We live in a world filled with hard choices. Also filled with easy choices and hard consequences. With complex choices that mean that some of us will be denied something, often necessary. That some of us will sacrifice and suffer and a few of us will get more than our fair share of comfort and gain. We live in a world where everything we have is paid for by the misfortune or “have nots" of others. We can hate the world. We can resent each other. We can feel guilty, but above all, I try to remember to be grateful for what I do have. For the fights we win. For the joys, comforts, and wonderful things that I got and someone else didn’t. I’ll never be content with the state of the world. I try to remind myself not to be complacent. But, I really can’t hate the world. There’s not always a balance between the good and the bad, but the good is so good. It’s easy to forget that when you’re wading neck deep in shit. The world is an ugly place, but it’s also where we store all our hopes and dreams. Our loves. Our passions. Our potential to be better than we were yesterday and today. Our strides for a better tomorrow.
Holding hands, the artist and the scientist stood together at the edge of the gallery.
The artist stepped forward, contemplating the prints on the wall. She was absorbed by the contrasts, the composition, the ability to make something out of nothing. She felt truly inspired and sketched down thoughts and ideas in her notebook. This was photography; this was art.
The scientist was drawn to an installation in the corner of the room. Blinking LEDs creating cascades of colour across the wall. Images of circuitry and formulae filled his brain and sent electricity throughout his body. This was physics; this was science.
On the walk home they paused at the window of a department store.
The artist had been stopped in her tracks by the kaleidoscope of colour that confronted her. Shoes, dresses, and handbags all competing for the attention of a fashion connoisseur. She let her imagination briefly sweep her away into a world where Vogue and Elle were pleading for her to be their cover girl. This was fashion; this was art.
The scientist, meanwhile, was gazing at the outdoor clothing. He admired the wind and water-proof jackets, the high-tech training shoes, and the camouflaged outfits that were hidden amongst the fake greenery of the window display. He pictured himself soldiering through the undergrowth, defeating all opponents, aided by his superior equipment. This was technology; this was science.
As soon as they returned home the artist hurried to the kitchen whilst the scientist smiled from the bedroom, listening to her rummage through the pots and pans.
The artist worked in a chaotic blur – pouring, mixing, and crafting, without so much as recipe books nor measuring scales. The oven filled the air with the scent of sweet temptation, and after, she delicately worked her magic to ice her edible masterpieces. These were cupcakes; this was art.
The scientist finished his drink – 250ml of coke with 100ml of Jack Daniels – and crept out of the bedroom. He found the artist asleep, draped across the sofa, and he pulled a blanket up over her to keep the cold, night chill at bay. Back in the kitchen he admired her creations and lightly traced his finger around the complex shapes of icing that had flowed from her mind. This was geometry; this was science.
© Nick Milnes, 2012
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| The Pussycat tattoo is coming soon. |
The Owl and the Pussycat set out to sea in a pea green boat with honey and "plenty of money" wrapped in a five pound note. The Owl serenades the Pussycat while gazing at the stars and strumming on a small guitar. He describes her as beautiful. The Pussycat responds by describing the Owl as an "elegant fowl" and compliments him on his singing. She urges they marry but they don't have a ring. They sail away for a year and a day to a land where Bong trees grow and discover a pig with a ring in his nose in a wood. They buy the ring for a shilling and are married the next day by a turkey. They dine on mince and quince using a "runcible spoon", then dance hand-in-hand on the sand in the moonlight.
Edward Lear
Edward Lear
Art can be found in everything. Our planet itself is an artistic creation so beautiful.. Nature, the stars, our anatomy and the miracle of producing life. It is through Art that the beauty of mankind is realized. Music, paintings, sculptures and writing.. all bear testimony to the great things we are capable of as human beings. Art is our light in such a world as this. I find inspiration in those that are inspired; despite how dark and sad this world truly is. And in the heart of the poet that still loves ..even though it is broken.
Like the rays of the sun, Art and words can reach out and touch the masses. And surely it is through Art that we can breathe love into this world? Everywhere I turn people are suffering… Withering long before they are due to die. Yes our bodies are dying everyday.. but each of us, in our own way, are dying internally in some way with every breath. The innocence of childhood snatched away from us by a world that can be immensely cruel. Is it not through art that our purest inner soul can be true to itself? What society weighs down with chains; breathes freely in art, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t it?
