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!

Reflections on Servitude

I have just been browsing my collection of notes, as if wishing to confirm my suspicion that I am slowly becoming worse - not better - at writing. It is not so much that my ability to string words together has been vitiated, though in my estimation it certainly has, but more noticeably it has been the absolute torpor of association which has set over everything I have written of late. It is as if I cannot bring myself to make connections, as if connections might be an acceptance of a world I largely detest. I feel more keenly than ever the harsh reality of Byron's words when he wrote: 'As I grow older, the indifference - not to life, for we love it by instinct - but to the stimuli of life, increases.'

I can no longer write as I could in the following piece, which was constructed, as I recall, on a bench somewhere in Bath, itself an unusual setting for me - I cannot usually write amongst humanity. It may have been posted here before, but I shan't go to the effort of actually checking this (I can conceive of few things more tedious than reading my own blog posts).

---

I look on these people, sliding along the ground before me, and experience some decoction of utter woe. There is no joy here. People move because it is necessary to their economic fetters. Nobody really gives a fuck about anything that is occurring outside their dull sphere. Indeed, they do not even give a fuck about what is occurring inside their dull sphere, but they pretend to. You can see, as these disposable faces drift past like grey souls on a twilit marsh, complete dejection in every countenance. Then observe the bearings of people's strides - straight lines, no curiosity, no interaction with anything. This is to say, no effort is made to explore or to enjoy. This blasted economic system has crushed the joy out of everything. People have Places To Be, people have Things To Do. It's all terribly austere. Freedom cannot exist under such circumstances. Freedom cannot exist when one is impelled to be in places one despises, to deign to stoop to actions one abominates. Of course, I think we all know this secretly. Yet we deny it at every turn!

Take the vilification of prostitutes. In this phenomenon we see the concentration of mankind's disenfranchisement. It is the offloading of personal despair upon an extraneous proxy. 'Ha, how degrading it is to feign love, to feign attraction, to feign life itself.' Yet this is our common woe! The fact that most of us do not sell sex is neither here nor there - the lion's share of our abilities, our ambitions, our talents, is siphoned off by a malevolent system. We hold the business of prostitution as some base, alien, humbling thing. It is in fact the occupational rarefaction of the condition of the soul under capitalism. We are all prostitutes. I say this with utterly solemnity. That we seem only to recognise physical subjugation, and not its pernicious coevals, says more of our narrowness of mind than the fact itself.

If we are, then, to hurl derision on those paphian entrepreneurs, it must only be in the following sense: it can only be, must only be, as part of a recognition of, and an assault on, our common subjection. If the profession is to be the victim of ridicule, it must only be so in the knowledge that we are not offloading our woe, but embracing it. It must be an exercise in common anguish.

This is a common theme in history. We have always adored the idea that our own insecurities, our own abject melancholia might be mollified by blaming another. Of course this is the whole point of the scapegoat. At present, we blame individual companies for tax evasion - Amazon, Starbucks, Vodafone, the list is too long for this infinite box to house. But what we do not do is question the system which sanctions such injustice. We do not question that our laziness, our ignorance, our own bumbling satisfaction in this economic system has led to this. It is the system which must change. To attack individual companies is brilliant for politicians - they can sit back and claim sanctity. Yet this does absolutely nothing to resolve the failings in the system. It is the annulment of responsibility.

I begin to think about my own childhood, and how I know my town exclusively because I trundled through it as a blithe youth. Were it not for this, I would only know the routes I explored by necessity. Who can make such an acknowledgement and escape without despair? We are born into this world, opportunity abounding at every turn, and freedom is stamped out of us wherever we roam. Wickedly, unnecessarily. I do not jest here - there is something worthy of colossal lamentation in this. 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,' declared Rousseau - the political philosopher subject to the most ridicule and pisstaking imaginable. Yet how is he wrong in his averment? The irony of the world today is that liberty is such an unquestionable axiom that nobody bothers to defend it.

The Myth of Specialisation

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!


- Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Exhortation


We are reaching a bottleneck now - indeed, probably have reached it - at which society will cease to progress in any meaningful sense. Our philosophy will not be broadened, our hearts will not be deepened, and our minds will not be expanded. It is not, as many have claimed, that man cannot any longer know everything, but that he must know everything. Although it is perhaps true that knowledge is becoming more specialised, in some sense it has also become more general - though in sooth I do not know how this synchrony has occurred. Today authors must be marketing experts, poets must be orators, mathematicians must be financiers and architects must be risk assessors. Nobody can be alien to the exquisite agony of producing a CV, or surrendering the soul to the torment of a PowerPoint presentation, by which we might share our ridiculous findings with our still more ridiculous peers. All of this is, of course, illusory and nonsensical - as if committing some old rubbish to paper in pursuit of a job could ever say anything of the character. The CV is our modern mode of poetry. Just as poetry encapsulates and consecrates the spirit of the age, so the CV serves to illustrate the deformity that is the modern human - dull and lifeless, bound to the quotidian. Spiteful, adversarial, discriminatory, unfair, drowning in the specific (which is, after all, but an illusion) - in some sense our lives replicate and reflect the horrors of these damnable pieces of paper.

