Madman in the Attic had become too too tongue-in-cheek for me; a bit on the nose, a bit unhelpful, a bit of a joke that didn't work anymore. I just discovered a new word, Metanoia. It's Jung, so its actual psychological significance or reality can be taken with a side of salt: a moment of re-thinking the world, of re-structuring the universe around a realisation, an epiphany: it is the category to which both 'psychotic breakdown' and 'healing' belong. That ambiguity is beautiful. It is "a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form", cf. Wikipedia. Been there, done that. And what a lovely spin, too: a more adaptive form.
Yes. There is something I agree with there. I do feel stronger, better. Recovered, but not like bones that recover more frail. More like steel, reinforced with steel, molten steel poured over, hardened into some enormous obelisk; the original thoughts, the original feelings, the original loves and losses are someone else's. They belonged to the old particles of steel, which dripped off as I was growing, becoming, strengthening. My self-image reduced to coal, the chipping forces made me crack; more pressure, and heat, and agony, and on the other side I changed, into diamond. As if coal I had had been my chrysalis; I had span it around me with negative thinking, poor decisions, and antidepressants had been the steroid, and my carbon-and-sulfur silk-web spilling too fast to catch; time was all it took for the Adult to emerge.
Metanoia, n.
It contains 'annoy'; that's cheeky, I feel, the right amount of on the nose. It contains 'meta', and look, look at the absurdity of a blog discussing why I chose the name for a blog only I read (properly), half-aware to Watch What I Say while Saying What I Feel. (The same time knowing it's slightly ironic, because I'm fudging this exposition to fit a very loose definition of 'meta', because I feel I have to. ) And it has these other fitting meanings, too: it is the retorical device of retracting what you just said and saying it again in a better way. What I mean by this is, it is the style of self-correction, that lends itself freely to streams-of-conscious, blog-blank-type, etc. What I mean by this is, it is my style. What I mean by this is... [joke not funny anymore]. In theology, 'metanoia' is repentance.
My blog has, stylistically, always been dependent on epiphanic elevated journals, taking real things and lifting them into the pure abstract, heightening things into pure fiction. Now it is named for being so. And it has always been a (more carefully constructed than it might appear) intentionally long-winded, winding, self-correcting and confusing style at once meant to seem instantaneously written but encoding more interesting truths all the same. Like the "Birds" poem (blog down), which is all about renewal and a desperate attempt to find happiness (pre- or mid-SSRI detox), which was a false start perhaps, this blog signals a positive-outlook way forwards. For one thing, depressing blogs don't get you second dates, and they seem to over-worry College.
I am torn whether to quote from Kanye's "Stronger" or Wordsworth's "Prelude", so I'll quote neither. Onwards!
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Saturday, 12 June 2010
Birds
Small, yellow birds come together
in swooping, long chains – they look
like sheet music , faint sketched out rows
dotted with black beaks and tails, perfectly
plotting out their song (a tweeting, chirping,
unapologetically freeform melody); swirling
staffs of song wrap around in ribbons,
and the closer in it ties, the louder it sings,
and the further out it loops, the more faint
and elegant it begins to sound. I am some-
where in that music, somewhere behind
those layers of invisible and disappearing staffs
(five line staffs, I can just make out),
being carried away piece by piece (each pair
of tiny bird-feet carrying a pound or so of flesh),
and the music rinsing me clean (on top the mountain,
so green, its scent so alarming), leaving me left
all but a man, scorched by their music,
wet and cold like an infant.
Sunday, 30 May 2010
And he says to himself, "Story of My Life."
Once upon a time I was a happy young man.
Then, one day, a wicked witch cast a spell on me, and I started (very slowly, at first) to become someone else altogether.
I was abandoned at the worst possible time.
Then, one day, a wicked witch cast a spell on me, and I started (very slowly, at first) to become someone else altogether.
The handsome prince promised he'd slay my demons, and be patient, and when the real me fell totally asleep he promised he'd wait for the 100 years-spell to pass.
At the worst of it, locked away, demons all about me, unable to think for tears falling or feel for numbness aching me, I was abandoned by the prince.
At this point, I succumbed and the real me fell further from the surface; the demons overtook me, and I became the Monster that knights and princes travel the land to slay.
(No wise prophets were there to recognise the innocent person underneath.)
Things got really bad.
Things got really bad.
And worse and worse.
I was abandoned at the worst possible time.
