Dennis Hollingsworth

Vanititas.

One of the rewards for writing is rereading one's own writing. It is the pleasure of indulging in a kind of mathematical-like poetry in the combination of thoughts/words/sentences/paragraphs/etc. ...not that this is aparticular exemplar of this kind of thing this moment. But the reach for music in a string of words is a good start.

I think I actually feel the squirt of endorphines right now, this moment.

A weblog is a kind of diary and therefore a rolling first draft. One of the pains of maintaining a blog is to repeatedly encounter one's tics, conceits, the horizonal limits of intelligence. This darkly revelatory form of confrontational self knowledge stems from inability to edit and refine one's blog entries, especially in the way I am living this summer furtively surfing as I do from ambient wifi. The quick edits on the fly as I used to do before is not possible here.

Rereading one's blog is like taking a long look in the mirror, frankly encountering one's flaws and shortcomings. Wrinkles from the years, scars from that pox so long ago, the curdling turn in the jelly and yolk of the eye sockets, the burnt away dermal elasticity, exhausted flesh draping over a protruding skull, that slight with which you so unjustly harmed a friend long ago, the many ways you had fallen short of being the good son, that train of indulgences that took the place of responsibility once upon a time. I may be self flagellating a bit now, that too is a shortcoming.

Vanititas.

Oh, so human, "all too human". So mortal we are with our reach that will always fall short. But then again, we do reach, don't we?

I think of the lyrics in Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" :

I used to visit the very gay places
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails.

The girls I knew had sad and sullen grey traces
With distant gay traces
That used to be there you can see
Where they've been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o'clock tales...

"Twelve o'clock tales"? Here in Spain, that would be four, five and six o'clock tales.

All of this and the only saving grace is that we care to strive at all. To live is to struggle after all.

I love how the rhyming words fly: "...where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life!""; and then a moment of zero gravity at the crest: "...to get the feel of life...""; and then the fall with the appropriate symbols that point towards death and mortality and therefore, self knowledge: "...from jazz and cocktails." Maybe life and therefore G-d is a process of garnering self knowledge, the G-dhead issuing itself into materiality and mortality, a divine ejecta propelled away from the absoluteness of itself, a forgetting of oneself in order to extend into experience and self knowledge? The sea throws itself ashore onto the rocks breaking itself and mixing itself with that which is not the sea, another which is not itself: the crust of the earth, the air of the sky above.

No wonder there is so much life at this edge.

Maybe the reach is not a reach unless you risk the fall?