Splinter in my Heart

Where did the years go?...
My childhood... It was, truly, another life. If I’d known... If I’d known it was never going to last... If I’d known my whole life would be shattered by the time I hit 17... If I’d known... I would have appreciated my time then.

But I was convinced it would never change! I was certain that my boring, safe routine would last forever, somehow... Now all that I have left are memories.

You can never go back.

I used to be a French speaking girl growing up in Paris... My Paris, my city, my love. Now look at me, only writing in English and forgetting everything else! I no longer feel as though I belong anywhere. I feel quite detached from the nationality spelled out on my passport. It says that I’m French, so I must be, but everything in my life has taken the consistency of a fading mist. It hurts.

I just don’t understand what it is I’m supposed to understand in life. I really don’t. The only person who was able to describe the inner pain that twists my heart was Baudelaire. He died centuries ago... Le spleen de Paris.

Growing up, I dreamed that one day I would meet like-minded people, tortured creatures who understood the pain of living as I experience it day in, day out. Years passed and I met no one. Some people are destined to be alone, and when I talk about destiny I suppose I take into account the way one’s personality plays a role in fulfilling that destiny. I’ve grown too weird and scarred now not to suspect that I’m myself ensuring that I remain alone.

So while ‘fate’ is leading me down a lonely path, I tend to reinforce that direction myself. In that sense I can see how it is said to be impossible to cheat fate, no matter how you look at it. Destiny is what has already taken into account everything you will have done, but at the time of acting you could not have a clue. If one could take a bird’s eye view of life, they would see the complete picture and realise that while one felt free to choose, the bigger picture was already drawn, and I guess that blurs the lines between past, present and future for good.

Whatever seems to happen now is both passed and to come in the greater scheme of Time. The smaller the entity, the more broken down the spectrum of Time will appear. The more perspective you can gather, the more likely you are to realise that Time is all times blurred into one.


Ah, childhood... when did you leave me? I was so very afraid of losing you I never saw in time that you’d already left me!

Errare humanum est

Everything has taken the colour of stupid these days.

It's miserable and cold outside. My hands are freezing. My head is spinning with pointless thoughts... No, wait, I'm lying. These thoughts aren't pointless at all, they are trapped.

I'm growing ever so tired of expressing thoughts through words that have no bearing on the reality I am chained to. How can you bear it? Is there some sort of switch you can press that makes you giggle and accept the absolute nonsense of everything around you? Is mine broken? And if it is, do you know of any good doctor that could fix it for me?

I walk down the street and I look blankly around me, at the faceless crowds, at the women pushing prams about and taking up most of the space on the bus, at the beggar in a corner, at the lovers holding hands as they walk through the park, at the men in suits looking like utter morons as they seem to talk to themselves, but really they are talking on the phone... I look at the world and I wonder: is this real?

What am I doing here? Who are you people? What am I?

How do I escape? Don't get me wrong, I love life, I just can't stand this world and its messed-up setting. I hate the fact that I have no choice but to live in it with not one single option to escape from it.

Having said this, I'm not depressed. I am having a rare moment of complete lucidity, and what I see scares me.

If you could see reality the way I constantly see it, removed from all the comfortable illusions behind which we hide...
... The trouble with having managed to pierce through the illusions is that you can never go back. Truth really is like a bad smell that sticks to you like a second layer of skin. No amount of scrubbing can make it go away.

Modern Day Slavery

Oh, the bore of looking for jobs... I forgot how boring and wrong it felt. I mean, not looking for a job in itself, but the process that has been put in place that resembles more baring it all in front of strangers (they apparently have a right to know everything about you, but you don’t about them) while selling yourself to them. I’m having a hard time finding a difference between prostitution and so-called work. And my, the jobs are boring... They really are for the most part.

I suppose everything that’s left that could be of the slightest interest would require better skills than I have, and probably better connections. I’m supposed to start the process of enslaving myself to society and I can’t even be picky! And I’ve lost all enthusiasm anyway, which is the only bad thing I let happen to me. Mopping around in utter despair doesn’t resolve anything, it makes you a loser from the start. I know that, but I can’t help it. I don’t stand a chance in anything society has to offer and the reason for that is almost absurd:

1- I don’t believe in anything society has to offer because it is corrupt and based on false, if not criminal, foundations. Everything good has become evil, everything evil has become good. Right is now wrong and wrong is right and the whole of the world is learning the Orwellian Double Speak (okay, granted, Double Speak has been around for quite some time already, but I'm a slow learner).

2 - Since I don’t believe in anything society has to offer, I’m stuck in a catch 22 situation because society requires that its slaves be competitive and ready to destroy one another to get up the ladder of so-called success.

