Reality Re-imagined

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. With thanks.

He could kill me this time. Before the blow that never comes, I leave. In the no-man’s land between now, and the awareness of now, I withdraw from my body. From the feet upwards, until I exit, like breath, from the back of my head. A gossamer shroud. A whisper of consciousness. A fragile, indestructible translucence that is I.

Then the iron poker in his hand slams onto the carpet and bends like soft lead, and I realise that it has not come down on my head.

It is a memory. An image with no physical sensations. A video devoid of emotional content. Yet I trust it. A memory that has endured through long years, appearing not to have changed, to be immutable. A composite of linked events that happened. A solid, credible, incredible reality.

But between the leaving and the realising did time skip a beat? Did reality slip through the interval into non-existence? Because, when and how did I return?

It had happened before. When I was seven. Not gently sliding out, but ripped asunder. The interval through which reality slipped that time was long. Thirty five years long. Time skipped not just a beat but a whole symphony was lost. Life is kind, it does its best to protect you. At some unrealised level you decide, better I don’t know what I know. Better I forget that I ever knew. Better I bury it so deep as to have no memory at all. Better my reality is so solid I can be absolutely sure that sexual abuse never happened to me.

Except just one thing.

I am looking down from the ceiling at a body lying twisted on a bed, eyes wide open. And I am curious as I look into those staring, lifeless eyes that I do not recognise as mine.

Unlike the events that actually caused the dissociation, throughout those long years of ignorance and forgetfulness, I don’t think that I ever forgot this disturbing image of returning to my body. A fluttering flag marking the spot where something was hidden deep within the ground of my being. A puzzling fragment, unattached to anything identifiable that surfaced occasionally in moments when my mind was lull

So when—unknowingly; accidentally; innocently— I dug around the flag and opened a crack in the crust of my world, memories erupted along the fault line of my childhood. They flickered in cinemascope across the screen of my conscious mind and I watched, nonplussed. Strange, unrelated flashes of scenes and feelings, and the words—sexual abuse—like a film title encapsulating a story. Where? When? Who? And I was sitting on the stairs. I knew whose house it was. I knew when it was. I knew who it was.

But not much more. Just sensations of being covered. Feeling insecure and frightened. Remembering that I used to think, when going for a pee, that a hand with a knife would come upwards and pierce me. And my mother putting cream on my genitals which she was surprised were so sore, as I lay on her bed staring out of the window. But I didn’t remember the leaving of my body to pair with the image of returning to it that my consciousness had kept with me.

There is mercy in forgetfulness.

There was no smoking gun. No fully remembered scenes. No he did this then I did that.

Were those real events that actually happened and were subsequently forgotten, or did they only play hide-and-seek in my imagination? In my hippocampus that juggles what might have been, what has been and what will be. Where the ball of memory rattles between the three cups of illusion, imagination and reality. Does imagination peep out in unexpected places where reality has taken it. Or perhaps it is reality that rolls forward from where illusion has pushed it.

I have asked myself many times what is the criteria for deciding on whether something was real or not real? I watched my desire to know influence what I thought I knew. I observed myself patching together half remembered conversations and scenes. I felt myself imbue memories with significance. I heard phrases echo down the years and gave them new meanings.

But all of that does not prove anything at all. And I knew it. Like a will o’ the wisp that floats enticingly above the bog, it draws me in deeper and deeper until I am drowning in a world of my own imagining, whose dreaming images ebb and flow with possibility. A place where I half intuit that I left my body and talked to angels who sent me back. Or where I was carried down a corridor with green tiles on the wall, or I shrank into a corner trying to disappear. Or the phrase, “don’t make a fuss, darling” is filled with significance as my mother prepares to drop me off at the babysitters.

But if you ask me now, were you abused as a child? I will answer yes, I was. Even though the evidence is sparse, how it was obtained is the proof. There are things that I am willing to trust. The first being that I did not actively imagine the first flashbacks, thirty-five years after the event. The scenes played out in front of me, and I was an astonished and confused spectator. And secondly, I have two body memories. Sitting in a chair one day, I moved involuntarily and as I did it, I knew when I had done it before, because I am there in the bedroom, scrambling back across the bed to the wall and I feel the terror and the desperation. And again, lying down, I suddenly knew that my hands and feet had drummed impossibly fast on the floor and I was screaming in hysteria, only to be slapped across the face twice.

