Foreword
These are the hardest things I've ever had to publish together in my life. I may be, even so, in the grip of terrifying narcissism. If this is the case ... well ... just as easily do I damn myself, as succeed in making the situation better.
You, gentle readers, will be the ultimate judges of this.
And if you believe me to be narcissistic, then I beg of you ... do inform me.
I don't believe in sacrificial love for others quite dear to me, and yet lately it seems to be the only thing I do.
I am unable in the privacy of my own relationship to do anything about it, any more.
And it now needs sorting, before it gets too late. If publicly isn't the only way, then do let me know I am mistaken.
I have tried for many years - through counselling processes, both separately and together. Lately, not so much. But some years ago, quite a run.
I love my Half Orange very very much, and there is nothing better I'd like to do than to make us a Whole Orange again.
So if any of you reading this who know me personally, or who find yourselves observing gently and simply at a distance, feel you can help me in some way to do this, and support me in my attempt to achieve the objective I yearn so much to reach, please do in turn reach out to me. You can find me on Twitter at @zebrared (other places too), on Facebook at facebook.com/lifeworklab or at lifeworklab.uk. Via any of the above, you'll be able to find some way of getting in touch - if, that is, you are of a mind to help out.
I also hope all connected, one day, find it in themselves to understand the nature and depth of the sadness and loneliness which slip through the cracks of our souls - certainly through my soul anyway - and have led me to putting the posts you see before you, together in one place on this web we sometimes fail to use as we should.
I sincerely would wish that the latter is not the case today.
Part 1: Family
Once upon a time (in time-honoured way), there lived a young boy and his family.
The family lived across - and had already drunk greedily from - many cultures, expectations and failures.
Although God lived in the soul of one parent and science in the brain of the other, in both lived the goodness of doing what was right, whatever that might be - even when one's heart really wasn't up to it.
There seemed to be more virtue and rightness about doing what was right when doing what was right felt the hardest thing to do, than when doing what was right was the easiest of ways forwards.
The family was forged of Mediterranean unconditionality alongside northern Socialist succour - a powerful mixture of contrasting methods whose results in both cases aimed at societal cohesion, both within and without, both internal to and external of.
Society, quite naturally, was important - was key - for such a family. In this sense, the society all children are taught as children to value - kindness, gentleness, looking out for others ... all that stuff and damn-fool jazz - was how this family was made, and wonderfully shaped. The society - at least as explained in those childlike promises some of us carry with such yearning - faithfully matched the nature of that family I'm describing; the nature of what had striven so much to continue to be a microcosm of a wider set of promises, a wider social contract.
But what's equally clear is that as we climb towards societal success, we must leave that set of promises - that set of premises, even! - well behind anything we once planned to be.
The families we build, out of the societies we have consented to, are designed from the very beginning to thrust out anyone who looks to success. The family here is a kind of reverse-cuckoo: "You really want to be happy?" it asks. "Remember all those nice embraceable-me things you learned to value as a kid? All lies!!!"
And so it is that this reverse-cuckoo demands that anyone who believes they want to be happy - and in exchange for the only success grown-up society/family cares to recognise - must leave society in order to be happy in the same!
An impossible compact; a trick, were it ever consummated, of magical brilliance.
Translate what could have happened to the specific family under discussion - a family which may or may not always have wanted to destroy itself - to a wider, broader set of human relationships, and we have an environment so full of self-hatred and loathing that it's hardly surprising so many people are sad these days.
Our society is telling its offspring all the time: "You want to be happy? Leave everything social behind you! Forget everything essentially embraceable now.
"Clamber up that pyramid, dear worker ... you have only your bonds of humanity to lose!"
It's sad, so sad, that the family which is all our society doesn't have sufficient confidence or pride in itself to believe success can be properly built on foundations of childlike premise.
Yet not all families, not all microcosms of that society, allow themselves to give in without a fight.
Of the six people in that picture you see, none has fully climbed the pyramid so far that they must feel, on their shoulders of work at least, the gnawing daily wit of a rather cruel universe. The only one who may be this unlucky is taking the photograph, out of the family frame.
And even in this one case, their humanity remains intact.
I should know.
For it's my family we see.
Perhaps then, even now, there is hope out there for us all - and if not for us all, at least for those deserving souls, brains and hearts which make up the braver of anatomies amongst us.
