Following the white rabbit

"The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that's difficult to access - to a level that's not material but spiritual. That's what poetry and music do, and that was the first calling of religion. Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, stop thinking and accept what I tell you. That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect. Art is a better way of achieving that, though the aim is the same."

Wise words from Abbas Kiarostami.

It's been forever and a day since I did anything even approaching a normal update. That is, not including a quote from somewhere or other, or vaguely mentioning something that's not really relevant beyond noting it for posterity.

So. What have I been up to?

( Blah blah essays blahCollapse )

I'll hear back on June 19th, when I also get my exam results. I got the April 20th essay back - I got a first in it and was pleased as punch. It was a straight-up literature essay that I'd been researching for over a week, so that felt gratifying. On or around April 20th I also received two other cool pieces of news. 1.) My dissertation proposal had been accepted, and I'd been allocated the supervisor of my choice. 2.) I got all my first choices for my module options in my third and final year. Happy times.

I've spent the post-essay/exam days putting my life back together, a phrase I'm at risk of overusing of late, but it's bloody accurate. This term (post-Easter) has taken a lot out of me physically and mentally, so it's been sheer bliss having the come-down. Staying up to stupid-o'clock in the morning reading books, comics, the internet, getting up after lunchtime, spending my days lazing in my bedroom or sitting room or in the park with friends and housemates. It's not without reason that the third years say that the end of second year is the most difficult part of the course. Or at least, I hope not! Next week is going to be filled with the inevitable drunken end of term fun, as everyone has their final house-parties, socials, BBQs, nights in the pub etc. I reckon all of my housemates ate going to disappear back to their respective corners of the country on about the 21st or 22nd, leaving me alone in the house for a week. Speaking of which, I need to find somewhere to put all my stuff during July and August, as my mum isn't driving at the moment and can't move it all back to London. Annoyingly, we're only moving two doors down, but have a two month gap between contracts. I should get on that...

( Reading, listening, all that cultural jazzCollapse )

On an ACTUAL closing note, I had a fight with vodka the other night, which it thoroughly won, stealing my memory and ability to walk in a straight line, and leaving me with a fair few bruises. I'm such a dolt.

It feels like a night for staying up, for watching to see if the sunrise is worth capturing on camera, talking and reading and idling the hours away. But travel and sleep pull at my body and for once I just don't want caffeine.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. Some will rest, some eat chocolate, some will worship, others will just appreciate the day off. Some will feel vaguely confused and wonder what they think, but not me. No, I've got it all tidily worked out - the hours of thought, the alternative options - been there, done that. Tried it all. Got the T-shirt, thankyouverymuch. I suppose a week or so submerged in the Catholic undertones of my Irish family's town naturally reiterates the atheism I admitted and committed to three years ago.

I'll close with some (translated) words from Sartre, from Huis Clos/In Camera/No Exit first repeated to me by airlight who knew her audience well.

"GARCIN: I "dreamt," you say. It was no dream. When I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be.

INEZ: Prove it. Prove it was no dream. It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of.

GARCIN: I died too soon. I wasn't allowed time to--to do my deeds.

INEZ: One always dies too soon--or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are--your life, and nothing else."

And if that's not an encouraging Easter message, I don't know what is.

I should be writing an essay but instead I am just reading poetry, drenched in the sunshine.

In a lecture on irony yesterday, the lecturer first used an example from 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. She asked if we were familiar with the text, and a few cursory hands were raised. Her next example for analysis was 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning. She again asked if anyone was familiar with it. Three quarters of the lecture theatre put their hands up. She was taken aback and wondered why so many of us knew it. There was quiet laughter as the realisation spread that we'd practically all studied it at GCSE. Five or six years ago, almost 200 fourteen and fifteen year olds were sat in GCSE English lessons in classrooms across the UK, reading 'My Last Duchess'. Little did we know that several years down the line we would all smile in recognition at the 56 lines, at university, in a stylistics lecture, on a cold Thursday afternoon in Nottingham.

Today I found out that a girl I went to high school with has died. I wasn't particularly close to her, and probably best knew her in about 2000/2001, but I feel sad nonetheless. Her name was Gladys. I gather that she was sick for a long time, and that not many people knew about it. I only hope that her close friends and family are enduring. I don't remember the last time that I spoke to her, but I think that we parted on good terms.

Watching Obama's inauguration set my mind wandering back to London, to my A-level History classroom of two years ago, to Miss Richards and her scrutiny of African American civil rights from 1865 to 1980. I thought of her, small Welsh bundle of energy that she is, with friends or colleagues watching the historic moment. In the same way, during Obama's campaign I'd thought of her down in her little corner of West London, teaching 17 and 18 year olds about Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and all the other figures. A school friend and I agreed that she was surely using Obama as an example, an argument, a discussion point. We might email her and try to get a whiff of her enthusiasm.

***

As my lack of entries probably indicates, I'm back at university and am increasingly busy. Exam season was filled with the usual tripartite of reading, essays and exams. It's all over now and I've been celebrating by doing laundry and cleaning my room. Clearly I'm living on the wild side. Reading week next week, to be filled with parties and hopefully Richard II. Then back to lectures, which I'm looking forward to, as well as the warmer weather that must be on the way.

"'I don't understand how you find the time to pursue so many things to a fairly geeky level.' To which I could only say I don't understand what everyone else does with their time."

"It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, call each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, 'We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins'. Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life."

Tennessee Williams prefaced his play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with an essay entitled Person - to - Person. The above quote is taken from it. I first read it about three years ago and it still resonates.

I've changed the theme of my livejournal once again. Only, this time, I spent ages picking through the CSS document of one of the default themes, tweaking it here and there, changing font styles and sizes. Problem is, now I'm tempted to just keep on fiddling with it rather than being satisfied. As when I started teaching myself basic HTML, I found the entire process really quite enjoyable.

In other news, I've realised recently that I need to start writing/sticking things into my notebooks again, as my creative impulses have been itching lately but refuse to be sated through writing. I think I need that more physical creativity.

I've read a lot of short stories over the past few months; Joyce, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and so on. I used to loathe the form, until a few years ago when in response to my complaints, a wise teacher introduced me to a couple of really good ones. A few by Doris Lessing, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; that sort of thing. These days I am an utter convert, which reminded me of another teacher of mine. I mentioned him in an entry in 2006:

"He openly admits to having gone through a crisis midway through his English degree at Leicester University, when he got sick of reading novels. Nowadays he says he tends to not bother with novels, choosing only to read essays and short stories"

I've not gone off novels to any degree, but I appreciate his point more than ever.

All the writing I've ever done has always been fragmented and in snippets, so perhaps I will toy with the short story form. I've grown to hate the lengthy character descriptions of Dickens and the endless countryside vistas of Hardy. I want the emotion and the psychology, unreliable narrative, free indirect discourse, a blurring of lines between character and narrator, movement into and between minds. Epiphanies, moments of being, sudden self-awareness; whichever label you prefer. That is what catches me, at just over nineteen and a half.