know anything, especially not how to think.
I know about learning because I’ve learned the word epistemology.
I know the word epistemology but I don’t really understand it.
I have two hands and I’m lucky to have them.
I have two hands and that’s enough hands.
I have two hands and I don’t know how to use them, not yet, not really, not at all, but I’m back in school again so hopefully by reading (if I learn to read) and discussing (if I learn to discuss), or at least by watching youtube tutorials, or at least by autotrophically absorbing content like it's phosphate runoff and I’m a microscopic constituent of some algal bloom, I will learn how to use them. Or at least how to approach them. Or at least how to set them in passive conversation, with each other, or with something or someone else entirely.

11.18.2024 stress pimple

I am sick of things meaning other things. I am sick of staying up late trying to figure out what things mean. Finding evidence to support my findings. No. Quests should result in material gain. Labor should result in something that is something. Treasure should be the endgame. Not the kind that is the friends we made along the way, the kind forged by dwarves. Verbal altercations are out. Physical fights are in. Irony is out. Named broadswords of mythological importance are in (not because they stand for truth or justice, because they have cool hilts and are cool). White does not "stand for." White does not "represent." White is heavily impacted by sweat stains that can sometimes be bleached but not always safely or effectively. White is grossly impacted by sweat stains which don't mean anything other than that I am a shvitzy person who shvitzes and has shvitzed and might even (godwilling) shvitz again.

11.17.2024 Cordelia and Florence

The sign outside Worcester said today the college is not open to the public. Members of the university can visit between noon and 4pm but must check in at the porters lodge. I did not check in. The gates were open. I walked right through.

I was the only one in the chapel, unless you count the figures in paint and leaded glass and mosaic. Unless you count Jesus and all his buddies. To be honest I couldn’t see them so well. I knew I was in the presence of Beauty but I couldn’t see it so well. Dim wintery light — colored windows — one flickering candle — my disgustingly streaked glasses — layer upon layer of obscured vision. Why don’t I clean my glasses. Why don’t I floss. Why don’t I send an email when I need to send an email. Why don’t I take simple steps to make experience bearable.

I sat on a pew and attempted to manufacture a religious experience.

Walking through the garden, along the pond, I felt suddenly jealous. Deeply jealous. Of whom, I don’t know. Of myself maybe. Of myself. For having the privilege of entry. There was a swan — I had forgotten swans were so large — and these Trees — botanically labelled — rustling — shedding leaves like dandruff — magical — thick with age — knotted ligaments — heads bowed — kissing the water. I always forget trees are so big. I always forget swans are so big.

I wanted to hold the feeling of gravel underfoot forever. I failed to hold it even for a moment, even for then. Boys playing football — ducks hovering and inverting — everything rustling rustling rustling — I failed to hold it even for then.

I don’t like what I’ve been writing lately. I use the wrong words most of the time. And too many!! Language frustrates — I know that, in an intellectual way — but I want to find words. I want to be that type of rare person who can use words. ——- —— —— Or —— if i am not so good at being within - or at processing - or at choosing - or at doing - or at metabolizing things like crunching and rustling, and holding them even briefly in my intestinal tract — it’s romantic to think that maybe i can still excrete something undigested that scientists and schoolchildren can pick through to determine — with some accuracy!— what I ate that day. It is narcissistic. It’s——— But — I - I just want to make sense of things. This — THIS — is my life. This is my everything. I can’t make sense of that. I genuinely can’t make sense of that. Swans are large — swans are so FUCKING large — and they’re just a tiny portion — the TINIEST portion — of Everything.

I headed to the bench on the lawn. I wanted to look out at the lake — the rippling, the ducks bottoms-ups-ing — the trees, wind-stripped and squirrel-rustled. To be cold but to be okay with being cold because that’s what cold weather is like. To maybe, for a bit, be within.

The bench invited me to rest. The bench was dedicated to the memory of a daddy, 1978-2018: Cordelia and Florence - Daddy is always with you.

Thomas — are you just with them always? Or were you there with me today? I hope you were there with me. I’m not sure if I cried (it wasn’t a real true good cry, just a tearing up) for you, or for Cordelia and Florence, or for me. Probably for me — I’m self centered like that. But I think you were there with me. Or maybe it was just that I was — briefly — there with myself. I hope you were there with me. I’d like to think we were there together, looking out at swans and trees and horizons too big to comprehend but somehow small enough to fit comfortably within the eye.

I hope your daughters are okay. I hope they’re growing up okay. I hope they’re okay with growing up, even if growing up means growing away from you.

I got up and finished my chocolate bar (why are all the UK chocolate bars so proud of how much air and milk they contain, and how much they crumble?? Revisit this.) and walked back through the green-scented world, past the paper poppy wreath laid below the names of boys who studied here and then left and never made it back. I should (therapists always investigate the word “should.” Assholes.) make use of the years I have that they didn’t get.

