Glimpses

I haven't written anything for a while, now. Sometimes I feel like thoughts in my head just keep repeating themselves over and over again and I don't see the point in rehashing the same old things. It doesn't make those thoughts any less relevant or perhaps even true, but it shows me that I lack answers, and still more questions in my head arise. It's tiring at times.

So I had a random read at my old writings, and I found this entry in one of my diaries which brought quite a few strange memories back to the fore, somehow. It happened sometime this year, between March and April.

"Last night was very strange and made me feel as though we were suddenly back a century or two in time, in the slums and glum of poverty in the dark entrails of London. Scenes from Dickens’ books kept popping in my mind... To give but an idea of the scene that played out before my eyes. Mum had just come back from a long day at work, and she had quickly prepared her dinner, a bowl of soup and some chicken, when the landlord finally came. He knocked on the door and we barely had time to clean the mess around us.

I hid the cat’s food away from sight, but the rest was as it stood: cluttered and messy because there is simply no room. I was still in my old pajama pants and wore that huge canary jumper (which I wear today, and almost every day because I get so freaking cold in here), my hair held back in a loose ponytail. He came into the room, wearing a black suit, and stood there like a lemon, really, for an awkward moment, not even daring much of a glance around him. He had a folder in his hands that contained the ‘contract’ and direct debit form, and asked for the rent, which is when it all kicked off with mum, of course.

She began to tell him how much money we spend on the electric just to keep the room warm... About 5 quid a day. She told him that it had now been 2 months we hadn’t been able to use the shower, let alone any hot water at all. He opened his eyes wide in fake surprise, muttering that we should have told him, even though we had. He said something like ‘English people always live in cold rooms anyway” in such a dismissive tone that mum just hit back with a “I’m not English so I don’t live like that”.

At some point mum began crying, saying something about living like pigs. I had to bite my lip not to laugh, really, because I knew she was playing with him. Dealing with ruthless, cold and heartless people who only live for profit on the back of more vulnerable people teaches you to play along just enough to survive. You can’t get angry at these people -not in their faces- and you can’t tell them the truth about their abject ways. You show them that you’re as vulnerable and weak as they like to think you are. The truth is that if you let out what you actually have a right to say - the truth of the matter- they would kick you out in the cold in a heartbeat. And then what? What do you do then?

As soon as mum started crying, the landlord seemed to lose his footing slightly.
“M’am, m’am, please, don’t cry,” he mumbled, taking a step forward and bumping into the things scattered in this tiny room, not knowing where to place himself. He looked at me and I simply shrugged, rolling my eyes in desperation. So he suddenly told us we could use the bathroom upstairs where the prostitute used to live - she moved out last week, you see- because there would be hot water there, and we wouldn’t have to pay for it. He says “come Aliska, come, I’ll show you, it’s a nice shower.” So I follow him upstairs, still in those dirty white and pink pants and bright yellow jumper, and I almost want to laugh at my appearance. I wonder for a second when it was exactly that we fell so low, and already we have stepped into the prostitute’s old little room. In a corner there is a shower room but when the landlord tries to turn on the light it doesn’t work, so he must show me the hot water in semi-darkness. I feel the warmth of the gushing water on my hand and I nod as he keeps saying “you see, you see, hot water! Ah, you see, it’s nice, it’s hot, you can shower now.”
I glance at the floor and see the streaks of grease and black dirt all over it and he sees it, too. He mumbles an excuse as to the dirty state of that wonderful shower, saying it will clean itself when we actually use it. I bite my tongue again not to express my disgust at him. I almost want to ask him if he would shower in that filth, but what’s the point when you already know the answer?...

We go back downstairs and mum hands him about half the rent money, and though he seems very hesitant and asks several times for the full amount, we promise to give him the rest as soon as we earn it. He leaves us at last and we are left hating the fact that we are now well and truly stuck in that shit hole. Yes, to move out we would need enough money for a deposit and first month rent, but we have barely enough to pay for this dump.