There is truth in art. Expression unmasked and fearless. In a world of media induced lies and the enslavement of our minds, Art is a channel for the beauty in our hearts. I do not believe in fighting violence with violence, so how do you change the world? Through love? Through inspiration and beauty? Am I mad to believe it is possible?
We all have a heart.. we all know what is right.. we all have a choice… and these hands are capable of creating immense beauty…
Sometimes, you think you know what you can give someone, you think that your words will have this healing power, that you will be able to give them what they've searched for years. You can list all the way you'd touch them, caress them, savour them in a hurried breath.
You know exactly what you would do to make them happy, because that's all you really want to do, make them happy. But sometimes, probing words and truthful sentences hurt more than they heal. sometimes, exposing their wounds to the world and offering to do stitched for them is more embarrassing than loving.
I am sorry, this was wrong, I have only ever wanted you to be happy, And I keep wanting you to be happy.
Her mind wanders around, always. Whenever she watches a movie or read book, the character come alive in her head and they live forever after. Whenever she sees a photograph of a beautiful place somewhere on this earth or not, she lives there for a substantial amount of time in her mind. Sometimes there places are energetic, filled with interesting people from all walks of life and full of adventures. She lived in London, Tokyo, New York City even, and Amsterdam. Sometimes, however, they are peaceful, quite, tranquil, like Rome's St Peter square at night, or the lake of Geneva in early dawn. The top of the Alps, a small island in the Atlantic. She moves from one place to another in just a split second, with a look at a photograph. I wonder where she lives these days. Her body seated in the park under a tree, her mind might be living in a tiny, dirty apartment somewhere in Moscow with all the characters from Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". I would love to come over for dinner sometimes.
She is an artist. A performance artist. Sometimes the people she talks to don’t know whether the conversations they have with her are real or a performance, an act. Her ability to feel shame or embarrassment is limited, other people’s embarrassment means nothing to her. In her world, in the world she has created, piece by piece, around herself, reality is non existent. All she wants to do is push people’s boundaries. She wants to see how far she can go, how far she can take people. How far away from the norm, from the boredom of everyday life. She wants to make people redefine themselves and the world. She wants to make people redefine good and bad, male and female, right and wrong, weird and normal, success and failure. She wants to make people be who they are.
I have always been a scribble ever since I could remember. I stopped somewhere in between being a kid, a rebelling teen, a wife, a mother and a divorcee. Everything, from truth to lust, from lust to love, from love to hate is when I start to take scribbling more serious. Fiction and non-fiction. What I'm feeling and what I wish to feel. Through words, I'm trying to understand life in so many different perspectives and angles.
Call me hopeless romantic, but feelings are the most difficult theme for me to write about. It has always been. Until one day I fell. deeply. deeply in love with a perfect stranger. The shortest love story yet the most intense feeling I've ever experienced. I was terrified at first, too scared to expose my own feelings, but my bravery won. I dared myself to write instead of just scribbling and our short love story was the spunk to put my every feelings into word. I let myself streaming down into this river of words, pages after pages of my journal. There's no lies, pages of honesty, sincerity, integrity, candor and simplicity of a heart and mind. The words never stop itself from filling every new empty pages, even after the love he once had for me fade as if I am just an idea to him, a faded idea, and we're back to strangers. But the love that gave me courage to write remains.
The words never stop, I never stop, ideas never stop because everything in live is truly inspiring.
And then one day, I lost the journal to my clumsiness. That is when I lost the ability to write, as if I lost a part of me. I shall stop and put down my pen because now, me and words, we become stranger.
Call me hopeless romantic, but feelings are the most difficult theme for me to write about. It has always been. Until one day I fell. deeply. deeply in love with a perfect stranger. The shortest love story yet the most intense feeling I've ever experienced. I was terrified at first, too scared to expose my own feelings, but my bravery won. I dared myself to write instead of just scribbling and our short love story was the spunk to put my every feelings into word. I let myself streaming down into this river of words, pages after pages of my journal. There's no lies, pages of honesty, sincerity, integrity, candor and simplicity of a heart and mind. The words never stop itself from filling every new empty pages, even after the love he once had for me fade as if I am just an idea to him, a faded idea, and we're back to strangers. But the love that gave me courage to write remains.
The words never stop, I never stop, ideas never stop because everything in live is truly inspiring.
And then one day, I lost the journal to my clumsiness. That is when I lost the ability to write, as if I lost a part of me. I shall stop and put down my pen because now, me and words, we become stranger.
