so I always knew who e.e.cummings is, but recently I have been looking at his poetry and I find it amazing. Some of it is touching- romantic, but in a modern way- makes me curious about his life- and who he loved and what it was like... his writing makes whoever his love was sound like the center of his universe- i hope he was as much to her...

ODE TO SLEEPING NAKED

in honor of my roommate being away

The freedom of your bare skin gently exposed in the cool air. The soft caress of the sheets moving across your body. Bare arm presses to feel bare breast and one bare leg slides over the other. How natural to have nothing on, covered in only blankets... how much easier one sleeps and how dreams are so much more vivid... bare shoulders peek out from under the layers of warmth- hair lightly falling over them only slightly shielding the cold... snuggle up and once again it is bare skin on bare skin- the smoothness sliding over and together... the last sensual innocence left...

I recently finished Camus's The Fall. It was amazing... so much so that I wanted to document and share some of the quotes I found:

+ His silence is defening. It's the silence of the primeval forest, heavy with threats.
+ Anyone who has considerable meditated on man, by profession or vocation, is led to feel nostalgia for the primates. They at least don't have any ulterior motives.
+ It always seemed to me that our fellow citizens had two passions: ideas and fornication.
+ I walk for nights on end, I dream or talk to myslef interminably.
+ You go in, they draw the curtians, and the navigation begins. The gods come down onto the naked bodies and the islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it.
+ After all, living aloft is still the only way of being seen and hailed by the largest number,
+ Some people's problem is to protect themselves from men or at least to come to terms with them.
+ I have learned to be satisfied with understanding. It is found more readily and, besides, it's not binding.
+ Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to dinf out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out.
+ Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor with us?
+ But it's not easy, for friendship is absent minded or at least unavailing. It is incapable of achieving what it wants. Maybe, after all, it doesn't want it enough? Maybe we don't love life enough? Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us?
+ He has two faces: he can't love without self-love.
+ If pimps and theives were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent, cher monsieur.
+ Life became less easy for me: when the body is sad the heart languishes. It seemed to me that I was half unlearning what I had never learned and yet knew so well-- how to live.
+ The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.
+ Power on the other hand, settles everything.
+ The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone.
+ I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
+ I loved them, according to the hallowed expression, which amounts to saying that I never loved any of them.
+ ...Almost all the women I have known seemed to me better than I. Nevertheless, setting them so high, I made use of them more often that I served them.
+ I often changed parts, but it was always the same play.
+ Some cry: "Love me!" Others: "Don't love me!" But a certian genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: "Don't love me and be faithful to me!"
+ The act of love, for instance, is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.
+ Men are never convinved of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death.
+ In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.
+ They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it's quite possinle to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them.. So what's the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action.
+ To be sure, I knew my failings and regretted them. Yet I continued to forget them with a rather meitorious obstinacy. The prosecution of others, on the contrary, went on constantly in my heart.
+ A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists.
+ Don't smile; that truth is not so basic as it seems. What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.
+ Otherwise, were there but one lie hidden in a life, death made it definitive. No one, ever again, would know the truth on this point, since the only one to know it was precisely the dead man sleeping on his secret.
+ We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming.
+ Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?
+ At a certian degree of lucid intoxication, lying late at night between two prostitutes and drained of all desire, hope ceases to be a torture, you see; the mind dominates the whole past, and the pain of living is over forever.
+ Day would come softly to throw light on this disaster and I would get up and stand motionledd in a dawn of glory.
+One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
+ Fortunately excess of sensual satisfaction weakens both imagination and judgement.
+ The indifference that already had such a hold over me now encountered no resistance and extended its sclerosis. No more emotions! An even temper, or rather no temper at all.
+ God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
+ The unfortunate thing is that he left us alone, to carry on, whatever happens, even when we are lodged in the little-ease, knowing in turn what he knew, but incapable of doing what he did and of dying like him


and lastly...

I am not worried about my safety, but about my presence of mind. I am also eager to block the door of the closed little universe of which I am the king, the pope, and the judge.

