ir a principal |
Ir a lateral
Seejay told me over lunch the other day that there in our gut exist some fibres that contain neurons or neuronic tissue. It is through them that we feel butterflies in our stomachs, or where we feel from the heart. She called it a second brain. This second brain cannot reason or make any decisions or start cyclones at all, but it does send information to the older brother brain about how the process of digestion is going. I'm big on digestion myself. I love talking about it, one reason being that it fascinates me how a process so complex can occur inside me and I be scarcely aware of its happening. It works like clockwork; no, better, because I can hear no ticks or mechanisms growling.
I know that lately things have been indigestible, or rather that I have not been digesting them properly. And when things don't digest properly, that is where the session of reading on the toilet falls well, because I can read and learn that crucial piece of insight that will make everything come out. The past few weeks, I have been gathering these pieces of insight, little glimmering pills, fed to my brain and passed to its little brother in the gut, to help with the passing.
These past three or four weeks, I felt several short-lived releases in the gut, followed by build-ups again of the same material somehow rearranged. The little brother brain went through a tough period, having to put up with the tumultuous behavior of the bigger brother sending down upheaval after upheaval, upsetting after upsetting. This material that kept circulating was a rehashing of what was previously sent down. Big brother brain went through a process of detoxification, and the unwanted matter was naturally passed down through the younger brother to be removed from the system entirely. And I felt it going, bit by bit.
The big brain is now at rest, though there is yet some digestion to be done. I am thankful they are on talking terms again, that they are hearing kinder words, instead of the older attacking the younger with what it has collected. It has to learn to understand that the younger brother brain cannot fight back; he cannot reason to pick a side in a war, let alone to defend himself. He just takes it until it's over.
He deserves better. He doesn't ask for much, just to be listened to and to let be in peace to do what it knows to do. As the mediator, I didn't much consider its existence - without a voice, I could hardly hear it, especially since the older brother had grown a habit of yelling out orders and judgments. But now I can hear it, since I can hear the quiet again, that fragile quiet post-natural disaster. It's been digesting for a long time, and it has intuitively known how to make things better. It took a long time for the big brother to listen to him, and when he did, he got even angrier and jealous that he hadn't figured it all out by himself. Little brother brain was reminding his sibling to include him, even if just a little, to share with him some of the burdens, but instead the big brother brain, after no longer able to deny the existence of his sibling, turned his fury onto him, blotting him out.
Little brother knew that the storm was of big brother's making, but he couldn't get angry, for it was not in his capacity to, so instead he let it pass, trusting that I would listen to the silent call for help. His message came in increments, and I began to have doubts. Big brother brain heard these doubts and twisted them into its own confused schemes. Still, the younger brother was persistent, and the message from the quiet built up vibrational frequency until I heard it. He had said, "Forgive you, brother." There was no "I", because he was not talking, and without one around which the cyclone could revolve, it disappeared. I learned then that while the big brother always had to have a voice as it could reason and propose things to the world, he could not do so without his younger sibling, who is much content to simply digest and let his brother know how that is going. The big brother brain has difficulty listening to silence, because it cannot hear that frequency, yet because that is the way little brother speaks, and I heard it speak, I realise now I can tune into it anytime.
He wants to be heard, the little one. He is wise, and I would be too, to listen.
How could I take in the thickness in the air of the thirty-seated room. How can I make sense that sitting on these seats are human beings, some met recently, some met seven years ago, who decided that it was worth their time and space to come and occupy those places.
I don't have many words, but these are right.
I am loved.
And I cannot help but love in return, love as a verb, as a state of being.
And you, you convinced me to be brave and love without holdings. And I feel I could have said words directly to you last night. And I didn't. And I don't regret it because I don't have any.
Just.
Just.
Just.
It went in the right place.
In the third act of King Lear, Lear goes out into a storm and is blinded, physically and symbolically, by nature's power. He succumbs to it. It is here that he sees himself for who he really is, a bare, forked animal, without his accommodations to give him the status of king. After the storm, he experiences catharsis, and a new man is born.
