Run with me.

this is too big to be contained from the world in a notebook

can't forget your plaintive yowls and the pain in them and the confusion. we're gonna take good care of you. i can't imagine the moment of impact that shuddered along your whole body and injured you so. maybe it was an accident and that is unfortunate, but if it occurred and you were left untreated by apathetic creatures my heart cries for their unfeeling and terrible beings

can't imagine don't want to picture the pain. i feel it too, little cat. I know why i am upset but the degree to which i am surprises me...and yet it doesn't. of coure i feel this way, you are my own and for the litany of reasons, from familiarity to ethics I can't bear the thought of you ever being harmed

http://www.deadprogrammer.com/starbucks-logo-mermaid/

The Starbucks mermaid specifically references the Continental mermaid 'Melusine de Ver', or Melusina. Familiar? It's the mermaid in A.S Byatt's 'Possession', the mermaid that figures in Christabel LaMotte's work.

Weird thing was I was researching the surname 'Werr' that I had used for one of my pseudonyms, not knowing its meaning but taking to it for its unusual and medieval sound, leading me to this site featuring 'Melusine de Ver' in its explication of the etymology of the surname 'Weir'.

A random quirk of things, perhaps, but I do enjoy the surprisingly unifying undercurrent in all aspects of my life. Just like the other time I had chosen the pseudonym Lucine.M, an anagram of my real name. Later I discovered that Lucine was the semantic opposite of an older pseudonym, Adria, meaning 'Light' and 'Dark' respectively, and that Lucine in some languages means 'Moon' - a symbol to which I feel an inexplicable kinship to.

I am feeling lonely. Solitude is usually bearable - preferred - but suddenly it feels acute and terrible. It's a desperate sinking emptiness in the gut, and for what reason? Stories people tell, and absences, and my inability to face anyone in the eye. And even as intimacy is preferred I am plagued by my nature, which entails that intimacy is always avoided.

The only reason for me to prize it is because it fulfills my sense of beauty. There is otherwise no other worth in it for me. Yes, painted idyllically - how unfortunately ideal. It is the sense of uncrossable discrepancy between the idea and the thing itself that deters me from pursuit. This is my attitude to all things.

I am lonely tonight, and I am tired of people. I am tired of how one sees only snatches of someone, I am tired of myself only being sated through full possession of a person. The latter is impossible and therefore disappointing. People are such real things, unfortunately, and what I'd like of them does not exist in this world.

I am at home with stories, and at home with beauty. I am not at home with the inert facts people are - the hard truths that people are wholly autonomous beings, have pasts untrod by yourself (And resurge in the present in unexpected, unknowable ways that will forever remain mysterious to you), and that for god's sake life isn't a movie to be lived by the dictates of oneself.

Perhaps...in this I glimpse the dread vision which many have succumbed to. I see all the more possible why life might not be worth living for the creature that prizes beauty above all else.


--

Do you know, I am afraid of crying? Especially in front of people. I very nearly broke today, for what reason I can't fathom (that is a lie - even if I can't understand why the emotion is so powerful, I do know why). Something thought vanished beckoned, and I stood still and inert, afraid of being a fool. I am the bigger fool now. I have a suspicion that I do not nearly trust everyone. I live for the image of vulnerability but despise it within myself.

There are great rifts within me, within my psyche, between my body and mind, between vision and the world...nothing can assuage me, I think, but the comforting solitude artistic contemplation brings. There is no cure for the mind always seeking something beyond the pale of the familiar and the proven.

--

This self-punishment has to stop. Nothing is stopping me from reaching out, except an intensely low regard of myself. You really need to stop being so thoroughly self-effacing and self-punishing. Yes, don't be deluded and narcissistic but for god's sake you're entitled to some happiness.

Forgot to record this dream. Dreamt I was in North Korea. Not your ordinary vision of the hermit-kingdom, a vision of a futuristic N. Korea, replete with futuristic hover-craft tech. Splotches of dream-scape half-remembered: the cityscape below, grey monoliths stitched in-between bright fields of flowers, seen from the glass bottom of a...of a flat? Perhaps not flowers, perhaps a luridly saturated version of the scene outside my own window, pastiche of Singapore and imagined N.Korea. I remember an image of an automatic, self-driving vacuum cleaner, bright red and blue and yellow, weaving it's way like a crazed snake towards me, us? Sense of danger - we're smuggled, not supposed to be here, anyhow.

Had another fantastic dream the night before, but didn't record and now forget.

As the guitar coaxed its way in melancholic string and tenuous voice through Blackbird, Across the Universe, and Hallelujah, the Earth's revolution around the sun thrust our coordinates, a little patch of lawn at the residence 21 Springleaf Walk (coordinates: 1˚ 23'48.10" North 103˚ 49'11.47" East) into the New Year - at least on Danny's watch (my own clock had chimed in the New Year 4 minutes earlier).

