Edited: Aug 2005. Author Michael Day takes flak about style in his novel 'Slide' that remains fair -- as far as it goes and I'd got in the book.
I finished it, held by a plot that kept me turning a few more pages each time.
Whether Mr Day woke up or an editor did, I don't know, but most grounds for my moan disappeared. No write-up, but it's a good story, clearly well-researched, about a horrifying prospect. NB
Hello, Sarah,
"Today,
"I did not begin this day with my eyes, but with someone else's. They became black and purple and I almost fluttered off into space.
"Nothing feels right when you are trapped in someone else's vision. It must be your own."
I wonder whose they those may have been. How many other pairs of eyes are out there, other visions, each unique?
People "clock" watchers say it's almost 6.448 billion tonight, just the human population of our planet. My plans were other than an announced "open letter" to you. This isn't it!
My infamously prolific and irreverent mind returned to yours while travelling "home from Africa" tonight. A double British "l" there from someone called Nick, Nicholas when people insist, whose nationality means very little to him any more. Someone asked if ever I write about groups rather than the voices of women (VoWs).
I do, if a VoW is upfront, and got stuck in the Métro by one of the stops a train occasionally makes at Invalides station, where the driver says "Sorry, sardines get off here and wait for the next one, if you can squeeze aboard."
'Dummy' (Portishead) was my private soundtrack, not a journey to lift me out of the world, fluttering off into space.
With "someone else's" eyes, you began, on March 5 -- a damp, chilly Saturday here. My waking day started with silence, letting the last dreams dissipate gently as ever, slowly replaced by whatever five senses were telling me that morning. It's perhaps no strange synchronicity this: I'd previously put some photos on the Net for a New Yorker of 'Parisian Purgatory', nothing special.
A presence had felt like an absence, it didn't matter, I wrote:
"She's only a phone call or a quick e-mail away, but for some reason beyond any explanation, I've felt a sense of rightness in doing neither, as with another friend with whom I've avoided contact for a little while. Some relationships need to gestate. If you don't understand a word of this, fine. Neither do I...
Maybe it's the weather."
Grey, just grey, bothers me. Not rain. Not water. Except I suppose one day soon I should get a defunct water heater fixed. I've had many cold showers lately and may have needed them, summer's coming.
But still...
Five weeks later, I told people about 'Sarah, of an evening, revisited.' I forget why I began "Warning! Work in progress..." but said how you gave me "an easy, wordless tuned-in smile with a stranger while discovering a voice (the other person was flying on her on own iPod), dreaming spaces and hand-in-hand trips to the inner places you go to find hope when the news is dominated by the dead.
"She's about opening cages, freedom to move on."
There was more, 'Nexus' had me sure (picking up a review quote you keep at your place, Sarah Fimm) "I'd leave out that "fucked up", certainly for this album, just say she's got strong attitudes, honest lyrics and ouch! what a range."
Since then, you've sometimes been a part of my travels.
"Individuality can be subtle, hiding in the cracks of our skin, sleeking about in the folds of our minds, or expelling itself in a loud belly laugh. It is our uniqueness that sculpts our humanity. It is everything to recognize it, receive it, and allow it to nurture itself."
So it is. What you called "individuality" that day I sometimes call "identity", our self-awareness and place among others beyond all count. We are ourselves multiple, you know this. Until last year, as others know, that took me so far the time came to find out for myself what I am. On April 8, without no more help, my brain was still rewiring the networks. Some poor buggers may have thought, "There's no stopping it, Nick's on speed forever!"
That's a story told and I recommend nobody read the last couple of years of the telling, which became totally open while it happened, among a host of jokes and notes of absurdities: that and the rest are now an appalling number of words, more than 1.6 million! A few enjoyed the ride. The French call roller-coasters "Russian mountains".
A probability I foresaw happened after 'Nexus'. Most people would be alarmed and upset, Sarah, to be told: "Sorry, I didn't mean to do this, but I've been into the folds of your mind." Some are. A few, close to me, who don't pretend to understand any more than I do, call me a 'walking I Ching'," but that's all about probabilities and to use the book and say "This is now and this is the future" is nonsense.
