Wheels within wheels

Yay! Got a raise and some praise. And a sort of warning this place may be going under some dramatic overhaul in the near future, but I’ll still be writing.

On to abstractions. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I'm in analysis is anything to do with entry requirements or mental health and more to do with being desperate for the opportunity to talk about things like martyrdom. Nobody's interested in that shit anymore. It's all why-do-people-suicide-bomb-this, self-immolation-that, tut-tut-tut-when-will-those-silly-people-learn. Nothing about what is so intimately you that you can't change it without being yourself anymore. At what point do you decide "this thing about me can't change, because if it changes I won't be me anymore"?

It’s hard for me at the moment – knowing a decision is going to seem selfish when your life up to that point has been made up of mocking selfish people who hurt the people who love them in the name of ‘finding themselves’ or whatever rubbish jargon baby boomers are using these days. And knowing that vast amounts of energy are going to have to be invested in saying, “So-and-So, I have to do some things that will hurt you, not because I want to hurt you but because I have to or my life will be wrong, and I love you” over and over until they hopefully understand.

Sorry if I’m being unclear. I’m not going to self-immolate or break up with my darling or anything like that, and the CSIS people whose computers started beeping when somebody typed ‘martyrdom’ into a blog can re-holster their guns. Let me try to clarify with two saints, my patron Catherine of Alexandria and Thomas More. Catherine is celebrated far more often in art and saints books, and her feast day is much more important, and she’s so popular as an intercessor that she got reinstated in the calendar in 2002 despite stupid fucking Vatican II pretending she didn’t exist, while Thomas didn't even get canonized until a few decades ago

She got done on a spiky wheel and when that broke she got her head done off. Thomas got his head done off too after he got off of getting drawn, quartered and hanged. They were both scholars and philosopher types, but Catherine didn’t leave any words and Thomas left a plethora, so back in ’59 or whatever Thomas got a great play written about him by Robert Bolt about the refusal to compromise the self.

If Catherine was as smart and philosophical as all that she probably understood her identification between her faith and herself and was content to die because a compromise of her faith would have meant a compromise of herself. But that’s not how the Catholic church used her; she and all the other early martyrs got used as examples of the surrender of the self, the complete compromise of the self, as the Catholic church became a tool with which to keep nations obedient.

I am not going to allow myself to get done on a wheel or get beheaded if I can possibly help it, but as I do things that hurt and confuse the people around me I have to make sure I explain like Thomas so I don’t get co-opted for other people’s purposes like Catherine, even if that means I don't, figuratively speaking, get canonized until 400 years after I die. You know what I mean, jelly bean? No? Well . . . never mind. Maybe next week I’ll write something that makes sense.

I promised you substance today . . .

but substance you shall not have. One or two science-esque articles instead. First of all, who here has heard of aural-visual synaesthesia? I think I have. A Finnish girl I used to live with claimed she could see music – or else that she could control the wind – or both. I was smoking my weight in reefer back then so I’m not sure. Anyways, I’m glad I learnt about it properly in relation to Kandinsky , who even for the most tone-deaf viewer would be a lyrical painter, I think. I’m fond of him.

Next, Figaro sent me this at work yesterday. I’ve had a thing about chimpanzees ever since I wrote a paper on The Second Sex that worked bonobo orgies into a discussion of human marital practices. That was back in 2000 and it was the point I started wishing we were more like bonobos than pan trogs and could settle our territorial disputes with lesbian orgies placated males sat around jerking off to. I’m not really into the ladies, mostly due to my unsurpassed laziness – when I look at a woman’s bits and look at a man’s bits and consider the pleasure of my partner, it’s like considering the difference between dealing with a rubix cube and a freshly peeled banana. But I’d dive muff if it meant an end to human strife, no question.

So it turns out that human beings have a closer genetic relationship with bonobos than to pan trogs, the normal chimpanzees who bash each other with sticks instead of have orgies to settle territorial disputes . . . that discovery filled me with hope for the future of our race, spuriously no doubt, but there you are.

Nonetheless, I assume the subject of the Guardian article was pan trogs since they don’t specify bonobo or pygmy at any point, and once more spuriously I thought that was interesting on a human level . . . identifying chivalry, you see, with what I think of pan trogs, and with what I think of the European social climate in which the warrior classes raised it to such cultural importance. It’s boggling my mind all of a sudden – an ethos to protect and encourage seemingly weaker members of societies in an environment only the physically dominant can be expected to survive – is chivalry a quantified example, I’m starting to wonder, of some great evolutionary leap forward?

And there you see my religion creeping out. I see evolution as an advance, a gradual process of perfection and becoming more saintly, which isn’t guided by a divine hand but was set in motion by it. That’s why I like to pick and choose my science, I guess . . . just looking at it as a bunch of pretty stories, like the Catholic Church was for me once.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

My tummy, my tummy, my tummy tum tum

I have the feeling things are piling up on me. First time since Figaro got here that’s happened – maybe my Catholicism is punishing me for the decadent indolence of Lady’s island or maybe I’ve been a bit of a general lazy tosser lately. I have to find a way to integrate sharing my life with someone and not being a lazy whore. It stresses me when the things pile up, you see, and there’s enough peripheral stress coming in from things I can’t control. It tells on me – my organs are starting to hurt a bit again, and while that’s probably from all the fat-binging at the cottage I know it was stress that brought it on last time. So I must deal with the stress.

The thing is the last time my organs started hurting, I was under mammoth and remarkable stress. The thesis and its defense, sharing a city with my psycho ex, seeing various controversial people again and all the rest of it. This time I’m not saying I’ve got no stress, and that everything is easy-peasy, but the sort of stress I have now is the sort of stress that I can expect about 70% of the time for the rest of my life.

I’m not daunted – I mean, last time I collapsed and turned yellow and slept for a few days, and this time I just ate vast amounts of fatty animal and have what feels like a little tummy-ache – but I’ll confess I’m fucking pissed I may have to adjust my diet permanently and that I can’t just let stress pile up and have a nervous breakdown like other people because my tummy starts hurting too bad first.

Al-riiiiiight! Did you enjoy that literal little navel-gaze? Me neither! I’ll be back with substance tomorrow, perhaps.

Playing through time

Back in Toronto, I think at the right time. I'd missed Lexie and being able to flush the toilet whenever I liked. But still feeling the effects of Northern Ontario's landscape - the most primordial I've ever appreciated. The glaciers scraped all the rock clean not that long ago and what grows there now is what's able to survive on exposed granite that bakes in the summer and freezes during the winter. The places that have gone marshy burgeon with all sorts of weird life, and the places that haven't have all these old, old plants - lichen, moss, and huge spiky trees that take the rocks with them when they get blown over. If dinosaurs weren't such cold-blooded wusses, you could imagine them walking around up there.

So that was nice. And we didn't stop eating and drinking all weekend, which was nice too. Lady has a beautiful cabin on a beautiful island, and I think being on an island makes it easier to be more decadent. I'm not sure how. But it did.

Anyways. Got back to news a stingray killed Steve Irwin and my old adviser has said he will, indeed, write me a reference. His intention is to send it to me, though, not the schools in question, which evidently proves he's a fruit. Has he never written one of these before? Fack. City headaches coming back. Now I have to stop being a punk about my proposal. Faaaack.

Any suggestions about where I can find the cheapest possible England ticket?