(no subject)

[vriad_lee]

i know it's half-baked and maybe doesn't even make sense, but just to get rid of it, just to get rid of it, because i won't stop editing until i actually post. i got rid of another one already thanks to the magic of email, and now this one. goodbye. be well. drink you milk eat your pudding suck your jelly-fish brush your teeth et cetera

shooldays by moi


going up those steps
losing a sandal
pressed by the multitude
shouted at
in the morning
first grade
crouching
to get it back
how i learnt
to hate my sandals,
my feet, and myself
that and previous,
following days

Comments

[poemtree.livejournal.com]

but the half-baked poems are the best ones. i mean, at least bukowski thought so.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

but he was a PEDOPHILE, no one cares what he thought!

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

does that poem makes sense, i mean do you understand what's happening in it? when i have to be very economical in english i don't know if what i say makes any sense at all

[poemtree.livejournal.com]

i understand, yes, but not enough to feel comfortable in offering you a concrete response.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

well, what i tried to describe was this: i'm walking up the stairs, in a crowd of schoolchildren. it's an early moring, and when school opens, everyone is let in at once, so there's a real crowd moving upstairs like some tide, and my sandal slips off my foot, and i have to crouch to fish it from under other people's feet while everyone is pressing and cursing etc.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Do kids go barefoot in Russia? (Meaning by choice, and not just at the beach.)

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

no, it's too ******* cold you know? in fact showing one's bare feet in russia is tantamount to showing one's bare ass, that's why i feel so unrestrained showing my ass to people (since they have already seen my feet). can you imagine something like that going on in nz or elsewhere in the world for that matter???

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to be imagining there... :-)

It's just that walking to school barefoot is not that uncommon in NZ. Hence PJ...

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2004/0705/102.html

is probably viewed differently in NZ than elsewhere.

Hmmm. There really is a site for everything on the net...

http://www.unshod.org/pfbc/nz_main.htm

!

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

soooper!
i felt the 6th school stairs under my feet as in a flash... this one's really GOOD

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

oh thanks! has anything like that happened to you there?

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

i can't remember if i ever lost footwear (i preferred kedy or something like them so it is hardly happened) but this feeling, when you have to stop or stoop or anything just because you're clumsy and don't fit in and they curse and shove and try to get closer to you and move hustily not to miss their chance to hurt you

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

well, for me shame was the overwhelming feeling, that you-are-ugly-ness, i don't even remember why such shame, because there was nothing special, well sandals, well shoe-bag, well ranetz, nothing special - but everything was filled with such shame

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

ерые shame! shame for yourself for being humiliated, despised, ostracized - and clumsy, ugly, miserable - and overwhelming shame for THEM over that, for being so unbelievably primitive, trifling, scared and scary - almost not human-like - and for your being there among them in the first place

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

i realized olny some years out of school what sort of animals they were - like, most of them. they weren't human by the 8th grade, but in first grade they were nothing more than monkeys, really - well, most of them, the best adjusted of them at the very least. that was what actually fucked up my brain at school, that attempt to romanticize them, and i actually successfully justified them - i was wrong, i didn't fit, i was missing something, i was the bad person. yes, you can explain anything with that: 'oh well must be i'm missing something'. it's totally fucken late to change anything at that deep level by know, because nothing that is there, at that level, makes any sense any longer, it's a thing you walk on, it doesn't change. yeah, for some things we owe a big thank-you to our parents. i mean, didn't they see? they had to see

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

that was their very theory - that the "rebyata" were in the right and that you must fit in and you are a loser if you can't. it was all about "respect" - gaining it, fighting for it, using it for good deeds. and it was the very dirty, miserable inmates' "respect", purely Yanomamo stuff. it was your fault and moreover your guilt if you couldn't gain respect and of those... well, young people let me say and got your immunity from their hands. it completely broke down Ilyusha who was not a good man from the beginning but could make a quite agreeable soviet "intelligent" had he had a proper education and friendly environment.