I feel that now. The weather last night during two very difficult but necessary conversations picked up to blowing proportions. It is only fit that nature draw parallels between the different storms. This morning I woke up with the sky clear, the ground wet, my mother remarking that the wind around one a.m. woke her up, a wind I had heard as well, unable to sleep at that time, surrounded by a layer of peace in front of a layer of looming uncertainty. Now as I sit and write this, I feel the terror rise up in my chest, and my fate feels unwritten, given into your hands. I have faith.
I have faith that the outcome will be what you want. I have faith that there can be resolution. I have faith that we are about to talk and find peace. When you get off the bus. I want to wait for you with flowers. Are they to apologise for my blindness, for not seeing the preciousness of what you offered me? Are they to be grateful, that you will give me a chance to redeem myself, to show you that I care and that I am committed beyond what I was before. I am fragile at this point.
He told me not to hesitate.
When I was a boy, that boy was chubby and I imagine him waddling around in my mind. I recall him penguining down the grassy hill in some forgotten pair of shoes, holding outside of his throat one note that penguined down after him. I want to recall the way he ran around the park, signalling with horse morse before turning left or right. I have an uncertainly brazen fondness for this boy I used to use the first person pronoun for, even though he now but animates in memories, in photographs and even a video or two. The world was clean for him, crackless, or if there were cracks, they had been rubbed in by walnuts. He holds inspiration for me, in a more literal sense, because I've said many times he lives inside of me. Since puberty, my body has grown around him like a protective forest. I know now that he doesn't feel trapped or lost or lonely as I once probably thought, nor does he complain, because on a level beyond words, beyond his age yet precisely of it, he has understood that I had to grow up and my innocence had to be shattered so that I could fit into the world's decoupage. Now I figure he has understood the next part as well, that his remaining in there even after the hardening of the body around him means my innocence is yet intact. And when I have moments when I think about him, when I member again, I can hear his waddling sound, cheerful, smiling a smile that doesn't fit between his cheeks and so has to leak over in between mine.
I hope he'll run around joyfully until he no longer needs to remind me of how I used to be and still am.
The colour pink says that love just needs a witness, and a little forgiveness, and then? and then?
I have been dreading my birthday ever since the prospect was coming. On one hand I really want the opportunity to thank people who have been active in my life, who have been willing participants in the test project of Crisperiences. I also want to have fun and hang out with people in one room whom I would not normally meet in the same situations. I am curious to see how they interact, and to participate in that interaction. I am also expecting some show of love from those invited. On the other 'dreading' hand, I have raised my expectations of what will be, from presents, to speeches, to level of fun and laughter, very high, and paired that expectation with the prophecy of failure. I have pretty furtively been sabotaging my own opportunity for happiness by mentally projecting my negativity, and therefore my victim mentality, upon what I envision it will turn out like. So that then I can turn around afterward and told-me-so myself, and use the failure as justification for keeping a hidden sense of unhappiness, one that I tell myself in whispered terms that I deserve.
I began to realise this on the bus, talking to you. I was trying to defend my egotistic stance by twisting what I was saying, complicating it. I felt like I was being hunted - not necessarily by you, but by the truth that what I was saying was bullshit and weak. It was an inner hunt, a temporary chase and takeover.
I am very scared that I will not be grateful enough for the people that turn up to the party and those who put something towards making my night wonderful. I am terrified. So terrified, that I am envious whenever other people can be grateful and I feel I cannot honestly be. I feel I should be grateful and loving, and I know these are not thoughts I can muster up to equate what they really mean, but still I feel a pressure to live up to that standard. When I am grateful naturally, it comes beautifully - but gratitude cannot be planned and I think it will not come naturally when it is pressured by a situation such as in a birthday. I know you and those others whom I love have put in effort and are continuing to do so... I am aware that it is your love or something akin to love that contains glimpses of it that you pour into this putting-together... and I feel I can't live up to it. That is what scares me. I know you are giving, but I feel unprepared to receive, as if there is a cork that blocks me from really receiving love to my heart. Instead, that love is relegated to my head and it twists and turns and soon turns into dust, and over this ash I mourn. I am worried that I will take this love and turn it into ash. And I don't want to. I don't want to. I have done it so many times. You don't deserve your gifts to be thrown into the fire, but to be cherished. I want to cherish them, I do, and for that to happen, I need to uncork my heart, to learn one thing.
