Hallway

I don’t have internet access in my apartment, so I can only get online at the high school or middle school. However, I found some writing from the last time I was in France, dated March 12th and 13th 2006, and figured I could put it on a flash drive and post it here. At the time I’d been reading The Elegant Universe. I didn’t finish it, and so I brought it with me to France this time too. There are other parallels with the found writing. I mention spirals right away. Talk about cavemen (second entry). Other themes come up that connect to current thinking. I ramble too. I guess I haven’t changed at all in two years.

The following is from the first entry. Not sure why there were only two entries, and two days in a row, though I guess that shows my dedication:

[March 12, 2006]

I wonder if this corridor has always been the same. If the atoms have replaced themselves like skin cells. There’s probably an easy answer in the collective mind of science, in a book somewhere.

I think about how I see my memories differently depending on where I am when looking at them. Then I think about how my memories contribute so much to who I am, and then I think of a spiral moving away.

Voices change over time. In writing, in throats, in heads. In wroads. Roads change too. Even if you stay on the same road you’re on a different road when you move. That’s what makes it a road, that it changes and you can change with it.

I don’t believe in chemicals. Imagine a globe, a spherical map, with each person’s worldview, that tiny point of our heads that rolls out across and through everything, as a light positioned where they stand. And that worldview, that perspective, is something so small holding up, putting together, something so big. That globe is being held afloat by each tiny light extending and wrapping around it.

We see energy. It’s tasted, touched, heard, smelled. Except that’s the passive voice and energy is never passive. Sure, it is directed and manipulated; but it never stops. It just changes. It wants to stop, but there’s nowhere for it to stay put. Because it’s still energy when it stops, it doesn’t die. It can’t be created or destroyed. But humans stop. They’re directed and manipulated. We change. But some of us can stay put, and all of us die. We create and destroy; we are created and destroyed.

I wore a robe for a whole school year, my first year at University, and I didn’t write a thing about it during that time. Why not? I never let myself burn photos or commit suicide, because I never know what I’ll think and want later on. So far things always have reached a new point of being appreciated.

Remember how pure capitalism causes the economy, usually represented by a line graph where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is prosperity, to have extremes ups and downs? So it’s usually suggested that we infuse socialist and democratic regulation to ease the slopes. Sometimes I try to assert control over my emotions and thoughts. Other times I let it go, to feel the highs and lows. I like rollercoasters, especially extreme ones. But riding a modern rollercoaster isn’t comparable to fluctuating among intense emotions. Old rollercoasters probably weren’t too much like it either; except any judgment I make of them now would be comparable to future judgments of modern rollercoasters, and opinions then about rollercoasters then are comparable to opinions now about rollercoasters now.

[…]

Soft usually means vulnerable, but also important. If I were to sleep alone in the woods I’d sleep stomach down with my arms under me so that my hands touch my shoulders. I know this because whenever I sleep without a blanket, often on a floor, I end up sleeping this way to best keep warm. Plus, it’s the safest way to sleep, because you need to protect your soft belly and under-chest, where most of the heat comes from. The other option is to curl into the fetal position, but this only makes sense if you have a sort of protection. Because from the first position you can pop right into action and get a quick view of what’s going. But in the fetal position there’s rolling necessary before you’re on the move, plus you have to expose your softness in order to look around efficiently.

The road changes, but it’s made of the same thing. It changes because of where it is, and I think people do the same thing. As a matter of fact, I think most things do the same thing.

What’s fun and exciting about thinking is how you can do it in different ways. That’s why poems can really get you going. Because a good poem makes you think, and it makes you think in different ways about the same thing. Cause the poem is made of the same thing, and so is your brain, but if you want they can both change and when they do it’s a direct cause and effect. For example, when the poem changes your mind changes, or when your mind changes the poem changes. But I guess that’s really the same thing, so maybe the poem and the mind are the same thing.

This corridor can’t be the same because they must repaint it now and again, plus there’s some gum outside door 315 that wasn’t there yesterday. And when I walked down it yesterday I felt differently than I did today. Still, I bet if I came back in two years I’d recognize it, barring an explosion, though I’d remember it differently than I do today.