Ashes in Rednotebook

i.

I have torn out and set fire to every page I have written. I obscure myself—kept a few fragments.

Some days (very few) I write endless nonsense. Some weeks I listen to music, stare at the running time, the track lists, pull up lyrics, pace the room, chase the same ideas till they fall apart, nothing makes it to paper.

The worst: losing hours on reddit arguing over looter shooters, on twitter over prestige television, bad takes on bad takes, on the New York Times being generally awful. It disturbs me how angry I get.

Since the winter quarter has ended (1 pass / 2 fail) the only things I can get down on paper are quotations on notecards.

ii.

Bibliopunk

What happens when you write yourself down?

Fernando Pessoa

Everything slips away from me. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and all it contains, my personality: it all slips away. I constantly feel that I was someone different, that a different I felt, that a different I thought. I'm watching a play with a different, unfamiliar setting, and what I'm watching is me.

Bibliopunk

Does solitude serve us?

Fernando Pessoa

To organize life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I've shaped my life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I've become a not entirely clear and definite individual.

Bibliopunk

Do relationships serve us?

Fernando Pessoa

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.

Bibliopunk

As much as I hate myself for it, I am a misanthrope. But I am a misanthrope with too much empathy, prefering to view people from a distance, where I can study their virtue without praise and critique their faults without condemnation. I want to remain unseen long enough to disappear, and then I want to write a book about disappearing. Although, I would much rather read this book than write it. It is the only joy I have these days: to read a book and find myself slant in its language. Sometimes I am mostly true. Sometimes I am the art of misreading.

Fernando Pessoa

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

iii.

all the signs in the sky
they offend me

so I shout quotes at them

of things I've read
and couldn't say

my own words go into
a different space

marked: abandoned

I speak only in the abstract

when I speak her name
it is not hers but a character

when she speaks of me
it is not in life but in drafts

we meet in failed novels