it is great to have the chance to catch up with somebody whom you like but also with whom there is no entanglement of conflicts of interest. i asked him a bit about his personal life, that is, his love life, and he did the same to me. i cherished his confession to the casual love affairs between diplomats in service. you meet at various conferences, then your foreign office sends you elsewhere or gives you another dossier, and another affair starts elsewhere with somebody else; it gives you some immediate comfort, but it is not sufficient to start a family and that he regrets.
then i finally arrived at my friend's birthday party in the bernese highlands when all were already sitting down to dinner. this friend of mine is an information technology specialist, so are many of his friends, and two of his brothers. i sat at a table where i did not know any of the others, and vice versa, and found myself being interviewed about what i do, which in turn turned into one very animated conversation about literature. of course geeks also know quite a bit about literature, and in addition there was another non IT person at the table, a latin teacher. i returned home content that i did not cancel my attendance at this party, something to which i had given more consideration than you can imagine.
here i walk around and wonder what my muse knows that i do not know, and deeply amused by the fact that i have been kissed by my muse, as somebody pointed out on friday. there is this feeling that has invaded me since wednesday. i spent wednesday afternoon with a man whom i never imagined meeting, much less liking, and certainly never dreamt that i would so quickly feel so understood by. i keep shaking my head, and telling myself that this is impossible, and that if it were to be possible, what on earth am i doing falling in love all over again. the comforting thought that i get is that the thing with falling in love is damn old with me, i have been falling in love for as long as i can remember, i fall in love with a stone, with a river, with a sparrow, with nothing at all, i just am in love with life. still, under all of this there is a woman, and this woman is somewhat foreign to me, this woman has been hiding for a long long time, and then on wednesday for some odd reason this woman was fully present. now i wonder what happened.
as i am writing this a friend rang me up from paris and she asks if she just dragged me out of bed with some fellow, i had to laugh, here i am in my pajamas with my flannel bathrobe thrown over, at my desk writing on some blog and trying to collect my thoughts about a week past. she is in deadline stress, her editor is asking for a date as to when her manuscript will be finished, and no this is not the sort of thing that writers like. deadlines are depressive, irritating, and feel like a kick in the ass, much hated, and somewhat effective. she just came back from london, loves london, but then i know few people who do not love london, and is on her way to new york in october for a month's work on the academic literary circle.
i complained to my friend in paris, and i am complaining here, and i have complained on wednesday and on friday, if not everyday of last week, that when something happens and i have to listen to this psychological symphony emanating from my entrails with a melody that i can not quite recognize, then, i am annoyed. who invited all of those feelings and emotions into my life?
it was life itself, the life that i love, the life that i have fallen in love with, that is what invited all that cacophony of melodic in-transparency into my world of feeling alive, this empty and meaningless life of mine is very rich indeed.
with all the riches of this world of mine, the most prized possession is that of being understood. how delightfully and fully understood i felt when i first wrote my muse a very personal and totally impersonal letter to tell him how much i admire him, how wonderful it is to feel the generosity of his spirit, and how totally frightening it is to feel his presence!
i may have used other words, but that was the tenor of my message to him. his response was clear, he understood, he accepted my implicit request for distance, and he has honored it ever since. this week my muse was very present in my life, he found his way into a conversation that i had no intention of bringing him in, yet, there he was, calm, serene, understanding, and with a few crisis all of his own. it was on friday, it was in a session with my therapist, it was liberating.
i do a fast forward into events that have yet to happen, and that yet are connected to the past week: i am in milano. milano is where my faithful friend lives and works, milano is where i will be in a few week's time. milano is a city that is a city, that is a city, nothing special, and spectacular. it is also the only place in europe where i have ever been involved in a car accident. i associated milano with music. period. forget the "duomo" and forget my friend, the place is about music for me. milano now looks like a place, that after paris, may bring some geographical inspiration into my disarrayed thinking. milano is somehow about being understood, somehow. yes, i am trying to make sense of it all, it is sisyphism.
two questions that i have right now:
1. why the fuck am i so damned altruistic?
2. why do i resist doing what satisfies me?
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