The family that wanted so badly to fit in, that was being forced - like so many others - to want to destroy the very socialness which otherwise would preserve its grandeur, has overcome with a persistence of vision and determination all the efforts and blandishments of modern society to make it give way, to make it forget what truly leads us forwards: that particular ability of our species, when given half a chance, not to choose to treasure what is easy but, instead, to choose to value what demands of us most our humanity.
Love over money, every damn time.
The society which always wanted to destroy itself? Maybe so. Maybe on that road, we're well on our way. But not the family. Not all families. Not every one, anyway.
And if you still have the grace to want to embrace yours, don't let it thrust you out towards lonely success.
Remind it, above all, that what's lost is society itself.
Family, meanwhile, may still be pretty free. Keep it that way, will you? We need you more than ever.
Part 2: Life
I remember what happened in a curiously distracted manner. It's almost as if I’m choosing not to remember. Impossible not to remember, though.
Impossible to forget.
Three moments in my life. Three moments when the world seemed to collapse around me. Three moments when I would beg to differ. No. Not a wonderful life at all. But at the heart of the matter, there is this abiding truth: whether we differ or not with what life has in store for us, we have no alternative. We must fight.
So is this a story of battle? Is this a story of war? Is war an appropriate metaphor? Can life ever mean an entire absence of peace, ever limit itself to a cruel persistence of vision?
You see, I was brought up to believe in the story of good versus evil. I was brought up to believe in truth. My mother is a Catholic. My father is an atheist. They are both believers in their own very different – and yet oxymoron-like – ways. There was so much belief infusing my childhood, like a sharply-smoked tea of distant origin. I was a membrane of the basest kind. Osmosis was my learning curve, my education, my tool. I refused to ask questions – for the answers seemed so obvious.
"What do you mean?"
“Can’t you see?”
“Not again!”
“Yet another thing to do …”
So that’s why only the questions seemed hard. But then questions always are.
*
It was 1992. War had reached Croatia. I was living in Spain. The city of Burgos, in fact. A beautiful city. Running through its centre like a peppermint stripe through a stick of northern rock was the verdant rio Arlanzón. Its banks were cloaked in thick meadow grass, sprinkled and cut back regularly to ensure perfection where nature resisted.
Modern men and women strive so violently to tame what is beautiful, untamed.
Burgos is a place of hot summers coupled with cold evenings that, even in the middle of August, require one to wear a jumper. A hardy people, los burgaleses.
Over one winter to visit, I remember my brother observing that in Burgos young women wore not short skirts but – rather – long belts.
A determined people, in fact.
My wife had a shortwave Sony. And so it was that I could listen to the BBC news as I sat at home with our one year old son. I was bereft of any understanding, any useful comprehension, about what was happening in the country my mother came from. Yes. It’s very true. We forget the things that hurt us and remember only the good, but the good we remember doesn’t really affect us – it’s only the things that hurt us and cause us pain which ever really hit home in the end.
We think we are able to ignore them but at some point they will jump up like a mental cobra of the soul and frighten us – as they surely should.
(Even a wonderful life is like that and, as I have already pointed out, mine has not been a wonderful life.)
And so it was that I was frightened. I am sorry to say, as I listened to the news, to the abandonment by the West of small countries which – a priori – should’ve known better (small countries which had no oil or other natural resources worth fighting over or defending), that I cried in the presence of our son on more than one occasion. He would not know why I am sure. Or perhaps he would. He now wants to work for the diplomatic service. Perhaps, in some small way, the injustices of that time have informed his understanding of the world.
Perhaps, in some small way, everything that goes around does indeed come around.
Perhaps, in some small way, justice can be done. Even if it must never be seen to be done.
So he cried and I cried. He cried because he was a baby and I cried because I was a man. He cried because his body didn’t digest his food properly. I cried because I couldn’t digest the news properly. At the heart of the matter, it’s not the heart that counts. At the heart of the matter, it’s the head. It’s heads that are turned and heads that turn the heads of others. A smile that glances off one like a touch of frost on one’s breath. A smile from afar is a cold beast – matter-of-fact and to the point. It’s only in close-up that a smile warms us up. Then it’s the eyes, not the mouth.
Then it’s the head that counts.
