"Love him. Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"
- Jacques, Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin (now finished!)
Apologies for the comparative shortness of the next few posts; between work experience and three birthdays I have less than an hour free a day in which to write these. In this hour I generally sink into the kind of sluggish, half-human state that would be ideal for watching The Only Way is Essex (I usually settle for Celebrity Come Dine With Me, even as a zombie I have standards), but suitable in reality for very little else.
Prompted by Eliot Boyd to write about the recent anti-proposition 8 victory in New York, but finding myself with very little to say on the matter*, I remembered this video. I remembered how despite not being especially eloquent, or lyrical, nor deliberately fragmented, nor skewed as though viewed from the bottom of a glass but instead as from the bottom of the heart, this poem by Alvin Lau gave me chills in a way that only Itch from the King Blues and maybe the voice of Tinky Winky from the Teletubbies have ever done before. Watch.
Thanks to my own sister for showing me this; she used it for a GCSE art piece based on the work of Grayson Perry.
*See the previous post for examples of how the human mind is mercifully capable of denying things too stupid to seem real, even if they clearly are: a mechanism no doubt in place to help us keep a grip on our own convictions, and by extension our sanity. Perhaps the reason I have never felt much of a strong desire to visit the US is my fear - my underlying knowledge - that attitudes even remotely contradicting this one still exist.
Happy midweek :)
