Reading Camille Paglia’s tome (which I’m working my way through, several – sometimes more, sometimes fewer – pages each night) I realize my novel has to decide whether it’s to be a social novel or a romantic work. I think more the latter, except that it should try to work with romantic archetypes and tropes to say something about current society. I’m thinking that “X” is the ephebian boy, the Apollonian, who ends up killing chthonian woman (“Anna”), the (literally) dangerous woman-as-force-of-nature (she tries to hurt him through violence). “X” represents, however, not just the hard, glinting outline of the Apollonian, but also the new economy: the internet, fintech, bitcoin, etc., where real things are pixelated and digitized into the cloud and given an outline (and an iconicity) to be worshiped and admired via branding and UI and styling. It’s not for nothing that all those UI things are called …I C O N S. In other words, “X” vanquishes “Anna”/nature (he throws her off a cliff at Beechey Head, after all…), but it’s not life everlasting and safety for all which results. It’s just a personal reprieve so he and his brethren (fanbois) can continue down the neoliberal economic and cultural path.
My meditation pack is about analysis, and now Andy is emphasizing that one needs to and can learn to listen to one’s team, which reminds me (sharply) that I don’t have one. I definitely have trust issues. Coupled with a relatively finely honed intuition, it makes me more than normally aware of dangers and duplicity.
For the first time in almost three weeks, I went to Facebook and looked to see what people were up to. G. posted a photo of tiny blue narcissi blooming in a window box. His reply to one of several admiring comments – that he does nothing to make them appear, they simply show up each year because nature is so generous and all-around wonderful (words to that effect) – just made me think, You have no idea, do you?
V. posted an article about the supposed prevalence of second sight among the Scots and Irish, and now this morning I’m thinking that maybe second sight is just the result of abuse. That finely honed intuition is a survival skill, but often you can’t admit the abuse, nor that it has become epigenetic. So you doll up your sensitivity by calling it Second Sight.
I’m really sensitive (and suspicious). I’ve grown more accepting of the foibles of others, realizing that they’re more about them than about me. But I’m attuned to them. I can remember, at 17, coming back to Victoria from my first attempt to re-invade Europe. At the end of my three month long travels abroad, I had my hair cut by a genius in Düsseldorf, and somehow my hair’s response to this wizard’s scissoring was to become super curly. I thought it (and I) looked great. I also returned even skinnier than when I had left, which I loved, so I was feeling both cocky and blade-like, like a knife. Sharp. I was visiting C. in her apartment at the Fort-Cook Junction, the one with the Murphy bed, and K. came over, too. As I talked about my travels, I came to the end – and the haircut – and I said, giddily, that I thought my hair looked super-cool, “like E.’s” (our former high school art teacher, epitome of cool). I distinctly observed K. reacting in a way that convinced me she would trash-talk me later. And indeed she did, as one of the other girlfriends told me about it. But here’s the thing: I knew before it happened that it would, just from a slight rearrangement of her facial muscles and something in her eyes. It’s that sort of catty betrayal which sticks with and on to me. More recently, it’s the Q.s betraying J. and D. in the wake of their anniversary party (where I wasn’t betrayed, but was witness to “friends” betraying “friends”). It’s all those things I can sense and see, which leave me wondering, Where is my team? Where am I in this supposed group of friends? Am I next-to-be-betrayed – or will I betray, too?
Second sight fundamentally derives from abuse.