Tuesday, July 5, 2016

La Vita è Bella

 


The more time that passes, the more I feel overwhelmed in this clamp of life that we all strive toward and ultimately wonder why we are doing it and if we are, in fact, living. Since this new life has begun, I posted less and less until I finally reached the point where I needed to post nothing at all, and zen'd out in my mountains for a while. Since returning to this platform, posting once a month became somewhat of a task, since we don't have an internet connection at home. You could say the connection has been lost, but I've been working on other connections. Everything remains beautiful, but my thoughts are lost, swirling calmly into the infinite abyss of wherever it is that thoughts go when you let them go, which is really what I have to do now: let them (a lot of things) go. The thoughts that I would normally vomit onto an internet database have been the most difficult, though.

It was always somewhat medicinal for me to just put it all out there everyday. Not only did it help me beautifully map out my life and give me easy reference points, but it helped me get through a lot of things to just write it down. It has become a hell of a lot more difficult to do that since returning to my little mountain town, where everyone knows my not so secret identity, I am worried about appearing more "professional," I am working for a business that I don't want my thoughts to affect negatively, and I am in a relationship that I am not interested in really sharing with the world like I always have.
Apparently there are a lot of things that I have been dealing with letting go. There is a part of me that needs to jump online every night and vent about my job and two year old and relationship and the check engine light going on in my car that I hate but am dealing with because life is what it is and you get it; everyone gets it. I was really attempting to entertain, but that was all misguided and gone now; let go into the infinite abyss of wherever it is that things go when you let them go. I redund.
In my attempting to write at least some of this life down, in journals that rarely get translated into readable, rational statements, I oft mention how little I am getting accomplished, but I am getting a lot accomplished. I have a difficult time defining what I would be accomplishing that would be greater or better or whatever than what is happening now, but I am accomplishing this now. This. That's it. It doesn't get any better than this. My problem is that after weeks go by without an update, or months *shudder*, I feel completely backed up, like I don't know where to start. So much happens in life, especially this particular part of this particular life, that I want to write about it all, but there is so much we have to simply let go, leave out, or bunny-ear to maybe come back to later. My life as a writer has taught me that those things rarely happen; you can never "go back" to what's happening "now," so you have to settle for how you remember it, or diluse it in reference to where you are now, and how it applies to now, because you will never be where you were when it happened, so as time goes by it naturally changes to fit into the current puzzle.
Diluse obviously isn't a word, but either you get what I'm talking about or you don't. This raises a necessary relevance of where we "were": unless it's fiction, which I wish my work to be presented as (good luck with that), are our immediate responses to things really that important, or should we really wait it out and talk about it later?...when we can form a rational argument and make a rational point? Jesus tap dancing christ, where am I going with this?
What I was attempting to transition into in that last painful paragraph was this beautiful soul that I have access to; this beautiful soul in this fleetingly rare moment in her life. I kind of hoped, but never really imagined that I would be able to capture a pregnancy again, at least not intimately. I want to go shoot every day, but life is happening, and this time is speeding by, as it does with beautiful little temporal circumstances like this. It really is a very small window, and the window is closing. Plus she is preggo, so there are all the cliché body issues and emotional ups and downs, and there is a two year old who is already fighting for attention, and I work 6 days a week, so on our (usually just my) day off we are still unpacking from our recent move into a bigger house and dealing with a yard that was let go for nearly a decade.
Time keeps going; it doesn't care where you are at or whether you can keep up. All you can really do to keep from going insane is deal with right now, and right now is a perfect example: she is off with friends for a couple hours, so I ran back to work to use the internet connection, and my time is already up. This is life. This is beautiful. I will resort to a copy and paste from an earlier post that I never got around to posting, like so many thoughts lost; let go. It is a different mood, and voice, which will likely completely irritate the reader, but is relevant to my mental process right now. The things I let go...
There has been a struggle with naming the new soul. My old wants have merged with new lives, over and over again. Ideals, goals, every little thing has been swirled into other lives and worlds so many times that I am left in a surreal cloud of memories and emotions and wants and needs and what was beautiful being now ugly and vice versa. There are certain realities, but even those are often questioned based on new information and doubts and blah and blah and blah. I ramble on. I wanted to name my now 16 year old daughter, basically abandoned by me to her new family and ideal that makes my soul weep, Eroica. The then wife (Sven), refused the idea because she said it sounded too much like Erica (?!). We settled on Adagio, which I am more than happy with, and so is she, I think (she doesn't talk to me much).
Eroica has remained an obsession in my life, even though my unhealthy obsession with music has since greatly waned to my obsession with capturing the beauty I see in the world and attempting to get people to understand it. At some point, in my creating online egos, there was an Eroica Skeezix (the old project) and an Eroica Ellirand, but neither of them developed, primarily because I’m not a girl, and I’m not about to pretend I’m one online. That’s just weird. In all this unexpected creating of life when I thought it was no longer possible for me, with this new beautiful soul, naturally the option of Eroica has come up. In this instance it initially sounded too much like erotica. I pleaded my case, and other names were welcomed, one of them being Aréte, which I think would also be an awesome name, and apply more to my recent push on philosophy (that’s a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reference for you layman [laymen?] out there). Last night I asked Violet what we should name her sister. She suggested baguette. Honestly, I could go through my notes on all the ancient literature I’ve read and find some amazingly unique names. That was always one thing I passively noted: unique girls names.
Call it human will. Anywhoo…Eroica: her natural doubt in the name has led me to actually do some research, instead of relying on the beauty that only exists in my head. I purchased and read Beethoven’s Journals, which, while beautifully fueling the wanna-be tortured genius in my soul, didn’t help much. I finally just settled for the poor man’s college: google, or ooglegay, for the pig latinists out there. I knew that B’s 3rd was originally written for Napoleon, entitled Bonaparte, but reading about why and the events that led to it being torn up, scribbled on, and renamed, made me think immediately of my life: the volumes I had written for those who threw me away or gave up on me: beautiful.
The work stands; the meaning sometimes does not. I found one article that eloquently explained that Eroica was Beethoven’s transition into his “middle age” works. That certainly fits, beautifully. Transition and regret, not of the work, but of the loyalties and reasoning? Yup. We still have three months of consideration and research, but my mind is definitely leaning. I even found a beautifully unique recording of the 3rd (Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1953 recording a la EMI), which I purchased from a shop in the UK and have been listening to religiously, and has been the only thing to get me out of the Sigur Rós, Valtari loop (1. Ég Anda, 3. Varúð, 5. Dauðalogn, 6. Varðeldur, 8. Fjögur Píanó, repeat). I am fully open to whatever happens. My name was set to be Zebulun, until my mother died during child-birth, temporarily killing me, at which point “god” came to her in a vision and told her to name me what she named me. My actual name wasn’t even an option up to that point, and my father was taken completely by surprise.
That was meant to keep going. There was more I wanted to say. There were other things I wanted to add. They are gone; let go; I ran out of time and never made time to go back to it. I couldn't, because I'm here now.
A brief overview of the last couple months. The beauty abounds. I just wish more of it was now, instead of then.