perestroika

It is very cold outside, and I am feeling strange and restless. I am out and about at midnight, walking, because I'm not sure what else to do, and because I love that, walking in and between the sounds and lights of a city. Where I live up north, the presence that presses through the night is the sea: the sound of it, and the way the wind in the pines sounds like it, so they're one thing, deep, and not at all human. It isn't safe to go walking in the middle of the night. I get woken up, sometimes, by helicopters - someone is out there, lost. Here, it's different, and sometimes I come out here just because I need a book or to print something or I need chocolate and Sainsbury's are still open at 10.55.

But there are other times, when I'm tired and I can't sleep and I'm tired of myself and of other things, and it's hard, here, to be in a place where no one knows your name. You can't get from one place to another without meeting someone you know; Claire caught me on the way here and didn't ask where I was going but gave me her gloves. I always find Michaelmas like this; everything closes in, first the nights and then the world, because you see everything shaped by time - essays, deadlines, weeks until Christmas - and space: the pools marked out by streetlights, every destination marked out by the distance that you can walk, into the cold and the twilight, from home. But, well, this is my home. I'm happy here, now, in this place. It has been fifth week for half an hour, so this is subject to change.

I have read five articles on What is Art?, and today was a good day. Last night I ended up drinking far more than is good for me and at some ungodly hour James and Maria and chiasmata and I were draped about the kitchen eating purple pancakes and singing along, with some gusto, to the national anthem of the Soviet Union. ("It's very inspiring," I said. It was - lots of bass-voiced Russians singing to the glory of the mother country, but leaving out the verse about Stalin, or so Maria told me. "It makes me really want to do something, I don't know what. How long does it take to drive from Moscow to Vladivostok?"

"Years," Maria said.) Gin. Yeah. Lots of that. With sloes in, and wonderfully purple in the jar. The pancakes were purple because we were out of sugar, so we used blackcurrant jam instead. They tasted just fine, although that may have been the gin. And vodka, too. I was punch-drunk anyway, for some reason; not much sleep, and being around people after three days closeted with the Cold War, and I was stupidly giggly and weirdly insistent about being made of fail. (Which, in itself, is made of fail, watch me be recursive.) And I got over that after a bit, but I was behaving quite oddly, which prompted someone to ask me if I were feeling Dionysian (I wasn't happy about that - "I'm down, and you hit me with Nietzsche? Is that what you do to people?") but that was actually it: I was feeling stupidly, studently at one with everything, and happy with it. I still have bits of that feeling, mostly because I didn't get much sleep last night either.

Er, yes. The reason I was doing this, and the reason I am so tired and stupid now, is that last night I went to the Union production of Angels In America, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. ( Millennium Approaches )

I woke up this morning still thinking about it vaguely, and read about art as function, as form, as expression, as truth, as beauty divorced from function, as a cluster of word usages, as the kitchen sink, and went with Claire to see Stardust. ( Stardust! )

And now I'm hopefully so sleepy I will go home and fall straight asleep and stop boring you all with my head's oddnesses. Tomorrow, sunshine and coffee and 1500 words on one of the greatest philosophical problems of all time. And much less gin.