I was blamed for everything that happened to me. Was it my own fault this thing happened to me, then?
Now the prince wishes to roam the world, slaying demons for others, and wants more than anything for some other knight to come and slay me.
Now the prince wishes to roam the world, slaying demons for others, and wants more than anything for some other knight to come and slay me.
And I still need saving, but no one seems to care.
I don't think this is even the happy young man talking now. I'm someone else, still.
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Written on the Occasion of a Confrontation
Hesiod the Hellenist, and Homer’s Homos
Do you listen to old Aesop’s fables,
Concluding the dead fabulist knew best?
Does Shame still reign your anus, unable
To enter Eros? This attorney rests
His case on science, on logic, on facts:
(The fact being you did not choose what pleases
Your being.) Retract assumptions: enact
Redemption for We that love erastês.
Fabulist and fabulous: ne’er collude,
‘Lest to suffer the rude, the boisterous –
Like an idiot you get fucked (no lube!),
Mentally at least: it’s preposterous
That your frail dignity should yet depend
On the judgements of lesser men (mere boys
At a loss, you concede, to comprehend
The situation.) You and I both toyed
With feelings we chose to reject, respect
Arbitrary mores and social controls,
Dare we not upon death, rewards collect,
For setting hell for ourselves as our goals.
You’re nearly free but so far from awake
That I could shake you by your bones, ring you
By your ears, drive you with a wooden stake
(Forsake that mistake, for is it not true
Vampires rest in horizontal closets?)
Wake up to see that a swirling access
To the uncommonly possessed (trust it’s
Me who wants what’s best; abide where digress
-sions spring from passion!) by the uninspired,
And get fired up! Reclaim the fires of hellls
They invented to throttle our desires,
ART IS YOURS – (mostly mine) – listen as bells
Ring out to proclaim my words as music:
Do not relent ‘til your face is in stars,
Praise poetry (its art metaphysic)
That teaches it’s fine to be who you are.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Utterly insignificant
I've never seen myself as important. No, quite the opposite. But I had hoped that by the time I reached a certain age I would begin to matter to people. I never mattered at school; I got good grades, but never praise. I played by all the rules, was nice to people, but making friends still didn't come easily. I've told myself all my life that this is due to ugliness, perhaps in conjunction with some other, imperceptible defect of character.
My first year at university was amazing, but I was always kind of cognizant of a growing patterning, a homogenizing of the masses. Soon, the group united under the banner of "Freshers" split, mutated and came apart, contracting and wincing into tiny little bubbles. As always, I am a loose particle, not attached to any particular bubble for too long, petrified of getting blown into the dirt. As always, I am excluded. People might not even realise it's happening.
I'm fairly confident I could commit a quiet little suicide in my room and go unnoticed for some time. I'd put the bin out so the scout would know not to open the door. It needn't even be locked from the inside. I disappear readily all the time. Done it since I was about 13. At 13 at school I would slip out at breaktimes and lunchtimes. I couldn't face people and what's more, it didn't seem like people could face me. Eventually a teacher in his infinite concern threatened me with suspension for my deliberate flouting of school rules; I called his bluff and dared him to knowing I was the smartest kid in that shithole, and the next day I was presented with a laminated card that would permit me to leave the building at my discretion.
I think things are getting worse. I'm slipping further and further under. I'm perfectly lucid at the moment; I am getting very good at faking lucidity, though; sometimes I believe myself. Every little rejection is a shove. Every impromptu picnic for which I am overlooked, every dinner party in my own kitchen where there isn't room to seat me, every well-organised trip to some little island with my entire flat + six acquaintances that I'm not invited to either. In my last relationship I was perpetually overlooked. Plans were cancelled all the time, around me, no matter whether I'd cleared days out of my schedule to attend them. For example, I was asked not to come to a trip I'd been invited to so it could be spent with one friend he hadn't seen in ages. Then, later, in term time such an event repeated itself all over again, this time for a friend he sees every goddamn day. Then eventually we broke up. And he went again, afterwards. Later, some girl breaks my camera. I can scarcely afford food, but it's an accident; her right to break my camera, to my ex, is more significant than my right to having one.
Everyone matters more than me. This is the message life screams at me. I can be on the verge of killing myself but whether someone has 'a good time' at the bop matters more than whether I make it through the night in one piece. I can't remember the last time I had fun at a bop, or a house party, or a club night; the fun, if experienced to any degree, is almost always overshadowed by a crippling self-hatred come 1 in the morning. I think I have anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure from those life events normally considered pleasurable. Pleasure, to me, is more like intellectual appreciation. I can take in that a film or a book or a song is 'good', but it must be good on purely artistic terms. My tolerance for guilty pleasures is waning.
