Unheimlichkeit

I've been thinking a lot lately about this feeling of unheimlichkeit. I first encountered this term freshman year of college in my Reading Literature through Science course, and it's remained with me ever since. Essentially, it's a German word meaning uncanniness, or un-home-liness. We used this terms in our discussions about parallel universes, free will, and the moral dimensions of a universe that has no privileged frame of reference.

I'm talking about it in a much more concrete manner here, because it's a feeling which has been nagging at me for a while now. Last night, I was kept up by a stealthy migraine, and as anyone who's had a migraine understands, you can't do anything to solve the migraine. Pain forces you to live on its own terms. It takes your time and distorts it. It saturates colors, heightens noises, and makes even the faintest smells unbearably nauseating.

Picture me sitting at my desk, a lamp with a towel thrown over it to muffle the light, trying not to throw up all over the scattered papers. I turned to writing, as I often do, to try and distract myself from the migraine, and I found myself returning again and again to this word, unheimlichkeit.

What does it mean? I suppose the closest I can come to describing it is that it's how I felt homesick for England before I'd ever been there. It's a wanting sadness, a knowing sickness for heimat. A profound desire to belong.

I don't feel as though I fit exactly anywhere. I grew up Catholic, embrace Judaism, and espouse Atheism. I was born American, descended from Irish, feel myself British. I don't even fit well into a specific academic discipline. Literature, language, theater, Classics, computer science . . . all of these I have known, but none is my exclusive home.

The only place where I feel that sense of heimat is in the books I read, among my beloved characters. It is a home constructed, assembled from ink, glue, and paper, conjured into being with my sorcerous synapses and sinews. Steven King called reading a "strange alchemy," and that describes my home as well as I can say. Being alchemical, it is not made out of things earthly or divine, but transmutes freely between the two. One day, I live in the dirt, the next in a palace of gold. Both are equally un-earthy, neither substantial or insubstantial.

This is the only place that is home, that feels like home. Between the pages of a book is nothing, and in that nothing, I have found everything.

Warpaint

My red lipstick

is a relic of a long-ago trip to Sephora with my mama, who wished I would wear it.
is French and smells like the grown-up sophistication of my music teacher.
is going with me everywhere in my purse.
is a special treat for freshman banquets.
is mercifully not there for my first kiss.
is mercifully not there when I drink gin (poured by the man who raped me) for the first time.
is not a invitation to kiss a slut (to the man who raped me.)
is slipping off my lips because I'm crying silently.
is not enough to protect me.

My red lipstick

is packed away in a drawer.
is not getting the fresh air and sunshine it needs . . . on my lips.
is an irritating reminder of when I felt like a person.
is gonna say, fuck it, let's wear red lipstick to Latin class.
is nervous about first dates, but hides it well.
is smiling more often.
is going to see "The Book of Mormon" at the Kennedy Center.
is going to be ok, Sean, if you kiss me lightly.
is coming right off, Sean, as quickly as my clothes, as we make love with everything we can.
is running low.
is too expensive for me to replace on a college student's budget.
is not just a pretty little thing.

My red lipstick

is Warpaint.

Some Thoughts at Nighttime

There is something profoundly lonely about late-night writing. It doesn't worry about style, hardly bothers with spelling and punctuation, though it can't shake the old habits of meter and verse as readily as it can throw off later conventions. It's like peeling back the layer of skin to see the muscles and bones and veins, the sounds of the words beneath. Beneath, I guess, means deeper than a quotidian reading. It means writing when you don't know how the words will turn out. It's like sleeptalking--you're aware you're doing it, but you have no control over it.

Life is funny, because it's like writing. The same feeling of beneath-ness follows it like a shadow. I have incomplete information on which to base my future. Do I dare disturb the universe? It's so much bigger and more powerful than me, and living with that awe is more comfortable than accepting the power beneath me, suppressed by the ordinariness of everyday living. The power to choose. Choose a graduate program, choose where to live, how many kids to have, what to eat, when to adopt a dog. Beneath the fog of choice am I. I feel at loose ends, like all the drafts of unfinished novels lying asleep in my notebooks until it's time to wake up.

Which story will I awaken? Which words will have the power of life and death over my future? I want to name this blog "According To" not because I think I'm the center of the universe. In fact, I hope I'm not! I'm just a collection of atoms that happens to be here, right now, thinking about where my life is going to take me.

"According to" comes from two Latin words which mean "to the heart." This later comes to connote harmony and consistency within one's self or a group of others, but the adverb according means "in proportion or relation to." This is the world as told through my lexicon, my limited experience, and my biased observations. I will not here attempt objectivity, but I will attempt candor. I will not attain structure, but I may attain clarity. I might even write something worth reading, even if it's only for myself.