I’m paddling again.
Apart from the warm little rock pools, the water is freezing. I can feel the huge flexing muscle of the sea. I feel nuzzled and indulged, dabbed and stroked by the dark archaic energy humming through my body.
It’s so black this water, so real and surreal at the same time. Then, in sudden lurches, like flashlights in the dark - the massive vaulting sky.
The sky does not know me like the sea, it just doesn’t care.
The sea understands everything and says its okay, always and forever.
There’s the noise too, all that water, the roar of Neptune and his fluid dynamics.
The incessant sizzle of the great voice.
You hear the great voice in all true wilderness areas, but it’s in a dying language that you can never translate into banal human terms, even the poets know their limits and those that don’t go insane.
What is this shit. Why have I been left here, isolated and alone? Is it cultural, financial, familial?
Basically yes to all of the above. Plus, I admit, I have to shoulder the blame somewhat for my inability to ‘fit in’, to be a productive member of my society.
School was…okay, I’ll come to that later maybe.
I’d rather keep that repressed at the moment.
I have psychoanalysed myself at great length over the years; I have coached myself, paid exorbitant fees from my admittedly bottomless existential account.
I have a Gold card for this account believe me.
I’m always withdrawing, throwing the cash around, being exceptionally generous to myself and heaping great wads of angst on any poor bastard who will listen.
This is the question, why don’t more people investigate it? I mean seriously investigate it: trawl the soggy seabed of their souls - of the collective soul - scrape the Mariana’s Trench of social perversity and have a long hard, deep look at life in the raw, hideously objectified and naked.
Bit too painful for most folks I guess…and me too.
We’re all locked inside our little egotistical submarines bumping around in this ocean of uncertainties called reality. Furnishing our interiors with as much ‘stuff’ as we can handle – or bear to look at, at any one time.
The other stuff, the moth eaten cardigans, the paint splattered jeans, the nylon Y-fronts, we hide away in the cupboards and draws.
We’re hoarders, gleaners, vultures and hyenas. We have a damn good shot at butterfly collecting. But our butterflies are counterfeit more often than not. To be human is to acquire stuff, and most of the stuff we acquire is other people’s cast offs, their jaded fashions and polyester ideas. All the old, borrowed and blue.
The only time we escape the submarine is when we die.
The pressure of life with its depths and currents erode and finally crush the thin shell of our understanding. We watch passively as the first cracks appear, and then attempt to seal the wounds with the cheapest, most readily available gunk that comes to hand: shopping, sex, drugs and alcohol.
But most of the time we just hope our vessel is well made and we maintain it as best we can.
Sometimes though I think the vessel just falls away, like shedding an old skin. We’re suddenly exposed to the freezing waters, reality floods in and the lights go out.
Here I am lost and alone in the water. Real water now.
Fuck its cold. The ‘Great work’ as the alchemists call it: the experiment to create a work of art of one’s life, to transcend the ego - has encountered certain problems.
Admittedly, these were foreseeable problems, but my foresight has been one of my most neglected faculties for a while now.
Hence my current predicament of feeling like shit and treading water in the Big Bad North Sea.
Here it comes, another black roller, lifting me and shunting me further out into the abyss. The brilliant fruit of the sun is being sliced to oblivion by the black knife of ocean. Day is peeling away again.
I’m numb now. Hypothermia? What are the symptoms?
Genuinely not caring about me anymore? Actually welcoming death? Or rather being unafraid of death and letting that ‘old friend’ cliché wash over me like the sea.
Not really sure if I’m hot or cold now.
I wonder briefly if my core body temperature is having some kind of last ditch microwave moment: the dying of a star. Going nova I will burst into death and illuminate the world with an unseen flash of radiation.
I’m such a narcissist, even when I’m dying, the facts of my death are important to me.
I’ve researched all the stuff on suicide; I’ve ruminated and cogitated at length. I’m just a wounded animal at heart - a very predictable wounded animal…I lash out and mistrust everything.
Time to throw in the towel methinks; give up the ghost; kick the bucket; reap what thou sows.
But the nagging doubt.
That long semester spent studying the human body, the biological psychology of man. The central nervous system, the rods and cones of the eye, axon’s, dendrites, sodium gates opening and closing, the peculiarities of the visual cortex, DNA, split brain research, kinaesthesia.
I know I’m a machine, but that’s exactly the problem – but not in the way you might think.
I’m starting to feel warm now, funnily enough.
I guess this would be termed a very bad thing according to the medicine men: the initial euphoric glow, the burst of dopamine as the brain begins closing down before death.
I’m quite looking forward to the past life flashback and the white tunnel – I spent a wad of cash on all those books, now its payback time.
If you’re not going to provide ‘The Classic’ experience, then please God, can I at least have some kind of divine intervention…what about a guardian angel? A UFO?
Shit I’m bottling out, STOP IT!
Definitely feel like I’m in the bath now, its rather fun actually. I feel really cosy and snug.
I do enjoy a hot bath, and one of the few consolations I have had in life - no matter what utter bollocking mess I’ve got myself into, regardless of all the shit jobs, sublime toss pots, crazed females I have had to endure in my ‘normal life’ - the bath tub has always been my philosophical refuge, my steamy academy of metaphysical repose.
Some writer once said on ‘The South Bank show’ with Melvyn Bragg (that means its supposed to have gravitas), how they always experienced vivid, psychedelic style dreams when sleeping near a large body of water - something to do with lunar gravity, tidal pulls and the high water content in the human body.
Hmmm maybe.
Funny, but talking of water…I always needed a bath to sluice off the crap of the day. I mean psychological as well as physical. It’s like polishing a stone, or bleaching the bog, heaving the cooker out and scraping up that last blackened chip that evaded the fryer.
There’s something immensely satisfying in doing these things for me. I’m absolutely sure its not OCD, just me ordering my mind by ordering my little space’s.
I know where all my shit is, no loose ends, no niggling little pebbles in the shoe of my consciousness. Just lace up and go, keep walking in smooth confident (appearing) strides.
I’ve tripped and stumbled a few times, arse over tit. Slid like a nipper on the ice of other’s words and ways. But it was a set-up job from the start of course, it always was for me.
Just a little longer now…stop moving…numb…goodbye all…aaaaah.
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