Friday or the preparations for hibernation

Bought three packs of cigarrettes already - I smoke a rather queer* brand of cigarrettes which is not sold everywhere, and so far I couldn't find them in my current neighbourhood. Have wine at home, just need to go out, perhaps while I wait for the bus, and buy a bottle of juice, just in case. Have beans-and-rice for my Saturday's lunch, tuna fish for my Saturday's dinner, chicken with garlic sauce for my Sunday's lunch and pork meat for Sunday's dinner. Have bread, cheese and meat for the snacks, and milk in enough supply for breakfast and for my classic glass of milk before bed. Have no coffee, but I suppose I'll do without it, especially since there's still whisky and firewater around. Have enough movies to watch non-stop the whole weekend. In short, and unless someone comes to bring me to the sun, I'm prepared for loneliness, for a weekend of hibernation at home.


*A long time ago, queer had a different meaning - today the word is widely associated with the gay movements, but it used to mean something unexpected or uncommon. I'm reading The Lord of the Rings, this time in the original version after reading it twice in the (quite good) portuguese translation, and the Hobbits of the Shire use the word queer quite often. It looks rather good there, really.

Suspend, shut down, restart?

The problem is, we cannot go back, we cannot be what we once were, we cannot push a button and reset our life, restoring it to what it used to be. We can change hide pictures or even burn them with painful matches, we can throw away all the mementos of that particular time, or lock them all away in a place meant to be forgotten. We can change the decoration of our room, of our house, so it doesn't remember; we can even change house, move to another city so to avoid walking through places that bring back memories, either good and bad. All that is utterly useless. What changed in our life, so to speak, didn't change our lives: it changed ourselves first, and our lives accordingly. We can always change ourselves, but can never go back. Our experience and our memory keeps us from doing so, even if we try in vain to erase the experience and forget unforgetable memories.

It's settled:

November is the best month of the year. And we're not in November yet.

Longing (II)

I suppose the first time such a feeling assaulted me was a long time ago, when me and some school mates were returning from the province's capital city. It was March, and the winter was already giving way to spring: the air was cold but clean, the sky a deep blue. The old road was surrounded by endless fields of wheat, that in the summer get an intense golden colour under the sun; but in that time of the year, the wheat was still growing, and the fields looked like a wide sea of green. And as the day faded away, I witnessed the most amazing sunset I have ever seen in my life, one that made me think how overrated is the postcard with our own star sinking into the ocean's horizon. There, right there, in a lost road in the very middle of nowhere, I saw the sun crashing into a verdant field of life, a sight like none other. Only those who see it could understand. In that very moment, I felt love for the land, for that land that was mine, that saw me coming into this world. In that moment, I wished to stop time and stay there, sinking into the endless green with the warm sun.

Longing

Today I had a sudden urge to leave everything I have here in the big city and to go back to my homeland. Not to my village, but to some city deep inland, to some place where I could have a quiet live and start anew. For a long time I thought about leaving the country entirely, and I still do; but as time goes by, I long more and more for my homeland: I miss the wide plains and the mountain ranges, the forests with secret ways and the endless fields of wheat that shine like a sea of gold under May's sun. I miss the peace that can be found in the sounds of nature, the emptiness full of life. A sky filled with stars. God, I miss the stars. I go to my village one weekend and look at the sky, it's everything there, so familiar: Venus and Mars, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and Andromeda. I miss the darkness, the darkness of the countryside - the big city is never dark, the sky is always veiled. Not deep inland: one walks one mile away from a city at night and the sky is pitch-black and dotted with the starts so hard to reach. Even the Moon is prettier there. It would definitely be a nice idea, to leave it here and move inland. I know where I'd like to live, I just need to find out something to do. Or maybe this kind of homesickness is just a consequence of, for two days, being eating the best food from my homeland like a madman. And yet the food alone would be a very good reason to go back there...

(...) One can try, however, to borrow time until some solution is found, until, so to speak, some miracle happens. I tried it, out of sheer naïveness. One cannot borrow time, for time cannot be borrowed: time is. Time belongs to itself, it's nature is oblivious to the petty human dramas we call life. I should have known it, but I made the mistake of indulging myself into a moment of optimism, knowing all too well that optimism leads nowhere. Or rather, knowing that optimism misleads, replacing reality by a poor substitute, a sort of illusion. Illusions are not real though, and following them inevitably leads us astray. As such, I made many mistakes along the way, always believing - foolishly, I might add - that eventually I'd be able to make things right. Eventually what happened was, I had to face reality when all illusions collapsed and I found myself alone in a dark room, the mistakes I had done while chasing illusions heavy upon my shoulders. Those mistakes were not illusory - they were real. All too real, terribly real. (...)

