portfolioooo-oooooooooo

I'm putting together my writing portfolio for college. The question is, what to include? Will the admissions people understand the "...s" on its own line in The Counting-House (and how the spacing of the letters is not typos but is meant to create a speedingup and slowingdown rhythm)? Will they wonder what the heck all that confusion in The Black Night's Alchemy is for (and that it represents an interior tumult of transient visions and phantasms)? And will they see absolutely no reason why the Reprise needs to be Sir Lancelot's (because the meaning of the poem draws from his mythological betrayal of honor for love or lust for Guinevere)?

Not to mention my stories. Will they understand that in Bells and Mist the girl does not throw herself into the water in the end but watches herself disappear into the mist? And the stories I've never posted on here because I always harbored a secret desire of publishing them and didn't want the publishers to google them and think I plagiarized myself? They have deep meanings and intricate symbols but are so hidden in metaphor that it's hard to understand them in words, they are meant to be just felt.

If I could send myself with my applications, it would be dandy, because I'd get to hover over their shoulders and explain everything whenever I noticed a confused look creeping across their faces. But although I am short, I can't stuff myself into an envelope, and I also can't send myself to four separate colleges.

And I was set against doing interviews because I know I'd be nervous and turn into a stuttering blob of stupid.

My writing is cryptic but I like that but I'm afraid no one will understand it. Or won't have enough imagination to get something from it.

the art of joy

What is so wrong with writing about happiness? It seems sometimes like, today, if you want to write a Deep book and have people actually read it, it has to be Doom and Gloom - no, that's even too cheery a title for what people seem to like nowadays. I forget where but I saw it described as neo-nihilism, or summat like that. It is very trendy to be a nihilist and it's even trendier to make nihilistic jokes and laugh about them with one's extra-sophisticated friends. It seems like optimism just... isn't marketable. At least, not if one wants to be taken seriously. There are plenty of venues for false cheeriness that doesn't really mean anything. But write a whole bit of literary fiction about how the universe is good and - ?

It's like society as a whole is in frantic pursuit of happiness. If someone is unhappy, he might go to a shrink and get some drugs to make himself feel numb. Or if he's a more sketchy sort he might just do drugs for the temporary high with no middleman but the dealer. Teens who do things like have sex without being in love say stuff like, "It feels good, why not?" Anything that gets in the way of one's personal happiness is a stupid obstruction - some even view their families as obstructions to themselves. Maybe the "intelligentsia" are doing what they do and rebelling against society, rebelling against happiness as shallow and devoid of meaning and instead choosing that view of life as meaningless so let's all just be empty. But those who have given up the pursuit of happiness end up trapped in the same behavior as those afraid of being unhappy.

I think what the world may need is just some simple optimism. Some real happiness that means something. Nihilism is arrogance... optimism is humility. No one wants to be humble nowadays. Why would we admit that we don't know everything? Optimism... accepting that you don't know everything and believing that there is something. Something. A purpose.

The world needs not to just want to be emptily happy and needs to search for a meaningful happiness which has nothing to do with drugs or empty relationships and etc. At least that's what I want - meaningful joy. Maybe one of the things is not just being happy because it makes just me feel better, but because the universe is beautiful, because the seasons change, for everyone else, for everything magical and for daring to stop denying that I am living in a miracle. See, nihilism comes with no responsibility. Joy does come with responsibility. I can't really explain it, but it's like the responsibility of believing, and of spreading joy, and of helping others in simple ways.

I want to believe. I want to be on the side of joy. I want to stop slipping away from belief - it's actually arrogant to do so... Like declaring that there is no purpose and just nothing is based on the assumption that the person declaring it knows everything. Which he doesn't, and can't. Now others' beliefs are for them and I can't and shouldn't change them. But I can hold on to my own beliefs.

Even if they aren't marketable.

For now, I'm tired of philosophizing. I'm tired of being tangled in words. I want to spend some time living simply. That awful tangle has never gotten me closer to anything, but it distances me from everything and everyone that I love, makes me feel alien to myself, and I don't want to do it anymore. It's high time that I finally cure myself of obsession.

wisdom and foolishness!

