“Writers Blog: Online Writer’s Circle – October 08”

1. On October 28th, 2008 at 6:45 am paolo Says:

   Self cuddled on a seat of the tramway,
   eyes shut
   Like a dying bum.
   No leftover of past life,
   not of crashes for girls
   nor of copulations
   always with the wrong ones,
   and then it’s you who are wrong,
   But the others alike.
   And there is only one thing you long for,
   The little bark of a dog,
   directed to you.
   You cannot answer her now.

2. On November 3rd, 2008 at 12:11 pm Kay Says:

   Lost Password
   *Authors note: This is based on my first boyfriend whom broke up with me in an odd way, and yet I still miss him*

   She stared at the photograph,
   Sadness clouded up her face,
   And a tear – so sweet and real,
   Slid softly down her face.

   Oh, dear love,I miss you so,
   And wish we were together,
   But we – are never, nevermore.

   Happiness had filled my heart,
   Though it is now shrowded in greif,
   And months have gone by,
   Yet still I long for you – my love.

   What did we do,
   I have trouble recalling,
   And wh, I don’t know,
   However, I know I loved you.

   Memories locked in,
   Like jewels in a safe,
   And can’t be retrieved,
   Because of the lost password

3. On November 7th, 2008 at 6:31 am paolo Says:

   We are accustomed to think in non verbalized forms.
   Our inner experiences are scarcely communicable and there is even less interest from others in our interior life.
   So we really live in a different planet.
   In the social desert ( even if we walk among throngs of humans) we survive in our bubbles made of delicate self produced cobwebs.
   Normal people live on second hand banalities, we live on hard thought about the meaning of life,
   in a certain sense in a desperate love for life.
   Life in the leafs of the oak, in the wagging tail of the dog, in the flight of the sparrow, in the lichens and the fir tree.
   Normal people worry about the working of their mobiles and remotes.
   Non verbalized thought is life.
   Verbalized thought is gossip has pretenses at sophistication sometimes, but is only nonsense.

4. On November 7th, 2008 at 8:29 am donna Says:

   I can’t internally mentalise much.
   I think in movement and systems and feelings, not pictures, not words.
   this means I do my talking mostly through my fingers
   even though I got functional speech by late childhood (I began typing the same time).

   I didn’t used to be a deep person until I began to gain receptive language (late childhood)
   and by my teens I really felt harmed by an ability to begin to reason about my experiences
   and by my 20s I was really the songwriter-poet.

   I spent most of my days solitary, which suits me fine.
   And as long as I’m doing and being
   I don’t notice a lack of company
   because as you say
   everything is company.

   I don’t think one must be non-verbal to be deep
   for I was once functionally non-verbal and unable to be deep
   but I would say that when verbal communication doesn’t come easily or manageably
   one sticks to what is really substantively important.

   shine on

   Donna *)

5. On November 7th, 2008 at 11:52 am paolo Says:

   Non verbal thought is a kind of shorthand that always precedes verbalization. The speed of preverbal thought is of the order of the light, compared to the sound speed of verbalization. When you catch a falling object (a pot of boiling water that might burn you) you do it without verbalization. Non verbal shorthand is something you don’t know how it operates and is normally a perfect perception of some realities, as the verbalization will never be.

6. On November 7th, 2008 at 12:11 pm donna Says:

   A wonderful writer, Mary Kay Blakely sometimes quotes me from a conversation I made using a napkin and a nut.
   I said, holding up the nut… here is the conscious mind… then held up the napkin… here is the napkin… the preconscious mind…. I think in the preconscious mind… this big napkin… yet to get it from my mouth I must pull this big napkin through this small nut.

   

7. On November 7th, 2008 at 12:41 pm paolo Says:

   What’s the relationship between “shorthand” thinking and verbalizing is very difficult to establish. Perhaps theorists of the mind might know something. Take a whole day of thinking and try describe it in words. Impossible. Thoughts are mixed, superimposed, some are tentative and sterile, some are decisive (like when in comics you see the balloon “idea!”). Sometimes you simply connect dots about the behavior and the character of a person and all of a sudden you understand the fundamental traits of that person, you obtain a synthesis and you tell yourself “how I didn’t understand him/her all this time, though I was acquainted with him/her constantly for years. Some time you realize in a second which was the right frame you should have used to understand him/her and you get the whole picture. This is not verbalized thought.

