Going bleary-eyed to the balloons, leaving a warm woman waiting, because…
Never once have i regretted going out early, when the blue half light of dawn seeps into your room under the door and drags out your soul. the thin air somehow full and distant. Something very old reaches into your love. Something simple. Something that isn't human yet underlies us. A few stars remain overhead. The world seems a simple thing. Looking up every now and then, the silence of the universe becomes sublime. How much do we really know? If we sit down with a quiet heart and open mind, we all know what to do really, how to live: Be kind to others, live more in the present moment, l practice simplicity at the same time as living each day like our last. Not always thinking about what we wan from life but what the world might require from us. The thing is doing it. Why not start NOW? 😊
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“Through me the way into the suffering city, / through me the way to the eternal pain, / through me the way that runs among the lost. / Justice urged on my high artificer; / my maker was divine authority, / the highest wisdom, and the primal love. / Before me nothing but eternal things / were made, and I endure eternally. / Abandon every hope, who enter here" (Dante, Inferno, 3.1-9). I have in my hand one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, One River by Wade Davis. My plan was to spend a few hours quietly reading. But the mere tone of the girl’s voice opposite me seems infinitely more enticing, her thick unkempt hair apparently more enthralling, than the rich Amazon rainforest in which Davis makes some of the greatest botanical discoveries of the twentieth century. It is imposible to read because, owing to the fact we both happen to be alive, there is a chance, no matter how remote, that we might talk, discover we like each other and spend the night in the slow throes of ecstasy. It is a mechanism that has become as overpowering as it is inevitable: I find myself dissecting a room wherever I go with almost scientific scrutiny until I identify the most sensual women there. Not necessarily the most beautiful, but the most intriguing. I proceed to endow her with all sorts of perfections and possibilities that are not her own. Stendhal was right about the Crystalisation process of love, but underestimated the rapidity of its strange and frightful effects. I attach myself to her in 10 minutes in the same way only a few fortunate men feel about their wives after 10 years. The sound of her laughter becomes music. The possibility of her belonging to me takes on the same immeasurable proportions as the night itself. The soft light on the side of her face gives her the appearance of an angel-in-waiting. My tea has gone cold. My book is unopened. Time has ceased to exist and my peace of mind is shattered for the evening. That still moment after physical exertion is when true ecstasy finds you. When you move out of yourself, and the world is gone, suspended, suddenly empty and yet more present than ever before. Exhausted, breathless, your body is newly anonymous and suddenly your own. Consciousness itself is little more than a glazed light looking up at the sky as though looking into itself. Time and place slip away, and the trees overhead glow and sway and become truly sublime, as one feels as a funeral or on a quiet mountain or beside a woman you love deeply or leaving a place that made you feel at home or when you stop for no reason on quiet Sunday morning walk in the park or see two people walking along and you feel they in love or when you wake up in the middle of the night and realise you are lying beside someones absence and understand true longing. Something magical exists in that moment, after the game, when you have fully exerted yourself. Time does not exist, senses burning, a truly privileged moment… when, for just for a few seconds, you see it, you almost see it, a glimpse of that silent beyond… and it floods down into your body and comes to rest in you, so that the world becomes a light unto itself, and nothing reaches you for those few moments, only the cool breeze, and that is all you need and everything you believe everything in the world to be fine, because it will happen in It’s own time and, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway, because that cool breeze, or woman, or place, or whatever detail it is that found you and shrank time into your absence, will always be there whenever you choose to return, or rather whenever you allow your body to take over and lay you down again, in that long sudden-ended always, making time stand still. And you know your good girl looks so good, tender voiced and her kind smiling shining eyes get bright just for you and she’s waiting over town for your call and you know she’ll take care of you and feed you and then, the greatest thing ever happened, while I was driving over to her place in the sun, with the windows down and the music loud, grinning to myself thinking how good life can sometimes be if you just let it - as easy as that! I noticed in the car to my left a cute little Filipina girl in the passengers seat looking over her shades at me… I laughed and smiled and stuck my tongue out and she waved and with half a second to spare I turned off the highway and we were right back on the same road to continue the dance… We took it in turns to overtake each other, smiling and laughing as we did and, when we