Showing posts with label mania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mania. Show all posts

10 May 2011

my mind/my mind/oh my//it dances.

Animal Collective - "Fireworks" (Bataclan, Paris - Back On Stages) from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.



I don't wanna be "all I ever see sometimes" anymore.

(I'm sorry I was an asshole).
(it's all cloaks, like Dale said).

24 February 2011

flashes of a wildcat pack.

Ossifer! I swear my mustache is real and no, I'm not wearing my cat sweater ironically.
It's just that I hear Sisyphus has a millisecond of triumph before his boulder comes tumbling--
I hear that magic-dust makes hair grow quickly; mine'll be long again soon. And Ossifer! I swear to drunk that time is a sing-song, that my manic ramblings are sing-songs. And mid-winter, warm-air, misting is a sing-song, like the kale I sautéd on my stove-top. Bandit! Throw on your spectacles 'cause it's a damn good day. Let your hair grow long with mine. We can memorize each other's favorites (first we can pretend we actually have favorites), and flash--
we can pretend we know each other, and flash--
we can wear mustache guises, and, Oh!
Our Manifesto of subversion.
We're just a wildcat pack. Too wild for our own goods. Too 'fraid to truly be lone.
(or maybe too wise) and flash--
togetherness is kinda beautiful, huh?

18 February 2011

Thesis work isn't so grueling

When the light-bulb hits and you realize all you really need is more theory on the feminization of Chaos.

And when your thesis adviser points you to exactly the perfect text for said theory.

And when you are sitting outside, reading on College Green for the first time since fall.

This sundress may be too short for such a breezy day, but the warm wind on my legs feels so good that I don't care.

Winter was a grumpy introspective tunnel, and this is the light: 2 applications for post-graduation programs in this week, a completed annotated bibliography and research proposal, a preparedness to finally make-manifest some of my ideas in writing, and some Vitamin D that isn't coming from a dietary supplement.

Welcome, spring.

08 February 2011

vibrations.

Am I going manic?
Have I been manic?

Flip-book flashes:
Exile, liminal suspension, permanent transience.
And I'm hanging to André Aciman's "compulsive retrospection" like it's: involuntary, irregular, inevitable (?), and BODILY.
Signifying lack of agency, even in memory.

And I wish I spoke French, just so I could read Michel Foucault, untranslated. Because I'm self-surveiling and contemplating madness.
And I wish I could channel all these whirling thoughts.
(I swear, I'm on the brink again//oh, have I gone backwards?//oh to be on the brink, on the brink, on the brink again--)
Flash: the-absent-I, Flash: language is laughing, Flash: corporations as "generational voices" and ah, postmodern-disenchantment Flashing like: having answers is the wrong answer.

Been drinking dark roast, straight and black, for the past week. And I swear a collection of recent situational occurrences have some undecipherable interconnection. Like the world is screaming, but the words are mute, and all I sense are vibrations.
vibrations.
vibrations.

(What the hell is up with me?)

31 January 2011

flashes of melancholy (and the Middle Ages).

John Keats wanted his grave to read: here lies one whose name was writ in water.
[They didn't honor it].

Learned the etymology of melancholy the other day. Turns, out--
In the Middle Ages, bodies were thought to be made of humors, right? Well, when certain humors were in abundance--or sparse--one was said to have relational illness.
Melancholy
was one of those humors.
Melancholia
was the humoral illness.

One with 'excess' melancholy was clinically deemed: high-strung, but remarkably creative; simultaneously insane and genius.

It's a love/hate relationship--The Poet's and Melancholy's--like something un-catchable that catches you. What is prescriptive mental normalcy, anyways? Is intellectual genius inevitably so isolating that one who has it cannot help but feel crazy? disconnected? I think that is sad. I'm no intellectual genius (and I vow to not be as broody as John Keats), but sometimes I feel crazy, too. Yeah, sometimes I feel crazy, too.

When I was a super-little tyke (like, too young to remember--so super-little), the Dr. gave me some 'test,' and told my mother I had an acute form of Attention Defecate Disorder. He tried to put me on Ritalin, and maybe that's good and well for some people, but personally, I think it was kind of fucked up that he suggested it. Luckily for me, my mom thought so too, wrote the thing off as "one man's opinion" and kept me undrugged-- never even mentioning the incident to me until about a year ago. And maybe I'll go through life losing things more often than most people, and maybe my mind'll be full of flashes, and my stories will go through all these anecdotal turns before they make their points, but what's wrong with that? I'm Joyful and my relationships run deep, and I do well professionally/academically/ etc. etc. Why fix what's not broken in the head?

I, for one, am glad Keats was Melancholy. (And for the record; he was too)

Creative Commons License
flashes of melancholy (and the Middle Ages) by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Inspired by Dr. Brandy Fraley--lecture on John Keats and his Circle.