Roads This post is private, sorry.

















When a friend wrote that she was deeply pessimistic, Trotsky replied:
'Indignation, anger, revulsion? Yes, even temporary weariness. All this is human, only too human. But I will not believe that you have succumbed to pessimism. This would be like passively and plaintively taking umbrage at history. How can one do that? 'History has to be taken as it is'; and when she allows herself such extraordinary and filthy outrages, one must fight back with one's fists.'

In his testament he wrote:
'For 43 years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for 42 of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently, an irreconciable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth. Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air my enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.' (Leon Trotsky, 23 Feb 1940, Coyoacan, Mexico)

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 1:36 PM 0 comments

  Fear and loathing This post is private, sorry.

-------



-------

"Keep me burning, dear God
With the stubborn-ness of being..."

-Salleh Ben Joned

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 5:58 PM 0 comments

  Inadequate This post is private, sorry.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 10:42 AM 0 comments

  Faithless This post is private, sorry.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 9:38 PM 0 comments

  Fever again I am amazed by bloggers who are able to write so openly about their personal lives. There must be something of sweetness, of freedom, in the little details, the names, the private jokes. And I imagine there must be a certain self-assurance for this to be made public, something I will never achieve.

Should you detect a certain wistful or wishfulness on my part, I leave that to you. You may draw your own conclusions.

Then there are bloggers I totally respect like Edward - who are equal parts personal and professional, whose posts always manage to get me off my big lubberly depressed arse and onto doing things. Does confidence come with age, Edward? Or knowledge? Or both? That one does not need to fear being known, that being known does not equate someone else's power over you.

For me, my little stories, verses, exclaimations are nothing but flimsy walls and filters to keep my own sanity in check. Perhaps this is the bliss of the creative act - drawing people close but never close enough to ever know anything true about oneself. The danger is when one's entire life is lived like this... everyone is an audience and you never truly trust anyone.

Yesterday night and today I have fever again. Things seem very bleak but I cannot speak, save to the inanimate pages of a plain book, with my inanimate pen; or this inanimate computer screen that I fill by touching keys. Imaginary friends that keep me holding on. It is a poor substitute for a listening ear, but at least it is bearable to me. If there was another person beside me I would drive us both mad with my silence. It is always the worst when the person leaves - they come because they love one, and one sounds truly desolate. So they stay, trying trying trying to get it out of one, to find the key made of a single word that will unlock all the other words, that the words can escape and not cause an endless inner torture. This is when words, ever friends before this, fail and betray me utterly. They refuse to be spoken, or expressed, even to be thought. They suffer themselves only to be written, in private. As communicators, words are unreliable at best. It is wise not to trust them completely. But pity the poor person who leaves one at last in exhaustion and frustration! - and I am filled with remorse and guilt, of having failed, of wishing I could have spoken, engaged, trusted. Angry at the words, that will not come.

Some people tell me I should get some help, take some medicine. Or that I something has happened to me that I don't want to talk about or have willingly forgotten - like brainwashed even! I tell you now that that is not the case. If I begin to doubt my own mind then I am truly lost. If it is truly forgotten then there must be a good reason for doing so. Why attempt to remember something that has already passed? Not that there is anythign to remember! I speak only for illustration purposes... or for the sake of speaking, of feeling the rythmic flow of words, like life, like thought - making them friends again.

I will not submit to the fever. I resist and reject it utterly. Fever exists, and it is no one's fault. Not mine, not yours. Let tomorrow bring the breaking of it.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 4:22 PM 2 comments

  Who gives a... down down down
very quietly it stole
down down down
very far down the rabbit hole
down down down
far away the distant notion
down down down
far away the golden ocean

Labels: B.A.P., sweet misery

  ¶ 1:54 PM 0 comments

  Fever Waking up, surprised by my own ill-temper, like finding a stranger in my room who doesn't belong there. The stranger is a stranger only because he is nameless (it is a he), but I know him. It will last a day, two days. Three if I'm unlucky. It is torturous -- the minutes crawl by, saturated with doubts. Water with heavy metals dripping from a tap. I drink, smoke, write and even work... in the end it breaks like a fever breaks.

Sometimes I'm inclined to take a pill for it, but I don't know which. Truly, if there isn't a drug to relieve the symptomatic effects of misery, they should certainly invent one and make it widely available. All the treatments I know of seek to address the root causes, to pull out the root and 'cure' you. I don't want to go on a healing programme with 3 different kinds of drugs and psychoanalyic counselling. What I want is asprin.

