The Right Interpretation of Mary Sharma

I wonderwander. Amidst the great achitecture of language, I construct fragments and hope for pellucidity. I ask questions, I ramble on, I reiterate, I fumblemumble.

The desire for Communication: the reason I claw my skin at night. But throughout the daylight hours, I am curiously silent. So fucking detached, I cannot find an interpretive community. I felt real wistful when I read that Herman Melville was so giddyglad to know that Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated Moby Dick. Melville felt that Emerson understood everything that Melville was trying to convey when writing that long book.

Never underestimate the soulorgasm that occurs when you realize that someone else shares the same interpretive lens as you. I want a pen-pal who understands my poorly-constructed words. Don't we ALL? We sigh romantically when songs and movies supply us with the hope that TRUE LOVE WILL FIND US IN THE END! We are bombarded with images of an everlasting love, an everlasting love that denies the borders separating human souls. We fall for the popular discourses on love. How can we not? It sounds so pretty to belong, to have a space within the crushoftime. To forget our meaninglessness within the broader universal landscape, we must construct our little Babel of love, we clamor for pure communication. But maybe everything is lost in translation, lost in the troubling space of hermeneutics. Maybe love is a naive idea. Nonetheless, I am enchanted by the idea. Just like everyone else, I want someone to fall in love with me and know me as I am. 

9/20/2010

Postmodern Suicide Letter

I am overstimulated, swimming in images of anorexics and sounds by My Bloody Valentine. I cannot sleep anymore so I watch a film. Yes, a film--a collage of more images.

I like to watch The Long Goodbye or The Gradute. I relate to the protagonist's overall indifference and dislocation. I don't dig teleological narratives anymore. I wander in films... immerse myself in an image, in a feeling, in a flicker. So I guess this shows you that just because I like more avant-garde films doesn't mean I'm any more intelligent than the viewers of He's Just Not That Into You. Either way, we're just fucking spectators. The Dziga Vertov group failed. When watching films, we're much too masturbatory and voyeuristic to "engage in a discourse about the representation of the Holocaust" or whatever.

What was the Holocaust again? A song by Big Star, right? Fuck history. I'm running away to my own private diegesis, with my music and my favorite films. I'm killing myself in images and sound, such beautiful images and sound. Radiohead, MBV, early Godard (before he became all political), Big Star, MASH.

In one of his digressions, my English professor told us that if we kill ourselves, we should make sure to choose the carbon dioxide option, and to do it while listening to our favorite songs. Not a bad idea, really. My death is just slower and less dramatic. Either way, suicide is painless, just like that Mandel guy said! That is not to say that the suicide feels good...or bad. I am neutral, numb, indifferent, and overstimulated At least it won't hurt when I finally end, right? Instead of taking that dose of Advil my sister took awhile back, I'll take a tranquil dose of The Long Goodbye and Bob Dylan's "I'm not there," and e-ven-tually, I won't be there anymore.

french boy

i cannot eat, drink, sleep, study. i looked at someone who made me feel as if i was on fire.
he looks deep into the eyes of whomever he is talking to. he is gawky and awkward and confident in that. i don't understand him at all, i just travel with the motion of his hands. he constantly says "how do you say. . . " and that's how i feel most of the time.

hey hunks of the world!

today i felt swell. i drank lots of tea in my apartment and read a play. i walked around the city and went to my favorite tea house and drank a vanilla latte tea. i went to the video store and got Coming Home. unfortunately, i did not get to go to the checkout because i had to talk to someone on the dreaded cell phone. apparently, according to my sister, the man behind the video counter was lovely and scruffy and polite, and i would have totally dug him. argh, i was so sad i missed that. however, i fall in love with every scruffy gentleman i see, so . . . maybe it's a good thing i didn't see him. i have so far fallen in love with a man wearing a grizzly bear t-shirt in little italy, a man wearing a casiotone for the painfully alone t-shirt in a used bookstore, all the men at the used bookstore i regularly go to, a european in my class who reminds me of ben whishaw. my heart is pooped from all this love-at-first sight nonsense. . .

i am actually kidding -- i'm not falling love after first glance -- but wouldn't it be great if i started heckling cute guys on the street? you know, women are constantly honked at and men yell strange compliments from car windows. some women adore that, but i think it's unfair that women have to deal with that when men don't. so maybe i should start randomly shouting strange complements to the men.

