Mimi is Rallying

Owing to a long span of artistic lethargy I haven’t been able to record anything since my departure from korea. Nothing by way of event happened, to be fair, but I have been feeling a lot. In effect, I was spent completely from the attempted breakup; my emotional capacities having been shot to the extreme, absolute sensitivity, I felt vulnerable to the slightest assault (or the intimation of assault) – including the inevitable state that follows this sort of ordeal: insecurity in his love. For over a week since returning to Berkeley (oh - depressing Berkeley!) I roiled in this impossible condition, which is unbanishable even as it is unsustainable . . I wept bitter, bitter tears at every opportunity; the breakup haunted me ceaselessly, relentlessly, and the results of trying to cope with such lancing retrospective scenes in this current emotively raw, infirm state, were grisly.

He seemed cold. Not by design certainly; in fact he was as persistent in his assertions and reprotestations of love as anyone could be, under those circumstances or elsewise (and oh, how frayed his own resilience must have been, too!), but at that point my recovery wasn’t up to him, or anything he could have done. Or said. It wasn’t even up to me, I don’t think. It all seemed so hopeless, so without solution – and I knew, in that turbulent, ravaged, poignantly tortured state, that peace would only be attainable in the form of God. Something beyond us. Nothing else could possibly allay the aching contraction of this soul, that sharp longing for love that was absolute, certain, unconditional, responsive, devoted to me.

Today, weeks and perhaps even a month later, after several occasions of strife between us (the times I felt infinitely pathetic, desperate, and pride-lacerated as I called him weeping, at odd times of the night, sleepless and restless, begging for love he could not procure; if he did, I did not and could not believe in its sincerity - how could I?) we’ve tasted the ascent to recovery. Our love is wholly restored. The problem now is, how do I reconstruct my artistic pith? It’s so ominously odd not to feel anything anymore. I’ve simply had no urge to write or draw or anything in weeks and weeks.

It’s time to write again. I must. I don’t know what it takes to get me passionate, but I must will myself to become so. I can’t live like this anymore, lethargic, soft-minded, counting down the hours until my boyfriend presents himself available, day after day after insufferable day. Reality is that we are apart spatially, and there is only so much we can do to satisfy one another’s emotional appetites in such circumstances; no, his emotional support is sufficient in providing me a stable, becalmed emotive footing on a daily basis; I need means of a more immediate sustenance, the soothing of the more vigorous, ambitious, fretful, and urgent demand that is my artistic inertia.

I don’t know when it crept up on me. Perhaps it is the influence of living so far in seclusion all the bloody time, which attributes to this unshakable state of unmotivatedness. The days of impassioned writing on a weekly, no, daily basis seem a lifetime away. Did I truly consider it my obsession? Did it truly come so naturally? If so, where is it now? Why is it so pathetically difficult to compose a single e-mail? I need to reassert myself back into that ambience. That frame of mind which enabled me to fabricate and dissect worlds, lifetimes, characters and villains. Let me purge myself of this lethargy, this anxiety, this insecurity, this prejudice against my own writing.

It’s a curse, this sodden ego. Even as I write this very entry does my conviction limp away, does my good intentioned agitation peter out to a milder, meeker cadence. What am I waiting for? Why can’t I inflame my own will to something recognizably lifelike? What have I become and why can’t I care more? My mind feels like a piece of stiffened tissue somebody once wiped their nose on. It feels dry and marshy at once, reeking neglect. I wish I could start a story. I wish I understood what this all meant. At the same time, there is something verging on deliberately evasive in the attitude I employ for my self-study. As if I know, very well, that I’m not in any condition to make sense of things yet. That something is still broken and rattling. I have no desire to read or record diary entries of this past winter respite, these past benumbed months. It taxes this worn organ here cruelly.

Ghosts

I know. Now is not the time for this.

But I found a peculiar entry I’d written in some online journal some years ago which gave me some entertainment. Without further ado:

My thoughts are shrouded in velvet as they bump against the stuffs of dreams.

Soft peals of laughter.

I stare matter-of-factly at his face, unlined, smooth, aristocratic, black-eyed. Of course he is familiar to me; I have illustrated that face many times in my narrative. My own creation now looks back at me with that queer, tilt-headed expression I know so well.

