26 June 2009
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on June 26th, 2009 @ 02:34:35 pm, using 924 words, 204 views
It seems there’s love behind everything. Love shaped to resemble anything you can think of. And all too often, love made out to be the prize. I distrust anything and everything that makes love out to be immaculate and a source of endless joy.
Damien Rice first came to my attention in a dark screening room as an unfamiliar voice delivering a haunting song, with lyrics that sounded personal and required a context to be understood. The context on that particular rainy afternoon was the inherent complexity of human entanglements.
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21 May 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on May 21st, 2008 @ 10:04:23 pm, using 353 words, 81 views
On my way from point A to point B, I got stuck here. In a pool of question marks, like the ball pools I loved to dive in as a child.
Question marks don’t have the same effect, though.
Balls are made to roll. Whatever comes in contact with them tends to roll right along. Roll and slide. Roll or slide. Both of those types of motion, of course, hinting at acceptance… carefreeness…
Question marks are of an entirely different nature. They elicit an entirely different set of consequences. Their hook shape either slides itself snake-like around you, seductively, like an arm around a waist pulling you close, or hangs you impersonally by your clothes on a wall where you remain suspended indefinitely… ridiculously…
Both of those promoting stillness… preventing movement…
One way or the other, question marks take the lead and subject your behavior to the whim of hands on a steering wheel. They quite simply conduct you.
What’s worse: question marks are by nature self-renewing.
Man… probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of unanswered questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we think we know? Why do we believe anything at all? Countless questions in search of an answer… an answer that will give rise to a new question… and the next answer will give rise to the next question and so on. But, in the end, isn’t it always fhe same question? And always the same answer?
- The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. That’s a fact. Everything else is pure theory.
(Run Lola Run)
Question marks spring from the ground up like a geyser on slow motion and then, once in the air, become one by one subject to zero gravity - giving you enough time to scrutinize every miniscule drop-like aspect, each zoomed in misty spray of doubt.
FLICKR photo by ReverendSam
FLICKR photo by ReverendSam
FLICKR photo by ReverendSam
29 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 29th, 2008 @ 08:40:45 pm, using 1161 words, 264 views
She’s the girl who’s always rushing. (It was said again the other day amidst heartfelt laughs.) She’s aware of it on days she musters enough attention to pay.
Rush…
Hurry – Dash
Hurry…
Rush – Dash
Dash…
Rush – Hurry
:D
There are the people who pay attention and those who don’t. There are days when attention is easy to control and others when it’s simply unruly like a mob of 5-year-old boys. And always infinity nestled in between.
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23 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 23rd, 2008 @ 08:08:24 pm, using 971 words, 383 views
Sometimes I feel like my thoughts are doomed to run full circle. No matter what seed they stem from, what route they follow, they will always run right into something else that’s come to me in the form of a thought. I don’t quite know what to make of that. Whether to believe my thoughts are limited in scope (that it’s a small world for thoughts as well as people) or to cogitate the possibility that I may be trapped within a maze looking for a way out, where a wider range awaits me. Or still to flatter myself that I may have a knack for matching thoughts, for recognizing both the outlines of puzzle pieces and the fractional images contained therein… a knack for tying up loose ends in a way.
Photograph by isolano (FLICKR)
Once again I bow to the genius of Stewart Osuisu Hirideyo ♥
—— ∫ ——
More of my favorite passages from The Invention of Solitude:
And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually seeing.
As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world). What he experienced perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of this room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others. and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance. If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory.
By the time of his third birthday, A.’s son’s taste in literature had begun to expand from simple, heavily illustrated baby books to more sophisticated children’s books. The illustration was still a source of great pleasure, but it was no longer crucial; The story itself had become enough to hold his attention, and when A. came to a page with no pictures at all, he would be moved to see the little boy looking intently ahead, at nothing, at the emptiness of the air, at the blank wall, imagining what the words were telling him. ‘it’s fun to imagine that we can’t see,’ he told his father once, as they were walking down the street. Another time, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door, and did not come out. ‘What are you doing in there?'’I'm thinking,’ the boy said. ‘I have to be alone to think.’
