it's never been like that, it's never been like that

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive — who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture — almost the precis — we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life — that's one way it differs from novels — his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite "in character", that is, in what we call his character. There's always a card in his hand that we didn't know about...My reason for assuming that I do this to other people is the fact that so often I find them obviously doing it to me. We all think we've got one another taped. — A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

Fall Left Me With This Winter So Cold

I've been feeling pretty much up to my eyes in music; I really haven't had much of a chance to listen to music the way I typically do, which is to say, I haven't had time to sit down and listen to an album over and over again. I'm actually craving silence.


Definitely at the top of my list of things to get this year is a pair of noise cancelling headphones. Forget the music, it'd just be nice to not hear anything at all.


The terrible thing here is that I honestly have not been in love with any albums or songs in over a week; I simply can't find a moment of peace. Wide-eyed in bed and the TV filters its way into my room; on the street the tearing of rubber across concrete rips my consciousness and I can't concentrate on listening to music. The constant elbow-to-elbow closeness of the buses and I hear more of their cell phone conversations than I do of jj or Four Tet.


I went back to Magus Bookstore and I bought another two books, this time Nicole Krauss' History of Love and Yann Martel's Life of Pi. I'm still looking for two novels by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby.


Here is a short excerpt of a story within The History of Love. The title for this short story is "The Age of Silence".

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only in sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one's face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one's lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I've always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

Aside from one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of seventy-nine fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for Sometimes when the rain, another for After all these years, another for Was I wrong to love you? They were found in Morocco in 1903 by an Argentine doctor named Antonio Alberto de Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever of the dysentery that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fists and fingers trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to a hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms -- if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body -- it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less. It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood.

 jj - "Troublemaker (Akon cover)"

Your Sword's Grown Old and Rusty

Today had some minor successes. I went into the Magus Books store and bought myself three books (believe it or not, only coming to $25!). I chose Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. About a month ago I bought Milan Kundera's Laughable Love. I am probably going to become Magus Books' regular customer, as I seem to have decided to begin to build the book collection of my dreams.


There is something to say about hardcover books. And not just the dime-a-dozen hardcover books you can buy anywhere, but the really beautiful hardcover books you'd find decades ago, with imprints and designs. Anna Karenina came in a wonderful green hard cover, with a protective sleeve whose inside is filled with a list of 365 other classic title. The other two books I found were, unfortunately, not hard cover, but they are beautiful nonetheless.


It's amazing how wonderful it is to be surrounded by books; I've always had a fondness for libraries, but the excitement of possible ownership of any book on any shelf is an entirely different experience (which is probably why I couldn't just stop at one book today).


And I have to say, the self-inflicted isolation is a marvelous break from reality; there is an immense burden that I've alleviated, and it actually allows me to reach out to people I run into much easier than before. I found that my choice to not talk to any friends or force contact with people has only led me to embrace the serendipitous occasions in which I run into someone -- today I found myself gushing to a girl I hadn't talked to since 10th grade. Without constantly checking my cell phone or keeping track of time or people, it's a wonderful release and an opportunity to just be out and about. I'm seriously considering deleting my Facebook and leaving my cell phone at home, and just to get rid of these socially intrusive tools that people use to excuse themselves from really caring about other people (while narcissistically forcing themselves on others with their frivolous status updates).


But at the same time I know that this type of social isolation isn't really a feasible reality. It's impossible to escape interacting with people; after all, I'm in this rat-race-of-a-world too.


Anyways, I am debating whether or not I want to use up another one of my 116 free breaks from this project. This Jamie Lidell album, Multiply, for all its merits, is hard for me to write about, and I don't feel like forcing myself to write something. I am pretty happy about the last two albums I reviewed, but I feel like my project is lacking in a more personal feel; if people were looking for music reviews, it would be more beneficial for them to look at Pitchfork or Popmatters.

Ughhhh

I hate being busy. Maybe it has to do with Milan Kundera's book, Slowness. Which basically discusses the relation between speed and forgetting. Then again, I could be honest and just admit that I hate being busy because I'm pretty lazy and would much rather be curled up at home with a cup of hot cocoa.

Which reminds me, I need to lay off the hot cocoa. It isn't even December yet but I've made a serious cut into my cocoa rations.

There is one overarching sound in my life, which is this: Ughhhhhhhhhhh.

I would like to play it all off, like life isn't corny and dramatic when you don't want it to be and painfully boring, despite the fact that you imagine you're the center of the universe.

And to top it off, my usual anchors, the people in my life that you can generally just drop a couple words by and feel like you're someplace safe, are scattered around the world, literally. I lost one to Uzbekistan, one to RISD, and one to time.

(Ughhhhhhh)

Oh, and if I may interrupt myself, I highly recommend Milan Kundera's works. Particularly Unbearable Lightness of Being, mainly because of the whole "lightness" concept which I find interesting. But also because it's a fairly interesting book with a very good plot and interesting writing technique. The majority of his stories follow the same style, in which a few characters' lives interweave and single events are seen at many different vantage points, with added philosophical meandering and just general poetry.

My favorite place right now is the UW libraries, among the book stacks. Unfortunately, I had a mishap and walked through section after section of books describing wars all around the globe spanning human history. It was a little disturbing, yet still satisfying to walk through and read some of the funniest book titles I've ever seen. And the Middle Eastern section of the library is full of beautiful hard cover books that look amazing. I like them even though I can't read any.