notebook fragment #1

24th May 2003; Rainbow Weather

Sometimes I think I am only real while moving. All my life, since I was very small, has been dominated by travelling - I lived in a total of twelve different houses, attended six primary schools, moved from Leicester to Cambridge and back again. Although my parents couldn't afford decent holidays we went abroad as much as our meagre finances allowed, staying in cheap ramshackle gîtes in Normandy and clergy houses in Cornwall. The extended family lives at opposite ends of the country, and many of my childhood memories are centred around long car journeys, which I loved: the opportunity to sit and reflect without being interrupted to do something "useful"; to read or write or more often to simply sit and watch the sky. That sensation, of stasis while rushing past fields and towns and forests, gives one such an awareness of the land, the sky constant and yet ever-changing, moving beneath clouds that continually collect and pool into one another, daylight flashing from horizon to horizon. It provokes a feeling of connectedness, of continuity, that wherever I might go on this earth I will always move under the same skies, the same light; and at the same time a distance, a sense of shooting through space while time seems to stand still.

I have made this journey between Cambridge and London too many times to count. Today the clouds gather moodily, their underbellies a threatening grey and their tops pearlescent, each peak reflecting the light. Rainbow weather. When I get back to college I will be re-launched into a routine of work and relationships, making never-ending chains of decisions about when to stop and sleep and whether or not to eat, and what, and how much. Now, however, I am still in the cocoon of transit; there is nothing for me to do but sit, watch the landscape flicker past, and be still. Here I am truly myself, with no distractions: it is the inbetween spaces that make me real, in the same way that the gaps between words give them meaning. Between here and there I have no context in which to define myself, no purpose or obligations other than to simply be. It is the eye of the storm, the zero, the nothingness that gives substance to everything else.

insanity?

an "interpretation" of the content in libellum's journal:

The forums, the friendliness of them, because I almost unable to go on the stifling temperatures but ended for a week and see past and there again and beauty I deliberately, just makes my lips on Friday. Outside the ideas I was mistaken. During my breath still surrounded, cocoon. Well they had begun (to be left I smoke). It's set I the real while moving restlessly in greater than I had my feet up been beautiful than falling leaves, go all I used to Cambridge and watched they why it's an amp for a silent luminous cocoon of most of loneliness and dodgems and they had come; all for years.

- libellum


I like this. No matter how many times I refresh, the nonsense is always strangely evocative, at least for me. It's like the livejournal version of a dream: rehashing events in a way that is ostensibly meaningless, but actually somehow makes sense of things. That or it's just self-indulgent silliness. Either way, I approve.

(go here for the script)