Intimacy is a Battlefield

Connectedness

we are all born of connectedness

the infusing of one to another
the coming together
the intimacy of one person and another person

if the sperm penetrates the egg: if the egg choses the sperm,
you begin your journey

we start to knit our own stories of connectedness
pre-linguistic learning...pre-cognitive learning
from the connectedness that came before us
that was outside of our control
we grow
we grow in the connectedness
of foetus inside womb
me inside another
you inside another
we are already beginning to learn our own repertoire of
habits and responses
responses to the other
ways of connecting ourselves to the other
a repertoire that will accompany us till the day we die.

then
if we survive the womb
we are forced through
forced from breathing fluid,
forced from being fed directly
forced from darkness
from wetness
into dry-ness
and brightness
and the shock of air
and the shock of ruptured connection
the umbilical cord severed.
our lifeline
broken

the fracturing is appeased by the soft flesh of the breast
the sating of hunger at the nipple
the intimacy, the touch, the tactile nature
the tenderness felt at the sating
the only thing that can settle us in the midst of the great trauma
the great insecurity,
is the harbouring
in that intimate bond of feeding
in the pains and discomforts
we are comforted...eased...accepted
we feel connected

but, then
then we feel the trauma of separation...again
another separation
once we felt the umbilical cord cut
now
now the severing is caused by the learning
that the mother is other
that there is conflict
there is tension
between my needs
and my mother's needs
between my needs
and the other's needs

my needs do not correlate with the needs of the other
we are different
we are separate
some sort of definite separateness
permanent state of separateness
a separateness that can only be appeased
by moments of intimacy
intimacies that last far too short a time
intimacies that burn up like kindling
and leave us feeling alone
as quickly
as they made us feel together

intimacies like kindling
that titillate us with the feeling of togetherness
but never bring true lasting warmth
the true lasting warmth of the womb

togetherness and separateness
participation and withdrawal
the pendulum swings
where do you feel safe?
when do you feel safe?

sometimes separateness terrorises me.
I don't mean intentional separateness
like the kind that brings relief.
I mean the kind where you are frustratingly alone
and you long for someone to call you
or offer you some sort of embrace
and this state lures me into self-hatred
hating the neediness that I try to mask
feigning a mighty independence
but
there are so many of us feigning independence
and we mostly do it so badly
for if we believed it entirely,
we would not be in relationship at all...

...but we are
here we are
still relating
still trying to mark out our identities
protective identities
that mark out the I
and the You
that create defensive walls to keep the two apart

I

You

we are separate

are you interested in who I am?
am I interested in who you are?
I, who am longing for intimacy...
I, who am longing for separateness...
are you still interested?
are you interested in me...
or are you interested in how I can meet your needs?
and
what do you do
when our needs conflict?

intimacy is not home...intimacy is a battlefield

Safe and Sound in the Mist of Meaning

My best guess is that life has no meta-meaning. No big, grand narrative holding it all together. Any stories that appear to do this, I believe are our own fabrications. 

The moment you lose the illusion of being eternal (or special, or whatever), meaning is from then-on, laid down at the feet of us ordinary individuals, and we are given the chance to take responsibility for it. We can no longer look for meaning to be handed down to us (as from parent to child, state to citizen, or priest to congregation). 

Well, we can look for this, and many of us do, but it is this freedom that I reckon we fear. We would often rather play the child, and have someone sell us a story, at the expense of some sort of freedom. The more afraid we are of our own participation in our world of meaning, the more we call the stories of others (Parents, Priests, Politicians) that we buy into, grandiose things like TRUTH.
 
The real illusion (and this is a great act of self-trickery), is that all those blankets of meaning, no matter how much we find ourselves struggling under the weight of them, were knitted by us, yet we perform the best disappearing act in history. We CON-vince ourselves we were not involved in the illusion. This is why I think, we humans, are great illusionists, magicians and tricksters. We all get something out of buying into the illusion, even if they are illusions that are seemingly to our detriment, and even if it is for gaining something as mediocre as comfort or convenience.

