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.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Friday, 7 August 2009
Not Dead Yet
No, not dead yet. Despite all predictions, of his arse, his head, his bollocks: he is not quite dead.
Citalopram is a soft but stupid drug, which makes you shake and makes you tired. Especially when you ignore your quack's orders to give up the booze. Then it's worse. You shake all day, you feel like death (oh the irony). Also you don't want sex. You want death more than sex. Heh. Death and sex are indeed two sides of the same filthy coin, with Edward VIII on it.
It's a fuckwitted drug, which makes you want to drink to calm down, even though you oughtn't to drink. Well fuck that. I feel great on citalopram and loads of Stella. Citalopram and no Stella then I feel like shit.
I seem to have the DTs!!!! Fuck me I have the DTs!!!
Alright. Well no-one cares about that. Well what have I been up to. I have spent the last two weeks throwing out year after year of my life. The tip is my second favourite place. They let me put my clothes, tea towels, videos, computers, anything. All my life goes into the skips there. Thirty two years of rubbish. Lots of it. Any sign that anyone loved me. The things I loved as a child. The VHS videos I spent years recording. The books I collected.
All gone. In a flash of bin bag, all gone.
My car, even. Gone even before I sold it, thanks to an utterly unscrupulous Ford dealer!!!
My poor little Fiesta. Don't get me wrong, I love my sexy new Focus, with its glorious, vast, curvy arse, and its tempting Pacific blue colour....but my poor little Fiesta which did me so well up and down the M4 and took me to Frogland 3 times....
*sigh*
Can one have an affair with an ex - car?? Is it ethical?
Oh but I'm still in love with my Fiesta and her little teardrop rear lights....her invitingly tight front grille....oh Fiesta, would you take me back, even though I abandoned you so?
No. I knew it. Even when you had gone when I went to pick up the Focus, I knew you'd moved on. You'd never have me back. Someone else was driving you. Someone else was getting their foot soaked because of your malfunctioning aircon, someone else was having to get in via the passenger door because the driver's side door was fucked, someone else was feeling your utterly lame braking. Someone else knew that your foglights were shit. Someone else knew that your brakelights never ever fucking worked.
Not the Ford dealer, thankfully, but, I guess, someone else. The someone who'd taken you out even before I'd sold you.
And the Focus? Yes she is as sexy as hell. Her tits (front fog lights) are fucking amazing and her arse...well, I've fucked it already. Twice. But you know she doesn't love me like you did. It's like her mind is on someone else, someone bigger. Someone who doesn't need to move the seat forward. Who doesn't need to lean to see the blind spot. Who doesn't need to move the rear-view mirror. Who can just park it in reverse with hardly needing to look. Who just knows where the front end of the car is when they do tight turns and that.
My Focus will never love me, I'm not man enough. And I still fancy the sexy little thong off my ex-Fiesta, not that she ever wore a thong but you get the picture.
Oh fucking hell, has ever a man had such a problem with his beloved cars??
Citalopram is a soft but stupid drug, which makes you shake and makes you tired. Especially when you ignore your quack's orders to give up the booze. Then it's worse. You shake all day, you feel like death (oh the irony). Also you don't want sex. You want death more than sex. Heh. Death and sex are indeed two sides of the same filthy coin, with Edward VIII on it.
It's a fuckwitted drug, which makes you want to drink to calm down, even though you oughtn't to drink. Well fuck that. I feel great on citalopram and loads of Stella. Citalopram and no Stella then I feel like shit.
I seem to have the DTs!!!! Fuck me I have the DTs!!!
Alright. Well no-one cares about that. Well what have I been up to. I have spent the last two weeks throwing out year after year of my life. The tip is my second favourite place. They let me put my clothes, tea towels, videos, computers, anything. All my life goes into the skips there. Thirty two years of rubbish. Lots of it. Any sign that anyone loved me. The things I loved as a child. The VHS videos I spent years recording. The books I collected.
All gone. In a flash of bin bag, all gone.
My car, even. Gone even before I sold it, thanks to an utterly unscrupulous Ford dealer!!!
My poor little Fiesta. Don't get me wrong, I love my sexy new Focus, with its glorious, vast, curvy arse, and its tempting Pacific blue colour....but my poor little Fiesta which did me so well up and down the M4 and took me to Frogland 3 times....
*sigh*
Can one have an affair with an ex - car?? Is it ethical?
Oh but I'm still in love with my Fiesta and her little teardrop rear lights....her invitingly tight front grille....oh Fiesta, would you take me back, even though I abandoned you so?
No. I knew it. Even when you had gone when I went to pick up the Focus, I knew you'd moved on. You'd never have me back. Someone else was driving you. Someone else was getting their foot soaked because of your malfunctioning aircon, someone else was having to get in via the passenger door because the driver's side door was fucked, someone else was feeling your utterly lame braking. Someone else knew that your foglights were shit. Someone else knew that your brakelights never ever fucking worked.
Not the Ford dealer, thankfully, but, I guess, someone else. The someone who'd taken you out even before I'd sold you.
And the Focus? Yes she is as sexy as hell. Her tits (front fog lights) are fucking amazing and her arse...well, I've fucked it already. Twice. But you know she doesn't love me like you did. It's like her mind is on someone else, someone bigger. Someone who doesn't need to move the seat forward. Who doesn't need to lean to see the blind spot. Who doesn't need to move the rear-view mirror. Who can just park it in reverse with hardly needing to look. Who just knows where the front end of the car is when they do tight turns and that.
My Focus will never love me, I'm not man enough. And I still fancy the sexy little thong off my ex-Fiesta, not that she ever wore a thong but you get the picture.
Oh fucking hell, has ever a man had such a problem with his beloved cars??
Monday, 25 May 2009
PIF42 - Love
Now, love.
Try to find someone who will love you.
You can survive a long time without love, but you will find that you become weaker the longer you go without it. Love is more essential to life than hate.
The time has now come to make everything ready for someone who will love you. This does not mean that hate is bound to come, but there is a risk of this, and we must all be prepared for it.
Keep your mind clear. Store unwanted thoughts in dark corners of the mind, where they will not disturb you.
Keep your heart open. Try to exercise it regularly and do not expose it to pain.
How much love is enough? Well, each person should have at least one other person they depend on.
You may not be able to love the right person. In this case you should examine your feelings carefully and try to ration all feelings so that they will last out.
And don't forget your sense of sympathy - or humour.
The internet will tell you what to do, when to do it, and how. Read the blogs and keep reading the blogs.
If however, you have had hate in your heart for more than five days, you should take it outside and bury it in a trench, and mark the spot of the burial.
Try to find someone who will love you.
You can survive a long time without love, but you will find that you become weaker the longer you go without it. Love is more essential to life than hate.
The time has now come to make everything ready for someone who will love you. This does not mean that hate is bound to come, but there is a risk of this, and we must all be prepared for it.
Keep your mind clear. Store unwanted thoughts in dark corners of the mind, where they will not disturb you.
Keep your heart open. Try to exercise it regularly and do not expose it to pain.
How much love is enough? Well, each person should have at least one other person they depend on.
You may not be able to love the right person. In this case you should examine your feelings carefully and try to ration all feelings so that they will last out.
And don't forget your sense of sympathy - or humour.
The internet will tell you what to do, when to do it, and how. Read the blogs and keep reading the blogs.
If however, you have had hate in your heart for more than five days, you should take it outside and bury it in a trench, and mark the spot of the burial.
Friday, 15 May 2009
No Love Lost
My silence, as well as being caused by the wretched busy-ness, has been a symptom of a wider dis-ease: not the anti-slumming on expenses that has suddenly brought democracy down to where it belongs, but something far more mundane.
The absence of love.
Indeed, just as my philosophy is that of an agnostic physicist circa 1907, so my understanding of love was that of a middle aged man with unspoken Christian tendencies in an Iris Murdoch novel. In other words, I believed, truly, that love was real and that you loved someone and they loved you and there was noone else and you'd fight things together as they attacked you (both).
I now realise that this is not true. In fact everyone wants sex, not love. Given that I was as faithful as they came (or, more to the point, didn't come); I am now shocked to hear the women I have been with since the end of the only relationship of my life tell me that kissing is just something you do; that you snog anyone, even if they're in a relationship, if you want to; that sex is just sort of a power game that you give and take from.
In fact, all of this makes sense, but I am kind of sorry to hear it and to know it. When I went on a date a while ago, and snogged my date passionately, I thought it was because we had a real connection, and were clearly soulmates (ho ho) - in fact it was because that's what you do - it's an indication of a date, a signal of an attempt to create a more than friendly relationship, but not sign that that relationship exists. In other words, the beautiful deep kissing that characterised my relationship, and that I thought showed I was starting a new one, is in fact a non-verbal way of saying hello, and nothing else.