came to a stop at the traffic light, she wound down the window and said hello and asked where I was going…. she gestured for my phone number and I tried to give her the business card I’d already taken out of my wallet, but the lights changed, so I overtook her on the right and drove up along beside her so close our cars were separated by mere centimeters and handed her my card laughing and smiling like a kid and waved as I sped off in the sun with the windows down and music blaring again and feeling just about as good as anyone ever felt in the world surely, going to my good girl’s house with an empty belly and a full heart and the sun shining oh so sweetly and we ordered a feast and got a little tipsy and she called her friend up to invite her over to join us in bed for the afternoon… There is no real success in life, but in the glimpses of immortality we are sometime afforded. How our understanding of death shapes and grounds our lives gives them purpose and significance. Understanding the thing that renders our life meaningless, ironically gives it meaning. What does this mean day-to-day? It means involving oneself in the wellbeing of the community and experiencing everything as acutely as possible, filling your days with sudden liberating thoughts, original moments of fleeting insight, that come in a formless flash and are gone in the same way…. Those privileged moments when there is no thought of time … momentary freedom from what Burroughs described as “the claims of the ageing, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh”. Then occasionally we can bypass the brain’s instinct to busy itself with analysis and tap into a deeper well of sensation and experience The other factor, that you doubters are free to blindly ignore, is that I have an awareness - in sports in general - that isn’t normal for most players. I’ve had it since I was young. I often take it for granted but remember it when, like now, I finish playing (basketball) and come back to reality and think how many plays I made that happened independently of thought and made people say “wow” and “how did he see that”. I’m inconsistent, even with basketball, but you won’t see many players making as many special plays as I do. That’s a fact you can accept or ignore. It doesn’t matter. But I am a force of nature. And, with football, that most rudimentary of games, I only needed to develop the basic skills (I still never practiced once, or need to) for the awareness and fluidity and voracity to be transferred from the court to the pitch. Who the opponent is makes not one bit of difference: the only factor is me and my capacity on a given day to disappear into myself and allow my body to take control of the game on my behalf. An obvious but overlooked idea: that ontological solipsism / the ingrained self-other dichotomy underpins social inequality. How (a change in) that theoretical stance could influence political action in any practical sense remains to be seen… Well, we should give up our salaries for one 😅 We always read about the importance of aiming to be happy, to ‘love myself’ and focus on personal goals. It might be prudent instead to live what Socrates called a life of Virtue, to Flourish, and not always ask what do I want from life, but what the world might require from me Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology – essentially a critique of Cartesian dualism – demonstrates that our perception of reality is primarily dependent upon bodily experience. Form itself, though ontologically fundamental, cannot be accounted for in the terms of traditional realism, in that it is fundamentally perceptual: there is an “immanent signification” underlying reality’s essential mutually-dependent relationship with consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers an interpretation of reality that realigns our understanding of the world with the natural flow of experience: presenting reality as neither as objective and complete in and of itself, or as a mere projection of experiential solipsism.
Sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life.” The world as it appears directly to perception, then, should be our starting point for philosophical enquiry, argues Merleau-Ponty: “Perception orients itself toward the truth, placing its faith in the eventual convergence of perspectives and progressive determination of what was previously indeterminate. But it thereby naturally projects a completed and invariant “truth in itself” as its goal. Science extends and amplifies this natural tendency through increasingly precise measurements of the invariants in perception, leading eventually to the theoretical construction of an objective world of determinate things. Once this determinism of the “in itself” is extended universally and applied even to the body and the perceptual relation itself, then its ongoing dependence on the “originary faith” of perception is obscured; perception is reduced to “confused appearances” that require methodical reinterpretation, and the eventual result is dualism, solipsism, and skepticism. The “fundamental philosophical act” would therefore be to “return to the lived world beneath the objective world” (PP: 83/57)” (from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). In his seminal work “Phenomenology of Perception” Merleau-Ponty begins by asserting the primacy of the body-subject and its pre-objective orientation towards the world. Not only do our pre-cognitive experiences (in which experience is grounded) contain meaning, they underpin it. An extension of this, language should be seen as itself a physiological form of expression, that may appear limited or closed off from the world it seeks to interpret only on account of its having become habitual. At a fundamental level, language is comparable to music in the way that it remains tied to its material embodiment; each language is a distinct and ultimately untranslatable manner of “singing the world”, of extracting and expressing the “emotional essence” of our surroundings and relationships. Whilst a solipsistic incongruence prevents us from discovering the inner worlds of others in as complete a sense as we each experience the world ourselves; our common corporeality nevertheless opens us onto a shared social world. Similarly, while we never coincide with the world itself, or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are also never entirely cut off from it; perception essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it reveals is contingent and revisable. So, somewhat paradoxically, phenomena both transcend us, and are dependent upon us. The tacit pre-reflective form of consciousness becomes explicit only when it finds expression through itself, but always already exists: “The phenomenological reduction, on his interpretation, is not an idealistic method but an existential one, namely, the reflective effort to disclose our pre-reflective engagement with the world.” (from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). If the nihilism of Samuel Beckett's work was replaced with Merleau-Ponty's flourishing.... "in the destitution of modern man, acquires its elevation.” His philosophy sought transcendence though the expression of the ordinary. In its richness, the very texture of consciousness is revealed; in its intellectual rigor, the true nature of experience is distilled down to its bare elements; in its simplicity enabled readers to "arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot). Becket's secret defence of humanity is, for Merleau-Ponty, a very overt one. Both plumb the depths of the human condition, which is where thought and poetry can work their miracles. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
Michael Herr, Dispatches Albert Camus, The Stranger Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and The Sea Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Ryszard Kapuściński, Another Day Of Life Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road To The Deep North Jack Kerouac, On The Road Henry David Thoreau, Walden John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo Peter Matthiessen, Snow Leopard Wade Davis, One River John Fante, Ask The Dust David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous John Steinbeck, The Pearl Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude Re-learning
The act of coveting has become a blind obsession. In one sense, you could say it’s a form of ecstasy, in the original sense of the word, ex-stasis, to move outside oneself. On the other hand, you could say that looking at the world as a set of potential photographs untimely serves only to remove one from the reality you were seeking to observe. As with anything, there’s a balance to be found. But finding that balance would involve possessing a state of mind, and serious volition, a sensibility and a curiosity towards life beyond the superficial transitory cheap thrills that now define me. Like the Paraguayan anarchist Rafael Barrett said: "While I possessed nothing but my catre and my books, I was happy. I now own nine hens and a rooster, and my soul is disturbed. Property has made me cruel […] Where is my old peace of mind? I'm poisoned by distrust and hatred. Evil spirit has taken over me.” I have two weeks off to centre my soul. Re-learning to look at world. But I won’t. Instead, it’s Naked Lunch and Karak tea for me, sat on cafe terraces beside Tunisians smoking shishas and clearing their throats, wringing their hands at the passing girls like flies on a turd. No different to me. Disembodied lust, lascivious indulgence, an excess of empty longing. We’re all just big kids in expensive suits out here. I no longer give myself over to anything, or observe things as they are or stop to enquire, I never look at things stripped of their instrumental value, all the while knowing these acts of coveting and indulgence are formed out of, and lead to, my own misery. My life has become that of a hungry ghost. Sitting in expensive restaurants alone, living other people’s conversations, borrowing their smiles in place of my own, vague snippets of worn-out beauty appropriated from afar. There’s nothing I’d like to do or see I’d just as easily not do or see. I even turned down a night with three girls on New Year’s Eve, in favour of walking alone by the sea in the dark. The feast is finished, because it never began. And yet I seek it out constantly. A halfway hedonist, a junky’s understudy: peering over the pages of last month’s Gulf Times, dark flickers of fear and lust in my eyes, sentencing every passing stranger: studying the strength of every man I see, the beauty of every woman I witness. No book could ever capture the sound of a woman’s laughter. No book could ever capture the breezes so soft you have to close your eyes. And yet reality, I finally believe, is enhanced, not betrayed, by the semblance given to it by art; in the same way that the veil