Until we fully accept our individual participation, in the knitting of our world of meanings; we will not be fully free, and we will limit our personal growth. We will continue to be like children wanting to be parented, buying into someone else's meanings, narratives, stories, reasoning, understandings. I believe it is a human predisposition to do this, because we have all been children, but I believe we can only grow as we slowly let go; as we let the stabilisers of other people's ideas be taken off our little emotional bicycles. Although, that is not to say that we won't craft our very own stabilisers and bolt those on as a replacement, which may be a temporary fix, however, I just don't think we really need the stabilisers.
 

My best guess is that we were always participating in the warp and woof of those worlds of meanings, and I am suggesting that we own up to our own handiwork. The moment we stop passing the buck, we begin to participate in the hard task of finding out who we are, and what we prefer, and decide what we want for ourselves. This is the moment we begin to take a little more charge of our lives: how we choose to be, where we choose to be, the way we choose to be, in relation to ourselves, others, and life in general.

I actually don't think we need much meaning in our lives (even if we may be addicted to it). I reckon we generally just go along, and do what we do, with or without grand schemes of meaning. Many of the stories we have secretly written are probably not even that beneficial for us; for our mental health and for our ability to deal with all that life presents. These kinds of meanings, are ones we would be best to free ourselves from. If the stories we hold are effective at helping us get on with our lives, and flourish (if it is indeed flourishing that we want to do) or damn ourselves (if is is indeed damning ourselves that we want to do), then, we may carry on unquestioning.

I do think that part of the human experience, and human need, is to find stories with which to interpret our experience of our life. However, I imagine that we are best to keep the stories simple, related to the ordinary, which might prevent the destruction caused when the meta-meanings collapse and can no longer sustain the life they are supposed to be expressing.

One of my hardest trials in life, came when I let go of my meta-meanings, like a child letting go of a bunch of pretty helium balloons. I stood there feeling abandoned, and choked up with a sense of loss. And then came the dawning that I was still the same person, with all the same habits, and reactions and feelings, but, I was now just feeling a lot more alone, a lot more naked, and a lot more exposed. I was the empty-handed child. 

So, there I was, unadorned. I was without the meta-meanings but I was still the same. The smokescreen had cleared, and there was the once-great magician: not that great afterall. He had just been hiding in the smoke, in the mist of his words, but he had never left the stage at all.

Desire at the Helm

Desire feels like a promise 
A promise of great riches
Desire feels like truth
The bringer of certainty and ontological stability
But, we forget that the desire says everything
Desire is a ventriloquist.
And we, the desire-ers,
are the dummies in this act.

We aren't making love to ourselves as such
but there is some deception at work
it is a trickery
an optical illusion
it's a sleight of hand

are we fools who pretend that we are in charge
we make the decisions,
quasi-decisions
hazy-decisions
based on the twisted information;
the propaganda of our desires.
I wonder in the midst of this
if there is a democracy within
or if it is a rouge of democracy
that spins the truth
and we get drunk on the rhetoric of freedom
when all the while
we are being driven by our desires
and we have no real choice in the matter
and whatever we end up deciding
we will justify after the event
keeping our scriptwriters in business.

And maybe I am the last person in the world I should believe

Giving Birth to Eternity

I wonder
when the word "eternity"
first passed human lips,
did it spill out into the air
did it burst forth
or slip out like a whispered secret

was it an utterance 
burgeoning with hope
or a painful prayer
spoken by someone 
whose back was breaking
under the weight of their life
the spine splintered and lacerated
under the cross of their existence

or

if it was the yearning of a lover
freshly sweating from the tangle of passion
to never let it end
pained by the thought of
endings

When Tenderness Hurts

I just can't get there
I feel trapped in me
There is a better place
but it is beyond me

I can feel this thing around my heart
the emotional cling-film
it's suffocating me

clammed-up and stagnant
the stifling humidity
of this concealed world
that even my own eyes cannot
pierce

I cannot muster enough light
with which to penetrate
that dark

if only my eyes looked upon myself
with the tenderness
that I wish I had known
yet
all I do, and continue to do
is to amplify and echo the harsh
voices and verdicts
that accompanied my childhood
at least
they are the ones I remember

how do you learn to do what you have never done?

were there redeeming memories?

this is true
but
it's not true enough
there have been faint whispers
from time to time
that although barely discernible,
were tender enough
to bring tears to my eye

because tenderness hurts sometimes
and sometimes its the last thing you want

The Last Spell in the Book

There is a feeling in life that we don’t like to feel. There are many of course, but the one I am talking about now, is the feeling of being out at sea, with no land in sight…or something like that.

