Friday 1 February 2002

Pic of the day: A gaggle of umbrellas. For some reason, lately it has been raining in the afternoon but not in the morning, so I have taken home more umbrellas than I have taken to work. (No, I have honestly bought them all, over a period of several years.) There are now five of them at home, and none at work. Well, one, but it is severely wrecked.

A normal inhuman day

One of the camera & film shops here in Kristiansand has a nifty station for making paper prints from digital cameras. Sadly, it does not produce them at the spot; there is like 5 days to wait. It must certainly be possible to do better than that. Anyway, it's not for me. It's for the Friend. She wants paper prints, for some reason understandable only to humans.

And of course the pictures were all such pictures as humans use to like: Family members (hers, not mine, not really) smiling at the camera. This puzzles me severely. Was I like that once? It's been so long, it is hard to remember what was, and what I just pretended.

And this, dear congregation, is my text for today.

***

I've simply loved you
more than I love life itself.
And I guess that's why they call it the blues:
Time on my hand could be time spent with you ...

Elton John: I guess that's why they call it the blues.

Yesterday I read the LiveJournal of an online friend who missed his girlfriend (when they were apart for a few hours) and I was once again reminded how different I am from my fellow humans. I have emotions too, but they are calibrated differently. For instance I don't miss fellow humans when they are alive or grieve over them when they are dead. Well, I haven't so far, and I suspect I'm more than half way through this life by now. I would surely have noticed.

***

On the other hand there are emotions I don't even know the name of. That's why I brought home this CD by Elton John in the first place. To listen to the instrumental passage in Nikita with the lights off and the starfield screen saver on my PC. To briefly ignore my human habits and let my strange inhuman soul burn as intensely as this mortal form allows, crying out soundlessly, radiating in the void. Part of me wished it would just go on and on, but frankly that would not have been a good idea. I was already gasping for breath as it was. One ignores one's humanity at one's own peril while in human form.

I've already told you long ago that I'd like that particular piece of music to be played in my resurrection. Hold the lyrics. Oh, sometimes I really chafe at these mortal limitations to body and soul. Mostly soul. The thoughts I try to think get so hazy and heavy, like a child's clumsy clay sculptures, not like the graceful birds in flight that my spirit reaches out for.

Oh, and I just read the other day in the Norwegian magazine Illustrert Vitenskap that music is at least 50 million years older than humanity. Well, I know already that other mammals react to music, also species that can't even remotely make music themselves. Even birds, whose last common ancestor with us is perhaps 250 million years in the past, still have some of the same preferences in music. (Makes you wonder whether evolution is as autonomous and random as they say, hmm?)

I better stop before I get any more abstract. Good night.