doesn’t hide a woman’s beauty, but creates it. So I’ll go on sipping little cups of this and that in the fancy little uptown joints, until the chink and murmur of the high-toned chatter either fades away or becomes deafening, everyone grinning over little plates of this and that, their kneading mouths a blur of who saw who where and what was said and lunch tomorrow would be simply divine. The slow nods, the quick agreements, the unheard words as each of us seeks to assert our own inconsequential views and offend the December evening with our stale avarice and fragile flashbulb souls. “The upside of being old and tired,” Clive James wrote, approaching death, “is that a little thing like a finch’s call sounds like heaven.” But we always leave it so late. We take so much of life for granted. How many mornings, how many minutes, do we really appreciate being alive for the miracle it is? Just being here would be enough, the necessary and sufficient end in itself. Here I go again. Mental masturbation. Forty five minutes now pontificating while dedicating. It’s drying around the little hairs. Forget stream of consciousness. It's just a stream of shit. Trying to pass off my sorry as art. Trying to communicate with dead men because I’m too far stuck up my own ass to make any friends. All the while knowing the parade of sterile taste and feeble handshakes and elevator jazz and loveless sexual encounters and blindly bending to the whims of my desire is carrying me away and taking my place. We are all sensation junkies. Another day of life passes us by. Of life. Something so sacred, so valuable, so miraculous to billions of people. Yet totally forgotten and taken for granted by billions more. Forget what was said about the rich being unable to enter the kingdom of heaven: we are cut off now from life itself! Too busy looking at our own gilded reflections and burdened by the weight of our avarice to ever actually enjoy the splendours already at our table! Getting nowhere in a hurry. If we sit down with a quiet heart and an open mind, we all know what to do, how to live, how to act. Be kind to others, practice simplicity, live each day like it was our last and not worry too much as everything will happen in its own time in the end. Better to not always think about what we want from life, but what the world might require from us. The thing is doing it. Why not start now? Right now. I remember a time when I burned completely, when I gave myself over to everything, with an unburdened curiosity towards life and living, with no thought of time or appearance or haunted by uncertainty; when I lived for and with the mountains, the sea, the old quiet cities, the being-on-your-way thrill that is always already there waiting to screw in all your senses at once like a florescent bulb: When I would go out early in dawn’s blue half-light, shivering and cold, leaving a warm woman waiting, the rhythm of my blood coursing through everything more wholesome and certain and final. An end it itself, though a journey. I never once regretted going out early. In Tarragona, by the sea with the cobbled alleyways; in Tangiers, with the pre-dawn tea near the port in a fog of ghostly Arabic mumblings; in Iruja, with the blonde Swede and desert highways and being drunk with friends by the lake; sleeping on rooftops in Ait Benhaddou etc etc. When the dawn seeps under the door and drags you out. The air still thin. Rucksack heavy at first. Something reaches into you, and drags you out. Something beyond us, yet ourselves. It is at the same time so completely personal and private, yet something we all share, that reminds us we are not separate beings. The heart wrenching sense of longing for a place you never knew before, and still didn’t leave, and which has nothing to do with the place itself. The old country roads ever-receding out over the horizon. While a few stars still remain overhead. And the mountains and rivers without end. Borges once wrote that “after some time, one learns the subtle difference, between holding a hand, and chaining a soul.” So few of us ever learn to live by this and instead fall into the old quotidian habit patterns of work, family, eat, sleep. But these really are trivial matters. Petty worries that could be overcome with a bit of elbow grease and a few days in the pool or in a library or manual labour. Far greater concerns are afoot! Those voiced a century ago by the great political thinker Rafeal Barrett. His arguments were not new, and they aren’t now, but they are eloquently laid out and, as the chasm between rich and poor begins to yawn again, his words carry great importance: “Nine tenths of the world’s population, thanks to written laws, know the degradation of poverty […] that extravagant waste of human energy. The law rides roughshod over the mother’s womb!” It is not enough, says Barrett, to substitute one set of restraints for another: humanity must throw off the old shackles of inequality all together if it is to fulfil not only its potential but its duty to live well as citizens, as custodians of the earth. Lofty ideals, to be sure. But as Barrett says: “The sailor plots his course by the stars.” If we should not be guided by ideals, then by what? Social inequality has become engrained in the human mode of existence to such a degree that it appears to be a natural phenomenon. But one doesn’t need to be very learned in Sociology or History to understand the intrinsic flaws and shortsightedness