It is that feeling you get when you have no more words, to communicate anything to the other you are meant to love; no words that could make it any better. When the world that once felt solid and secure, has given way to a fluid world of molecules. When you have got to the last page in your book of spells, and the last spell fails to do anything. The chaos continues and we are impotent to change it. The conflict simmers [whether inner or outer; they both feed each other], and we feel helpless; at a loss, longing for some solid ground…like a fridge to clean, or a good dose of self-harm…any way we can reduce the world into something so small and manageable, as to give a feeling of control; to feel like there is a world that exists, that is so small, we could make it better.

But, I am guided by that bright shining North Star of human contradiction.

Even though there are times when we want to have control…to tidy things to within an inch of their life…and put the CDs in alphabetical order…there are also times when we long to pass the buck for our lives onto someone else’s shoulders; like the shoulder’s of a big parent in the sky…like Fate or Circumstance. We mutter the words like a mantra, “but it was out of my control”, or "it wasn't my fault", as if saying these words were a charm that would ward off responsibility.

Sometimes we are playing the child, with are arms held outstretched, hoping for the sweetness of relinquished control, and sometimes we are sitting, arms folded, refusing to talk, curling up in a red-faced tantrum because we are being ignored by that Big Parent in the Sky. The world is not playing ball.

Sometimes we are playing the parent, and we have forgotten how to let go…we have been clinging so tightly for so long, that we would need hugged into submission, or convinced by some life threatening disease, or relational upheaval, that we are not in the pilot’s seat, we are not master and commander…we are not in control, and we can’t Harry Potter our way out of it.

Great Expectations

If we are looking for coherency or constancy we are looking at the wrong species.

If we are looking for stability or security, we are looking at the wrong species, and are living on the wrong planet. Yet, despite this, we have these kinds of expectations, and the requisite disappointment when human beings do not live up to our expectations. But, where do these expectations of human beings come from, because it seems like they were forged on another planet? We often expect human beings to be better than they are...to be other than they are...or when they are not performing according to our expectations, we live in the disappointment and the sulking. We call it unfair, and take it out on the world of human beings, because they do not conform with our desires. We desire them to change. We hope that at some point, the offending other, will start to get in line with our pre-existing expectations.

The bizarre thing in all of this mix, is that we rarely ever question our expectations. It is as if our expectations were preordained by an immutable God, and if we let go of them, the world would crumble. We cling to our expectations like a child to a pacifier. When if falls out of place we play out the tantrum, until we get our way, or something closer to it, or alternatively we just keep sulking even when we don't get anything back. These sulks can last for years or lifetimes. Instead of information gathering in an act of existential curiosity about the world that exists around us, or the people that float in and out of our lives, we glue ourselves to our expectations with ever greater resolve...and suffer the pain of the fracturing. We will do this time and time again. Like a ritual of self-flagellation, as if we were addicted to the pain of the disappointment. It would be admirable if it weren't so painful to watch, or to experience.

When we enter into relationships, we enter in with a million little expectations, hidden in our creases, bulging in our pockets. They pre-exist the relationship. When we encounter a human being, we may at first, make some effort to see who they are. To see if they are the kind of other, who might come close to satisfying us...to see if they are a safe bet. If we can tick enough of the prerequisites, then we venture in feeling vulnerable and exposed. Our refrigerated desires start coming out of the fridge of our hiddenness, ready to be projected onto another human being. At some point we stop asking who the other is. We stop asking questions fuelled by curiosity. Instead, we drop the curiosity, and start colonising the other with our expectations. The other can be a little shocked by this...assuming of course that they have not been doing exactly the same thing. They may well have been expecting an other, who did not expect too much of them. But, they soon discover they are in a relationship with someone who does expect something other than what they are giving. What do they do?