Why am I making this fuss about kissing: well, you don't often see it in porn (or so I am told) and in my relationship you only did it to show love, lots of love, and you held each other and you felt soft and liquid and it didn't quite mean sex but might lead to it, or it might not, and it meant you were realigning your selves.
Since I started again I have realised that in fact no-one is ever faithful: that no-one cares and that no-one actually believes in any of that bullshit about soulmates. The women I've been with and the men I've spoken to all know the true score - that you find Mr or Ms Now, and you fuck them, then you move on, or you don't and you die alone. Either way, generally speaking, you die alone.
But no-one is under any illusion about faith, or faithfulness. Neither of these things exist, but are passionately held to in ignorance, in nightmares, in sleepy silences, in the careless looks. They stalk our sexy world, our freedom to fuck. Always there is the idea of who it is you want, who it is you believe in, who it is you live for, but hiding behind it is the one you want to fuck, and he or she is always there, in your mind and eye, always your eye, the one who will make you so hot, the one to satisfy you. And from time to time you will kid yourself that this somehow ties in with love (where in fact it creates it); you will use it to leave a relationship or start one. Your orgasms will justify the fact that you have no-one to sit and be silent with.
Nor will you ever have, ever again. Not if you live to be ninety will you find that person who will sit with you in silence and occasionally stroke your arm, while you both look at the sunset, or sit and read. But you will find the people who will fuck you, there will be lots of those. And so you will conflate the two, and then you are lost, lost in the traffic. The traffic and its endless lost libidos, its casting eyes, the traffic and its car-pooling.
Love is the one who will clean you; love is the one who loves you for what you have achieved and what you might achieve; love is the one who clings to you when they are at their deepest hell; love is the one you feel across the clouds, and you sense her settling down, you hear her prayers and wishes and you can't quite distinguish between them; love is the shared beating you both take one late summer's day.
Love is the thing you have for a bit; but only for a bit. Then they get bored, and the cock is better or the pussy is wetter. There is always bigger cock and wetter pussy. There are always bigger tits. There are always more rippling muscles.
And so eventually we kill our delicate tapestries of feeling because feeling is nothing beside sheer physical necessity, and even less beside sheer physical necessity amplified and falsified by cynical media. But we live by cynical media, who want us to want to die rich, so we buy all the lies because they're what we want to hear. Porn is a cultural religion, with its ultra clean lines, its plastic perfect bodies and its meaningless noises, some kind of quasi spiritual vocalisations that are lies, and that everyone knows are lies, but that make us want to be part of it: all in all, quite the profane version of the mass, as practised now, at the end of time, just another end of time.
All the cock.
All the pussy.
All the tits.
All the power.
Nothing. Nothing. No feeling, no love, no world, no time. just noise. Noise.
No love lost.
The absence of love.
Indeed, just as my philosophy is that of an agnostic physicist circa 1907, so my understanding of love was that of a middle aged man with unspoken Christian tendencies in an Iris Murdoch novel. In other words, I believed, truly, that love was real and that you loved someone and they loved you and there was noone else and you'd fight things together as they attacked you (both).
I now realise that this is not true. In fact everyone wants sex, not love. Given that I was as faithful as they came (or, more to the point, didn't come); I am now shocked to hear the women I have been with since the end of the only relationship of my life tell me that kissing is just something you do; that you snog anyone, even if they're in a relationship, if you want to; that sex is just sort of a power game that you give and take from.
In fact, all of this makes sense, but I am kind of sorry to hear it and to know it. When I went on a date a while ago, and snogged my date passionately, I thought it was because we had a real connection, and were clearly soulmates (ho ho) - in fact it was because that's what you do - it's an indication of a date, a signal of an attempt to create a more than friendly relationship, but not sign that that relationship exists. In other words, the beautiful deep kissing that characterised my relationship, and that I thought showed I was starting a new one, is in fact a non-verbal way of saying hello, and nothing else.
Why am I making this fuss about kissing: well, you don't often see it in porn (or so I am told) and in my relationship you only did it to show love, lots of love, and you held each other and you felt soft and liquid and it didn't quite mean sex but might lead to it, or it might not, and it meant you were realigning your selves.
Since I started again I have realised that in fact no-one is ever faithful: that no-one cares and that no-one actually believes in any of that bullshit about soulmates. The women I've been with and the men I've spoken to all know the true score - that you find Mr or Ms Now, and you fuck them, then you move on, or you don't and you die alone. Either way, generally speaking, you die alone.
But no-one is under any illusion about faith, or faithfulness. Neither of these things exist, but are passionately held to in ignorance, in nightmares, in sleepy silences, in the careless looks. They stalk our sexy world, our freedom to fuck. Always there is the idea of who it is you want, who it is you believe in, who it is you live for, but hiding behind it is the one you want to fuck, and he or she is always there, in your mind and eye, always your eye, the one who will make you so hot, the one to satisfy you. And from time to time you will kid yourself that this somehow ties in with love (where in fact it creates it); you will use it to leave a relationship or start one. Your orgasms will justify the fact that you have no-one to sit and be silent with.
Nor will you ever have, ever again. Not if you live to be ninety will you find that person who will sit with you in silence and occasionally stroke your arm, while you both look at the sunset, or sit and read. But you will find the people who will fuck you, there will be lots of those. And so you will conflate the two, and then you are lost, lost in the traffic. The traffic and its endless lost libidos, its casting eyes, the traffic and its car-pooling.
Love is the one who will clean you; love is the one who loves you for what you have achieved and what you might achieve; love is the one who clings to you when they are at their deepest hell; love is the one you feel across the clouds, and you sense her settling down, you hear her prayers and wishes and you can't quite distinguish between them; love is the shared beating you both take one late summer's day.
Love is the thing you have for a bit; but only for a bit. Then they get bored, and the cock is better or the pussy is wetter. There is always bigger cock and wetter pussy. There are always bigger tits. There are always more rippling muscles.
And so eventually we kill our delicate tapestries of feeling because feeling is nothing beside sheer physical necessity, and even less beside sheer physical necessity amplified and falsified by cynical media. But we live by cynical media, who want us to want to die rich, so we buy all the lies because they're what we want to hear. Porn is a cultural religion, with its ultra clean lines, its plastic perfect bodies and its meaningless noises, some kind of quasi spiritual vocalisations that are lies, and that everyone knows are lies, but that make us want to be part of it: all in all, quite the profane version of the mass, as practised now, at the end of time, just another end of time.
All the cock.
All the pussy.
All the tits.
All the power.
Nothing. Nothing. No feeling, no love, no world, no time. just noise. Noise.
No love lost.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Me
~A story written in about 10 minutes, from a title given in Creative writing club yesterday~
I was sitting in my chair reading, and waiting for my wife to return home. I was expecting the usual slamming of the front door, the exaggerated sigh, the unmistakeable odour of victimhood and the air of frustrated anger that usually came my way at this time of the evening. I was prepared to respond as I habitually did: with a mixture of the nod and the quiet acquiescence of the freshly made cup of tea.
So when the door slammed, I thought nothing of it; but when something vivid and white flashed past me and flung itself down on the sofa opposite I looked up in surprise. A white shirt? Her?
There was a youth sitting opposite me, stereotypically tousle-haired, his white shirt open at the collar and two vivid sideburns that looked like a sharper version of seventies powercut-and-inflation facial hair.
"Who the hell are you?" I asked, unable to get up but feeling stuck between the arms of my chair.
"Oh shut up, grandad," he replied, before looking around him and saying "I've always wanted to say that."
"What the bloody hell are you-"
"Oh for crying out loud, shut up and listen. Why on earth are you sitting here, on a beautiful evening like this, reading Harry Potter again? Why the bloody hell aren't you actually doing something?"
I was at a loss. I was reading Harry Potter, that much was true, but I hadn't really looked outside for hours. And what business was it of this interloper's?
"Jesus man, look at the state of you. Fat, bald, and - I don't believe it - are you still wearing that shirt?"
"There's nothing wrong with my shirt." It was my favourite shirt. I had had it for years. In fact, I sat my finals exams in it. I remembered the constant sense of panic and the persistent feeling that I had simply failed: not just in my degree, but in something deeper, in everything.
"Yes there is, it looks dreadful. It looks about twenty years old."
"Twenty one actually." I could not understand why I wasn't calling the police, but I also could not understand why I was allowing myself to be drawn into a battle of wits with someone much more agile and intelligent than me. Probably.
He laughed and he began to fiddle with his long hair. He looked around for a moment, seeming to take in the room.
"Not much in here is there? Where are the pictures? The family? The home-ness of home?"
"We went for the minimalist look."
"Oh yes. Where is your wife?"
"I'm not sure. She went out hours ago. Shopping probably."