of so-called civilised society: “The majesty of the Universe shines above us and makes our humble exertions sacred. Little though we may be, we shall be all, provided we give ourselves completely […] Our mission is to broadcast our body parts and our intellect; to open up our insides until our genius and our blood spill on to the earth. We exist only insofar as we give.” We can say that there is no greater joy than coming face to face with the largely incommunicable pleasure of touching and being touched, watching and being watched, that essential yet allusive affirmation of our existence as conscious body-subjects, whereby momentarily there is an as it were ‘lifting of the veil’, a stepping into the light. We move outside ourselves in those moments of ecstasy, in a very real way, become ourselves when we give ourselves over to another. And in the manner in which we sense and touch and see consciousness externally, succeed in interacting with the world from a new perspective which is, in fact, our own. From a moral standpoint, as well as a perceptual one, we all too often see others in the third person, as part of the 'furniture of the world’, rather than as first person ends-in-themselves. It is the nature of consciousness to forget its own phenomena. “Perception hides itself from itself”, writes Merleau-Ponty. We are understandably absorbed in the objects of consciousness experience, in the world around us. Yet we never completely give ourselves over to these things, or immerse ourselves in phenomena with real attention, instead in habit and the vagueness of routine. In this middle distance we lose sight of our own experience, until we decide to deliberately examine it, whence it is always already there. Merleau-Ponty writes that “We must think of the human body (and not consciousness) as that which perceives nature which it also inhabits”. His ontological reversibility of the body, the other and the world is rooted in the notion that perception at a pre-reflective level is grounded in embodiment and, in broad more simplistic terms, a kind of Taoist theory of existence which, in terms of morality and freedom, entreaties us to integrate our lives more intimately with the earth itself, by treating others as ends in themselves, overcoming the habitual modes of thought (which leave us in a no man’s land between experience and world whilst not fully amercing ourselves in neither) and to realign our existence more closely with natures own rhythms, and with things-in-themselves. We should seek to live as much as possible, for the good simple things: Sex, a good book, little Sunday morning walks, being in nature… the quiet glorious moments in life when you realise it’s not only worth being on earth, but miraculous. "Our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the absolute value of anything, even / especially the totality of death. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures," writes neuroscientist David Linden. Governments have historically leveraged this predisposition in the form of the "pie in the sky when you die" promise to keep the lower classes subservient. Instead, we ought to savour life's sweetness, knowing that it will be proceeded by nothing, nothing forever. And so I offer up my prayers to the stars, and to myself: that I might escape this air-conditioned nightmare of steel and glass and pious interminable bickering, and get back to the land, and learn once again to give myself over to the simple things and patient rhythms of life itself, as they are all that matters and bind us to the unknown. I pray that I might regain a degree of curiosity and easy-mindedness because, as Barrett says, “the only crime is sterility.” So I pray that we can all hold onto the simple things, and at the same time learn the value of letting go, with a kind of detached vigour, the same kind of laid-back seriousness you see of little old Japanese men walking down country roads in the movies. And as the old saying goes: be in the world, but not of it. Amen. Simple advise to myself, that I won’t take, written on a Friday morning by the pool
I hope that it matters… These daily substitutes for immortality. Condemned to meaning, Beyond us yet ourselves, We hold the world in our hands, but so rarely in our words. Always already there, An awareness unto itself, The earth becomes conscious of itself, Sings itself into existence, When we simply sit and wait. Let the universe go about its changes. There are some things that can be taught in other way than through silence. For the most part we lead very ordinary lives but not very simple ones. Always groping after what is already there, before our eyes, in the fissures between words, the sediment of speech. Oh! The voluptuousness of looking. I know just being there is enough. But I am so far from that. I try to let things happen in their own time. Knowing it will all take care of itself in the end. And it’s true that nothing good in life is ever wasted when it’s done with loving care. I try to trace it all back. Ours is a borrowed song - stabilises the meanings of the words which translate it. There is nothing that words cannot say! Yet speech is defined - no, undermined - no, refined, by that which gives it life. In the end it doesn’t mean anything anyway. And that, of course, is the beauty of the game. Like the old masters said: be in the world, but not of it. Don’t be afraid of letting go! Of far more delight to me, Is the music of the offstage