Norfolk Terrace, Day 60. [0:28] Moving the Desk was a Metaphor
At a makeshift campsite in the outskirts of the Congo, my brother’s theatre friend Cory Betts handed me an instrument I had never seen before: sprouting out from where the guitar’s neck would’ve curve off at the top, was an organically shaped gap, an oddly crafted hole. I was instructed to blow into it at a certain angle, evoking a strange mezzosoprano rift, while strumming a certain pattern on the otherwise normal guitar. I got it to work, but the lyrical harmonic sound threw me off—the mixed timbre was so ethereal that I stopped playing. Then Cory picked up my real guitar, shook his head, and told me it wasn’t in tune. My heart sunk.
Again I woke up to another vivid but nonsensical dream. I realized the lateness of the morning hour and so I made great efforts to pack up and get to the library by 10:30. Fifteen minutes after that, I managed to get there. Propping up my laptop on the third floor (counting the ground floor as 0; a British thing?), I started first on emails and then onto writing my scholarship patron Mrs. Jill Buch (I had luncheon with her on Day 39) a much deserved thank-you letter. I spent a considerable amount of time in writing it, rewriting two pages of it for the sake of having no cross-outs or lack of clarity.
I stopped at page 101 in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Book 1 of 8, yay! On a serious note, I did read an interesting article about the book’s characters organically representing allegories of utopian and republican ideologies amidst the setting of narrative realism to reveal the actualization of an ideological experimentation, veiled sufficiently in literary aestheticism. Still wary of reading this book over Easter, though.
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| (She gave out candy too.) |
I ate lunch with a creative writing friend in the library; just by chance I saw him. He has huge metal bolts jutting out from his leg in a complicated, double-ringed metal cast intended to stabilize the bike injury that had left him hospitalized a few weeks ago. The accident didn’t stunt his optimistic spirit, though. We talked about what we might do for the short story we’ll have due at the end of the course. Then a lady who works in the library came up to us and asked us a survey: which library user are you? I said I collect books and save them for later. I think I should’ve said “collect what interests me” but that’s retrospective nonsense. She gave us the animal that corresponded to what user we were: I was a squirrel. Hoarding nuts?
I attended the final Jailbreak meeting tonight with Dan—we are really going to do this: Travel as far from UEA as possible without spending a cent, er, pence. A guy who made it to Belgium his freshman year explained that he and his friend got there by luck. He lost his passport halfway through Paris on his return and had to go back. That’s definitely not encouraging. This journey might really be an act of faith, a spiritual trust in the seemingly arbitrary but hopefully meaningful course of life.
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| Fusilli and Burger Mixed (Vinnie definitely posed.) |
I wanted meat for dinner but didn’t have any. Luckily, Vinnie and I teamed up and we made fusilli with a tomato sauce enriched by burger bits and onions. Amazing.
After Vinnie threatened to turn music on if I spent one more minute on facebook, I buckled down and researched for a good power hour.
I got tired of my desk, so I pulled out the unused one from its neglected corner of the room and placed it at odds with my previously tempting bed. The thought came unbidden that I should move the desk, that a new study setting had to be established out of the old. There was a certain power in creating new space for the desk, disturbing the formerly oppressive order of furniture. I left alone the layers of items and books on my desk, ideas completely incomplete, and I focused on a cleaner surface, one book at a time. (Yes, this paragraph can be read in a metaphorical light.)
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| A Change of View |
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