3 - I have lost any trace of a strive to compete, or pretend to compete, for things I don’t believe in.

This all equals to one thing: I’m fucked.

Opium for you and mud for me

So it's a hung parliament, huh?

You know what’s really funny about it all? It is the fact that news agencies have to spend ages trying to explain what it means to people. Can it get any more ludicrous? The UK has a system so unnecessarily complex that most of its own people don’t understand how it actually works - or what it means. And they still call it a democracy? Personally, if it hadn’t been for that soporific Structure of Government module I had to take in second year, I would not have a clue either.

When I tried to explain to my mum what it meant, she just shook her head and stopped listening. So the Tories are leading, but they failed to reach a majority, which means... It’s a hung parliament.

What disturbed me is how certain people who DO have brains (for the most part) got completely sucked in the illusion of having a say in the matter because their skulls have been drilled with the idea that votes count. What use is a vote when all you can vote for is rotten to the core? I suppose they don’t realise that all they’re casting votes for is just about the same as being granted the right to choose between a rotten apple - and another rotten apple. I fail to see how one could be enthralled by the idea. Unless you’re blind and cannot see for yourself that everything is really controlled from the top and that unless the power that be stop imposing their own pawns for us to choose from... Anything called ‘change’ is nothing but a sham.

But I know why even intelligent, well-learned people fall for it. If they didn’t, if they truly faced the farce, they would be just as deeply depressed as I am, perhaps worse. You could actually lose your mind, even the will to live, just trying to face the reality removed from illusions and lies. It’s easier, and ironically better for your sanity, to embrace the lie. In that sense, I’m starting to understand the deeply sarcastic ending of 1984. Orwell knew exactly what he was talking about, and Winston’s fate was sealed the moment he woke up from his lifelong inner coma.

What was Big Brother but an allegory for the machine we are all trapped in? Did it ever matter in the story whether the face of Big Brother was that of a real man, or of someone that actually still existed? No, it didn’t. It didn’t because Big Brother represented the ideal imposed on the world, and it transcended man. Big Brother was the machine, the face was only part of the illusion to make people feel more at ease.

Does it matter that the Deepwater Horizon blew up in the middle of the Atlantic, spewing millions of tons of crude petrol in the water everyday since then? No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t because we are not the ones in charge, we only hold the illusion of being so. So now I wonder what the point is in even knowing about it. It only serves to feed the illusion that we have a say, when it is painfully clear we don’t. I am literally condemned to sit at this desk and watch others destroy the world I am obligated to live in. And when I say ‘others’, I really mean the few in power - the ones with the money and connections that put them in high positions.

The UK system is really just a good reflection of how everything in life has been purposely made more complicated that was ever needed. The more complex it looks, the better, it seems. Yet such areas ought to have been very simple to grasp.

That heavy load of clutter called thoughts won’t shift... My head is in a terrible fog right now. Is there no end to that feeling of intense confusion?... I crave a mere moment of clarity that never seems to come my way. Everything is always like an endless whirlwind of chaotic thoughts and I’m exhausted.

I guess it was good that today happened to be a busy day. I had to leave the house early for some meeting and then had four hours to kill before the next lecture. I spent it with a girl in my year and together we did some revisions. What struck me is how peaceful it felt to be sitting next to somebody who didn’t expect you to pretend to be something you’re not. She’s the quiet type who never boasts about anything in particular as so many people I know like to do.

The thing is... I don’t know how I got to the point where I feel like my head is about to crack open like an egg. The only thing that keeps me going, it seems, is the thought that it will soon be over. Once I’m done with all my exams, I keep deluding myself that I will finally be free, but what really weighs on me like a ton of lead is the gut feeling I have that I’ll always be a prisoner of the machine.
I was reading 1984 the other day instead of reading stuff for my exams. The end of that book left me with a profound feeling of dejection. Not even Winston could beat the machine, and that thought keeps dancing in my head.

Another thing that makes me sad, in a way, is the inner knowledge I have that I have reached the end of the road as far as the Dive is concerned. I have written everything that mattered to me in all the possible ways I could think of and yet words are only what they are: words.
Carrying on would make no sense because there is one thing I’ve noticed, and it’s that I keep going around in circles. Until I break that cycle, I can’t see a point in adding any more thoughts.
People don’t understand what it means to think too much, but I do. I really do, to the point where I sometimes question my sanity. Not being able to stop questioning every single thing, always having your mind buzzing with thoughts when in reality the whole of this world is built on delusions and lies. I keep seeing past the veil of delusions, but I’m trapped. What good is it to be able to see when you can’t change a thing? All it does is make you more depressed. In that sense, the machine wins again.

