It's the nights that really bother me- i just don't know what to do with them, or with myself. It doesn't matter how tired i
am, i cannot sleep properly. I also have no-one to talk to, and all the communication i do have is somehow unsatisfying.
I've been on my own here for two months now.
If i go out and get drunk it doesn't improve things. I'm still a melancholic drunk, and alcohol just reveals a metaphysical void for me, and makes me very single-minded, but these days i have nowhere to put my passions and they resound back on me.
I wish i knew what to do. And i wish someone would listen sympathetically.
I've stopped thinking that this is somehow of value because cathartic in itself. If i carry doubt to everything i have to carry doubt even to that. So i know that i have to continue, and i know that i have to be active and inflict myself on the world, not hiding away or denying anything... I know that above everything else, until in fact that realisation is all that remains...
Furtherance, continuance, in the face of no matter what miseries. A thing about misery; the only good thing; it cannot last indefinitely. It is like a piece of elastic, it stretches and stretches and then it breaks. And with the break, the ultimate point being breached, some relief is gained, some falling back upon oneself, like the lull after the crescendo of a symphony, but this lull, this space, is somehow sadder, more desperate, because emptier, because charged with a resolution to continue and not succumb. But is it really a resolution, really a choice, or just what is left after all other options have been investigated and
found to be dead ends?
Meanwhile, there are the nights... I could stare down the nights, look into them, look through and past them, and into their
voids and not be afraid, surely? No, the answer is plain; i AM afraid. Why? Analyse it.......
I am afraid of not being here anymore. I am afraid of being forgotten. And yet i know that i WILL be forgotten and not here.
Why does it bother me? Egoism, maybe. Attention-seeking.
Thursday 27 December 2012
Monday 17 December 2012
Solipsism Again 2
Solutions: I will march up the hill and survey the city below. I will consume cheap palliatives. I will investigate tawdry and uninteresting mysteries. I will draw empty city streets. Above all I must find courage from somewhere, courage enough to somehow live on, dragging my cadaver through whirlwinds and roundabouts of trouble. The blues fall flat and reach my ears no longer. The girls don't talk to me. All communication comes rigidly and departs. I am listening to symphonies but there is some barrier between them and me. I want money and not work, romance and not politics. I give five percent to sex and ninety-five to love. I will go to the final boundary and transgress it for that love. I will throw myself repeatedly into fires. I will be immolated and transfigured, lying generously from an open heart, and telling myself compulsively that nothing remains.
I felt free, I felt alive. I walked down the street and felt the wind in my face. I thought, "I am intact, I am whole". It was a tiny, strange triumph which was soon subsumed into the leaden ocean of time, that shifted around it, that pulled me with it, till again I was lost at the centre.
Back to solipsism. The solipsist, that selfish bastard, sees only the grim fairground of circumstance, the dance of phenomena, pass before his grotesquely all-perceiving eyes; he himself is the centre, the still centre and axis of the world. Still, did I say? No; the eye of this storm is turbulent, it quakes and seethes, it is infected with an unseemly sickness which can never find rest. It quickens and slows like a heartbeat, it pulls up and down on the marionette-like form of the solipsiser, jerking him into motion; it besets him with toothache-like pain, but a toothache of the heart, a wormlike pain that quietly eats at him, which, when he puts his head on a pillow and shuts his eyes in the dark, comes alive in him and begins monstrously to reign in him, welling up from his centre to fill his head with voices, not actually heard or hallucinated, but, almost worse, merely rehearsed or conjectured, ridiculously repeated like stock phrases, as though the emotions were bad actors or incompetent comedians, insisting on playing to the end their tormenting routines.
This is the nameless pain that eats like a worm at the heart of man.
I felt free, I felt alive. I walked down the street and felt the wind in my face. I thought, "I am intact, I am whole". It was a tiny, strange triumph which was soon subsumed into the leaden ocean of time, that shifted around it, that pulled me with it, till again I was lost at the centre.
