It's nice to find something inside a box

 *

It's nice to find something inside a box

 

 1. A box. How curious. I wonder if it has anything inside? 

Why not give it a little shake? 

Ooooh...a faint rattling sound!

 

2. Now, push the little try. A glimpse of what's inside...

 

3. Whoah, what can that be?

4. A twist tie! So useful.

*

My bed, being naked and alone

 *

My bed, being naked and alone

I know I wrote about my bed before.

 And I know there is some risk in writing about it again, of committing the writer's cardinal sin: repetition.

But, you know, I'll go on. I won't read what I wrote before, I'll plough on, because it gives me such release, such catharsis, to tell you how it is.

 I delay going to bed, I don't want to lie there. I know why. It's because it's unmanly to seek refuge in sleep; men stay on their feet and fight until their very tendons collapse. 

Then, when the day has truly ended when it doesn't seem embarrassing to go to bed, I go. I undress. 

It`s strange how when you undress you become naked but now because you have spent so much of your life clothed your nakedness seems alien and stranger than when you are wearing clothes. So I don't spend long looking at myself naked for this reason- I find the sight disconcerting, perhaps even shameful, though I wouldn't  be committing a crime in front of the mirror. I wonder if Californians ever feel the same, but I somehow doubt it. I am sure it is feeling located in the strange alleyways of my Scottish background, and the aftermath of Calvinism.

 I make sure the room is perfectly black. I have double curtains and I pull them tight together so no chink of light can enter. Then I get inside that blue blanket which is quite unbelievably soft, a new born baby could not be more kindly swaddled.

There you can see the leafy pillow: this is where my head goes, a watch beside it. I can`t live without time. The thought of waking and not knowing what time it is is as horrific as it would be for me to be dropped into some distant Chinese city, all hateful concrete blocks and street signs incomprehensible -a sense of panic would overcome me.

Then I close my eyes, then it comes in an silent wave or like a light being switched off- so rapid that you feel nothing at all, a slight of hand. Or...or it does not come and I lie like an idiot, cheated. Come here, come! Oh come here, sleep! Oh come!

I cheated myself by presuming that I might deserve to enter the dusk woods. It feels like nothing so much as being stood up. Affronted.

*

Sleep is like music, if it is good or bad, I mean of course, music that catches you completely- you are physically moved by it, your heart beats differently, your moods rise and fall, it plays with aspirations and doubts. Some say that music can make you a better person but I find that sentimental, far too optimistic.

.

I think we all know that life is hell, really, but most think it rather bad manners to state that too openly. It's like that experience when you go for a meal in a restaurant and the food and service are lousy, but only small children are given license to say, this really isn't great is it! as the others look awkwardly to the floor. But sometimes you are so pissed off that you have to say something.

 

*

The avenue I walked down

 * 

 The avenue I walked down

 avenue 

 

I came on Sunday. 

I wasn't feeling too well. I had a sad feeling, I felt pointless too. The bad part of Sunday, the mooching around, the irritation, the boredom. 

I had a thought about how thirty years ago I had the same feeling. You might think that one's emotional life would develop over time, so that such negative states no longer affect one. But it seems to me part of the essential misery of life that one never really escapes the treadmill, even after learning that one is within it.

 

 A twig representing how I felt

 

I had passed this avenue on the fast road, an exquisite road with endless, tall dreamlike Scots pine, rising with such heavenly aspiration anyone would feel enchanted there. When I passed this entrance, I always thought, " oh you must stop there one day." I must have had that thought over three hundred times.

And so, I went there with the Lumix camera, a lovely black metal thing that fits snugly in the hand. 

From this entrance you follow a track through woodland, and then, you meet a fenced parking area and a kiosk with sign with bold acronyms, telling you that it pertains to a work-based social organisation of some sort. 

Then, over a sandy path you reach a fine narrow beach and the Atlantic.

 I felt, when I met these facilities somewhat like a trespasser, a bit uneasy. The mood in Brazil has become less laid back lately, even in touristy areas. There`s a sense of suspicion that I feel wasn't present when I came here 16 years ago, and this affects people's behaviours in these areas- you don`t have the sort of ready conversations that you used to- I`m sure I`m not imagining that. Though I must say that the only person I met, a woman with two small children, smiled and said hello in a pleasant way, a way that made me feel all right.

Oh how strange that my sentiments might be moved by such an easy thing as a lady`s smile? What is the point of thinking at all, when ones feelings jump and rise or fall with the predictability of a pin ball on a warped board?

*

This is a shell I found lying on the sand-

The shell in my hand

I'm not going to show a picture of the ocean. Imagine it yourself.

*

As I drove off, I heard the Velvet Underground song ¬Ocean¬.

I can find two versions of the song, one on an early Lou Reed Album and the other on a posthumous released Velvet Underground compilation called VU. The Velvet Underground version is earlier and more surreal. The song that I heard in my head was the Reed`s solo take and is also intense and troubled. But it is more coherent, with scenes of drowning and desperation, of castles and towers and warlocks - rather Shakesperean. Whether the lyrics have directed meanings or are meant as imagistic poetry is not clear from the commentaries I have found, but I suspect the former. 

 However, it is argued by David Caune on Quora that Malcolm is a reference to the son of Henry Melville, author of Moby Dick. Malcolm`s suicide, a result it is argued, was the result of violent abuse from his father. Lou Reed was subjected to Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy, an attempt by his parents to control his homosexual tendencies, and Caune sees in the song a refence to the trauma that this treatment caused him, which he parallels with that of Melville's son.

Castles glowing at night, towers above outfright

Warlocks decapitating

Malcolm he lives on hate, Serve your brain on a plate

Feasts on your mouth for dinner

The song ends-

Here comes the waves

 

 

Following Caune, these waves might then be waves of ECT therapy. And you hear the music rise into a crescendo, loud and more pain filled, a music which seems to not just describe but glamourise destruction. 

*

There was something self-pitying and just plain crappy about how I handled the day.

 But it's just like that sometimes.

*