Many people think of dear old Van Gogh as a 'tortured genius'. Every brushstroke revealing the orgiastic writhings of inner demons. However, as anyone who only wishes to work will tell you: misery is debilitating condition. It makes work impossible. Work is not cathartic, should not be cathartic. Gardening is cathartic, or fishing, or needlepoint, or watching Oprah. Work is work. When you have a fever you cannot work, at least not very well. Vincent was only able to paint AFTER the attacks passed. Perhaps the world has branded him the ultimate misunderstood artist, but I think he understood himself perfectly well.

Here I heap my own lump of soil on the myth of the Suffering Artist. Let it be buried forevermore!

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 3:37 PM 0 comments

  A storm inside "You can't change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving."

[from A Man of The People by U.K Le Guin]

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 11:35 AM 0 comments

  Close watch Yes, I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

Lying in bed, thinking of another time, you come up to meet me alone at night. In my room you sit in a corner watching and watching until I fall asleep.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 4:28 PM 1 comments

  Working and Dreaming As they say: put your secret down a well. So this blog is no longer what it used to be - not that that changes much in , I still have no idea who comes to read, who does not.

Strange, this compulsion to reveal and conceal, as if telling is a kind of redemption.

I noticed that as the posts went on, I used 'I' less and less, or I got to play with constructing different versions - Arty Betta, Politically Informed Betta, Sensitive Vulnerable Fragile Betta, Secretly Smart and Sexy Librarian Betta, etc. (Mmm, yes, I like the last version too - throw in some silk shirts and lacy panties, why doncha)

Today I feel very tired. In terms of being artist, it is the same long cry that probably haunts every part-time waitress in the quiet night... I wish all I could do is work at what I do best.

In order to keep income coming in, work has piled up, work that seems so far from what I want to do. Like climbing uphill, or using languages you can never get your head around. As I chip away as this little mountain of work, thoughts and ideas spring up for future art - a concrete reflexology pad for migrant workers, projected text messages of a couple trying to break up with each other on different sides of the world...

Art is like running downhill (even when you have to run uphill!) - everything seems to increase exponentially: expertise, quality, depth, complexity, elegance - with each effort. The more I make work the more I understand the nature of work, labour, effort.

And this other work, the uphill work, I also see through that lens. The different ways in which people work, or are forced (I used this terms loosely) to work - to create effects or to create actions on the world and in people. I do this so that I can make art. To find a way to get from hand to mouth is part of making art and is not divorced from it. So the hill is one and the same... I try to remember this.

Work is what gives life purpose. War takes away work, takes away living. We work because of a dream. A footballer works for a dream.

I wonder... is it about how hard we work, or how hard we dream?

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments

  1.30am - under duress Deadlines are snapping at my heels! But:

This city's hard on the heart and head
At the end of the day you find both dead
But one thing doth redeem it all
And it is known, my friends, as football

Australia to Japan 3 - 1, I cannot f888king believe it. Why? How?

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 1:30 AM 0 comments

  Workaholics Anonymous Oh Buddha. 24 Hours a day. It is non-ending, and irritatingly, mostly non-paying (immediately, anyway). Depressing, yet strangely comforting thought : If I was in an office job I'd be a millionaire by now.

Bicycle and teeth and blog must all now shift to the back seat where they wait patiently like dawn on the horizon. I go a'diving. See you at the surface and I leave you with the best present I have received all year - a poem sent to me from G. I have never loved a poem so much or so deeply.


The City In Which I Loved You
by Li-Young Lee

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
andI mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you...

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain rining like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you...

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches,
swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest...

a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.

but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the
humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,

and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street

beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse

lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:

that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.

And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out
teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are

my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don't survive,
whose names I do not know;

they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you.

The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or
other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.

If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.

You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 7:51 PM 0 comments

  Jaws I am sorry for the somewhat depressing previous post. It has come to my attention that certain people think I am in 'a funk' - this observation derived solely from my blog posts. I do not mean to be funky. I want to be happy like a pink bunny who has corn. And I wish to make you happy, dear reader. But the truth is I am in some physical pain at the moment. My left jaw is rather swollen and it is quite painful to eat, speak, smoke or drink. I am subsisting on pieces of toast and all manner of cold liquids. Alchohol seems to numb everything so I partake liberally. I wait patiently for things to subside, but feel generally blah.

This reminds me of an essay Paul Auster once wrote about the relationship between eating and speaking. Both activities being centered in the mouth. Eating is about entry, whereas speaking is about escape, and the mouth forms a sort of portal that fascilitates them both. The body has more than one orifice (for some reason I disklike this word intensely) of course, but only the mouth is...

