Piano

I miss my piano. I miss putting fingers to keys, reading a totally awesome sign language, and making music my way. I miss dicovering new scores, I miss the sight-readings, I miss the elation when you get a whole piece right.

When I go home this summer, I want to have learnt 24 new pieces, you hear me, future self? Three for every week. Ack! I'm gonna start looking for 'em scores now.

Mary Shelley

'As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories'. Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air - the indulging in waking dreams - the following up of trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator - rather than doing as others had done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind.'

- Mary Shelley, 1831, Introduction to Frankenstein (or the Modern Prometheus)

The Stench

Death approaches on self-pity
It has a stench, like that of rat-infested longkangs
Strong, silent, of rotten eggs and cow-dung
Filling up the nostrils 'til they fume out

You can smell it, silence puncturing the air,
So you watch how, how it punctures it black
You are terrified it will suck you in
Your eyes limp, faces spent, muscles slack

Why are you afraid?
Life still echoes down your spine
Your brash youth has yet to recede
Why are we afraid?

Perhaps it could be contagious
Perhaps we too could start crying for ourselves

- Shu -

Sometimes

I truly thank God for all the people I have in life. There is this amazing level of love in me right now and I am feeling very contented.

My gift is writing, which is something I've known for a long time. It is hardly arrogance, because this inevitably includes the admission that writing is the one and only thing I can do without batting too heavy an eyelid. But I am changing. I am growing and improving and finding the transformation incredibly exhilarating. And the writing is changing - the lexicon increasingly exact, the drama less intense. Je me demande si c'est bonnes nouvelles? Because I know that my writing lives on roping people in on a do-or-die ultimatum, and often has a dramatic, almost surreal, edge to it that compulses a certain imagination.

What does this mean for me as a writer if I can only write when I am in my own pool of self-pity? Have I traded in my creativity for my sanity?

Maybe what I have to remember is that when I was 'insane', the creativity was induced. Now, perhaps some sort of real creativity will ensue. It has to.

Please.

God-structuring

God found me. This sounds as though God could never find me before.

I found God. This sounds as though I have more power than God.

Either way, the phrases don't work. God and I found each other. I was lost and then I was found. Why does 'found' sound so accidental?

Jane Eyre

'Hush, Jane! you think too much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement: the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you.'

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Did you cry a lot? ... you were cleansing the soul.