What do we do? What do we do when the our expectations and our experiences don't match up? What are the "that always happens to me"s that punctuate our stories? Do they tell a repetitive tale of a faulty existing world, or faulty expectations?

Hang on for dear life to our expectations of course. That is the human prerogative isn't it? We would rather keep our ideals and the complimentary disappointments, than suffer the ultimate disillusionment of that other reality. We will find a million reasons for why we can never unearth that reality, and how it is arrogant to talk about it as such. Who is to know what reality is afterall?

Our expectations were our first love. Our hearts are not fully open to the world and the people in it, because they are still hankering after the love of the first love...the expectations...the wishes.
 
Then, there are longings. These aren't expectations, just a struggle with the world as it is, and not letting go of the security blanket of the "world as we wish it was". But, where did this idea of a world, any other than the one that exists, come from? Is it just that we perceived this world differently at some point? Of course we did. When I was a child, feeding at my mother's breast, it was a radically different world than it is now. Sorry, lets rephrase that, I perceived it as a radically different world. My experience was radically different. I am no longer a child. I am no longer parented, badly or otherwise. I am my own parent. I still want my needs to be met, and I would still rather I didn't have to communicate that, and that my desires would be known and sated without me having to do anything. But alas...that is also not the world I live in. Yet, it seems, that some people gauge the world that should exist, based on their perceptions from when they were nursing at their mother's breast, or being looked after (badly or otherwise) by some parental figure/s. They think that is the way the world should continue to be. A world that corresponds with their needs and their desires.

So, what can we expect? What is it ok to expect? Is it ok to expect honesty, and openness in an intimate relationship for example? Well, I will be controversial and say no. We can't expect it. We can request it, and as I have often been heard to say, "the opposite of expectation is request". I may desire honesty and openness, but I can not make that happen. This is where I can get frustrated, thinking, "how the hell can we relate to eachother, if you won't be honest, and open?!!"...but, really, I need to be assessing the information I am getting about the person I am relating to. If they are not on a place on their journey, were they feel they can be honest (the way we determine), or open (the way we determine), then that is just who they are and where they are at. Shouting, nagging, or getting angry won't change a single thing. There is no lever big enough to change that. It also leaves me with the ball in my court. Which is usually the last place we want it to be. Why? Because then we have to make a decision based on the information we have received. Freedom, decisions, responsibility. Ah shit!

Making a request of someone is much more egalitarian than it sounds. It allows the other a voice, and a response. It allows the other a voice and a reponse, that we have no control over. It allows them their separateness, and in being open with a request, we face the risk of the negative response coming back. However, at least we are treating the other like a human being, with their own needs, own desires, and own ideas. Instead of trying to maintain some sort of toxic symbiosis, we allow the breath of air to come inbetween, and we wait for the response. This is much more humanising, and much more egalitarian, and dare I say more loving, than having expectations of the other person.

So, does this mean expectations are out the window? Well, what use are they? When they are not informing us of anything...when they are taking templates from a world of wishes, and overlaying them on the people and events in the world of is-ness.

If our expectations are of any use...it is simply, that they tell a story about a world that existed for us once, and tell us about our desires. But, when we start projecting them onto the people in our lives...especially the people we claim to love, then what are we doing to them? It seems that when we are heavily laden with expectations, we don't see people for who they are, and let them tell their story as they wish to tell it...instead we squeeze them into a pre-existing formula...a pre-existing dance...a pre-existing pattern...a pre-existing ritual...a pre-existing drama.

We no longer see people for who they are, but how they can fit into the world we need to feel exists.

The people we love, become, simply the people we need to reaffirm the world we hope exists.

People become our little charms to ward off the world of is-ness.

Little amulets. We care little for what they are made off, only what they can facilitate for us.

