World Without End

Jacques Derrida on love, speaking in the movie Derrida (2002):

“Love is a question of who and what. Is love the love of someone or the love of some thing? Suppose I love someone, do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? i.e. I love you because you are you. Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence?

Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, seperates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity, or because I love the way that someone is?

Often love begins with a type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realise the other person doesn’t merit our love. The other person isn’t like this or that. So at the death of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are but because they are such and such [a person].

That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. The question of Being is divided into what is it ‘to Be’? What is ‘Being’? The question of ‘Being’ is itself always already divided between who and what. Is ‘Being’ someone or some thing? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone – singularly, irreplaceably – and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the qualities, properties, the images, that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.”

This interview is HERE on video by the way – nb, it takes the interviewer till about 1:40 to convince him to say anything at all. Talking to my old philosophy lecturer used to be a bit like this!

You could easily have seen this already but just in case you haven’t, you can rest assured that music is safe.

As for me, I’m sore but I’m happy. When I get to certain points of breakthrough (i.e. new things; i.e. stress) my body has a habit of throwing a fit and seizing up. This time it’s my neck and shoulder, which quickly and surely froze up over about an hour this afternoon. It hurts, but it’ll go over a week or so, and it mostly makes me think of those who live bravely with far worse. It’s a reminder that I genuinely need to limit stress whether I feel like I do or not – but it’s also quite a good sign, because it has not depressed me.

Re. stress, I went to the optician’s today. To his credit he didn’t try to sell me glasses he clearly felt I didn’t need (unlike every chain optician I’ve ever gone to) but I thought his reasoning was a bit odd. Having concluded as soon as I mentioned my health that my problems focusing my eyes are caused by stress (which they are), he decided that ended the issue. I was quite glad of this but halfway home I realised that if my eyes go when I’m under stress, it might rather lessen that stress if I could, you know, SEE. Still. Fair play to him. I tend to trust people who don’t want any money.

Good night to you. I hope you wake up happy.

I’m going to have to get a new computer, not sure how much to spend, how much to keep back as savings. Not a nice feeling. I always feel a bit sick when I spend money.

Given the enormous pretentious oblivion of my 20 years with major depression, given the sharpness of my long abandonment to emotional adolescence, it seems a little deflating that it can apparently be cured by taking four pills and running up and down the canal every day. And yet that is indeed what seems to be true. If I take those four pills and keep running, I feel, think and behave like something approximating an adult. True, it’s taken that time to find the right pills, and this on the NHS. But still. Looking back across the gothic gloom of the last twenty years I can’t help but feel a bit of a tit.

Oh well. If I am, in fact, better (the horrors of the middle of the night notwithstanding) I had probably best get on with working out what to do next. Baby steps, though. Every time I overreach I end up being too tired to go for a run, and then it all starts again.

Ooh, I did a tweetcloud! Look at it! Look at my tweetcloud!

This is based on the most common words from the last three months of my tweets.

Sometimes think I seem more bipolar than depressive. It certainly moves in swings. It may be that what I consider well is really more like mania, though I’m looking at the last “up” phase with something approaching amazement from my current position at the bottom of the whole entire universe. I certainly seemed to do a lot of laughing, flirting, embarking on big projects, dancing, this last time I even found I was able to engage casually with anagrams and wordplay which I haven’t been well enough to handle in a decade. This list reads like what my bipolar friends do when they’re going manic, but I don’t, quite, yet, do any of these things really enormously inappropriately. Not even the dancing. Maybe the flirting.

I will mention this to my doctor but it still seems the most productive time of my life, much more like the real me. I’m a bit lost.

Nonetheless, it’s not where I am now. Tried to look at my level 1 textbook this morning and it was like wading through treacle. I should be able to manage a paragraph of a level 1 coursebook without my brain freezing over. Blimey.

“Oh well,” as I believe the young people are saying these days. Off to get my son, and then I’ll make a third attempt at actually writing up the minutes I should have done nearly a month ago. It had better work this time, the next meeting’s tonight!

You’re all awesome and I love you massively so here’s Mr Cholmondley-Warner.

x

ps: if you are following me on Twitter and I haven’t followed you back, I probably don’t know you’re you, if you see what I mean. If you’d like me to follow you give me a poke, it’s always nice to meet a real human being out there.

:: shuffles in wrapped in blanket ::

Hullo.

I’m not very well.

I’ve got depression. Oh you remember me mentioning that do you, well bully for you, I suppose you want a big shiny medal or so-

Sorry. Sorry. Right. Yes.

I can hardly move. I can’t think. I just want to sleep all the time, so that’s what I’m doing thanks to a generous spouse who has realised I’m not well. In between sleeps I’m sort of alright for a short while, long enough to go and do one simple task. Like buying this filing cabinet for example. As far as I can see all it just provides another surface to pile stuff on though, it can’t change my ultimate incapacity for untidiness and -

Sorry. Did it again. I’m in rant mode.

There’s very little I can do. I went down to the bottom of the hill, bought the cabinet, came back. Nearly got run over but that wasn’t my fault. As a matter of fact none of it’s my fault.

