New direction

Inexplicably, now have heat in the attic.  Curious.

More than halfway through 1984.  No recollection of any of it at all.  Fell asleep reading it last night, and between that and the giant spider near the head of my bed, had a lot of strange (some disturbing) dreams.

Two interesting observations by Winston in the book, "the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.  They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and they were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind..." - and "if you can feel that staying human is worth while even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them...if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make?  They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.  They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable." - George Orwell, 1984.  The latter stemming from thinking about how the proles were more human than the Party members.  Do we ever know what separates one from the other?  Why did some people become Party members, subject to all the control, and others were allowed to continue to live like humans live?  The former as good an argument for a broad-based education with critical thinking (as well as a free and independent press) as any I can think of.  As far as events of today go, I've talked about those elsewhere.

The clown piece was getting too complicated, so:  Start over.  Will try to spit out some sorta' outline for this for tomorrow.  Pretty sure it's down to three characters.

Sheer terror and exhilaration.  (For current things.)  You show up because you have to.  You make art because you have to.  (At a New Year's Eve party, I was telling someone that my degree wasn't all that practical, and he commented something to the effect, "Well, at least it's not acting, " to which I replied that that was my back-up, and we both laughed and I said I wasn't doing it for money, but because I had to.)  You make art because you have to.  You love because you have to, and in all these, the resistance just breaks down.  We are who we are.  And who we are is good enough.

Cheers to a weekend of failure.