ingo

I'm trying to become more confident about sharing writing & thoughts with the world. This is an extremely unpleasant prospect! Anxiety-inducing! But if I ever want to achieve certain things I'll have to be less of a digital recluse, and making a few posts public here and there seems like a good way to start.

It's a bit uncomfortable to think about. For the most part my personal journals have been friendslocked since 2001! My tumblr was public, but also less of a commitment. Less personal. Cat pictures and complaining, for the most part... which, come to think of it, isn't all that different from what I post here! But it was a little more anonymous.

So it's silly to be this nervous really, because my journal posts are not exactly Great Literature! However I'm still kind of averse to opening things up and interacting with the world, etc. I am an avoidant person at heart and I like to be secretive.

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

I'm tired of life. It's an endurance test, like a compulsory athletics lesson that grinds on for decades. I spend a lot of time living in a fantasy world because escapism is the only thing that helps, but it doesn't last forever. I'm tired and I hurt and I'm sick of trying.

At least there's tea.

Given that I've never finished any of the incredibly simple knitting projects I've started in the past (basically, a scarf), and have never used a pattern in my life, you could be forgiven for wondering why I don't try doing something easy, like a banana warmer or an apple cosy.

Right now, so am I.

But I will prevail.

Eventually.

(Stupid incomprehensible pattern! Where do you want me to put the extra stitch? and what type of extra stitch do you want me to put there? Why can't you be precise, omg.)

Simone de Beauvoir shipped Jo/Laurie.

:D