Screwdriver to the Cheek

A roll of quarters pressing into my thigh caused me to remember the single kiss I gave to Sarah. Meeting her after class, I briefly pressed against her closed mouth and then embraced her. I did it without thinking, spontaneously, as though it were a habitual and casual greeting between two friends who weren’t secretly wishing to rip clothes and enter each other. The calculator in the pocket of my hoodie, now pressed between us, prompted me to explain that although I was happy to see her, it was only a TI-83 she felt digging into her stomach. It was a silly thing to say because of how difficult it is to mistake a calculator for an erection (which she may have felt as well), but it was that line, originally about a roll of quarters (which more closely resemble a penis) that linked those two partly similar moments.

I immediately put that kiss out of my mind, but Sarah didn’t. I did not think about it at all until she brought it up some days or weeks later. I forget the exact comment and the context, but she teased me about having kissed her and then not saying a word about it. I changed the subject, but I was struck to realize I had forgotten that obviously momentous incident. How strange that it was so spontaneous and impulsive! I really believe that I did not perform that action freely.

There was another episode of that spontaneity. Watching television, nested into my limbs, Sarah attempted to guide my chin towards hers. Without realizing she was initiating a kiss, I instantly stiffened my neck. It was resistance in some sense, but I wonder if true resistance is possible. Looking over what I have just written, I see myself always caused to act. The quarters and the calculator acted on me almost as though they were material, mechanistic causes, while the agents of my spontaneous bodily actions of initiating and then refusing kisses are obscure.

I am in my stony rented basement, illuminated by blue christmas lights. I stop reading Locke to read the short fictions from two issues of the New Yorker. One is about young lovers who adore sentences. I am very attracted to this. I happen to see a 1947 black and white photograph of novelist Malcolm Lowry with his wife (who I misogynistically identify only as ‘his wife’). I do not know him but I read a caption that tells me he was considered a new Joyce by some. In the photograph he smokes a cigarette, wears only pants, and has a build seemingly untainted by art of muscle-isolating machines. I romanticize it.

I begin to romanticize my own life, specifically, my own downstairs, one-beer situation. I write these questionable paragraphs. Perhaps someday a high school english teacher will encourage her students (yes, even the future high school teachers are usually women) to wonder if I intended the reader to compare my stony basement with a dungeon. Yes, make fun of that.

I read one sentence on Wikipedia about what Leo Strauss, a twentieth century political philosopher, thought of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Typically, or what I am led to believe is typically, he claims Locke has an unpopular and therefore hidden content. I frequently look down on old authors assuming they inevitably build with the rotten timbers that are their cultural heritage: Rousseau, for instance, was compelled by his judeo-christian heritage to believe that mas has fallen. But Strauss has the opposite prejudice. For him, classical authors - and by this I mean authors of the classics - invariably transcend their contemporaries, their intellectual/philosophical tradition, and wrote what would have been considered subversive. It is very inspiring.

After reading the translator’s introduction I feel quite overwhelmed. My study of Proust will most likely not be as insightful or exhaustive, and this troubles me because I have already decided that Proust is the way, the truth, and the light (yes, I should not decide so soon) and so I should like to know him instead of just feebly explore him. Perhaps the St. Johnnies believe this exploration is itself the way, the truth, etc.. Or maybe they believe it is a necessary first step. Fuck! I think about writing this paper so often and write it so rarely! I so frequently assume that I will never evolve past this infantile way of being.

Poor old solitary immobile Proust was turned down by so many publishers who were blind to his genius. This makes me feel something. I don’t know what it is. Probably despair for my own unspoken writerly ambitions. If his brilliance, so radiant, can so easily go unnoticed…

Swann’s Way is fascinating, overwhelming, behemoth. I am daunted. Further, I am afraid my familiarity with it has dulled my initial wonder, or that I have forgotten what is so remarkable about it. It is hard to remember, to open myself to it again. Maybe I should not be searching for those initial reactions- maybe I should seek out my current ones instead. And maybe, meanwhile, my old ones will resurface.

