I have failed countless times to update this blog, and I have a feeling no one really reads anymore. However, since this was where I started writing it always feels most comforting to return to write short bit about my life here

I was browsing today this article where a number of individuals had submitted pictures or scans of their teenage diaries. I have hardly graduated out of teenhood myself; once a very interesting character told me that you don't truly stop being a teen until you've passed 25 years of age. Sometimes not even then. Yet I can't help but look at (the now hidden) entries that used to chronicle my life in secondary school and then in junior college. I was a very different person then, and yet, not so.

As I write this now, I am waiting for myself to fall asleep, for the memories in my head to die down so I may just tumble into a nice dreamless sleep.

Yet sleep evades me, as it naturally does when you need to wake mere hours later for the most important task of school. It feels so new all over again, because people just come and go and come back again.

But enough of my rambling, I should really try to at least close my eyes and lay down, and hope that eventually sleep will take me.

To all those people who left my life, I miss you. You know who you are

<3 M

sunnuntai, toukokuuta 21, 2006

the sad and beautiful

i believe i've left one of the posts hanging with my fascination with addiction. don't get any ideas now.

been thinking about a certain kind of addiction, to sadness, to drugs that make you depressed, to drugs like opium.

i think its kind of strange that the innocent poppy flower could be made into something that is associated and blamed for the decline of life. i've seen pictures, fields of poppies. they are but little small things, red and yellow, pretty even. who would have thought that a simple flower commonly used as medication could end up as something so abused and so essentially bad? but there you go, give enough time, and anything innocent cna and will be perverted by man.

everytime i think of opium i recall Baum's "The Wizard of Oz". the part where Dorothy and the rest walk through a field of flowers and she and the lion force off sleep which is induced by the flowers themselves. mr christopher "tough love" chen said that day that he has walked through a field of poppies before. i don't know where one could find a field of poppies anymore. it seems like something straight out of a book, or back in time.

so that day we were looking at this extract from DeQuincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater". in some part the persona calls the opiate an elixir of pleasure. very ironic if you ask me. pleasure and sadness wouldn't usually go hand in hand unless you have bipolar disorder or you derive some sadistic pleasure in making yourself extremely sad.

but still isn't it interesting that so many creative individuals have taken opium or a form of opium to induce a state that makes them exceptionally creative. Keats did. how weird that they chose to celebrate the beauty in sadness rather than the beauty in happiness, in joy, in life? that they focused on the heart rending song of a nightingale at its death like Keats did, or a tragedy where a lover dies in her partners arms.

its unique to be addicted to sadness, if you ask me. its different from wanting to be rid of pain totally or induce hallucinations. to like sadness, to see a beauty that comes with hot tears, or an unjustified death, or some form of degeneration and decline is different. weird, maybe, self torturous, definitely, but unique, ultimately.

its not as if people need opium anymore to induce such a state. there's always alcohol. but to me its different. alcoholism is a disgusting habit, there's nothing beautiful in drowning in your own vomit because you've taken too much of it. as far as i know, alcohol causes much more damage to your body than opiates do. i view opium in a different light. to me, i don't see them as being the same thing.

in fact, i don't see people needing any form of substance in order to induce that state of sadness. the world is full of the sad already. the ever famous fictitious villain hannibal lecter, said in one instance that the society we live in now is in a limbo. progressing but regressing at the same time. the draught of sadness lingers sweetly on anyone's lips who has lived past the age of innocence.

i guess the sweetest part of this misery is the feeling of bittersweet nostalgia, where you know you're past the point at which you could have turned back, instead of having to be in that sadness. its like a sad smile, like a death that could be avoided, like the loss of beauty. anyone is capable of that when pensive or wistful. no need for opiates of any sort. the poppy flowers can be left instead to rot and die on the fields where they take root.

that will never happen i know. there are always going to be people so in love with their sadness, so intoxicated by pain, so in want of that small paradise in which they reign that opiates will always be in demand.

the complications of being addicted to sadness. if you die, its like paying the price for wanting a price of exquisite pain. if you don't its like having to pay a price everyday. self damaging but oh so beautiful.

thus my fascination. if only i could know what the high felt like, without the drug. if i could visit the paradise without the key. if i could feel the sad smile, without actually being sad. isn't it such a interesting state of affairs?

but i can only peek, and i can only be satisfied with that and my mediocre language and fragmented posts. leave the sadness and excellent writing to Keats and DeQuincy.

marlz

sunnuntai, toukokuuta 21, 2006

the sad and beautiful

5/21/2006 05:11:00 ap.

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