Watching Before Sunrise, or Before Sunset—I can’t remember which is which, but I mean the second one. The one where they’re years older and millions of times more lonely and cynical, each having been somehow stunted by the failure of their romance. Or maybe not its outright failure, but its failure to materialize into anything more than a moment. A haunted, haunting moment. There’s this melancholia lacing everything they say, but there’s something so nice about it at the same time. Maybe I find it comforting because I’m finally at an age where some of that is setting in in my life… the realization that nothing was necessarily fated to work out, that some very profound experiences hold far less sway over my current reality than I expected them to. At one moment, Celine expresses the feeling that she’s better on her own, not because any of her relationships have been particularly horrible, but because they have been underwhelming, simple, never living up to her expectations—which, in some ways, is more horrible than any other possibility. Still, there’s something affirming in the idea that someone, not her character but the screenwriter at least, shares or has shared this sensation with me.
It’s been so bloody hot outside today. I’m using “bloody” not so much as an expletive than as an actual descriptor. It is so hot, even now that the sun is going down, that the air feels bloody—wet and warm and dense. Every living thing is staggering around looking for shade; the landscape is practically vibrating in anticipation of a thunderstorm. I just had a flash of a thought that involved going for a swim in a pool of ice cold vodka. I don’t know why that appeals to me right now—it would be horrible, possibly life threatening, definitely painful—but it does. Oh it does.
I’m going to be published again. I’ve known it for a while but today they sent me proofs, so they can’t take it back now, can they? Every time something encouraging happens with my writing I experience this dual sensation of relief and anxiety. It’s almost like this: I’ve fooled another person into believing that I know what I’m doing. Sounds self-deprecating, and it is, but not in any kind of phony way. At least I don’t think so. My internal editor works so fast these days, clipping bits and pieces of my authentic self and repasting them where they’ll look better, feel better. At any rate, having another poem published is an objectively good thing. I am objectively happy about it and I wish I was closer to more people so that I’d have someone to celebrate with.
The countdown to my big move to New York has begun. I’m taking every shift I can get and saving almost everything I earn in anticipation. It feels a lot like when I was little, looking forward to a big vacation like Disney World or something. When we’re children, though, we are excited purely. We haven’t yet figured out that anticipation and nostalgia make up eighty percent of our experiences. Now that I’m a wizened old lady, I find myself playing tricks to prolong the excitement, and to keep it from becoming too tainted by the reality check I know is coming.
I tell myself, journaling, that it’s okay to be too introspective. It’s okay to rub my impressions of life between my fingers until the polish wears off. I think it’s important to get this unfortunate aspect of my personality out of my system and onto paper so that I can go out again and have wonder. Wonder is the Holy Grail. “Nostalgia for the kingdom,” is what Cortazar pinpoints as the driving force for all art, all…human effort. And I like the way he puts it because it’s pretty, but I think it falls short of articulating what we’re really after. I think its something more akin to nostalgia for an unmade world. That’s the problem. “The kingdom” calls forth a million images in every person’s mind, but the concept of an unmade world hangs like smoke in the periphery of anything and everything we can imagine. We have no idea what we would do with it if we had it, but it’s like a death drive. We’d all stagger drunkenly through the desert forever rather than face the alternative: that the world is a finished, completed, and that the most significant work that’s left for us is to stay alive, to exist unto ourselves until we don’t anymore.
Eh. I wish there were some sort of anticlimax that would fit here, at the end. I’m still spitting and gagging over all of it myself. But there isn’t. So it goes. I think I’m going to let my thoughts return to vodka swimming pools for a little while.