Myths, Puppets and Cobwebs

Why do we ever tell ourselves that we see things clearly, or even, see things as they are? What kind of myth would we need to tell ourselves in order to believe that? What kind of story would we need to assume to allow ourselves that kind of sight. The sight of the fool, who believes he sees.

Aren't we all just tangled up in little spider webs we have spun; little silken webs of connection. We don't even see things at all, we just feel the tugs of the webs that we use to attach ourselves to the world around us, and the people that inhabit it. Close-to-invisible threads, that have us hooked and glued to the others in our emotional landscapes.

I watched little Sisyphus the spider, rebuild his web again, seemingly exactly like the last one. As fascinating and arbitrary as before. If for some reason, his web were destroyed every hour for the rest of his existence, I am certain he would do the same over and over and over again. And he would not think that the world were set against him, and he would not feel that the world was conspiring to make his life a misery.

I admire his lack of projection. There is no Murphy's Law. There is no luck, good or bad. The world is no more for us as it is against us. Even the negative stories, which can be much easier to pen than the happier ones, give us a feeling of being more than we are. I am no more than little Sisyphus. The world does not see me. The stars do not look down on me. There is no God in heaven shedding a tear at my nihilism.

Puppets and puppet masters, tangled in our strings, choking ourselves on our connectedness.

The Lonely Nihilist

He jerked his arm up like a knee in response to a doctor's hammer
There he was with his arm outstretched,
the other arm counterbalancing his excitement, at his side.
His eyes were bulging out from behind their curtains,
his skin was verging on pale
with the adrenaline of speaking out in the midst of the vast congregate.

"can't you see: the emperor has no fucking clothes!?"

From his mouth, ushered forth words, like blessings and curses
arousing eachother in mid-flight
teasing eachother and feeding eachother
and as they struck and stuck to the ears of the flock
a wave of eyes eddied back to snare him

They all peeled around,
even the ones he could not see
the gazes from behind heads
and behind shoulders
anonymous in the crowd
made their burning presence felt.

One of the eyes suddenly became a mouth
and frothed forth
a bundle of shallow esoteric words

"Of course he has no fucking clothes!
Are you blind? Can't you see?
Either do we!!
Either do we!!
Look at us!
You fool!
and if you would stop being so fucking arrogant
with your hidden insights for a second
you'd see that you are fucking naked too!"

"How dare you spoil the parade!"

Humility swept over him like a rash
that no amount of hands could scratch
The mouth had disappeared back into the sea of eyes
The eyes had disappeared back into the sea of heads
But he felt more watched than ever
like a light were shining down on him
as if God had become real just for the purpose
of laughing at his ridiculous crime
his arrogant prophecy

he walked off, wishing his tail was more between his legs than it was
he was so very alone,
and there was no echo anymore making him feel any less lonely
he was just as redundant of meaning as everyone else
but he was the loser...he was alone.

he muttered into the distance
his silhouette decapitated with shame
and enforced humility

How dare you spoil the parade!
How dare you spoil the parade!

Jesus and the Secret Police

It wasn't just self-awareness. These thoughts, were the kind of half-born, half-aborted thoughts that dangled from my brain a lot of the time. These thoughts were the constant commentary of the internalised critical gaze. It is as if I have one of those imaginary friends from childhood, except that this imaginary friend is a wee bastard. He's the kind of friend you would ditch as soon as he wasn't looking, except, he was always looking. He was a half-breed. He was half clingy friend, and half secret police.

To be honest, it seemed as if I had normalised the presence of these ever watchful eyes, like the Christian normalises the ever-watchful eyes of the sweet Lord Jesus. It becomes so much part of your identity, that your behaviour is automatically policed and edited, lest you be caught with you pants down. On occasion you would have to be reminded that Jesus was watching, like some sort of divine Pinochet. It all came with the slogans and propaganda too.

"What would Jesus do?"

This would sometimes be interchanged with "your granny", as if your granny embodied the same behaviour-rectifying properties of the risen Lord. Either of these options would potentially leave one full of all sorts of shit. 

In my policed-by-Jesus days, there was a superstitious belief that if you thought about something unholy or profane (most of these things deemed unholy were synonymous with natural functions or desires), a hidden porthole to the underworld would open up, and you would forever be ruled by the power of your evil desires vis-a-vis the anti-Christ with his hoard of demons.