Last night was what I needed... he was who I needed... :)

You know, I dont know that I ever got over that one- I had so many other things going on in my mind- it almost feels like it is now that I am getting over it--- now that I am finially hurting over that and not hurting over everything else I had weighing on me at the time. Finially tears fall for the loneliness I am feeling- always said that I didnt need anyone- always had to be the independant one- relationships come and go and somehow i am still in the stage where I cannot see my self in another one, but that yearning is coming back... It is as if I have woken from a sleep and found myself naked and cold in a New York alley--- so exposed--- so alone- I wonder if somethings will ever stop hurting or if I will carry it around with me forever- i dont know-- but you would think after all this time, the pain would dull a little..

III
The comfort of another person
Holding you deep into the night
Is a privilege
Reserved for those who love
And are loved in return
But for people –
People like me
Who don’t know what love is
It is a failure
The warm embrace
Safety net of hope
Dispelling the fears
If only for the night
The one need-
Never getting filled…
For some-
It’s a privilege
For me-
It’s a failure.

how disheartening that they are all the same...

This whole life has just been constant stumbling, trying to find the balance. It is such a journey to figure out your boundries and convictions. I do not know that I ever learned the difference between right and wrong- but these recent years has been such an experiment... You get the idea that one day is going to hit and bam you will be grown up- i am not so sure that day will ever come but i think things would be a lot easier if it did. Everyday I learn new things about myself and grow just a little bit stronger than I ever was before... I look back to when I came here last year--- everything so new, the world so big- I thought I knew so much and that I could deal with anything- it is interesting, not only how things change, but how they really cause yourself to look around you- again and again.

AHHH procrastinating yet another paper- ahh and i cannot type tonight either- sitting here too long- the kierkegaard paper is all but done- a few more meetings and a couple more rewrites and perhaps i will have my a, doubtful though- we will see- the prof. is so intimidating- my meeting tomorrow will be about how much i suck writing and why am I am english major... he does it everytime... ahh... but he can shove it- skinny pompous ass little old man... grrr... but somehow I will have all of Kierkegaard engrained upon my soul and Kafka not far from it... I guess that is somewhat of an accomplishment--- now if I can only get him to tell me "good" a few more times--- i am determined to win this incredibly bitter troll over :)

I know that it has been a long time since I have written anything happy or good, but I might have been inspired I used to think that the tormented writer was the more successful of the writers, but I am not so sure anymore. When I am upset I fail to see the beauty of everything around me... I miss the simple things that I love- the way grass or rain smell. The birds singing after a long winter- the way the sun usually wakes me up in the morning. There are somethings that will make your life amazing if you let them- No, I am not so sure what I am going to be "when i grow up" or whether or not I will succeed- whether I will ever write the way I want, the way I imagine...and I dont know if I am going to ever know what love is or have a child... but there are some constants- somethings that are so much greater than our inconstant meanderings and mutable lives- - - the sun will always rise and the birds will always sing- a cliche thing to say right- well maybe somethings earned the right to be said over and over- does the suns warmth and light ever lose its significance? Does its constantly ever let us doubt that there will be a tomorrow... Can you really be outside as the sun shines through a cloud and not think of something magical as you see the rays glide down from the sky, creating shadows, light playing and conquering darkness?? Yes, maybe I am a little cheesy- overly sentimental, but sometimes it is needed- sometimes I need it- to show that maybe I do feel something- - - and with this-- there is so much out there- so much more than me--- it is so easy sometimes to get caught up with your own feelings- it is easy to watch things build up until you just cannot fight them anymore- but somehow if you just pass through them and realize how small they are and how short your life really is- everything becomes a little clearer...