The words rhyme, and even if there is no real connection between them, he cannot help thinking of them together. Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room. Breath and death. Or the fact that the letters of the word “live” can be rearranged to spell out the word “evil.” He knows this is no more than a schoolboy’s game. (…) Playing with words in the way A. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world. Playing with words is merely to examine the way the mind functions, to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it. In the same way, the world is not just the sum of the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meaning of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other. ‘Two faces are alike,’ writes Pascal. ‘Neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh.’ The faces rhyme for the eyes, just as two words can rhyme for the ear. To carry the proposition one step further. A. would contend that it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well.
Possible epigraph(s) for The Book of Memory.
‘Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me.’ (Pascal)
‘As I write down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my own weakness, which I am constantly forgetting. This teaches me as much as my forgotten thought, for I strive only to know my own nothingness.’ (Pascal)
… everything. as has been noted before, is connected to everything else. And if there is everything, then it follows there is everyone.
22 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 22nd, 2008 @ 10:05:58 pm, using 408 words, 242 views
Who was the first person to repel society instinctively? To lower an arm, receiver on hand in the midst of conversation and take a deep breath. Who first needed such an intermission simply to get through a phone call? Or to sneak through the back door so as not to have to say good morning? To keep people at arm’s length or downright push them away?
What exactly changes from there to here? From the child who stares at anyone and babbles away if they can’t yet speak. The child who will say anything and everything from the moment they learn how, disarming anyone and everyone in the process. The child you yourself used to be. Where exactly does one start and then stop liking people? Closing the circle, reducing the circumference deliberately inch by inch, until eventually there’s room for just a handful of them. When does the great majority of people become foreign to you and you to them?
This flying creature, this vulture soaring above is its own parachute. Enviable flight. Enviable, graceful, nearly slow motion landing. It floats in the air motionless the way I’m only able to stop pedaling my bike and keep it moving for a stretch. It… does it in the air. I can’t help watching it intently and ignoring all surrounding unfeathered forms of life.
It leads this someone to self awareness to be the girl sitting on a sandy beach, camera strapped from shoulder to navel and a black spiral notepad on one hand, pen two-thirds of the way inserted into the spiral. It’s lonely to be the girl who prefers this wind that muffles every other sound to the sizzling midday sun. At once wishing to be taken over by a primal urge to fit in (the reasoning behind that being… eagerness in place, natural alignment would certainly follow) and yet having crossed a line somewhere along the way or rubbed it blurry. Or maybe just having become someone slightly misaligned with the majority.
It’s disheartening to be the person who goes into a shopping center for its benches as though you were looking for the wrong things in the wrong places.
But then again, sometimes the odd one out turns out to be perfect. Or so my favorite photograph tells me…
Photograph by Stewart Osuisu Hirideyo ♥
16 April 2008
Written by
Iris Watts Hirideyo (
)
Published on April 16th, 2008 @ 11:46:00 pm, using 1301 words, 583 views
Yes, there was a reason for Paul Auster that day, after all. Just as there are reasons for waiting and refraining from forward motion. Just as there are reasons for eating and sleeping. Just as there are reasons for walking, pen and paper on hand. There’s solitude to be consumed to its last morsel. There’s the present, that entity of gelatinous texture (neither liquid, nor solid) both able and unable to stand on its own, and its enclosing glass windows, its solid, transparent link/barrier - that which at once promotes and hinders connection. It is by way of solitude that we learn to relate appropriately.
I walk these steps tonight, along this waiting platform, leveled chin and unseeing eyes fixed ahead, with these words just behind my lips: what I need, you need. I understand that now.
There are sudden diaphanous dreams of Amsterdam and its winding streets and its Vermeers.
There’s always a reason.
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