Of course, why should I matter? I realise that I'm talentless. I haven't cultivated any useful trade skills and at the only level at which I could be happy to exist (the top) I am assuredly not good enough. I won't win any poetry prizes no doubt because I am simply not as good as the competition. I probably will never get anything published because I am probably more rubbish than I realise. I thought a job application lately was successful, but now the Personnel person is taking their time in getting back to me and it becomes apparent that my defect of character has shown through. Oh, but I fake being real so well! Don't I? I smile at the right cues, I am polite and courteous, I can even convince people that I find their jokes funny, that my words haven't been processed by some faculty short of the soul, that we have some sort of human connection. Perhaps this makes me a psychopath. But no! Psychopaths get away with it better. I am just humanfail.
I do have feelings. (This, I can vouch, is probably the strongest evidence that I am not a psychopath.) They are just very, very minimal. To others, at least.
No future,
No hope,
No love,
No joy,
No reason.
My first year at university was amazing, but I was always kind of cognizant of a growing patterning, a homogenizing of the masses. Soon, the group united under the banner of "Freshers" split, mutated and came apart, contracting and wincing into tiny little bubbles. As always, I am a loose particle, not attached to any particular bubble for too long, petrified of getting blown into the dirt. As always, I am excluded. People might not even realise it's happening.
I'm fairly confident I could commit a quiet little suicide in my room and go unnoticed for some time. I'd put the bin out so the scout would know not to open the door. It needn't even be locked from the inside. I disappear readily all the time. Done it since I was about 13. At 13 at school I would slip out at breaktimes and lunchtimes. I couldn't face people and what's more, it didn't seem like people could face me. Eventually a teacher in his infinite concern threatened me with suspension for my deliberate flouting of school rules; I called his bluff and dared him to knowing I was the smartest kid in that shithole, and the next day I was presented with a laminated card that would permit me to leave the building at my discretion.
I think things are getting worse. I'm slipping further and further under. I'm perfectly lucid at the moment; I am getting very good at faking lucidity, though; sometimes I believe myself. Every little rejection is a shove. Every impromptu picnic for which I am overlooked, every dinner party in my own kitchen where there isn't room to seat me, every well-organised trip to some little island with my entire flat + six acquaintances that I'm not invited to either. In my last relationship I was perpetually overlooked. Plans were cancelled all the time, around me, no matter whether I'd cleared days out of my schedule to attend them. For example, I was asked not to come to a trip I'd been invited to so it could be spent with one friend he hadn't seen in ages. Then, later, in term time such an event repeated itself all over again, this time for a friend he sees every goddamn day. Then eventually we broke up. And he went again, afterwards. Later, some girl breaks my camera. I can scarcely afford food, but it's an accident; her right to break my camera, to my ex, is more significant than my right to having one.
Everyone matters more than me. This is the message life screams at me. I can be on the verge of killing myself but whether someone has 'a good time' at the bop matters more than whether I make it through the night in one piece. I can't remember the last time I had fun at a bop, or a house party, or a club night; the fun, if experienced to any degree, is almost always overshadowed by a crippling self-hatred come 1 in the morning. I think I have anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure from those life events normally considered pleasurable. Pleasure, to me, is more like intellectual appreciation. I can take in that a film or a book or a song is 'good', but it must be good on purely artistic terms. My tolerance for guilty pleasures is waning.
Of course, why should I matter? I realise that I'm talentless. I haven't cultivated any useful trade skills and at the only level at which I could be happy to exist (the top) I am assuredly not good enough. I won't win any poetry prizes no doubt because I am simply not as good as the competition. I probably will never get anything published because I am probably more rubbish than I realise. I thought a job application lately was successful, but now the Personnel person is taking their time in getting back to me and it becomes apparent that my defect of character has shown through. Oh, but I fake being real so well! Don't I? I smile at the right cues, I am polite and courteous, I can even convince people that I find their jokes funny, that my words haven't been processed by some faculty short of the soul, that we have some sort of human connection. Perhaps this makes me a psychopath. But no! Psychopaths get away with it better. I am just humanfail.
I do have feelings. (This, I can vouch, is probably the strongest evidence that I am not a psychopath.) They are just very, very minimal. To others, at least.
