Denise

By Paul D Robertson

Pastels, 80 x 55 cms.

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I do dig her purple towel...

Social Mechanics..?

I’ve never been able to understand social mechanics. It seems that people will have an intense dislike for me and I can never work out why. I slip through the fabric of the social menagerie and seem to offend people every step I take. I am not cruel or vindictive. I don’t have that in my nature. I guess it might be that I get angry and lose my temper and wax lyrical in the face of stupidity, but I don’t do that very often. It remains an eternal mystery to me. People float in and out, sometimes they’re cruel, sometimes flippant, but always enigmatic, and I feel like I have (of course) a scream in my throat at the absoluteness of the lack of communication. We’re all fucked up, some of us have been crippled by life’s great turning wheels, and yet there is no solidarity. Someone will ask me a question and I feel like beginning my sentence by explaining that they might not be able to hear me because of the pane of glass between us; the separation of experience and memory and the inadequacy of the tools that we have for communicating with each other.
I don’t get it, I never have. Most people only exist for me as a collection of unexplained actions that happened to occur within my field of vision. And yet I am DESPERATE to communicate. It seems like my every action is driven by the need to explain, the need to bridge the loneliness and by so doing stifle the despair. Is that in itself an offensive thing? What is it about me that I need to change?
It exists everywhere in equal proportions, like a great stinking miasma, a universal audience of apathy and miscommunication spreading out across the planet. There is a world – consciousness, or at least world hegemony, and that is that we are universally alone.
Existing through books is not enough. I guess I’ve always known that. C.S. Lewis said that we read to know that we’re not alone. But it doesn’t really work like that; we read and find that we think or feel along similar lines to another person, yes, and so we are relieved. But this is a person that we will probably never meet, and certainly if we did we would be unlikely to be able to communicate with them at all, let alone on the level that they had communicated with us. It’s one way. I think that that’s why I am always giving my books to other people, - it touched me, can it touch you too? Are we alike? In this, if in nothing else?
I have this thing where I feel like my every action is unconditionally controlled. Not in the sense that I have absolute control, more that I MUST maintain it. It feels like my hands will fly up of their own accord, scattering everything in their flight, or that my legs will kick out by themselves in the middle of a conversation with someone. Or sometimes like I must rigidly control the muscles in my face so as not to let them slip into what it feels like they naturally desire to do. If I let my masque slip, there will be a twitching grimace that will assert itself in a spasm that will gain control of my face, and once this process starts, by the simple slackening of my tight control I will unleash something that I am unable to regain. Something horrible will get free of me and I will be a gibbering mass of uncontrollable sibilance and jerking palsy. My limbs feel as though they are over-full of blood, my body transfers a feature of each sense to me in Technicolor extremes. I feel that I must move quickly, else I will be trapped in my body by hysterical convulsions. People seem to me to be moving in slow motion and talking in riddles, though that in itself is nothing new.
No, not anything new at all.