I don't really have a leit-motif to write tonight but I'm just doing it... just letting myself flow and trying to explore my thoughts through my words, it's interesting... how language can give you information about the real hard core of your life, your own words, your own space, your own imagination... reveals information which is unknown even to yourself.
I've had a couple of lazy days... a denial kind of thing... total denial... and maybe a bit of a search... of direction probably. Coming to grips with myself a little bit in the last week. I've been alone for Ofer is still on his American holiday, no word from him yet... not that I was expecting anything, but it would be nice nevertheless if you know what I'm talking about.
But just let it be like that... there're worse things and I'm certainly convinced of that. These days "alone" have been a bit strange in any case. Probably I've had just too much time with myself and also plenty of time among strangers, with strangers, a stranger myself... probably even to myself.
I'm trying to re-think things in a scale of grays, without judgemental predicaments about the right and the wrong but probably more about the convenient, and fate and me again lead a struggle, almost a battle. For it is so human to go against fate, to go against history and against physis... this struggle against fate is the story of Achiles and also the story of Jesus, even of Alexander the Great and many others... to the same extent the history of the Jewish people, we're a people against our own fate, against ourselves.. I can see it in my life.. I've been struggling for 20 years to fight fate, and the sooner or the latter it just chased me... and surpassed me.
In the last two years fate and me have fought a lot less though, and I don't know if that means growth, it's probably just surrendering... taking upon things you know are just there, you can't avoid them. Call it the way you want, call it blood, call it historical "momentum" and even can call it "struggle".
It's an endless circle... I'm always going back to the same old burnt out topic, the tragedy... life itself a tragedy... a Greek tragedy. An Oedipic raison d'etre.. or in words of Goethe "frozen music", that's how life is... just like frozen music. I don't find the connections of my life itself to the tragedy, but of life itself... in disattachment... in observation... in drunkenness of theories and chants.
I try to re-think the latest chapters of my life... like a periodic sequence of time, just like something mathematic and I certainly fail, I truthfully fail. It's more of a diachronic thing, it's more of a "daimona eautou" in words of the Greek world, a "kata to daimona eautou". Probably is simply a rule of logic, a rule of nature.. a rule of dynamics, you see it in comparative linguistics; issoglosses, connections, comparisons, analogies, syntagms, a super-spiderweb, a supersystem.. just like the universe, like our galaxy. Even chemistry could prove my point, or maybe relativity would do just fine.
"I adore theatre, it is more real than life" in words of Oscar Wilde, the idol of my youth... the idol of my earliest years... I used to enjoy his speech and his delicate cruelty, which now I find probably aesthetic, but meaningless... just like I used to enjoy George Elliot and in particular "The Lifted Veil", such an amazing piece of art... and Victorian not even by character, but by definition, feminine and moralistic. And even when their points seem proven in nature, they don't prove the definition of their art itself, at least not in the terms of Aristotle, in the terms of the river of Heraclitus, "for you will not dive into the same river twice, since not the river nor yourself are the same being".
From then on I probably upgraded, and even read Keats and Shelley... and the unreadable Wordsworth. How could I forget the lectures of Patricia Simmonson? Funny though how I remembered her today, so little that we got to know each other and such a miserable lecturer she was... and how much influenced me... you see? It's a thing of the spirit, probably literature or rather learning literature might be just like religion. Not a religious being myself, but there's something to it... there's indeed something religious about me, something religious about my understanding of the world. Probably I didn't enjoy any other lecturer just like I enjoyed Simmonson, with the exception of Kaltsidou, some other time I might devote a few hours to talk about her, Greece and the German Romantic spirit, the Tracian morality.
I also used to read Shakespeare which I found very fascinating and elaborate, probably not his books about the Jews in Venice (and yeah I read it, quite boring though) and even Macbeth boring I found... a bit too classical, too artificial and too full of content... a kind of late tragedy but Shakespeare, to whom I owe all respect wasn't Greek enough in my taste, how could an Anglo-Saxon ever be? Ever read Cynewulf? Probably there's an answer to my question.
But "A midsummer's night dream", that I really liked, it's rather refreshing. Hyppolita... Hyppolita.. that was her name, such a sweet lady and as funny as it might sound I immediately relate her to Calista Flockhart! yeah I know... how stupidly banal of me, but in the end of the day I hope you don't have issues with that but I'm simply a man of the 90's (not sure if I'm already in the 2000's, somehow I think I'm still stuck in the 90's for a while) and I also reckon I had to look up the name online, as I had some trouble remembering it. That's what happens when you learn the Classics all your life and drop out for 6 months to be a businessman.
Poor Hyppolita... so innocent and pure, so beautiful, so clever, so fearful... a wanderer herself. I think we have a lot in common, just like Tori Amos and I do (yeah gay joke). Theseus I didn't really like and I was expected to, but that's like coffee with sugar, I was expected to like it and I certainly don't, or did I just convince myself I don't? Well it doesn't matter, at least for the sake of the historical memory.
Leave thrills asides, I retrieved to the children's book kind of, now I only read little myths and short tragedies, they contain the real core, they're self-contained, just like me... self-obsessed artist. But never mind you, I'm an intellectual, so I read Erzensberger sometimes. Who can anyway forget "Einladung zu einer Jasmintee tasse"?
I also read the Bible.
Ari
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