"Well, if she did, she went with the guy from No.27."
"What?"
"Come on. Don't tell me you didn't know: the lifts to work, the silences, the confidence - she's sleeping with the tall, slim man from No 27 who still has all his own hair." I cannot say that I was really shocked: I saw now that I had been thinking this for months, but hadn't wanted to admit it. But I was curious as to how this youth knew, and why he cared. But he had moved on.
"Do you remember your first kiss?" I did. It was kept, safely, in the corner of my life, surrounded by glorious skies, a permanent force field of anxiety, and the background of exams. I had been sixteen, and she had been beautiful and the most intelligent girl in the school. The enforced wait had made the first contact so special and so full of...of...me, me and her, that it had simply stayed here all that time. "And what happened then?" Not much, was the honest answer. Come our GCSE results, two months later, I had done poorly, she had excelled, and in a fit of the spiteful childishness I later made my speciality, ignored her and the relationship was over. He looked sympathetically at me. "They say your first love is the most special, the one you keep returning to."
"I don't think so. I don't feel any shade of love, and it's too long ago now for regrets. I feel....shame, I suppose. Shame and beauty. Funny combination, that."
The youth looked thoughtful for a moment. "So this is what it all comes to, then," he said. "Reading children's books in an empty room, with an empty heart, and not even enough hair to tweak like you always used to do; no calling, no ambition, no faith."
"I suppose so."
"It's a bit of a waste of time, really. I might as well just-" he leaned into his pocket to pull out what looked like a small bottle of tablets.
"What does it have to do with you?" was my bizarrely inappropriate question, since by now I knew perfectly well what it had to do with him.
"Well, why should i work, and strive, and do as I am told all the time, if you're just going to sit here....rotting away?"
I had a sudden thought. I stood up, feeling stronger than I had done for ages. "Look, I've got an idea." His right eyebrow raised itself. "That's it. Don't sacrifice her. Look after her. You're right for each other - you can change things. You can, you can make it different. Make it all different. Just by that first love affair. Change everything."
He laughed and shook his head. "No, old man. I'm not doing anything different. I haven't done anything wrong. It's you who needs to change. You who needs to undo the evil you've caused. I'm just a kid. Why should I try to undo your cocked up life?"
"Because you're the one with the power, the energy. You can do it."
The youth stood up slowly, sighing. "I was afraid of this," he said. "You really are finished, aren't you. You've absolutely nothing to give anymore. Something has gone very, badly wrong and your entire life is being scrunched up and thrown in the bin."
With that, he ran his hands through his luxuriant hair and slowly walked out of the room.
I was sitting in my chair reading, and waiting for my wife to return home. I was expecting the usual slamming of the front door, the exaggerated sigh, the unmistakeable odour of victimhood and the air of frustrated anger that usually came my way at this time of the evening. I was prepared to respond as I habitually did: with a mixture of the nod and the quiet acquiescence of the freshly made cup of tea.
So when the door slammed, I thought nothing of it; but when something vivid and white flashed past me and flung itself down on the sofa opposite I looked up in surprise. A white shirt? Her?
There was a youth sitting opposite me, stereotypically tousle-haired, his white shirt open at the collar and two vivid sideburns that looked like a sharper version of seventies powercut-and-inflation facial hair.
"Who the hell are you?" I asked, unable to get up but feeling stuck between the arms of my chair.
"Oh shut up, grandad," he replied, before looking around him and saying "I've always wanted to say that."
"What the bloody hell are you-"
"Oh for crying out loud, shut up and listen. Why on earth are you sitting here, on a beautiful evening like this, reading Harry Potter again? Why the bloody hell aren't you actually doing something?"
I was at a loss. I was reading Harry Potter, that much was true, but I hadn't really looked outside for hours. And what business was it of this interloper's?
"Jesus man, look at the state of you. Fat, bald, and - I don't believe it - are you still wearing that shirt?"
"There's nothing wrong with my shirt." It was my favourite shirt. I had had it for years. In fact, I sat my finals exams in it. I remembered the constant sense of panic and the persistent feeling that I had simply failed: not just in my degree, but in something deeper, in everything.
"Yes there is, it looks dreadful. It looks about twenty years old."
"Twenty one actually." I could not understand why I wasn't calling the police, but I also could not understand why I was allowing myself to be drawn into a battle of wits with someone much more agile and intelligent than me. Probably.
He laughed and he began to fiddle with his long hair. He looked around for a moment, seeming to take in the room.
"Not much in here is there? Where are the pictures? The family? The home-ness of home?"
"We went for the minimalist look."
"Oh yes. Where is your wife?"
"I'm not sure. She went out hours ago. Shopping probably."
"Well, if she did, she went with the guy from No.27."
"What?"
"Come on. Don't tell me you didn't know: the lifts to work, the silences, the confidence - she's sleeping with the tall, slim man from No 27 who still has all his own hair." I cannot say that I was really shocked: I saw now that I had been thinking this for months, but hadn't wanted to admit it. But I was curious as to how this youth knew, and why he cared. But he had moved on.
"Do you remember your first kiss?" I did. It was kept, safely, in the corner of my life, surrounded by glorious skies, a permanent force field of anxiety, and the background of exams. I had been sixteen, and she had been beautiful and the most intelligent girl in the school. The enforced wait had made the first contact so special and so full of...of...me, me and her, that it had simply stayed here all that time. "And what happened then?" Not much, was the honest answer. Come our GCSE results, two months later, I had done poorly, she had excelled, and in a fit of the spiteful childishness I later made my speciality, ignored her and the relationship was over. He looked sympathetically at me. "They say your first love is the most special, the one you keep returning to."
"I don't think so. I don't feel any shade of love, and it's too long ago now for regrets. I feel....shame, I suppose. Shame and beauty. Funny combination, that."
The youth looked thoughtful for a moment. "So this is what it all comes to, then," he said. "Reading children's books in an empty room, with an empty heart, and not even enough hair to tweak like you always used to do; no calling, no ambition, no faith."
"I suppose so."
"It's a bit of a waste of time, really. I might as well just-" he leaned into his pocket to pull out what looked like a small bottle of tablets.
"What does it have to do with you?" was my bizarrely inappropriate question, since by now I knew perfectly well what it had to do with him.
"Well, why should i work, and strive, and do as I am told all the time, if you're just going to sit here....rotting away?"
I had a sudden thought. I stood up, feeling stronger than I had done for ages. "Look, I've got an idea." His right eyebrow raised itself. "That's it. Don't sacrifice her. Look after her. You're right for each other - you can change things. You can, you can make it different. Make it all different. Just by that first love affair. Change everything."
He laughed and shook his head. "No, old man. I'm not doing anything different. I haven't done anything wrong. It's you who needs to change. You who needs to undo the evil you've caused. I'm just a kid. Why should I try to undo your cocked up life?"
"Because you're the one with the power, the energy. You can do it."
The youth stood up slowly, sighing. "I was afraid of this," he said. "You really are finished, aren't you. You've absolutely nothing to give anymore. Something has gone very, badly wrong and your entire life is being scrunched up and thrown in the bin."
With that, he ran his hands through his luxuriant hair and slowly walked out of the room.
Monday, 16 February 2009
How Do You Martians Say "I Love You"?
Crikey O Reilly this is hard work.
Campaigning against the bankrupt Labour-fascist government? Nah.
Reading the comments at Harry's Place? No. It's a pleasure.
Slagging off the atheists who call everyone who doesn't share their worldview a nutter? Erm, no, though that's quite hard (I probably am mad).
Trying to make serious contact with women?
*ahem*
Fuck me this is like scaling the north face of the fucking Eiger (not that I've done anything harder than walked up the hill to the fucking pub - and nor do I intend to).
For crying out fucking loud, when will human beings (and I think we've been this way for a hundred thousand years or more) - understand that love and hate, far from being opposites, are two sides of the same FUCKING COIN! Depth is depth, passion is passion and ties are ties. We are bodily connected but then we take it further, away from cock and cunt, and we carve ourselves into another's soul.
They do it to us too.
When they stop doing it, when they stop writing with their words and their looks into our hearts, then we notice the absence of the twinge and we feel the pain of the heart scabbing itself up: repairing and redrawing its surfaces. That hurts so much more than the initial wounds, and the hurts of the repairing last for the rest of our lives.
And some fool always, always, asks if we are over it yet, or worse demands that we get over it. Well, if we did, we'd be machines, monstrous, evil, unfeeling, machines, who move from body to body absorbing whatever we can take from it and moving on.
No.
In love someone carves themselves into you, you do the same, and you bind yourselves together in whatever hormonal feelings you have that then become part of thought and part of weltanschauung: we carry another person (not body, but body and soul) and they (hopefully) carry us.
