I set out to write something about engagement this month. About why it’s important, how it’s a choice as a person, pedestrian, audience member, artist etc. About how lately I don’t feel engaged, ever, and so it’s no wonder I am [so] uncomfortable, lazy, bored, distracted, disinterested, etc. It only took me about 17 words to realize I had nothing of importance to say. I was writing a list of reasons I already knew for liking something I have always liked. Maybe I was just complimenting myself on my own tastes to kill my boredom. I could have just been warming up the old wheels & cogs, but regardless it became apparent that I was writing directly from the ego (I’m aware that this too seems egocentric). In some roundabout way, this got me thinking, or feeling, about (NOT REVOLUTIONARY →) : What’s important to me? What do I want? What are the things I find important to read, write, watch, talk or not talk about, tell my mom, my boss, et al.
Frankly, I could mediate on this question of wanting endlessly. The options are pretty endless and for someone with a deep stomach like my own, you’ll find there’s a lot of food to consider before you get to thinking about any other kind of sustenance [I actually just broke to eat a croque monsieur]. The point is, the question has required a great deal of circumambulation from me just to get a glimpse of satiating thought. It has been a month of sifting through vanity to realize I am typical, typical, typical. The question means to aim its subject, yet I have been set off spiraling through some horrifying, psychedelic montage where every thought I breach morphs into something else distracting me so entirely that I forget what I was thinking about before. It’s like everything I’m touching turns into a bunch of little bunnies and they go hopping away from me towards a kind of ultimate pleasure.
So this is the way I’ve been thinking as I read what I have both described and heard described as “a simple novel.” I read it quickly, with a smile, paying it a mild amount of attention and a bit over a week later I’ve found myself dealing with a lot of feelings. For the past few days things go according to the following: there is some stimulus approaching me (or for our purposes, X), nevermind the speed, velocity, or any of that. I then notice X. My mind and body begins to process X through some complicated neurological procedure (this part goes unnoticed, however)until, it is at some unmarked point before the follow through, abandoned. Then, as if left up to chance and chance alone, I spit out a random, but focused, really focused, response leaving myself with dropped jaw and either tears or facial sweat beading and falling slowly. X finds itself manifesting plentifully. I find X anywhere and everywhere and begin to develop a relationship with X, if that’s even possible.
Disinterested in these random fits of blind, generalized passion, I begin to identify with our heroine from the simple novel, Lucy, whom I’m not quite sure about. As a person. Though people in her world find her quietly mysterious, therefore intriguing and made of the stuff of romance, I have no great feelings towards her. I was left feeling unaware of the time and place she lived (despite not being so) and so I don’t know how to categorize her or filter her fictional actions and quirks through a lens which would ordinarily allow me to contextualize the narrative/draw some conclusions about it in regards to me/the world/literature. Lucy just floats, unattached, through this stark fictional world pointing at love and England and Italy. And I feel so like her. And I am so like her. And I have such nonspecific, general and few thoughts about her. Am I her? Wading through unidentified passions and unrealized periods of stasis for so long next to the Arno (or E.River?), that my thoughts collect moss and my eyes shut behind those fishy-see through eyelids? No, I’m not. Though I often sit by the river and don’t think/though I often sit by the river and feel.
Here I begin thinking about simplicity. I like when things are simple, I want to be a simple person. It’s pleasurable to think about grass and dirt and fields. It’s pleasurable to hold a potato in your hand and let its skin fit into the grooves of your skin--that’s simple. As I further paralyze myself through my own complications of things (i.e. justifying my life as a career “shop girl” because it maintains to supply me with the necessary amount of funds to continue living the exact same life I have been living even after realizing this shop girl life hurts me deeply and leaves me mentally vibrating on the plane of a heart-stopped-beating-long-ago OR envisioning my nonspecifically-distant future, happy, as a man of both heart and mind who engages personally, interpersonally and professionally with creativity and graciousness, while here and now I reward my negative behavior with bottomless frozen margaritas and marlboro lights only to wake up (again) with a headache that I undoubtedly will let annoy me and find to be no fault of my own), I look at any of the messes I did not intend to make from within this moat of swamp-mud I did not plan on finding surrounding myself and suddenly (!), I am in a place of learning. Temporarily virile, I hold still (for moments or months) and then, Eureka! Simplicity! Like Lucy, I have tumbled out of the undergrowth into a bed of violets! And this is a marvelous feeling of weightlessness. In this (cheap, metaphoric) sea of violets, I will let myself love what I love. I will let myself be kissed. If I were wearing a white linen dress, it would be wet with dew and caked with mud and I would blush because I was being kissed, or I was staring off at Italy, and all of this headrush business would have nothing to do with my soiled dress: thank you Lucy, thank you Italy!!
I don’t know what it is that allows things to be both simple and not. I don’t really know if I care. I’m also unsure of whether or not it requires some sort of advancement of the self or just a reorganization of thoughts. However, I do know that time is passing and I would prefer to engage with that than the alternative. As far as Lucy is concerned, she moved back to Italy with George!
Personal Homily #4