Hey! Here's another letter to Emili for my records and your curious eyes:
There's this horrible oppressivee mist on everything, it's sluggish, like the heat of the jungle, it's not cold and ice-blasting like chrystalline winter, it's just humid and rotten. It's shit summer weather.
The book you sent me is called "words of a believer" and is written by a Christian, inspired by literary fervour to impart his wisdoms to others. I imagine him, bright and jolly, pointing at everything and declaring it God's work. I've not read it yet, just skimmed through:
"when you see a man being led away to prison, do not be so hasty to say: "that's a man who's committed crimes against his fellow man"- because maybe he is infact a man who wanted to serve mankind, who is being punished by his oppressors for it."
There's also a passage comparing mankind to a hive of bees and urging us to share our honey with those bees in need. Well, I guess it makes sense.
I find it astounding that so many people sign up so wholeheartedly to religious doctrine. When one considers the entire world's human population, the nonbelievers are really in the minority. I'm up for keeping an open mind, but blindly following the rule book of one group or another seems to me as closed as shutting one's mind off entirely from the spiritual.
It's the whole "hell" thing that does it for me. I find it frightful that some of our friends, otherwise friendly and reasonable people, genuinely hold onto and absorb themselves in this belief which consigns us (me at least) to "hell"- to eternal punishment, while they anticipate a future of basking in divinal light and love for themselves! Can people seriously be so ridiculously stupid?
Perhaps organised religion will slowly die out over time, killed by modernity and the rationality of our mechanised, urban existance? In a way, it would be a shame.
I'm particulaly interested in tribal cultures and beliefs, voodoo for instance, the long-held belief in the power of "the spirits" and the dualism of our world co-existing alongside a spirtual world of the dead. I can't remember if I already wrote/spoke to you about my experiences talking to a medium?
Are we really just a complex machine, powered by the brain? Surely we can't be solely made of physical, material stuff? There are studies which have measured the weight of the soul, a very slight reduction in mass after it leaves the body (or maybe just the weight of a death-exhalation?)
The dead body is made up of the same material stuff, just minus the "life energy". If I'm going to believe in anything, it's this: Something cannot become nothing. Every physical atom in the human body persists, just in another form- so why not the "life energy" too?
Perhaps God is just another word for all the "life energy" in the universe. It must be a steady amount, forever getting re-used and re-cycled.
If we're all a part of the same life energy, then I am you, and we are both my cat, or Elvis, or that tree over there...
Have I told you this theory already? I've become quite posessed by it.
I enjoyed your letter and use of adjectives: "mysterious looking man" Haha! I'm fascinated? I imagine him a crumbling, little wizard.
You said you were in a strange, self-questioning emotional state? I understand what you mean, the pressure to behave in a certain way. For me, it seems that one must follow the codes of normal behaviour or else face exclusion, be pointed out and unmasked as "weird, anomylous, unwanted", an element hindering the smooth-running of the world. So I go around with my mind on the task at hand. Smile and laugh in the appropriate places, use the self-service machine at the supermarket, keep walking in the crowd, don't stop and stare, don't lie on the floor and look at the fluffy clouds, don't say words which pop into your head before they've been considered and approved... it's a stress.
We need to break free, but perhaps we need the right circumstances, the right partner-in-crime. Everything beomes easier when one becomes two- as with you and I when we would live out our whims: "Shall we get pierced? Shall we turn the internal urge into action and physical sensation? Shall we see what these people have to say, instead of just wondering?"
Of course, it is difficult to find someone to act as the external part of one's consciousness. One should hold onto it when one finds it.
I feel slightly guilty that at lot of my pain about M's death is selfish pain. I'm crying not just for him, but for what I've lost, like a child who's been denied it's favourite toy. But also the pain of losing oneself, through the other person.
I think I'll come to London (If I haven't managed to find a part-time job in Sheffield) one weekend. Lena keeps asking me to. I feel undeserving of her attention and affection- or rather, I feel that she only clings to our friendship out of a loneliness and nostalgia for the past and a harkening back to a memory of a time when we were united as part of a "something" together. Rather than out of a genuine love. She says it is love though, but is it just the idea of love?
That girl seems to be "alone" even when she has people around her. I think there is some truth in it, when she drunkely texts "I don't understand people. I can't be close to anyone"- that's not a criticism, just an observation, and perhaps I'm mistaken- but in my imagination she's a "stand-alone" figure.
It seems like she longs for your past frienship- why do you not re-start it?
Other than that, I've just been doing exams, Library sessions and am currently sipping chocolate and chili chai in a buddhisty cafe called "teasutra".
I took Dan out the other week. Since his fit he seems distracted and disconnected. It's the blue, swedish eyes that do it for me, too captivating and flashing with emotions like sunlight off black-ice, fire behind an exterior of stone. He refuses to "make love" with me since our break-up, and so we have fallen surprisingly easily into some kind of platonic union, with me fussing over him and reminding him of his doctors appointments like a mother.
Books: still gripped by "Women in Love". But don't you think Gudrun and Ursula are horribly ugly names?! Perhaps one shouldn't simplify such a great, flowing work of art into such a crude question- but who would you prefer? Gerald or Birkin? And why? Answers on a postcard.
Miss you. Lots of love. Yours, S.