It passed with a count down, a mangled chorus of Auld Lang Syne, and a short cheer. And afterwards, the night went on like every other night and the guitar continued playing in its own time. Physical time (grounded in the physical revolution of the earth, matters of geometry and geography and angle of sun) dictated a surety, but our watches could not agree (in marginal degree). Of course, what matters is the collective signification; hence we crossed over, with fragile certainty.

Holly and her beau's voices harmonized in tranquil sad sweetness to the lovely vibration of guitar strings as I watched silent and rapt in the face of beauty. Sparklers, fireworks in the darkness, spun playfully around in the hands of adults on the road outside exulting in child-like joy. If only I could translate the lyricism of the scene, the harmonization of images, cinematic, onto the page through the Word instead of Image. Imagine this – twenty-ish sated guests strewn across the lawn on transparent plastic, candle-light flickering at corners, two crooners filling the air with an acoustic, bittersweet texture; outside, unillumed, enshrined by darkness, little voices play, their faces suddenly lit by hot, golden sulphurous sparklers, fizzing on the end, like the sparking end of a magical wand, searing the night with light. This, playing in the background of the soft, languid scene on the lawn.

Four hours before as we were setting about the candles, I'd walked into a glass partition, thinking it to be an opening and bruised my nose. It bled freely, and for several stunned moments I was worried I'd broken it. Contemplated going to the doctor's in my panic, but settled to wait until the blood dried. I was alright for the rest of the night, but tense, worried about rogue bone splinters in the brain and blood trickling to the lungs if I held my head too far back. I made a joke about being quite a sight if I walked into A & El; I'd painted on my face a lurid orange and white Fox-mask for the Animal themed party. Imagine that with a gush of red from the nose, bursting into a dour waiting room smelling of antiseptic and injury.

My fox make-up was smudged by an ice-pack, and my mood as visibly spoiled although I tried my very best to be sociable - and I felt stupidly self-pitying.

I met Sophia again as I sat reading outside the Fortune Tent. We spoke about Fairytales, but there seemed to be something lost in translation. There is a meeting point that necessitates masks in conversations between relatively unfamiliar acquaintances, a road of politeness, meetable bland ideas, commiserations. Do not mistake that it was terrible. It was nice, but not very intimate - we briefly discussed the Snow Queen, The Juniper Tree, and she told me the less romantic side of the Taj Mahal's narrative (Dictator king, wanting to maintain the sacred originality of the tomb had the eyeballs of his architect gouged out, and off chopped thumbs of decorators).

What does it mean to have chemistry? Sometimes I think what we call chemistry is really a trick of vanity when the other mirrors oneself in opinion and other aspects.

---

The earth rolled on, and the turn of its axis and turn around the Sun sent no shudder to our individual coordinates. The day passed like any other except to remind ourselves that we write our dates differently, and that every year seems to descend upon us with increasing rapidity as if the Earth and Sun were conspiring to rob us of our youth.

what I seek is a brutal sort of beauty, a kind experienced blindingly in ecstasy. It is not the slow steady stewing kind of aesthetic appreciation - that is, a sensible loveliness - but a madcap, ridiculous, insensible, bizarre, sublime kind of thing, a sort just short of killing you. I like my beauty like a knife, like a bolt of lightning, like a hurricane, like the dark oceanic depths, like the expanse of deep space. A sort of rapturous awe, a feeling of eternity.

That is perhaps why I am intrigued by the down-and-out, the woe-begotten, the grotesque, and the seedy underbelly of everything - it is in these places the beauty is raw and rare and evermore sought by my aesthetic experience. There is a fullness to tragic beauty symbolic of something worthwhile underneath the grime and badness of everything - it is not a privileged person's exploitative pleasure, a mockery of someone else's terrible state. I had to say that last bit because my sensible mind told me to - it does not come naturally to the sensuous stream of these thoughts, breaks the silvery flow -

This, this is why I look to wide empty stretches of beach and grey tumultuous waves with a covering of black, overcast sky, why I seek the pain of loneliness, and why I probably will find my best loves in the movies or the sublime pages of fiction. There is something woefully limited about a human being that makes him less susceptible to a strenuous beauty and a jagged kind of love - there are the complicated nerve endings wired to the pain centres of the brain and memories and the conscience...it is the woefully limited, inert fact of persons that make beauty so incidental, only to be spieled in stories made out of the edited perspectives of moments in time and space, existent only in the mind. The mind is my place of love, but I'd rather think there was something out there in the Universe, which I (and you), could suddenly greet and meet with a shout, a burst of rapture, glittering enlightenment

Netted in the dark eye of the train carriage: motion, fleeting gestures, imprints - an approximation of the truth. No illusion of the stability of its contents - instead, the realities of movement, city-living, the body in space, travel, ephemera.

