A Reprise

I'm getting through a lot of books lately. I may finish Soft Focus today, and I'm in the last third of Mrs. Shelley. I'm also reading Epipsychidion, but my every poetry reading becomes more of a study. I'm afraid I can't read longer poems for pleasure at all. I'm still working, in the remotest sense, on Alastor: or, The Spirit of Solitude.

Through this city I wander. The cold is pitiless, wind blowing right through me. It only makes me feel the more invisible. There is no beauty that meets my gaze, and I am accustomed to looking down always, or squinting against the dead leaves in the wind. This is a place where it is always winter. The sky is gray, the chill tolerable, but never pleasant. I have grown so used to it, that it is as though weather has ceased to exist. Snow, rain and sun are weather. This gray chill is a void. I feel so lonely that I think I am losing my mind. When I am around others, I behave disgracefully. I am so pleasant and winning as to attract their distrust, yet I cannot help this desire to connect to someone else. But every day that I am alone, it becomes clearer to me that I never will have anyone. Once there was someone for me, someone I believed would be with me forever, but I cannot think on him long. I must keep moving, or I will freeze through and through, body and soul. As I gaze at the door...

Paintbrushes

I had a bad time of it last night. Going on two weeks now, I haven't felt right. I think though I don't talk about it that I haven't been right since I found out about Mrs. Mark. Lately I have been awakened in the middle of the night by Jonah's frights. I have to turn on the lights to check on him, and this normally wakes me up thoroughly. I can't not check on him because the thought that he might have hurt himself keeps me awake. Last night he was on the perch and the other two were on the floor, looking frightened. Why's my bird have to be such a pain in the ass? Why do I love him almost more than any other living thing? And I don't dream in my sleep so much as think, and it's never of anything calming: either of an error in one of my projects, or something just gruesome.

I was getting seriously annoyed with my day-- hungry, bored, Summer Party not open, too much time on the Internet, just generally nothing to make my day happy at all. However, I am now at Summer Party, the sun is shining, and now I'm not feeling so bad at all. I spent all last evening working on my kimono. I hope sincerely that cutting out the pattern pieces is the hardest part. These were cumbersome and huge, and bending on the floor is so tiring. Tonight I'm going to sew the main pieces together, do as much as I can. I plan to have this done by Friday, and certainly in time for Anime Matsuri, if I choose to wear it. Sewing again brought back so many wonderful memories from college: crouching on that concrete floor for hours on end sewing medieval gowns. Some aches and pains are so sweet. In fact, some of the fabric I'm using I bought in college. Keeping it around for years really paid off. I totally love violets right now, and the thought of a violets kimono was what push...

Delphinia leaves Gauvain and Oskar staring resentfully at each other. Distraught, Delphinia listens anxiously for word of Gauvain till she is lulled into a semi-conscious state. It is in this state she travels to Oriente's room. Delphinia steps into Oriente's room, drawn by Oriente's "presence." She dares to take her diary from the room and read it in secret. However, Beatrice interrupts with unsettling news. Adelia is to arrive within days. As soon as she is able, Delphinia requests an interview with the Markgraf, but Gervaise tells her he has left on an unexpected journey. Delphinia is filled with anxiety as shadows gather and a storm builds. Unanswered questions leave her restless. Feeling afraid at all kinds of sounds without her room, she secures the door and lights a candle, determined to soothe away her terror by reading Oriente's diary Oriente recalls her earliest childhood days and Oskar, the boy charged with pushing her wheelchair. Circumstances beyo...

Life seems more and more finite to me. Even the very greatest humans will die, and it has always been so. I look at all I have done in my life and I see a great volume of unfinished work-- countless half-finished stories and projects, some finished, needing refinement-- nothing great or even close to great. Shelley was scarcely older than me when he died, but he left his marks, and still people muse over and delight in his work. I feel that I am nothing. How can I claim that anything I have done is worthwhile? That the work for which I feel such passion is noteworthy? It still needs so much more, and I try and toil, and still it needs so much more. Personal relationships and acts of kindness be damned. It's my writing I want to leave as legacy. I have always known that I will know when I have done all I ought. I feel now that I have not even started the work, not even left enough behind so that others would marvel at my work should I die and say, She might have been truly great . I...

The Romantic and scientific are so much both with me. No wonder my mind is a confused muddle. It seems the two can never stand together-- well, then, I am a walking war, and for the most part it does seem this way. Like Shelley I am inspired by singular and absurd passions and seemingly doomed to a life of antisocial quasi-dissatisfaction, but there is this reasonable side I cannot totally deny, and to which I more and more cling, believing it will be my salvation, my claim to sanity and my vehicle to output the creative works that my very lifestyle seems aimed to discourage. Do I feel I have no control over my life? It is absurd to say, so I never say it, the lowest, weakest complaint that well-educated, I have been put on the conveyor belt of life and altered at the appropriate stations, to output for a company, for capitalism and for the overall good of our country. What a weak, complaining thing to say when I am a free woman of strong constitution. Yet though I am creative I cannot...

Snow in Fairfield, Texas. Ethereal, otherworldly-- snow on green grass, on flowers, laden on leafy trees. I've seen snow, but not very much of it, and never in spring. Somehow, it made me feel that I'm not too late for all the things I've loved and lost along the way, to find my true path. The snow didn't come at Christmas, or in February. It came in April, even more beautiful on green than it would have been on gray. It is not so bad to come late. It's better late than never, and perhaps better than sooner.

I am not going to worry about other people anymore. I am going to venture farther into this mysterious forest of myself, because I will never find anything there that will harm or betray me. I will strive continually to be true to myself.

I have finished The History of Emily Montague, and find myself at a loss as to what I should read next. It will be hard to top that work, which despite holding every device and convention intolerable to modern critics, held my interest throughout. I had The Nocturnal Minstrel in mind but feel I should try a new author. I have some great gothic fiction resources I hope to consult this weekend. For now, I am still reading Mrs. Shelley, P.B.S.'s letters, and of course, his poems. I love the eighteenth century for its attention to reason, self-awareness and a growing Romanticism which blossoms in the Shelleys. I am not willing to advance to the nineteenth century just yet. I want to study the gothic and epistolary novels as I continue to work on The Soul of the Rose. There were some things I read in E.M. that I want to quote, but eReader doesn't allow text selection, so I will have to find time to do it later. Also much with me have been my beloved Helen and Anne, two idealists: on...

I found this article today about finding a quiet center in nature.