The King James Version

A religious code, a moral code, a battle code. A dictionary. An encyclopaedia. A treasure chest of sayings, of teachings now its mysteries are unlocked. The mouth of Everyman with their English-speaking tongues. Everyman now a judge, freely opining and interpreting, quoting from.

Picture credit: The Bible, 1845, George Harvey (source: WikiArt).

See The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg.

From journal, October 2022. 

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is useful. Nostalgia is, in some instances, practical. A fiction I tell myself. For it's not. Nostalgia is rose-tinted and limiting. More sorrowful than perhaps enjoyable, for these people are gone, that time is spent. Nostalgia is a hungriness to see, hear, be with them, or be them again; to be in that buried past, to be that buried self. Undisciplined, it rattles bars. The remembering self wants in but nostalgia can only take you so far; and yet, it can prevent you from focusing on the present and the future. I will understand myself through my past, through my inherited past, forgetting that sometimes to comprehend you have to live.

Picture credit: Nostalgia, Grigoriy Goldstein (source: WikiArt).

From journal, October 2022.

Anguished Youth

In my head I have led many different lives and had many romantic adventures, just as marvellous or as incredible as those in books or on the big screen. I have brooded often upon these dreams and let a strange unrest creep into my soul. I have yearned to meet these images in some way in the real world – but how to seek them? Or have them seek (and find) me? I have each time come to believe that without any act of my own they would encounter me: we would meet as if meant to be, and any doubts I might have held would in that moment fall away. Day after day, silent, watchful … until the madness passes and the heart calms.

I have mirrored, I am still mirroring (at forty-one!) Stephen Dedalus' anguished youth.

Picture credit: James Joyce in 1915  by Alex Ehrenzweig (source: Wikipedia).

See A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. 

From journal and a larger body of thought on Stephen Dedalus, September 2022.

The Problem of Being

The problem of being a dreamer, a reader, a writer is fantasy. Most other people live in the world, whereas the dreamer, the reader, the writer is carried out of it, either involving themselves in the true or fictive tale of strangers, or dreaming for themselves the impossible, the miraculous, even to some degree believing this reality could happen, or at the very least feeling these delusions to be safer. There is no possibility of being really hurt or causing pain to someone else, and any perceived deficiencies and inadequacies don't matter – they can more easily be overlooked or overcome. And illusions, well, they have none of the humdrum, as they naturally take place in a different world than the one inhabited; these two realities are separated, one inside the mind, one without. Although, of course, if this line grows blurred, converges, sanity may depart or the closely observed discipline of isolation may be more and more strictly exercised. In isolation – circumstantially or self imposed – starts fantasy and self-denial, such as pledges to perhaps admire those persons who are “wild” or less meek or have a geography, a personal and public history. Those who were born in one place and ended in another; those who in exile found their voice or talent, and perhaps too the “home” they failed to see when they lived there; those who like our ancestors are forever moving, making, and marking, their territory by naming their “things” in it; those whose instinctive sense of direction is not like the dreamer, the reader, the writer blunted by settlement and rootedness.

Picture credit: Guardian of Desert, 1941, Nicholas Roerich (source: WikiArt)

From journal, September 2022.