A little different this time- I had a meeting this morning. meetings are good things... i love my advisor. we talked a lot about where i was going and decided to worry not about what i was going to end up doing, but instead what I am doing right now. We talked about class and about my paper... the renaissance is so interesting... we talked about women and their roles... then we talked abotu Eliot and we decided that we would do an independant study on the wasteland... that will be so exciting. :) so much in store for the future and i dont know that comm is going to last as a major- we will see- he told me to test it out even though he doesnt fully approve. but this all should be good- he is one of the few people that encourages my excitement about all these things. :)

Sometimes I think I get caught up in my own thoughts- I was reading through the archives and I see how happy I was and I remember it all. I remember the little things and how they set me off on this tanget for days- how beautiful everything was... But somehow I stopped seeing the world outside of me and got lost in everything I was/am feeling. I want to be happy again and I want to see everything- everything I saw before and everything that I didnt get a chance to see. Living in this world is like constantly walking down a crowed new york side walk--- there is always a site, always a pecularity that asks for you discovery. I lost my ability to see these but I want it back... for those moments that I wonder if I am going to make it in this world ( and oh, there are so many of those moments), I want to be able to forget those worries and see the beauty of life, the beauty of being. There was a time when I used to end every passage with how great or right everything in my world was... i had troubles then too--- but they didnt get to me... I didnt let them get to me... and somehow I am going to get back to that place... or rather move foreward and create a new place improving on that place... Yes, i will sometimes doubt my future and doubt my reformation or my lapsing back to the past... but all of those are in my power... i cant change all of those- why do i worry so... its all in my hands.. i just have to figure out what to do with it all... thank you for this night- sometimes things become so crystal clear...

If I were given a second chance to do everything right- shouldnt I take it? When I think about it, I have been so lucky to a certian extent and now my luck is carrying me even further. I have a clean slate and before this I have messed up so much. This time I have the knowledge and the experience though the experience could work against me some how. i dunno... something just came up to make me evaluate everything that has happened in light of the present and of everything that was not possible that now is--- somethings that arent supposed to change sometimes do.

Its easter- one of those days that is supposed to be important in my religion- can i say though, without fear of chastisment, that I do not like this whole easter thing. I dont like the idea that someone came and died of our sins. For this to be possible, we must first be sinners. Human nature must be sinful. But that is what we are. Must we repent the very thing that is the most innate things to our existance. By our very nature, we are sinners? I dont know, I like to believe we are something better. I dont want to be saved, I want to be rightous from the beginning. I am not saying that I do not "sin", because surely we all do bad things, by mistake or totally consciously, but... to say that our very nature needs repenting- isnt that losing faith in mankind--- i dont know-- if i didnt go to catholic school half my life, I went to church and catechism classes. These are not uninformed ramblings. I just think there is something out there that is better for me to believe in... maybe I am just disillusioned, but I cannot rightly go worship something that I do not truely believe in- that would be a disrespect not only to myself but to all those that do truely believe in the church and thier respective religion.

Those few moments when he pops into my head still really hurt. It has been so long and still I dont seem to have healed. Such hatred boils inside me towards him and consequently towards all of his successors. Most of the time I forget but then something will remind me- sometimes so random that one would never guess the association, sometimes because i see him, and sometimes because he just pops into my head. That one relationship affected my life so much and I dont understand why- i dont understand why I still hurt over it. I know that things would have never worked out between us- and i know now that i could never be with him- i cant stand so many things about him- yet--- i hate him because he left me i think- i dont know why - maybe because it was the realest thing i ever had and i wanted it to last forever- miserable or perfect--- i think about how many people i have dated recently because of him- somehow they are all like him- resemble him in some eerie way- and it is only in retrospect that I am seeing this- and I wonder how I am seeing this. I realized that if I went and just talked to him and was goofy by any extreme of the word- he would give me a weird look and ask what i was doing instead of just laughing like most people do- the cynacism- i dont know that i cant deal with that and I dont know why it bothers me so much that that is how it would be. Sometimes I worry that this isnt right- that i still feel the effects of this relationship- but i loved him- i dont know. And i hate it that he wont let me hate him- he wont let me not talk to him- but this is only in a very passive sense. i dont know- we dont even think on the same plane-- we are so totally different-- sigh- what is this- what is this spring- does it bring back memories of love- i dont know- maybe i hate spring as much as I hate winter- just so angry for some reason- so much inside of me.