A fabric huge rose, like an exhalation.

There is a mountain here, a bursting scape of defiant nature that rises up through the concrete at the center of the city. Though countered with superficially sliced walking trails, the fingers of its trees yet stretch over to either side. It is a bastion.

Though, compared to others, it isn't as much a mountain as it is a very large hill. Most say that you can reach the top in a half hour's walk. Still, like so many other things, I insist upon turning its climb into a metaphor. So I tell myself that I need to prepare, that I need to climb it only when I'm ready and have the right shoes. When saying this, I heard "You could just do it now," and, "You don't need any shoes other than what you already have."

Nothing subliminal was in those statements but, like ascension, I ran away with them to grow even more metaphors. There are two very separate appeals in making a climb. One is the excitement of going as you are and seeing what happens, an appeal of uncertainty. The other is the excitement of knowing what you are about to do, an appeal of having made proper preparations. Wonderful things can happen out of either method if the circumstances allow. But is one better than the other in all instances? Or, can one plan to be sporadic? Whatever the case, the benefits are never known until you are standing on that mountaintop. And once you are there, the method never matters.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

A personal tidbit, rather than an extradited contemplation:

I've moved to a new city for the summer. I spend most of my time walking around, looking up at the different/same sky, and the people and buildings that have set themselves up to surround me. This is an entirely different place from where I regularly reside, and that is what I enjoy most.

However, it seems as though people commonly notice those things that remind them of where they've come from. The favourite cafe I've discovered reminds me of one from my town. One of my roommates is the doppelganger of my friend Sam Rodgers. As a matter of fact, I am seeing doppelgangers on every street corner, ghostlike renditions of friends from other places. It is at once both familiarizing and estranging.

Perhaps I am one among very few who imperceptibly search for those things known in what is unknown. But, still, one then wonders how an embrace can be shaped that includes only the wonder of all things unrecognized.

Lying in separateness.

Popular emo songs of the 1990s sing of distance and a desire to collapse that gap, most commonly (since they're emo songs) between a romantic couple, or some ideal childhood circumstance. Closure is such a desire to sing about, distance is such an obstacle to defeat.

There is nothing more valuating, though, than the noticeable correlary posted concerning such a distance and how much it concerns you. This, called misery. Perhaps you might not realize just how much a person means to you until you are no longer allowed the luxury of their presence. So you yearn for that presence to come back.

But I wonder, when that presence is again presented, at how quickly the hollow ache of misery, one that resides so low in a person's abdomen, simply dissipates, hastily replaced by relief and elation. Yet how valuable is misery, then; for elation would not occur if it were not for the emptiness preceding it. This, an appreciation for misery sometimes called masochism, is sometimes for one to allow it value and graduating appreciation through its perpetuation. But some say, in response to such accusations of an addiction to misery, that they will allow it to perpetuate as long as it must, for the fortune that follows will be all the greater.

Upon my breath.

Today Volumes III and IV of Thrice's Alchemy Index were released upon this needy world. Or, in the least, upon me, in need. Its timing is welcome.

There might be words that exist with which I might explain how incredible their artistry is in The Alchemy Index albums, how brilliant Dustin Kensrue's lyrics are, connecting words and music to present listeners with a very real internal image of the classical elements, how you can hear them in the songs, spanning full genres with ease. There are words but I do not have them.

The title of this (online journal) is taken from the English sonnet track from the Air album. It suits. I thought I might reproduce.

Silver Wings

From tender years you took me for granted,
But still I deigned to wander through your lungs.
While you were sleeping soundly in your bed,
(Your drapes were silver wings, your shutters flung)
I drew the poison from the summer's sting,
And eased the fire out of your fevered skin.
I moved in you and stirred your soul to sing;
And if you'd let me I would move again.
I've danced 'tween sunlit strands of lover's hair;
Helped form the final words before your death.
I've pitied you and plied your sails with air;
Gave blessing when you rose upon my breath.
And after all of this I am amazed,
That I am cursed far more than I am praised.

The I as a Fish Enlivened and Upstream.

An individual is made up of one's many encounters with others. The relationships gained throughout life are not a slicing away of individuality, but a sprouting out of branches and the ability to grow and flower. Through them one may gain strength and stretch higher.

There is a chronological flow to this. Connections are first gained through your parents and your other family members, whose own individual traits are added to yours, however few there are. Perhaps at first there is a near-blankness, but even that is still allowed as some characteristic of an individual. And when you leave your house, as time passes and relationships connect, your sense of self expands to the point where you are enabled to share that selfhood and strengthen it through a blending with others.

Relationships flow upwards like vines skyward, the more gained, the better one's self, one's house and bare brick, is covered by soft leaves. The value of an individual is stagnated when cut away from others. It is increased when engaged.

The I as a Dead Fish in the Sea.

We are people so we are individuals. I wonder if it is safe to say that. And in the word individual, there seems to be a certain heraldry, something so purposive in proclaiming not only who you are, but that you exist to state who you are, and to do so through a relation of difference between others. This is a good thing, it seems.

But a person is expected not to do this. Yes, a person may feel great cause to define their individual political stance in opposition to an oppressive one, but that is a political field and not an interpersonal one. The strength of being an individual for self is taken apart because of an expectation to divide yourself for others. In entering relationships with others you are expected to provide out of yourself a certain divisiveness, to slice a few parts of your individual person away so that what you are now defined to be, as it is, is through those very relations with others. You, an individual person, are defined through however many ways you divide yourself for the pieces of others to fit in your stead. You are defined by the things you are not.

So if this is some false kind of individuality, a shadowing form of strength of 'person', where is the real person's strength and truth? It seems that, if this definition through division is what is preferred, then one is disallowed from searching out where and who that is, kept away from coming alive.

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.