Thursday 21 January 2010

Heart and Art

It seems odd, and overtly narcisstic, to announce one's own continued existence: I still am.

It wasn't an easy 2009, and I had to seek help to carry on. I don't pretend to be free of the tendency to darkness and soil, but I stopped taking medication some time ago and have found someone who wants to knit themselves to me in perpetuity, and more, to carry my issue. You'd think such a violation of nature would bring pestilence, hatred, famine and disease - but apparently not: someone is out there who thinks that TTD could help make good people. Together, we intend to perform this act of bestial art.

This is more powerful than I could have imagined. It means that in such darkness as we now find ourselves naturally in, I look up rather than down - and that I find myself softening towards my previous life. If there were an eagle-eyed reader of this blog, they'd find that I've only ever deleted one post. All of my other hatreds are still here for the amateur psychologist to peruse. I don't regret those hatreds. It's a weird tendency of our world to shout "hate! hate!" when someone says something they don't like. We want to censor and stop. We want to prevent. All must be seen to be well.

And I proved one of the conjectures of my teenage years: hate and love really are very, very similar things. They switch and turn on a heartbeat.

You can really love someone with all your body, and feel the knot in your stomach at all hours of the day and night: then you can hate them the same way: then you can love them again.

All the reasons are the same, only inverted, or shifted either side of the equality sign.

You really can stand, leaning on the broom, contemplating the wreckage of your heart, and you really can pick it all up and glue it with pritt-stick. When you've done it, and you've wiped your hands, and you've scraped off the bits of glue that squeezed out the sides, and you've thoughtfully and carefully held the pieces still for far longer than is necessary, then you can say "I mended my broken heart".

People will never tell the difference. Honestly - they won't. There is no difference between a heart naturally malformed and a heart carefully put together with glue.

You really can walk into the sunset together, even though you have a limp and she has a club foot.

That - that's what life is really about.

4 comments:

Matt M said...

Glad to hear things are looking up for you. And great to see you posting again (A one off? Or will this blog be resurrected?)

lady macleod said...

Well said, keep limping and looking for that sunrise as well.

Bill Haydon said...

Matt: I'm not sure. See if I have anything interesting to say...

Do you still blog? I can't get access to your profile.

Lady M: Thank you.

Matt M said...

No, no blogging at the moment. I've started and then deleted about seven of the damn things in the past few months. It was all getting a bit ridiculous. Think I'll just go back to boring people at the pub.