And here I am wondering what life looks like outside of the ever-watchful gaze.

Gods of the Mountains

What do you do when you feel that there is nothing you can do? What do you do, when you feel completely without foothold in the world, feeling helpless and entirely arbitrary in the lap of the gods? The gods of the mountains who send the storms, the floods, the droughts, the lava

Cause and effect. Conjure up a cause, no matter how convoluted: it is better to feel like you have some control after-all, rather than be an arbitrary play-thing of Mother Nature. We create our own list of sins and crimes, that we believe elicited the events, and for the child this could be mother's tears, or daddy's anger. 

We convince ourselves of the direct connection between the crime and the reciprocal punishment; the cause and the effect. So convinced, that we believe this is Reality, that this is the Truth. But, there is a con in the act of being convinced; and we lose something in the exchange. The exchange of the messy, mysterious truth, for the simple, reassuring Truth.

Scapegoat, or self-sacrifice? We will either choose to blame ourselves for the uncontrollable familial events, or find someone else to blame, like the inadequate mother, or the critical father. Any story and ritual, just to feel like we have a modicum of control.

All these rituals are kept in tact by the superstition. The superstition is reinforced by a story. The story tells us, that we are not arbitrary, and that we mean something. In fact, the story tells us we mean everything. The story we tell, reminds us that we are at the centre of a universe that is spinning uncontrollably around us, that gravitates ominously around us. Geocentric self-importance. A Ptolemaic universe, where we are the earth, around which the bodies of the heavens revolve. We conjure up a story of connectedness that gives us a place and role, and a purpose. We convince ourselves. It is better after all, in the absence of understanding what the hell is going on, to be convinced of something. Isn't it!?

All that is left now, is maintenance, keep it going. Like a spinning plate on a stick, or a hypnotised hamster in an exercise wheel, entranced by the ritual; a priest hooked on the smell of the incense. We become addicted to our rituals. We depend on them for stability in our worlds. These stories and rituals of thought, feeling, and behaviour, can stay with us far into adulthood. In someways, there is an adulthood that can only truly exist once we have broken the tablets and the commandments. These are the very things that prevent us becoming the fullest version of ourselves, free from the puppet strings of co-dependency; free from the illusory cords of control.

For the co-dependent, it can seem that every word or deed has some sort of metaphysical consequence. A foot out of place, might upset the fabric of the universe, and all hell would break loose. So they learn to edit out any potentially offending behaviour, any word that may be misunderstood, behaviour that might be misinterpreted, or action that might be punishable or cause anger; policing themselves out of true being and freedom.

Guessing, like a detective on the trail of a murder that has yet to happen, developing a sense of what might happen, what people might be feeling, might be thinking. Reading the future in the tea-leaves of other's gestures, and expressions.

And so, if it is the priest who maintains the status quo, and if this is the case in our inner life, it is vital to invoke the prophet to upset the status quo of sacrifices, rituals and incantations. However, we are both the priest and the prophet, and we wrote the story that gives them both meaning.

The prophet comes to untie the invisible knots that we used to connect ourselves to the world around us. To loosen the ties that bind us, yet let us feel at least a little bit more in control. Controls, which we can be at the mercy of, like puppets on strings, yet, can also use to manipulate the world around us. 

We must learn to let go. 

This is of course terrifying. It is terrifying because you will no longer be in the centre of your system, and because you will be cut adrift, and because you will have to learn who you truly are while you are not busy being-for-others. We have to face up to the narcissistic nature of our thinking and feeling. We will no longer be able to blame everyone else for our feelings. We will no longer be able to play victim.

And so, we will face the greatest amount of inner resistance to this change, to the overthrow of the old system, the old regime, the old ways and laws. The ego will try to suppress the revolutionary movement; silencing it, giving it no room to express its desires for something else. The crackdown could lead to overwhelming inner conflict, or depressions. 