I can count the ways I fell in love with you.
Not because they are finite but, rather, because they are innumerable.
I fell in love with my wife and we got married.
Then in our third year of marriage, just as war came to Croatia, just as I couldn’t stop crying in the presence of my son, she came home one day with a simple headache and a box of paracetamol.
I do remember walking back with her from her school that day. Funny, isn’t it? Perhaps, in truth, the secret to living life is knowing when a bad thought is actually one you need to hold onto. A thought you need to treasure. A thought you need to learn how to love, for – maybe – the Lord believes it of use.
It was a hot day. A sunny day. A Monday, I think, as the fishmonger’s was shut and in Spain – at least at the time (I don’t know now; it’s been a while you see and things change as time passes, they change so very much) – the local fishmonger’s was always shut on Mondays.
It was a strange headache. It kind of hurt round the back. She went to bed at midday. She never went to bed at midday. She never went to bed unless it was night. Midday was for dozing on the sofa, after lunch; after the 3 o’clock news. Midday was unheard of. That’s why I was frightened. I wonder – now – what our son was feeling at the time. Though still mainly unable to speak, he was also surely unable to entirely misunderstand what we were saying to each other. What we were doing to each other.
A strange headache it was. Round the back, round the neck, round and round in circles that tightened.
She was in hospital by late afternoon.
The diagnosis was severe. Bacterial meningitis. The severest form of all, in fact. It really did seem too much.
And now my memory of how it felt begins to fade. It’s affected me for sure. I’m convinced that it’s still deep down there, waiting to jump up and strike me when I least expect it to, when I least need it to; or, maybe, essentially, in my lapsed and only ever partially infused belief system, when the Lord feels it may be most useful for me.
What do I know?
Why should I care?
Tell me that, at least.
Life seems, quite insubstantially, to be a series of random events that generate fear and apprehension in small beings of little relevance. And we spend most of our time trying to shape these events, even as we cannot; we spend most of our time trying to achieve a certain relevance that we can only ever define in terms of what we ourselves – quite futilely – judge to be fine. What we ourselves judge to be wise. We determine the rules of the game so that we can achieve our goals. But – in the mad rush to achieve this relevance – we forget how navel-gazing being judge and jury can be. For that is all we are. Judge and jury. And that is nothing. There is no virtue at all in defining what defines us.
*
She survived of course – but only because she’d suffered meningitis on two previous occasions, and had, in time (though not plenty of time), been able to recognise the symptoms.
“Two previous occasions?” you ask.
Well, indeed. There must be more to the story than that. And, of course, there is. After a certain and stiff period of recovery and antibiotics, it was revealed that the runny nose she seemed perpetually afflicted with (the runny nose which meant she went through as many Kleenex a day as those gorgeously sexy cigarette packets of black tobacco that almost everyone of any, even feigned, relevance seemed to smoke in that decade) was actually the liquid that was supposed to protect her brain from knocks and bumps. She had a hole in her nasal cavity. Congenital, almost certainly. Deadly, without a doubt. A multitude of earlier x-rays had failed to show up what the modern technologies of magnetic resonance discovered. When the man at the clinic in Palencia gave us the results, he smiled sadly. It was such a sad smile.
I remember the sadness in the smile you see. Even as I say I remember only the good; but, if truth be told, as I recount the story, I also remember quite a lot of the bad.
I wondered, afterwards, on the journey back in the ambulance to Burgos, what that smile meant. I didn’t say anything to my wife.
What can you say?
The surgeon then said we’d need to do a biopsy.
Biopsy?
Why?
Don’t we do such things for cancers?
Just a test we were told.
Doctors sometimes do the sorts of things we ourselves choose to do.
Is that because they’re human too? Is that because they can’t help getting involved, even as they know they shouldn’t?
So I suppose you want to know what the result was. Well. No cancer, actually. The sad smile from the man in the clinic in Palencia meant nothing in the end. A trailing thread of brain cells that had hung down into my wife’s nasal cavity – probably all her life – was the route that infection had taken three times in her life. And the surgeon said the solution – yes, the solution – was a rather dramatic operation. He put it in simple terms. She could either ignore what had happened and wait for it to happen again. And for sure, sooner or later, it would happen again. Or she could decide to have the operation.
