Sketching Mad VII and VIII (final of history rants.)
Pastels before I had worked out how far I could take them, or perhaps was capable of doing so. Another version of the sketch two pages previous.
The voices only a small fright. Only a little. Had already inherited my
father’s scepticism as he turned the world from a vast mystery into
smaller and smaller pieces of information with careful and brilliant clarity
for his only son and his only daughter. Pieces a brilliant young girl
and a quick strange and solemn boy could understand.
They spoke to me. They told me I was an angel. Had been an atheist since
I was ten. Didn’t understand until then completely what that meant,
but I knew of God and I knew of my father’s clever careful words.
Knew he did not believe in angels. Like boys, mad or sane, across the
seething swarming teeming planet, for those with fathers who even began
to try to succeed in the immeasurable task of raising a man – a
father is a god. In this my father safeguarded me and saved me perhaps
from being immediately branded and subsequently tortured by the psychiatric
profession. His dispassion – operating on the cat on the kitchen
bench “You see these things, Paul, we have them inside us also.
They are the machines that make us live.”
Talked to the voices when I was alone, but knew somewhere that they were
me. They made little sense. I ignored them.
They returned every few years, ringing louder discordant and shouting
as I began to drown in the verdant misshapen growths of self-hatred wrapping
my heart. Never lent credence to what they say, tactile hallucinations
far more distressing than disbelief and rationale reasoning poor in the
compulsion of trust in my own touch. Hard to walk when your sense of touch
is screaming to you that you knees are bending 90 degrees the wrong way.
Have hallucinated since 12 or 11, most craven raving suffering madmen
I have known who have consistent hallucinations have a great deal cringe
wish distress with delusion. Paranoia fills every space in their lives
crippling fear. My worst experiences in anxiety a nameless and reasonless
monster in every sense in the most true most ancient most real fucking
TERRIFYING and inescapable horror. I will choose pain over fear. Always.
Never could believe never became paranoid hallucinations pure and not
building into unreason I AM NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO BE HUNTED AND OBSERVED.
They whispered in my ears and I listened. They kept me awake and sometimes it would sound exactly as if dogs were barking by my ear, and my name hissed over and over to me as I began to doubt. Never acquiesced never ever gave in and began to believe in the hardness of breathy hallucination only that I was worth nothing a fever of trickery swimming through think stinking mud holding pain like it’s a gun or a talisman or a glyph.
All of this mass mutilation of reality hit my senses one by one blow upon blow the shitty student house I was in was stripped away. Happened quickly, I know that is true, but it felt slow
All this a swamp a
stamp a landfall a whirlpool the ground giving way fall the fall the FALL
the most real vertigo. The moments all of it blazed branded into my brain.
And then black and it just went on and on there was no respite no total
separation no coma of numbness the cancer of self hatred eating growing
through every break and twist in the real. The dark inside stretching
forever into the distance and I was blind with fear I knew that any more
and any longer I would never come back.
Nothing within that mass swinging tumult could take me away from the pain
of the moment that I was in THERE WAS NO RESPITE immolation the only constant
pain loathing purified rarefied.
It was mixed state in extremis I could feel it crashing into abjection
sobbing before whirling and flying back up and this was where fear began
and slowly took over. I accelerated into full mania knew that was where
I was going but as I raced into it my memory stopped. Five or ten or twenty
minutes later I came falling down and everything in the room in the house
was smashed I had no MEMORY from each. New cuts my wrists ripped open
blood pouring from them and from the opened veins in my elbows.
It KEPT GOING. I couldn’t stop had let Cerberus from the leash and
all three heads were nuzzling my brain. Up into a blackout pure and down
into despair and desperation and for the first time mortal fear, terror
of death at the hands of me as memory-less puppet, the mannequin marionette
unknown. Not my hands, someone and something else another me trying to
kill me.
This is when I knew terror. I knew that if I did not stop I would do it.
Never come down cut my throat but get it RIGHT. I didn’t know what
I WAS as I went up into it. A rotation at intervals of twenty minutes
fear crossing my heart squirming in my gut white pale with it went to
look in the mirror face covered in blood I could see in the broken shards.
No memory, just the knowledge that I wanted to die and was capable of
doing it. No understanding of whom I was or what I would do.
Clarity slipped a tiny splinter but pure and real and I found the phone and went back to hospital. Voluntary and afraid.
That was the last
time only in the sense of the completion of its extremity. It took me
four more years before I stopped drinking and finally tried in my heart’s
core in my heart of hearts to heal.
But that was the key. The epiphany. The Answer; that there really was
none.
Whatever redemption I have found it is driven by that fear and that terrible
knowledge. And by will. By WILL.
I will never give up the responsibility of sanity is MINE as much as I
can choose I will choose will force it shredding strength as it returns
and returns and returns, exhausting inevitable, seasons of pain I will
NEVER stop fighting.
At the edge, at the corner of Nietzsche’s Abyss, there is only really death.
Post script.
Still here. Sober
for eight years. Paint for pain, write for release. Sing for absolution.
To me there is no meaning to life other than that which we give it; that
we apply to it. We INVEST meaning into our lives with our time, with our
efforts and with our love. And there is no succour in madness.
I
have inscribed on my cigarette case “tempus fugit. Memento mori.”
“Time flies. Remember you will die.”
OR
Self portraiture the final indulgence, honest in its incomplteness if nothing else.