life without a plot

12:30 at work is when my brain decides to have thinky thoughts about everything from random trivia to Life, the Universe and Everything. Not when M. or B. are there, because then if you aren't working you're socialising, but when I'm alone, when there isn't any work to be done except dusting which can wait for the next day, and not too many customers to distract me, my brain tends to wander. During M.'s last holiday I -- not exactly wrote, except for a few sentences or fragmented phrases here and there, but plotted a good part of the never-to-be-finished-but-fun-while-it-lasted TW fic.

When I come home in the evening there is barely anything left; mind wiped blank, no real will (or need) to write, words slip away or suddenly lack conviction and whatever thoughts I had before seem stale and a bit alien. No longer quite true, or quite me. Language and thoughts/feelings drifting in different directions...

~


Watched The Tempest a couple of days ago; didn't dislike it, but didn't find particularly inspiring or compelling either. Too short maybe, just barely telling the story? Or perhaps I've missed the point? But then, I remember almost nothing of Peter Greenaway's version (even the title only when The Tempest didn't turn up what I was looking for on imdb.com) beyond having seen it (before The Baby of Mâcon put me off Greenaway's films for pretty much forever), so maybe the play just doesn't strike the right note with me...

I've also started to reread Modern Nature, which I originally read when I was around 20, 21ish, while working on an excavation in Enns in summer, shocking one of the other students (I still remember her saying how The Crying Game had made her want to throw up, so I thought she deserved another shock or two) who wanted to know what I was reading on the train, and probably pretty much convinced her I was a lesbian. Which I wish I could be more certain about after all this time, instead of just not being very interested in anyone. Er, tangent.

I think I actually like the journals better than the films, the poetry of them, interweaving memories, art, sex, death, love, illness, film, politics, and always returning to the leitmotif of the sea and the sky, the landscape at Dungeness, and the garden he builds against the elements and against time.


Admittedly my fascination with the garden is probably the romantic escapism of a city person who managed to kill all but the hardiest potted plants, and types away at her computer listening to the noisy grasshoppers (?) in the yard. Still though, the descriptions of the garden always seduces me, and make me vaguely long for something like that, because it seems such a real thing, in touch with life...