“I’m not neglecting you,” I say guiltily, suddenly out-of-sorts under all his placidity.

The same laughter, from somewhere to the left of him. “I was almost afraid of her never showing up,” Lady Shiemi Telamur confers with him audibly, the graceful arc of her fingers touching the skin of his forearm for the space of a second or two. Both are amused, I see, to my annoyance, but there is something else.

There is always something else.

“I’m not neglecting you,” I repeat, this time addressing the both of them. His eyes remain flat; her lips remain curved. They are not convinced. Can I blame them? Neither am I.

A third figure enters the scene, without shimmering or ghosting forth to announce his presence; he is simply there the moment I turn my head.

“Well, well,” the newcomer says, approaching the others in his wide-legged gait. “What’s this now? Why have I been summoned?”

“You summoned yourself, fool,” the Lady Shiemi says sharply, but I am pleased to see that her eyes skip over his thickset frame, the look too brief and too soft to be anything but the raw underside of the emotions. She has not changed; and she will not – I think to myself, subdued – until I do.

The newcomer,Tyaoris by name, smiles with his brows drawn low, a fox peeling its lips back to reveal teeth. “So I did.” The intensity of the blue in his eyes, as he turns his head to acknowledge me for the first time, is startling.

“Are you afraid?”

I swing my gaze back towards him. The man whose calmness unsettles me.

“Afraid!” the Lady Shiemi exclaims, “You can hardly be more afraid of him than you are of the very thoughts inside your head.”

“That’s right,” says Tyaoris, “You created me.”

“Like you created all of us,” says the placid man. The last word contains a note of something I cannot understand. Sorrow? Gravity? I then recall his name with something like a shudder. Jostayn Roen. My proud ambassador.

I hear footsteps behind me, which lets me know that my perception of them was intentional. Menaihya could walk through a field of bramble and not be heard. I turn and see her gazing fiercely at me. Which is to say, the rest of her face is as blank as the cloudless, shapeless sky that drapes us, washing us in strange, unnamed colors.

She says one word.

“When?”

Soon. I will start to do the things I love again, soon. I will start by writing.

It isn’t a recuperation, by all means, but look: my conscience prods me further away from ruin, a little bit closer towards activity. That should count for something, at least.

Okay, back to paper.

In Time

Thanks to Whitelatte, whose charming, most deliciously kind comment on another website concerning my blog suffused me with new inspiration (to write today’s blog entry, at least), I shall set aside my papering for the night and come directly – here.

The truth is that it is not so dramatic a move/sacrificial gesture as it sounds; the fault lies with the professor of my Victorian Period class; everybody knew the typo on his paper prompt actually indicated Friday as the deadline, but he insisted today in class that it was only fair that he moved the deadline to Monday, three days subsequent to the previous deadline, because the typo had read “Monday the 6th,” not “Friday the 6th.” As if people had actually dared to hope.

At any rate it’s a rare and wonderful thing, deadline setbacks, and believe me - I am grateful. It’s just that I was counting on the panicked condition today’s papering would inevitably wreak in me to provide the drive to get this paper out of the way, so that I would have the weekend “freed” up for a second paper, due Monday. Instead, the unexpected boon of a couple of days’ gain to the first paper has sapped away all said tension; consequently, tonight I found myself spending approximately two hours riffling through clothes online I would never bother to purchase, composing a few emails, coming to my sadly neglected blog to write a post. How can I complain! Anyway, research and pages of scrupulous notes notwithstanding, I had nothing to say about Tennyson.

So in the quiet space of my room, I write. I wish to record an incident from a few weeks ago, which I described in the following diary excerpt:

I was in a discussion section just now for my class in Shakespeare, and for some reason I left it feeling happier than previously. This self-heightened, self-initiated and self-monitored recuperation of spirits is a curious thing; in utter silence I swell and deflate, in countless loops, with little or nothing to motivate the rippling dynamics – nothing save the exquisite gyrations of my psyche. There is something dangerously flexible about its inflections, and something completely unrestrained by spatial and physical bounds, something ungoverned by laws of the Appropriate, Rational, the Reasonable, the Real. I wax, I wan. With nothing but the nature of my whims as pilot.