i can imagine what it was to grow up in that dvor our father grew up in and what it was to gain respect from local hooligans as he did. i think he never got over it.

so Ilya didn't. we all walked away from it and he's still there playing "a man" and standing his stand over completely wasted and abandoned - and just somebody's else! - ground.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

yes, what? i just have to agrree! about ilya especially, although in reality i know nothing about him/his childhood. but that total surprise - moving from our flat to that hell like in a matter of day, never realizing what happened until you are out of it in 8 years, and even then not realizing what happened, for years! the surprise of it! i don't know, i think i'm intentionally stupid sometimes, wishful thinking as a form of protection, i guess i took that from mother. because how blood-thirsty i would have been by now, if i didn't compensate all that screaming hell with some unrealistic self-deceiving goodness? or maybe i'm blood-thirsty by now anyway, i don't know

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

post-traumaic syndrome, we all suffer of it (excluding Anna maybe, and even here I'm not sure).

it is time to forget and move on as brain-shrinks say (at least in books and films they always do so).

you owe nothing to them and you owe nothing to that boy you were then either. you are not anything like a "complete new person" now but you have nothing to do with that boy too. it is like coming home from a war: you can't get away from it but you can't live with it as well. the trick is to find some ballance. onr day i just looked around and said to myself: "hey! look around! the war is over and you just never had time to notice it - you were busy fighting!"

the problem is, till you are still there you're still trying to find your place there and explain it all to yourself - torturing yourself in an empty room in the middle of nowhere. i tried to cope with Ilya forever; sometimes we even got "friendly". and the very day i so the war was over he just disappeared, walked away from my life, painlessly and (i think) forever - i got free from him at last, when i was 35 or something. till that day i was that girl he did things to, and it was me, not him, who didn't let the girl go, made her to return there again and again.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

yes, i understand that (more or less), but what scares me is that the memory of those things is vanishing. not some actual facts, events etc, but my own perspective at that time - because it was something concrete, and real for a long time, and then i did a lot to make it irrelevant, to find a new perspective, and when i more or less succeeded in that, i saw the old concepts vanishing and i can't quite remember how it all was, and i want to remember, because if you don't you turn into a shallower person. the perspective i had then, it was such a huge chunk of - i don't know, universe, and at some point it might be rendered completely obsolete. what i really would like to do is to return there is some form (no fuck i don't want to actually go to school again!) and reevaluate everything, because when i was actually going through it i misunderstood what happened, and drew very negative conclusions about some innocent - or neutral - things. like, for years i tried to paint everything white, keeping the bad stuff away from me, and then i had to paint it all black? do you know how that happens, when you're proved wrong in your extreme theory/ideology repeatedly, and then you are forced to accept the other extreme? in fact, i have dreams about that all the time, how i return to school and redefine everything, the only problem is that my new ideology (or whatever it might be called) isn't strong or comprehensive enough to accommodate all that hell that i created in myself at school. and the more i forget how it actually was, the less chance i have to understand what actually happened. but again, it's some low-level stuff, i don't know if you can change such things at all (although in fact i think you can). the way that school made me see the world is correct, in part. any outlook is correct, in part. but there are defining moment when you grab either the good stuff or the bad stuff, and that defines what your life is going to be from that point on. i can't prove my school cynicism wrong, because it wasn't wrong, it just was what it was, it was what i got, i just grabbed some wrong stuff at a wrong point.

