Steer at a bullfight
sometimes i think about that bit in the sun also rises where jake is talking about steers at the bullfight. you know.
he’s sitting somewhere, maybe the cafe, and he explains to someone that the whole bull run/bullfight display relies on just a few steers. they have to guide the bulls to the fight, and then keep them from goring the walls of the corral and killing each other. the steers have to form a herd and keep the peace, but sometimes the bulls just turn on them and they die.
you should read it. i always think about that part.
May 8, 2012 Leave a comment
Two by two
there are these moments of virile colour that break through the grey veil.
i wonder if everyone feels it. this hovering mist that keeps the place running. the big cog in the machine, the barricades that keep us two by two on the packed escalators and shoulder-to-shoulder in the swollen elevators. maybe it’s sydney’s monochrome dream or maybe it’s bigger than that.
maybe it’s life after 21. maybe it’s life when you finally accept that everything will trod on and on forever and if you don’t go with it, fine. but it will trod on. maybe it’s life in a city, or life with a job, or life after you realise you went with passion and you could have done just as well with skill. whatever it is, it is a veil with a purpose. a mist with intent. and none of that is the point.
the point is there are these moments that tear through it. they run right under its nose and they swell and they dismantle the whole thing. these tiny little moments. they’re concentrated chaos – colourful, impermeable, impregnable explosions of spirit, set to blow right in the heart of the matrix.
i really love them. i wish i could discuss them with people. i would ask what yours are like, how you found them, how you find them again. but it seems intolerable. how do you ask that? how do you bring it up? how do you explain it, even.
i just keep saying ‘these things’. these moments of something. like electricity, like a lifetime of electrons jumping from one spot to another. i felt it first a few months back, at 5 or 5.30 every day. i found it in plain sight, right there on the corner of sussex and bathurst. one light changes and BAM, this chaos. red and white and blue and green and orange flying everywhere in blurs and streaks. loud noise. mobs of people all shrugging into this one spot by the curb, watching on. and the noise! the colours! the movement. arcs to the left and the right, a race straight ahead. they’re just motorbikes, but for one second – maybe two – they band together and become so overwhelming that you don’t know a thing ’til they’re gone.
it’s like that in a lot of places. by the river at 6am, when it’s so quiet there’s no way to know if you’re still alive. after pushing everything to failure and lying there in the dark forcing yourself to breathe, forcing your lungs to work, and there’s nothing but fire. at night time when the world is cold but you are warm – your toes are warm, your fingers are warm, your nose is warm. as you come around a loping bend and the tasman sea starts right next to you and it stretches out forever, to who knows where, and the sun is at your back and there is a chill bouncing right off that infinite sea and planting kisses all over your face.
May 6, 2012 Leave a comment
The embarrassing truth about me
I’m being summoned backwards. Back to the dark and to the forest. Back to the days where I lived quietly as a poet and a prophet and I was too young and too full of it to be any good… Too full of bravado and answers and all the things you slowly learn to give away. But there’s been this question lately. I feel statuesque. I miss animation, I miss scorching everything, blazing from dawn to dusk and taking the universe with me. It’s a feeling that’s crept in to everything, even my last post here – there’s a question there, and it’s why? How do I fix it? What happened?
Those questions are around every corner for me these days. They’re in every place I look.
But this morning? An unlikely answer. The Google bot writes to me and says I have 17 legacy blogger accounts that need some attention. I log in to one to look around and I find preservations of myself from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
I find Little Meg writing these notes and hurling them forward. At the time, I called them breadcrumbs for the world. Today they speak directly to the wisp.
I find a litany of truth and sin and horror, and I find instructions. I find these confessions about who I was and who I dreamed of becoming and I find that I checked a lot of those boxes over time, but I also dropped a lot of the things that made those boxes important to me in the first place. I find that I’ve gone too far one way, and I’ve gotta head back.
I find that you can be impressed by the wisdom of your little self. I find that accidental grandeur and hysteria and nonsense and sentimentality and fiction and imagination and overstating and highs and lows are all good things, and that in between each of them fall moments of real truth and art. I find that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable and silly and you push through it and that’s the search.
And now I remember.
I remember that I am weird in a way most people don’t understand and that I need NEED to be alone much of the time, without fail, and I need to think – really think – about everything around me and I need to retreat and bring something back and these things are not hobbies, they’re not negotiable preferences, and when I treat them that way I become less. I become half, I lose the bits of myself that offer a context for passion and vibration and fire.
I remember that I am embarrassed by my needs and my feelings and my beliefs. I realise that when I could share them under other names, as someone else, I could share them, and when I was forced to become me, I had to swallow them up. I let them turn dusty and I lost my way.
Thankfully, they did not molder or disappear. They kept resisting and resisting and they emptied me occasionally and they popped up in my conversations and my articles and my blog posts and in everything I produced. They came up, and I revisited them again and again and again until finally I got it.
I get it.
I have to resist now, and be embarrassing and be embarrassed by my earnestness and my foolishness and my intensity and by all of it. And that’s the search. And that’s the way forward. And that’s what we’re going to do.
Love,
Meg.
