'Stuff goes mad on the peripheries'

[dolorosa_12]

As the year is about to end, I'm going through my old organiser and trying to work out what I need to transfer. I'm an incorrigible scribbler, and the book is full of random quotes, brain-vomitings and other stuff that make absolutely zero sense unless you know the context. I decided to transcribe some of it here, because it amuses me.


[Note: stuff in quote marks is, unsurprisingly, the words of other people. Stuff not in quote marks=my own words.]
6th January
'Everyone is wearing brightly coloured tights or reading the London Review of Books in a funny hat' - Article on Hampstead, Tanya Gold.

10th January
They talk about porn, but as usual no one has any idea about fanfic.

24th January
It might work as a short story about in the War of Heaven and Earth universe, but why would God/community of Heaven need human limbs/organs?

27th January
My imagined utopia is a dystopia.

8th February
Fen eels.

14th February
Autumn-bright voice
then suddenly fire.
'I feel it in my bones.'

17th February
'On the one hand, who you are in highschool is who you'll be forever, and that's very wonderful. On the other hand, who you are in highschool is who you'll be forever, and that's terrifying.' [Can't remember the source of this quote, but I think it's in reference to the Harry Potter books.]

5th March
'The phoenix alive'.

19th April
Dream - I could fly
- I was a slave
- I was being pursued by a terrifying woman
- I wound up with an abusive father on a rough bush track, defended his daughter and he threatened me
- I was in a cabin with Duke of Edinburgh people
- I was in a palatial hotel/department store, flynig around the ceiling (which was festooned with glittering, jewel-like lights) and the terrifying woman chased me
- I was among fellow-slaves in rural Ireland. A little girl died, demanded proper burial
- I was at Harvard. They were doing brain surgery on me, in a race against time, as the woman had removed something from my brain and was gaining on me. Everyone was fighting her
-I was begging fellow-slaves for help in burying the girl, and we were in a boggy field, covered with mud; they were digging pumpkins. Still I was pursued
- my name was Jillian.

9th May
'Rushes into my heart and my skull'.

10th June
People around saints act in a more normal, socially-acceptable way so as to stop the saint's behaviour being completely beyond the pale.

27th June-16th July
Review of A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin.

29th July
'I'm not going to knock you down
but I'm not going to help you up.
It takes so long to turn you around...'

Dallfocal='dark word'.

1st August
'Things you find in the far east correspond to things you find in the far west because stuff goes mad on the peripheries.' - P. Sims-Williams.

4th August
'See away/ to the north-east/ the splendid sea/ whale-haunted'.

29th August
'That I think nothing could be wrong'.

26th September
Noch einmal!

20th October
'Saw the northern lights above/ the eclipse of the sun'.

21st October
When was coffee introduced in Europe?

31st October-2nd November
'Run, whirlwind run'.

4th November
Causal sentences. Come at me.

7th November
'Doing it for the thrill. Coming in for the kill.'

21st November
'To tell the difference between die See "sea" and der See "lake", taste the water.'

28th November
'Though I know it's asinine, I respect the production design' - The Nostalgia Critic in his musical review of Moulin Rouge

'Rushes into my heart and my skull'. [Sensing a theme here?]

5th December
'Like punching in a dream/ life's tearing at the seams'.

'For I am done with my graceless heart/ so tonight I'm going to cut it out and then restart'.

6th December
'Well the heart is hard to translate
It has a language of its own.'

15th-22nd December
[A truly pathetic countdown 'One week!!!!!' 'Six days!!!' etc.]

Comments

[isigfethera.livejournal.com]

'See away/ to the north-east/ the splendid sea/ whale-haunted'. -Love this! Is it Old Irish?

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

See, I can't actually remember the context. It's written in the days in my organiser during which time I was at a Celtic Studies conference, so it's highly likely to be a quote from some paper I heard there.

Google isn't throwing up any results, and I have a strong feeling that this poem may have been invented on the spot by a speaker to illustrate a certain point about metre or poetic content. It is beautiful, though, isn't it?

[isigfethera.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's beautiful, and it reminds me of Old English poetry and whale-roads and the imagery of the cold but beautiful sea. I need to read more medieval stuff, I miss it. *sigh*

And I enjoyed this post! :)

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Old English poetry has beautiful sea imagery. As does the Irish stuff. One of my favourite Old Irish poems begins: 'Old age has overcome me in the manner of the sea' and goes on to compare life with the ebb and flow of the tide. It's wonderful.

[(Anonymous)]

"I'm an incorrigible scribbler, and the book is full of random quotes, brain-vomitings and other stuff that make absolutely zero sense unless you know the context. I decided to transcribe some of it here, because it amuses me."

Tell me about it. Bipolar mania is (for me) basically one long continuous high speed brain vomit, which is why it never makes any sense at all to an outsider even when its actually not so bad in context.

