by
Annie Lord
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I think for a moment about these mistakes. How quickly I made them. How easy they were to make. I stopped making an effort, always walking around the house with Sudocrem on my spots. Carrying on talking about my work even when he was trying to relax so that falling asleep would come easy. I was so secure in this love, I thought that he would forgive me for each and every one of those mistakes, but soon they all piled up and there were too many of them and all these tiny ones were enough for him to say, ‘I want to be on my own.’
After the bath I lie on my bed all twisted up in a towel, not moving, not even to grab my phone, and it’s not even like I’m thinking about not picking up my phone; my mind has just drifted off somewhere else where phones don’t ask to be looked at. Time passes. I’m not sure how much of it and I don’t know why, but there’s this flicker of realisation where I come back down into myself and snap upright and as I do I see myself in the mirror that sits over the fireplace, all strawberry pink and puffy, and I smile at my reflection as if saying hello. I never confront myself like this. Sometimes it happens when I’m drunk and I’m in the toilet, talking myself through the motions to try to stop myself from doing something stupid, like, Yeah, use that toilet roll. I get it’s a bit gross that it’s damp at one end but it’s probably better than getting wee in your knickers, and when you get back out there try to drink some more water and be nice to Hannah cause you were a bit short with her last time she made a joke. And it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life. And in the towel now, with coldness starting to prick up all the hairs on my arms, and the sheets dark with damp, I experience another ‘over’, and this time it’s a promise, to keep on being nice to her. To order expensive takeaways, and go on walks, and watch films that are difficult to understand, because this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.
i like this!
‘Are you going to sweep that up?’ I asked, knowing that you hate being told to do things right before you actually do them.
‘Obviously,’ you said, spitting the word out at me like chewing gum onto a pavement.
I never feel that angry anymore. If someone does something I disagree with, like uses the last of my margarine when they know I like toast in the morning, or turns the oven off when I was warming it up ready to put something in it, I don’t shout. I think about why they might have thought they could do that. Maybe they were worried about the house burning down. Maybe they thought I was finished. I follow the thought patterns until the red glow eases away and I can fall asleep on the pillow at night without gritting my teeth.
I’m still not sure if you learn anything from pain, though I do think you learn from what you do to get away from the pain. Finding ways to process your emotions better. Learning who you can rely on. No longer positioning your sense of self around another person. Months after lockdown first started, I’m like one of those people who comes off a TV survival show, turns to the camera and says, ‘Now I know I can get through anything.’
i think pain teaches a lot actually but i like this
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.
Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort.
These horrible days -- when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles -- are part of my method of work.
[...] Here are some various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed--which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were--but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work--that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.
It is in the twenty-second session of that gathering that a chasm opens between the delegates, a split remarkable not only for its depth, but also for the seeming triviality of its catalyst. The question is whether a party member should be one who ‘recognises the party’s programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal association under the direction of one of the party organisations’, or ‘by personal participation in one of the party organisations’. Martov demands the former. Lenin stakes all on the latter
Relations between the two have been cooling for some time. Now after an intense, vigorous debate, Martov wins, twenty-eight to twenty-three. But various fits of huff and dudgeon ensue on other issues, and by the time the party leadership is to be decided, walkouts by the Jewish socialist group the Bund and by the Economist Marxists mean Martov has lost eight of his original supporters. Lenin manages to push through his choices for the Central Committee. Minority in Russian is menshinstvo, majority bolshinstvo. From these words the two great wings of Russian Marxism take their names: Martov’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
In 1903, at the Second Congress of the RSDWP
Prominent in the Zhitomir attack were the Black Hundreds, an umbrella name for various cells of proto-fascist ultra-reactionaries, which sprang up out of authoritarian outrage at the 1905 revolution. They are apt to sprinkle a few populist calls, such as for land redistribution, atop fervour for an autocratic tsar – Nicholas II is an honorary member – and murderous spite against non-Russians, most particularly Jews [...]
sounds terrifyingly familira
Nicholas receives word after desperate word that he must alter course to survive. The British ambassador transgresses protocol to warn him he is on the brink of 'revolution and disaster'.
Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.
hahaha this is gold