"Anna writes to me that she is fighting with her boyfriend, over how bad her housework is how he tells her he is an eternal child.
I want to be a great genius like Woolf or Kierkegaard, Anna writes me, but I am worried that I'm not smart or focused enough. I've lost the ease in which I used to write, I tell her. I want to write book of moral seriousness, of history and memory, and I don't know how.
I feel like its just outside my reach, to figure out how. Everyday I try to figure out how."
I woke up today at 7:30 am and called my mom. I had an anxious dream where her and I were on a journey back home on a bus in winter, and I was doing a terrible job calming her down. I tried my best to delicately take care of her mental state as if she would crack like an egg and splooge out onto me. It was a long, logistical, simmering, bad dream.
I feel pleased my subconscious sorted these things out -- that my sleeping life is very much in tune with the rhythms of my waking life.
Later, I went on a run, which turned into a half-marathon run, because at some point I decided that I wanted to prove that I could do it still. I could, but I was slower during the race. Still, the ability to get into cruse control for 3 or 4 miles was a great confidence booster, although the 7th and 8th and 9th miles were dreadful since my body began to crash.
Around the third quarter, I tend to panic. Just like the first quarter, I want to quit immediately. I wonder what happened to my ambition. Whats the point of panicking when you're in the middle? What can you do anyway!
Two notes from listening to "the Nose" by Gogol.
Gogol emphasizes the fleetingness of Joy - once the Major finds receives his nose back, he feels relief and excitement. He's gotten what he's wanted, what desire of his has been thwarted for the whole story. However whatever happiness he feels disappears as soon as it comes; the nose doesn't re-attach. It's just a pebble in a pond causing ripples. I love this metaphor. We're bodies of water, being manipulated - eventually falling into our resting states until the next event.
The story is full of people at the center of their own universes, bumping into each other. He shows how consciousness bleeds into another. We individually experience and hold views of the world that we circulate, consecrate, rinse and repeat in our daily lives that help us make sense of the world. When you look at it in this way, the world feels really big - impossible; and at the same time, very limited and only possible.
To loose the ease of writing - I've lost it too! I worry about not being in action, of losing things. At the same time, I'm not entirely convinced it matters, that actually the concern is just guilt speaking and nothing comes easy anyway.
I got coffee with a friend later today and he told me he was going to propose to his girlfriend but planning everything has been making him nauseous. I couldn't figure out what in his body made him feel that way. Maybe something was collapsing.