My reflection stands in the foreground, a dark unlit shadow, stark against the blue-grey blur of the other passengers - the diagram over our bobbing heads is the hieroglyph of our shared trajectory. An aisle of white bifurcates my figure from other passengers, yet a dialectic tension exists between us (as in all dynamic abstracts), maintained by the mechanism of the eye's focused gaze that cancels out the possibility of flat detail. Passengers in the background emerge into clarity only while my own figure recedes to a blurred smudge, merging with the scenery (the iliac curves of dark tunnels whooshing by).

Observe closely and a pattern emerges. This machine, this rail-beast, keeping time like a faulty heart, possesses an almost regular gallop (lub-dub, lub-dub), which stirs the composition, our images vibrantly vibrating until - in a rippling instance - it collapses to a thin, lifeless line. Then taffy-like, our images mend and coalesce, vibrating gelatinously at the edges as they solidify back into position. An analogue: the jagged colouring by a childish hand that leaks past borders, bridging between figure and background.

Perhaps those are our souls, momentarily loosed from our bodies with each jolting heartbeat of the beast; inert to progression, trailing sluggishly behind in pale shadow.

A restive tango, wobbling to a rest at each train stop, resuming as the roar descends once more. Between Boon Keng and Farrer Park a particularly passionate shudder fractures the singular scene into a mirroring diptych. I'm confronted with a twinned reflection, spooning with itself. The chorus, simplified to a stylized sketch, links arms in a daisy-chain of paper-white figures, spreading to a blur.

"This routine would repeat, our bodies --"

and then I am here, saying -singing!- I am drunk on hope and the ripe rose dew of potential, the succulent amaranth flesh of it. I am feeling lush, amorous, whimsical, hopeful, creative. Oh bliss!

And so it goes. A deep breath and then a leap into the blue.

Had to get out today to clear my head. The bravery I feel when I watch Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton fades the moment I turned my head from the screen, close the window. So nervous, a million thoughts.

Neighbourhood romp. When I get restive I like to wander around neighbourhoods. I like to watch people in their intimate spaces. The front porch is a grey space, half in, half out. So are windows.

I strolled past many rumbling, dead ugly houses - and I loved them. I looked through the diamond slits in the gate at an a old concrete modernist monstrosity; through sepia-tinted windows into a dingy flourescent lit space with an old stairwell - the sort you'd expect in old industrial factories but never in houses. A delicious thrill ran through me, the same sick pleasure I get when I look at something or someone I can't stand. Their dirt, rust, ugly shape and colour would have repulsed me in my younger days, so I don't know why it's turned into sick love. (Or maybe i do - i have known to love with a measure of hate, and hate with a loving sort of obsession)

It's something to do with nostalgia, the dried-up static nature of it, the way it's been a witness in time, a thing in space, accrued with the significance of cycles of rain, wind, sun, of cars driving in and out and past and people looking leaving staying. Seeing a place lost in time, suspended in temporal gum-amber lifts the chaffing winds of time from my own mind. Maybe? No, maybe not. Whatever. It's the only hypothesis that seemed logical. But perhaps something logical isn't something we are dealing with. Logic to me is something causally traceable, not indeterminate (although is randomness really illogical? Difference between chaos and randomness? mathematics, the mind boggles) If something is caused by something else in the distant past, no matter how hidden from the self, therein lies the measure of logic: there's a root, a birthing moment. But there is no seeming way for me to understand the enthralling sensuousness I derive from looking.

From looking. Perhaps it is not really the old things that enthrall me (although they factor) but the voyeurism, the stolen look. Why am I so interested in other people's lives, particularly if I don't know who they are? Why are people interested? I don't make stories about them, I just like to look. It's not anything sexy, unless there's a way to fetishize about rust and dust and broken concrete and slovenly-falling-apart places, ruin. Ruin, oh I do love ruin. Maybe I love ruin in the way of an excuse.

There was that dream two nights ago, a dream with a delicious kiss. I was a young man, virtually a boy, and I'd kissed another man - a british officer. Usually in my dreams kissing is preceded and followed by nervous anxiety, a clumsiness. Usually I'm a girl kissing boys or attempting (always attempting!) to kiss girls. There are walls in dreams. In this dream there was none. Perhaps I was feeling particularly liberated that night. Would I rather be a man? I know sometimes i would in the power-and-priviledge sort of way, but then I think - no, what a terrible notion, the idea that I'm desiring manhood because it comes with a liberty that women don't have? Come now, it isn't transparent but constructed. I think - I think if I could choose a power I'd like to change into different people all the time. I'd like to look and be looked at as someone new. Ha, there's that again, the embodying, the looking.

Also, remember the familiar dream architecture, the revisited corridors, the reiterations, the spinning cubed cube hypercube. The mind remembers somehow, wanders back in, wallpapers the place, changes the lighting, repopulates it. I wake up and I remember - yes, I was there once, in dreams! but when? Then I don't recall, and then I wonder if I'd dreamed a dream that only seemed to recall a dream. Perhaps that level of contorted complexity is not impossible, and my mind is a tricky place. wonder what it's like under influence.