Friendless Solitude, Groaning and Tears

Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up

By ignorance and parching poverty,

His energies roll back upon his heart,

And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,

They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;

Then we call in our pampered mountebanks -

And this is their best cure! uncomforted

And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,

And savage faces, at the clanking hour,

Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,

By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies

Circled with evil, till his very soul

Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed

By sights of ever more deformity!

          - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Dungeon

I can no longer tolerate the presence of the indestructible viper which winds through the chambers of my heart, breathing its pestilence without remission.

This morning I watched, for the first time since my childhood, the screen adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda, a film of which I was always terrified - and which I accordingly refused to watch - owing to the presence of the invidious Miss Trunchbull, who vaulted children through the air as if they were paper aeroplanes. I mention the film because today I was utterly rapt in it, a novel occurrence for one who cannot watch anything without becoming restless as Hell's denizens. For the first time in an age, I was able to consume an entire film offering in a gulp so insatiable that Bruce Bogtrotter would be proud - envious, even. I do not say this with hyperbole - I cannot bring myself to interest in anything, but revisiting this childhood film brought such a quietude to my soul, which sadly and inevitably gave way to the gross analysis which is about to follow.

I realised that the voracity with which I consumed this film resulted from the way I saw my own character in the character of Matilda - a connection I did not make as a child, probably because it is only recently that I have been able to claw at the rotten carapace which still largely obscures my true self. Matilda is a clear outsider, locked in a family for whom she has the best intentions but with whom she can share nothing of herself. She is the corporeal manifestation of all they oppose - introspection, thought, rebellion, intellect (though of course Matilda is a child of such precocity that here I can claim no similarity). And she is hideously tormented for her differences, even by her family (though I do not think this is active malice, rather a simple inability to comprehend her unique construction).

The difference between my story and Matilda's is that, whereas Matilda finds the understanding and intellectual stimulation of Miss Honey, and the subsequent sense that her spirit has been filtered through a prism of grace, that her inmost passions might blaze with unashamed ferocity, I have fuck all. Of course I can read the essays and such of people I admire, but there is something validating and viscerally real in a companion, which is lacking in words conveyed through the ages. Not to mention that reading is a one-way street - I cannot ever hope to write to Shelley or Byron or Wilde or Poe (not that they would respond if I could), a source of grief rather than consolation. I feel entirely as if my spirit died in the 1800s. Today our world is some sort of Enlightenment-Modernist malaise where verity is sought in nonsense, in which rationality is praised and emotion discouraged in some fundamental way, at an ideological level. It grieves me that we must always talk of efficiency and optimality - the human heart knows nothing of these hideous constructs, and the prevailing characteristic of our age is one of knowledgeable unknowledge - we know so much of our surroundings and yet nothing of ourselves. Man mistakenly conceives the external as sacrosanct, when in fact it is environmental noise. The human heart is a nest whose nutriment we must observe, lest it congeal to poison - the which we breathe, producing the froth of the ideology we build our lives upon. It is cause for universal sorrow, and this is the paradox - for the apparatus of our destruction is the very thing which precludes its own negation. Only a new Romanticism can save man, but how can this be pursued if the heart is considered worthless? I am attempting to explain this in the introduction to my nascent 'volume' of poetry, if it can thus be termed, but it is a Gordian knot of abstraction - Romanticism necessarily requires the deification of instinct, which makes arguing for instinct rather difficult. If instinct can be successfully argued for, is instinct then necessary? This all becomes entirely involuted as soon as it is prodded. All I can safely state is that I believe Romanticism would solve many problems in the world, which so often result from a lack of empathy or a lack of knowledge of what humans are, what the world is. Self-awareness is simultaneously beautiful and grim, inspiring both humility and dread. I tend to believe that people somehow disable their ability for self-awareness, or at least subdue it, because they know that it may take them down a road they dislike. Yet it is also a road whose span is verdant and essentially honest.

Men are expected not to show emotion - and so they do not. And therefore, in individuals such as myself who happen to be both endowed with a phallus and capable of great emotion, all anguish rankles in the breast, destroys its host. Hence the quoting of Coleridge - although he described life in a literal prison. Yet this is what our souls shall become when emotion is swept from the stage, empty receptacles through which experiences pass unapprehended, which eventually implode in a spiritual vacuum.

I think the ultimate aim is the realisation of the love Shelley describes:

'If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.'

I know secretly that the only way to break my chronic loneliness, emptiness, whatever one wishes to term it, is to put myself into the world, to try to find something. Yet I cannot venture into a world which does not value me, and herein lies the trap. It may be founded in misanthropy or world-weariness, of the type Byron described most eloquently - at the irritating age of 18 (anapestic tetrameter is commonly found in early Byron):

Dear Becher, you tell me to mix with mankind;

I cannot deny such a precept is wise;

But retirement accords with the tone of my mind:

I will not descend to a world I despise.

Yet it may be something else. I spoke earlier of humility, but perhaps I have been too humble. Certainly I see in myself the tendency to refrain from interaction with others because I know that I will only make an idiot of myself, ruining the convocation in the process. But then I wonder how others do it - however strongly I detest my own character, there must be others in the world who cannot cope. There must be others who never find those who genuinely give a shit about one's life. There must be others who, in place of a facile ease with people, heave around a paralysing nebula of alienation and despair. I will readily admit that I am boring if I am required to - but the most boring person in the world? This cannot be the case!