8. On November 9th, 2008 at 9:14 am paolo Says:

   In “Good old neon” David F. Wallace explains in a vivid way the degeneration of self, or perhaps the built in structural weakness of self as it develops in talking with others. “My whole life has been a fraud”. And there is also a disturbing paradox, because how to get rid of the fraudulent condition, this mortal sickness of your soul, if your self-denunciation might be a part of the fraud? Perhaps one should accept that he be condemned to silence, as the character of “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman and the protagonists of the films of Kim il Duk, the Korean director.
   The strength of the feelings might be our only salvation: not the perfunctory kisses exchanged at a funeral, or the repulsive embraces between politicians, but the passionate hugs of mothers and her children, when they discover that they are of one flesh, in the face of loss, separation reunification or of grave danger.

   As for me, I have rarely experienced the happiness of a hug, certainly not with my mother. Only the representation of feelings in the movies may be a solace for me. And sometimes you find such representation without the physicality of the hugs, like in the splendid trilogy of Apu of the great Indian moviemaker Ray (“Pather Panchaly”, which I have seen dozens of times) and in the cinema of the Japanese Ozu, where they never touch each other, but there is so much force of feeling!

9. On November 9th, 2008 at 1:49 pm paolo Says:

   The most difficult task! We all live in a bubble and it takes a huge amount of effort to maintain the bubble in good order, particularly at the borders. Getting out and reentering are the most difficult exercises. To survive we must know where the walls are, where the openings are, how they may be opened, when they can be opened, how long we can stay inside (outside we may stay for a very short time). Like the whales we have to surface once in a while to capture some air. That might be a metaphor for our form of sociality. Our nutrients are inside the bubble, but once in a while we need to make a sortie in order to catch some social air (words? a smile?), legitimacy, some crumbs of social nutrients fallen down from some other’s people table. We can only do this in haste, half-heartedly, with fear, because we cannot live outside, we risk constantly annihilation, like mice in the night, while cats are sleeping.

10. On November 9th, 2008 at 7:10 pm donna Says:

    so well put.
    I spend probably 80% of my life alone
    it allows me to cope with the 20% without running and to cope with some focus.
    I feel ‘fried’ by society
    but I do a great job of climbing mountains
    I’ve no regrets.
    I’m glad I ventured beyond the bubble
    pushed it’s limits
    tested fear
    found where fear was an illusion
    of course it still only half listens to me
    Seroquel helps it shout more quietly.

    Donna *)

11. On November 9th, 2008 at 9:51 pm paolo Says:

    I have pretended to teach for some years in Venice. Why pretended? Because my lectures were horrible exhausting pastiches delivered to 7-10 students. At my the first lesson there were more than a hundred and I was so stressed that going away I nearly pliunged in a canal . But the lessons lasted only 45 minutes, three a week. The rest of the time was spent in wandering in the city. Both arriving with the motor boat from the station and leaving , looking back at the marvel city disappearing were magic moments. And also having my meal at a small trattoria for students, and after that eating an orange on the little wall bordering a canal, drinking a coffee and sleeping a few minutes lying on the not very comfortable desk of my office (I had an office all for me for the first time in my life!). My expenditure in relationships were kept at a minimum. I was practically alone all the time. Then I was “promoted” to a bigger city (Milan) where I had to deal with great numbers of people, and I nearly went mad (well, behind my back someone said I was mad, though a “sweet” one). No bubble at all. I might say that in this period I didn’t exist, Sometimes you lose any control of your borders and at that point you cease to be a living being you are completely ruled by external forces.
    Little pleasures have always been my moments of bliss, like eating a sandwich on a public bench and taking a nap on that same bench, like a clochard. But after all I have always been a clochard. And we, of our kind, are only apt to be clochards, or so I think.

12. On November 10th, 2008 at 6:08 am paolo Says:

    And concerning clochards, can they be generous? I am not a giver. Not in terms of money. I never cared for money. But in terms of availability to help others. And after all, would you ask a clochard or a beggar where is the best restaurant in the vicinity? He probably knows, but would you ask him?.

13. On November 11th, 2008 at 8:17 am paolo Says:

    The Queen, heads of state, government leaders and other dignitaries, war veterans, representatives of the armed forces and other service units, relatives and friends of the fallen gather at their country’s cenotaph or other memorial to pay tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice so that others might live in peace (from an English paper).