[(Anonymous)]

when you try not to forget a feeling (esp a feeling of the kind) you feel it again, as much mitigated and distorted as your memory and the time allows. it rots inside you poisoning your blood and any new thought you try to think. it is like plucking on a healing wound because you know you understood something when the bullet hit and are afraid to lose it. this brings nothing, explains nothing, helps nothing. you can't "forget" anyway: any wound lives with you, body never forgets a pain, you know that. brain never forgets either. soul never forgets. what you feel as a feeling sleeping away or betrayal is healing, nothing more nothing less. let your wounds heal to that extent that they can be healed. and that is not much anyways.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

as far, the way i treat my memories proved to be rather efficient - as far. but i don't know, maybe you're right, maybe i should try to let it go as much as i can. although, it seems that wether i let it go or not doesn't depend on my will, and that forgetting how i felt then leaves me with less means to reevaluate it. i guess i know what you mean - there is bad stuff in life, and you can't make it good. but i'm not worrying about the bad stuff in life so much, i'm worrying about that part of it that i let slip into myself. and i do believe - sometimes i do - that i can dissolve it by some sort of reevaluation or analysis, and that if i forget it, let it completely slip into subconscious, i'll lose all control over it. now, at least, i see at clearly marked as 'bad stuff'. i don't know, i might be deluded in all these ideas, i'm rather neutral as to how correct they are. but it's my private mine field, i have no way to be certain about anything. so there

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

your notions of good and bad have become deeper and more definate since then, haven't they? so why do you think you need this shock therapy to stay in shape? what i say is not FORGET. what i say is DON"T TRY TO BRING IT BACK TO LIFE. when i stopped this "never forget" game i remembereв tons of stuff i suppressed (and had no idea i did). you beat down into your subconsciousness more stuff now then you can dream of: you're still fighting and this staff is still the question of life and death, of your sanity. not to forget, just recognize the person you are now, and you are not that boy, you can't re-live or even re-construct his life!

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

well! i don't know. maybe you're right - one way or the other, it doesn't look like an option now, to just let it go, to recognize myself as some new person etc. besides, remember john irving? writers know how to use their shit? i guess i prefer to analyse that shit now. i guess that's my shit track of life, i don't know!

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

you got it all wrong. i say, the way to analyse it at last and understand it at last is let it go emotionally. as i said, i managed to analyze all the stuff and even remembered lots of things (events, words etc) as soon as i made peace with my own gone self. you can't live pretending you are the same person they kicked in the schoolyard and trying to put it right for that long gone person. ypu what that person vecame, but not him and you can't make him think or live your way. in fact, you lost touch with him long ago - if not completely, in lots of aspects. that's all.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

but i'm not talking about redefining myself socially. i don't want to be someone who returns to school and is no longer kicked, that's not a problem, i could compensate easily for that kicking if i wanted to (at least, so it seems). i'm not thinking of 'that' person, i'm thinking of the stuff that got embedded on a very deep level then, it happened to me then, but my 'now' has inherited it. i would be quite happy to be someone who was kicked at school, or even someone who was acting mean at school for that matter, i don't need to make peace with my past at this point - i want to see as clearly as possible what exactly happened with my picture of the world, how it warped exactly. the best way i can describe it is that there's some point i need to remember, it's hidden somewhere, and i'm unraveling what i am, how i have become that, trying to find that single most important point. and maybe there's no such point at all? maybe it's a sum total of forgoten points? i don't know

[emma-loy.livejournal.com]

ooops, that was me!

i want to add, you are still trying to judge yourself. is there any sense in trying to judge a boy who got into that hell at the age of 7? i broke a couple of lives and successfully finished destroying my own when i finally understand that i was trying to live (or justify or condemn - there is not much difference or even border) the life of a person who wasn't me by any approach. when i looked at myself with open eyes for the first time i knew i was torturing and killing a young woman i turned into by then almost the very same way they had been torturing and killing the girl i was 20+ years ago! and i knew quite well it was time to stop.

the war is over, maybe even the good guys lost in some methaphysical sense of the word, but the war is over and it is time to go home. and you have a home - a life of your own, you are sane and your life has nothing to do with them anymore. not that little for one who returned from a war.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

i don't know, it seems to me like simplyfing things, besides i'm not trying, i'm not fighting, i'm being sleepy and neutral, so i HOPE that i won't be killing anyone. well, AT LEAST! i answered to the anonymous comment above too