April 28, 2012 Leave a comment
The smacks
Are you there, God? Let’s blog. I’m cracking the seal on the UBERWENSCH roll back. It’s quiet here on the ranch tonight. Babeface is out. I’m listening to some inoffensive piano on 8tracks and trying my damnedest to blog. The whole thing smacks of bullshit.
I seem to have become a wisp. I don’t know a fucking thing anymore. I look around myself half the time and actually can’t believe what’s going on. I listen to people talking about their lives and I just find myself thinking over and over again: “Are you serious?” I listen to myself talking and I laugh. Over and over again.
What comes after vapid? What comes after inconsequential drip and interminable fucking dullardry? And, really, I mean are you SERIOUS?
Did this happen to anyone else? Did you wake up one day and realise you couldn’t even offend people anymore? Did you wake up and wonder what the fuck was going on? Did you ever try to blog? Did you ever look up ‘writing’? Do you know what’s next for you? And how do you make people authentic again? How do you respond to everything?
I had a dear friend for many years, a truly special person with whom I felt inextricably linked. Now we’ve shaken hands and said our civil goodbyes and what is the response to that? What does an incredulous laugh become when you mix in a sense of injustice? And your rage? And your hurt? And all the foul play you weren’t there for? What does it add up to and how do you make it into a sound or a word or a gesture? And where do you put it when you don’t hand it to the person you made it for? How do you respond?
Are you there, God? What happens when you’ve read all the poems that will ever be your favourite and you can quote Hemingway and Proust doesn’t matter? What’s next? What happens when there’s no music? What happens when you realise you’re cold and you drone on and you laugh with people and you eat the raspberries and you wage a battle against gluten and you search and you search.
April 24, 2012 2 Comments
The end, and then the beginning
UBERWENSCH became stagnant because I didn’t know what it was for. Between you changing and me growing up, everything sort of got lost and jumbled.
I made my first blogroll before Blogspot even existed. Over time I’ve moved from Geocities to LiveJournal, from Blogger to WordPress, then to tumblr, then to posterous, and back again to WordPress. I carried readers with me and I picked up new ones along the way, so – as obnoxious as it is to say – you guys represent my phases. Some of you got me when I was 16 and learning to write. Some of you got me when I was 18 and talking music, or 19 and talking photography. A lot of you appeared when I started to obsess over journalism.
These days I’m 24 and not so craftily delineated. I’ve blurred. I spend my time sitting here thinking, well, now what? Do people even read blogs anymore? What if it’s not a list, what if it’s not a how-to or a reveal? What if you fuck up the title and it doesn’t retweet well? What if you don’t have an auto-share button? What if the whole post amounts to nothing, what if it looks like blogging did back when we started it: an uncomfortable parade of thoughts and stories from your day, an offering of expert opinion on your microcosmic slice of the world, written for a tiny handful of people who can already guess the ending ‘cuz they grew up with your archives.
I loved that blogging. I loved the isolation of being a blogger. I loved the fact we were figuring out what worked and what didn’t and no one had written a damn thing about it. I loved the chaos; the explosive, unstoppable motion of an inkling that spread throughout the digital world. We were frontier men.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the 2.0 version of blogging too. I love the kind of blogging that gets somewhere because people know how to engage with it. I love the diffusion of information, the democracy it brings to the whole blogosphere. I love that people are reading and writing and carving their station. I love the way things changed when this kind of blogging took hold.
But you can’t have both in the same spot. They’re opposing forces. They devour one another. Holding them captive in a small space means that nothing breathes. No one wins. So it’s over. UBERWENSCH isn’t the catch-all anymore. UBERWENSCH is rolling it back. It’s the blog that’s doing it wrong. It’s the one that I had when I was 15, when I was still effectively anonymous online because none of my friends used the Internet and barely anyone kept a public journal. It’s about me, Meg White, and whatever I think that means at the time. It’s about the days when I have too many feelings, or I have some complaint to make about a person of importance. It’s about what I’m learning or thinking or worrying about doing. This is the blog that will get me fired from something.
And the rest of it will go on on megwhite.com.au (Note: I was trying to put this post off until all the content was done on the com au, but things are on hold in that department right now. Meanwhile, UBERWENSCH can live, so I am charging ahead). The main section will be a boring portfolio. My new blog will be a cyber trove of digital strategy, print journalism, copywriting, marketing campaigns and all the things that land nearby. It will be informed by my professional interests. It will follow the rules. You will look at it and see the full-time wordsmith and web maven that hides within me. This is the blog that will get me my job back.
It will be weird to dissect the readers of UBERWENSCH, but it’s necessary too. So if you’re here for the real stuff – the intel – you should add blog.megwhite.com.au to your feed or your bookmarks (or follow it if you’re on tumblr). If you want my professional portfolio, visit megwhite.com.au (eventually). And if you want me, stay where you are.
As for post frequency and all the expectations of that nature? Let’s figure it out as we go. Right now I’m juggling work, fun and uni, and getting these sites off the ground. It’s all a bit much. But UBERWENSCH just got easy, and that was the point.
Love,
Meg.
March 20, 2012 1 Comment