Can I hang a reality on those three things, and say that definitely this happened? And if I do, what does that mean to me, so many years later? Or does it even matter whether it happened in reality? I allow myself to trust in the reality of those things because of their involuntary nature. As though they happened from the outside in, not, like the recollection of memory, from the inside out.

But what am I saying if I think like that? That only the things experienced through my body, unwilled, are definitely real. Then am I real? The I that left my body: the gossamer shroud; the whisper of consciousness; the fragile indestructible translucence. Was that just imagination? Because what am I, as a personality, except the recollection of memory?

I born freak

Image by Wave Generics from Pixabay

My life is a complicated long division sum.
811,946,422,277 divided by 137.

Just do the math.

0 ÷ 0 = infinity/undefined
I am a cosmos unfolding along the ocean current of time. I am space. I am absorbed in the eternal present. It is an endless, beautiful fascination of ideas that form and dissolve and reform. Forever new, forever enticing. Wondrous.

Knock, knock.
What?
Life is passing.
Is it?
Do something.
Sorry?
No, you really do have to do something.
Thanks for the suggestion but I think I’ll just stay here.
No, you can’t, just go do some math.
You mean like, 0 ÷ 0 = infinity?
No, use real numbers. You need to move.
But I have no inertia.
I know. That’s beside the point. Generate gravity and pull yourself together.
How?
You have a body and it is heavy. Very, very heavy.
Oh yes… you’re right, so I do.

Knock knock.
Hmmm.
You were going to do something.
Was I?
I don’t think you noticed, time has passed.
Has it?
Yes, at least an hour has gone by.
Oh shit, I think you’re right.

1 ÷ 1 = (write your answer here)

I am creating. I am writing. Words make connections, they flow. They dress themselves and walk the catwalk in their designer made, coolest outfits. Colour, shape, texture, flow. Catch me, use me. I sew them together and rip them apart. I chop the hemline, pinch the waist and reshape the neck until the outfit is some smooth, elegant, sparse prose. I step back from the details—the lapels and the silver buttons—and I see the whole fashion show. I’m engaged, involved, immersed. I am me. The dress hugs my form, reveals my mind and I feel… satisfied that it’s over. I’ve lost interest and moved on. Publish? Why would I bother to do that?

10 ÷ 2 = (write your answer here)

I empty the dishwasher. I shop for food in the market. I cook. I shower. Occasionally I clean. I look after my body. Nothing fancy, just eat, sleep, walk, sit, wash.

144 ÷ 8 = (write your answer here) That one made you pause. Just for a second or two. I know it did.

I must decorate the spare bedroom. It is not a project I relish. I have zero motivation and by the simple expedient of shutting the bedroom door, the whole task ceases to exist in any of the parallel universes of my conscious mind.
One day, I randomly open the door. I recall, as if from a distant, long forgotten past (which is in fact about three weeks ago) that:

  1. the room exists and
  2. I was going to paint it.

I walk into it and look around. It is full of junk that I have put there whilst decorating all the other rooms in the house. I walk out again and leave the door open. The room now exists in my reality.

I think about it in micro steps. Today I will do something. Not nothing, just something. I move the table to the dressing room and pick up some random papers and irrelevant stuff and deposit them on top of it. On returning it occurs to me that I need a rubbish bag.

I walk into the kitchen and open the cupboard under the sink where the bin bags live and see the recycling. It is Wednesday, I must put it out ready for collection tomorrow. I’ll do that now before I forget. On the way back I notice that the plants need watering. I turn on the hose and leave it balanced in a way that waters the things most in need. I go back into the house and pick up some music that has fallen on the floor. It is a piece I am currently learning and I sit down to play it. I desire tea. Caffeine, that self-medication that I used before I even knew what it did. I boil the kettle and think about what to make for dinner. An hour later, I become aware of an unidentified hissing. It is the sound of water.

