St. Mawr
is so so D.H. Lawrence-ian.
Men aren’t men anymore! Society has taken men away! There is no animal spirit left in men! Admire a horse instead, he truly is!
Society is a joke! It is tiring and exhausting! We say things we don’t mean over and over!
I love D.H. Lawrence, but I’m almost on my period, and this book it making me want to literally fight someone and scream vague truths that they would never understand at them (so very D.H. Lawrence of me).
In other news, I watched a stupid proposal video that someone posted on faceook, and started sobbing. Dear goodness, hormones.
I haven’t read
The Lord of the Rings since I was, oh, probably in third grade. Maybe I re-read them the next year, I don’t remember. Anyways. Reading them again (aloud, with my lover), remembering why every other fantasy seemed inadequate for years afterwards. Very glad I never bothered to watch the movies.
there’s a narratology class at Chicago next year. I don’t know why, but I always assumed that it was something A.S. Byatt made up for “The Djinn in the Nightengale’s Eye.”
Favorite short story, ever. I have to take this class.
I’m thinking about getting bangs. I probably won’t, of course, but I’m thinking about it.
yesterday
cigarette smoke and other suburban smells in the late spring night, and a quiet dinner by candle light. I don’t know what those smells are, but I know them, and it reminds me of a lot of indistinct things (other suburban nights with cigarette smoke).
There is something so good about these things. About eating with people. I am constantly being reminded of how needed this is. Not eating casually with someone, not even on a planned outing… but gathering around a table and eating things made by the hands of some or all of those people around the table (a sentence I keep hearing, from that Jewish boy on the weed farm in Jerusalem Valley: “there is no language that doesn’t have words for, ‘let us eat bread, my son.’”). The quiet talk and laughter of people who are eating this meal together (I don’t mean a quiet sound, but that there is a sort of subtly to it, because silence is just as easy, but talking is nice) (there is a sort of community, a family-ness about these sort of meals that it is hard to ignore; whether old friends or people who’ve only known each other for a few hours). Eating together is such a simple thing, such a simple drawing together. I don’t understand this magic, and the magic in having food lovingly made (it is a stupid phrase, but I do mean what I say: something deeply imbued in food made for these meals, something that comes achingly— even without meaning for it to— from that place under the rib-cage).
And there was music and singing in the candle-light darkness, when the food was eaten. And these were old, old friends whose history I have known and seen (though not been, exactly, an old friend to them— merely included as a girlfriend to an old friend), and that made it all the better.
My hair had been cut by a friend earlier that day, I felt strangely shorn and mangled. Mangled is too strong of a word. And I wanted to cry for something, for longing, maybe. Or maybe out of a deep sadness that I cannot create. I wish I had something deep inside me to give, to make, to sing.
And so I wanted to cry (it seems cruel that someone who half-worships words should be so ungifted with them, but all my phrases are dry and half-copied, stilted and limp).
But I didn’t cry, because there were people about. And when I got home I didn’t cry because you were here with me.