So it was that I encouraged her to have the operation. I have a general and overwhelming belief in high-technology medicine, though, as you may gather, I find it difficult to believe in God. Yet, the former requires one to put one’s life in another’s hands even as the latter makes no greater demands. Why do I believe so easily in the tools of God where believing in God Himself is so very, very hard?
But I am digressing.
“The operation?” you say.
Aparatoso is the Spanish word the surgeon used on at least one occasion. I suppose “complex” is the most appropriate translation. But the word aparatoso is also used to describe multiple pile-ups where no one gets hurt. Is that what an operation means? Is that what medicine is all about? Is medicine always a series of accidents waiting to happen? Or is medicine, actually, like so much of modern life, a question of apparently accidental wisdoms which actually reveal our greatness, our ability – in the face of insignificance – to soldier on into the future?
“The operation?” you repeat.
The operation? This is how the surgeon described it to us. It involved peeling back the skin from my wife’s forehead from under the hairline to avoid visible scarring, drilling a hole through the skull on the left-hand side to allow for access, glueing the congenital defect with something the surgeon described as approaching a medical form of bog-standard super glue, and then putting everything back together again, much as Humpty Dumpty might rescue a kingdom.
In that description we have the full horror and awful wonder of our ability to soldier on into the future.
We had to wait for two weeks as my wife recovered from the meningitis itself.
In the meantime, I would sit at home and look at my wife’s dainty slippers and remember what it was like when we first met; and remember the times we went out for drinks and the times we spent walking through a park and the coach journeys from Burgos to her hometown of Salamanca; and fighting with my mother-in-law and trying morcilla de Burgos for the first time and visiting friends in Navarra and the sound of the street in the early morning; and the time we holidayed in Croatia and the time we were rained out for two weeks in Llanes and the good friends I made and then later the good friends I lost. And if my son was about, I would not cry. And when my son was asleep, I would sob quite uncontrollably.
So we went ahead with the operation.
And the operation was successful.
And the patient survived.
It took six months for her hair to grow fully back. It took years for it to lose its initial spikiness.
*
Yes. Reading back on this, it seems I remember rather more of the horror than I expected. If the outcome had been different, perhaps I would have chosen to remember differently.
At the heart of the matter, it’s the head that counts.
*
Over the next decade, I tried to set up a training empire and failed, lost money which didn’t really belong to me – or, at least, wasn’t mine to lose – and made and lost some very good friends.
My wife lost her job too.
We had to retreat from Burgos to Salamanca. We lived there from 1999 to 2002. We retrained and decided to pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off. We were going to do so many important things. We were shaping events, giving them a form, creating content, writing a narrative.
We were doing what all human beings with a little time to waste try and do.
We were playing games.
We were children again.
It’s so much easier to be a child. Time doesn’t hang heavy as yet. Except in the sense that sometimes it’s too slow.
Not like being a grown-up. When you’re a grown-up, time simply flies past. The less you have, the faster it gets. Time is not exactly elastic. It doesn’t rebound. For at the end, it simply snaps.
But at the heart of the matter, it’s the head that counts. And just as we were on the point of setting up an online publishing company, my mother-in-law, the one I always fought with, the one I could blindly see no virtue in, the one whose own mother had accused me of stealing her granddaughter away, the one who was invincible, the one who intervened in every act and family decision, the one who cooked so well, so completely, so correctly, so inviolably, the one who worried so much, the one who consumed Aspirina (but only the branded version) in much the same way as some children eat chucherías … well, she intervened once more. She intervened in a way no one could ever have foreseen.
She died.
She took six months to die. In the meantime, of course, she had space and room to organise her affairs. She bought each of her children a new car. We continued to go out for meals. Towards the end, she sat in a wheelchair. She needed help to eat. She was losing control of her bodily functions. Her speech was getting slurred.
She still sat at the head of the table.
At the head of the table is where it counts.
But she didn’t count any more.
She didn’t even know she was dying.
The family decided not to tell her. The doctors concurred.
Till the end, she thought it was a cyst in her brain. Till the end, she was completely unaware of the implications. Till the end, invasive brain cancer was simply not on the cards. Thus it was that her family were unable to say goodbye. They didn’t say goodbye. They couldn’t. When they could, it was too late and she was incapable of understanding the words. I wonder, now, if my son didn’t understand more when Croatia went to war and I cried him to sleep and watched my wife’s slippers sitting emptily at the end of the bed.
