Introduction = sowing the seeds = the moment of conception = an idea planted, grows = we go about planting kisses = flower beds = petal soft pillowcases = the feel of your cheek's touch = sleeve, where I am wearing my heart = worn out = feeling wrists to find a pulse = a search for vital signs = warning, danger ahead = the curse and blessing of the power of forethought = chess games and computational decision trees = detaching from all emotion to access pure reason = choking on Kant's passages (and there's nothing pure about that) = mouthful of musings = philosophy pieces = information that people can't or won't swallow = nobody wants neuroscience at the dinner table = meditations on a mealtime = hospital 2004-5, 2007, 2010 = food and feelings group = a whole new language and unnatural associations = learning to speak, or say it in other ways = a critical period to make them understand = growing up, growing into new habits, growing out of old ones = life is a line, not a circle = drawing lines = boundaries, beginnings and endings = it begins to take shape = life is not a shape = the possibility of something else other than fulfilment, other than completion, in a life as happy as any other = setting apart now and then, us and them, happy or not, good or not, too much or not enough, all or none = ways to categorise everything and everyone and ourselves = social cognition = part of human nature = unnaturally human = war, schadenfreude, Josef Fritzel = I do not understand = what is the point? = small purposes and pleasures, and the process of seeking them out = ketchup and small pots of jam and teaspoons =everything shrinking away = figurative and literal = most things = food and feelings = such is life, such it has been = you don't notice strangeness until it is all you have seen until the moment you noticed everything, strangely - new eyes, fresh sight = laser surgery = sight for sore eyes = another one I don't understand = meeting new people = Introduction.
During the process of looking through years' of writing, I can only in retrospect appreciate the beauty of misunderstanding and teaching yourself to understand, making mistakes and cleaning them up to only make them again in different forms, to changing all of the time and yet feeling fossilized, or paralysed, or petrified, and then seeing all that written down in certainty, unwitting of how the certainty itself is uncertainty and overall, the only consistency throughout all I've found so far in my Aladdin's nostalgic cave of pictures and words and ticket stubs and scribbles and receipts and notes left by friends and phone numbers written by strangers and love letters written from lovers and not lovers and poems and pages torn out and blacked out and everything else, like the equation of relations between the subjective and introspective, nonsensical and identical.. the only thing that never seems to change is that it's all so stubbornly inconsistent. I used to think that looking back at writing and collections of keepsakes and mementos from the past would help piece together a picture of a life like compiling a jigsaw puzzle until it all looks clear, but now I realise how making a narrative of our own lives, making our selves consistent and into a story told as time elapses, is something that our mind forces us to do without us knowing we are doing it, and that keeping a paper trail as you go along, like I have, is something that fights against that. I've only just seen this. This mess doesn't make sense of me, it just makes sense that it is a mess because the years that passed up until now were awfully messy while I was writing them down, my writing becoming messier. It is the writing things down in the moment, or trying to typewrite feelings in the moments we feel them, or keeping souvenirs from the moments, trying to make matter of them, that retrospectively pulls apart the stories we have stitched together to form a comprehensive narrative for the life lived so far. We weave the threads of these stories to make sense of random senselessness and chaos and endless mess, so that it all means something. Seen together, the story doesn't make sense as it didn't then and why should it? It all matters as much anyway.