In the discussion section I wasn’t charismatic or overly assertive (I kept more in than out), but I did express what I needed to, the passion I felt for the subject providing me drive to articulation. And I felt that what I said were satisfactory; I felt good about myself. I felt good about what I am doing – which is studying literature, connecting with the text in a fashion that involves exercising the very faculty I value most about myself: my function for analysis, perception, imitation, interpretation.

At this moment in time, I am content purely for the fact that I believe I am doing what I love to do, and also what I am best at. What relief, that those should be synonymous! It is a rare thing, and I am duly grateful. The sun is quite soaking me in heat to the bone. I await the bus to arrive, tired from my vigorous badminton playing from last night, but at peace and pleased at the knowledge that it is, at this very minute, Friday afternoon. Right now, I like being here. I enjoy my status, lonely and pseudo-miserable as it gets sometimes. I am grateful for everything intellectually this place is doing for me, to me. I love what I do, and if I don’t love where I am or who I am, those things will follow suit, in time.

And suddenly I am tired. I can’t identify the reason with any absoluteness, but perhaps it’s because I still feel mildly harrowed from the pressure of my looming paper(s) (one of which could and might and may have been done with tonight!), or possibly it’s because it’s nearing midnight and I didn’t pack too many hours of sleep last night due to a strange and random feverish state that has fallen on me of late, or perhaps I am just muted in general spirits right now. There is and has always been an underlying condition behind all these shows of insecurity and instability and persistent discontent, and I feel it needs to be addressed somehow, confronted at its roots - but it’s just so baffling sometimes. I don’t make sense to myself. And that as always is a tiresome idea. Redundant creature!

Looping

I am experiencing a strange phase in which words don’t come to grasp when summoned. The things I write seem dry and overworked, spewage from a tired and indifferent mind, a tired soul. I’ve grown accustomed to the days of solitude, days during which I don’t utter a word to anyone, days when the muscles of my face feel taxed when meeting an acquaintance unexpectedly on the street – because of the effort made in the simple act of smiling.

But solitude isn’t a new concept for me. I don’t dislike it, exactly. It is this indifference I have a problem with. I wish I could find a way to imbue myself with the desire to seek out people, and human company! I’ve grown much too comfortable with the absence of pressure related with having to arouse my social sensibilities to life; or, in other words I’ve grown far too uncomfortable with social obligations, the give-and-take element involved in communal interdependence. I’ve become my own unit, complacent in relying on nobody else to dictate my schedule, my habits, what I feel. It’s come with terrible consequences.

Because I’ve lost touch with the connection that binds people to the obligations, conduct, and protocol associated with socialization, because I’m no longer acquainted with these concepts, I come off as an eccentric figure, a not exactly antisocial character, but one that behaves just awkwardly enough to give a strange impression. It makes people slightly wary of me, and to keep a distance from me, which I can’t help but reflect because that is the nature of my perceptive, conscious, cautious character.

So then it all loops back to the beginning, and my inability to want to be social feeds on my inability to be social – and bah, such madness. Such a sad, ineffectual thing, playing at dignity is.

Somewhat Self-induced . .

My room smells like rotting apples and stuffy carpeting, no matter how many times per day I air it out. The situation calls for a trip to the supermarket, where I will purchase several fragrant candles. I’m squatting in the middle of the room to write in my diary despite that absolutely nothing elapsed in the ten days since my previous entry – however, because I’m thoroughly inebriated in the most pathetic, brain-frazzled manner (from days on end of sitting in front of the computer screen – oh, idle waste!), I thought to force myself into a break and jot down a few words.

Orientation passed without remarkable . . well, anything; I didn’t try hard enough to be social to deserve the right to be disappointed, but I was, though granted, I wasn’t expecting much to begin with. It was a tiresome affair, with hours of sitting through presentations and trying not to seem too conspicuous in my discomfort as I wandered through the seas of noisy, overhyped international students – Chinese with their thick accents, Europeans with their high-nosed arrogance, Asians who, without their yellow skin, could pass off as Americans.