The thin red line

It is not something that I can show you. Not in the same way by which I can show you the brown colour of my eyes, the worn black of my clothes, the colourless chaos of my drafts. It's something you have to see for yourself, the thin red line drawn faintly around me in a closed circle. Like a warning, drawn only for those few people who are meant to be part of our lives, so that they learn: outside there was me, but here I truly begin. My own inner circle, the one that very few people in my life will have access to. Now and then, there is someone that can cross the line - but those who do must act with care, for they are in my own sanctuary. That's the most sacred rule: one can be there, but one cannot change anything. Everything there has an order, a reason for being there in that exact place. Come in, do stay, do not touch anything.Watch, don't touch. That's the primal rule. You break it, you'll be closed out.

Limbo

There is one thing called reality, and there's another thing that's us. And reality does not bend to us; it is actually the other way around. We are bent my reality. Or we are left in its borders, in a no-place that we could call limbo. It's pointless to struggle. Our nature belongs to reality. Struggling against the reality is, in the end, struggling against ourselves. And we all know there is no possible victory when we fight ourselves.

I remember being in the limbo of reality. Happens in times like this, when a loss brings up illusions, too many illusions. It is a time for mistakes. Or apparent mistakes. Sometimes I wonder if, in the past, I couldn't have made more out of it. Not all illusions are illusory. Or rather: some illusions might become true if we follow them. My days of chasing reveries are long since gone, but I find myself wondering quite often: what if? Maybe there's something for me to change, and find solace in the limbo.

What makes us the people we are today*

I don't believe there is anyone who can be faithful to the cliché "if I could go back, I wouldn't change anything, for everything I did made me the person I am today". If I was to go back through time, I would definitely change several things. Especially because those were the things that made us the people we are today.

*Yes, I quoted you. And translated you - badly, but I did. I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it - that piece of text was too good not to quote.

On interpretations

Remembering a great evening, a great conversation. What matters when we read someone, is not that the author meant: it is what his or her words meant to us. We cannot guess the underlying intention of every sentence, every word. Why do some books touch us in a way that other books, perhaps better books, don't? It's all a matter of interpretation. The books I liked the most were the books that touched me in some way, that triggered feelings that I don't think the author ever expected to trigger in any of the readers. Writers, they write for themselves. Not for someone else - even if the story, the book, whatever, is dedicated to someone else. If one wants to write for someone, then one writes a letter, a good and old-fashioned letter. And even this is arguable.

So it's all about interpretations. Goes, for example, for everything I've written here in the last four years. What I meant, or even the random target of my words, doesn't really matter: what matters is that the words meant for those who read it. Probably it never meant a damn thing, but hey, that's not really up to me. I know what they mean to me, and sometimes, after i write something here, it ends up meaning something totally different. It goes for music, for example. What has the musician(s) in mind when they create a song? They know the meaning of their own songs, but for the ones who listen to them - me, you - they might mean something completely different. I always thought that the song Like Spinning Plates, by Radiohead, was about love - until a video I saw recently shown me that it is actually about war. Avoiding the common place that says that love and war are one and the same thing, the funny thing is, Like Spinning Plates is about war, and makes sense that way, but it could be about love. About betrayal.

Going for my favourite song, Knives Out. It was rumoured that it was about cannibalism. Could be, yes. You go to some lyrics website and read the visitors' comments. Let's look at some interpretations, from here:

I think the "mouse" is a metaphor for who the "I" in the song used to be. I hear it that way because of the parallel between "He's not coming back" and "I'm not coming back" at the beginning.
It sounds like the narrator's really struggled with his decision to give up on whoever he's talking to. It sounds like he's finally given up on defending himself from being "eaten" by an insensitive partner who he once trusted. He lets them impose their own unfair and selfish interpretations of his intentions to make sense of their own lives narrowmindedly, so that the injustice of his situation stops "eating" at him.
By letting himself be a "mouse" to them, by allowing a part of himself to be caught, cooked, eaten, disregarded, belittled, consumed, destroyed, he is able to finally detach himself from a painful internal struggle which he now sees is pointless. You can hear the last trace of venom he allows himself to feel in "If you'd been a dog//they would've drowned you at birth." He realizes that he can't make them see how they've hurt him, either by pleading or by anger, so he makes the difficult decision to give up on being involved at all. (Or maybe I'm just hearing all this because of personal experience... does it make any sense?) [anonymous]

It does make sense to me. But it could also be like:

To me this song about how we encounter certain situations and we are forced to do things we don't want to do - Sometimes we just have to take the knives out...(try not to think to violently when you hear this one) [Clark]

A longer review gives some interesting points. My highlights:

(...)Well, the knives in "knives out" seem to have a dual meaning to me, perhaps this is due in part to a third interpretation, that of the film director. Nonetheless, I made a connection between the "knives are out" in the Shakespearian Julius Ceaser sense (et tu, Brutus?) and the relationship souring when the couple fight in the train compartment, her with the knife, him with the lump hammer. She also "goes under the knife" in the wonderful operation game scene, is this revenge or more likely a dissection of the relationship and her after the break up.
The medical theme in the video for me is especially poignant (I work in operating theatres); I have also occasionally interpreted the sound of articulating a "hundred thousand breaking hearts" also as the sound of a soul "in extremis" (at the point of death). There are parallels between having your hope denied by love and the feeling of life as a futile exercise, therefore you have reached death in life. I once treated a man who arrived for emergency surgery. As he arrived into the theatre, before he was anaesthetised, he held my hand, looked into my eyes and said "I'm so glad to see you". He died shortly afterwards during the operation despite our best efforts to save him. [Mr. K. Tootnoy]

We can never escape our personal experience. Interpretation is all about it: personal experience. And about the right moment, too. Sometimes a book, a song, a painting tells us nothing at first, but when we read, listen or see it some time later, it does ring a bell, it does trigger an emotion we had not felt before.

Concerning Knives Out, I'll stick to the first interpretation. And Like Spinning Plates will always be about a broken dream.

(untitled)

You can't take it with yer
Dancing for your pleasure

You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all human beings

Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)

Reckoner
Take me with yer
Dedicated to all human beings

radiohead, reckoner, in rainbows, 2007 #7

When gods do battle

It reminds me, not without irony, of the clash of the titans that was the struggle of both ancient gods, one armed with an ideal of perfection and self-righteousness, the other armed with a reason that was sadly considered evil. The war between them laid waste on the entire world, and nothing escaped the fury of both gods in battle. And nothing was ever the same after they killed each other.

Innocence

If I'm willing to accept that nothing is innocent, then I must be ready to go all the way through it. It implies, among other things, that everything happens for a reason, that every action, every word, has an underlying second intention. It might be obvious now and then, but, truth be told, my intuition was never really brilliant. So I can't know for sure the intentions that those words might hide; there's nothing for me to do but to guess. And now I remember, I was never good at guessing either.

The news of Western's demise has been greatly exagerated.

And of Sci-fi's demise too. One word: Serenity.

metalanguage (no sound)

nothing is innocent. nothing is fucking innocent. it came to me with the rustling of the leaves outside, blown by the wind. it is a cold wind, cold like no one you've felt before. for a moment i understood. for a moment it was clear. but then it was lost. no one is fucking innocent. the night is dark, even though the skies above are not black. they glow in a yellowish colour that casts no light, only wind. what does that mean, being innocent. none of us is. the guilt, it stains us, we cannot get rid of it. i understood, i understood it all for a moment, a moment i could not hold, a moment blown by the wind. it was clear. i was clear, i with my stains, with my guilt. sorrow, whatever, innocence long since lost. of course. pride is a thug, one that fears not doing the dirty job. we deliver it all into its hands, it fixes everything. and we rest. we give ourselves excuses. it's not us. it's so damn easy to give excuses, to find meaningless reasons for our failures, to rely on pride to do what we could not bring ourselves to do, to distract ourselves in petty activities and thoughts while part of us is being murdered in the night. we know it, we avert our eyes, we ignore the sight and pray for it to go away. it won't. we know it. it's so easy to say no. it's so easy, and we do it, we do it time after time, so we can hide our weaknesses and our fears while we convince ourselves that we did the right thing. the right thing never helps, i said once. the right thing is never done, i say now. it wasn't done, it will never be done. and here i am now, blown by the wind. would you know it? probably not. you could destroy me now, you could lay waste on whatever is left of me with a single word, with a simple word. you don't know it, you can't know it, and i, i will sit here in the dark watching, waiting to see you go, it's the next best thing. i also do.

Jesus Christ in a pole,

I'm listening Bangers and Mash (by Radiohead) in the radio. Praise the lord, I thought this morning was one lost morning already.

Threads

Frodo Baggings knew it: How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand. There is no going back. There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep. That have taken hold*. It's never that easy. Sometimes it isn't possible at all. It wasn't for Frodo, who in the end left the Middle-Earth and the world he knew and loved. Some hurts that go too deep. Indeed.

*by Frodo Baggings in the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

The gloaming.

