Rationalizing.

"The trick to loving is letting go."

- The Jane Austen Book Club

So let go, so let go,

Jump in,

Oh well, what you waiting for?

It's alright,

'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown...

- "Let Go," Frou Frou

"Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past."

- Celine, Before Sunset

We hold on too tight. We're nostalgic. Photo albums, journals, home movies--we love to relive as much if not more than we love living itself. Yet it's painful. To hold onto these memories hurts. We end up wanting the past back instead of hoping for a better future and enjoying what we have now. The past can be a trap and being too preoccupied with it is dangerous.

Nothing lasts forever; everything must end. For better, for worse, that's just how it is, and you can either try to hold onto it--whether you do so consciously or otherwise--or you can just do what you can with the time that you have, and when it's over, appreciate that it happened. You can try to stay in a moment that has passed. You can try to recreate something that's gone. You can try to hold onto something that's not there. But sooner or later you will have to keep going. You will have to move on. Then you can either hold onto the memory and live in it, or you can live in the present and let it be. Love that it happened, learn from it, embrace it, then let it go.

I suppose that letting go really is all you can try to do. You can't try to hold on anything for too long or it will just slip away faster. Just enjoy what you have, love what you have, immerse yourself in the present. Let it wash over you and bask in it, and when it's gone, let it go.

I wasn't going to just rant and moan and get all preachy but I have a migraine and need to sleep. Maybe I'll fix this up another time.

Edit 11/12/08
11:28 AM
I didn't really clarify any of that. It's fluid but it's mush. I started off saying, "We hold on too tight," and that's really what I meant--not, "let go of everything and don't remember anything," but, I guess, only hold memories in the open palm of your hand. If they stay, they stay. If they fall away, don't try to close your hand but let them fall. Then there's room for more.

Laaaaaaaame. Whatever.

"We all hope...

...It's what keeps us alive."

- Charlie Fox, Speed-the-Plow

Ha. It's what kills us, too.

On lukewarm November nights, the fog crawls off the bay as the sour water rolls over the divide to drown the rain-soaked streets. The wet road is blanketed in darkness—the streetlights do not shine. They do not light the way for wanderers. Standing like soldiers at attention along the waterfront, they only glow. The globes of mellow light diffuse into

thousands of particles, like boxy pixels blurred into superfine spun sugar. The golden clouds surrounding the spheres of soft illumination are warm, yet they offer naught but cold comfort. They seem to hold the wisdom and sympathy of all others who ever felt lost, but they are selfish and deceptive, for though their glow casts a rosy veil, this veil cannot eradicate the darkness—it can only separate lamppost from the night. The bulb burns bright, but its aura cannot turn the darkness into light. This aura is illusory: it twinkles with life to all who see it, but it is false and empty at its heart. It gives no answers, asks no questions, but stands indifferent to all who pass, and any who dares to seek more will only find darkness.

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Now playing: Spring Awakening - The Guilty Ones

If "grace is a touch of truth"...

So. The search for truth is not uncommon. Whether it's conscious or not, many people spend a lot of time looking for truth in their lives, and in others. I'm realizing more and more how subjective "truth" really is, though.

In Something's Gotta Give, when trying to get out of trouble with Diane Keaton's character Erica, Jack Nicholson's Harry tells her that he's never lied to her, that he's always told her "some version of the truth." Erica retorts, "The truth doesn't have versions!" It's a nice little comic bit that lightens up a serious conversation, and in the context of the film, it works. Except, perhaps "the truth" does have "versions."

When God is talking to Joan in "Joan of Arcadia," he tells her that grace is "a touch of truth that lets you see the world in a new way," and "it can only be felt when you're open enough to accept it." It "lets you see the world in a new way." To me, this implies that everyone has different truths. I mean, I suppose it depends on your experiences and what you gather from them, but everything depends on that. I like this idea, though--that truth isn't absolute, that it's subjective and varies from person to person. It makes truth that much stronger, I think. Plus, it enriches our lives--in sharing our truth with others, and learning their truths, we grow. It's so easy to simply dismiss other people's truths when they differ from our own, but whether it's something they learn by socialization or by experience, it has at the very least some validity to it. To have the grace to accept that, and be open to other people's truths, truly is a gift.

I bet Andy Warhol had the grace to accept others' truths.

I started thinking about this a week or two ago after reading something for my Story Structure class, which reminded me that stories have their own truths as well. It's perfectly logical: people have truths, people have/create stories, so stories have truths. No fault in my syllogism there, haha. Anyway, this is the first excerpt?