Everything just tired me, the lectures on culture shock, the descriptions of Berkeley, the pride in their elitism, even the gaggle of Koreans – to which I belonged and drifted with for a time – that complained in their nitpicky, obnoxious Korean way throughout the tour; I wanted to go home; I wanted not to belong to this category of people; I was darkly observant and skeptical. This entire experience of America, of Berkeley and its excellence, its so-called diversity, seems like a faded affair, a tiresome thing, a phase I am forced to go through in yet another unexciting chapter in life; which is pathetic, and stupid, because I chose this, I chose everything, and why must I ruin everything? What sort of psyche is mine that perversifies every experience I have and am entitled to in a way that leaves me deprived and hating? What are these boundless standards and insatiable expectations? Why do my emotional faculties cower whenever they are called to the test? Enough on that for now, however; I don’t know how to fix it and I don’t know whether I should even if I could.

Here start these unromantic beginnings.

Untimely Bouts of Selfishness

It doesn’t quite feel real, things. There is great tragedy here, but I am not the one afflicted. I am the girlfriend of he who is afflicted, and I am at a loss as to what exactly a role that entails. My own feelings of loss and pain can only be absolutely faint and puny and selfish in comparison, and yet, this repeated surge of indignation towards blame that does not lie with anybody, a world that continues functioning without the slightest bit of sympathy towards what is only one tragedy among millions, and a God who seems to punish, not love . . .

How can God allow this to happen? How is this remotely just? And then again, there is little fire behind my anger towards God; which I think is the result of my constant chagrin regarding the affair. Do I despair for him, or do I despair for me? Am I so heartless? In highschool my friend’s sister died, and I did not shed a tear; does my world and capacity to feel extend only so far as myself?

I am not naturally a dry-eyed, stoic person, at least when it comes to my remorse, my losses, my pain, my sufferings. But what is this inability to feel, on any level of sincerity, for others? Even those as close to me as my boyfriend? His father is dying. I am powerless to uplift his spirits – I am even powerless to try; I am pathetic and heartless and at a loss as to what is the proper way to behave. I do not know what is appropriate and what is not, which words will console and which words will offend, sting, fall cruelly on smarting ears and heart.

The important thing, then, is for him to, despite the crudeness in my endeavors to comfort him, recognize the sincere pity and sympathy and sorrow behind it all – but alas, that is where I fall short! I despair because I know my limits so well. I despise my self-centeredness. But even such self-deprecating, repenting, remonstrating thoughts will do nothing on elementary grounds; I still feel a rebellious pulse of indignation on my behalf, at my defense. This simply is not fair! As I await my boyfriend’s return from the room where they keep the near-death patients, I sink into an uneasy but lifeless stupor . . .

Retrospection

Somewhat frightening, all this blank space. I do not know where to begin, and I do not know whether I am doused enough, of late, in Inspiration to continue once I have. Can I commit myself to the exquisite cadences of writing once again?

Better start now than later. Especially as my darling Lucy (otherwise Violet) has begun to be wonderfully active in terms of writing since her departure to Germany, and it’s most intolerably rare that we’re both writing at the same time.

What has elapsed? Nothing, and everything. The semester has passed by, a reel of spring flora, rainfall, filming, Ilsan escapades, and 15-page papers on Nietzsche, and it was surprisingly insipid considering it was my final semester in Korea before my exchange program in Berkeley. Then again, why should it have been anything more? Why do people have these expectations on things that are “final?” Last year of high-school, last opportunity, last chance, last week of vacation, last few days of life itself. There is that romanticization of that final, exclusive experience, even as one is sorrowful at the notion of things “ending,” all the while anticipating, positively or negatively, that which awaits them in the soon attainable - but as of yet so inconceivable! – future. What am I sorry about? Departing all I have come to associate with South Korea in the past three years, I suppose. Saying goodbye to Violet. Leaving this life, this subway-taking, bakery-frequenting, shoe-shopping, convenience-store-foraging, busily-street-walking, emotionally-looping life, behind. For a year, that is. For only a year, yes - and yet I get the feeling that things will not be the same once I return. (There, forming expectations again.)

