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January 24th, 2009 in Uncategorized by terebinth
This is only a test, of the receptiveness of New Journalspace to photographs. A little more than that, should anyone be curious, as it shows my back yard at night. I don’t spend very long there, especially at this time of year because it’s cold out: mainly just the odd foray to the coalhouse to replenish the cooker’s fuel bucket with Small Ovoids. And, yes, I live next door to a church. Very peaceful neighbours: they’re not in much…
January 24th, 2009 in Uncategorized by terebinth
No, I’m not gay, though I wouldn’t mind if I were. It’s only that, in almost five years of writing at the old Journalspace - and here I should acknowledge that “writing” creates all too energetic an impression of my presence there over the last two or three of those years - my journal had been open to all members of the site, but never to search engines and the world at large. Well, hardly ever, to borrow a qualification from the captain of HMS Pinafore, which happens to be vaguely familiar with me from my having taken part in a school production of the said operetta back when I was 12: I did open the journal to all readers for a couple of days in 2004 when it featured on JS’ front page as a ‘Reader’s Pick’ and depriving all comers of the opportunity to read it seemed for that short while unfair. That’s mentioned only because I tend to fear and endeavour to avoid even small deviations from honesty, here and in any other engagement I care about, which includes any relationship I enter into by choice and as far as seems fair the unchosen ones as well: and if I think differently of those it’s because relationships not chosen may quite reasonably be with persons who would be hurt by knowing aspects of what I am.
So: hello to the new Journalspace, and, perforce, to any citizens of the world outside who may chance to visit here, since I find myself granted under the new dispensation only the stark options of being open to the Googlebot and all or invisible even to my fellow members. Most of my friends from the time of my high online activity had left, or more or less left, the old JS even before the Overwriting. I rarely had the slightest interest in new features as they appeared at JS, and I expect I’ll not be too bothered as to which features appear, or do not appear, here. I have the old address, and that matters more to me. I think sometimes of people I’ve heard nothing of for ten, or twenty, or thirty years: and should anyone think of me ten or twenty or thirty years hence I would like them to be able to find me here. Why they might want to, is quite another matter. Historically, for history includes all our pasts, I have written here mostly of nothing. Of the unremarkable view from my window, unremarkable except in that I do not expect my life to be so long that I will begin to find anything unremarkable without some temporary defect in my own perceptions being the cause. Of books, typically older ones forgotten by a world that never much noticed them in the first place. And so forth. Sometimes I may refer to the circumstances of my life. Oh, we’ll see. “I’m here, and I’m here to stay”, as William Faircloth somewhere puts it. Right now I rather like the thought of engaging somewhat with the new community that’s forming around the refugees from the old one, the more so if it forms, as the old one did, largely in consequence of folks wandering around and sometimes liking or being engaged by one another’s words. And I’ve written enough about nothing for the moment, but there will be more.
January 19th, 2009 in Uncategorized by terebinth
I think I do have the will to start all over again here. Only, though, if I turn out to have, without forcing the issue, the requisite materials: first and foremost, a mind that sometimes generates words when I sit here and know myself alive for a while and am variously conscious of some of the lives and human works and natural presences that are dear to me. For the most part, like Landor’s “old philosopher”, I strive with none: not in my instance because none are worth my strife, but because little or nothing that touches my living tends to seem worth striving over. Not least because the very acts of strife tend to destroy anything that might be worth endeavoring to protect. I treasure knowing that we are each alive for a while, and generally the times and conditions I value are those in which such a knowing remains bright and immediate and active : and few, to me, are the forms of disputation that leave room for such a knowing; argument, for the duration, tends to swallow our lives in a dynamic all its own. Perhaps it is necessary for the world’s business that most of us forget most of what we know we are most of the time. If so, I concede the point, that is what we must do: but at the very least such a truth, if truth it be, seems to furnish a powerful case for monitoring the world’s business, attempting regularly to distinguish just how much of it truly has that sanction of necessity.
A fragment of cobweb hangs from the ceiling, waves randomly in the currents of air. A bunched-up towel is my main protection against the spring that has burst out of my upholstered cushion. The sofa beside me is strewn with books and a few letters. Six feet away stands a small convector heater. Tonight I am enjoying the relation between words and living. For this while at least there is nothing here that I am passionate to change. I stand no chance of growing accustomed to the world, and the realisation pleases me: it is my insurance against believing myself to know how anyone should live. I would probably admit to a few convictions, some of them painfully commonplace, regarding how we should not.
January 14th, 2009 in Uncategorized by terebinth
Excuse, please, my making occasional visits here, switching elements around and tinkering with this or that detail before I entertain much thought of coming to rest and finding something to say. For now, I allow myself a small but distinct pleasure that http://terebinth.journalspace.com/ is again to be an actual web address referring to a page for which I bear a measure of responsibility. I don’t know why that matters at all to me: I am almost, but not quite, ashamed that it does. In the end I am not ashamed that my life has continuities large and small that are loved in their infinite degrees. It would be less of a life if it did not.
