it's unbearable!

So I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and there was this one passage that really resonated within me. Near the start of the novel, the narrator brought up the idea that life is like a musical composition and that there are motifs that keep on being repeated - like how Anna Karenina meets her love at the site of a train station suicide and then takes her own life in this same manner. Or how the bowler hat keeps returning, each time with a new meaning, for Sabina.

The idea reminds me of the structure of a Sonata. In the Exposition, the themes are brought up and then played around with in the Development. They're inverted, given new harmonies, turned major or minor and embellished, but it's still the same motif and when you hear it, there's this sense of familiarity, clarity and unity. That's exactly what the composers were aiming for in the first place. I'm going to be 20 in three months time, I'm probably nearing the end of my Exposition, but I feel as though sometimes I'm seeing and hearing the same things over and over. I feel aulde.

I don't think this is the place to divulge some of the more personal recurrences that I see, but there are small things. Like how your partner smells exactly the same like the other people that you've been with despite the fact that none of them use the same cologne. It's like you're with the same person over and over again. For me, the songs 'My Girl', 'Sunny Side of the Street' and 'Lady' keep being played everywhere I go and I can't help but feel this strong pang of nostalgia in my gut every time I hear them. Whenever I stop over in Singapore, I see the same bench where I rested my head against Magda's shoulder after our long flight from Perth. I don't know where it is in Singapore, but I always find it or walk/drive past it unintentionally. I don't want to know its whereabouts. Everytime I see it, it's almost as though I see us sitting there and the notion that I will never again be the exact same person that I was 6 years ago, used to freak me out. I'm being incredibly wanky (do I overuse this word?), but I like the idea that we're constantly evolving along the same old motifs.

I think I'm obsessed with knowing everything about love and sex; for crying out loud, I want to be a sexologist. I'm concerned that because I'm constantly trying to learn and experience as much as I can, I will never feel the unbearable lightness of being. I was with someone that I thought I loved, but I was never comfortable around him. There was always something in my gut telling me to leave. I didn't end up ending it, though. My gut also told me to stay, and so I felt heaviness.

My grandmother's name is Marianna and when she was a teenage girl, a fortune teller told her that she was going to marry a man named Marian. She disregarded this piece of information, laughed it off, because it would obviously be too ridiculous to marry someone whose name was so similar to your own. Law and behold, that's exactly what happened. You have to ask the question, do recurrences happen because they're predetermined and a part of our musical composition or because we want to see connections. I'd like to think the former point is correct, but then again, I think back to Friday night / Saturday morning. In my drug addled mind, I thought that it was no coincidence that Animal Collective's 'My Girls' played on as I connected with another person since my break up. It felt like that night in October last year when i danced with my last partner. Was it another motif repeating itself or a clear sign that Amps doesn't change its set list?

I often wonder if Maj chose the right guy or if the fortune teller's words were in the back of her mind when she said 'yes' to Kaku's proposal. It's odd though, someone came up to Mamulek out of the blue once when she was on her lunch break and told her that she had to spend more time with her brother. Wujek Waldek died a few months afterwards. When I was in India, waiting for the train to Jodhpur in Jaisalmer, a man told me that "red bird is going to fly at 21" and when I asked if this was a bad thing, he said "no, very lucky hand". I hope so. The women in our family seem to have easily readable futures :) Either that, or the turbaned stranger didn't know how to speak English properly.

I've side tracked a little. Fark, I know how to ramble. Was talking about it with Magda the other day; I tend to be quite open about my experiences nowadays, even on public forums like the internet. I guess the more secrets you have, the more likely you are to talk about those that aren't as significant.

If the musical composition has an Exposition, and a Development of the themes presented, then it has to finish with a Recapitulation and Coda. In the traditional Sonata, the Recap was essentially a repeat of the Exposition which is boring. If life is like a musical composition, (and even if it's not, I will always see it this way) I think it would be like one of Ravel's sonatas. The themes return, but they're way funkier and more intensely harmonised than the initial presentation :) I'm still at the start of my life - my music is only just beginning to develop its themes and motifs.

I like this book, and I like how I've changed over the last three weeks. It seems silly and corny to say that I'm starting to feel like myself again. Maybe I wasn't living my life to the fullest over the last two or three months, but now I am.