Knowledge.

When are you able to say that you really know something? To say that you 'know' connotes a complete meaning that has been found. Otherwise you would only be able to say that you 'know something about something' rather than that you 'know something.' The last step to 'knowing' is a finalizing, puzzle piecing together of evidences that you may have gathered. Until then you can only know parts and, though you might know many of them, you do not have a glimpse of the whole.

This is why movies are so frightening when the antagonist is some shapeshifter, changing forms to what suits its needs. Real people, though, are shapeshifters too. Maybe they should also be frightening, then, but in fact that is their allure. A few years spent with someone in a relationship of any sort will allow you to look back on who they were when you first came to know things about them and notice how differently those two personas compare. At least, that is a hope. A person ought to always be changing as a result of learning and experience rather than sit in any dusty stillness.

The best we know of a person is what was. We can know the whole of another's past persona because it is no longer changing, it hardens in time's coldness. But those past personas, however many, are only parts of what is now, they are only a handful of evidences, and so the only firm item of knowledge we may have of another person is that they are changing. They are not the whole. Not yet.

The English Student Apologist.

Many students enter university wanting to study some thing in particular they had determined is worth spending four years exploring, but part way through decide to choose some other area of study they hadn't yet discovered until they had already entered. I think there was an episode of The Cosby Show about this, probably concerning Denise.

Anyway. Ignore the fact that I love the Huxtable's. What I want to focus on is that discovery of a new fascination.

I have always loved reading, and, though university English courses can get burdensome with that activity, there aren't many things I would rather do than sit around and talk about books with other people who enjoy sitting around and talking about books. My splitting decision, however, did arrive, though it took form in a desire to travel and wander rather than switch degree programs. I am, after all, a vagabond at heart. We know this. But today, while anchored in the library, I received a most freshening dose of literature that reinvigorated my convictions. I had to immediately share it with one whom I knew (assumed?) would also appreciate it. But I think I might document how beautifully blistering this is, a single page out of Michael Ondaatje's novel, Coming Through Slaughter:

You didn't know me for instance when I was with the Brewitts, without Nora. Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I would go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers and the muscle reaching into the machine and plucking the note, the sound travelling up the stairs and through the door, touching her on the shoulder. The music was his dance in the auditorium of enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs. God, to sit down and play, to tip it over into music! To remove the anger and stuff it down the piano fresh every night. He would wait for half an hour as dogs wait for masters to go to sleep before they move into the garbage of the kitchen. The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.

Everybody's love in the air.

--

This single page turned every recent thought about. Literature has the ability to make fictions more beautiful than reality. That feeling a book gives you, the way it cups around your heart, is one I don't suppose any textbook could ever give. As a result, my argument is not for Economics, but for English.

Levers and Pulleys

I have been thinking about coincidences. And not in the theological sense, where questions as to how an all-knowing deity could allow us room for things such as coincidence and free will, questions that are unanswerable and at a level almost blasphemous to be asking in an (online journal)--although that might have been something of a spark.

What I am thinking of is how our bodies move. We awake, we lift ourselves up and set ourselves off to spin, swirling around one another throughout our every day. We might choose obliviousness to some and attend others. But what is this choice; or, is it choice?

There has been an instance several years ago where I sat in the same room as another, probably even whisked directly past each other, but was entirely unaware of that person. But only at that time, for that whisking, that swirling, eventually spins you right back through a pair of doors to a position where, odd--you do interact.

There is this dance we play out during the day with others, and it might be best to welcome them to your dance floor, rather than stiffen at their stepping on your toes.

A tangle of mysterious prejudices.

We stumble into our homes in a humbled haze late at night and in despair cut off our hair. We want a new outlook through a new body.

We finish and look upon ourselves in the glass. We nod, approve, but we only see a half. Another appears behind and fixes the parts we can not see. This one sees it all, trims to form, approves. A friend will have our back.

"brightness falls from the air"

It is late in the evening. I am sitting in my orange coloured room after a day of motionlessness and contemplation. What I am wondering at this small moment is about what makes people happiest. The borders in this house are thin, so I am listening to a group of friends playing Jenga in my kitchen overhead.

Last night I was upstairs with my friends in my roommate's purple room and, though having such a desire to write, could think of nothing existing of which to write about.

Right now, however, I listen to my friends and know, of course, that having these people I care about is quite a brightness. But it is odd, I think, to not have this at the front of a person's mind when surrounded by them and to instead realize this only when separated and sitting in a dim and empty room.

The Greatest Man Says.

"To make a Christmas best," says my Great Uncle Herman, "it is up to you to decide. The entire purpose of the season is joy. It has nothing to do with gifts or food, but with giving thanks and praise to life and to those in your life. That's Christmas. To love."

I made a tremendous effort at the Christmas spirit this year, an attempt to counter a dragging preconception that it would be the worst Christmas. Quite a failure.

But I was speaking to Herman at the big Christmas dinner one side of my family has every year, and his words showed me where I went wrong. Well, everyone seems to dislike Christmas. But it seems that what everyone dislikes about it are the things Christmas is not even meant for. People stress out to purchase obligatory gifts. But when gift giving is supposed to be a representation of that thanks and praise a person ought to be sharing, this stress has no place. So cast it aside. Focus on the enjoyment of your company; feel the love focused upon you; reflect it back.

Yesterday today.

There is this unfortunate website that goes by the name of Facebook, a website you may have heard of. There are many things that have been said, and can be said, about it. But a most recent occurrence has caused a wave of...something, to press upon me. A curious mix of past and present.

Over the last several days there have been a flood of people of yore that have reinstalled themselves into my life. Perhaps only in a manner of speaking though, I suppose, because many of them I have not seen or spoken to for about six or seven years, and I am unsure as to whether or not they would see or speak to me some more now, aside from looking at those pictures of me on that website or editing some detail concerning how they know who I am.

If they wish to cross paths once again, then I would, of course, love to. But this entire occurrence has made me wonder at how much I have changed since being an awkward boy with too many joints. And how much I am the same as a man.

How strange it is. When the paths of two peoples' lives part ways, no longer paralleling each other, and as one continues along their particular path, the other person doesn't entirely go away. The image they keep tucked away, the memory they have of the other person, stays frozen at the point before they parted. I have forever remembered these people as children, just as I was, with crooked teeth and eyes of inexperience. New eyes, ones that have not yet experienced that dry, dark chocolate taste of adulthood. Those were eyes yet excited with wonder. I find myself looking at the eyes of those in the photos of today to see if they have changed with experience. Some are very different, but I am warmed on a cold night like this to see that some yet shine the same.