"Story is metaphor for life.

"A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words--a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this! Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived. A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what's obvious to everyone on the street.

"Writers of portraiture must realize that facts are neutral. The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens."

This got me thinking about the words "fact," "truth," "honesty." Fact is neutral; truth is not. Truth is combining the subjective with the objective. Then what is honesty? My dictionary defines "honest" as "free of deceit or untruthfulness; sincere." Then again, it also defines "true" as "in accordance with fact or reality." But, I suppose that works since reality is subjective as well--everyone has a different reality; there is no absolute. But I digress. Honesty goes either way then, I guess. Depends on context. It can be the fact, or it can be the truth. They can be the same, but they don't have to be.

The excerpt on story structure and truth goes on:

"Every human being acts, from one moment to the next, knowingly or unknowningly, on his sense of probability, on what he expects, in all likelihood, to happen when he takes an action. We all walk this earth thinking, or at least hoping, that we understand ourselves, our intimates, society, and the world. We behave accordingly to what we believe to be the truth of ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. But this is a truth we cannot know absolutely. This is what we believe to be true.

"We also believe we're free to make any decision whatsoever to take any action whatsoever. But every choice and action we make and take, spontaneous or deliberate, is rooted in the sum total of our experience, in what has happened to us in actuality, imagination, or dream to that moment. We then choose to act based on what this gathering of life tells us will be the probable reaction from our world. It's only then, when we take action, that we discover necessity.

"Necessity is absolute truth. Necessity is what in fact happens when we act. This truth is known--and can only be known--when we take action into the depth and breadth of our world and brave its reaction. This reaction is the truth of our existence at that precise moment, no matter what we believed the moment before. Necessity is what must and does actually happen, as opposed to probability, which is what we hope or expect to happen..."

This is where it gets complicated. It's late and I have to be up early so I'm going to have to finish this another time.

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Now playing: Ingrid Michaelson - Glass

On Writing...and I don't mean the Stephen King memoirs.

At times I look at this thing and hate myself a little, for it, for various reasons. One of them is this:

I use this pretty much just as a space to jot down random thoughts, to work out on paper things that swim around my head til I can't see straight for all the extra noise. I like it because it's logged online and I'll never accidentally delete the file or forget to save it properly. I like it because I don't have to stress about the quality of writing that goes down here--it's just thoughts, and that's all.

Except that's not what it should be. I love finding simple ways of putting thoughts, of working them out in a way that makes sense to me. I like breaking down thoughts and putting them into words that everyone else can understand. And I like writing in a style that is more, "This is what I mean, I think, does it make sense to you?" than the "I am pretentiously condescending to explain this to you" vibe that I feel like my more formal writing tends to unintentionally convey. (I have a mortal fear of being pretentious. And of being seen as pretentious.) Yet, I've been cheating. I say that I'm trying to put my thoughts into writing that is easily accessible, and perhaps to some extent I am doing that, but at the same time, I'm just being lazy. I don't try to write well. I forgo all attempts at lyricism, which I love; I don't bother editing at all, really; I let myself ramble instead of trying to be concise. My poor diction betrays my weak vocabulary, and my imagery and figurative language? Practically nonexistent.

I like writing. I like to write. But I don't work at it. And I mean, while Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose has its strong points, it doesn't work for a lot of people because, well, Kerouac was brilliant. He could sit down at a typewriter and just let the words flow from him like music. He could command language in a way most people can't. For most people, it takes hard work, dedication, and practice to become a strong writer and develop a personal style. I need to do that.

I also think being a great writer requires experience and exposure. It means reading more, and reading different forms and genres and styles and writers. It means listening to a wider variety of music (despite my post on pop music) and absorbing the rhythms and beats and cadences and melodies. It means looking at paintings and photographs and seeing the textures and angles and perceptions and lighting and color. It means reading and watching plays and hearing the dialogue and seeing the body language among the actors as they interact. It means watching films and seeing all of this combined with even more layers of personal interpretation on the audience's end. It means going out and being around people, talking to them, and Andy-Warhol style observing them and listening to them and being interested in them, because to me, humanity is the essence of writing and all other forms of expression.

Thus, my latest resolve is to try to improve and grow as a writer through these posts. Though I'm sure many of them will still end up being ramblings and musings of random thoughts, I am going to try to dedicate at least some time to doing that better. To being better.