morningambassador’s posthaven

It's hard to know which face is the real one sometimes when you tend toward being a pleaser... especially when ill.

I take these things quite seriously - sensitive-to-others behavior. It's conditioning, I know, but also nature... Habits of a lifetime are a lifetime's work - or more - to untie those knots. And not throw the baby out with the bath water.

I was just told:

"Comedy is tragedy plus time."

I remember hearing that back in the day.

I was so sick the other night that I was trying to argue that King Lear and Ordinary People were examples of comedy by the classical Aristotelean definitions. The next day I was shocked by what had come out of my mouth... though it is enlightening - perhaps valuable on occasion - to argue the other side of the coin from what you have studied and imbibed and with which you agree. Mental exercise or what?

Things can change in a minute. Don't forget it. It might save your life some day. That and jumper cables and a first-aid kit and cell phone. And chewing gum, so I've heard. Don't forget that either.

Have you read any of Salman Rushdie's books? I know his predicament in the real world, but he has effectively built real worlds of his own, inclusive, symbolic, multi-cultural, humorous, serious. I find his main works, especially, stunning and astounding. Books like that I put down upon completion, and all I can think is to question the universe, "How does a human being write something like that?" I bring him up as he clownishly manipulates existential questions that trouble me.

I probably shouldn't write where the world can see when I'm feeling like this and in this state of mind, but then it wouldn't be balanced, would it? I guess folks can just look askance if certain entries trouble them. Rest assured my state changes during the day, the week...

Here are a few quotes by Rushdie and also a favorite of his books: "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."

"We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses: A Novel) 

This one is to fill out the first.

"We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners."
— Salman Rushdie 

"Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin."
— Salman Rushdie

And that brings me back to a previous post on writing... I should edit it in there, but not right now. Really. It's just the red shoes driving me on.