To the pet shop

Me n my Chinese friend Jay go to the petshop to buy goldfish.
And rayed along the walls more like a petting zoo are meek cats and long-faced Afghan hounds that nod and avoid your eye.
Some dogs that back off when you approach them but then when you show you mean well let you embrace them, stroke their furry backs, feel the flip of their tails, their arch and curl. Black dogs, anonymous brown dogs, thin ones with ribs showing, reclining white ones with thick fur.
Dogs never look you in the eye. It's a threat amongst dogs, as is the baring of teeth. After all this time they have only fitfully adapted to life amongst humans. They merely  put up with your embraces.
I tell Jay that I was born in the Year of the Cat. He tells me that the Chinese character in this case actually means "small furry animal with a weak back".

In the army barracks

In the army barracks, prison block of the new recruits.
60's functional architecture, godless and soulless. A main housing block and two outflung wings. Sounds: Coughs of angsty recruits and swing and clutter of cagedoors shutting at dusk.
And all the army newboy recruits are snoring except for one newly-shorn recruit. He lies facedown and bellydown on the rough sheet and embraces his pillow, screwing up his eyes and burying his face in the coarse grey material. At length he drops off but then awakens again when his own fitful snores are mistaken by him for the far-off cries of men echoing in the dormitory, like cries of battle. Near him sleep peacefully, as though dead, worn-our crewcut recruits, tangled in their blankets, feet jutting out at strange angles.
Now day is already breaking and from his bed he gazes out of the large window down past the perimeter of the barracks to the scrubby semi-rural semi-suburban wasteland beyond...
Between the angles of an electricity pylon and a wire fence and a grey administrative building in concrete is a grassy mound and a trickling stream, that in a burst of early morning sunshine seems like a rural idyll, a mini-Eden, to him in his captivity.
And now early to the nearby college dorm steps a statuesque and proud college girl, a brunette neatly and primly dressed, framed by the electricity pylon and the corners of the admin building, and seen by the soldier as though on a catwalk, jauntily stepping. She loves to taunt and encourage the awakening soldiers, who whistle and call out at their grey windows, this girl with her grotesquely proud and chubby face, her shapely calves, her lively, downturned grin. Something to tell the girls about later.
And she looks up at the high windows of the barracks, raising her skirt to show off her legs, patting her behind, mouthing words, seen distant in the early sunshine, pale and fresh.
-Is she an angel or a devil? Still lying face down on his mattress, the insomniac's hand passes below to between his legs.

Case study 2

So you take to walking. The walls begin to close in on you, so you flee them. You gain the empty streets. It is now that you notice a very curious effect, one which relates to your fellow humans. You begin to lose comprehension of them. Their movements and words and ideas begin to seem odd. You see them, of course, engaged on their various errands. You see people in cars, briefly glimpsed. You see couples arm in arm. You see groups of friends, gaily chatting, confident in numbers. You see the blue light of televisions in livingrooms, curtain-obscured, plant-shrouded.
But all they do and say seems impossibly remote from you, much more remote than, say, an animal could ever be. A dog will still deign to sniff you, a cat may flirtatiously rub itself against you. They recognise a fellow creature. But these awful, smug humans, with their hideous selfishness, their pathetic privacy. How they avoid your eyes. How they dwell  in illusion, how they artlessly construct and live in fantasy worlds. What can they possibly be thinking? What on earth are their motivations? You gaze at them as though you were behind a wall of glass, and they were all conversing eagerly in a totally foreign language.
Now, the former strange pauses, the feelings of something left undone, begin to expand and occupy more space. They combine with your forgetting of the language of social interaction, and well up at random moments. In the middle of the day, engaged in some commonplace task, washing up some dishes, say, you suddenly halt and struggle to get your bearings, as though lost.
Now is when the solitary man finds himself becoming odd. Sometimes on his nocturnal walks he murmurs to himself, or the interlocutor in his head. Often, now, he listens anxiously at night, trying to detect some texture in the silence, as though it was a blank stone wall that somehow bore a message. As though the silence were the pop and hiss of a needle on an ancient 45, and at any moment, some faint music would emerge. One night, the solitary man waits at a crossing for the light to change to green. It is midnight. He has walked up the long way from his empty flat through streets where seagulls fight over scraps. Suddenly, standing there, he says aloud "I am going mad".
Naturally, this frightens him very much.

Case study 1

I am definitely not a misanthrope.
I call myself a lover of mankind, and I try to act as such. But it's true that mankind eludes me. I see nothing in men but rivalry, gliding like ghosts to their errands. I know for sure I am not like them. As for women, they are a blank. They are and remain a problem, even to themselves. They are a riddle. Watch them slouch with shopping-bags through streets. What can they be thinking?
And so it is that I, estranged from man, am cast among them, slowly, ponderously walking, through an autumnal town centre, in a post-industrial city. To an office building I go, and ascend the bare steps up to Level 3. The place smells like a hospital, and is so scrupulously clean that one has an urge to defile it. After standing at a plastic podium for a while, jabbing my finger on a touchscreen, my name is called and a small, curiously twisted woman with a faint moustache moves a slip of paper in front of me, which I sign with my name. This is my life and cross to bear.
I was explaining to someone, some interlocutor in my head, "I used myself as a case study. Effects of solitude on the human person. One goes through phases. First of all, one feels liberated. The mind is refreshed and acute. The deliciousness of the solitary vices, the solitary virtues, are happily indulged in. Lust and philosophy, life and history as joyful, diminutive games, played on the blank wall of the mind. Everything incommunicable and private, everything endogenous and subjective, can be revelled in. At first these encounters with the bare self are unchallenging.
After a while though, usually late at night, one suddenly finds in oneself, arising unbidden, a curious, hateful dismay. One discovers it like one would discover a cavity in a back tooth, with a sort of disgust and shame, and at the same time, a morbid curiosity about the sources and progress of the decay. It comes at bedtime, as a strangely definite sense that one has left something undone. It is when one tries to pinpoint exactly what has been left undone, that one becomes puzzled. Why can't I happily sleep, fold etc. to bed? And then the whole, stark truth wells up at you. I haven't lived. I haven't lived today. Something, some opportunity or other, has somehow been missed, or rather, it never arose, and this not arising, this failure of phenomena to appear, this absence, is felt like a presence, like a ghost in the room which stands all night by your bed and prevents sleep.

A Pain

The old pain has returned. Diagnose this pain, seek its origin and course, and how it may be ended.

The pain rests like a glowing coal in the abdomen. It is very reminiscent of a toothache. It feels as though something is irredeemably rotten, and the festering heat from this decay is the

source of pain. It is also like a hard knot which cannot be digested, in the stomach.

What is the effect of this pain? Lack of ability to concentrate. On a book, a television, a computer, a task. Outward objects appear like symbols, like adjuncts and emissaries of the pain itself.

The pain prevents sleep. It glows through the night, sometimes in the day it suddenly prevents movement, and a stasis ensues, in which the current action appears meaningless, and in that space of questioning, action is arrested.

The effect is to leave the mind confused and disoriented, hearkening for an answer to an unanswerable question, an impossible grasping after facts.

The pain is intolerable, insistent, always making itself known and grasping outwards for an answer. The pain is also a need and more than a need, a question and more than a question.

The Nights

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.  

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.