Two days later, I notice the bedroom door is open. I remember I was going to paint that room. I’ll just do something. Not nothing, just something…

391 ÷ 17 = (write your answer here) You thought you might stop playing at this point didn’t you? Or perhaps you’re some math whizz who knows their 17x table off by heart, even when it strays past 12×17. Or perhaps the more diligent, conscientious ones amongst you, carefully worked it out using their fingers and toes. It’s really not that hard, quite doable if you put in a bit of effort.

I have an event in my diary. It is at 2.30 in the afternoon. It involves someone else so I have to remember. The problem with remembering is that it requires a sense of a future that is going to happen. But there is no future, and to be honest, there’s not a lot of past either. The future and the past are just imagination. Not real. I mean, isn’t the present all we’ve actually got? And what is the present except 0 ÷ 0.

From breakfast through to lunch, I nudge myself out of the present to imagine a future in which I meet a person. Occasionally the future jerks me with an electrifying adrenaline shot and I panic myself into checking the time, the date and the state of my undress. It’s OK, I’m safe, the future is not supposed to have happened yet. I am not able to do anything else, as I know that like painting the spare bedroom, I will forget that I have to do this imaginary event in the future and get sidetracked.

I set an alarm. I meticulously plan how to get out of the house and into the city. It has time stamps. I put my water bottle next to the door. But I forget to find my car keys in advance. I have two minutes to find them. I retrace my steps all over the house, I unmake the bed, I look behind the cushions, I check the bathroom drawer. I find them in the fridge. I get into the car. I start the car. There is no water bottle beside me. I make my first of three trips back to the house. Second trip, sunglasses. Third trip, teeth.

Eventually, at precisely 2.30pm, the imaginary future becomes the real present.

52,758 ÷ 27 = (write your answer here) You gave up, didn’t you? I know you did, stop pretending.

I am invited to a party. It is my friend’s party. I want to go, because they are my friend and I want to show that I appreciate the invitation. I walk in the door and am robbed of my ability to read the room, because there are simply too many people milling around in a small space. I have no job title to act out, no character to become. I have to be me. But that’s 0 ÷ 0. Immediately I am unanchored, drifting across an open sea with no compass.

I smile and latch onto someone whom I have met before, at this party last year. They are a kind, normal, receptive human being. They smile in return and ask some question to which the answer should be something bland and innocuous. I try to drag myself into the place that can oblige them with what they expect. But 0 is already being divided by something very rapidly tending to 0.

I desperately generate gravity. I find that my answer contains the word death, but too late I’ve embarked upon it. They look surprised, but now there is a gravity well forming, and all the expanse of my universe is pouring into it. The sparkling cosmos of extraordinary ideas is a wondrous adventure to be explored in a frenzy of intensity and hyper-concentration. I find that five minutes later they are staring at me, unease flickering behind a fixed smile.. I know from past experience that I have pinned them, like a butterfly to a board. An internal voice screams, back off, back off right now!

I step to the side and allow them to escape across the room to a conversation about golf.

I see a piano. I sit down and I play. I play for the pleasure of others and the relief of myself. I am there, I am participating, I am acceptable.

154,366 divided by 79 = (write your answer here) You’ve moved on haven’t you? Simply not worth the effort.

I go to work. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I hyper-concentrate on what I’m being asked to do for 3.5 hour stretches. Then, exhausted, I go home and escape into 0 ÷ 0, after which I sleep. It keeps my body alive.

I wear a mask, under which I am doing complicated long division sums in real time, second by second.

Of course nobody ever guesses that I born freak.

Compassion

This is something I wrote for myself some time ago, but I’m offering it up for anyone who is enmeshed in what is currently happening in the Middle East.

In order to cope with the discomfort of listening to someone talk about something that creates stress in you, you need three things.

Courage to keep sitting there and actively listening to the meaning of what they are saying.
Faith in yourself that whatever is happening inside you, you can cope with it. That you will not be traumatised by their trauma.
Compassion on yourself – not them. If they are voluntarily talking then they are having compassion on themselves. Your compassion on yourself will create the environment for them to continue to have compassion on themselves. Fear expands to fill the space available and in order not to be overwhelmed you must create a container for it. So the compassion must expand at a greater rate to contain it and dissolve it.