So my wife’s mother (sounds better than mother-in-law, sounds kinder) died of brain cancer just as we were planning to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off.
My wife felt cheated. Years spent back in Salamanca had led her to the point of beginning to truly communicate with her mother. Things were on the point of being said; important things.
Not entirely generous things.
Now her mother was dying.
Now it was too late.
It wasn’t our decision not to say goodbye. Even that decision was taken out of our hands. Can you imagine what it is like to watch someone die for six months, to visit them every day, to perceive a daily deterioration – and never tell the truth? Can you imagine, at all, what living a lie for six months can be like? Everyone except the object of the lie knowing exactly where reality lies – and not saying. Not expressing their innermost feelings. And feeling that, in so doing, the right thing is being done.
I lost my mother-in-law and only saw the good things in her once the gaping hole that she left violently opened up behind her.
But then, as I have already pointed out, time – for her – had already snapped.
*
I thought I was going to be a great publisher. I studied with astonishing minds. Electronic publishing was on everyone’s lips. The future was ahead of me.
The future was ahead of us.
But, in time, the future also snapped.
It snapped for me and it snapped for my loved ones.
I have seen famous people describe a nervous breakdown. I shall not describe it here. It is too public a place and I am not very public a person. Or maybe I am but maybe this is no longer what I should do.
Suffice it to say that – once again – it was a fact that at the heart of the matter, at the centre of my soul, it was a head that broke down and brought me to the edge of despair. Despair is not always clearly so – and thus, here, it was to be the case. Perhaps the essence of a nervous breakdown actually lies in our inability to obviously perceive it. The world takes on a different flavour – but that flavour seems so real and absolutely tangible.
My breakdown involved me writing about Iraq and its lead-up. As I did this, I prepared my own internal battle of wills. I prepared my own killing-field.
Every morning I wrote. Every afternoon I posted. I was an early convert to the virtues of an interconnected world.
I believed the politicians when they said we had to make a difference.
I believed in invading the sovereignty of dictatorship.
How could I believe otherwise after the lessons of the Balkans? How could I believe otherwise after my beloved Croatia’s experience?
Coherence, above all.
Coherence is an evil thing. Coherence is anti-human. Coherence is an excuse not to follow a new idea. Coherence is a bond that ties us down to previous stupidities. Damn the coherent man or woman. Damn the coherent instinct in us all.
So what saved me? After all this, which, in fact, is nothing out of the ordinary, what served to rescue my soul?
At the heart of the matter lies my head. Our heads, our thoughts, are sword blades we balance tenderly on. They can serve to strike us down or reveal us; they can serve to hurt us or save us.
They can serve to attack us or defend us.
They are what makes us different from everything else.
Part 3: Death Remembered (x 4)
In February 2002, just as my wife and I were working to set up an online publishing company, my Spanish mother-in-law fell ill with a brain cancer. She never knew, right to the end, that it was cancer she had; the family kept it from her, but the toll it took on her in those six months was something I never want to have to witness again.
Never mind suffer myself.
She died in July of the same year.
In the summer of 2003, as a result of my own progressive mental ill-health and after many months of quite frightening psychosis, I was encouraged to spend a month in hospital in England to recover a semblance of normality. This I agreed to; and, very quickly, this I did. So quickly that after finally being discharged, I started to work twenty hours a week in a hamburger restaurant. And this, after my social worker had informed me that for many months I would only be able to do a maximum of two hours voluntary work a week. If that.
In some way, however, I felt my serious ill-health was a penance for not having got along with my mother-in-law from the very beginning. Her mother, from the start, had said I had arrived from abroad to steal her granddaughter from under the family's noses. There was, therefore, misunderstanding on both sides. But I should’ve been more generous, myself. I knew what cross-cultural families were like; I had lived in one all my life.
So this was probably the first time dreadful illness crossed my path (excepting perhaps when I was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of ten. But that was kind of small beer – after all, my GP at the time said for me to not make such a fuss, as he pointed out that if it were flu, no one would be complaining).
