I am not wise

I’m not.

Sometimes I think I am, and then something happens and I realise that I most categorically, definitively, am not.

Sometimes I think I have got it all going on. I surprise myself with supreme grown-upness, just sometimes. And sometimes for months on end I am a picture of profundity and calm.

When actually, all along, I am not wise.

I know a lot of things, but the more I know the more I know I don’t know, as my mother would say, and as my mother’s mother said before her.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I had major deja vu upon cutting my hand open a short while back. How I was teleported back through the years – exactly the same person, doing exactly the same thing, thinking in exactly the same way. I was not wise then, and I am not wise now.

I read something today. Writing is the urge to communicate and be alone at the same time. That has nothing to do with wisdom, as such, but it seemed to go some way towards explaining the strange mental quandary that writing creates.

Today I had a conversation with a friend about his impervious waistcoat. We threw some words around. Like invincible. We could have also gone further and used words like infallible and impregnable, but we had work to get back to.

I wish I had an impervious waistcoat. But I am not impervious, or infallible, or wise.

Don’t think I am being self-deprecating, or fishing for a compliment to make myself feel better. For starters, I don’t feel particularly bad about it (just a fraction contemplative in a wan, shadowy-eyed, Monday-eveningish kind of way). 

And, more to the point, may I be so blunt as to point out that you are not impervious, or infallible or wise either. Oh, unless you are Plato, or Confucius, or some kind of figment of your own imagination. Which – may I also bring to your attention – you are truly not.

So that makes us more or less the same, you and me (give or take all the oceans of difference and strangeness and whatever else that may come between us, should we ever actually come together in the first place).

Now I have consumed a touch too much Tiramisu and we are hoping for rain. It could go either way (the rain, I mean), so we’re not holding our breaths or anything.

There were some other things from the past week… I can’t remember them all now. I was in Auckland. I had a notebook with me, but all I wrote in it was I am not wise. Hence the title of this entry.

Thing # 1:

I cling to books because I cling to life.

We have the upstairs book collection and the downstairs book collection. Bedroom books are the ones that threaten to topple over on me and smother me as I sleep. I live to tell the tale, though.

At any given time I will always have about 22 x more books in my bedside pile than I could possibly read. I will attempt to read somewhere between three and five books simultaneously, poorly, and with the attention span of a sugar-rushing kid, and I will invariably fail (just as I am not wise) to see the finish line with approximately 66.6% of them.

The other day, Simon finished with a book I had also finished with (or dipped in and out of). He said shall I take this downstairs? And a sense of panic and finality came over me.

I should point out that our downstairs bookshelves are stacked three deep (I blame Simon’s vinyl collection for spreading) and I cant find anything any more.

The exact thought that came to me was: I may die and never have a chance to read this book again. This is the last time I will ever read – or even lay my hands on – this book.

I’m not sure where the thought came from, but it knocked me for six, as my father might say. And then I regained my composure and went to bed, clinging to a new book (for as long as it will have me).

The book was Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore, in case you were wondering.

I also just finished reading Paul Auster’s Invisible. I even got up before work one day to finish it. I never get up before anything to finish anything, so let that be an indication of how much I enjoyed it.

I had some other thoughts, over the last week, but they’ll keep (as my father would also say… actually that’s not true – he usually says you’ll keep as a response to some impertinence).

Frankie now has eyes on her (even if they are sympathetic ones) and all of a sudden she has become a different beast, and so have I. More scrutinised, less free.

I need an impervious waistcoat. I need some pearls of wisdom.

Tuesday, blah, more blah and the dead duck

Still on a borrowed laptop, so haven’t got my groove on. Feel like moping but to do it here would make me feel like serial facebook updaters who talk mostly or only about their ailments. Once or twice is okay (especially if the ailment is gruesome or noteworthy), but I know people who post I’m tired of feeling sick etc about once a fortnight, and they’re only talking about hayfever. And after a while you just want to punch them. Or, even more aggressive, de-friend them and banish them to the cyber hinterlands.

The most remarkable thing that happened to me today was witnessing a dead duck on my walk to work this morning.

It was in the strangest position. It was arranged like a golden retriever sleeping in front of a fire with its jaw (beak) jutted out in front of it. Only it was a dead duck. Freshly dead, at an intersection, by a sandwich board, not far from the dairy. Like it was going for an iceblock and just ran out of puff.

Then I had some funny Twitter interchanges about said dead duck. Then I remembered I had about three days’ work to fit into just one measly Tuesday (woe is me) and then I worked at a disconcertingly alarmingly unwaveringly solidly stupifying rate until about 7.16pm this evening.

Then I found this cool picture of a print of a dead duck (its origins can be found here).

Oh, the other remarkable/out of the ordinary thing that happened to me today didn’t actually happen to me, it happened to Si, but it is still the only thing apart from the duck that I look back on about today and will think about again. Because it is not my happening I’m not at liberty to divulge (yes, I know me saying that is about as shit as me moping and going on about feeling sick and sorry for myself). He got a sad email from someone, with a line in it about being kept afloat by champagne and valium. That’s all that needs to be said, but it made me feel miserable inside.

It made me think about sad, cautionary tales, the perils to be found in broken internet boundaries, safety blankets, palliatives, distractions and the symbolism (or lack thereof) of dead ducks discovered on the footpaths of inner city streets on sunny Tuesday mornings.

It is raining now. One of my legs has gone dead and I have just realised that it is my brother in law’s birthday (or was it yesterday?).

A post, pre bedtime

  

You know when you are so tired your eyes itch and no steady stream of thinking comes. And sleep becomes academic although desirable, and also something a little bit fearful. What if it never comes again? (For example.)

This is a photo, or two photos, of lichen (top) and an aerial view of flamingoes from way, way up high (bottom). They go well together, I think.

Since I last wrote Si fell through the floorboards. I helped jumpstart a car for the first time in my life. I gave in to work anxiety and felt sullied and disappointed with myself because of it. I woke super early and listened to repeated radio stories about the sad plight of the NZ scallop in scallop season. Something about the fine layers of silt that get stirred up and bury the scallops as they settle. Also their numbers are dwindling, because apparently back in the day everyone just took a few months off and chanced their arms in the deep old sea to dredge them up with not a care in the world.

I have sat in a lot of rooms with a lot of people, nodding and sometimes scribbling, and now I am drinking restful tea with eyes that need toothpicks to stay open.

I have seen what just might be fate in full swing, and have seen someone attribute a favourable outcome to their prayers being answered. And I liked it, although I am not entirely convinced.

I have seen what it is like to be old and alone and bordering on incapacitated and – selfishly – for now – I am pleased that I am none of these things. Because at the end of the day I can’t not relate the situation back to myself (even though I am peripheral to it, at best, or more likely completely irrelevant but a small part of the so-called ripple effect), being, as I am, the very centre of my own universe.

Good night.