There is no question, it is a long road, and psychically we may not survive the journey, but there is something that looks more like freedom at the end of it. For some, that freedom is far too terrifying, and so they will continue to police themselves, and continue to embrace the propaganda of the state. They will continue to pledge their allegiance, and maintain their devotion to the old gods of the mountains, at the expense of their own personal liberation.

Prayers from the Hinterland

...reaching toward…striving toward

...crawling-on-our-bellies-with-nails-dug-into-the-ground toward

We chase after the meaning of all of this like we chase after eternal life; the fruit from the tree that gives us knowledge, some divine secret that holds it all together, holds us together in our un-hinged-ness, but we are chasing after butterflies. The wings of these things are far too fragile, as if they were creatures made for another place, another far more tender world. We steal the breath out of the lungs of the thing we love, we cling to life and we lose it. The very act of love becomes a strangle hold. Like caging birds of paradise for the beauty of their colours, but their pearlescent plumage loses all its essence, its soul destroyed by captivity.

We touch the butterfly’s wings and it can never fly again.

…and the truth shall set you free…the truth shall set you free...

Why do we cling so tightly? It is that deepest of human insecurities, that fears the loss of love, the loss of the good, deeply superstitious that life is set against us. It is as if we were knit together with a longing for a love that could not be satisfied in this harsh world, a love without fear, a love that does not ask us to edit ourselves into the fragile artificiality of deserving. Starving for a love that could hold us in the darkest night of the soul and ask for nothing in return, and that would keep on forgiving every insecure cruelty, time after time again. We are a starving people, we have a hunger that cannot be sated, and so when we see the flicker of its wings we chase it to its demise.

…here is the answer to the riddle…you must lose life in order to find it.

For most of us, to ask for anything more than a puncturing of the numbness, for all too short a moment, is to ask far too much. For us, to ask for life in all its fullness is a luxury beyond the knit of our lives. We make do with pick pocketing pennies from the pockets of life; crumbs off the table. We steal, for life does not surrender itself easily for us to sate ourselves.

These stolen morsels; they are not what we need. We need water, but we drink wine. We need love, but instead we fuck. We need to follow our desires, but instead we lose ourselves in wanting. These are the diuretics of the soul. We appease ourselves with pitifully poor substitutes; little titillations that make us feel, something like ‘alive’, for a brief fragile tragic moment. Hooked and empty, hooked and empty.

…all we like children have uttered vows…“I will never let this happen to me again”…

We long to re-enact a drama where we have power, where we have an ounce of control over our own destinies. We would do anything, pay for any delusion, and exchange anything for the fantasy of control. Just a little morsel of control over my own feelings, or the feelings of another. We let go of any desire to have real power over our worlds, but we appease ourselves with these little unrealities, these twisted little delusions.

…suffer the little children, for they have suffered enough…

What is exchanged in these interactions is rarely what is literally exchanged. The currency changing hands is a sleight of hand that hides the more esoteric exchange. Monies become metaphors. With this currency we buy our delusions, secreted within the masquerade; we step on stage, we sell ourselves to have a taste of this control. This is the poison, this is the addiction.

Hooked on reliving the past, finding safety in the repetition; a paradoxical safety. Safety in the most dangerous of worlds; reliving and re-enacting the shortest of tragedies. Tragic stories; painful histories scraped into the walls of our heart. The prisoner within engraves a story on the walls, desperately hoping the words bleed through into the world of the appearances and apparitions. Bleeding like prayers.

Will the truth set you free, will the truth set us free, will the truth set me free? We are waiting for the miracle. The miracle of the one whose very touch resonates at the core; an intimacy that melts our defences, reminds us that we are loveable for no other reason than because we are.

We are longing, we are hungry; longing for the prophet to come. The prophet who sees through the walls of our identity, beyond what we allow the world to see. The one who sees the truth of the hidden self, behind who I say that I am. The hidden self with the secret name. A secret name hidden in a secret place that no one will utter. These are the names on the white stones, the names that do not bind us, or reduce us. These names speak of everything that we are, all the things we were but were afraid to live: a name like thunder that decimates the defences we try to hold up with feigned strength.