my allergies are ridiculous. i'm writing from a remote outpost of hell and misery.
but oh, the middle of Time Regained is freaking me wild like smoove b. It does not matter whether I desire the neurotic tailspin, or the delirious joy of time travel and Art. Both kinds shall be provided to me for my pleasure.
Seriously it's everything I've been writing about for the last umpteen years. i was going to say the last 3 years but then i thought of all the things i tried to say 15 years ago in poetry about moments in time and looking forwards and backwards and the imaginary and ideal and the happiness possible. Everything proust just said about the freedom from the fear of death is just so cool. and it goes on for pages and pages. He just got snippy about social realism which is maybe ruining my trip a little, but oh, it's so good! Me and him and Coleridge are totally hanging out in the gay bar talking about our completely insignificant childhood memories. (What P. does not talk about is that it's part of why old people have a reputation for being lost in the past, or reminiscing boringly, or just sitting and spacing out in the sun on the porch; at some point inability to act and the desire for freedom from pain can maybe force one into a sort of buddhist enlightenment which becomes living the life of the imaginary. It's not necessarily senility or craziness.) Now, when he gets onto the "decipherment" --- i've often felt this too as an alluring but probably false idea - the feeling that there's something "there" to be read or unencrypted from either the random happenings or sights of reality, the impressions experienced, or from the interior "impressions", inchoate swirly stuff that becomes coherent verbal thought, that there is an underlying or pre-existing "reality" to be interpreted. That part he seems uncertain about and I must say that part I don't believe a bit unless i'm feeling particularly mystical in which case i'd say that that reality that is everything is only perceptible by god, and that's actually the only definition of "god" that I accept at all, an imaginary consciousness that could contain and see and know everything, i guess that's most people's definition but they believe it's true whereas i only believe it's an idea. Oops, I lost my train of thought.) But anyway there doesn't have to BE an "underlying meaning" and maybe he's not really saying that at all, he's saying that the impression (which is entirely individual because it depends on so many random experiences and associations of memory in the individual so that no one really sees a flower or a cigarette butt or a particular sunset or another person in the same way) ... um....that the impression and its individualness is the important thing to grasp in order to make art or really make anything. Maybe this could be summed up like whump's maxim "the more you know, the more jokes you get," but in this case, the more self-aware you are and the more you know about your own "impressions", the better your art. Maybe this is the ultimate navel-gazing narcissism? Hmmm it can't be helped. arrrrgh I'm groping after trying to say something new here and I'm not quite getting to it.
the amount of kleenex i've used up while writing this morning blather -- it's scary. there's little white heaps of completely soaked kleenexes all over the kitchen table around me. some people have flowers, some have used tissues.
i wish there was more coffee in the house.
okay - moomin is up - to action! I must be a woman of action! I turn aside from dreams and images, and charge forward like Saint-Loup into the trenches of breakfast and lunch-making and the putting on of socks and the going to Target and the visiting of the allergist!
Seriously people. Sometimes thinking about this stuff, which I do often, makes me feel a little crazy and alone. And so I'm wildly happy and feel that I love proust madly for making me feel less alone, even while I'm pissed at him for saying a bunch of important things so much better than I ever have or will.
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