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.

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.

Crescendo and Diminuendo

And now the sun is rising, something dies... And I can't begin to write or say anything. I hear the calling of the gulls in the sky invalidate me. Something is dying and along with it, I feel myself dying. I see the opalescence of the sky light up, but I can't see any worth in it. I feel with a slow realization the wretchedness of everything. And I feel deathly tired.
Writing is useless. Not a thing to be gained from it. No surcease of sorrow, no intimations, no companionships. Nothing. But there must be something, something somewhere, that is beautiful, pure, fresh, untainted. Somewhere there must be an incorruptible core, otherwise it's all in vain.
Nothing is ever communicated by me, not a word of my language is ever understood. In the long run it's wholly meaningless, utterly corruptible, non-translatable to other spheres of thought. Yet there must be something... There must be something...
There must be a golden state! I want it and would die for it in an instant. And maybe dying is what it takes. I must soar above it, I must leave it all behind. And I repeat, there must be something...

No. It is time to begin. I am utterly sleepy again, sicktired, sick of hearing all the noises I must hear, all the sights I must see. The winds of the old rail tracks are rattling in the trees, which is such a mournful sound, like the mournings or blessings of old ghosts.
No lamplight down here, which makes it scary in the middle of the night and all blasted and hollow.
This is the kind of old train tracks where drunks stumble and curse in the dark, or are just namelessly sorrowful with dreams of sleep, returning home. They might as well be blind among the trees and sharp stones. I know his thoughts because the old bum, the old drunk, the nameless ragged teenager of no future and alcohol, is me. None other than myself.
Here are some of the gloomiest, most inexpressible thoughts that can echo and slumber around in that brain: "I, suddenly, full of bright anguish, just suddenly passed the playing field beside the dark slopes and the empty windows of the school building at night, and I felt and saw in the window, something that pierced my heart in an old rage mingled with beatific peace, the sad papers and collages stuck up on walls with coloured papers and pieces of glitter, the cluttered-around empty stools inhabited by no-one, similar to that nursery or primary school which I myself attended and which are empty now too, as empty as me on this road, in the dark, sniffing, uplooking, never quite catching the flash of light or the smell of some ancient and beautiful scent in the musty backwheeling classrooms that connects me to the ghost..."

Meeting Joe King

We met Joe King outside the pub.
Robert engaged him in conversation.
What band ye in?
The Queers.
It's too smoky in there man, he said.
Lots of passive smoking, said I.
Huh?
Passive smoking.
So you guys from here in Edin boro?
No, from Fife.
How far's that from here?
Across the bridge.
(This clearly means nothing to him).
.....
"We took a walk around Edin boro.
It's nice".      

Fragments of Poetry

Perhaps one day she'll close her eyes, and fall,

Maybe her body will feed the earth.

Perhaps her yellow hair will scatter into corn,

Her blood become roses, her loves

A great tide of sunflowers. The earth will welcome her

Like a mother, suck her dry of desires and fears-

She'll be dispersed in the endless womb of the earth.

The earth has a magnetic pull, a woman to a woman,

Drawn by blood, drawn by weight, drawn by 

Too many years of love, to succumb, and merge. 

A new bloom grows in the ash- an edible bloom

Which has its own delicious dew- new tears of relief I bless it with.

A new dawn can come, smiling between grey apartment blocks,

Penetrating night. And a small word can come like a chuckle from your solar plexus

Like a child's word. A small flame, knowingly enkindled,

Unexpectedly, of its own brave accord.