128- Atlas, At Last.

Atlas, at last
Don't let too much time pass.
For time is running out,
And I am just running about.

Direction, can't find it.
Desperation, can't hide it.
Faith- why fake it?
My life- just take it.

A frightening sight to see
The helpless, hopeless plight of me
Crashing ruins of that tower so high
Babbling, "Oh Babel," yes, that is I.

Fragility and futility
Intellectual capability
This inevitable duality
Causes great fatality

Crushed by the weight of the world
Fighting with fists clenched, fingers curled
Flattened, battered, beaten to death
Gasping for an unachievable breath.

Atlas, at last
Finally crosses my path.
Raises the difficulty with ease
And finally, I am able to breathe.

I'm sick of being tired but never sleeping. Sick of being hungry and never eating. Of being lonely. Merry Christmas.

I think I have a guess as to what "it" is... A sense of reality? Could that be it?

Even rebellions follow precedents, and that discourages me.

All I ever really want is for every piece of literature ever to relate back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

"I think, therefore I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." ?

I'm hungry for knowledge and thirsty for love.

On The Ups & Downs

Sometimes I am happy,
Those are good times.

And sometimes I get sad.
Very very very sad.
Now, I never get angry.
And on the rare occasions when I do,
I direct my anger towards myself.
It's not very friendly.

All the negative emotions, I try to avoid.
When they happen,
I ride out the storm.

When I get happy again,
It's great....
But always tainted by the fear
Of going back down.

On Intellectuals, and Niches

"If only I could find my people or my place in life"

Hmm.
Been finding more intelligent people to talk with,
But it's like the social bullshit you have to go through to get to that point of open intellectual discussion makes it not even worth it.

Honestly the only thing I can relate this to is the narrator of Invisible Man becoming a part of the "Brotherhood." Let me expand.

The narrator finally found something to belong to, to further his cause.
Turned out, it was a lie.
A light without the t. A ligh.

And well, that's all I can really say.
This shit is still an illusion. People still aren't "real."
Reality, what the fuck is that shit?

On Comfort Zones.

My whole life has been a series of comfort zones.
Trapped inside an electron cloud ya know?
More like trapped inside the eye of a hurricane,
A blind eye.

Shit, I'm getting so complex up in hurr.

Well. Over the last few years I have expanded my comfort zones, gradually.
A lot, yes, but not enough.

I am so far behind.
Yes, march to the beat of your own drum,
But you have to march. Not crawl. Not drag your damn feet.
March, bitches.

April.
And May
Be one day I'll March.

See what my mind has turned into?

Well anyway, I am so far behind. I feel as if the time for experimentation, to figure out how the world works, how people act/react in situations, has passed.
Everyone around me has already figured this shit out, and I haven't even started.
Where have I been?

Oh, yes, "on my own little island," reading books. Avoiding reality. Learning how fictional people act, assuming real people are the same way. Never.

However, It's Never Too Late To Start.
I know this!
Just makes me feel even more out of my comfort zone in the attempt to start,
But I'm going to start.
Tomorrow.

Tomorrow Too Late?


Okay, done with the references nobody catches.
I hate winter.
Going to read more books and avoid more people.
Good night.

Today, so far, has been a great success. A+ to me. Let's hope chem lab doesn't phuck it up.

There are currently 14 books IN MY BED.

Some sappy lyrics, mkay?

"You are the knock of my knees,the swollen sound of each song I scribble down and tear up, because they never match up. You are the words I fumble for. In the morning, you are the daybreak, and I am glad. And at night, you are the dream I fall asleep to have."

"At some point I'll call you and tell you I miss you, and you are the point of my days. And my face will get flushed, and my throat will choke up when you tell me that you feel the same."

"So tonight I will call you and try to say thank you for being the sun on my face. I know the world's almost over, but you make it seem better, and I hope for you I do the same."

All Kevin Devine lyrics.
Yeah I don't know. :3

On Jimmy Joyce

This belongs on my book blog, but i don't give a fuck.
Here are some great words from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

"The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended."

"The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet."

"By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him."

"He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered of of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death, but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe!"

"'Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless...?'"
(^that's a Shelley poem that Joyce integrated into the book, I love it).

"To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples."

"His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders."

"He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world."

"This was the call of life to his soul, not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar."

"There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth."

"His thinking was a dusk of doubt and semitrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had been acquanted with nobility."

"The ivy whines upon the wall,
And whines and twines upon the wall,
The yellow ivy upon the wall,
Ivy, ivy up the wall."

"Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates."
(An orator summarizes, poets vary their verses.)

"It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry."

Everything here just feels so stale. The air, the experiences.

I need to spend less time trying to be less lonely, and spend more time reading books that make me happy.

I had the most inspiring thoughts today. I tried to share them during my two hours between school and school, but nobody wanted to listen.

On Boxes

I am considering going back to my summer ways.
Of building walls and whatnot.

I was so good at faking it back then.
I am so not good at faking it anymore.
I can't even be real as well as I used to.
I can't even be real.
I can't even be.
I can't even.
I can't.

I can't even hang out with people to distract myself, because being around people upsets me even more. What's wrong with me.

It sounds silly, but I am always questioning my existence.

On Connectedness.

Hmm, last week I went through what I'd like to call an 'existential crisis.' I am not sure if that's a proper use of the term, but I like it for my situation.

Well, I wanted to die, but that's not important, because that's over now.

I suppose the best way to start this would be with Grendel [by John Gardner].

"All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal-- a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two dark, great realities, the self and the world-- two snake-pits."

That has been my attitude as of late.
I wrote a poem titled Nihil ex Nihilo (nothing comes from nothing, I believe, is the loose translation), that basically boils down to this concept.

I often find myself dillusioned with the idea that I am like those around me. That so-and-so "gets" me. No, we will never get each other. Depende de tu punto de vista. Depends on your point of view. We'll never see from the same point. I'll never get to the point. You can come close to see what's going on in my head (this blog is probably your best way to do that), but I mean, I don't even understand me.

All we ever yearn for is to be "got."
To be understood. That's all we crave, is understanding.

"But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in."
-Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

In order to understand things.... that's what we do. We connect things. That are completely unrelated. This post is a perfect example. Somehow, I have managed to relate Grendel to Stephen Hawking in order to better understand my concept of connectedness. I have always admired the ability of writers who can integrate many different elements into their thinking and writing, and it's something I've been trying to improve on.

Well, last weekend in my crisis... I realized the bare unconnectedness of the universe. Just like when you think you're on the same page with someone, and suddenly you're not... Everything that happened, you made up in your head. You jump to conclusions in your head, make unfounded connections. I had this realization, but with the whole universe. I was at odds with everything, and what it meant.

It's really fucking scary and confusing. I'm still not sure how I feel. But I woke up at 5pm on Sunday and decided I would be okay, and maybe if I held out for a little while, something would fall into place. And as of right now it seems to be working. A year from today I will be in New Jersey, whether at Princeton or Rutgers. I can't quite work out the connection as to why I love NJ so much (besides the fact that my favorite musicians orginated there), but I know in my soul that it's where I want to be.

Nothing really makes sense, and I have not too much to believe in, besides myself and my Jersey future. I am not sure which connections are safe to make and which ones I should leave alone. It's just really frightening to look at something and realize its solitude in relation to the universe. All importance we put into things is.... made up by our eagerness to make connections. You look at something, and it automatically triggers all sorts of memories or similar things. In one sense, I believe this is beautiful and an amazing quality of the human mind... But I am fearful that it can lead to a great falsification of reality.