Back to solipsism. The solipsist, that selfish bastard, sees only the grim fairground of circumstance, the dance of phenomena, pass before his grotesquely all-perceiving eyes; he himself is the centre, the still centre and axis of the world. Still, did I say? No; the eye of this storm is turbulent, it quakes and seethes, it is infected with an unseemly sickness which can never find rest. It quickens and slows like a heartbeat, it pulls up and down on the marionette-like form of the solipsiser, jerking him into motion; it besets him with toothache-like pain, but a toothache of the heart, a wormlike pain that quietly eats at him, which, when he puts his head on a pillow and shuts his eyes in the dark, comes alive in him and begins monstrously to reign in him, welling up from his centre to fill his head with voices, not actually heard or hallucinated, but, almost worse, merely rehearsed or conjectured, ridiculously repeated like stock phrases, as though the emotions were bad actors or incompetent comedians, insisting on playing to the end their tormenting routines.
This is the nameless pain that eats like a worm at the heart of man.
On Solipsism Again
What is this feeling? This feeling is not desperate. This feeling is quite clear. The desire for change, destruction, transformation is associated with clarity and calmness. No frenzy, tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth, if desperation then a calm and lucid desperation. It comes in still moments and declares itself softly. It partakes of fear, but fear advances stealthily and comes as a whole, round, complete feeling, deep like a pool. What shows on the surface? There are no tears. At the worst, I hug the walls. I thought that despair would be accompanied by conventional anguish. Instead, it comes full and blank and almost comforting, it comes like a whitewash spreading from the roots to the summit of a mountain. It is like that clarity, that drunken clarity, that pause in the bustle of thoughts which enables you to see your surroundings as they are. I am keeping myself alive, for what?
Solipsism, the disease of infecting everything one looks at with one's subjectivity, so that it is instantly transformed into something warped and distorted, something bland and flat. And there is no product of culture that I cannot distort in this way. It's "the human condition" they say.
I left the flat and came back to the flat. I was feeling sorry for myself. Briefly washing up at the sink, I struggled to contain the feeling. I went to the livingroom, I put my forehead to the wall, caressing my brow, not allowing tears. Do I exploit these feelings and occurrences by recalling them, by re-enacting them in writing? By doing this, do I wear a mask, do I take pain and pantomime it on a stage, for cheap laughs, cheap applause, cheap pathos? The stirring up of false pity? That is part of me too: Playing to the gallery. This reflection on emotion is not the main event, or the thing itself. The feeling that can be described is not the essential feeling, not the all-consuming, important thing. That comes sourly and wordless, wordless because heedless of words, because pre-verbal, because riding on calm waves of overwhelming terror, and more, a purposive terror which tends always toward action. If only it could encompass or encourage stasis! Then I would be set for life; I could stay in bed. But I know it will not let me rest as I would wish. This is only a temporary rest; and it is this temporariness itself which disturbs me.
Solipsism, the disease of infecting everything one looks at with one's subjectivity, so that it is instantly transformed into something warped and distorted, something bland and flat. And there is no product of culture that I cannot distort in this way. It's "the human condition" they say.
I left the flat and came back to the flat. I was feeling sorry for myself. Briefly washing up at the sink, I struggled to contain the feeling. I went to the livingroom, I put my forehead to the wall, caressing my brow, not allowing tears. Do I exploit these feelings and occurrences by recalling them, by re-enacting them in writing? By doing this, do I wear a mask, do I take pain and pantomime it on a stage, for cheap laughs, cheap applause, cheap pathos? The stirring up of false pity? That is part of me too: Playing to the gallery. This reflection on emotion is not the main event, or the thing itself. The feeling that can be described is not the essential feeling, not the all-consuming, important thing. That comes sourly and wordless, wordless because heedless of words, because pre-verbal, because riding on calm waves of overwhelming terror, and more, a purposive terror which tends always toward action. If only it could encompass or encourage stasis! Then I would be set for life; I could stay in bed. But I know it will not let me rest as I would wish. This is only a temporary rest; and it is this temporariness itself which disturbs me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)