Maybe I'm just being too emotional, sentimental, or dramatic. But losing my journal hits me hard. Its like I'm losing a part of me. Those pages after pages of nonsense is my past, my memories, words after words made me of who I am today.
Oh, how I love to re-read what has been wrote just to keep myself on track every time the tides of oblivion strikes.
This is tragic ....
Oh, how I love to re-read what has been wrote just to keep myself on track every time the tides of oblivion strikes.
This is tragic ....
Sometimes acceptance is a slow burn. Being forced to acknowledge and understand that what you want to do in life is unattainable.
Not giving up, but respecting limitations and boundaries. Perhaps there are things one could change about their situation or self to effect a small change in their world, though it may not be the splash one wanted or needed.
Oddest for me though, is where these thoughts are coming from. Normally they are the product of depression and desperation, an unwillingness to accept what may come causing a deep hatred for what is.
This time they’re coming from a good place. A mindset where I know I can be happy with the things that aren’t what I want if I so choose, even if I’m aware that there will always be something missing, a tiny void of what-could-have-been.
And so I continue the arduous process of remaking and reshaping myself and my world-view. Here’s to the best. Ever upward!
I don’t know how to make this sound beautiful, how to write about regrets in a way that still holds some sort of elegance in the words. But regret is not a beautiful thing. If regret was a color, it would be black ... the deepest onyx. So deep that you drown in it. The current pulls you under, and you’re searching for the grasp of an ally to save you. But none come. And as the inky death overwhelms you, you begin to question your choice of friends.
All her
loses show her what she still has left. She still has her love for reading, her
wonderful secondhand books and plenty of tea. Her imagination is as vivid as it
has always been, her mind still take her to happier places, to places peaceful
and wild all at once. At times she still dreams of Oscar Wilde. Dreams so funny
she wakes up from her own laughter every time. The clouds are still there, ever
changing. And she stills herself, maybe just a little sadder and somewhat
quieter than before. But that’s alright, because her mind is loud still and her
nose wrinkles when she laugh so much like it has always done. There is so much
she can lose, but not these things. These things will always be there, and that
means she will always be fine in the end. A safe feeling isn’t Jordan?
I grew up in a city where children begged. Where their clothes were riddle with holes and their feet were bare and bleeding. That world is still out there. It's the kind of world that most people I know would never see. But it is those eyes and those reaching hands that come out in the dark and touch me. There are many moments in my life where I feel stretched to do something for them. I have often wanted to just give my lunch-box, my clothes, everything that I had so that they could sleep easy for just that one day. I realize now that the poverty itself is a very fundamental thing in any city, any place. There are so many people who are poor for something. Not just money. There are more than just money that makes someone happy. It could be something as small as a found butterfly wing. A smooth rock. And the more I thought about it, the more I understood that I have certain things that other people may never have. Maybe they have the small something that I have been searching for all my life.
The problem with the narratives inside my head is that they are not logical or well considered. They are not the way stories should unfold, and this is what makes me afraid. The people inside my head are not real. They don't have names and they aren't completely drawn together. But what keeps them alive is that they have the rhythm of a story stitched inside them like vital organs, all moving together in an ancient dance. The people in my head walk with each other and haunt me in the daytime. Do you know what is like to hold a secret inside of you that you can't tell no one? It drives you to become mad. You itch and claw into the deepest recesses of your waking memory to find the words. But you can't find the right thing to say. You are perpetually afraid that you won't do these people's stories justice. And every night it is as though they all stand in the middle of your room and breath in all thrust a pen into your hands. You make desperate scrapes on paper to save yourself from drowning in the oceans of people you harbor. And do you know why I write? I write because if I don't do it, I am not certain that I will live the next day. I wrote because I am helpless at doing anything else. Words are the only thing that my hands understand. And when everything is taken away from me, they are all that I will have.
The Writing
The story is a retrospective from...from...from where? What? Prison. Ostensibly. And yet, there hasn’t been a trial yet--no judgement. Nabakov tantalizes you, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” to pass judgement on Humbert Humbert yourself. Are you willing? Or will you just turn your head, wincing?
