i forget, you know, i forget the power of words - how they can take me outside myself and lull me into a rapid transit thought process that hurries and flows in and out of ideas with quicksilver rapidity.
it used to be my life's goal to work with words... to play with theories and metaphors... to take an idea and give it life on the page or with my voice... to weave together syllables... to provoke with consonants and vowels.
i seem to have lost sight of that.
my job is challenging and i enjoy it. my work involves eddying people and information to and fro and attempting to garner coherence from both.
just a side step away from where i thought i'd be, really.
but it is a big side step.
posted beside my computer is a quote from one of my favourite theorists, stephen greenblatt:
For history is not simply discovered in the precincts surrounding the literary text, or the performance or the image; it is found in the artworks themselves, as enabling condition, shaping force, forger of meaning, censor, community of patronage and reception. And the work of art is not the passive surface on which this historical experience leaves its stamp, but one of the creative agents in the fashioning and re-fashioning of the experience".i have been a passive surface. i want to once again fashion and refashion my experience - be a wave of turbulence rolling through my world.
my brother's thesis supervisor is my former thesis supervisor. my brother told me that this professor talks about me in class - as the one who got away, the one who was published before finishing her B.A., the one who... the one who. somedays i wake up and second guess my decision to leave school, though really it wasn't a decision it was an imperative. somedays i wake up and love where i am and what i'm doing so much that i don't doubt it for a second.
these words, though, are my soul. these words, though, live inside of me and burn with a fire that i cannot contain. these words, though, seek freedom and solace on the page, in the air, on the screen. these words, though, need to be set free.
last night leonard cohen said that the greatest thing we can do is forgive ourselves our imperfections because, after all, what are we but imperfections. i can forgive myself, if you can forgive me for sharing them with you.
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