The Martinville steeple incident is, I think, and here it is difficult to remember, important to me…I mean, it is remarkable regardless, but I seem to have had some glimmer of empathy, of understanding that came from shared experience. I thought at one time Proust was describing a very mysterious and nearly ineffable experience I had dimly witnessed myself. But I wonder now if I am not making a huge mistake when I say I can sympathize with Marcel, and here’s why: I sometimes perceive a monstrous enigma, a vast mystery when I inquire even briefly into my signal witnessings. I become piercingly curious about them. All this I formerly believed Marcel shared, and that it was this radical confusion in the face of reality he was expressing. However, somehow, this experience of his has been consummated, or fulfilled, or concluded, or explained to him by his writing. Do I need to have written that to understand its effects? This is why I am so curious about how far this family of experiences extends- and whether there are any familial experiences for his writing. Then maybe I could come minutely closer to understanding.

Fuck. I feel so powerless to interact intellectually with reality. Is this just my own personal hangup because father was hypercritical or is it the true state of affairs? It’s Plato who expresses so many of these difficulties, and I don’t see him providing any answers. But then, my complete inability to understand existence is eclipsed by my complete inability to understand Plato.

I feel like there must be some sort of trick to engender a totally new and gratifying insight…I think the tutors know this trick and I do not think they want to tell us. Maybe it would make no difference to tell us, and it would only be meaningful if we arrived at it honestly and individually. I have a suspicion that maybe one trick is to juxtapose two unlikely ideas or situations and compare them. Maybe another trick is to come to some provisional conclusion and then see if you can’t apply that conclusion elsewhere, somewhere that you would not naturally go. It seems what’s common to these two tricks is the action of somehow surprising yourself…of arbitrarily examining a situation in way you wouldn’t normally…Now I wonder if what this method provides isn’t wisdom but only freshness and novelty, and ideas that are only potent in this way. And now I wonder if this is all I want. Just novelty, passing beauty. (It can be so hard to find ideas beautiful and significant!) This makes me think I am just playing a game like mathematicians play (math). Is this the exploration-type model of the life of the mind? Have I come back?

It is tempting to consider Swann’s Way the work of an alien genius. Proust makes observations (such as his assertion that novels are the most lucid and concentrated vision of happinesses and unhappinesses, even if these same experiences were to actually happen to us personally [page 86], or his revelation that we can only know our emotions through others’) and comparisons (carrying enigmatic Martinville steeple-type experiences home as though fresh fish preserved under grass [page 183] or a servant’s hair being “at once like a bundle of seaweed, a nestful of doves, a band of hyacinths and a coil of snakes [page 337]) that are so remarkable and novel we think they never would have occurred to us. It is a great joy to understand one’s own experiences through Proust whenever possible. Yet, this is the very attitude young Marcel has regarding the writer Bergotte. He considers Bergotte to be unapproachably (word?) elevated and ardently wishes he could “possess an opinion of his, for everything in the world…” (page 97). The similarity between the reader’s attitude toward(s?) Proust and Marcel’s toward Bergotte is so striking one wonders whether Proust intended for his readers to make the comparison. Perhaps he even foresaw our reaction to his work and meant to obliquely address it in this way by detailing Marcel’s. This second hypothesis is tempting except for this difficulty: Marcel realizes his sentences and jokes are very alike Bergotte’s and maybe even essentially the same. Does Proust anticipate his reader arriving at a similar insight? Does he mean to catalyze it? It seems incredibly unlikely that I should turn out to be even remotely comparable to Proust, but then, what else am I to learn from Marcel? I am reminded of a similar episode. For the longest time, I was sure Marcel’s desperate love for his mother was something I could not understand. I struggled to reverse this unhappy and unfruitful belief, trying to remember some instance of the feeling. In the end, I was surprised to realize, through no exertion of my own, that I almost routinely had similar feelings for my girlfriend: I would lie in bed at night wishing only for her to come to me, and in the morning I saw in the habit of bitterly protesting when she left me. I even went so far as to anticipate that misery and dwell on it, which is quite reminiscent of Marcel. The fact that it was my girlfriend and not my mother does not bother me because I am confident that if I have this feeling at all, then its original recipient could only be my mother.

