A Line Made by Walking
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Read between March 1 - March 10, 2022
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The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. —J. D. Salinger, from “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”
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The weather doesn’t match my mood; the script never supplies itself, nor is the score composed to instruct my feelings, and there isn’t an audience.
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must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head.
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But he was a sailor, and not a conceptual artist. I always forget about that.
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Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?
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About how flying and falling are almost exactly the same.
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Because people don’t want homes; they want show houses—only
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What was it about the sound of a DVD case striking the bottom of a DVD deposit box on a drizzly day in spring that made me feel so abruptly and inexplicably bad?
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The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and now I don’t think I can bear it any more. The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed.
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It’s a great lump of bronze. Brown and hard and twisted like the moon never was.
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I want her to waft free, and find me.
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Because structure and maintenance and pattern, and broccoli, are what sanity consists of.
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And for approximately the first three minutes of running, I feel spectacular.
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And so my father has every right in the world to be disappointed by the dog’s dinner I am making of the last life he gave up his own for.
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It wasn’t my parents who annoyed me; it was the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in their presence;
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‘I think about the gap, the huge gap between my life as it is and my life as I would like it to be . . .’
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But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.
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The artist’s last words to his brother, Wikipedia says, were: ‘the sadness will last forever.’
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think: there are only two directions, really. Away from home, and back again,
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Works about Lying, I test myself: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929. The painting shows a pipe, and beneath it Magritte has painted the words: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Because his image of a pipe is not a pipe, of course, it’s a painting. Every painting is just a painting.
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I lose even the puny, haphazard purpose I normally maintain.
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my insides are glutted with salt
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‘WHY CAN’T YOU LIVE A GOOD LIFE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,’ I yell at the telly, ‘INSTEAD OF IN DEVOTION TO A MYTHICAL BEING?’
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‘That was the magnificence of God,’ she says. ‘BOLLOCKS TO GOD!’ I yell at the telly. ‘THAT WAS THE MAGNIFICENCE OF NATURE!’
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I sip my drink. God is an abdication of personal responsibility, I decide. I like this phrasing. I sip my drink. He is an excuse for escaping the hardest parts of life. I sip my drink. My third, my fourth? God is history’s most successful scapegoat, I think, and this is good phrasing too. How good I am at phrasing tonight.
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But in the end, it only lasted as long as every day lasts. Immoveable, intractable.
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As if, in the instant which came before the stopping of her heart, she learned to swim, a second too late.
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It’s nowhere near Christmas, and I’m all on my own, and I’ve never been able to sing anyway.
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I am not sick, just lost. And lostness is an entirely fixable state.
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‘I’m okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren’t living up to other people’s version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest,
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find his stillness will do for me.
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I wake on the morning of my birthday, and think at once: now I know, with certainty, that it’s too late to be a genius.
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But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.
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And now I wonder why the fuck I bother, when there are already so many versions of me, writing down my thoughts.
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I follow his trail but I leave the brindled slug where he is. I assume he knows why he wanted to be there, what business he has with the bathroom mirror.
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But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.
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How do the flowers know it’s night-time? Why is the moon everywhere?
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I cannot bear to be the kind of person who simply watches television.
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I HAVE BEEN CERTIFIED AS MILDLY INSANE!
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Have I puked up my deadness now? Only dahl, only lager.
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I think about how this wide openness is the view I love best, and yet, if I was out there, how quickly it would kill me.
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Check your wardrobe for suitcases. Your life for the space a young white man used to take up.
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‘I write the world’s simplest poems,’
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‘Don’t feel guilty,’ she said. ‘Nothing good comes of guilt.’ She said it after I admitted how frightened I am that all this stupid sadness is chewing at my intellect.
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it’s time to postpone—if not entirely abandon—my burden of unrealistic ambition.
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But it isn’t fair to forgive myself so easily.
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My eyes prickle from the early cold, crying without my consent.
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You can’t dance to paintings.
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It is so utterly the end of summer.
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Please stop all the worrying and just enjoy the slow stars,
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