how fortifying

While eating a watermelon for breakfast (OK, I lie: I had 4 slices of watermelon, followed by a chicken wing, followed by half a bar of Green & Black's, followed by Bombay Mix from Mustafa, all in front of my laptop watching the latest episode of 30 Rock and laughing at Kenneth Parcel's Bird Internet) I realized that I have recently acquired an amazing amount of books. And that this book buying has to come to a temporary standstill, while I save my money during the painful interim. 

But this is part of a larger idea: the time I fritter away in BMT has allowed me to enrich the inner life, the life of the imagination. Time dilates and expands; somehow one can control the movement of time by concentrating on the perception of its ebb and flow. In other words, time flies when you're having fun, and the reverse is also true. Tired of the real world, I escape into some quasi-Barthesian, Pleasure-of-the-Text realm, where meaning is fragile and I'm suddenly sensitized to modes of signification. I feel this rising level of disinterestedness: I'm not really a participant; if there are signs of enthusiasm they are done in jest, in a self-conscious mockery ripe with irony and also abjection. Yet, I am still constrained by this enterprise because it has power over me. (At this point I'm like, who really exercises this power? Why do I submit to this? Am I complicit in my own oppression? Wtf?) 

Reading is comforting because it grants me the autonomy of generating meaning on my own, a counterpoint to a life of constraint and submission to larger structures of power. Constructing and discovering another vivid reality with the ability to engage and stimulate the senses (an illusion twice removed of course) prompted by the deliberate crafting of language alone, I am constantly amazed by how words create and limit. The ideas and feelings they evoke are subjective, but there are fundamental visceral commonalities (I gingerly and hesitantly posit) that seem to string humanity together. 

You know, when I tell people that I love words and I love books, their immediate reaction is scorn and, in charitable cases, pity. People don't realize that it's the same as loving biology, or loving sleep — it's an interest that promises such an immersive experience that it borders on escapism. But it's also, if you will, a curse, because the relationship between language and the self is necessarily isolating. The experiences of the Self are closed to the experiences of Others: the nuances of one word to one person may elude another. When the word yellow appears, it doesn't just signify one flat color devoid of detail. It triggers memories and related words that trigger yet another set of memories, creating this tsunami of meaning that engulfs us for an instant, and then recedes back into a sea of possibility. When I think of yellow I see sunshine, I think warm and surprisingly, I see red flannel shirts and bearded folk artists. (But that's just me because I'm weird like that.)

It's just another expression for the state of being alone and swimming in the harrying, wounding current of thought. Y'know?