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness. May Sarton

Mingle a little folly with your wisdom; a little nonsense now and then is pleasant. Horace


I think that losing the ability to do things like have snowball fights, look at the sky with a feeling of renewal, and feel the full magic of every season is terribly sad. I mean, no matter how much knowledge one accumulates, all of the facts and theses and dictums are worthless if he has no wisdom. And wisdom, to me, has nothing to do with how much one has studied or how good one is at reciting a schpiel of information. Not to say that facts and information are meaningless - but they are not so meaningful unless something valuable is learned from them - not just an improved database of facts but a living and growing lesson in wisdom.

That's the problem I have sometimes with academia - why sometimes I view academia as grey and sad. I do feel so desolate for those who have reams of knowledge about some subject but have nothing real inside of them but dry cynicism. And it's also why sometimes I laugh at things like angst!poetry: when someone writes a painful and searing poem or something, and then goes out for coffee and talks bitterly about seemingly meaningless concepts that they may or may not have invented themselves, all the while pretending to wallow in a supposed agony of thought. It makes me want to hand them a pair of polka-dotted socks and show them real happiness - not just theoretical bliss.

Knowing this makes me feel better because I must admit to sometimes getting in such a wallowy state. Angsting about how oppressed I am by new scientific breakthroughs and the philosophical repurcussions of the discovery of such-and-such new chemical, throwing myself into a dark whirlwind of conundrums and hacking at questions to try to find answers - seemingly not being able to accept that the beauty is partly in the mystery itself. Such a dreadful and such a fake state, when every notion of happiness is batted away like a fly on the wall swatted by illusory theoretical nonsense. In short, sometimes I'm afraid of life because so many questions are unanswered, because so many theoretical problems keep surfacing. But really I think that what I really need is to twirl around in the cold autumn woods, to feel leaves cracking underfoot and to witness the sky wispy with spiritlike white clouds, and to laugh with friends about absurd things.

I think that one can know a very impressive deal of things, but really true wisdom lies in accepting and even praising the mystery, and having amazing faith that there is something that we cannot know. And not dwelling overmuch on this, but just loving the small revelations that can be found in all the secret places and even the obvious places sometimes... and never ever presuming to be too sophisticated to jump in piles of leaves and have snowball fights. That's it - I think "sophistication" is really a great ugly thing, that just sucks the life out of everything. Because it loves complicated words and carefully articulated cynicism, leaving no room for real life. And real life is going out on Halloween night, and going to any lengths to help a friend, and drumming up inadequate words to make things better for someone, observing strangers, and looking at red leaves falling and needing nothing else to affirm goodness. Wisdom is being happy to be unsophisticated.

introduction to consciousness

Unconsciously: half-formed thoughts not said. knowing something found a while ago. okay and then stirring of sour doubt. cycle of falling and salvation played out in a day. the dimensions. edges that aren't really frayed.

Consciously: cold autumn rain and wet leaves like bleary-lamp-post-Dickens-London. longing for somehow-knows-what. fiction and reality blurring so beautifully. the past trembles deep within somewhere, thrumming softly, and my fancy flies to the usual haunts: someone whose name I do not know walking down a cobbled street and Thoreau and Emerson talking like friends in Concord and Napoleon losing at Waterloo and men whose long black coat-tails billow out behind them and purposeful strides and the art of stance and worlds of spirit inside red leaves.

You know I want to write a more hopeful surrealism. Instead of something wrong just beneath the conscious surface, I want to evoke something unnamably beautiful behind the visible.

how

Blast it, it's been happening again. That pressing down feeling of scaredness. Blast!!!!! It's becoming greatly annoying, really. I had a very happy fifteen or so hours last night and this morning in which the world and the universe seemed right and being alive seemed normal. Then I was sitting there today and knowing it was coming back - but thinking, "no, come on, don't...": the feeling of alienness in one's own world - the disbelief in everything that I see and even everything that I am... I just want to give myself the gift of willful suspension of disbelief, of just letting go... It's like I want a vacation from my the parts of my own mind that bring that dreadful nervousness about.