I adore the whimsically (or else perversely) named Scandinavian band “I’m From Barcelona”. Why would they lie about something so trivial? I don’t know! Of particular interest to me is their song “We’re From Barcelona” in which all thirty-something band members continuously insist that they are all from Barcelona. Maybe they are alluding to a sort of global community, but then, why Barcelona? Maybe Kia knows. They may all be figuratively from Barcelona inasmuch as…I don’t know…Barcelona represents humankind at large? Another intensely endearing lyric is “Love is a feeling we don’t understand, but we’re going to give it to you”. How delightful! How humble! How unpretentious! Consider, too, “Feeling like a tape recorder/ Stuck between rewind and forward/ Always going two directions/ One’s ahead and the second is backward”. That he would see fit to clarify those two directions fills me with affection.

Their music videos have the same kind of primal sincerity and childlike tone - in one, the lead singer/songwriter mimes playing all the other members when they are lying on the floor like keys on a piano. In another, we see the band members singing on risers as in elementary school - all without over-produced glamour - and at the end, the last row changes place with the front row. Why? Fantastic!

Unless it is a vastly clever ploy at only seeming unsophisticated. I fucking hope not.

The Vengaboys’ “Boom boom boom boom” is the type of unmitigated mastery that I can only, and unhesitatingly, describe as magnificent. While I am fascinated by the insistent testimony that ‘this is what I want’, it is the inevitable, cyclical return to the qualification that she wants you ‘in my room’ and that the two of you be ‘together: together in my room’ which most intrigues me. One is almost tempted to re-evaluate the singer’s primary desire. I suspect that she does not, as she so ardently claims, primarily wish to ‘go boom boom’ or ’spend the night together’ but rather to be a hostess, invite someone to her room. She desires a more active, powerful role in general. It is, then, a declaration of lust, but not in the conventional and limited sense. Whatever be the case, this song and it’s progenitors are, as an anonymous youtube user has said, “Smoking hot… and so fucking good“!

And then my senior in time worked but not in rank read it suspiciously. It’s okay, though, because at the time my job was to stand in readiness to tear tickets.

“Every time I see one of these high production value commercials put on by the otherwise unheard-of Foundation for a Better Life advertising civic virtue and, as far as I can tell, nothing else, I am reminded I need to research the Foundation and revise my understanding of capitalist democracy (democratic republic). Thinking about it now, I am surprised it does not address a divisive issue like the Colorado Springs “Abortion Is Murder. Signed, God” billboards. The Foundation does not appear to be promoting a political, religious, or secular agenda- just broad, inoffensive traits like caring, or maybe patience. How about that.”

After he read it, my co-worker dismissed my naive curiosity, telling me that people will advertise anything. He himself would advertise littering, he testified, if he wouldn’t get in trouble. So, that thing happened. I told my parents this about the Foundation, and after hearing that they appeared to be completely non-profit, my father told us that they were in it to make money. Cynical ass.

“I tore a middle-aged woman’s ticket just now and told her to go to theater 7 on the right. She walked a few steps down the hall, paused, and, dreamlike, hesitant, told her friends that she had never been to a theater on the right before.

I have. It’s a good time.”

Sorry I couldn’t deliver, person who searched for “screwdriver in girls ass”. You are amazing, because you hopefully visited my site even though it is not within the first 856 hits of a Google search, and after those 856 hits, Google informed you that the other 130,000 hits were omitted because Google thought they were redundant.

sisu tattoo
nakednews download
tok different cultures have different truths
politics and the english language theme
stonetongue
“goodnight cow, jumping over the moon”
malt syrup lollipops slaughterhouse five
tok does god exist
margaret atwood “you wake up filled with dread”
screwdriver in girls ass
external assessment tok questions
screwdriver japan
screwdriver music
different culture have different truth a truth is that which can be accepted universally. what are the implications for knowledge of agreeing with these opposing statements
spätzle
what does chingon mean
itunes screwdriver
amusing monologues
cheek hot girls
tok external assessment essays
“spätzle schwob”
poems with maggie
thompson screwdriver
poem for maggie
beadly flowers and things
cheek “staff of life”
celebrating saint nicholas day in greece
toilet mushrooms
screwdriver and joke
cunninlingus
“aubade philip larkin”
chris spada
toothpaste artritis
theme of politics and the english language
the erotic sense of screwdriver