Compassion is a power of unconditional love. It is not pity. If you feel pity, turn it into respect. That person is dealing with stuff you can’t even imagine.

You do not “give” compassion, you “have” compassion. Meaning you offer to embody it. Compassion is the act of relinquishing yourself to unconditional love and requires courage and dispassion. It is non-personal. It has no subject and no object.

To be in the presence of compassion when you are in distress is to be reminded that for every action (experience) there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a reminder that in your world of unremitting pain, such an opposite exists. The experience of it is excruciating because the contrast is so great it cannot be accommodated. Its presence forcibly splits your world apart. It requires change in you. You can choose to paper over the cracks, pretend it never happened and cling to your pain. Or you can use it to help you find your way back from the extreme to the balance point.

Compassion is hard.

Before the note…

In order to get lost in music, it has to be there already.

When you create music, you can’t get lost. If you get lost, you simply stop. Because you are in the space before the note. You create it from yourself and then you release it through your body across the instrument and into the world.

It sounds.

But by that time you are no longer with it. You are realising it’s child, and the child of its child.

And that’s why you have to practise, so that you can let go of each note before it’s played, and know that your body will merge with the instrument and create exactly the sound that you intended.

Image by: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. With thanks.

Why music saved my sanity

vinyl-records

Words are such untrustworthy things. They cling to the edge of the impulse-to-live as it dies. Scavengers. Every moment of consciousness is a reflection of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. So often the translation is I think, therefore I am. But thinking is so far removed from I, much better to translate it as I am aware, therefore I am. To get from the impulse-to-live to thinking requires a fair number of steps; become aware, assign meaning, fumble in the mental dictionary for words that might be appropriate, string them together according to the rules of grammar, and finally listen to the result. By which time, the world, and the impulse-to-live, has moved on. So there we are, right out on the edge, clinging to words, living in the past.

Do you see what happens there? Where the wriggle room is? Between becoming aware and assigning meaning. That’s where past experience, outside pressures, conditioning, all perk up and claim a piece of the action. They scurry away to the dictionary to slap a label on the impulse, often erroneously. Words can take life and skin it, dice it, discard most of it and then triumphantly proclaim the morsel contained in a single word as The Truth, complete, whole and entire. Nothing to see here, move on, move on…

When I say music saved my life, I’m not being entirely fanciful. It definitely saved my sanity. At a time when all the words in my head were cruel, judgemental and manipulative, music was the thing that revealed a piece of me to hold on to. I’m not talking about lyrics here, I’m talking about notes. There’s the impulse-to-live, and that grabs hold of a note—a sound—and follows it to the next note, and the next. Instead of words imposing a meaning, the impulse-to-live inserts it’s own meaning into the note and feeds it back before that dictionary of predisposition can literally get a word in. What music showed me of myself was melancholia which is a much misunderstood term. It is not depression, it is the exquisite beauty of sorrow. The musicians of the 16C understood it perfectly. And if you would like to hear what that means, try listening to John Dowland’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell. The beauty of the song is not in the words, which are of such despair, it is the music that makes it so beautiful and life affirming.

Image by: Free photos on Pixabay

Interstices

Interstices

I find myself in the gaps between words. In the interstices, where awareness flows unfettered by meaning and paints a world that does not fit neatly into the dictionary. I cannot shoehorn all of myself into ways of being that end in a full stop. My sense of self stretches beyond this physical body and rational mind. It encompasses the continuum in which I swam before life taught me words and separation, or hormones taught me reactive emotions. And it embraces the experience that I expect to feel as I die, when words and emotions dissolve into the velvet depths of silence.

The growth of years has little meaning for me as I do not experience myself or my life as temporal stepping stones. Some things I knew before I learned them, others came in cycles linking past, present and future. The ways I define myself now are not, explaining how I worked hard to get the money to achieve the thing, or picking over the traumas of my childhood. They are how compassion saves me, how joy surprises me and how I understand that life has no meaning that can be spoken of in words.

Picture by Geralt on Pixabay