Season of mists

The sudden change in the weather has made me feel unsettled; my head is full of other mists.

I'm looking for a word to describe the way things affect (afflict?) me. The best I can come up with at the moment is "hyperassociation". There are times -- and this is one of them -- when everything that assails my senses seems to drag my mind back to another time, and at the same time drag my emotions headlong into the feelings associated with that time; not remembering the feelings (can you meaningfully remember a feeling without experiencing it again?) but feeling them. If the feelings are too strong, they make me unable to concentrate on the present; I get trapped in flashbacks of my own life.

Light, voices, music, smells, textures, colours can all have this effect; without any warning I'll be seized by the feelings of some past occasion, and it's only after a few minutes (if at all) that I'll identify what actually produced this flashback. Seasonal things produce this effect more strongly, because they repeat and reinforce previous associations while adding new ones. The weight of Summer alone is enough to slow my walk and bow my head.

Sometimes all the voices of remembered conversations are so loud that all I can hear above the din is myself silently screaming. And sometimes it feels as though every touch of a hand has been felt before, is a thousand past touches all rolled into one; every cry, every open mouth, every body rocked with passions is one and the same.

Myths feed on this kind of association; archetypes and thrice-told tales wind through the millennia like Ariadne's silver threads, so that on one level every mother, every lover, is linked to every other. This is how we find our way through the labyrinth of human experience; we light candles to guide our way, we look to the light ahead and the light behind, lights set outside time. (The power of Patrick's breastplate, armour borrowed or beaten from history: Christ before me, Christ behind me.)

...

I wish I could sit down and work this out, think about this before saying it rather than just thinking out loud here. But I feel like if I think too hard and too clearly, look directly at these things, they disappear into the mist.

It's the end of the week as we know it

Thursday:
Well, CUP don't want to give me a job. This isn't entirely surprising; I think I did okay at interview, but only okay. Still, at least I got as far as interview. And the more I think about it, the more I think I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the job that much -- it would have been the next stage up from what I'm doing now only without the geeky bits (which are about the only redeeming feature of current job).

Good (if too short) chat with daneel_olivaw before going out. Felt like it had been a very long time since we had a normal talk about normal things ... probably because it had been. Only a week now till he moves to Cambridge, hurrah!

Pub was fun, though it was a shame lnr and ewx had to leave early. Fun talking to hoiho and fanf about religion, schoolgirls, guns, music, knives, and Why Bad Things Happen To Good People -- a question which emperor wasn't keen to answer after 5 pints, funnily enough. :-)

Friday:
Poor old pto452 really doesn't like the cold weather. Bit of a rocky drive in, including stalling god-only-knows-how-many times, usually in front of irate van drivers.

Work was bearable, partly because Cynical Richard and I seem to be racing each other into total hysteria. I'm doing less and less work, but feeling happier about it in some ways -- partly because it's more fun when there's somebody else there who's willing to laugh at it all and sit around talking rubbish instead of working, and partly because I know I'm making a real effort to leave. Entertaining conversations on irc also kept work from getting too boring. :) And now I know where to find nou and uon on irc, hurrah!

Actually, though, thinking about it I've probably done more work in the last couple of days than in the previous week -- mostly documenting stuff and thinking about solutions for all the big changes we're making. Sometimes I almost think I could stand to stay here, but I know that if I do I'll just never really achieve anything -- I'll keep seeing each bearable bit as a reason to be lazy and stay, rather than as the slightly more interesting exceptions to the general rule of tedium.

Picking Kate up from the station in an hour or so, then going over to lnr and rjk's for pizza and wine afterwards. The weekend starts here!