Last night, Tim suggests to me, I go to a faith healer. Implicit in this, maybe I'm broken, I don't know. I don't feel right, but I'm not sick and I'm quite sane (which at times I'm afraid is precisely the problem).
After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.
I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'
Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.
Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.
I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.
On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.
The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.
4 comments:
Maybe you'll find this relevant/interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ixRqOauq4
I'm not a Hare Krishna person myself, but I found it useful.
Thank you, this video is very interesting.
Do you know who "anonymous" was?
THAT is EXACTLY what my father might have written (and it's not entirely implausible that he found your blog through mine). If not my father, it is a bit creepy that I am able to find evidence of my father in everyday life even when he is not present.
I don't know who it was but now I am convinced your father serves as my spiritual guardian and otherworldly advisor.
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