Yet I must go back to the idea of this corrupted specialisation, this generalised specific which infects with bluntness the arrow of human progression. Though I cannot claim to discern the exact origin of this phenomenon, I think it can reasonably be seen as the inevitable consequence of capitalism's endless march towards efficiency. Yet it is now devouring itself, sacrificing purity for profit. And of course, profit is a short-term phenomenon, like a flash of lightning to be captured in an instant, whereas knowledge, philosophy, art - whatever you wish to term it - is immortal, a great river which flows through the human heart. It is this which we persistently deplete in favour of the transient, the mundane. We build empires of dust, and all the while we make funeral pyres of gold. The base of capitalism is rooted in true nothingness, a vale of phantoms. The very core of its philosophy is illusory. This idiocy is allowed to reign because, well, idiocy is the prime comorbidity of power. Capitalism cares for nothing except the temporal and the present; indeed I have long suspected it to be a natural reaction to the prospect of death (though I will only expatiate on this when I have fully considered it). Certainly it entertains the concurrent tropes of life - short-termism and the search for endless progression or meaning. Its theme is essentially tragic, as a person searching in vain for something which was never there. Admittedly, in this sense it perhaps mirrors life itself, but it can offer no revelation, no wit, no charm, no recompense for sorrow. It is a distraction in the face of unknowledge - superficially pleasing but intellectually corrosive. It encourages us to categorise unknowns as if they were known, rather than to see them for the mysteries they are. The ultimate effect of which is, of course, to punch the final seal onto our lack of knowledge, to paste over the human heart with the sickly glaze of contentment. Capitalism cannot understand that love is a hunger, not a glut. It is a febrile agony, not a static appeasement. It is maniacal and unreasoned, not calculated and sterile.

I always find it curious that a thing so necessarily human, so buried in relations between men, can care so little for human beings, can impoverish the vast majority with no ramifications. It is an entirely human phenomenon which seeks to divorce us from all humanity, depriving us both of emotional experience and any true, sublime, unobstructed love. For everything is deceit when money is involved. Everything is bias.

Comedy - A Fragment

Comedy is essential to life - perhaps more essential than art. One will find with any cursory glance at the world that the most brutish, inhumane and unempathic are, whatever their differences, united by an almost inhuman lack of humour.

Comedy is our only way of dealing with such evil as evolution has set no precedent for. It is the only recompense in a blasted world - quite simply it is the tonic which sustains life. Without it, it would be immoral to continue. Comedy is rooted in tragedy - that is its paradox. Just as Byron wrote that,

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,

So too do those with the most humour understand life's tragedy best - if subconsciously or not. In them is a knowledge and an empathy, a solemnity and reverence for the woe of others, which cannot but manifest itself in wit. They adopt an ironic view of life because cold honesty would be suicide. Comedy is the only force which might slam the book shut, which might restore the contents of Pandora's box.

Paradoxes are by their nature insoluble, and so we live our lives by them. They are the perfect elixir in a world so nonsensical and improbable that our senses cannot fully assay it. They allow us to indulge in the construction of infallible truth, which is in fact unwavering falsity. They allow us to exercise our need to define, to explain, whilst being loose enough that our parochial minds can graft them to a chimerical sphere. They have such an allure because they allow us to tread a line between eternity and desolation, and in this small sense to become transcendent. They are neither vagaries nor edicts, yet something stronger than either, something which strikes us most cleanly through the soul. They have in them the shattering blast of perdition and the soft whisper of a zephyr.

I find it fascinating that one of the prime generators of comedy is the absurd - this cannot be unrelated to absurdism in a philosophical sense. The absurd is hilarious because it is unresolved - it defies our rationality, which we find in some way to be the greatest transgression of all. The bizarre is something we subconsciously descry in the world. This, I am certain, is why so many jokes are made of the most appalling things. The internet is awash with jokes pertaining to Nazism and the Holocaust, neither of which should be remotely funny to the empathic being; it is that they corrupt our view of the world to such an extent that they are laughed off, indeed must be laughed off, for comedy is our only way of dealing with such unique horrors. The intangible grimness of such events is simply beyond our faculties, and cannot be processed in a human way. The laughter produced by such morbid jokes is always nervous - it is the isolation and banishment of something we are powerless to alter, for powerlessness is something that the self-conscious creature cannot brook, something which defies progress and civilisation in one deft move. Comedy is the release valve of the soul. This also explains our ridiculous need to make jokes of the recently dead - our only mode of grief in a godless world.