Anyhow. I narrate the whole sad story of my mother-in-law’s death, as well as my own fall from grace (and all with a few background add-ons), over at my blog 21st Century Fix. The story in question was published in a charity book I helped to get off the ground in my previous employment. It’s called "At the heart of the matter". You may find it of interest.
That, then, was Luisi summarily dispatched by the Big C. The next to go was my dearest Croatian aunt, Tuga. She was diagnosed with a different cancer – and ultimately, through the vibrant faith in God which permeated her whole life from those wartime bombs in the 40s to the awful crimes of the Communists to the terrible terrible civil conflict that the 90s brought to her beloved lands, managed to outlive her original death sentence by quite some time. I saw her a year or so before she finally left this world; she and I both knew we were saying goodbye, but equally we knew we would never forget each other.
And only a fortnight ago now, my Spanish father-in-law, Pedro, went the same way through a combination of two cancers – one suffered for more than a decade; the other, cruelly creeping up on him and in the end joining painful forces in a body-deforming and horrifying haemorrhage. Body-deforming to such an extent that my wife, who succeeded in flying in just before he died, thought she had gone into the wrong hospital room when she first saw him.
So there I thought it would just sit, you know. There I thought it would just lie.
Except that a few days ago from a dear dear editor friend who I knew from the best bit of 2002 – that publishing internship I was privileged to enjoy in a Spanish university’s publishing house – I received, via heart-stopping email, a final jolt to my system and sense of equanimity. One of my classmates from the Publishing Master I studied in Madrid in 2001, and who had found employment in the same university, had previously suffered a sequence of botched operations for another case of brain cancer. Botched operations which he nevertheless survived. Well. To add universal insult to gross injury, it was now the turn of a second member of the same publishing house to be diagnosed in 2012 with yet another grim brain cancer. (Not long, in fact, after his son was diagnosed with a lymphoma. But that is a story with a happier ending which I shall perhaps tell one day, when I know more of the details. Not everything is awful in cancer-land, I know. And it’s true that many do survive its reach. In the midst of my current sadness, I have to accept I must recognise that too. It’s only fair and reasonable to strive to be even-handed, even in such circumstances.)
And so it was to be Paco’s final journey, borne with the grand inner strength only a man of his beliefs could sustain. So it was that in reply to this heart-stopping email, this is what I wrote. Short, brief, a few words which cost me nothing; and yet, in their writing, cost me everything.
Kind of in his memory, in fact:
"Espero que estés bien. Acabo de intentar llamarte pero o no da señal, o da comunicando. Solo quería decirte que se ha hecho una misa donde las monjas aquí en Chester en nombre de Paco. Sé que no habría sido exactamente su elección, pero creo que también lo habría entendido. Todavía no me lo puedo creer: una persona tan suya, tan fuerte, tan capaz, con tantos conocimientos, con su habilidad técnica y humana, y con su saber estar – y ya no estará cuando pase la próxima vez por Ediciones. Un abrazo para todos, y en particular para su mujer y su hijo."
"I hope you are well. I've just tried to phone you but it either doesn’t ring or just says engaged. All I wanted to say to you was that a Mass has been said at the nuns here in Chester in Paco’s name. I know it wouldn’t have exactly been his choice, but I believe that he would also have understood it. I still can’t believe it: someone so very much his own man, so strong, so capable, with so much knowledge, with his technical prowess and his humanity, and with his ability to just be – and he won’t be there when I visit Ediciones the next time. A hug for everyone, and in particular for his wife and son."
Part 4: Narcissism, I fear (I)
I'll try and make this brief. I’m not good at brief. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor – or even, properly, the teacher I’ve earned money as being.
The only thing I’ve ever trained properly in is film, literature and publishing.
My Half Orange hurt me with the truth the other day. She said all the time we’d been married I’d never been successful at anything. That’s twenty-seven years and counting, you know. That brief enough for you? She doesn’t tweet – but she very well could.
She’s right, too.
Looking back at my life, I’ve never managed to make a permanent success of anything I aimed to put my hand to.
Nothing has stayed put; neither has anyone ever really approached me to say: "Well done!", and meaning it. Few people outside my immediate family trust my motives; my ways of seeing; my desire to get things done for everyone.
This world is not for me. I am not of this world. I don’t lack self-confidence in my skills, my approach; my desire to do good, to spread good, to strive to be good, to love.
