Category: About

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
– Dr Johnson

Magnificent light over the bay, a glorious sparkling in the water that’s too friendly to blind the eyes. Little dots of people down there moving around, ecstatic; too far away to know what they’re doing. Misty hills in the distance, glory sat up in the sky. It must be after noon.

A streak of seagull shit running down the window splits those worlds below: the aquatic; and the urban sprawling into a wet green that refuses further development.

I often look out there, it seems to mean something – that view. What it means I can’t say. In the past I’ve witnessed great expanses from a bedroom window: the bowl of London like a nuclear crater; the impossible optics of broad slow incline; the purity of undisturbed ocean. They all had their meanings much clearer, or so it seemed.

This view is not like them. This one tickles at the edges of consciousness. When you move your head to see it, it’s still far away on the edges.

Ill thoughts these past days, darkness welling up from inside the lungs and stomach and spewing from every orifice. Retching and lapping up the spewm. Sun be damned – it’s mocking me. Go on it says, you come out here and enjoy life, what’s stopping you. I hiss and claw at the curtains.

This is too important for sunlight and joy. Too essential. But what is it? Memory becomes more advanced by the day – picking and choosing how it recounts complex and vague concepts. A slippery eel, electric, finding any precise thought at all becomes nigh impossible.

To become someone else, someone new: is it dying or becoming a snake that sheds its skin?

Too many people have been lost to the need for change, change of self, change of core, change of essence. Fools! It’s not that they’re after. It’s just a change of personality. What does Jung call it? I can’t quite remember. The collection of complexes that make up what you think is your unified self. Heck, maybe it is unified, in a manner of speaking. I’m not a psychologist, I’m a priest – but that’s neither here nor there. You just need to tangle with your complexes. Re-order them. Squash some bad habits. It doesn’t have to delete the Core Balance. But it is oh so easy to become unbalanced, and stay there.

This is the black bile these past few days: boiling atrabilious blood coagulating in the shade, and now this vicious filth. I’m not crazy, I don’t think it’s possible to be perfectly balanced, not as a human anyway. There will always be margins of drift – not error, if it’s absolutely necessary it can’t be error. And those margins of drift allow error to develop. Miscalculate the quantity of black bile permissible in the system, fail to understand the rate at which flame in the blood is snuffed out, and suddenly you’re overwhelmed by the stuff. Choking and gagging as you swallow it back in.

So I need to restore the balance. That means changing the personality, meddling with the complexes. Am I making sense to anyone? Are these simply the loquacious ravings of a antiquated lunatic? Not important. Focus. That’s just the bile forming for another convulsion. We must come to the point, the bitter red pill: pride, arrogance, total perspective, raging hatred and burning anger, barely contained. It’s the only possible salve to this particular wound. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I was wrong.

A terrifying journey begins. Will I survive? Will I escape the all-encompassing narcissism spawned in someone who believes in themselves, against popular dismissal, against all odds, against reason? Reason… is it a tool or is it the truth? Who can say.

Yes. I will survive. The first dark steps on the path to the light. Better than death. Better than the end.

Soon it will be time to leave. For the air. The outside. Something in this place reeks like sweet vapours and corrupts the mind. These drugs – emotions – crawling across my eyes and ripping up my veins. Just to think seems impossible – I forget it and then remember halfway through another awful trip. We must stop swallowing the bile. It is not good. But if we stop then it’s sealed – we mean something then. We are saying we have a right to exist as ourselves. The fucking arrogance of that. The self-indulgent, egotistical, sociopathic cruelty of stating that we have meaning, ourselves, as an individual.

Writing this, as though I mean something, as though my experiences would be worth reading. How fucking dare you? Wait a moment is this bile or coffee? Have I already stopped? Worse: have I already started? Oh god save us Jesus! Quick! I’m dying! Somebody help immediately! Send help! Send the army! Send the navy! Send the household cavalry! Bring the glistening swords! Sturdy truncheons! Well-oiled diamond bullets!

It’s no good. It’s happened. I know I’d be talking about atom bombs otherwise. Mutually assured destruction. God! It’s true! The balance! I’d been fooling myself all along: lies about enriching others’ lives by my own destruction, when really I was just scheming the downfall of all things, all along. We’re safe. Don’t worry. The plot is over. The king is safe. King? Well, whatever that slimy creature is. Some kind of tentacle monster I should imagine. Don’t approach it! And don’t kill it either. Not yet. It’ll end itself one of these days, in its own time.