Language is one of the biggest means of influence on the mind... These days, it’s all about manipulating terms like ‘equality, justice, minority, racism...’ Oh, and ‘terrorism.’

This is roughly how it works: first you impose a new term or notion, perhaps a mere innocuous-sounding word... Like equality. Isn’t that a lovely word, a word full of right-sounding ideals and direction? Isn’t that something we would all want to achieve? Wouldn’t that pave the way to a better society? Surely it would... So of course, most of us embrace the concept at once, and often for all the right reasons... because equality is a beautiful concept to strive for.

Helas! By the time the new notion has been accepted by all the right-thinking people, the second phase is already in motion... The one that will twist what was good into something perverted and wrong. This happens every time a notion becomes an umbrella word that can shelter pretty much anything under the sun. Equality for men and women, for kids, for various ethnicities, for gays, for whales, for rats... By the time the word has been turned into an umbrella one, most of us have already lost perspective, because everything was done in such a pernicious way that... I guess I should now mention that little story I came across today while browsing the net on my phone, and which seems to sum up perfectly why we fall in the trap every time:

Someone wrote about the frog and the boiling pot of water. If you were to lower a frog down near boiling water, it would apparently jump away at once. Now, if you were to take the same frog and lowered it down a cold pot of water, it would happily jump in; and if you were to start heating the pot to boiling point... The frog would boil in it to death. It would not try to escape because it wouldn’t even realise what’s happening.


Isn’t that a wonderful metaphore for conditioning? And that is exactly what is happening to us. We are the frog stuck in a luck warm pot of water being slowly brought to boiling point, and when that happens, we’ll be dead before we know it. And by dead, I don’t necessarily mean physical death, but much, much worse: inner death. After all, we are not physically stuck in a slow-cooking pot of water - the mind is.
And the mind is exactly what makes us human in the first place.

Snowing Down to Reality

It’s a picture perfect of winter outside... The sky has cleared up a bit since yesterday - that’s the one good thing about this island: clouds drift away as swiftly as they appear - and the wintry sun is a dim golden glow on the snow.

The naked trees have a thin layer of whiteness spread along their twisted limbs and the evergreen shrubs are half-immersed in a blanket of snow. Birds are fluttering from roofs to treetops, wings black against the sun that seems to set low forever in this winter time. And when I pop my head out the open window, a gush of icy air greets me, full of mordant freshness that tickles the skin. It looks and smells just like winter indeed.


The news are full of snow stories, of course, and the media even managed to come up with a new expression: Frozen Britain. I’m really starting to think they have that one person sitting in some office, somewhere, hired and paid for the sole purpose of coming up with such catchy expressions. It’s probably the case. Why not? Everything these days is delegated to the maximum and every task imaginable has been split in smaller ones so that no one person ever does anything on their own anymore.

Apparently, division of labour speeds up the supply of any sort of goods and greatly increases it. The great downside of this, and to me it is a huge one, is that we end up with people who are unable to do one COMPLETE thing themselves. They can do part of a thing, but someone else is now forever needed to complete that thing. I don’t see how that makes us stronger or more evolved in the detail.

On the whole, we do look evolved because the masses end up making a complete thing, but what doesn’t fit is the fact that in the detail, each individual is maimed: not one person can actually do a damn thing. It bothers me no end. It makes me feel as though I was handicapped from the start. Maybe that’s exactly it. That division only served to nurture consumerism, and the price to pay was that it handicapped us as individuals. We don’t know anything completely, we only know bits of things.

Even if you gathered all the bits that you know, it wouldn’t even come close to knowing ONE thing completely. Therefore knowing a lot of different parts does not equals to knowing the whole. We are handicapped. Our minds are like a limp foot. We ‘know’ a lot of various little things, perhaps one little technique in the detail, but we remain ignorant of the whole. Our knowledge becomes even more limited and so does our perception, if not our reality itself. We feel more knowledgeable because we seem to know so many little things, but we are really more ignorant than ever before.


The proof is, again, in the pudding. Not only are we growing dependent on complex, faceless structures from ‘above’, but we don’t even realise it. How could we? The only way to realise that is when those structures collapse, and suddenly we have to rely on ourselves, and... Surprise! Most people couldn’t save their lives even if they tried. They wouldn’t even know where to start. In that sense, I feel like we’ve been turned into mindless chicken, except our type of chickens live in 'luxury' homes rather than inside a wooden den.

Take away the landscape detail, and all that’s left are chickens.