Folie à Deux. Fall Out Boy's new album. Out now. It's cute as punk-rock goes, uplifting and fun. But not original. Some heavier riffs, burning absinthe and electro beats added to the mix would have made it edgier and more interesting. No hits on this album, and honestly I did expect more from the alternatives turned sell-outs. Don't know what it is with people frowning at the sell-out label stapled to their heads but yes, a few people out there might be too blinded by their Fall Out Boy love (like me) and thus accept this a-little-too-bland-for-my-taste album with open arms.
"Folie à deux (roughly, "a madness shared by two") is a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another." (Wiki) I love the name of the album though. Psychosis for two, the new à la mode platter at the chicest restaurants. Wink, wink.
The Bell Jar is so ME. It's like reading about myself. Which scares me like hell. The same off-beat thoughts and observations, the sadness, inertia, indecisiveness. Fearing the future. Like I said, it's like a secret voice coming from my own bones. Sylvia Plath committed suicide.
Morbid and confusing like a lunatics dream. And still, that inertia, that apathy is something I experience quite often – the paralyzing fear of the future, the nagging paranoia that people compare your past with your present and future. The insects crawling down your back. Lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, listening to the silence, not feeling a thing – feeling scared because you're not feeling a thing. Reluctantly going out of bed even though everything in your body is working against it. Positioning yourself at the bedside, looking out the window. Endless gray skies. Dullness. Apathy. And something wrenching your guts out because you know it's not healthy to think and feel like that, you know you ought not disappoint the people around you. You know you ought to perform, to have a receipt at the end of the day, showing what you've accomplished. Feeling guilty because you're not capable of accomplishing anything. Or not being enough anyway. Closing in on yourself, the skin clammy. Why. Why wash today when I'll just have to do it again tomorrow. Why eat today when I just have to eat tomorrow again. Why do anything since it all comes to dust in the end.
Poems are dust. People are dust. Dust, dust, dust.
This is the Bell Jar. The bell jar around you, not allowing any fresh air in to your existence. Watching the world move on, develop, watching people talk and live and have fun and feeling like puking on all of it. A disconcerting feeling you're missing out on it all. The morbid thoughts popping up now and then. “Oh that would be a nice way to die”. Standing at the train tracks, listening to the beauty of the song of iron, the whistling and bustling and people walking. Static. Hesitating. Scared. Bailing out. Smiling to oneself while standing there. “I could have done it you know... just don't want to disappoint anyone”.
Fascination with sound and scent. Picking it up. Distinguishing it from the mass of buzzing. Wondering why I noticed it and why it is distracting me and why I am thinking this at all. Go on, be normal, stop being so neurotic.
The future branching out into a fig tree, every swollen fig a possible future. One is university in Japan on scholarship. One is working one year (with God knows what) earning money to go to Japan. One is a one-year language course in Japan, funded by loans. One is staying put, being bored to death and paralyzed about the future, reading and writing. One is death, no more thoughts or worries or disconcerting feelings. One is uncertainty.
All the figs equally possible, some more beckoning than others. Fearing that soon they will all shrivel, turn black and drop dead to the cold ground frozen solid.
When a young person sees an asylum or jail as a safe future, something in society has gone awfully wrong. I just don't know if I can take the competition. The harsh market. Selling yourself like an overpriced object. The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath. She committed suicide.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Wonderful little wizarding stories, making you smile and marvel at the mind of JKR. Kept me busy for an hour. Kept my mind off things. I enjoyed it very much and the first thought after reading it was - this I will read to my children, like others would read Cinderella and the like. My favorite out of the five wizard fairytale was “The Warlock's Hairy Heart”, which was really engaging and interesting: a wizard notices the silliness of all his friends who has fallen in love and vows to never let that happen to himself. Thus he performs Dark magic that cuts out his heart, and he locks it in a coffin. Thinking he now has eternal and undisturbed bliss ahead of him, he lives on alone in his big castle, wealthy and handsome, not mourning the passing of his parents or taking any interest in any woman's courting. One day his pride is damaged when he overhears two servants pitying him, and he decides to take himself a wife, just for show of course. So he starts courting the richest, wisest and most beautiful magical lady available, but she knows something is the matter with him. She gets him to show her his locked up heart and she demands that he put it back where it belongs. The wizard does so, but his heart has grown so forlorn to his own body, it's hairy and shriveled and more like the heart of an animal, that it turns on him. It possesses him and make him rip out the heart of the beautiful lady. She dies, and eventually when he realizes what he has done he rips out his hairy heart and there they both die. Sweeney Todd-style. Dumbledore's personal comments on this is that it is a story that speaks to the darkest depths in all of us – and addresses the least acknowledged temptations of magic: the quest for invulnerability. But to hurt is as human as to breathe. The young warlock regards love as a humiliation, a weakness and a sickness and search out a means to ward this sickness off at all costs. Then he babbles on about how a hairy heart now is a saying about someone particularly cold and callous, and that some relation of his was going to marry but found out in time the wizard in question “had a hairy heart” and decided not to (although it was also argued that the reason for not marrying the wizard in question was that he had been discovered fondling Horklumps, which is nasty pinkish shrooms, don't ask).
Dumbledore has such an original mind. I love it.
