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| philomel |
Today I found some rambling from about a year ago, which is still resonant today, and should serve to prompt me into action!
I have been searching for things that move me, things that transcend usual responses, sounds and tastes and words that tap into a deep well of feeling. Stuck in an office all day, it is easy to forget that things exist beyond the computer and the banality of day-to-day drudgery. Exchanging pleasantries with colleagues who are actually friends, but during work hours become pale ciphers, reduced to work-chat and food-chat and words that flee through the mind leaving no impression at all. Everything reduced to the screen, colourless, furring grey round the edges.
Words provoke a reaction. Books that finish and close a story irrevocably bring with them a loss, an emptiness in the chest and lump in the throat. Having invested feelings in the characters, in the landscapes and worlds they create, the ending is a quiet wrench, a relocation to the present reality. Words describing love and loss and sacrifice and aching loneliness as the pages turn and the characters walk away from eachother, and die, and are lost to a place they cannot be followed. Even books with happy endings, marriages, success, redemption, can bring hot cheeks and stinging eyes as the words run out and the stories stop and they can only be brought back to life by going back to the start and beginning again. And who spends their lives re-reading the same book over and over? Those existing in paper live faster, suffer more, experience every emotion to excess, tragedy and comedy, life and death.
It is often reported that smells can take you back to a place, reawaken old memories and bring scenes vividly back to life. Spraying a favourite perfume lifts the spirits, and brings a smile throughout the day as you catch a scent of it. I smell my wrists for comfort, wrap old scarves, fibres fuggy with old scents, up past my mouth to breathe. I used to collect lilac from the trees by my house and the heady flowers conjure up blue skies and bare feet in the dust and making pictures out of white clouds scudding past, of the two Siamese cats that lived next door. Flowers are the smell of my childhood and prompt happiness, unburdened.
Taste, and food, is a frequent preoccupation. My mouth waters at the prospect of tart berries, strong cheese, rich brownies, rare beef. I am fortunate enough to eat regularly at good restaurants, where dishes are beautifully constructed, ingredients are impeccably sourced and explode with flavour. Food is more than fuel. I can remember exactly certain meals from years ago, the first time I tried an avocado, the temptation of bacon that broke my five years of vegetarianism, a glorious seafood plateer spilling over with prawn and crab and lobster and mussels. At times I crave tastes that will not recede until they are sated. Food to match moods and to make them, the contentment of nursing a hot bowl of pasta, the bursting freshness of oranges that cleanse palate and head, the round mouthfeel of expensive chocolates.
Sounds, music, can tap directly into the body rhythms, without necessitating thought. Classical music stimulates a physical response. Sitting in a concert hall, the swell of strings or soaring arias take crystal slivers and drive them into the skull, running icy streams along the spine, quivering from head to toe. The body strains forwards towards the source that is all around, synapses sparking and shooting pleasure sensation to every part. In clubs, the bass is felt in the chest, a vibration of the ribcage, bones making the shell of a drum. Music squeezes the chest dry, inhaling and exhaling sounds, takes speech and leaves you voiceless.
I want to find more things that will stimulate me, make me feel more alive. I want to rediscover myself through sensation, find out more about what I want and who I am. If this sounds terribly, awfully pretentious, so be it, I have lost a bit of myself somewhere along the way, or perhaps it is yet to be found.
| 30 Nov 08, 8:17 PM Malinki UK(NW), 6 yrs |
I fully understand what you mean. I feel just like that sometimes. There are occasional events that re-awaken a sense of being alive, but other than that there is a kind of grey monotony. I was in a supermarket in Italy recently and I stumbled across a tub of talcum powder that my grandmother used to wear... and it made me so tearful, because it was almost as if she was suddenly there. To feel totally connected with something, even something small, is an incredible feeling. I supposed being the kind of person who can appreciate something beautiful or different is a start. I distinctly remember walking across Waterloo bridge with a friend at night and saying "Isn't this beautiful?" and he just hadn't noticed. From my window I can see over the city and sometimes I just forget it is there and when I remember I just stare out and think it is the coolest thing. I suppose it is just a case of remembering to look again.
I don't think that sounds pretentious... I still have no idea what I want or who I am but I am feeling very spurred into action to work it out as I don't want to waste another more minute seeking answers where there are none. "If she ever takes to living as she plays, it will be very exciting - both for us and for her." Room with a View | |
| 30 Nov 08, 8:27 PM MissKimberley NL, 8 yrs     |
Thanks for this blog, I shall return to it sometime later. You have just given me valuable food for thought, so to speak  "You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being, the way I am made." Marquis de Sade | |
| 1 Dec 08, 10:18 PM philomel UK(E), 3 yrs |
These are the sorts of things that really make me appreciate living in London: sometimes I forget, but wandering along the South Bank or up Parliament Hill make me overwhelmingly happy to be living in this city. I just need to make more of it! Miss Kimberley, glad it gave you something to think about. Hopefully good things not depresso ones! All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood. Edited 1 Dec 08, 10:19 PM by philomel |