Who can really tell fortunes for anybody awake enough to choose how to live their own? People know I'm still prone to "head-trips", no thought-reader either. A few days ago, I said -- with some trepidation -- that with you, it was very different.
'Looking before I leap: treat seraphims with caution'. So I do. Never before has a "head-trip" taken me anywhere near a stranger and one who's a "Quiet Revolutionary". Back at work after a week's rest when the rest of the world and its riot of "news" was switched off completely, back in the routine madness, back with scores of people I must be with instead of just those I long wanted to make more time for, it's still too real for me to say it never happened.
Your latest album spoke of networks. On hearing all I could, after that, I wonder which way round it happened!
Sarah, it's a risk. An "experiment", that's what 'taliesin's log' was subtitled when it began. The current "really, luv?" is simply affection for those I do. If you look, you'll see, on every page, the 'Big L' is something I'm more cautious about than ever! It's done too many wonderful and terrible things through me before and while I say "luv" every day to lots of people, it's no longer to be used as an excuse to beat and drown them until they gasp for air and space and the right to be themselves.
You, not halfway round a world, just a long way, are back from a tour of the States. I hope it was as good as it could be. Only tonight, rather late, did I look notice you keep a log of your own. I've not read the journal and don't want to be gratuitously nasty to anyone else, but must say a new bedtime book, 'Slide,' by Michael Day ... it's giving me a hard time.
Mr Day, a novel about the "world's first environmental war" could stir me, but I'm an editor. I'm trying hard to stick with your story. Please next time remove one word in three, mainly adjectives, even nouns. When I got to:
"They were going after a special type of gold trapped in the huge sedimentary basin lying deep beneath Rockall Bank. Black gold.
Oil.
Enough oil (...)"
Just enough. Why the "special" and "type of"? Are sedimentary basins generally small and shallow? People who don't know what a sedimentary basin is will have to look it up anyway. A new paragraph for "Oil" did me in.
For those likely to read your book -- well-starred at Amazon UK -- you could have spared your fingers.
Normally, if I don't like something, I won't do an unwanted hard review. Those can be funny, sometimes helpful, but I'd rather read something constructive than waste time on demolition jobs.
Sarah, some reviews, even most of your reviews, bewilder me! Really, luv, I'm not obsessed; maybe I'm crazy or you are, maybe it's both of us. I know I'm "nuts". Many people who listen to your music and the words seem often to miss the point; that's no fault of yours, no lack of clarity.
What you've done convinced me to change a project, 'Sting in the Lotus,' cheerfully trashing dollops of screenplay. I lay no unique claim to understanding what you sing, except feeling we're on similar wavelengths, such as I've never known with a "stranger", woman or man.
My "open letter" is largely done. You need time and light and space and air and freedom, above all freedom to give out more of who you are. Tonight, it feels wise to ask you first. All being well, may I soon publish what I'd like to tell the person I believe I've "met", often looking into a mirror, perhaps as others do, that we're on the same road for a while?
It's no love letter, no fan letter, more a very strong feeling of recognition and that when I read your online journal, this will deepen. It is a risk -- one that gets shorter with each word I write now. I use too many still myself. The film, as is or maybe was, goes places words don't. So, often, does what you do.
"Overthinking," you say, "gets you nowhere."
Hence I call it "fuckinfilosofy," usually to be inflicted on those who ask.
We may never meet. That's fine and beside the point.
I think we already did; part of a pattern, beyond dreams, however "perfect", and I don't want to push you. If I'm right, you seem to break a few "laws" of physics!
You know about those. I'd tease you, as I do most people. And I's tell you and others about a big law of physics scientists recently decided may not work any more.
Maybe you already know.
I think we have stuff to share, often with others as well, because it's fun and interesting and it's where we're going. Before I go any further in public, I should ask you, one busy person to another, if that's cool?
Say "No" and I won't. Say "Keep it private -- and short!", I shall. Say, "Shut up, Nick," I shall. Anyone's allowed to do that, especially between friends.
Now your music has made of you a friend, I'll cheat.
Before going on, I'll add one more brief paragraph. In private. It may help you make up your mind, but the choice can only be yours.
Nick
(To be continued. Or not. "Pursued" is not the word, that's not on.)
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