    Yesterday was an anniversary. The anniversary of the end of WW1. As Karl Kraus put it in his “The end of humankind” (1918) it was really the end. You may understand more the savageries of Stanley in Congo. In that place of Africa you might look at people of different culture as “aliens”. These atrocities happened faraway, Europeans didn’t know what happened except Joseph Conrad who was on one those boats navigating the river and yelled “the horror, the horror!” in his “Heart of Darkness”. But WW1? It was visible to everybody, it was between people who ate in the same way, spoke sometimes the same languages, were on both sides Christians, with military chaplains on both sides witnessing the slaughters and blessing them too, “assisting” (sic) those soldiers who were shot by firing squads for being terrorized or for refusing to participate to the carnage. Has there been any atonement for what happened? Great talk of “heroes”, monuments to the generals who commanded the business in every city of Europe, statues to mustached soldiers in heavy coats embracing a gun, while “deserters” are still denied a grave with their name.
    In the schools there should not be obligatory reading of the heroic fights. Only two book to learn history: Karl Kraus’ “The end of Humankind” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”: the horror the horror!

14. On November 12th, 2008 at 8:30 am paolo Says:

    I am 75, in a sense a veteran of WW2, I was child, scared by bombs,
    grenades and automatic fire (I crossed the Gothic line walking in the
    woods with my family. When I started again to go to school, I found
    myself I had to study history. The program ended with WW1 there was no
    time to make an appraisal of the origins and developments of WW2. And
    there was also a well founded self imposed censorship about a war who
    had been lost by my country, and concluded in shame with soldiers who
    tried vainly to fight the Germans without orders, the “king” having
    fled to the south, and the general staff having dissolved. The 8 of
    September of 1943 (Armistice day with the allies) was my country’s “day
    of infamy”, the harakiry of an undignified cowardly political élite
    (?). When the general Alexander went to pay visit to the “king” (in Bari) and
    asked what he might do for him, the “king” answered “bring me some fresh eggs
    for the queen”.
    When I was in school again, in 1945, the textbooks of history were still
    treating the glorious battles of WW1, the “victory” of November 4, the
    “redemption” of pieces of Italy which were very well administered by
    the Austrian Monarchy. The textbooks were all seething patriotism,
    heroism, martyrs. In Rome there is still this huge kitsch monument to
    the “unknown soldier”.
    And WW1 was decided by a clique of three or four persons (Salandra,
    Sonnino, the queen mother).
    Millions of Italian citizens, poor farmers of the South were dragged
    into the battlefields by the military police (Carabinieri). 600,000
    died and millions were maimed.
    The only thing we can say now: no patriotic rhetoric aanymore! but only
    atonement. Soldier shot by firing squads for “cowardly in battle” are
    still without graves.

15. On November 15th, 2008 at 2:40 pm paolo Says:

    Our inner experiences are not communicable and aother people have no interest in our interior life. Our interior life doesn’t contribute to the production of cell phones. So we really live in a different planet.
    In the social desert ( even if we walk among throngs of humans) we survive in our bubbles made of delicate self produced cobwebs, constantly damaged by the usual unavoidably traffic with the external world.
    Normal people live on second hand platitudes, we are forced to live on hard thought about the meaning of life, about suffering and joy and all forms of whys.
    In a sense we live in a desperate longing for life which has nothing to do with highways. airports, videogames, stock exchanges or nukes.
    Life is in the leafs of the oak, in the wagging tail of the dog, in the flight of the sparrow, in the lichens and the fir tree.
    In the other planet (of people integrated in the machine) people worry about the working of their cars, their mobiles, their remotes and gadgetries of all sorts.
    Non verbalized thought is life for us.
    Verbalized thought is made of instructions to build and run the machines. If it’s not that, it is gossip, chatting about nonsense, even if it has pretenses at sophistication, is useless garbage, hot air.

16. On November 16th, 2008 at 9:09 am paolo Says:

    This might be the simplest way to describe the situation of the autistic person. He/she is on a raft in a sea in tempest, trying to save his/her life. This is the primordial commandment for living beings: to save your body (but is it really yours? or does it belong to Life).This commandment is wired in your mind, and has a priority over any other commandment.
    Can this subject feel empathy for others? Not now! He must look to the next wave, and see how he/she can remain afloat. That’all for now. But this “now” may last all his life.

17. On November 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm donna Says:

    I have a painting on my website called Next.
    it probably captures this feeling.