Perfect Contentment

[mallorys_camera]

There was a moment yesterday when I felt perfectly happy.

I was sitting on the old swing in the unseasonably cool late summer afternoon, watching Rutger nervously explore the front porch and from time to time dipping into a book called All We Know, which is a really odd biographical triptych about three lesbians -- Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland -- who were kind of famous in their day, but now are best summed up in a quote from Virginia Woolf's Lives of the Obscure that the author obligingly delivers to us on page 5: "One likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost... waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom."

I was sipping green tea and nibbling chocolate.

It had been so long since I hadn't worked for myself or had a high power job that demanded I be mentally on call every second of the day that I had completely forgotten what weekends were like when they were times you had utterly to yourself.

So this is what I like to do, I thought. I like to read. I like to eat chocolate. I like to hang out with my cats.

(I understand that last veers dangerously close to caricature there. But what can you do? You like what you like.)

Might seem bizarre that I didn't know these things about myself. But I didn't.

I have a couple of invitations this weekend, but I'm inclined to blow them off and do absolutely nothing but eat chocolate, watch the cats, soak up the tepid sunshine and read.

(I suspect this book is a PhD thesis that its author, a certain Lisa Cohen, somehow talked Farrar, Straus and Giroux into publishing. And they wonder why print publishing is dying! She somehow got it blurbed by Michael Holroyd -- I guess that's the Strachey connection since Esther Murphy was married to a Strachey. Holyroyd is the author of one of my favorite biographies of all times, a three volume exegesis on Lytton Strachey (talking about lives of the obscure!) Strachey was one of the pillars of the Bloomsbury literary circle of the 1920s. I'm not sure who their 21st century analogues would be since there are no literary circles anymore. Anyway and anyway...)

Comments

[crookedfingers.livejournal.com]

I recently read Michael Holroyd's biography "Lytton Strachey: The New Biography"-an interesting character.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's the book I'm talking about! I think it's one of the best biographies ever written.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

There was a moment yesterday when I felt perfectly happy.

Me too.

Maybe we are creating new literary circles now. Live Journal. Those cottages Eugene O'Neill, Louise Bryant, John Reed and pals played in are still there, in Provincetown. Have you ever been there?

[anais-pf.livejournal.com]

You might consider getting yourself some cake to alternate with the chocolate. Enjoy.

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

sounds wonderful. I spent a few hours reading outdoors yesterday, drinking green tea, and I really treasured it. I'm going to try to add more moments like that back into my life.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I sit outdoors with the dogs around sundown and read.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

These are names I don't know, except the publishing house and Virginia. I asked this girl holding her bike against a pole on the train about the book she was highlighting in yellow, one of Chomsky's. "Do you think his philosophy makes his life easier on him or not?" I have a grudge. She caught it in two minutes. "Yeah the detachment." Does that imply a subjective truth he's trying to duck, that there is only subjective truth? saw where I was going again. "I'd throw my mother under the bus for objective truth." So she knew, I knew, we both live missing some part, a lot.

Detachment. I dislike adverbs. Trying to keep in mind that is a screen against something. The thought, is modifying a verb has desperation. So she said, we said desperate is us. "God you're a logos girl," is desperate. Last words to her. So what.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I've never been to Provincetown! Never even been to Cape Cod.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I may bake some cookies today. :-)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's odd how I tend to devalue solitary moments of pleasure. As though if I don't have some sort of audience, it can't be fun.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

A nice habit! :-)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Earth to John: There isn't any such thing as "objective truth." Not even in physics. :-)

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

It's pretty. Come visit sometime, it's not going anywhere. This userpic with me driving the boat, the water is Nantucket Sound.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yes and no.

Special relativity proves all location is relative in space-time, meaning any idea like "while Marge was combing her hair in New Jersey, at that exact moment a luminous body was consumed by Cygnus X-1" is not possible. Because any moment exists only at a single point in space-time (like "Marge's vanity, Nutley, New Jersey"). Time exists only relative to location.

Under the laws of quantum mechanics, when a quark disappears here (on my desk, say), it reappears in my bathroom, or three galaxies away. But it reappears in an absolute time. This disproves locality. It means whether the quark reappears close by, or galaxies away it reappears at the exact same time. All existence thus is local, and quarks exist in a state of entanglement indifferent to space or time.

Both theories have been validated in multiple experiments over decades by independent observers, using the scientific method. So: special relativity proves space-time, and absolute time cannot exist; quantum mechanics proves an absolute time, derived from the entanglement of quarks.

If we prove two absolute truths that contradict one another, this becomes a proof of a single absolute truth reconciling the two we are not yet able to apprehend. Physicists have cute ways of reconciling these: one is Technicolor. Another is supersymmetry, and a third is "extra dimensions." The last is really cheap shit, they just keep adding exponents until the math works. But none of these escape the one absolute truth, all they try to do is reconcile the two apparent contradictions.

Btw, if "there isn't any such thing as objective truth," why does math work? Being human, we see as through a glass darkly. Hey. Some adverbs I guess are cool.

[bel-ebat.livejournal.com]

A few years ago I thought about the common belief that if you "look back" on your life, you'll see that all the times you remember and the times you were happiest were with other people. I realized that isn't really true for me. I'd say A LOT of my most vivid memories, aware memories are of times when I was doing something alone. I think that in almost all of them, I'm happy with myself—or I'm at least very aware of myself. I don't know what that means about me beyond the fact that I might be VERY self-centered. Or at the very least more of an introvert than people think I am. :)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Math works in the limited context that math works.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I think you and I share this in common. I don't think either of us are introverts or even particularly self-centered. We just find ourselves fascinating, and so naturally we like to spend time with ourselves. :-)

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yes. There is no square root of negative 1, no division by zero, and an asymptote approaches but never reaches zero. This means we're tangent to a reality we realize only in the marriage of contradictions, and we can't work with it. I hope that's where human beings are from. Life is short, people protect themselves, we forego a lot and I don't see why. I'm glad you enjoy the old cities, and green tea and chocolate and online dating, meeting new people. There's a lot on offer in life. I can't settle, I never will, don't think most people do, they are pleased and agree that way, live decided and satisfied. All I care about is true. She knows you or she doesn't. If you don't know each other, buy a stuffed animal it's about the same thing. I'm all for vibrators, but shared they are way more fun. I'm a Romantic. I meant that. I love fun, naughty is fun, the fun I know is with other people.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yes. Because we see only the shadows on the wall of a cave, of a greater world outside we can see, know, only in part. So we are each known only in part and that is sad sometimes. It's a nice day here, hope the same where you've relocated. Outside, anything can happen.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

It's difficult to challenge or surprise yourself alone. If you or anyone is happiest alone, I'm happy for you. I have difficulty with the semantics of "to fascinate yourself." The word I know always takes an objective, it is the opposite of a reflexive verb. To fascinate yourself sounds tautological.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

objective

object