We are not bonobos and we are not chimps (no common ancestor for 7 million years). We lie down together, weep together, fight together, die together.
Except that we don't, anymore. We don't die together.
We die apart, in nursing homes or hospices, or on late night roads on the way back from work. We die with memory, if it has survived, looking at those who loved and left us, those we left: we die with our "life partners" in mind and all of them either dead or many, many miles away, in another nursing home, or if they are lucky, in another family. We die with them giving us no thought at all. Ten years, twenty, thirty: it doesn't matter. In the end, they do not think of us, and we do not think of them, except, unconsciously, in the breath of the moment we see the hillside; in the glance at the youthful oak tree; in the shadow of the face of a young person.
We don't want to die together because it hurts. So we fuck someone else, and we think elsewhere, and we have porn, and we lie about our own bodies to ourselves.
And in the end we die.
We never said "I love you" and meant it: we never tied our own being to another; we never wanted the commitment love brought with it; we desired to love to turn into hate, so we could leave, and go, and feel alright when it stopped being about the sex, or the attraction, and it had become more about the selves.
No I am no projecting - I did say "I love you" and meant it: I did want to tie my being to another and for us to die together, however slow it was, however long it took. I wanted the other half of my being to lock into me and for us to walk together to all those places: the cinema; the pub; the school; the estate agent; the doctor's.
I was eight years, my only adult relationship, with a woman. I wanted monogamy. I wanted love, I wanted to share myself, truly.
It does exist. It's not a game.
We're only names in a dying memory, floating out into the equilibrium, while the nerves and connections and veins die off into soil. There we go, evaporating into time.
Gone.
We've gone. And, in the end, no-one gave a flying fuck.
Campaigning against the bankrupt Labour-fascist government? Nah.
Reading the comments at Harry's Place? No. It's a pleasure.
Slagging off the atheists who call everyone who doesn't share their worldview a nutter? Erm, no, though that's quite hard (I probably am mad).
Trying to make serious contact with women?
*ahem*
Fuck me this is like scaling the north face of the fucking Eiger (not that I've done anything harder than walked up the hill to the fucking pub - and nor do I intend to).
For crying out fucking loud, when will human beings (and I think we've been this way for a hundred thousand years or more) - understand that love and hate, far from being opposites, are two sides of the same FUCKING COIN! Depth is depth, passion is passion and ties are ties. We are bodily connected but then we take it further, away from cock and cunt, and we carve ourselves into another's soul.
They do it to us too.
When they stop doing it, when they stop writing with their words and their looks into our hearts, then we notice the absence of the twinge and we feel the pain of the heart scabbing itself up: repairing and redrawing its surfaces. That hurts so much more than the initial wounds, and the hurts of the repairing last for the rest of our lives.
And some fool always, always, asks if we are over it yet, or worse demands that we get over it. Well, if we did, we'd be machines, monstrous, evil, unfeeling, machines, who move from body to body absorbing whatever we can take from it and moving on.
No.
In love someone carves themselves into you, you do the same, and you bind yourselves together in whatever hormonal feelings you have that then become part of thought and part of weltanschauung: we carry another person (not body, but body and soul) and they (hopefully) carry us.
We are not bonobos and we are not chimps (no common ancestor for 7 million years). We lie down together, weep together, fight together, die together.
Except that we don't, anymore. We don't die together.
We die apart, in nursing homes or hospices, or on late night roads on the way back from work. We die with memory, if it has survived, looking at those who loved and left us, those we left: we die with our "life partners" in mind and all of them either dead or many, many miles away, in another nursing home, or if they are lucky, in another family. We die with them giving us no thought at all. Ten years, twenty, thirty: it doesn't matter. In the end, they do not think of us, and we do not think of them, except, unconsciously, in the breath of the moment we see the hillside; in the glance at the youthful oak tree; in the shadow of the face of a young person.
We don't want to die together because it hurts. So we fuck someone else, and we think elsewhere, and we have porn, and we lie about our own bodies to ourselves.
And in the end we die.
We never said "I love you" and meant it: we never tied our own being to another; we never wanted the commitment love brought with it; we desired to love to turn into hate, so we could leave, and go, and feel alright when it stopped being about the sex, or the attraction, and it had become more about the selves.
No I am no projecting - I did say "I love you" and meant it: I did want to tie my being to another and for us to die together, however slow it was, however long it took. I wanted the other half of my being to lock into me and for us to walk together to all those places: the cinema; the pub; the school; the estate agent; the doctor's.
I was eight years, my only adult relationship, with a woman. I wanted monogamy. I wanted love, I wanted to share myself, truly.
It does exist. It's not a game.
We're only names in a dying memory, floating out into the equilibrium, while the nerves and connections and veins die off into soil. There we go, evaporating into time.
Gone.
We've gone. And, in the end, no-one gave a flying fuck.
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Not So Dreadful Valentine's Day
In fact, here are the latest figures from the TD exit poll:
No of girlfriends: 0
No of Valentine's Cards: 2
Relationships suddenly in the offing: 2
Excellent effort, that.
No of girlfriends: 0
No of Valentine's Cards: 2
Relationships suddenly in the offing: 2
Excellent effort, that.
Saturday, 14 February 2009
Going Out With My Girl
Well, it's Valentine's Day today so tonight I shall be seeing Stella, my lovely girlfriend. She is rather cold at times, but gives me a warm glow - I don't know how she does it, but she gets inside me. She doesn't mean it always but she plays with my mind - you know, makes me feel things about myself that aren't true. Boy do I love being with her - she gives me such ideas. I hold her, cradle her, and we communicate so much through lips - lips are the source of our relationship. Lips and tongue, of course.
Stella likes to be taken, repeatedly. She lets me have her four or five times a night. I struggle to keep up, to be honest and at the end of it I always feel dizzy, dozy, and sometimes a little sad - as if I've spent myself on this love that actually always makes me feel bad the next day.
Well, we're meeting up tonight - in our usual place: the bar. And I will be searching for love in her golden depths. As I do most nights. We might do dinner, but I think she loses her charm if food is involved - just a few bags of crisps - that'll do. And I'll take her home. With her stuck inside my head, to my utter, delighted, bafflement.
Stella likes to be taken, repeatedly. She lets me have her four or five times a night. I struggle to keep up, to be honest and at the end of it I always feel dizzy, dozy, and sometimes a little sad - as if I've spent myself on this love that actually always makes me feel bad the next day.
Well, we're meeting up tonight - in our usual place: the bar. And I will be searching for love in her golden depths. As I do most nights. We might do dinner, but I think she loses her charm if food is involved - just a few bags of crisps - that'll do. And I'll take her home. With her stuck inside my head, to my utter, delighted, bafflement.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
You Who Know All The Arn-sers
Well, goodbye Mrs S:
You furnished me with so many fantasies: with your curves and beauty and brain -
You touched me under the table, you rubbed against me, you eyeballed me, you locked me into your gaze, your unbelievably erotic description of differentiation.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You didn't even know any of this: you had no idea what your body was doing, and had you known, you would have disowned it. You felt nothing, knew nothing, and you built your own body inside mine.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You rub, smooth, stroke, flay. You burn your eyes into imagination and you just go on and on, with your balloon-bursting sexuality, as powerful as nuclear, as silent as space: on you go, by me, through me, past me - and you know it, but will say and think nothing.
You really did have all the answers, for a while.
If life is subtraction, you are the difference.
And the difference is?
A middle aged woman walks past a youngish man, her beauty causes him to stop, for a moment, because he thinks he remembers something: but the feeling is gone and the dance is over.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You furnished me with so many fantasies: with your curves and beauty and brain -
You touched me under the table, you rubbed against me, you eyeballed me, you locked me into your gaze, your unbelievably erotic description of differentiation.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You didn't even know any of this: you had no idea what your body was doing, and had you known, you would have disowned it. You felt nothing, knew nothing, and you built your own body inside mine.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You rub, smooth, stroke, flay. You burn your eyes into imagination and you just go on and on, with your balloon-bursting sexuality, as powerful as nuclear, as silent as space: on you go, by me, through me, past me - and you know it, but will say and think nothing.
You really did have all the answers, for a while.
If life is subtraction, you are the difference.
And the difference is?
A middle aged woman walks past a youngish man, her beauty causes him to stop, for a moment, because he thinks he remembers something: but the feeling is gone and the dance is over.
Goodbye Mrs S.
