heart wounds

Sometimes when reading you find something so beautiful it hurts your heart a little, at least i do. when i read a piece of poetry that is so simple yet so eloquent i want to hold it i want that so bad i forget that it is not real there is a quote from a romance novel by Lisa Kleypas that i read earlier this year in it a character says:
 "...and then another letter had come from Christopher so devastating that Amelia wondered how mere scratches of ink on paper could rip someone's soul to shreds."  
i agree whole heartedly with that statement books are "mere scratches of ink on paper" but sometimes they reach out and grab you be the throat. i like that.




this is my line journal it is with this that i justified spending a whole year outside of education (don't worry I'm over my initial guilt now) but here it is and inside it has many quotes: lines, whole poems and speeches from plays that when i read them made me genuinely happy

here is one from the play a disappearing number by the theatre company complicite what i like so much about this play is that it is devised meaning that it was written by the company some of the speeches where made up as they went along some written during rehearsals when i think about this and read this i wonder how something like this could come from someones mind like that it is truly beautiful:


"What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown uncovered together. they are strewn pell-mell. one of your ribs leans against my skull. a metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis (against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. it is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. yet it does. with you i can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough"


there you see do you love it?


recently i did a production of Sarah Kane's Crave it was in a round about way what my last post was about that and the fact i had briefly lost my bag, purse, money and charity with the world
but there all back now
but during that production i discovered the beautiful poetry of Kane's writing say what you like about the violence, sexuality, and blatant insanity of her writing but you cannot deny the poetry of it or even its effects
in Crave the characters have no names, backgrounds, ages or even fixed genders and reading it, it is very hard to get a fix on personalitys and then perform them but there are some beautiful speeches made all the more poignant as they are slightly ambiguous for example the one i am about to quote is by the character "a" it has been suggested that "a" stands for abuser and the character its self at one point shouts "I'm not a rapist, I'm a pedophile" there is an amazing speech that he does earlier on in the play to a person he supposedly loves it is aimed at character "c" which is again suggested to stand for "child" but it is beautiful when performing this we split up the speech and used it as a transition into the next scenes so that everyone had a nice chunk of text and we were able to demonstrate the fragmented aspect of the speech here is my section: 
"...and wonder who you are, but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree, angel, enchanted forest, boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep, i can't find the words for it."
all well and good. but this is the section that i really like. it is subtle and dark and strangely haunting:


"Don't say no to me.you cant say no to me because it's such a relief to have love again and to lie in bed and be held and touched and kissed and adored and your heart will leap when you hear my voice and see my smile and feel my breath on your neck and your heart will race when i want to see you and i will lie to you from day one and use you and screw you and break your heart because you broke mine first and you will love me more each day until the weight is unbearable and your life is mine and you'll die alone because i will take what i want then walk away and owe you nothing. its always been there and you cannot deny the life you feel fuck that life fuck that life fuck that life, i have lost you now" 

I do theatre, what did you expect?

Being a theatre student i am morally obliged to be a pretentious prick and i am. it is my duty and right to bore well meaning friends with quotes from things that they have, understandably, never heard of. it is imperative that i badger them to come to "just one more" ridiculous play where no one says anything and no-one will shut up and do i feel guilty? 
Well I'm fucked if i do and a shit if i don't: Lawyers love mime, Chemical Engineers love ambiguity, Sports Journalists are suckers for Brecht, Politicians think absurdism is super-fucking-awesome at least that's what my friends have shown me. 
The point of this is that i am ,in a very round about way, questioning the validity of my chosen degree. someone on one tree hill i think it was Lucas (now that's a cultural reference for you) said "your art matters" but does it? i begin to wonder to whom it matters.
i chose to study English literature not because it was what i am best at (it isn't) or because i find it easy (i don't) or even because i like the sound of my own voice ( which obviously i do) i chose it because i wanted to know things, i wanted a mind full of dusty facts, i wanted to know something about everything if i could never know everything about something. 
Guess what? 
I ain't even close.You know what else? 
i am starting to care less and less.  
grrr arrrgh!
it is at times like theses when i wish to be eloquent, to be able to say what i mean but:
"that is not what i meant, not what i meant at all"
my point escapes me.
as i don't doubt it does you.
i like writing it down though. feelings like these are like water, transient, impermanent they seep through my memories making clean, pristine images blurry, indistinct then when they are of a mind, rip them to shreds until everything good and pure, fun and sweet is re-written bad.
i forget how i felt when it was so good that i thought i was made of light. Right now i can only remember feeling like this all my life.
This feeling is a bitch. 
and here is my point. if in 3 years i make some feckless fool read this and call it my art will they have to nod and smile? or are they well within their rights to tell me to cheer the fuck up and stop writing this self serving shit?   
i am a English and theatre student. 
This is what i do.
what does that mean?
Fucked if i know.