I am open, honest; and I work hard to be sincere.
But people I want to work with rarely want to work with me.
People I want to be allowed to dearly love – outside my immediate family, that is – never seem to want to touch my soul in the way I yearn for.
So now …
Right now …
Imagine NO ONE can touch my soul. Imagine NO ONE could touch yours. Imagine how THAT would make you feel …
I was once imprisoned in a hospital for believing I was being followed.
Now we live in a world where practically everyone literally follows tons of other souls. And no one gets put into hospital.
I’m frozen; stuck; sad with my life, with the injustice of my past, with the weariness of my present. But the worst of it all is I have no one to touch my soul. And in a sense, though above I say otherwise, even in my immediate family my soul is not touched as I would wish.
I write stuff which no one reads but I need to write: and it’s a job and a half to get a member of family to do more than reluctantly listen to it being read out.
No chance at all of convincing them they should read it for themselves.
So am I bore in my middle-age? Was I always a bore? Am I that irritating oldish man who people meet at parties and avoid at the next? What to do? How to live? Where to live? Why …?
I do believe in myself; that’s the weirdest thing. I’ve never really lost faith in that. How could I have lasted so long with all my damn-fool wastrel projects, if some inner belief wasn’t still pursuing and constructing within my insides?
But other people never do. I assume other people see me as a threat; need to hurt me somehow so I don’t get that single opportunity to fly as everyone should.
Either that, or my mind is so unbeautiful I’ve no chance of dealing with the really ugly world as it stands; I’ve no way of convincing people that love might also be my right.
Does NO ONE want, then, to touch my soul – to meet me halfway instead of beat me half-dead?
I weep as I realise this may be true, after all. There is no pain so great as to be despised or hated – except the pain that comes of persistently succeeding in making people want to ignore you.
Yeah.
I do think I’m being followed – kind of unhappily too. So what? I’ve thousands of Twitter followers spread between four accounts; about a hundred on Facebook; about another hundred between various blogs I guess – including this one. Not all will be benign; not all will want the best for another.
On the other hand, many will simply be waiting to see hurt befall people – any people; not me in particular … know what I mean? See what I’m saying?
It’s just the way of the world I’m not able to become a part of. I don’t like hurting people nor seeing them get hurt.
And I love so very much being with people; and I love so very much giving them ideas. And I love so very very much the power of such freely exchanged ideas that … fuck it! The ideas the last year of my life has managed to lead up to – the ideas I was going to present to Google, and finally didn’t because they were judged not to be cutting the mustard … well, here they are to be shared with all and sundry.
And they may well be worth sharing, and they may very well be a pile of shit. But either way, whatever very well they are, they’re the very well that represents what I am.
And neither do I think at all they might be a pile of shit.
You don’t want to help me feed my family? You don’t need to see me happy? You can’t find it in yourself to touch my soul at all? (And even if the first and second are too unreasonably much to ask of anyone – as, indeed, fairly speaking, they may well be – the third for sure would allow me to sort out the former two for myself.)
I live in a world, then, where love is not mine – even to imagine.
The only thing I do finally comprehend is that no one WANTS to touch my soul.
Or, at least, the very least, that the one person I’d love to touch my soul in the way I need … well … simply finds themselves unable to do so.
I just want to be loved the way I’d love to be loved. A normal way; nothing special; the kind of things which involve touching and being touched. Body and soul, together in harmony. Touch my body, touch my soul, touch my being – if you can.
But not the way the person I most love finds themselves only capable of.
Lordy.
My goodness.
I really don’t know what to say.
If that’s my future, I’ll have no past.
Part 5: Narcissism, I fear (II)
Or A Letter To ... an unknown woman
I met you just a little over twenty-nine years ago. When you left me that summer, I wrote to you for a year. And as has always been your nation's habit, you preferred to phone more than write. Unfortunately, this was not the age of Skype. This was much more, still, and for quite a while to come, the age of a clickety-clack keyboard and the inkiness of type. So I continued with my long letters, and you replied with your occasional notes. To be fair, I was writing in my almost-first language. You, meanwhile, had to communicate through the veils of educated foreignness.