But I still grasp tight to the stubborn wanting to know for sure, the not being able to just let go and believe, the wanting proof, the... Oh, I just hate when my mind twists itself to make me almost view the world as a joke that is not funny. I can't stand it really. I just want to live, but I am afraid that just living will not be enough.

It's not just the fact of glory-lust (of which I have), but also of the ache for something more made more painful and intense because I do not know what this "more" is. Added to this is the fact that I have almost resolved to save the world, thinking that if no one else will do it then I have to do something... And if I'm not as lustful for glory as Napoleon was, I admit to sharing his lack of trust and agreeing with his maxim, "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself." I'm such a dratted chicken when it comes down to it, though. I just hate it... it's like I do not even feel like myself, and because I am so often afraid, I often feel a stranger in my own identity. Oh, I love those times when I can just accept the world without questioning it. The rebels and the thinkers praise the virture of being able to question, but when one begins to question everything and when this questioning makes his firm beliefs evaporate from him, he begins to tire of the constant questioning and earnestly desire a blissful rest. I just don't know.

I feel something, but I don't know what. In these kinds of times I fear that I've twisted things up too much. In this state, I can't get anything done. Everything fades except my aching and festering disbelief. I don't want it, but there is always in the back of my mind the argument to believing without question: the dispute reads, "But how can it be that simple?"

Okay so freak-out the day before yesterday. I also know that solving problems requires some levelheadedness (something which I um lack) and that things can be okay. I felt pessimistic yesterday but I also know that I am usually optimistic, and believe that people can fix things and are basically good but just sometimes are too selfish and sometimes don't pay enough attention. And as (^_^) pointed out, fixing-things are being done by scientists &c. I just also do think that everyday people need to care too and need to do things to fix things too... And oh yeah. I worry about EVERYTHING like my life depends on it.

PS, It's getting colder here anyway. Thank goodness.

worried

Many times I think that most humans are not fit to run a whole planet. They get all their priorities wrong and are so bad at seeing the big picture. They seem to care more about the present as opposed to the future, never wanting to compromise their present comfort for the good of future generations. They take it for granted that their environment is intrinsically a part of them but have such a hard time realizing that they are a part of their environment.

Today I cried watching the weather channel. They've been saying there have been so many hurricanes this year that they've almost gone through the alphabet trying to name them and that the waters where the storms form are warmer than average, contributing to the turbulence in the area. The rain has been coming up the coast and October so far has not been cold and crisp but wet and humid... I was crying and yelling curses in my head at all the people, including myself, who either do not care enough or do not believe anything bad could really happen.

I mean, we can be bloody idiots. No one will care, for goodness' sake, if the weathermen say that a temperature a degree warmer than usual could have a negative impact on the soil or on the temperature of the water a thousand miles away. Why is no one realizing that a warmer temperature could mean the obliteration of all the things that we hold so unconsciously dear? Crisp fall days and frozen winters, Christmas snow and January ice on the windows, mild blooming springs and summers that are hot but not unbearably, blisteringly so?

Everyone is quick to talk about the Economic Impact and the Political Outcome but no one is appealing to the natural sensitivities of the people who could fix things. A warmer temperature - I cannot bear the idea of spring rain on Christmas day, or of humid sticky Octobers - tank tops on Halloween or sandals on Thanksgiving? Sure, people do not always consciously think that their climate is unalterably a part of themselves, but it is, and unconsciously people hold it so very dear.

Very often, I just feel like whacking people over the head with something heavy and blunt. Humans are so selfish. We want our own precious comfort and do not want to accept any responsibility. We deny things and drive our cars and think that the greenhouse gases are invisible so they're not real and only worry about how much the gas costs, not how much it is polluting. And the politicians all care about the politics of oil, and they must keep polluting, because think of how much the economy would suffer if we had no pollution!