Forgiveness.
To truly overlook the mistakes of others, and so also to overlook my own.
The colour pink says that I'm learning to be brave in my beautiful mistakes.
I am learning to be humble. Complication as a habit is the opposite of humility, because it pretends to blow things out of proportion, to claim they are heavier, harder than they are in truth. I am surrounded by many who live their lives simply. Pride prevented me from thinking I could live my life simply as well, as if I had several heavier responsibilities that they did not have which complicated my existence. That was a lie I told myself, one that I believed in.
I want to simplify my life.
Step one, simplifying my mind. Think only when needed. Don't try to find answers to complicated questions about love and where it is. Instead, live this moment. I'm it.
I've been exposed to a lot of distress these past couple of weeks. I started reading Stephen King's The Shining and stopped at 68%, before I went on to read a less tensioned book in French, though still very intriguing (La Biographie de la Faim). A few days ago I finished that, so I went back to finish the King book. And of course, it climaxed, and got bloody, violent, and through feat of imagination, audible. I don't want to be disgusting, but the terror holds a certain thrill. I don't know what it is.
During the reading of the French book and then the conclusion of King's, I watched the second season of Spartacus, which was thrilling not because of the hordes of battle and sex scenes but because of something else, an element of drama that I hadn't considered much before - reversals. In each of the ten episodes, several reversals of power occurred, and I was engrossed enough to gasp at several of them. Surprise is useful. Reversals lead to surprise. And although I hunched that the title protagonist would not have died even though the principal antagonist hunted him down at every turn and injured him over and over again over several episodes, I did not anticipate the ends of other characters and the throwing off a cliff of some of the other plotlines. The ending made me feel a loss, the kind of emotion held in watching a ship sail into the distance over a calm sea. I rarely have reactions to television series like this - I recall having a similar reaction to Charmed's final season in 2005-2006, and in hindsight, Charmed was not even near as reversal-filled or gripping as Spartacus.
I mention Spartacus because it had its share of horrors. Blood, guts... moments when I put my hands up to my mouth in disgust at the graphic nature of the deaths of some of these extras or non-pivotal characters. I shan't mention.
Now I'm onto my next series of visual gore. I'm watching Dexter, as per recommendation by my brother. I am halfway through the first season now, and it's thrilling as well. The plotlines and the twists are interesting to follow, and the characters feel... human. Even Dexter himself, who is a psychopath and who cannot feel. There is not as much graphic gore in this series as in the aforementioned or as in Game of Thrones but there is its share. Its terror, rather, is derived from how disturbed I feel as a viewer. Disturbed at this protagonist who is trying to blend into society while carrying out his own sense of justice, hoping distantly that he may one day be able to feel love or remorse of some sort. It's fascinating to watch. He is different, marginalised, but uncaring on some critical level, non-conscience-possessing. Psychopath on the inside, so he tries to blend in, to hide in the plain of sight.
I am also watching the fourth season of Nurse Jackie, a series rife with dark humour, and weird characters. I enjoy that. It's unpredictable, and the writing of the dialogue and the scenes feels unreal, yet very human. The characters that surround the title character are peculiar - they have personal particularities that identify them when they pop up on the screen and the dynamics between them is excellent to witness. I'm impressed by this show. It doesn't distress me as much as the aforementioned, but it contains some element of humanness that I enjoy witnessing.
I can recognise myself in all of these television shows. Spartacus is full of horrible people doing horrible things to each other for power, yet their struggles and triumphs connect to some deeper nerve endings in me. Dexter continues to fascinate me, also on some human level. Nurse Jackie likewise. Charmed very much did. Even The Shining did on some everyday level. All of these fictions putty up truth in them. And although I haven't been able to describe what truths they speak to me very clearly, because I am not in the mood to analyse them, something in them makes me feel a sense of connection. I enjoy things that I can connect to, even if I cannot outright putty words together to say how.