There are people out there who have known at some point in their lives what poverty was all about. Losing everything or rising from nothingness... One day it might well be that I won’t be poor anymore, or that I won’t have to be poor to follow my beliefs against corruption. I would never want to forget. I could never forget or pretend that these things never happened. They happened, one after the other, each worse than the previous, like a vicious circle. These are horrible times, they really are. They make you question if you are still human, or a poor excuse for a human life. They make you question the people out there feeding and building their wealth on people like us. They make you question the core of human existence, societies themselves and their ruthless order.

Poor people have to exist in order for the rich to be. If you want something, then something else has to give. If you already had a taste of getting what you want, then you might feel sad at the account of some poor sod’s struggles, but you will no longer be able to let go of your wants. That is corruption of the mind. Because of this, and because of the natural envy that grows in most people’s inner hearts, there must always be poor people to grant a wealthy status to a few.

I could die tomorrow and be safe in the knowledge that I lived a very human life in the end. I experienced a wide spectrum of what being human on this Earth really means. I pushed, and pushed against the boundaries of my own mind to try and make sense of what my eyes showed me. It started out like so many others out there, more or less shielded from pure reality thanks to the power of my imagination that fed constantly on a plethora of illusions, but in the end I had to face glimpses of our reality as it stands before us, far removed from any cushioning veil of delusions.

If I try, these days, to remember how it was like back home, when I was still so young and blissfully unaware of the realities of life... It feels like home, a bittersweet wave of wistful remembrance growing hazier as time goes by. It feels like another life, perhaps just a dream I once had."

Stream of consciousness

The trouble with too much imagination is that it is bound to take you further than reality and therefore there is always a painful crashing down period.

I went to see the new batman yesterday. It’s hard to believe that heath ledger who played an amazing Jocker, is dead. That such talent killed itself, just like that, and all the world has left is one last breathtaking performance immortalised on screen.

There is something about feeling too much or being so sensitive, somehow, that every simple beauty or glimpse of what is hardly ever noticed becomes an epiphany of some sort, yet pain is as much emplified for no logical reason. As feelings keep burning lungs and spirit the mind grows weary and a mental torpor slowly eases its way through the body itself until the light is so faint that you stagger down the well you knew was there all along, but you can no longer avoid it. 

There is so much beauty through the pain of living that it is bound to kill a spirit in its bud when one dares to gaze at such spendor for too long. Written words are a painter’s brush forming infinite combinations of colors to mirror the hues of rain and sunlight. Alone they are little more than shadows of what they ought to become. Together suddenly the world is set alight and there are no limits. These days words seem to flow out of my hands and I watch the threads of thought slide along those lines without even knowing whether it is really me writing or something beyond my own self already. When one achieves greatness of any kind, does it mean the soul must have gone to other shores where only splendor and perfection prevail?

 Like a vessel the body translates or convey what little can be from those unphasomable shores and withers slowly under the strain, much like the one who one day built wings so he could reach the sun.

But what do I know? What am I? If there is but one thing I am aware of it is how tiny my body is amidst the ocean of life. But my mind? How far does it stretch? How far can one venture and be certain that it is not in fact an illusion of infinity? What if what I saw for infinity was only a trick of the light too bright and I kept flying in circles? Who would warn me? Who would even notice?

Sorrow tires me yet my mind feeds off it. The contradiction is again sublime. If I was made of words I would want to be a poem.

Why do I keep writing even though the writing itself is far from perfect? Because the process is the closest one can get to their own sense of perfect, which is always subjective in its very nature. Yes, of course the notion of perfection is subjective... The process of creating new lives, no matter how fictional, awakens a new lease of hope and opens the mind’s window to let your inner eye wander as free as can ever be. And so it is that with every page of any story I feel more of a sense of being alive than reality could ever grant me. But then there are the eyes to see what is real before you and life as it is is rarely more than one long cliche after the next. 