And if someone says something else, that we must see the big picture, and fix things, he may not be taken seriously, but written off as a too-liberal environmentalist, and what in the world will make people listen?, and I am so scared that we will wreck the world, this achingly beautiful world of perfect precarious balance, with the sacred cycle of the seasons... And so I cry when I watch the weather channel, and hide and pretend nothing is real, and long that we were in the 17-1800s instead, and that the people with power had had some foresight and seen what starting to burn coal sometimes would lead to...

And I think that maybe some art is the answer, I mean, I am no politician but I do plan on being a writer, so maybe I could do what I do and write a book, and scare the people into caring... Like 1984 and Brave New World can scare people away from certain ideas about government and society, use words to paint a bleak and frightening empty world whose image conjured between the covers will scare the hell out of everyone who reads it, and this giant shock will shake them out of apathy, but it would have to be marketable, and popular, so the average person would read it. I've been thinking for a long time, and thinking that eventually I will have to take some responsibility, because I cannot love something and watch it die without saving it. And it would have to show reason, and be believable, so absolutely frighteningly believable, and I have to absolutely have to make people care.

consciously naive

This tends to happen to me a lot: something that seems charming turns out to be boring, annoying, or at worst, agony. Working at a cafetypeplace seemed charming but really I disliked that job muchly and am glad that I don't work there anymore. Now that schoolthings are making me think about college again, I'm wondering if college could turn out the same.

From reading my entries you readers probably know that I wanted much to go out of state for college and not to one of the public schools (reasons as follows, 70% egoism, 20% wanting adventure, 10% worry about academics and future job-ness). The egoism has luckily been checked, seeing as I'm usually a good student, but most definitely not the best and with complete certainty not nearly the most devoted. The worry about future job-ness is not as strong as it used to be, because I'm once again not completely sure about future job-ness, knowing that I want to be a writer eventually but needing something to do in the meantime as it might well take years and years to get published...

The remaining factor is the wanting adventure. There are (epic music plays) conflicting forces at play here. It seems that if one does not TAKE A CHANCE! TAKE A RISK! and move milesandmiles away from home to go to college, he is being BORING, he is refusing the principles of CARPE DIEM, he is MISSING OUT ON A CHANCE TO LEARN AND GROW AS A PERSON. I've been wondering whether or not this is true. As a rule I am afraid that my chickenish tendencies will lead to me missing out on life and thus feel pressured to try to make myself want to do the CARPE DIEMish things.

But lately I don't know what it is. The thing is that I'm not sure if the cause of me staying in state for college (if that does happen) would be 1) me being a wimp or 2) that decision being what I really&truly do want. And it seems like there is no way to figure it out. I'm just thinking about things, when I am at home, like this could be the last year I live here or if I move out when I am eighteen in less than one year from now I will never live here again or moving out so quickly will create a RIFT of sorts. You see, for a "teenagegirl" I'm freakishly close to my parents. There is no single trace of rebellion-against-parents in me because we are so close. I don't feel "READY" to stop living at home really, and I just DON'T KNOW if it is because I am afraid.

I am afraid of growing up in the sense that I am terrified of losing innocence: of one day waking up knowing that the glorious wonder of lifethroughachild'seyes has gone away. So I really do tend to guard innocence like a precious thing, refusing to let dirty-seeming problems come near me. Innocence leaving a child seems to me to be a great tragedy. (It's kind of like Holden Caufield trying to erase the swear words from the halls of an elementary school because knowing dirty words would be another step away from innocence for the children.) Yep, like Cassandra Mortmain (in one of my favorite books, I Capture the Castle), I am more than a little bit consciously naive in that I make an effort to keep away things that could make me less innocent...

In comingofagestory type of books, the character moves from being a child to being an adult by realizing that there is a whole life to experience and the character can't truly live by being sheltered like a small child. I am just afraid that if I move out into the Adult World, I'll destroy something completely precious and irreplacable.