What do I anticipate? I anticipate a year rife with fresh experiences in San Francisco, California. I anticipate beach tans, libraries, bipolar weather (according to my brother), grinny Korean-Americans, lean-fat ham, Costco cheesecake, friends, camaraderie in English. What am I guilty of having romanticized? These last few months in Korea, in which I had hoped, rather naively, to reconcile myself with this country and its culture and its people. I suppose I can’t say I’ve failed. Proof of that is in this strange, unexpected byproduct of a slight reluctance in leaving. No, not really. Reluctance has too strongly a certain nuance. A slight doubt, let me call it, in the thought that the best is really ahead of me. Once I mentioned this to a certain professor and I read in his face a judgment of pessimism and cowardliness, which very much displeased me. It is neither of those, I protest to myself! I have merely been seasoned to being less romantic, that is all.

Leavetaking is a strange psychological process. I can’t believe it hits me anew, every time.

Sepia Reflections

In the process of rummaging in nether regions of my various personalized cyberspaces, I found this snippet of an entry I wrote several years ago. While I hardly believe it’s perfect, I think it was with a fairly lucid mind that I peered into my inner self as I wrote it. Ensuite, here is a list of pseudo-philosophical reflections by a teenager whose world had just been uprooted, jiggled about a little, and replanted in a disorderly fashion.

Albeit the fact that I have multiple, by which I mean three (I love how Aristotle adds all those insertations beginning with the phrasal “By which I mean . . .”), papers to work on, and despite the fact that I left tonight’s meeting prematurely in order to do just that, after writing on Jinny’s homepage I felt an urge to leak out some of this internal disarray.

Did happiness and its point of origination have to have a linear relation? We were all meant to be poignant. It is the way in which we express that ball of roiling sentiments within us that makes the difference. Our maudlin tendencies are what make us less animal.

Bonds are only meant to be broken.

Is this the subconscious mindset I have adopted since embarking on this new road? Why am I so reluctant  – so scared, I daresay – to shed my iron defenses? It is a phase, I tell myself frequently. “This too shall pass,” was ever the comforting catchphrase. Unfortunately, it may be too late. The characteristic of reputation is that it sets its basis on the first impression.

I am rediscovering myself.

I am learning my strengths, my weaknesses, my limits, my tendencies, my beliefs . . .  And I’ve come to the conclusion that I carry a complicated persona. However, mine is an entirely predictable complicated persona.

I am melancholic because I am an artist, and I am an artist because I am driven by my emotions. Those emotions, in turn, spew out of me in artistic forms. I channel my poignancies through writing, through drawings, through expressions.

I am, ultimately, driven by the health state of my heart. Therefore, accepting the fact that I cannot be unfeeling, undenying that I am not indifferent, must be in itself the first step towards stability.

My strength is also my weakness.

My happiness is gleaned from the world’s acceptance of me. My own view of myself is a pitiful blend of feeble vanity, disgust of the lowest sort, and dry skepticism. When people love me, I love myself. When people hate me, I despise myself.

I demand perfectionism in all aspects of my being. Everything I do and am must have a particular degree of excellence, and at the point when it doesn’t, in lieu of pushing myself, I crumple.

Despair over my failures is often the source of depletion of my confidence levels.

I spurn pity and yet I am not hostile towards it. When people are sympathetic, I welcome their attention. I in turn am sympathetic, yet oftentimes I am insincere. Frequently is it a spurious smile I smile. My facial expressions and I are two separate and very different entities.

I have always sought stability. My instability scares and repels me, though sometimes I am horrified at the inhumane capacities to which I find myself willing to feel. My selfishness knows no bounds. Is it stability I desire, after all? Haven’t I countless of times in the past felt a paradoxical pleasure at pain? (Both mine and in what amounts I have exacted from others?)

What have all those tears left me?

A sallow stain. An aching, fluttering pulse. A faint tart aftertaste.

Bitter dregs.

Who am I? I’m not certain I know anymore, if ever I did to begin with. My personality has been rendered muted. “Who I am” must consequently be linked to “what I want,” and that, essentially, is the query to which I cannot supply an answer.

The unknown frightens me.

And then I recall.

The known scares me more.

Inkmaids

New project underway. Lucy and I decided to collaborate on a story together, which both grips me with unmanageable excitement and intimidates me. The latter because this sort of thing will require commitment that I can only hope I can spare, at this oddly preoccupied stage in life. I’ve never been apt at splitting my dedication (and obsessiveness) to two things, and I have to say, I’ve been fairly (re)obsessed with Wheel of Time of late.