That’s why I used to love watching movies or read fantasy stories. They would open my inner window, you see. Throughout my early years this was enough for me to revel in my own little worlds but then as I grew older I was forced to stare reality in the face and that tiny window was no longer enough. Hanging onto it as I grow old now would blur the fine line between reason and folly, I suppose. As long as I find the strength to question myself I cannot be so bad. The day I take my own word for anything I will know that reason is morphing into something much darker, a shade closer to nothingness, perhaps.

When anger meets the mind

I want to belong to no country, I wish to have no nationality or homeland. The world is my oyster and with it comes a sense that there are no borders, no frontier or boundary that could ever be imposed on me and my mind.

God is money, didn’t you know? If there really was one out there he was buried a long time ago. You can find god in every purse, every transaction you make, in every note or coin you play with in your hands. That’s such a conveniant tailored-made deity, really. No need to think too much about it, everything is written on the label, or should I say value? Thanks to the money god we can even put a price on abstract notions and human beings can also be purchased in more ways than one. Of course, I am bound to take the view of a pauper, I must necessarily be biased on the subject. I can see the in-betweeners, those who get on with it all, the middle class family always adapting to the current. There’s no blame to be placed on them but I could not feel sorry for them for even when they stop to think they rarely let thoughts or conscience dictate their actions. Denial or charity is their outlet. 

Of course I am generalising. I’m only human and I can’t find the strength to go deeper than appearances on that matter, not yet anyway. There is a forgotten voice in limbo, lingering on throughout the ages which the world is forced to ignore if it is to carry on the way it does now. That voice is the sacrifice believed to be necessary. That voice comprises everything you can’t adknowledge within yourself when your mind realises how wrong things are.

We’re all so isolated in our own little life that it often takes a disaster to wake us up from that dull, self-centered torpor. Even disasters nowadays aren’t strong enough to get through most people who have been utterly desensitized. You only realise how much society has been mechanised and rendered faceless in a way, when even small issues force you to take action that requires interaction with society. Everything is now a business of some sort, from the so-called religious establishments to the schools and the state. Everything must bring profit and be viable or it will be thrown away. Even charities are a business: to be worthy of their time and pity you must meet a certain degree of helplessness or get lost.

We don’t live to enjoy life. We live under the rule of money whereby ‘hapiness’ and enjoyment are dependent on how much you have in the bank, regardless of what you are as a person. Whether you’re a monster or a saint it is the amount of money you have that defines you. Thus even individuals have been rendered faceless. 

The world as I see it

diary time and other thoughts...


There was a ray of morning sunshine but it has now been covered with a thick layer of dullness promising more rain and it is cold. When will it be summer, I wonder? If I’m stuck in this town then at least give me warmth and sunny skies! Instead I’m stuck home watching the rain pouring down my window. 

There is never enough wine to numb the pain of living. No, actually living is the wrong word. I should say ‘thinking’. When one thinks too much they’re bound to feel pain. There are moments of blissful lucidity followed by a sense of helplessness. There is also the sense that you might be completely wrong in your reasoning and yet this makes you already different from the rest. People who do the best and the worst in the world always seem to have one thing in common: they think they know. They can’t be wrong. Even when they are. If there is one thing I understand now it’s that there isn’t a right or wrong answer, a black and white spectrum. There is only a grey area and only the best you, as a person and as a member of a society, can do. This is exactly what we need to understand, beyond the rain and the inward tears: do your best to the best of your abilities. If you can remain true to such a motto then you can’t go far wrong. You might still be mistaken in the end but your good will was there. there was a conscience.

Void is chaos

Void is chaos. Chaos is a blurred line between control and delusions. Delusions are a first step leading right back into that giant gap within the mind. Welcome to nothingness.

08/06/08

I’m afraid. I’m scared, terrified. Everything around me has taken the colours of blood, pain and evil murmurs. I am still me and yet my thoughts have lost grip of their coherence. I have no control left over what I feel or ought to feel and the same ideas, same thought patterns keep dancing before my eyes, no matter how hard I try to chase them away.

