Side-Notes

 
What I mean by side-notes is that they contain no new startling revelations from my memoirs. After this week's sequence, I have to plan it a little (different for a diary, forward planning), because there is a lot to write and though I may write sequentially, it will always appear backwards.
I don't think I am intending, or am actually able to write this in a chronological sequence. Memories of events, determinant factors, just rise up into the consciousness and, in any event, if I chose to read all of my stuff going back through most of the time, I could transcribe, but I would never have the time. I want to stick to what I feel is salient to where I have got trapped in the here & now. Certain clues might already be emerging, but it will all come, depending on how able I actually am to write it decently.

The major reason for this side-note is a response to the reaction this week. I had said that I am writing to myself, and I MUST keep it that way. So if I don't answer the comments, please rest assured that I am reading them and it is now in fact a further encouragement to keep on. So when I wrote to Auds the other day "Ne Me Quittes pas", that is what I meant: Don't go away from me. And I hope I won't. Thank you all for your heart-felt comments.

I am trying to capture Siberia with the camera. It is harder than I had thought. Partly because you can't HEAR the sound of it, partly because of the dimesions. Now I think that this difficulty could go towards explaining why I posted "Born Running" and "Keep on Running". It is as if I have to explain what has made me me, that could, in turn, explain, why I experience this as a prison without escape called Siberia.

I am actually looking forward to writing the next entries to this diary/autobiog. Masochistic of me, perhaps, because I already know what it has to contain, which is the follow-on from the miracles and other elements of my childhood. Everything that was seminal to all the most positive and most negative in me.
It has never been lightly that I have always answered the question: "What is your greatest achievement?" automatically by saying: "To have survived". There is what I know, there is what I have been told and there is what has been confirmed of my own auto-psychological excavation & analysis.
I also know just how richly lucky I have been. It all could have been so very different. And if today I, we, have so little to show materially for our time, I understand that too. Even miracles have their limits. And we cannot have everything.
It is like we are all dealt a hand of cards at the beginning, when our circles start turning. We have to play that hand and we can't usually see where it will lead. But on this basis, this strikes me as a fabulous reason for never judging anyone else, or over-estimating or underestimating them.They have their own hand of cards, their own circles to turn through, their own 360º.

"Ulysses", Ruth. I am telling myself our one-word battle anthem today; because today has been really hard. It is the contagion of Siberia, you see.
May the weekend be better, although the days and nights don't really make any difference when nothing happens to distinguish them, and you feel yourself being sucked deeper into something awful so lacking in stimulation that you are surrounded by human debris who know no better, and you wake up exhausted, incoherent and having to try and repair yourself, just because you do not belong. And just because there is no alternative. And you are starving for lack of art, sky, intelligence, ocean, diversity, curiosity, engagement, fields, trees, roads, beauty, sense, the unlimitedness of being truly alive.
ULYSSES!!!