the gaze of the other paralyzes.  that is its nature.  in the face of the other, we shrink, we shirk...  in darkness, we grow unbounded by our limits, but within light, in the eyes of the other, we suddenly have a finitude, and, in fact, we shrink away from our potentialities.

***

i felt a tension...  i feel a tension.

there is a state of being broken.  of feeling on edge.  and accompanying it is a perpetual tension...  i am not certain why this is so.

to clarify: i have been paying attention to my different modes.  one involves drifting comfortably over surfaces.  another, which oftentimes closely approximates or mimics the first, and in fact, probably depends on the first (or supports the first) involves "putting everything in its right place."  with regards to this second mode, i recall times when i was in elementary school when i would arrange all of my pencils in my school box just so, and would even be frustrated when the natural jostling about would disturb their perfect symmetry...  related to this: once, in college, when a woman walked across campus to "study" with me, and lay on my bed talking about how "tired" she was, all i could do was continue my studies, because that was what i was supposed to do.  it was an opportunity that i honestly didn't see or even think of capitalizing on at that time.  again, it all has to do with this second mentality or mode, which crystallizes me in a prison of steel.

a third mode involves the poetic existence, or at least, my approximation of it.  it has a certain attitude to it, and, as i mentioned, a certain tension.  it involves brokenness: wearing clothes that have holes in them, wearing an expression that has a near sneer on it...  speaking obtusely and frankly...  there is a rebelliousness implicit in it, as though the second mode has highlighted the contradictions implicit in all existence, and that i am forced to take this stance, because to be "artistic" and true automatically requires a kind of ejection and rejection...

i don't know if there are other modes of existence, but those are a few that i can categorize.  i have drifted in the first two modes for a long time.  it is rare (and probably not sustainable) for me to exist in the third.  the third, by the way, contains or allows passion.  TRUE passion, not the routinized passion that i embody today.  true passion in the sense that it is destructive, nonsystematic, perhaps anti systematic.  it doesn't give a fuck about tomorrow, or reasons why; it simply is, and does.

***

i'm trying to understand these, and also the way my mind/heart remember (or fail to remember).  i suppose this relates to my modes of being too.  the systematic mode sometimes remembers (although oftentimes memory does not play into the "system" because so much of what occurs in life is nonassimilable, or irrelevant); but even when it remembers, it does so sketchily, it mutated the memory to fit into a container.  the anti-systematic mode sometimes remembers, although because it is so thoroughly unsystematic, it only remembers "surfaces" and impressions.  i don't know how or why i cannot reconcile the two, but my relationship with my past is often- problematic.  i either don't recall, or i can't feel.  or both.