These Are The Things I Could Do Without (Part N)
1. Deception
2. Hate
3. Self-delusion
4. Self-pity
5. Persecution complex
6. Martyrdom complex
7. Thinking that a fucking middle ranking management job is harder than being the fucking prime minister.
8. Love of stress.
9. Love of power.
10. Ambition.
11. Busy-ness.
12. Love of, and belief in, authority.
13. Doing What The Government Tells You.
14. Not having the originality, intelligence or courage to do your own thing.
15. Manipulation.
16. Lies.
17. Shallowness, where feelings are related only to self.
18. Inadequate use of language, where your deceptions are leaked through your own utter incapability with language.
19. Lack of concern.
20. Exclusion.
21. Ridiculous projection.
22. Pathetic fallacy.
23. Thinking That People You Don't Know Don't Deserve To Lose Their Jobs, While People You Sacked Did.
24. Management/Worker.
25. Lying: specifically, about your non-existent love of literature and religion.
26. Saying And Doing Whatever You Like, Whenever You Like, But Being Mortally Offended When Someone Else Does The Same.
27. Teasing.
28. Bullying.
29. Emotional Manipulation Of The Crudest Kind.
30. Hypocrisy.
31. Denying the people who love you space in your life.
32. Lying: specifically, about things you never went to, because they did not exist, and sounding so hard done by when lying about those things.
33. Pretending you want a family.
34. Refusing to make a shred of effort for someone you "love".
35. Making up rubbish about "soulmates", then ditching it when you've got work to do.
36. Thinking that when your dog dies, so does your soulmate.
37. Slagging off your "soulmate" for retreating into the hole you've kicked them into.
38. Telling someone you're not slamming the phone down on them, then doing it.
39. Crying and shouting insults over the phone.
40. Slagging someone off, then walking out on them when they open their mouth.
41. Ignoring the one you "love"'s birthday. Again.
42. Telling them you'd rather be listening to shit rock somewhere in the arse of England than being with them on New Year's Eve.
43. Sleeping with someone else.
44. Probably.
45. Because you lie, and lie, and lie again.
46. Being fucking horrible and then never mentioning it again.
47. Refusing to touch, only talk: then refusing to talk, only touch.
48. Cutting down talk whenever and wherever you like.
49. Taking obvious love, and its action, and its proof, and ignoring and forgetting it whenever you feel a bit hard done by due to something completely different.
50. Being embittered, ugly, full of regret, and with the kind of blotchy and bloated face that knows it has only limited years in which to spread its hate-filled bile and its barely concealed self-hate, not to mention its certainty of its own inadequacy; though its knob is a good size, its potency is not, and its entire character is a pile of stinking fucking dog crap.
No 50 is clearly a remark by TTD directed at himself.
For the avoidance of doubt.
2. Hate
3. Self-delusion
4. Self-pity
5. Persecution complex
6. Martyrdom complex
7. Thinking that a fucking middle ranking management job is harder than being the fucking prime minister.
8. Love of stress.
9. Love of power.
10. Ambition.
11. Busy-ness.
12. Love of, and belief in, authority.
13. Doing What The Government Tells You.
14. Not having the originality, intelligence or courage to do your own thing.
15. Manipulation.
16. Lies.
17. Shallowness, where feelings are related only to self.
18. Inadequate use of language, where your deceptions are leaked through your own utter incapability with language.
19. Lack of concern.
20. Exclusion.
21. Ridiculous projection.
22. Pathetic fallacy.
23. Thinking That People You Don't Know Don't Deserve To Lose Their Jobs, While People You Sacked Did.
24. Management/Worker.
25. Lying: specifically, about your non-existent love of literature and religion.
26. Saying And Doing Whatever You Like, Whenever You Like, But Being Mortally Offended When Someone Else Does The Same.
27. Teasing.
28. Bullying.
29. Emotional Manipulation Of The Crudest Kind.
30. Hypocrisy.
31. Denying the people who love you space in your life.
32. Lying: specifically, about things you never went to, because they did not exist, and sounding so hard done by when lying about those things.
33. Pretending you want a family.
34. Refusing to make a shred of effort for someone you "love".
35. Making up rubbish about "soulmates", then ditching it when you've got work to do.
36. Thinking that when your dog dies, so does your soulmate.
37. Slagging off your "soulmate" for retreating into the hole you've kicked them into.
38. Telling someone you're not slamming the phone down on them, then doing it.
39. Crying and shouting insults over the phone.
40. Slagging someone off, then walking out on them when they open their mouth.
41. Ignoring the one you "love"'s birthday. Again.
42. Telling them you'd rather be listening to shit rock somewhere in the arse of England than being with them on New Year's Eve.
43. Sleeping with someone else.
44. Probably.
45. Because you lie, and lie, and lie again.
46. Being fucking horrible and then never mentioning it again.
47. Refusing to touch, only talk: then refusing to talk, only touch.
48. Cutting down talk whenever and wherever you like.
49. Taking obvious love, and its action, and its proof, and ignoring and forgetting it whenever you feel a bit hard done by due to something completely different.
50. Being embittered, ugly, full of regret, and with the kind of blotchy and bloated face that knows it has only limited years in which to spread its hate-filled bile and its barely concealed self-hate, not to mention its certainty of its own inadequacy; though its knob is a good size, its potency is not, and its entire character is a pile of stinking fucking dog crap.
No 50 is clearly a remark by TTD directed at himself.
For the avoidance of doubt.
Friday, 6 February 2009
Journey in the Dark
An exercise in acting...
...which didn't lapse once...
Good heavens, these guys (and gals) were good. I mean really good. Is there a reason why bands like Delta 5 didn't make it big? Was it to preserve their genius? Was it to keep their special gift special? Was it because everyone in the world is a cunt?
Or is it because we men absolutely fucking hate any suggestion of female infidelity (which is not in fact suggested by this track, quite the opposite, but which *is* hinted by the music)? Yeah, damn straight it is. Girls like these were the object of crap songs, not the makers of piercing, modernistic love stories.
Fuck knows, but you know, I'd take Delta 5 over any mass production fucker any day - Elton John (hair transplanted) - fuck right off. Those girls were good. Really, fucking good.
Can you imagine Girls Aloud reinterpreting this? Fuck me, it would be all about how sex wasn't *quite* as good as the singer had hoped. About how his cock wasn't quite as hard as it should have been, and how he refused to fuck her in the back room (her "tutu" not quite to his liking, one imagines).
...one knows nothing, one knows the truth...
and someone *always* knows the truth
Human relationships obtain, despite the media saturation of genital contact, the actual relationships still exist, they are still real. Despite the non-contact of cock and cunt, humans still relate. Love still exists, humans co-exist, they seek each other, in the dark and they don't seek cock, cunt or arse. They seek each other. They seek truth - namely, the other. The other is -1, the self is 1. Together they are 0. It doesn't matter, and it is the supreme human calculation. Together we make 0. We make nothing. We slide into non-existence together.
That's the point.
...four days together....
....it gives another backdrop....
We have spent a decade building backdrops to relationships: glamorous, clean, shaven, plastic, unreal decor of a square room; light, always light, lots of light.
We are the backdrop to our own lives.
Our lives and pornography have merged, in a not-very-felicitous-concert: no difference between the two now: the achievement of sexuality is all we cling to. The achievement of body - ours or the other's - and of touch, the most brutal touch (devoid of time) - even people born at the time of Cuba are stoking their bodies with plastic and oil to make someone else want to possess them and nothing else.
In this late-capitalist world, possession is nine tenths of the law; debt the other tenth.
Grown ups really think that others will love them, for wanting their body for a moment. They really believe that slaking desire will give them life. They really think that in forty years, someone will be there, still addicted to their body, still giving everything for that word, fuck. Fuck, it will be the conversation of the dying in thirty years' time, the last word on our lips - but he wanted to fuck me, I wanted to fuck her, we wanted to fuck. We fucked. And still, while we lie, cadaverous, our bodies eating themselves, still we will say it, and still it will give us that thrill.
No end of fucking. Not now. Not ever.
End of love. Always, under the duvet, always, end of love is there. In the cry, in the thought. It is the stolen object that induces panic in the dream; it is the fence underneath the snow; it is the person who stares at you, inexpressive, silent.
No end of fucking.
Ever.
...which didn't lapse once...
Good heavens, these guys (and gals) were good. I mean really good. Is there a reason why bands like Delta 5 didn't make it big? Was it to preserve their genius? Was it to keep their special gift special? Was it because everyone in the world is a cunt?
Or is it because we men absolutely fucking hate any suggestion of female infidelity (which is not in fact suggested by this track, quite the opposite, but which *is* hinted by the music)? Yeah, damn straight it is. Girls like these were the object of crap songs, not the makers of piercing, modernistic love stories.
Fuck knows, but you know, I'd take Delta 5 over any mass production fucker any day - Elton John (hair transplanted) - fuck right off. Those girls were good. Really, fucking good.
Can you imagine Girls Aloud reinterpreting this? Fuck me, it would be all about how sex wasn't *quite* as good as the singer had hoped. About how his cock wasn't quite as hard as it should have been, and how he refused to fuck her in the back room (her "tutu" not quite to his liking, one imagines).