"It might work as a short story about in the War of Heaven and Earth universe, but why would God/community of Heaven need human limbs/organs?"

Is the context of this a talk about Real World Religion?

My answer as a Christian is two fold:

1) Its about wants, not needs
2) God is not Omnipotent *in the sense that most Christians understand*, because its a confused notion that combines ideas from Greek Philosophy and Jewish Theology


"My imagined utopia is a dystopia."

I should hope so! Imagined utopias that are utopias are always the biggest dystopias.

"On the one hand, who you are in highschool is who you'll be forever, and that's very wonderful. On the other hand, who you are in highschool is who you'll be forever, and that's terrifying."

Hmmm. I see what this says I think, but I don't know. Brain Science now says changes slow down to a trickle around 25, not 18, although they do get more subtle in that window. And while that fixes some things, the stuff you put into the brain, which also has importance, changes forever. A year ago I was neither a Christian nor a (genuine) Feminist.

Thank you for the blogs!

- Love Jordan

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

"It might work as a short story about in the War of Heaven and Earth universe, but why would God/community of Heaven need human limbs/organs?"

Is the context of this a talk about Real World Religion?

No, it's in the context of a dream I had, where angels were killing humans so that they could harvest their organs. (And the first thought I had when I woke up was whether it would work in the universe of a story I've been writing for years. The answer: no.)

Re: the highschool thing. I think it was a quote from a review of the Harry Potter books, deploring them for displaying this attitude (that is, that one's personality and morality in highschool remain one's personality and morality for life). I, like you, don't believe that one's highschool personality is set in stone, and, like you, I became a feminist in later life (although sadly not after thought and reflection, which seems to be how you arrived at that view, but rather due to some pretty shitty stuff happening to me).

[(Anonymous)]

Lol. Context INDEED important. I was taking "limbs/organs" in the metaphorical sense employed sometimes in Christianity (believers are "the Body of Christ"). Which will probably make my comment make a lot more sense, if it hadn't been clear already. That dream sounds interesting though, you should write it as its own story perhaps!

As far as feminism goes, I wish I could claim I deduced it from first principles because I'm Such a Genius. But I became increasingly and unpleasantly aware of Shitty Stuff Happening to women in the context of my own life (although obviously not first hand.) I had a strong framework of ideas about morality and humanity from other sources, that happened to be heavily tied into modern conceptions of privilege and kryiarchy (AFAICT), once I figured out how to translate from one set of terminology and concepts to another. And I had your repeated linking to the awesomeoness of Sady Doyle, which really is what catalysed my thought process to synthesise the above into my current views :-)

As it turned out, I also had a lot of pent up personal dissatisfaction with the gender system, for reasons of my own that were inchoate and unarticulated at the time, but almost certainly part of what drew me to feminism on a subconscious and emotional level. See:

http://noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/who-cares-about-mens-rights/

One more thing. Scribbling on paper = so 2008. And I know how you luvz the intrawebs with a passion. The tools for brain dumping into The Cloud are increasingly good, whether from computer, smartphone or tablet.

See for instance http://workflowy.com (theres' effectively a usydgroup one of these now!) or http://ww.evernote.com, for instance. In the worst case scenario, if you're determined to stick with the dead tree business and then transcribe it all later, with the latter you can snap photos of what you've written, and it will do Optical Character Recognition to turn it into searchable text for you.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I've finally got a spare moment after the extreme busyness of the Christmas/New Year period, so I can respond to your comment properly.

Thanks for the link to No Seriously What About Teh Menz. I actually ended up reading the blog through in its entirety, and although I found much with which to disagree, and some of the commenters made me want to tear my hair out, but the posters have their hearts in the right place, and a lot of what they wrote was very interesting and forced me to reexamine some of my own beliefs, which is always a good thing.

One more thing. Scribbling on paper = so 2008. And I know how you luvz the intrawebs with a passion. The tools for brain dumping into The Cloud are increasingly good, whether from computer, smartphone or tablet.

I feel here that the operative words are 'smartphone or tablet'. Most of my random thoughts pop into my head in one of three contexts:

1. When I'm in class;
2. When I'm running, walking or otherwise in transit; or
3. When I'm sitting in a cafe.

I don't own a smartphone or tablet (I'm planning to buy one or the other for myself as a 'finishing my PhD' present), and so it's hard to get these kinds of thoughts online as they appear in my head. So I think I'm going to have to stay low-tech for this.

[jordan rastrick (from livejournal.com)]

Hey I can google/fb login now! Sweet.

Do I have a comment in moderation, or is it merely enqueued in my own mind, by way of having drafted and then lost it and then forgotten that I lost it?

Cheers,
Jordan

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

You do have a comment in moderation, thanks for reminding me. I've been mostly offline during the Christmas period, but I will approve it and reply when I have a bit more time.