"dude, your white v-neck t-shirt really accentuates your pecs"
or
"you look as if you could be sufjan stevens and rosie thomas' fake love child"
or
"you have the face of a Grecian god"
or
"now i know how it must have been to see lord byron face-to-face.
or
"i'll let you be in my dreams if i can be in yours" (dylan)

i think this is a revolutionary idea. if enforced, this could change the whole landscape of gender relations.

let's do this, girls!

“We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist."

The world is truly explosive with beauty. right now. but also, all the time, I just don't always have the eyes to see that, you know?

Yeah, I guess everything reminds you of something, but you're not everything anymore, thankfully. I think of you sometimes, but not a lot. I decided in the end of 2008 that I would no longer knowingly hurt myself. I would not fall in love with people who don't give a shit about me. I would not write long letters to people who never read them. I would focus my energy and love on people who care (a bit). Because it's not good to hurt yourself. Didn't Thom York sing "You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts?" Words of wisdom.

We are given life, and yes we all have mental disorders, but we have to overcome them and try to love and spoon and help other people because they're just as lost and scared as we are (most likely). Let's not waste our lives on thinking of people who don't even know our names. They probably don't know their own name. Let's just fake our names and run away.

So,

Today was explosive with beauty because not once did I think of anyone with longing. I looked at my life straight in the eye and realized that some people were not the people I wished them to be. Impressionism, impressionism. Reading Ford Maddox Ford's "The Good Soldier" was a revelation for me. You should read it, too, but mostly you should just hold the door for people, smile at strangers, let your fellow student borrow your notes, send valentines to your loved ones, send your nephew Halloween candy or Izze drinks, give change to the nice fellows playing music on your street, dance a lot, and tell your family/friends/folks you love them supremely.

secure spoon

i'm drinking peppermint tea. my sister made it for me. she feels the need to take care of me. i think she sees me as being very fragile. i constantly shatter things- i just broke this big glass pan. The glass went flying everywhere... I got cuts all over my legs, my toes, my fingertips.

I'm not dysfunctional. I can do things. I am very independent in the sense of how I conduct myself, obsessively so. I don't like anyone to control my behaviour, at all. But I do like people to comfort me. I like to snuggle and spoon and hug because it makes me feel I am in the cocoon, I am not vulnerable anymore, I am safe.

I think I only feel really safe in my dreams.

PseudoLove

I think that in some masochistic way, I used to like unrequited love. It was almost a pleasurable thing for me to have this person that I elevate. I’d listen to Chet Baker’s “My Ideal” and pine and think of how perfect that imaginary boy was. But maybe I always knew he was imaginary. In my diary, I always used words like mysterious, untouchable; in geometry, my teacher would talk about intangible lines, planes, and I’d think of him. He was always far, far away, so far away that he was like a one-dimensional fictional character, an intangible plane in space, a dream, a sublime hero in a poem -- the Lancelot of "Lady of Shalott."And I think, I was really, really stupid, and all that pining may just reveal that I didn't want anyone at all. Maybe I was just scared of love and all the baggage that comes with it. Maybe I’m so magnetically drawn to mysterious boys because they’re mysterious---they're close enough to be electrifying, without being too terrifying.  I no longer want to fall for some mysterious boy too quickly and create a false, highly mythical identity for him. I’ve been so disappointed in life because I have hugely high expectations, created by listening to too many love songs and watching Benny and Joon too much and reading too much Yeats and listening to Chet Baker's "My Ideal" too much.