Tuesday 9.36pm

I am listening to I'm allowed by Buffalo Tom.

Sometimes, I feel strung out, a patient etherised on a table, barely aware of the world.

De-integrated. Is it a word? You google it and get things that look like words, but their meanings are attenuated, only just in touch with the world. So it is the right choice for how I am.

Nothing touches me except the biggest ideas. I was reading about wheat last night. I was thinking about how it was that one person must have tried to eat grass and realised that the grains were good. How? This is a big question. Do we innovate by accident -- stupidly eating anything that looks like it might pass and getting lucky -- or did some neolithic genius nut out the edibility of grains? Did their goats favour a particular type of grass? Did they reason that if the goat wasn't poisoned, the grass would be edible for humans? (Not a smart inference, of course.) Did they perhaps note that their goats preferred to eat the ears and leave the rest of the grass if there was plenty to eat? Do goats do that?

And is it possible to be a genius in a world that does not allow its expression? Can a hunter-gatherer be a genius? Is the genius latent, waiting for some material to work on? Or is genius only the intersection of this mind and this world, neither sufficient without the presence of both.

I get to thinking about slaves. If you had genius-level intelligence, how would it be to be enslaved, and have to work in a field for people who didn't have your brains but had a knotted rope or a whip? How would that be?

I am listening to Octopussy by the Wedding Present. Which is P's song, as I've mentioned. I think P is de-integrating too. She is like a drowning sailor, clinging on to driftwood and calling it her dreams. P likes to think big but her subject matter is mostly the very small. I don't know whether she has a view on wheat.

I was reading the Wikipedia article about it, and it stated that bread wheat had been created by crossing a strain of wheat -- I forget which one -- with goatgrass. I couldn't help wondering whether it was purposely crossed or whether goatgrass just happened to be growing in a farmer's field and nature did the crossing for the farmer. It makes you think a little about genetically modified plants, which can infect surrounding crops without anyone's wishing them to. It seems natural that plant genes should have evolved to be very good at inserting themselves into other nearby species.

I wonder whether everything is dumb luck.

I am listening to What's the matter here? by 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant's brilliant meditation on child abuse. Natalie doesn't accept the bullshit that it's okay to "discipline" your kids by abusing them, and neither do I. I once slapped the twins on the leg. They had done some minor shit when I was looking after them, and I was furious. They looked at me with total incomprehension. Naughtyman said, you have made my leg hurt. I still feel guilty about it. I would never make a good malefactor, thanks to my powerful conscience. If I do something wrong, it nags at me ever after. These are not things that I have worked out from principle are wrong; these are the things that the deeper me knows are wrong.

I still feel guilty about Ziggy. He was the cat we got when Zenella was very little. We thought it would be good to raise her with a pet, and I don't mind cats. He was a beautiful cat, shy and gentle. When we left Australia to go to the UK, I tried to find him a new home. I had one all lined up and the woman I had agreed to leave him with pulled out at the last moment. I had to leave him with my inlaws. They are not cat people, altogether wrong for Ziggy, who needed to be cared for. Their idea of caring for a cat was to make him a nest in the garage underneath their house and ignore him as best they could. He ran away and went feral. Of course, he would not have survived for very long in the wild. I will never forgive myself for killing him. We have been thinking about getting another cat. This time it would come with us. It would cost more than 3,000 dollars to take it, but I will not get one unless I am willing to do that.

When I say that people online don't matter to me, I am comparing them to how I feel about Ziggy. I am too strung out for anything to matter less than the things I care about deep beneath my shell, in the small tiny beating heart of meat that feels like me. If I become re-integrated, who knows how I will feel?

I am listening to Eighties fan by Camera Obscura. It makes me feel lonely.

I also feel guilty about the path I have taken. I do not know how I would explain it to the teen me, and I feel I should be able to. I wonder sometimes whether I buy old eighties records to convince myself that I have not abandoned the boy, that I have enough love remaining for him to keep hope alive. I know that that doesn't make much sense. Who says that we have to? Sometimes we are just chaos inside, like a pit of bubbling tar, incoherent, inchoate maybe.

I am barely living. I feel as though pieces of me live each piece of my life, and they won't cohere and make it a life. I don't know why I think they should but I do. I feel like I should feel alive.

I am listening to Bizarre love triangle by New Order. It should cheer me up! It's one of my favourite songs. I have no idea why I love New Order so much. I've never been able to analyse it, the way I can with some other bands.

I was reading a thing the other day about writers' rooms (sorry, don't have the URL). It made me feel deeply sad. Here were these people -- mostly not very good writers, with the exception of Ballard -- saying yeah, I write for two, three hours in the morning, and then I read and think for the rest of the day. And I'm thinking, me too! Except I don't, can't, won't.

I know it is no good whining about your life, how you are too lazy, too stupid, too talentless to make great pop records or write great books. I know all that but you can still feel a bit sad that you are stuck in a basement in Mansfield, staring at a PC screen, as though you were a pygmy in a forest, a genius without a milieu in which to use it.

But does the pygmy mind?

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:36 am