I wanted to go back into the chapel, to sit in that dim magnificence and give religious experience another go. But it sounded like someone was practicing the organ. So I moved on.

11.15.2024 a bit ponderous, but we have to do it, rough or otherwise

I deserve to be contained. I deserve to be within. I deserve a background that retreats. I deserve to be transferred from canvas to words, to be expressed with syntactical nuance that respected critics respect and admired critics admire.

Interrupt me. Unsettle me. Destabilize me. Teach me to see and be seen, to notice and be noticed. Take me to a carefully decorated and fittingly overpriced Chinese restaurant (as much a place to have gone as a place to go) and order the whole duck. Present it to me. Carve it in front of me. I want a spectacle. I want a poetry nakedly involved with objects. I deserve a composition that eludes the proverbial.

Off in the corner, in the far right corner, a white man in white is casting his line.

I notice a lot of things. I deserve to have a great poet really make something of these things I've noticed. I deserve to be noticed myself by a great poet, a man with an unbearably rich internal life (I couldn't possibly understand his internal life) who hadn't intended to Go Out tonight but was talked into it by friends, and who now, seeing me across the room, is suddenly glad that he was. Talked into it, that is. I deserve to be plucked out of the throbbing crowd and set in passive but radical conversation with the Old Masters.

You see this port in the distance? Think of the circular bay of this port in the distance -- we're in the world of fractals here. I'd start with the furrows as my way in. Use the furrows as reference. Use the furrows as cognate. The flailing legs are important, but only as part of a conversation -- they are in dialogue. They are set in conversation. An event emerges as an array of shape and color; the sun is sinking behind Naples and taking the world with it.

11.08.2024 therapy

I am not going to look at you because I want to give you space.

11.07.2024

I want to write but I can't think -- there is a humidifier, plugged into the far wall, and its thick hum has become everything. I am full of it. Green walls and dull thick hum and no room for anything else -- not for energy, not for comprehension, not for extramarital affairs, not for gilded illumination, not for ME. I need to stand up and leave before I unbecome entirely and sink undiscoverable into a pond, murky, unrealized, in the foreground of a painted world.

11.04.2024

tried to find walter pater’s grave. instead found a living man, sitting cross-legged, haunting the dead. startled, I rushed away.

11.02.2024 pocket kitkat

Last night I went to the Keble Halloween formal. There are all these proper nouns I now have access to — Keble, Trinity, Balliol, Lincoln, Jesus, Christ Church, St. John's, Oriel. There are all these places I now have access to, but I haven't yet taken advantage of this access, not in a full and rich way. I suppose I've had access to the proper noun “Jesus" for a while, I just haven’t (some would argue) made proper use of it.

Keble is all Victorian brickwork — stained glass — painted intricacy — glittering mosaic. The ceilings arch high above, buttressed with the soaring promise of Industry. Brick, in England, seems to go largely unappreciated. Maybe because the 1870s are so recent here you can still stick out your tongue and taste them, hot steel and acrid coal. New brick is new money. Brick is for factories and train stations. Brick is for row houses built by laborers for laborers. Brick is a ruddy-cheeked industrialist, counting coins and recording profits. Stone, on the other hand, is the collegiate material. Stone is the worthy foundation on which educated men are built. Kiln-fired men can climb out of their natal fire hard and immaculate, but they always retain something of the common clay.

C— commented on how beautiful it was. The brick. I agreed, because it was. The face-shaped jellied-tomato starter, I also agreed, was visually delightful but inedible. So many things are, though: chandeliers, Queen Anne furniture, pebbles, pre-Raphaelite paintings carefully lit by low-wattage bulbs. The boy dressed as post-rebrand JoJo Siwa ate most of his. I admired his tenacity.

C— and her friends are all studying creative writing. I felt jealous hovering on the margins of their externally endorsed creative industry, their companionable routine of workshopping, the fact that they’ve all submitted work and people with Taste have read it and considered it and found something in it worth nurturing.

"That man is here!" She pointed him out. "The one you sat next to at the Trinity formal, the one you flirted with."

I cannot remember having flirted with anyone. I remember giving my name, receiving his, asking if he'd pass the wine.

"There was definitely flirting happening. Your voice changed when you spoke to him."

Voices are always changing, aren’t they. The past is thick with vocal cues I might have employed — words I might have used — hands I might have placed — rooms I might have gone back to — papers I might have improved — proposals I might have submitted in a timely manner — eyes I might have looked into directly — used saucepans I might have washed immediately.

I do not know what material I belong to. Not brick. Definitely not stone. Maybe chocolate, highly processed, carried around in the trouser pocket of a man in formal attire who might or might not be flirting (who, as the night goes on, touches my arm when he talks to me), suspended at groin-height, melted by body heat until I take on the shape of my container.


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