Cable District

We spend so much time trying to describe, or transcribe the things we find affecting into one form or another. When I hear certain songs it can be extraordinarily overwhelming, somehow someone managed to demonstrate the beauty in their thoughts purely with melody. It’s amazing but regular. I see a lot of things that I think are beautiful, that I find beautiful, it is common to me.

I remember the Med Sud album by Sigur Ros, it’s only this year that I’ve been able to listen to it without just crying, I still get teary to it now and then, some songs, my word, some songs are enough justification for all of existence, it’s all worth it, all this time and chance, to come up with that, for that to be manifested. All meaning is applied anyway, but that’s as fine a meaning as any other I can think of. It’s not sad obviously, just beautiful, although I guess that is an oversimplification. I know how this sounds so if you’ll forgive me the way I’m treading terrible cliche I’d be grateful, but I see beauty more as an emotion than a thing, for me at least, in the same way something might make you feel sadness, happiness or anxiousness some things can make you feel beauty. It is it’s own experience, distinct and separate, for me it’s a heavy feeling, euphoric but with an underlying melancholy in parts, and almost always overwhelming, it totally engulfs.

Separately, the holiday is fine, there has been a fierce thunderstorm going on tonight and I’ve been on the balcony watching it. I’m going to the zoo this week with the family, and kart racing and hiring a jet ski then I booked a hotel in Brisbane CBD for the upcoming weekend so I can see some friends. 

I’ve planned to see Kieran independently, he’s very quiet in a group setting but he is usually the one with the most interesting things to say. I’ve known him for quite a few years now but we’ve only become friends this last year, before that we were just acquaintances. I knew him from his group and didn’t have all that much interest in him because he refused to be drawn into conversation and would rarely offer an opinion without being asked, forced even, but we began writing to one another online and his full personality came across in it.

So that’s why I’m trying to organise an independent meeting, away from his friends, especially Simon whom is Kieran’s best friend, dear lord if only Simon would shut the fuck up half the time he could be worth having as a friend, but his constant talking coupled with his poorly rationalised, reliably subversive opinions are exhausting and confounding.

Anyway Kieran is reluctant to reply to my requests at the moment as lately I’ve been writing cliched love prose to him for the fun of it, he’s an easy person to unsettle and I’m fond of people like that, it’s a great deal of fun saying or doing things that leave them staring in amazement/horror, not in a malicious way of course, no humiliation or anything like that, just, sort of, social taboos or shows of extreme emotion that even if they were genuine they still really ought not to be expressed aloud. For instance, my last e-mail to him began with this:

"You’re like the sun that shines during Spring’s eve, a quiet, nearly mournful moment where latent heat and light reach those who happen to be watching the scene, as each moment can only be important to a handful, a few, and I am there, in that evening, watching as you fade and cross through me, branches, leaves, air and ultimately the atmosphere. Just watching this phenomenon that is taken for granted, this giver of life and chance, a cosmic coincidence unlike anything else known to us, felicity, providence, whatever name means the most but that which still crumbles in the face of the weight of meaning we desire, of it’s importance… and still I am here watching, you, Kieran, my Spring sun, my love, from the deep forest within me, just watching, focused on you, with love in thoughts."

That sort of thing puts the fear of hell into him.

Actually that reminds me, Brent and I were discussing the idea of writing a novel which focused on the aesthetics of word usage, with a stock storyline and characters. So the novel would be focusing on hideous, contrived and often nonsensical prose that is deliberate in it’s attempt to sound poetic, but failing spectacularly, cheap poetic cliches that read like the song lyrics you find in chat program and face book personal quotes. Descriptions that sound nice which mean nothing or the other end where the prose is overly specific. I don’t expect we’ll ever do it, mainly because it’s not that interesting but I do like the idea of getting a book like that published. One giant in joke sort of thing.