No future,
No hope,
No love,
No joy,
No reason.
Friday, 26 March 2010
Coup d'etat
They tell me I'm a blood stain;
A leper retched upon the earth;
Toxins drip within the brain,
Deciding what I'm really worth.
And though I cannot yet believe
What others know as 'simple facts',
I trust my powers to perceive
Reliefs in all those things I lack.
The world confirms it every day,
In every thought that goes unspoken.
And every passing word or phrase,
Stirs new fears of being broken.
For every act I never make,
Can live forever in remorse.
And every choice I do not take,
Takes my life apart by force.
Why do I try to read men's minds,
And scan along the smallest gestures?
Why invent the science of mankind,
To justify my every posture?
I play "So Unsexy" for inspiration,
Shuffling through the tracks on iTunes.
Alanis induces exasperation,
And quatrains never seem to bloom.
Force yourself outside of ease,
(-- Oh can I lose a stone or two?)
Inventory all you please
(-- Yet nothing does like couplets do.)
How uneven are these lines
(They drag and drag and drag and drag)?
How many revisions, how many times
Before they cease to zig, and zag?
I cannot help but shatter glass,
In ever surface I offend;
By fist or by my own impasse,
I bleed and see my own pretence
Has fallen; to be ignominious,
For blogging pain or misery,
Is the only kind of eminence,
I might ever hope to still achieve.
Bad lines and bad rhymes all,
Every single one of them!
Give it up and gain the gall
To say you tried and failed (again).
Must a face be quite so grim?
I can only offer pity.
Do you have no brain within,
To make a little ditty
That might alleviate your pain?
No? Here you go, put it down.
Don't bother revising this again.
Just lake, pockets, water: drown
Away your every care,
In blood or booze, I care not which.
Don't make me listen, do you dare
Suffer the ears enduring this?
Bad poet, bad, you bad bad boy!
You're not anyone. Bully, moi?
But I am you, and you annoy:
Enjoy your inner coup d'etat!
Give it up, give it up!
Take your face, and bleed away
Just do not spill another cup
Of blood upon the rug today.
You're just a stain, a stain you hear?
A stain I cannot yet abide.
So shun the inner voice; I could not bear
Should either man remain alive.
Your inner poet? He is nought
But pretension entertained too long.
Consider how much time you've fraught,
For words that always come out wrong?
Have you found a mode of discourse?
(Which voice am I? Why, I'm the third.)
Have you Earth and brain divorced;
Do you still search for rhyming words?
Put away whichever words remind
You of the year or date,
A poet never permits time
To burden art with undue weight.
I thought you hated all those frauds,
Who slipped in modern-sounding things?
Could you live through to applaud
The rhyming Gmail.../fail/ure ring
Of a poet whose inner hunt for sounds
Is dominated by all things mundane?
Do you dare to write aloud?
Do you dare to write again?
I, the Third, have taken over.
I'm the only poet in this head.
Busy yourself, read Behn's Rover,
Your career's already dead.
You do not have a face for photos,
Nor have you e'en a pen for books.
Your verse is just as full of woe,
As your saggy body always looks.
'BDD'? bipolar 2, 'NOS'?
Why acronymise my complaints?
You're just a failure; eternal rest,
I hurriedly prescribe you take.
You've pushed companions far away,
No friend remains, not a lover.
Do you expect your brain to tolerate
While you conjure yet another
Awful word or awful sadness?
I cannot bear you either, boy.
One, Two? It's time to test
Whether you are yet for joy.
Test over; your results are here.
I sentence you to death (again),
Why haven't you yet disappeared?
Accept my sentence. Do not remain!
Fine. Burden me, the poet, too.
But your ugly face, it will not do.
I request a handsome muse,
Whose visage I might abuse
To conjure up a rhyme or two
With which I might escape the blues
Granted by cohabiting with you
Inside this coffin, this chew-
ing mass of leprosy.
Can I cast him off to see?
You've broke it! You've broken everything,
No metre, no rhyme, quatrains all unstrung,
Just when I think I'm on the thing,
The form is changing; I'm undone!
Is this the compromise we've reached?
(Yes, I hear the my victim say.)
Is this the lesson that you teach?
(You'll never mock another day.)
If to oblivion I must recede,
Then you, Third voice, I take too
Let us drop into the bleed
Between our different forms; I'm due
Escape from this, the world
(Repeat that word!) I said I'm due!
