The Voices

My schedule has my final "Work" period of the day down as 1900-2100, but having been a bit under the weather lately (I caught a couple of the "start-of-term" bugs that're always flying around academia at this time of year), I have let myself stop at 2000 instead, with a few more breaks during the day as well. Hopefully as term progresses and my health improves, I will gradually increase the number of working hours again - I see the coursework decreeing a few "all-nighters" in the (not so distant) future too... If you want to know the sort of thing my coursework entails, I have a blog chronicling my final year which, although currently quite sparse, will hopefully, during the year, shed some light on what is apparently quite an obscure discipline to a lot of people.

In the meantime, here is a poem I wrote about 10 minutes ago - it's a bit "meta" since this was written to try and quell some of the noise to which it refers:

It's noisy in my head,
Like a telly on the blink.
But the noise is more than static -
There are madmen in my attic.

How can I make them see,
That these half-formed words and sounds
Just flood my brain and knock me down -
It only takes an inch to drown?

I hope they mean no harm,
But their presence all the same
Really does me no good at all -
True thoughts displaced by inane drawl.

Here We Go Again Then

Who would have thought it - I made it to the start of my Master's year? When I was growing up, particularly in my teenage years, one of the things that I considered to be an inevitability in my future would be the acquisition of a degree. The astonishing effort to get this far was not something that I remember featuring in this prophecy, and the exhaustion which it has generated was more than a little surprising and deflating. I am thus looking forward to my final year with mixed feelings. In principle, University has been fantastic, the majority of my units over the last few years have been things that, had I been in better health, would have been of great interest to me, and so I should be tremendously excited... There is, however, also the increased sense of trepidation which has been steadily growing since I was told that I had passed last year's exams, and is in fact only the latest, almost seamlessly transferred, incarnation of fear which has engulfed me for a number of years. Basically, my anxiety seems to have more lives than the Master - every time I think it's dead, it glows a little and returns in a newly regenerated form of madness.

This time next week I will have had my first day at Uni. I say day, but I think that it will be one lecture only on Monday. In fact, before Christmas I believe I have an average of 8.6 contact hours a week. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is one of those degrees where you have a couple of lectures a week and then spend the rest of the time drinking and sleeping - I will study 8 units and write a thesis (with accompanying website and poster design) in the course of this academic year, and I can quite easily envisage putting in a lot of 60 hour weeks before I am through. If anybody is reading this and happens to be interested in the work I do, I plan to maintain an online chronicle of what a final year in Engineering Mathematics entails, hopefully at a level accessible even to the sciencephobic.

The hope is that this year will progress in a smoother fashion than those preceding it, but as I am not renowned for my optimism, I am not going to lay odds on it. As usual - and based on everyone insisting that it's the healthy thing to do - I will attempt, during term-time, to assign more recreational activities to my schedule, which probably means I will try and reinstate my Word of the Week hobby, and perhaps begin writing and taking photos again. The likelihood of renewed panic seems to be quite high, and as this site has been designed as a venting place, I imagine numerous dark and/or inane ramblings will appear here in the near future.

I see a pattern emerging...

Different poem, same theme:

And how,
In this world of promise and light,
Do you see so little
In the way of illumination?
Could it,
Though, in truth, I shudder to ask,
Be that your blinkered eyes
Look not for a brighter path than this?
Tis plain
This lethargy runs far too deep
Dulling the mind and wit -
An apathy to be fought in vain.
A cloak
Is draped heavy about the heart
An enveloping force
Quells a passion never even there.

A Conversation

I feel like a ship
Broken in two

But everything's fine
What's wrong with you?

Waves of confusion
Break on a forgotten shore

But you got what you want
You can hardly want more?

If the answer were simple
Would the question exist?

What question is that
I don't follow your gist?

I wish I knew
And could see some light

Why do you feel so wrong
When it's all going right?

Why is it no different
When I see what I've got?

How is it that still
You're not content with your lot?

Contentment is one thing
Harder to reach is an easy mind

So you're sticking with melancholia
To accompany your daily grind?

Sounds of Simon

A number of people have expressed a desire to see what my writing is like when framed in a more up-beat context, so here is a contracted review of my favourite musician, instigated by the glorious (and most likely once in a lifetime) experience of having seen him in concert this week.

Disclaimer: These opinions, while stated as fact for the purpose of publication, are entirely my own. You are perfectly free to disagree with the ideas presented here, in the same way as I am perfectly free to hold them in the first place.

Unless you are a complete heathen – and I am aware that such people do exist – it seems to me to be impossible not to appreciate Paul Simon on some level. A master wordsmith and the embodiment of versatility, his career has spanned over half a century. Does that mean that he had a career and then spent the proceeding few decades milking it and thanking heaven that he didn’t die along with so many of his contemporaries? Certainly not! His current tour is not a mere nostalgia trip: he is in fact promoting his 16th studio album (that is, not including soundtracks, lives or compilations), So Beautiful Or So What. Nor is it a comeback, since he never really went away. True, he is not churning out an album a year, or whatever the going rate is these days for those new artists who manage not to be a one-hit wonder, but his last was only 5 years ago. When you consider that he is a family man, still semi-regularly touring, approaching his 70th birthday, who has produced a record containing such beautifully and intricately arranged original tracks, that timespan suddenly moves from the mundane to the phenomenal.

Why do I say he should appeal to everyone? The expert spanning and conjoining of genres and, indeed, cultures – as witnessed by the African/Caribbean influences and collaborations in his recent works; the mix of subtlety and transparency in his wordplay, generating the span from tears to chills, to laughter; the glorious instrumentation and rhythms, causing an inescapable urge to move and give in to the call of the beat; his ability to remain continuously relevant, with old and new material alike; his continual productivity, and his general, all-round ‘nice-guy’ attitude combined with his dedication to his music, his band and his fans are but a taster of the virtues of a man whom I have no compunction about describing as an artistic genius.