...one knows nothing, one knows the truth...
and someone *always* knows the truth
Human relationships obtain, despite the media saturation of genital contact, the actual relationships still exist, they are still real. Despite the non-contact of cock and cunt, humans still relate. Love still exists, humans co-exist, they seek each other, in the dark and they don't seek cock, cunt or arse. They seek each other. They seek truth - namely, the other. The other is -1, the self is 1. Together they are 0. It doesn't matter, and it is the supreme human calculation. Together we make 0. We make nothing. We slide into non-existence together.
That's the point.
...four days together....
....it gives another backdrop....
We have spent a decade building backdrops to relationships: glamorous, clean, shaven, plastic, unreal decor of a square room; light, always light, lots of light.
We are the backdrop to our own lives.
Our lives and pornography have merged, in a not-very-felicitous-concert: no difference between the two now: the achievement of sexuality is all we cling to. The achievement of body - ours or the other's - and of touch, the most brutal touch (devoid of time) - even people born at the time of Cuba are stoking their bodies with plastic and oil to make someone else want to possess them and nothing else.
In this late-capitalist world, possession is nine tenths of the law; debt the other tenth.
Grown ups really think that others will love them, for wanting their body for a moment. They really believe that slaking desire will give them life. They really think that in forty years, someone will be there, still addicted to their body, still giving everything for that word, fuck. Fuck, it will be the conversation of the dying in thirty years' time, the last word on our lips - but he wanted to fuck me, I wanted to fuck her, we wanted to fuck. We fucked. And still, while we lie, cadaverous, our bodies eating themselves, still we will say it, and still it will give us that thrill.
No end of fucking. Not now. Not ever.
End of love. Always, under the duvet, always, end of love is there. In the cry, in the thought. It is the stolen object that induces panic in the dream; it is the fence underneath the snow; it is the person who stares at you, inexpressive, silent.
No end of fucking.
Ever.
Sunday, 18 May 2008
The Echoes of Your Footsteps on the Stairs
The point of this line*, is of course, that although it points to the love between Winston and Julia it really refers to the approach of Thought Police Agent Charrington. For the entirety of their love affair the sound of footsteps has haunted them, even if they have not thought of it: it is a bleakly cynical satire on adulterous relationships in a free society and a bitter denunciation of the impossibility of even innocent relationships in an unfree one. Indeed, since the moment Winston put frown to face, many years before he put pen to paper, he has awaited the moment of discovery. Critiques of Nineteen Eighty Four routinely, and rightly, comment on the paucity of Julia as a character and on the one-dimensional nature of their relationship. Of course, this is part of the point. Winston says: "I hate purity." He wants a relationship dominated by sexual attraction: remember he loathes Julia and is convinced she wants him to die, before she slips him the note. His hate turns to lust turns to love. His lust is rebellion (whereas for us it is the affirmation of our world's values - I think (shlock horror - Orwell was wrong here). For both Winston and Julia, lust is an affirmation of existence, love comes later, if at all. Though it does: in a riotous haranguing of the doctrine of ideology, the infirmity and yet strength of the body ("as applied to artsem") is enough to give Winston colour, vigour, to defeat his ulcers. His eventual love is defeated, not by weakness, but by sheer instinct.
There is a sequence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the Knight, about to take his rightful execution, flinches as the blade is lifted. The Green Knight taunts him as a coward but the point is precisely that his reaction is not cowardice, but that of a living being, that of life in the onrush of death. There is nothing you can do. It is part of the glorious ache for freedom of life.
So it is with Winston. He loses nothing, does nothing, in Room 101 but succumb, briefly to the inevitable. It does not mean love does not exist, or freedom; it means that humanity is beautiful enough to be defeated by brutality. If it were not, it would live with brutality and be, itself, evil. Hence O Brien plays him the tape of his promising to "throw vitriol in a child's face" and breezily waves away his assumption of humanity. Winston, naively, as anyone (maybe - probably- I don't know) in such a world, assumes humanity comes from a single or the single deep feeling at one's heart. He carelessly discards other values - or, maybe more pertinently, has never known them.
He would not betray Julia. Of course he would; he says that only because it is uppermost in his mind, as it is in hers. She loves him, for reasons never quite made clear. He loves her too.
But he is not, until Room 101, properly confronted with what he knows the Party has held against him and all other Party members since time immemorial: the thing he *most* fears. This is no big deal as far as the Thought Police are concerned; it is just a matter of locating it in any individual.
*Which opens the possibility of a Mule type character (out of Asimov's Foundation) being the one to defeat the Party - perhaps??*
In that final place Winston merely accepts what he has so far learned and not quite revised properly; that the kind of love that is required is self-abasement, a kind of religious worship, but of the ecstatic, mystical kind, such that the personality is moved out. It is not betraying Julia that does this, that is just a side effect, it is the facing of one's worst fear.
So it is that fear is a vital element of life, for sound self-preservation reasons (we are organic and irrational after all, and *not* machines); for some that is avoiding jam, or The Jam, or spiders, or spider diagrams, or whatever. Facing our fears - and by extension, the "talking cure" is not the way to go - these things are suppressed for a reason.
Suppressing his fear of rats, he loves and enjoys Julia in a room he *knows* to be crawling with the fuckers. Face to face, as it were, he cannot exist at all. He is destroyed, not by his actof betrayal but by his entirely human, or even entirely animal, instinct. This is precisely what the Party are attempting to demonstrate: you are an animal, and a piss-poor one at that ("if you are a man, Winston, you are the last man"). Let us liberate ourselves from the purely animal in our enjoyment of your suffering. It is this which moves us beyond lust into a realm of abstract power. We have changed you, which is what we wanted to do; over and above the infliction of pain, it is the fact that we have changed you that matters. That, not the "making him suffer", gives power. We have power, we change you. We change all.
So the people who desire change desire power.
Sexcrime, like thoughtcrime, is insidious. It creeps slowly into your marrow until you no longer realise it is there, but it is sinking your blood into a firey earth. Sexcrime becomes your being, into your dreams and your work; it slow-burns your heart into nothing. Sexcrime is all, in a free society.
When you have had enough of thoughtcrime, that is.
*from the soundtrack to Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) by Eurythmics.
There is a sequence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the Knight, about to take his rightful execution, flinches as the blade is lifted. The Green Knight taunts him as a coward but the point is precisely that his reaction is not cowardice, but that of a living being, that of life in the onrush of death. There is nothing you can do. It is part of the glorious ache for freedom of life.
So it is with Winston. He loses nothing, does nothing, in Room 101 but succumb, briefly to the inevitable. It does not mean love does not exist, or freedom; it means that humanity is beautiful enough to be defeated by brutality. If it were not, it would live with brutality and be, itself, evil. Hence O Brien plays him the tape of his promising to "throw vitriol in a child's face" and breezily waves away his assumption of humanity. Winston, naively, as anyone (maybe - probably- I don't know) in such a world, assumes humanity comes from a single or the single deep feeling at one's heart. He carelessly discards other values - or, maybe more pertinently, has never known them.
He would not betray Julia. Of course he would; he says that only because it is uppermost in his mind, as it is in hers. She loves him, for reasons never quite made clear. He loves her too.
But he is not, until Room 101, properly confronted with what he knows the Party has held against him and all other Party members since time immemorial: the thing he *most* fears. This is no big deal as far as the Thought Police are concerned; it is just a matter of locating it in any individual.
*Which opens the possibility of a Mule type character (out of Asimov's Foundation) being the one to defeat the Party - perhaps??*
In that final place Winston merely accepts what he has so far learned and not quite revised properly; that the kind of love that is required is self-abasement, a kind of religious worship, but of the ecstatic, mystical kind, such that the personality is moved out. It is not betraying Julia that does this, that is just a side effect, it is the facing of one's worst fear.
So it is that fear is a vital element of life, for sound self-preservation reasons (we are organic and irrational after all, and *not* machines); for some that is avoiding jam, or The Jam, or spiders, or spider diagrams, or whatever. Facing our fears - and by extension, the "talking cure" is not the way to go - these things are suppressed for a reason.
Suppressing his fear of rats, he loves and enjoys Julia in a room he *knows* to be crawling with the fuckers. Face to face, as it were, he cannot exist at all. He is destroyed, not by his actof betrayal but by his entirely human, or even entirely animal, instinct. This is precisely what the Party are attempting to demonstrate: you are an animal, and a piss-poor one at that ("if you are a man, Winston, you are the last man"). Let us liberate ourselves from the purely animal in our enjoyment of your suffering. It is this which moves us beyond lust into a realm of abstract power. We have changed you, which is what we wanted to do; over and above the infliction of pain, it is the fact that we have changed you that matters. That, not the "making him suffer", gives power. We have power, we change you. We change all.