A toast to the Inkmaids! And our first installment to come.

[Addendum] It’s done. The account is set, and the first post is ready for dear Lucy to take up. Without further ado, I present Dames of Deceit.

Friendships, Diaries, and the Man of Feeling

I just had a long cyberchat with my good friend Anna, which lasted two hours and consisted of nearly seven-hundred lines. Though we drifted around a bit, we eventually settled on the topic of friendships, and this is the wholesome subject that tugs mildly at my thoughts now, upon the conversation’s termination. “Friends,” I told her at one point, perhaps with a touch of premature complacence, “are not meant to make you love yourself less. It should be the other way around.” Premature indeed. Within moments I would have realized that such statements turn a sickly shade of hypocritical once my lips form them. Not particularly because I think that I am a bad friend to have, which is debatable, but because I have never followed that philosophy, if that is what it is. I have never even thought about it until that moment.

Or have I? How many times have I wondered whether friends can be friends and yet be rivals too? How many times have I nursed this wretched soul, wringing it of jealousy, telling myself firmly that such things are wrong, and perverse besides? Can you be jealous of a friend? Can anyone be as singularly selfish? Self-loving? There’s a whiff of irony that I cannot solidify right now. My head feels like a stuffed nose.

So I’ll create a short out of this, and tack on an irrelevant diary entry instead. (Addendum: Or perhaps comment on tacking on an irrelevant diary entry.) My blog entries thus far are so unorganized, so slapdash, that it makes me writhe with mild OCD sensibilities. (There are some of us, some very close to us, that possess ones that are slightly less-mild in degree.) I happily look forward to the day when I can allow myself the liberty to access the Internet whenever I wish.

I take out the small, hardcover diary from somewhere within the becluttered confines of my bag, and riffle through its leaves. My writing is tiny, compact, filling the pages with spidering black script, and I can’t help but feel a small satisfaction. It’s something that makes my pride feel very stout to know that I have the ability to record my feelings throughout the passing of time. In bits and pieces, to be sure. If I’d been able to directly transfer my cogitations to paper each time they arose, I think I would have kept very fat journals so far. Admirably fat.

But the beauty in keeping a diary because I can! It is strange, though, how what recurs through my head most often is whether I can find a way to publicize my entries or not. I don’t quite approve of these wants, even as I originate them. There is the principle of the thing. How contradictory is it to publicize a diary! It only sounds halfway decent when the diarist is dead.

What exactly is my intent in wanting people to read my entries, anyway? From as far back as Junior High I can recall having wanted this very thing. Perhaps I have this longing to have folks read my thoughts, peer into the firework of my emotions, and exclaim at how wonderfully complex they are. Are they though? Am I not mistaking immaturity for complexity? But more to the point: what of the ability to be able to transform my emotions into words, words that act as eloquence and coherency to that vicious psychological tangle - ? I have not mastered it, but I admire those who have.

I discussed the importance of classics with some people recently, and at one point I listened as one fellow spoke of an interesting book which explained that there was once an age in which one equated the mere acquirement and storage of knowledge with intelligence, and power perhaps, but today, we’ve stepped into an age when there are excessive and overabundant means to knowledge, what with the Internet and countless ways of interaction with the most first-rate sources, and the definition of intelligence, therefore, lies in the personalization of knowledge. Long sentence. But it sums it up completely. This is why writers have that much more of an advantage: because they, from the start, have that ability to make what they learn their own, permanently, by fusing intellection with interpretation, and a lot of things besides, such as being particularly choosey in the knowledge they aportion out for themselves.

How privileged I am then, if I am a writer! I knew as I heard it that this description fits me thoroughly. I am choosey in that my writings are not mere summaries; they speak of what is important and personal (emotional) to me, and they are the result of the information having undergone not a screening but a painting process, or even a sculpting process (although I approve more of the paint analogy for the reason that it intimates the addition of colors, and the vivid alterations that it must bring). Today, at least, I am proud of what I am able to execute. Today there is not a shred of doubt in my mind as to what my identity is – that of a thinking, feeling writer.