It’s a slow procession of illogical beliefs which have taken over my better judgement, and the more I fight against those wild elements, those figments of non-sense, the worse they seem to get. It is a very strange thing that is happening. I am very aware of those alien thoughts and while I remain the mistress of my self I can no longer prevent what can only be called obssessions. Obsessive thoughts that lead straight to imbalance. These pages will have no sense, I’m afraid, for they are my only means to reject such ideas away from my head.

Paranoia is also starting to overwhelm me and I am afraid of everything around and within me. And those thoughts won’t leave me alone. They won’t leave me alone. They won’t leave me alone. They won’t leave me alone. They’re very much my own thoughts; I am the one formulating them in my head. There are no outside voice or anything of the sort: it is me. What makes no sense to me is that I just cannot think of anything else and that scares the hell out of me. I had to stop writing as though I knew what I was doing because I fear everything I thought I understood merely stemed from obseesive patterns of thought. I thought my mind was free but it is in fact held in a cage and it can do nothing but turn like a beast prisoner of its own iron will.

Nothing much makes sense these days. I look out the window and see the shades of sky, from mournful greys to incandescent molten gold, and I see the world contained in one single tear falling from above, crashing onto the frozen ground and scattering its precious power.

I have no desires, no drive to do anything. I haven’t washed in days. My hair is greazy, my appearance foul. I wish it was a simple matter of snapping out of it all. But it isn’t, I’ve tried.

I feel like the devil is out to get me, I feel possessed against my better judgement. Can’t you see? I am trying so hard to rationalise what makes no sense in my head... I’ve lost it completely, haven’t I?

They say that if you were losing your mind you wouldn’t even know you had. I take solace in that only, yet I still cannot explain what is happening. If I am simply being silly, then why can’t I snap out of it?

For the second night in a row I felt scared as I went to bed and stared at the things around me, almost expecting- again, against my better judgement still present in one side of my head- something to happen. Religious beliefs have taken residence in my head, too. I want them out of there but they won’t buldge. It’s been months now. I made the mistake of sharing such crazed thoughts with mum and since then it has felt like I have somehow released a demon out of its cage. I made it all more real than it ever had been. I am afraid that the sound part of my brain might be losing power to the degenerate side... I can sense the fine line between the way I feel now and how easily I could slip further away from rationality if that happened.

I think I am evil and that I should die. It’s the only way to make everything stop. There is no other way. I should end it all before it’s too late. Before I lose it completely and can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy. Before the sound part remaining let go and I am left with no more logics or power to rationalise my thoughts and actions. I want to keep away from anything remotely religious for fear that it will only exacerbate my delusions. I need help. Yet every single person arond me believes that I am fine. they’re obviously not living in my head 24/7. I want out of that head just for a few days, even a minute. I want it to shut up for a moment, just a moment... I need rest.

I think the whole world is set against me and that the devil is trying to destroy me. Then there is my sound presence of mind that keeps telling me that this makes no sense whatsoever. First, what is so special about my person that the whole world would tire itself against me, and why would the devil, which is merely a metaphore for all things bad, go after me, the pathetic drop in the ocean?

I try to rationalise those crazy ideas and although I can see how illogical they are I can’t get them out of my head. That is my problem. No amount of rationaliation seems to be enough... Thus I am left scared and ambushed by my own self. I had so many things to write, such nice stories dear to my heart but how can I write when all this is happening in my head?