I feel very, very guilty. Like I’ve done something awful just out of reach of memory. And I feel hated, exiled. And ugly. And so on.

I’m alright as long as I don’t get tangled up in anything too complicated, though. I can even brighten up and laugh if I’m just having a straightforward conversation. But any friends I make are going to have to be awfully patient when I’m unwell, and for the most part it hasn’t happened.

I got retweeted eleven times on Twitter the other night, y’know. For this tweet, this tweet and then this one. I must have been on a roll, but I was feeling completely horrible at the time. It’s funny how the borderlands of misery and mania can make our minds work at max efficiency for a bit. I reckon if I manage to get back to running once my back stops hurting, it’ll help me retain some control.

Anyway I’m now out of rant mode and into ramble, so I’ll leave you with this.

Rosie at The Beatles Story

Originally uploaded by World Without End

After two hours in the Beatles museum I’d learned to truly hate the fab four in a way I’d never hated anything, but it only encouraged Rosie. Here she is with John Lennon’s orange glasses. Rosie is an emotional storm in a little redheaded teacup, and she dissolved into tears just after this because John’s dead. I’m half enchanted and proud, half frightened by the little fanatic.

I hope it’s alright to thank you here for the supportive comments on last night’s post, but I’m doing this through my mobile phone and replying to comments seems a bit beyond me. Seriously, though, thank you. It helped.

Today went alright, actually. I’m a Quaker if I’m anything at all, but I still managed to dance like a twat this morning, proving that dancing like a twat will probably lie dormant in my system for the rest of my life unless triggered by certain chords, key changes or overhead projector lyrics. Anyway, that was nice. I haven’t danced properly for ages. I dunno how many other people were dancing, not many I suspect, but having small children always did provide a wonderful excuse.

As for the sermon it wasn’t so much bollocks as it was completely irrelevant. Harmless enough. I came away wondering what I’d been worried about. I’m tempted to do a blow-by-blow review but it wouldn’t be fair. The real lesson might be that I need to calm down about things, and perhaps not get quite so absurdly defensive before anybody’s even talked to me.

Far more traumatic, actually, was a return visit to the ominously-named Splashworld pool complex and torture chamber, where I managed, on my last visit, to get myself and daughter stuck halfway down a lengthy waterslide. Chaos ensued, especially when the next people came down the slide. This time that was avoided. Everybody’s intact.

I’m going to go to sleep now. Might try to go to Liverpool Tate tomorrow. Might just go to a soft-play. Might actually come up with something to say.

x

I am in a hotel. Note: I am not in *an* hotel. An hotel. Doesn’t sound right. An hotel. Sounds correct, but not right.

So I’m in a hotel. We are staying in Southport visiting my wife’s family. Hotels are weird. I have to simulate sleep from 8pm onward for my children’s sake, though really I’m tapping nonsense onto Twitter or stifling giggles at Will Self being horrid about hotels in this week’s New Statesman.

Tomorrow we will go to church with my mother-in-law. This will mean an Elim Pentecostal service. I grew up in Pentecostal churches so I’m hard to shock, and it’s always nice to get the old hands-in-the-air once in a while, but I’m sort of dreading it, too. You see, I’ve been feeling quite good recently. Much of the progress of my thoughts has been recorded here – I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s done it, I’m certain the sentence about ego and intuition from a little while back has been key, although it’s hard to discount the benefits of a regular running regime too. But whatever the cause I’ve been happy and relaxed and peaceful, and I don’t want some great cackhanded pastor loudly declaiming the sins of the flesh tomorrow morning and pressing a lot of buttons which would have been better left alone.

Anyway, thanks for coming along on the journey. Hope to have a bit more sense to blog tomorrow.

I’d just like to say that Terminator Salvation was an enormous stinker of a movie. I could have written a better movie than that if I had both arms tied behind my back and I was being eaten by soldier ants. The bit where Skynet obligingly explains why it has taken on Helena Bonham-Carter’s face (“but I can take any form you wish”) is utter, utter cliche. Skynet needed no face, and it’s lazy and limiting to give her one. We sensed a malevolent brooding in Skynet already, but that doesn’t make her anything that can be vaguely approximated as a human woman, because she’s not a person – she’s Gaia on a really, really bad day.

You know what went wrong with this film? Christian Bale, that’s what. He’s an egotistical fool and he ruined my movie! The initial intention was to give John Connor a much smaller part, and frankly that sounds like a far, far better storyline. John Connor’s pretty much a human Macguffin anyway; if he really is a perfect war leader there’s little point focusing on him because he’ll be boring. As Bale proved. Well done.

Anyway. I had to get that out of my system. Thank you and good day.

It’s freezing. It’s FREEZING!

Running gets a lot harder when it’s cold, eh? Also it was not-funny dark tonight, and the stars seemed to mock me from their cold, ancient beds.

I now have my Homer Simpson slippers on, and I’m not going anywhere without them for at least eight hours.

Night night