this is one of my favourites paintings. usually i fall in love with paintings for the light (like this or this). but in this i love the colours. for some reason it reminds me of the feeling i used to have when travelling by train in india, sitting on the stairs at the open door. free. the excruciating pain of loss is just labour for the birth of freedom (which is just some people talking). what is better? to be alone & cold, or warm yourself on the borrowed illusion of warmth, that is the reflection of a fire on the window pane of a laughing family house, as you walk by.
the feeling of being expelled from the safety of home, i remember. but i also remember the stomach churning panic and grief turning into the exhilaration of freedom. the sudden scary-mummy-less-ness turns slowly into exciting-mummy-free-ness. a summer evening sitting with misc kids by a rail track that passed behind their house. waiting for the evning entertainment. the train that went by. colgate tooth powder. the communal screen showing sharabi. a classmates house. food warmth and a borrowed mummy. but she's not really mine, even if she says she loved me. the essence of mummy-ness is that she is tied to you and will not abandon you or let you freeze or starve. she will take care of you. but then you realise that you can take care of yourself. the fucked up teenage brain relaxs.
after an age, i remembered living in stockbridge. sometimes, something change us, and our lives so much, that we forget who we were before. i remembered walking home in the evening, past the basement flats, with one window open to the world. i remember looking in, from outside.
if i ever come back to edinburgh, i will live in stockbridge again. but will i come back? what does the future hold, i wonder. i wake up most mornings thinking about it.
finally saw "The River". SO DISSAPOINTING! Bad taste in my mouth. unfortunately it was the last of my movies of the weekend. i watch 3 movies from my lovefilm queue every weekend. this weekends lot was an education, heimat) and the (ghastly) river.
mesmerised by the idea of cognitive binding, at the moment. like for example whenever i say at the moment i remember hearing it in french in class with the bathtub example (lise saying my husband is in the tub at the moment), or that every time i encounter any article in any title i have the words THE end of THE affair in my head (and a moment when i was looking through musty library shelves trying to locate it).
i have insane amounts of work to do but i am taking a day off. still feel too sick to venture out. besides, i am still "speechless". i cannot even croak any longer. its still snowing. will it ever stop? im sick of the cold & the inconvenience. the snowpeople from yesterday have been ravaged by the wind, and covered by a fresh layer of snow. but in all its horrible-ity, the season will bring the christmas market, mulled wine in the park and my beloved robin. and the light ...
the afternoon light is slanted low. my city glows. the old grey stones blush pink. and then evening falls, and the sun is fractured and reborn. at night each street light echoes eerily off the carpet of snow. every sound is muffled. the solitary light outside the stone gate downstairs reminds me of narnia, sticking out of the snow like that. and little speech bubble hangs over it (what do you think of Sarkozy?).
after months of casual detachedness my patriotic loyalty has been reawakened! i think the festival should have been in 'my city', literacy rate or not!
as i struggle to focus on case studies of prosopagnosia, my psyche bombards me with memories of floating over a courtyard in california, patchworked with sunlight and happiness, a frown, and only one moment of acknowledgement. and many such memories. the war is necessary before the peace might descend. afterwards, we can begin again