I have never read another book written quite like Lolita. The writing has depth, layer upon layer, strata against strata, texture among texture, breathless, eloquent, exacting, alluring, inventive, sexy, pleading, conceited, lurid, savory, languid, and slyly self-deprecating. The author is flagrant, unapologetic, a dandy even and he has absolute command of the English and French and Latin language. He invents words. He hyphenates them. He nymphorizes them. It’s a gamboling and frolicking story in the rarefied air of an unrestrained, unapologetic and unadulterated polyhistoric writer. He whiffles the writing in so many little stylistic flourishes. He writes sentences and paragraphs in ways that I would never have guessed to try. It’s insanely periodic writing; I grab my head akimbo in pure awe of the sentences. It’s subtle and raw at the same time; it’s pure. Pure, like what happens in your neighborhood behind closed doors, just before an arrest. He incorporates a dry, brittle sense of humor--even a bit of sass. He taunts the reader to follow. He dares the reader to like and enjoy Humbert Humbert. He pokes you in the eye. He scandalizes you, but with a pen that is at once brutal and sensitive, but always careful. There are echoes of Joyce and Poe.
The Subject
Lolita is supposed to be shocking, revolting even, many people not able to finish it. Titillating, serious fiction about pedophilia is the clear edge of the literary envelope, something banned in many different communities, even today.
This 300+ page book chronicles a crime against a minor. Nabakov makes this an even more difficult sexual arrangement for his readers to contemplate, because the 12 year old is an eager, compliant and willing partner to the crime.
Enter Humbert Humbert. He suffers an atavistic urge to procreate with young nymphets. This is a social problem driven and turbocharged by the midbrain. He understands (his cortex understands) that the culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s find this taboo and perverse, definitely criminal. But our poor Humberto doesn’t care. He reasons with his midbrain, and pleads to us, "the jury." In the not too distant past within our own Western culture, and certainly in modern cultures of tribal peoples, 12 year old girls are ready to mate. Lolita has already menstruated and had sex with a boy her age. In many cultures of the world, Lolita would be given up as a wife in exchange for dowries of cattle, land, political favor. The whole story, then, brings this taboo to a moral question. And its a question that you--modern citizen--find uncomfortable, like I do.
Even more disturbing, Nabakov makes Humby Humberty a caring, loving, protective paternal figure that wishes Lolita the best in life. There is no direct, lewd reference to the act of sex; nothing salacious; nothing pornographic. No, that would be too easy to damn Humbo to the devil. Instead, Nabakov explores the possibility that real love may exist betwain the tween.
And, as much as I feel ashamed for being so taken in by Humby, I was fooled but, believe me, Lolita is a victim and no amount of saddening flashbacks to Humbert's past can change that.
There are 2 version of lolita's movie, one is filmed in 1962 and the other is 1997. When making a film about pedophile and a nymphet you are going to offend someone, The key is not to offend the whole audience. Kubrick's (1962) film cuts out a fair amount of the back story to turn the movie into dark comedy, where's as lyne's (1997) stays true to the story, making the movie much more dramatic.
Not to say that Lolita (1997) is bad. It's a very interesting take on the story and could be great if it was better executed. Its extreme shots shows its lack of commitment to the drama genre and are what ultimately bring down this film. Lolita (1962) is a truly beautiful and original film, so I really recommend you guys to watch Lolita (1962)
You are on the planet with a brain functional enough to formulate a question. True, there are some “What is the point?” days. There are days when everyone in the world has had the same idea you have had. You begin to feel like you’re spinning on the same wheel. The Earth and the sun and the wind are all going about their business but you feel as solid as a stone. Just let it all out. Don’t get yourself another notebook. It’s not a pretty place filled with blank pages. No, that is the worst possible idea. Get a book that’s already been filled with words. Something old, reeking even. Dug up from the mess that is your attic and your basement and every other forgotten room. Write the words that other people have already written. Memorize beautiful passages so that you can imbue them within your atoms. When people invent powerful enough microscopes (or better yet, bother to use their eyes) they will see the good inside of you. Write other people’s words down. Write them wherever there is space. On your arms, legs. I like writing from my elbow up. Write adventures on your ankles and draw on yourself. Put that pen to good use and colour in the empty canvas that is your skin. You don’t need to be the greatest person to figure it out. Do it without restraint. You can thank me when you are all inked up and pretty.
Every year you grow. You learn. You meet new people. You experience new things. You cry. You smile etc. But most of all, you make mistakes. We’re far from being perfect. We have our faults and flaws but that doesn’t make us any less beautiful.
No New Year resolution for me, but it’ll be the same note like how I started my 2012;
Survive another day, one day at a time.
Along the way: I will dedicated my being,
to creating something truly beautiful to share with others;
I will commit my heart to making the world a little bit better for others;
I will pledge my mind, to thinking up better ways to spent my time and effort.