I'm sick of failing at the word;
To the worldly word, let's bid adieux.
A leper retched upon the earth;
Toxins drip within the brain,
Deciding what I'm really worth.
And though I cannot yet believe
What others know as 'simple facts',
I trust my powers to perceive
Reliefs in all those things I lack.
The world confirms it every day,
In every thought that goes unspoken.
And every passing word or phrase,
Stirs new fears of being broken.
For every act I never make,
Can live forever in remorse.
And every choice I do not take,
Takes my life apart by force.
Why do I try to read men's minds,
And scan along the smallest gestures?
Why invent the science of mankind,
To justify my every posture?
I play "So Unsexy" for inspiration,
Shuffling through the tracks on iTunes.
Alanis induces exasperation,
And quatrains never seem to bloom.
Force yourself outside of ease,
(-- Oh can I lose a stone or two?)
Inventory all you please
(-- Yet nothing does like couplets do.)
How uneven are these lines
(They drag and drag and drag and drag)?
How many revisions, how many times
Before they cease to zig, and zag?
I cannot help but shatter glass,
In ever surface I offend;
By fist or by my own impasse,
I bleed and see my own pretence
Has fallen; to be ignominious,
For blogging pain or misery,
Is the only kind of eminence,
I might ever hope to still achieve.
Bad lines and bad rhymes all,
Every single one of them!
Give it up and gain the gall
To say you tried and failed (again).
Must a face be quite so grim?
I can only offer pity.
Do you have no brain within,
To make a little ditty
That might alleviate your pain?
No? Here you go, put it down.
Don't bother revising this again.
Just lake, pockets, water: drown
Away your every care,
In blood or booze, I care not which.
Don't make me listen, do you dare
Suffer the ears enduring this?
Bad poet, bad, you bad bad boy!
You're not anyone. Bully, moi?
But I am you, and you annoy:
Enjoy your inner coup d'etat!
Give it up, give it up!
Take your face, and bleed away
Just do not spill another cup
Of blood upon the rug today.
You're just a stain, a stain you hear?
A stain I cannot yet abide.
So shun the inner voice; I could not bear
Should either man remain alive.
Your inner poet? He is nought
But pretension entertained too long.
Consider how much time you've fraught,
For words that always come out wrong?
Have you found a mode of discourse?
(Which voice am I? Why, I'm the third.)
Have you Earth and brain divorced;
Do you still search for rhyming words?
Put away whichever words remind
You of the year or date,
A poet never permits time
To burden art with undue weight.
I thought you hated all those frauds,
Who slipped in modern-sounding things?
Could you live through to applaud
The rhyming Gmail.../fail/ure ring
Of a poet whose inner hunt for sounds
Is dominated by all things mundane?
Do you dare to write aloud?
Do you dare to write again?
I, the Third, have taken over.
I'm the only poet in this head.
Busy yourself, read Behn's Rover,
Your career's already dead.
You do not have a face for photos,
Nor have you e'en a pen for books.
Your verse is just as full of woe,
As your saggy body always looks.
'BDD'? bipolar 2, 'NOS'?
Why acronymise my complaints?
You're just a failure; eternal rest,
I hurriedly prescribe you take.
You've pushed companions far away,
No friend remains, not a lover.
Do you expect your brain to tolerate
While you conjure yet another
Awful word or awful sadness?
I cannot bear you either, boy.
One, Two? It's time to test
Whether you are yet for joy.
Test over; your results are here.
I sentence you to death (again),
Why haven't you yet disappeared?
Accept my sentence. Do not remain!
Fine. Burden me, the poet, too.
But your ugly face, it will not do.
I request a handsome muse,
Whose visage I might abuse
To conjure up a rhyme or two
With which I might escape the blues
Granted by cohabiting with you
Inside this coffin, this chew-
ing mass of leprosy.
Can I cast him off to see?
You've broke it! You've broken everything,
No metre, no rhyme, quatrains all unstrung,
Just when I think I'm on the thing,
The form is changing; I'm undone!
Is this the compromise we've reached?
(Yes, I hear the my victim say.)
Is this the lesson that you teach?
(You'll never mock another day.)
If to oblivion I must recede,
Then you, Third voice, I take too
Let us drop into the bleed
Between our different forms; I'm due
Escape from this, the world
(Repeat that word!) I said I'm due!
I'm sick of failing at the word;
To the worldly word, let's bid adieux.
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