v-s.net v0.6

Tuesday, 2:11 am in Archive

Y’know, I was thinking… anyone who has to defend their originality in any way, or to justify it, or to explain it, probably doesn’t have it.

This is after listening to one of ~Mat [h]’s housemate’s skanky absolutley wonderful drunken ‘ladyfriend’ talk about some party acting drug thing she went to where everyone was running around writing their names on the walls in poop and wearing silly hats and being ‘so original’.

There’s a difference between originality, talent and inspiration. Someone can be talented without being origial. Someone can be inspirational without being talented. Talent and inspiration come thick as thieves; especially when you know where to look. But honestly, I’ve ‘met’ maybe one totally original person in my entire life. If you include famous people alive in my lifetime, I can think of maybe half a dozen more.

Originality is… special. Not like diamonds, because diamonds can be mass manufactured (even the especially pretty ones now; they can finally mass-market pretty diamonds even more perfect than natural ones). But like tungsten. Tungsten is a very bland looking metal and one of the rarest that’s found in the Earth’s crust. And yet without it we’d all be sitting around in the dark because tungsten is what makes lightbulbs glow. I had a science teacher once that was convinced we were all going to run out of tungsten in the next 50 years and have to resort to flurescent strip lighting.

I’ve always been fascinated by lightbulbs. Fragile glass balloons. They’re one of the few things I can think of that I constantly want to smash.

Bare bulbs, wet-split floorboards and rising damp through the plaster. Dusty velvet, cobwebbed silver and marble starwells worn to slops by hundreds of years of feet.

No wonder I love White Wolf… No wonder Et tu, Angelus? still lurks around somewhere at the back of my mind.

I have an urge to go visit French castles again. Only without the ropes and tour guides. I went to the Paris Opera House once. That’s where the Phantom of the Opera comes from. We somehow got seperated from our group and went up a few flights of stairs we shouldn’t’ve. Running around the boxes in the dark, through old velvet and corridors walked once by the elegantly coiffed, in a place with a secret river where a strange figure haunted ballerinas in a room of mirrors…

Double helix stairs that never met… but that was somewhere else. Somewhere with black and white checkered floors worn to pits between the grout. Somewhere with hedges and copses and a hedge maze we never managed to find, maybe because it only existed in our heads since at that time it seemed impossible that such a place could not have one.

A long, wide dirt path with huge trees arching up overhead. Horse hooves and carriage tracks almost still visible despite time and revolutions.

Strange and twisted gargoyles crawling up every avaliable surface on the long external balcony that twisted between turrets with tiny windows made from ancient, diamond-cut glass. A room filled with fleur-de-lis with faded blue and gold paint almost visible.

Flash again to ravens sitting fat and content on a place once washed with death. Crumbling walls and suits of armour.

Tourists. Always tourists.

No wonder I loved Redemption, though it was a travesty of a game. Running through Prague at night, dancing on the rooves of chapels, fighting ghosts in the Tower of London.

I’m nostalgic for something that doesn’t exist. Hollywood haunted castles, sliding glass panels filled with occult writing, artful cobwebs, strange knee-high mist.

Wonder and history, repackaged and rethought, through a glass darkly.

Waxing poetic. Now I’ve lost my original thought.

Oh well…