I battled on, deeply in love with a person I imagined I had been lucky enough to find. I was looking for worldly-wise and battle-weary. You smoked black tobacco, and wore little bows on your little black shoes; and so I saw knowingness and wisdom way beyond my times, my parochiality and what I felt (maybe undeservedly) were my fairly hard-fought experiences.
I visited your country the following year; stayed the summer; caught a bug; survived the bug in your tender care. We stayed awake, all one night, till the coming of wonderful dawn. We spoke of many things: about the world; about starting out on the journey of one's life; about the future - maybe, even, the future we might share. And so without really knowing what was happening there, there we were falling in love.
We got married fifteen months later, in studious and privileged chapel. Some customs confused me; other people resisted me; I was blamed for your freedoms, too - you know, stuff like choosing suddenly to drink skimmed instead of whole-cream milk, or eat brown bread instead of white. Daft stuff like that was my fault, they let it be known. Being different - becoming different - was clearly quite an infraction. But you didn't seem to mind; in reality, in retrospect, I think you saw me as your shield. You didn't exactly enjoy my discomfort; you did, however, enjoy your gentle liberations.
You so loved to hold my hand in public - and near the beginning, so did I. But then I saw how you were far more affectionate in public to myself - and everyone else - than you ever allowed yourself to be in private with me on my lonesome. And lonesome it became too. It hurt me, that did - to put on a show, you see, it seemed to me. That's what it seemed to me it was all about. A terrible tension. To your family, I was to be this fairly irascible soul. Meantime, to my family, you were this gorgeously, agreeably, affectionately rounded woman. All softness and kindness; all physically embracing truth; all that sincerely, fairly, justly emotional charm.
But the more private we were, the less you were able to embrace me. The more public we found ourselves, the more loveable you appeared to the world. The families I tried to love equidistantly neither saw me as I could have been - nor ever imagined yourself as you really were.
So maybe, then, in retrospect, this contributed a decade later to my going seriously mad. Yet, quite true, it was you who continued to believe in me throughout this madness; you were the only person - either known personally to me or professionally hung round me neck - who honestly stood by me, who was able to see me fighting real demons; who was able to perceive these truths instead of (far more easily) demonising a reality.
A reality which the rest didn't half choose eagerly to flock around and allege me.
For that, then, I shall always be grateful. The love you had never been able to express to me - at least in the way I would have preferred - served, at a crucial moment, to maintain my strong sense of injustice about what happened in those years. Years, in fact, quite dreadful for you and our long-suffering children. Years when you stood by me, despite serious wrongs on my part; despite great disappointments; despite my inability to deliver the burnished life you always have deserved. Years when you stood by me - not out of duty but out of real, true, abiding affection.
It even helped me fall in love with you again - though I think, by then, my ability to love well had been tarnished, rather than burnished, by so many of the crossroads of choices I'd wrongly taken.
I don't think you have ever stopped loving me, you know. I don't know if recently it's become more of a habit for you. I suspect it might have done. And I don't know if I deserve that love either - nor whether I am able, any longer, to return it in the way you properly need me to. All I do know is that I would give up everything I know how to do (which, competently, is very very little by now) if only I could work out exactly why what you've always needed from me has never managed to include our private embracing.
Epilogue
I've thought lots of stuff over the past eleven months: that I'm rude, unpleasant, self-centred, egotistical. As my wife's money has slipped through our fingers, and my inability to convince myself I could work out how to sustainably, honestly and ethically make money - as well as convince others of the value of the same - has dreadfully manifested itself, so I question every foundation of everything I think.
There are other matters I've considered too, of course: that the problem may lie in my own unawareness of the real nature of my sexuality; that I may be the paranoid schizophrenic the doctors believe I am, after all; that I have all kinds of delusions of grandeur about my drearily expressed attachment to generating and playing with ideas; that I may be autistic; that, in fact, I may simply be the most goddamn lazy and self-indulgent soul the planet has ever gone and seen.
Right now, I have no answers. Honestly so. This is the truth. I really do not know where this may be leading us to.
But I ask in good faith, as much as I can summon, if you've read thus far, please do find it within your good self to tell me:
* what, at the moment, I might be useful for;
* how I might one day add sensitive value to this thing we call humanity;
* how I might be able to justify my square metres on this beautifully blue rock of experience and love;
* and, eventually, via what means I could just be happy at being my self with my dearly beloved Half Orange.