*at this point Betta felt too tired and miserable to carry on*

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 11:17 AM 0 comments

  Earthquake M.'s sister was affected by the earthquake in Jawa. She telephoned her husband in Indonesia for news. He went over to check and her house is no longer where it was. M. goes back to Indonesia on 16 June. She's been with us for 7 years.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 4:10 PM 2 comments

  My city We flirt and we engage in a game of power. We pretend we do not love each other, but when I think of you I do so as if you were a lover. Difficult, sanguine, fickle, distant, savage - beautiful, compressed, irreverent, and occasionally, very very funny. You encourage the romantic in the poet, but such poetry is weak and sentimental. I will never write you a love song. I will use you as you use me, bleed you as you bleed me. I think that if I know more of your history and politics, I will understand better, know better. Knowing is a way of possessing. But I think, you should never be mine, just as you will never completely win me over. If we cannot be equals then let's forget about it! I could care less how sublime the food (supposedly) is. Rest assured I hate you with a passion. But not enough to pin you down, give you a name, to tell you what you are. You are a crazy city, and I am crazy to let you live in me.

It's obvious who will win.

written after a whole day spent in town, filming at various locations

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments

  Unsatisfied Mind What is this? A verse? A neural snap gone wrong? Snippet of a unresolved scene in a dream? Result of reading about latent lesbianism in Henry James' The Bostonians?

I want a hip flask baby
A conversation with the ghost
of Jeff Buckley
And to kiss the lips of a lady
who kneels five times a day.
I want her...
etc.
*probably some vaguely erotic interlude here - colour fucking or something equally non-bodily fluid*
_

Lyrics to Satisfied Mind by Jeff Buckley, because it is the complete opposite of what I am today, and because I mentioned his ghost.

How many times have you heard someone say,
"If I had money, I would do things my way."
But little they know, that it's so hard to find
one rich man in ten, with a satisfied mind.

Money can't buy back all your youth when you're old,
a friend when you're lonely, or peace to your soul.
The wealthiest person, is a pauper at times
compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

When my life is over and my time has run out,
my friends and my loved ones, I will leave there's no doubt.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind mind mind, mind mind,
Satisfied mind.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 5:28 PM 0 comments

  I want I need I will... oops! Fell over. @ Betta Bi-polar Strong desire to douse myself in alchohol until every single pore reeks of it and my liver dances in my side like a ferret on drugs. Must. Get. Drunk. NOW. Blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

This is worse than cake. Oh so much worse. Bring back the cake. CAAAKE. Sob.

Must make loud noises that have no inherent meaning but are able to convey full extent of existential (and financial) angst. MEEEWWW. MEOOORRRRRRR. RAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. FUCCK.

Corn. I want corn. Steamed corn. OKAY? And a rubber bouncy ball. Not the dorky ones with the plain colors. One with toy suspended in it. And glitter. Preferably the toy is a ship.

I want bubble tea. Apple Mango flavor.

I want breakfast foods.

I want dance class. Weep. Weep like a willow. WWWEEEEP.

Maybe cigarette.

Ooooohhhh. Am in parents house. They have booze. See ya later fornicator!

Disclaimer : Please ignore this post.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 8:27 PM 0 comments

  Comic relief, unhampered thoughts It is not easy to take one's life. In my circumstances a gun would be extremely dificult to come by. Swallowing pills has a large margin of error and one is apt to come to in a hospital bed - stomach pumped and suffering from the most excruciating (not to mention embarrassing) hangover. Slitting one's wrists is painful, so is jumping off a building. Drowning would be simply awful - the desperate fear and panic right before the end, as one's instinct for survival kicks in. As for hanging by a noose, a rope with eight coils really stirs a deep horror within me. What a brutal inelegant instrument.

I suppose one might contrive to be murdered. But really, who wants to be found raped and stabbed in a gutter somewhere? The squalor of the situation would be unimaginable. Could you hire someone to take your own life? But then, you never know when you'd change your mind, and then where would you be? Also, if I could afford to pay someone for my death, I would certainly use it, fake it and go off to live in a new life in a Latin American country.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 10:13 PM 2 comments

  De-worming Today I am being eaten from the inside by a strong urge to delete this blog. No conceivable reason. Perhaps yet another way of exerting my flagging sense of control.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 10:28 AM 3 comments

  To anyone who is listening/reading What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

P.s. Also a shout-out to gnute, to whom I'd like to holler back her lovely phrase 'Strong as Jif, by god, Strong as Jif'.

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 12:34 AM 0 comments