So the people who desire change desire power.
Sexcrime, like thoughtcrime, is insidious. It creeps slowly into your marrow until you no longer realise it is there, but it is sinking your blood into a firey earth. Sexcrime becomes your being, into your dreams and your work; it slow-burns your heart into nothing. Sexcrime is all, in a free society.
When you have had enough of thoughtcrime, that is.
*from the soundtrack to Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) by Eurythmics.
Sunday, 27 April 2008
In Which TD Goes a Bit Soft in the Head
My previous post was, as you can easily imagine, written while heavily refreshed. Reading it, I see a lot I'd like to have changed and a lot I probably should not have put: but its message is essentially sound and it is this.
Brace yourselves for a post devoid of hatred or self pity. Yes, it's true.
I was at mass this morning, as usual, with a slight hangover, as is also usual, and some lingering regrets about blogging while tipsy. Then I realised that the idea of my post, and of many previous ones over the last few days or even weeks was simply to try and recognise the fact that, for want of a better turn of phrase, my heart is opening up and is reaching out to people as it has hardly ever done before: that I care about so many people, that I want them to be happy and safe and well, that they are in my thoughts, that thinking of them is wonderful: in short, that I love them. Perhaps not many. I don't know that many people. A few, then: far more than before.
This is quite difficult for an old raging soak like me to understand. It doesn't, after all, depend on what they think of or feel for me, it is wholly independent of requital or interest, devoid of expectation and is nothing to do with any kind of possession, just of a joy in another's existence.
It's also a difficult sensation to understand. Years of introspection and closing off, of hiding myself away, these have left me unprotected for such genuine feelings.
I should not really be writing this post any more than the previous ones: but it is true, and sober, and explains some of what has gone before it in the sense that it has been germinating here without my really understanding it until now.
You strip away the layers of protection and disguise, the masks you have built and you find that, after all, there might be something there, that really does exist and is positive.
Brace yourselves for a post devoid of hatred or self pity. Yes, it's true.
I was at mass this morning, as usual, with a slight hangover, as is also usual, and some lingering regrets about blogging while tipsy. Then I realised that the idea of my post, and of many previous ones over the last few days or even weeks was simply to try and recognise the fact that, for want of a better turn of phrase, my heart is opening up and is reaching out to people as it has hardly ever done before: that I care about so many people, that I want them to be happy and safe and well, that they are in my thoughts, that thinking of them is wonderful: in short, that I love them. Perhaps not many. I don't know that many people. A few, then: far more than before.
This is quite difficult for an old raging soak like me to understand. It doesn't, after all, depend on what they think of or feel for me, it is wholly independent of requital or interest, devoid of expectation and is nothing to do with any kind of possession, just of a joy in another's existence.
It's also a difficult sensation to understand. Years of introspection and closing off, of hiding myself away, these have left me unprotected for such genuine feelings.
I should not really be writing this post any more than the previous ones: but it is true, and sober, and explains some of what has gone before it in the sense that it has been germinating here without my really understanding it until now.
You strip away the layers of protection and disguise, the masks you have built and you find that, after all, there might be something there, that really does exist and is positive.
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Woman In Chains
So the nicking from Tears for Fears continues....
This is more of a thought than a post, really, which comes from a convesation I had yesterday with a very beautiful woman, who thinks she needs to lose weight. She does not. Her daughter, she says, suffers from real self-image problems for the same reason. Why does this happen in our "civilisation"? Why do young (and not so young) women seem to have such problems so often? I have yet to meet a heterosexual man who does not adore the curves and softnesses of a woman's mysterious, delightful body. I have curves myself of course, but then again they _shouldn't_ be there. I understand that sometimes these issues are caused by health concerns. Fair enough. That's the root of mine, as well as the fact that breasts are attractive on women and not on men. But otherwise - straight men love female bodies that move and undulate, that press against clothing, that can enfold them.
I guess I understand some of the myriad reasons for the problems that women have (including, probably, a male dominated world of media and pornography), but I ask, in all naivety and innocence: what is there not to love in a beautiful, curvy woman?
This is more of a thought than a post, really, which comes from a convesation I had yesterday with a very beautiful woman, who thinks she needs to lose weight. She does not. Her daughter, she says, suffers from real self-image problems for the same reason. Why does this happen in our "civilisation"? Why do young (and not so young) women seem to have such problems so often? I have yet to meet a heterosexual man who does not adore the curves and softnesses of a woman's mysterious, delightful body. I have curves myself of course, but then again they _shouldn't_ be there. I understand that sometimes these issues are caused by health concerns. Fair enough. That's the root of mine, as well as the fact that breasts are attractive on women and not on men. But otherwise - straight men love female bodies that move and undulate, that press against clothing, that can enfold them.
I guess I understand some of the myriad reasons for the problems that women have (including, probably, a male dominated world of media and pornography), but I ask, in all naivety and innocence: what is there not to love in a beautiful, curvy woman?
Thursday, 14 February 2008
Another Damn Valentine
Piss off, you damnfool twats, with your pseudo-romantic moneymaking gestures, your slighting of commitment for the one off splash, your fuck-awful pictures of rotting personalities behind beautiful bodies, your ghastly insistence on appearances, your fuckwitted obeisance to the god of sexual attraction, whoever it may be, that idiot deity who really ought to be shot and buried in a shallow grave.
Fuck me: once, loving someone meant attaching yourself, stitching your bodies and souls together so that you made a stronger defence against the storm tides of chance and bastard time. Now, it means: is his cock better than the other guy's? Are her tits a bit saggy? How good is the pussy I'm getting? How long does the cock last? A broken heart means an empty snatch or a pair of balls like two tins of fussell's milk (copyright Viz).
No-one gives a toss, no-one cares a single fuck for the idea that two people can, or even ought to, find themselves in each other, share a mystical or inexplicable attraction that solidifies until there is no telling between the two: once it gets tough, once you stop being basically fuck-buddies and something higher or more permanent threatens the lightly stained glass of your lives; once some prick turns up in a BMW or with some fuckawful job that makes him boss all the other cunts around, that's it - the "love" is gone and the relationship is over. So what? It wasn't fun anymore, it wasn't going anywhere, you stopped satisfying me, we stopped making sense, I wasn't feeling the vibes, we just weren't right, you turned out to be someone else.
So what? Who gives an arse? We're not monogamous anyway and any attempts to prove otherwise are doomed to failure once you've seen Milf Sluts Go Nuts Vol 42, not that I have. Jeesus, she comes like a train! He can go all night and look how hard he comes! Pornstars are the modern gods, except that they're largely unspoken leaders of our aims and ideologies (although apparently Jenna Jameson declared her support for Hillary C: fucking hell if I were a Yank I wouldn't be able to vote for Mike Huckabee fast enough). We're all too ashamed to admit that porn drives our images of male and female and that anyone who doesn't match up can fuck right off. I'm not saying that I don't, or that I'm shit in bed: whatever - who gives a flying fuck anyway?
Valentine's Day? Go fuck yourself, sonny, like a whole load of us have to.
So what if I'm bitter? It's hardly a valid criticism of a lemon, now is it?
Fuck me: once, loving someone meant attaching yourself, stitching your bodies and souls together so that you made a stronger defence against the storm tides of chance and bastard time. Now, it means: is his cock better than the other guy's? Are her tits a bit saggy? How good is the pussy I'm getting? How long does the cock last? A broken heart means an empty snatch or a pair of balls like two tins of fussell's milk (copyright Viz).
No-one gives a toss, no-one cares a single fuck for the idea that two people can, or even ought to, find themselves in each other, share a mystical or inexplicable attraction that solidifies until there is no telling between the two: once it gets tough, once you stop being basically fuck-buddies and something higher or more permanent threatens the lightly stained glass of your lives; once some prick turns up in a BMW or with some fuckawful job that makes him boss all the other cunts around, that's it - the "love" is gone and the relationship is over. So what? It wasn't fun anymore, it wasn't going anywhere, you stopped satisfying me, we stopped making sense, I wasn't feeling the vibes, we just weren't right, you turned out to be someone else.
So what? Who gives an arse? We're not monogamous anyway and any attempts to prove otherwise are doomed to failure once you've seen Milf Sluts Go Nuts Vol 42, not that I have. Jeesus, she comes like a train! He can go all night and look how hard he comes! Pornstars are the modern gods, except that they're largely unspoken leaders of our aims and ideologies (although apparently Jenna Jameson declared her support for Hillary C: fucking hell if I were a Yank I wouldn't be able to vote for Mike Huckabee fast enough). We're all too ashamed to admit that porn drives our images of male and female and that anyone who doesn't match up can fuck right off. I'm not saying that I don't, or that I'm shit in bed: whatever - who gives a flying fuck anyway?