I cannot not believe in God, either. I keep agreeing with all those people who find logical arguments against its existence and yet I keep believing. Is that simply a glimpse of how powerful human conditioning can be? Blind faith that can never be erradicated... I am left thinking that perhaps I should destroy everything religious around me. There are pictures of Christ above the door and I find myself thinking that I should burn them, that it would liberate me. It’s a very appealing idea right now. Then I get that thought that if I did just that I would be giving in to what the devil wants me to do. So I should resist the urge. But how long can I resist when I feel so obsessed? I want to go to church, not to mass, but simply walk inside one and drop on my knees. But I’m afraid that it is all in my head and going there won’t change a damn thing. Worse, still, I would end up even more obsessed. It’s all my cousin’s fault and only now do I realise that mum was right all along. She had advised me not to go, warning me that every time she saw members of her family something bad happened to her. I didn’t listen and she said those things and now those things won’t leave me in peace. I need to snap out of it. If I could, though, I wouldn’t be writing this. I am doomed. Cursed. DOOMED.

Suite a 10.37am: Perhaps what is really happening to me is far removed from insanity and merely the painful stage of discovery that leads one to Enlightenment or Knowledge. I’ve had the logical understanding dawn on me slowly which is that one is to depart from comforting, man-made beliefs if they are to see beyond illusions, toward the wondrous fields of reason. Where men are strong enough to believe in themselves without the need of religious cruches. Where men can let go of fables and tales, hints of ‘deraison’ that feed the need for supernatural explanations whenever something lacks clarity or basic knowledge. The fact that I must let go of everything I thought I knew or took for granted is eating at the very core of my person and without the shams enveloping me like a feel-safe cocoon there is only me left with the rather cold and distant comfort of my brain as sole companion in my quest. My conditioned being finds itself threatened and therefore every last remnant of conditioned beliefs are heightened to a degree that feels close to insanity. My conditioned self is the one fighting against the process I put in motion. It is hanging on so hard and entering in such a violent conflict within me that I feel too overwhelmed not to be depressed. But my depression is my inability so far to process too deep a sense or feel of others’pain and what I can see is going wrong around me. Unless I can find a way or ways to reconcile every discovery I make for myself with the ability to cope or shoulder the weight of such discoveries I will not make it very far and will end up consumed by helplessness. I must find a way to put everything into persepective so that I can focus on the quest itself- not the idea of changing anything for I would need to reach destination before even attempting to venture solutions. In this I suddenly find solace again. It is shaky and weak and I could lose sight of this thread fairly easily, still... But if I could just focus enough!

Nobody said it was going to be easy to let go of everything you ever thought you knew... It is in fact more painful than physical distress. I might be playing a dangerous game with my own self but what else could life be about, honestly? There is only this life and I will have the rest of eternity or a black hole of endless sleep where nothing ever exists again to get my peace of mind. This existence will only last years against a backdrop of nothingness. Why should I be worried? Why shouldn’t I gamble my very sanity if there is nothing better to do? If living a blind life according to the rules of biology and man-made ethos morphed into a worldwide propaganda called Religion isn’t something I can do even if I wanted to, then I will go else where and wander till I drop. I must first be able to deal with the isolation, solitude and sense of weirdness my quest is sure to entail. If I fail to find a balance, to reach some sort of acceptance as to the concequences then I’m afraid my quest will be little more than a short trip to ‘derision’. 

All those thoughts, the religious obsessions...They’re still in my head but they are in fact the expression of the threatened conditioned part of me emerging violently as I attempt to break away from all that I do not know as true knowledge. I found the key! I FOUND THE KEY. Now that I understand why I’ve suddenly become so obsessed with beliefs that were in fact burried deep into the core of what make up my social persona I can focus on finding a balance or a way to make peace with it to resume my journey.

I am no evil entity, nor am I a devilish spawn, but my uncanny sensitivity makes me so aware of the ills around me that it morphes the compationate side into depression, the exacerbated state of helplessness one plunges into when they can see but cannot act.

