Listening: The local Spanish channel (Univision 41), so I can concentrate.
In the fourth hour of the morning, the vigilant observer may detect an anomaly in the teenagers' behavior: they are no longer actually watching the TV. They are listening to the sound of the fan in the projector, maybe, or at most taking stray words from the characters' voices and fueling their hazy imaginations.
It always seems very important to me, during the early morning, that I express this feeling, that I not let it pass with the dawn and fall asleep. But there's not much to say: I feel inspired, but have no subject. It's just that everything is so much more interesting, more exciting, when you're so tired that you regress to childhood and you find yourself thinking thoughts that were familiar then: "it's 4:49. 4 plus 4 is 8, how do I get to 9? 4 divided by 4 is 1, 8 plus 1 is 9; so (a+b)+(a/b) = c ... shit, now it's 4:50."
As soon as you move, even just to sit a different way, the feeling either changes or disappears: just in writing this I've almost lost it. Why does it feel so important to hold on to it? It's not really a feeling of being alive. It's just that words like "alive" are reentering my vocabulary. "Pain". I've been living off the words "beauty", "love", "morality", "ennui", "sex" - every feeling that you can make impersonal, intransitive. The words "trust", "honesty"...well, it's harder to think of them; these are the ones I haven't been using.
My sister and I walked to the pizza place yesterday, where she informed me that I was aloof, self-centered, and unavailable. I denied it, but it was true. This blog is helping, though. I know you've only seen three posts so far, but I have about five more in Drafts, and I think about it a lot. I ate with my dad at the diner on Route 303 this morning, and I told him something that I think made sense:
I know the answer to almost every question people ask me. That doesn't mean I'm smart, it's just that over the course of a day, nobody asks me anything I don't know. So it becomes easy to give automatic answers, and to simply let my mind wander - except that it doesn't wander, it falls asleep. And it's been asleep all summer. So I think I'm doing this blog in order to ask myself questions I don't know the answers to, in order to force myself to think, be creative, and eventually rejoin the ranks of sentient humans. And, as I assured my dad, to tune up my writing for those college essays I'm supposed to be working on.
How strange, to realize there's actually something wrong with you.
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In response to the last paragraph, people don't ask questions that you can't answer because people don't like to ask questions that they don't think can be answered. It just enforces that people can't and don't know everything, and people rarely like to be reminded of that. Hence religion. And science.
ReplyDelete--Lena
But that defeats the very idea of a question: people don't refrain from asking questions for fear there might not be an answer; they ask questions because they *want* answers. The possible lack of a thing doesn't preclude our asking for it.
ReplyDeleteAnd religion and science are both *all about* asking questions that might not have answers!
"...regress to childhood"...ha, I do that at all hours of the day! Keeps me alert during mundane tasks; when I run or swim, what keeps me from thinking about the distance that I'm going is obscure, pointless calculations like this.
ReplyDelete-Rishi
Excluding purely factual questions, people rarely ask questions the answers of which they don't think they can figure out. Or get away with inventing.
ReplyDeleteReligion and science are all about finding answers to the questions. There would be no need for them if people were okay with leaving things unanswered.
So because we have religion and science, you're saying that people *aren't* okay with leaving things unanswered. So why would they not ask questions about things they don't know?
ReplyDeleteOr do you mean that people don't ask /themselves/ questions they don't know the answers to? That would make a lot more sense, but this post was talking about regular old transitive person-asking-another-person questions.