Valentine's Day? Go fuck yourself, sonny, like a whole load of us have to.
So what if I'm bitter? It's hardly a valid criticism of a lemon, now is it?
The Valentine's Day Post
Bollocks to it. Bollocks to everything.
Come on, you didn't seriously expect me to say anything else, did you?
Come on, you didn't seriously expect me to say anything else, did you?
Thursday, 7 February 2008
Learning a New Vocabulary
The vocabulary of being single has always fascinated me: from a distance of course. I have always enjoyed watching people flirt, snog and pair off (I'm _not_ saying that i am obsessed with porn, by the way) - but I have never had a clue how to do it myself. Now I find myself again at the point at which I need to understand this grammar, this linguistics - but haven't a clue.
For example.
Today on a course I meet a very nice woman, who wears no jewellery. In my pisspoor vocab banks I assume this means something. Accordingly I flirt with her, laugh and enjoy her company: she seems to like me, and asks about other stuff about me. Later our eyes meet across the crowded room, three times (c. star struck lovers of various kinds) - and afterwards, her first two words?
"My" and, appallingly, shockingly, "boyfriend."
Fucking hell. I see no way I could have predicted this, unless I was reading the grammar entirely mistakenly; unless I was giving wholly wrong values for x. So what was the problem? Was the equation quadratic, instead of linear? Did I screw up the manipulation of negative numbers?
What had she been saying, and how? Had she, indeed, been saying anything at all?
I vaguely remember all this from the 24 years before - and now I find myself exactly where I was then. What are people saying and what does it mean when they touch you, or doesn't mean, or would mean if you wanted it to mean, or might mean if you were also thinking that it meant, or could mean if you made it mean that?
I am told, by certain of my friends, that "men" apparently do, regularly, seduce "women" (I am told that there are various other permutations but I have no idea about these at all): how do they do it? What do they have to be to do it?
If we took x as being "a man, of variously unattractive appearance" and y as being "a woman, of uncertain, even irrelevant appearance" then how do we make x=y?
As I see it, it works something like this:
(x+k)(x+m)=y
where k=appropriate conversation
and m=appropriate twinkles in eyes.
But if I reckon it correctly, this gives
x2 + kx + xm + km = y
which is fair enough, except that I simply cannot provide km. And as for x2, that is just bloody awful.
If you suggested that the equation needed a further variable, ie p, where p="looks"*, then it might look something like this:
p(x+k)(x+m) =y
which I simply cannot provide at all, I am afraid. Ie - the equation holds true for x=0 and only x=0.
*=and where "looks" are defined as: not being a slob, not being bald, not being short, not being a bit boss-eyed, not having sloping shoulders and not walking funny.
I started this pile of old horseshit by talking about grammar and ended with equations. This reflects my utter disenchantment with the eternally ambivalent world of the humanities, and my wish that I was good at something real, something either true or not true, ie maths.
Fuck me I need a drink. But it's late and I've got work tomorrow. Damn. Piss and wind. Bollocks.
For example.
Today on a course I meet a very nice woman, who wears no jewellery. In my pisspoor vocab banks I assume this means something. Accordingly I flirt with her, laugh and enjoy her company: she seems to like me, and asks about other stuff about me. Later our eyes meet across the crowded room, three times (c. star struck lovers of various kinds) - and afterwards, her first two words?
"My" and, appallingly, shockingly, "boyfriend."
Fucking hell. I see no way I could have predicted this, unless I was reading the grammar entirely mistakenly; unless I was giving wholly wrong values for x. So what was the problem? Was the equation quadratic, instead of linear? Did I screw up the manipulation of negative numbers?
What had she been saying, and how? Had she, indeed, been saying anything at all?
I vaguely remember all this from the 24 years before - and now I find myself exactly where I was then. What are people saying and what does it mean when they touch you, or doesn't mean, or would mean if you wanted it to mean, or might mean if you were also thinking that it meant, or could mean if you made it mean that?
I am told, by certain of my friends, that "men" apparently do, regularly, seduce "women" (I am told that there are various other permutations but I have no idea about these at all): how do they do it? What do they have to be to do it?
If we took x as being "a man, of variously unattractive appearance" and y as being "a woman, of uncertain, even irrelevant appearance" then how do we make x=y?
As I see it, it works something like this:
(x+k)(x+m)=y
where k=appropriate conversation
and m=appropriate twinkles in eyes.
But if I reckon it correctly, this gives
x2 + kx + xm + km = y
which is fair enough, except that I simply cannot provide km. And as for x2, that is just bloody awful.
If you suggested that the equation needed a further variable, ie p, where p="looks"*, then it might look something like this:
p(x+k)(x+m) =y
which I simply cannot provide at all, I am afraid. Ie - the equation holds true for x=0 and only x=0.
*=and where "looks" are defined as: not being a slob, not being bald, not being short, not being a bit boss-eyed, not having sloping shoulders and not walking funny.
I started this pile of old horseshit by talking about grammar and ended with equations. This reflects my utter disenchantment with the eternally ambivalent world of the humanities, and my wish that I was good at something real, something either true or not true, ie maths.
Fuck me I need a drink. But it's late and I've got work tomorrow. Damn. Piss and wind. Bollocks.
Thursday, 20 December 2007
Ever Fallen in Love with Someone You Shouldn't Have?
No. Nor have I, obviously. Ca va sans dire.
Actually it used to happen distressingly frequently, back in the mists of time; I eventually figured out (when I fell in love properly, and could distinguish the difference) that it was a kind of coping mechanism: faced with situations or problems I was not keen to dwell on my brain seemed to trip a switch and start obsessing about someone, always wonderful and always inaccessible, instead of focusing on the issues at hand and dealing with them. So I learned that my pysche is essentially cowardly, sneaky, and romantic. I mean was. What a ghastly mixture. At 23 I worked out that this facility for love was also a brilliant way of achieving regression hypnosis: I could live as a 13 year old again (I mean 13 year olds of my shy disposition and slightly more restrained generation): not eating, not sleeping, not concentrating on anything except her. Incidentally as a genuine 13 year old when I did this many of my classmates took this her to be Mrs Thatcher, but this was not the case (my dad, on the other hand...). I always chose the most horrendously inappropriate people for the objects of desire, which continued into my twenties, although then it was the same person for a couple of years. But they would be all, for however long it took...for whatever was really bothering me to die down or be properly repressed. Only once did I confess my neurotic-love to its object, and the stakes were not high so it didn't matter: later on the stakes were infinitely high and I derived even more delicious, self-flagellating lovesickness from them.
Now that I come to write this stuff down it makes me think more of the idea of inaccessible women, and their pivotal roles in art and literature (Beatrice?)...but it's probably best not to dwell on that for too long, if at all. It also makes me think more about that awful, slimy creature, myself, but not for too long.
I don't write any of this thinking it's unique or unusual, btw. Just because it came to me in a dream, one of those odd ones that leave you slightly out of kilter for the whole day.
And I had been reading about fairy circles, alternate dimensions and psychoactive drugs that evening.
Actually it used to happen distressingly frequently, back in the mists of time; I eventually figured out (when I fell in love properly, and could distinguish the difference) that it was a kind of coping mechanism: faced with situations or problems I was not keen to dwell on my brain seemed to trip a switch and start obsessing about someone, always wonderful and always inaccessible, instead of focusing on the issues at hand and dealing with them. So I learned that my pysche is essentially cowardly, sneaky, and romantic. I mean was. What a ghastly mixture. At 23 I worked out that this facility for love was also a brilliant way of achieving regression hypnosis: I could live as a 13 year old again (I mean 13 year olds of my shy disposition and slightly more restrained generation): not eating, not sleeping, not concentrating on anything except her. Incidentally as a genuine 13 year old when I did this many of my classmates took this her to be Mrs Thatcher, but this was not the case (my dad, on the other hand...). I always chose the most horrendously inappropriate people for the objects of desire, which continued into my twenties, although then it was the same person for a couple of years. But they would be all, for however long it took...for whatever was really bothering me to die down or be properly repressed. Only once did I confess my neurotic-love to its object, and the stakes were not high so it didn't matter: later on the stakes were infinitely high and I derived even more delicious, self-flagellating lovesickness from them.
Now that I come to write this stuff down it makes me think more of the idea of inaccessible women, and their pivotal roles in art and literature (Beatrice?)...but it's probably best not to dwell on that for too long, if at all. It also makes me think more about that awful, slimy creature, myself, but not for too long.
I don't write any of this thinking it's unique or unusual, btw. Just because it came to me in a dream, one of those odd ones that leave you slightly out of kilter for the whole day.
And I had been reading about fairy circles, alternate dimensions and psychoactive drugs that evening.
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