what i possess i see from a distance, and what has passed, to me becomes existence. faust, goethe.
david: got your message on goodreads. yo, when i started reading “the fountainhead” this weekend, i totally remember you pointing it out in your apt one summer, so long ago (like 3 years?) and telling me that you hated it. so when i picked it up this past weekend, i had you in mind. it’s good writing, the thinly veiled mccarthyism, not to my taste but i liked it overall. howard roark is an awesome, pristine character and even though she nicked him here and there with her propaganda dialogue — he was more than that? shoot me.
but i turn to more serious shit. i wanted something heavy so i thumbed through thomas mann’s “the magic mountain,” and then eventually decided on goethe’s “faust.” i had a german feeling like. i’ve had this book since i was 13, tried to read it on a forced trip to the getty museum with mom one balmy afternoon and i remember an old man looking at the cover with raised eyebrows. he was right in his sneer because after the first page i slipped the book into my mom’s purse and forgot about it.
saw the doctor a handful of times this past month. every contact is misery and elation. watched a movie called “running scared” with the roomie. in one scene of the movie, one of the characters, a 10 yr old boy gets kidnapped by a couple. the couple turn out to be pedophiles + child killers who videotape themselves molesting and then dismembering children. nothing explicit was shown in the movie, it was all implied, quick shots of torture devices + a freakishly neat playroom. anyways, this scene happens in the middle of the movie and fucks up the rest of it because the mind keeps returning to this disturbing scene. as an aside, the pedophile child killers are totally not pertinent to the plot or theme of the movie which fucks up the viewing even more because as the movie continues (the undercover cop triumphs over the mafia)— all of it doesn’t matter because that one fucked up scene keeps prodding you into a spiralling consternation. i relate this to the roomie several times and she says pithily ” i know, everything afterwards is a blur.”
which is sometimes how i think about my life post-doctor, post-adolescence. cause after tragedy and trauma, what have you? survival? yeah, i have a measure of peace now. but underneath myself, running parallel to my daily life is a constant throb of doubt that this is not real life, that this is not how it should be. and this other life, which is not lived, which is past and turned over and over in my mind is the one i should be in, am in.
that’s all. i have so much more to write but it would be repetitive. ishmael and i once discussed, as we talked around our personal traumas, of how people like us who had suffered abnormal, grotesque childhoods would forever “punt” their miseries with their significant others, effectively re-enacting the pivotal trauma in moments of intimacy. why, we whined. because we want answers goddamnit, though we know they won’t be found.
“insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
hey, but don’t let me get you down. let’s talk about books and poetry (another way of “punting”). i like anne sexton, feel like i should read shakespeare’s richard & henry plays. i will let you know how goethe goes but the thing about poetry is that it has rhythm to it and soon you are just reading silly, missing everything because there aren’t enough stops and gaps — and all of it, all of it is so slippery.