Perhaps I am only turning in circles in vain, focusing on futile things everybody already knows about but they will be the futile things I come to understand myself, beyond the superficial sense that one understands even the simplest concept. I will no longer call knowledge what was handed to me unless I have made the effort to go through the steps that lead to that particular knowledge. Hence, it is highly likely that at the end of my own life I will know very little, but what I will have come to know for myself will be glimpses of true knowledge, away from illusions and erroneous steps leading to what I can only call ‘pre-fabricate’ knowledge. And even if this is all a waste of time and even if it leads me nowhere in the end I have a thirst for something that I won’t always have with me: my brain. It is the one true mystery of life and people waste time trying to comprehend the existence of god, a notion even more out of reach than any other mystery left for us to uncover! Why is it that, beyond logics, people seem so determined to find the answers to the existence of God and his so-called plans or purpose, when they don’t even know themselves? Is it because it is always easier to pick at something further removed from ourselves than finding the courage to face what is starring us in the face? It all comes down to ignorance which feeds our reliance on even more far-fetched explanations. I therefore must conclude that the question of god is irrelevant to man’s development. As I will keep digging beyond the surface of everything that is obvious and taken for granted I must expect more turmoil within myself...since I am my own guinea pig, in a sense. But hey, better be my own experiment than anyone else’s!

I suddenly feel so liberated!...Until the next hurdle, that is.

The world is governed by the rules of probability and chance ensued by the latter. Forgive my lack of clarity and wrong choice of terms when it comes to rather more scientific arguments...I am no mathematician nor am I a scientist, I only go with what seems to make sense. I believe in logics. LOGICS. The world is one maze of a jigsaw that looks very much chaotic at first glance, but if one is to take the trouble to look more closely they are likely to find that there is no such thing as chaos in the sense we understand or define the word. There is something that we see or can identify which we call chaos but haven’t we in fact given to the word a misguided definition?  We call chaos what is devoid of sense, what is truly random, an amalgam of randomness...here’s the dictionary’s definition, actually: “A state of total confusion and lack of order.”

But I claim that what we call chaos is little more than another mistaken thought on what we think we are seeing for what presents itself as chaotic might well simply be beyond our grasp.

And now : “Chaos theory is a scientific theory about situations that obey particular laws but appear to have little or no order.”

So, really a term like chaos has very little meaning and is a blanket word that covers aspects of what we cannot comprehend. But there must be order in the most chaotic shamble. As much as words like ‘all’ or ‘tout’ in French which I grew wary of very early on.

Because I believe in logics I must be able to see that everything around me -everything- follows some logical line and if I am unable to distinguish it from ‘chaos’ or nonsense then it is merely because I lack the understanding or necessary knowledge.

I grew bitter towards everything remotely mathematical and used to have nightmares about geometry. What I only come to understand now is that geometry, maths, physics and other scientific fields are tools one needs to use if they are to sharpen the logical side of their brain. The downside of it all is that such tools gives man the false sense of power over nature and life itself. However, scientific discoveries and the tools they provide in our quest to understand our world are never more than tools that should be used towards helping along the way. They provide no answer in themselves. They do, however, easily swell people’s heads into thinking that they hold the key to better understanding. 

Well...One should never let himself be fooled into thinking that a shiny tool- the means- can replace the answer- the end. The main risk in doing just that is what is happening right now: we lose our ways so much that far from seeking answers from within we keep skipping fundamental steps towards true understanding and we are blinded by the very things that were supposed to help in the first place. Therefore science has now become the means to a very different end whereby comfort and technology are in fact what we should be aiming at.

Now onto another side of me that has long disturbed me: the sense that I am arrogant. I feel very much deluded in the sense that I have that core belief that I am menat to do something extraordinary, somehow. As though I was that special. Well, perhaps it is a necessity to have a proportion of the human race deluded into thinking that they have something special to do or should at least what they can to leave a ‘trace’. If enough of us are enclined to think such things then the probability that one true genius will emerge from the mass is greatly improved. Makes sense. So, really, if I loathe that side of me for being so full of myself perhaps I should make peace by reminding myself that, if anything, I am in fact part of a bigger natural process within which the best can be harvested. In this I suddenly find the idea of being a mere grain of sand much more appealing. Then again, I was always secretly swayed towards the argument for humanity over the individual.