Now would probably be the moment for me to open up and write in the walls all the silent words that I've let out quietly in the last months. Those words, however, will remain secret, hidden away where I left them. What was not spoken before must not be ever spoken. Not anymore. Not everything is said and done, and perhaps more battles could or should follow; but the truth is, I am tired of the struggle, of the warfare. I can fight. I've learned how to years ago: I've learned how to win and how to lose, how to accept both the victory and the defeat. Defeat requires a particular grace, one that took me a while to master, one that still leaves a little bitterness behind. Just like now. You said that I had won, that I had it my way. It's so wrong. I never had things my way, not with anyone. The choice I have ever faced in my life was of another nature: it was the lesser evil, it was the sword or the wall. In the end, I did not end the wars I've fought by guile, or strenght of arms: in the end, it has always been sheer survival instinct. When everything else is shattered - pride, self-respect, ego, whatever - the survival instinct kicked in to keep everything in one place. Victories? I wish I knew what victory truly means.

Four

Four years of thoughts in chaos.

To be absolutely honest, this blog was supposed to be over today, on its fourth birthday. This is an old idea of mine, to put an end to it and start something new. Not that I've given up on that, but it seems - as every project I set my mind into - that it is "temporarily postponed", a brilliant euphemism for "I'm not gonna do it and even if I do I'll fail miserably at it". So probably this blog won't be over in the nearby future, and my new idea will stay in the realm of ideas, where most of my ideas stay anyway, too afraid to see the light. Whatever. Life here is a failure anyway, even though this blog hasn't exactly been a failure over the last four years. It had moments of inactivity and moments of near-orgasmic rush. It was a pleasure for quite a few times, a total boredom now and then, and a royal pain in the ass sometimes. Still. Four years. It's more time than I ever managed to spend with the same girl, for example. So it could be inferred that I'm more successful with blogs than with girls, but hey, let's not dig that hole now. Anyway. Four fucking years here. So many things changed in these last four years. So many people came and went. Even readers. Some of the readers who followed this blog when it started don't do it anymore (not to my knowledge, at least). Some of then started to follow later on. As far as I know, the blog only has one reader from the very start. Most of them I don't know in person, but all the readers I've met in person were absolutely worth meeting. Truth be told, my readers - you - made this blog as well. In a way. Not only by being kind enough to share your thoughts with me so I could publish them, but also by... reading the nonsense I so often put up here. Like this post, for example. So thank you all. Can't promise to be here for four more years, for Andromeda still haunts my mind; but I will be around for a while more, that's for sure, and if I ever decide to move you'll be the first ones to know where I've gone to. Cheers.

So knives out

The most beautiful song ever made.

One beat

We can see the end and yet we don't believe. You think about it, for if it didn't happen to you yet, it will one day - the law is inevitable, just like our own demise. Someone you know, you cherish, you love (as I said, you pick) falls ill. Terribly ill. The doctors confirm it with science: it's hopeless. You say to yourself, it's hopeless, death is on its way. You know it, you're as sure of that as you are of your own birth name. And yet part of you, some part of you you're not aware of most of times still hopes. For what, I know not; but it hopes. You prepare yourself. In the days that follow, your heart almost misses a beat whenever your phone rings. People ask you about it and you talk about the inevitability - you know, right - and show everyone that you're prepared to deal with it. Only, you aren't. We never are. One day the dreaded phone call arrives and your heart truly misses a beat. And you know that death has come. And now you know more than the fact that everything will change: you know that everything has changed. Just as your heart missed one beat.

Eventually, we all come to a point when we stop, and all of a sudden we leap forward, pushing aside everything that holds us and everyone that stands in our way. A last-ditch effort, an act of recklessness. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it is always inevitable.

Reveries

I should remember all the time that the world does not follow me, not in any way (thankfully). And that people are different, and me and them do not share the same principles, values, beliefs. Nor do we act the same. Sometimes I feel I should drop my reveries and wake up, even if only for a moment.

Good news:

Cranberries in Lisbon in March.

Saturn, the lord of the rings

NASA found one more ring in Saturn's orbit, one wider than any other. How cool.

Rain

I wondered whether it is a coincidence or not, resuming a very old discussion I've had with myself to decide whether I do believe in coincidences or not. It does feel, though, as if the skies lifted my sorrow into the clouds and shaped it in pouring rain, the tears he will always be unable to cry falling down on the earth. The first rain of the season, coming crashing down on me in the exact moment when you leave. How fitting. Makes me feel almost like a shaman, the power to bend the nature to my will flowing through my veins, turning the force of nature into my very own feelings.

I don't feel it yet, even though the nature is feeling it all for me, and pouring accordingly. It's still too early, you know, too early no note the disruption of routines, the subtle return to the permanent twilight. I can feel it in the air, and if the sun itself is clouded, making all the things in the earth less real and somewhat eerie. The feeling will come to me slowly, step by step, in every place where you were supposed to be, but where you aren't anymore. The small things - the small things are always the ones which hurt the most. They will, one by one, I can see them already queuing outside with sticks and stones. Let them come, I think. For each blow will hurt, but it will also bring back a little of the sweetness that fades away into the rain in this sad morning.