whispers The polished wing tip high heels The polite rain of applause and clean-pressed coattails The whole perverted high-toned scene! Well dressed pigs at a satin troff! Taking little sips of this and that, little opinions about this or that The sterile murmur of conversation And teaspoon chink on china cups, The third bowel movement in the diurnal music of the well off! Meanwhile, sitting in the plush leather armchair, I fight the desire to crawl up into the silk lap of the pianist, lost in concentration, like a dead leaf falling, and embrace the heat of her cold shade, her vanished days, her withered roses, her famished wolves, her sharp winds, her uncertain sorrows. All presented so neatly! I notice nothing that is not there. And the nothingness that is. The aroma of the hair of the woman sat beside me, The sultry tones of her Fellahin voice, The amorous dark light of her lowered gaze - These seem far more sacred to me, The way she runs her fingers through her hair creates the most mesmeric music! After half an hour of listening to these thoughts I realise the music communicates almost nothing to me! Virtuous, to be sure. But it’s all pomp and ceremony. Mozart was a master. But he was no Led Zeppelin! Then you surrender your senses You CLOSE YOUR EYES, Give yourself over to the music and let it carry you up out on a wave. The spectacle of the bassoons fades away, The boundaries slip so the sound of it reaches the shoreline of your dreams. The walls recede, the roof vanishes, and you float quite naturally. You float uprooted, dragged off, lifted high. Transported, immortalised, saved. CLOSE YOUR EYES! It all becomes so clear! A song unto itself, carries you in lagging consciousness, As though an ink black stream, Towards love and death and the blood that has all the rhythms needed to entrance. That impossible confluence Where you find stillness in death and stillness in love. And the thin silk scarf hanging off her shoulder, threadbare illuminated by the limelight, hides none of her beauty. In fact creates it. It all becomes torrential, so that each note finds you and reaches into your love, Until there is no longer any meaning, No muse or method behind the sound itself, Just as a poem cannot go beyond the words of which it is composed. It is always already there, When you choose to look. Observing the act of perception Is a form of music too. Sublime, triumphant, ex-static - and then gone. The Indian boys with the slicked back hair heave at the double doors, The murmurs pour out in empty suits. The quotidian car ride home, the silence in the dust, Something was stirred, you can feel it there, tumorous, tumultuous, tenuous, But you can’t put your finger on it! Sat beside your husband, silently watching the blur of lights and the buildings and passing cars you mistake for your life. passing through. But it’s really nothing at all. That tiny sound. Something you will think about again on a quiet little Sunday morning walk. That high toned little flame burning in the fissure between words! The same thing that makes the stray cats roam all night, makes priests pick up a bible, makes some of them put it down. The same thing that made the pianist sit upright and completely still for decades. That subtle continuous rhythm That comes to meet you at the edge of the light, That distant music, That incessant tap-tap. I wept on the vasectomy operating table. Legs spread, balls clamped. Dr. Yasser tried to make a few jokes, but he’s Egyptian. My tears were not caused by pain - but by the immense burden of guilt I’d built up over the years. I’ve become accustomed to it now - all the heartaches, all the loveless fucks, the abortions, the wasted time, the incongruence of my words and the feelings they betray. I saw all their faces as I lay there, passing before me one after the next like a chain I’d forged out of my own misery.
Romina from Argentina, who I almost married in Borneo and love to this day, who had a miscarriage on the toilet which, I suspected, was because of the visceral distress my reaction to the pregnancy caused… Jenny from the Philippines, who had been taking the pill whenever she felt like it, had to go to Hong Kong in the middle of the riots to get an abortion… Then Jessica, the stupid wench who wiped my cum off her belly onto her vagina, that abortion was in Japan… And recently Tryness, from Ghana, it must have been the discharge, no other reason, we were careful and I didn’t cum inside her. So many truly blissful nights. For a decade my appetite for the sensual became an obsession and took my place. Sometimes I was intimate with 3 women in one day. Sometimes with 2 women at a time. I couldn’t count to the nearest hundred how many there have been. Yet I’ve been depressed and isolated throughout. And today all that misery suddenly weighed down on me. But I also cried because of a deeper sentiment: being irrevocably stripped of the fundamental purpose of existence: to reproduce, to share life with a family. Immeasurably valuable and wholesome things, to be sure. I’ve often adored the thought, idealistically, but the fear and self-centredness and aversion to responsibility always kept me well away from it. So I’m lying there on a metal table with my arms outstretched like the crucifixion, in a green open-back robe, being sterilized. With Afari it was close. She was with me there, lying on the table, watching my crucifixion. She gave me all of love. It overspilled around my heart. So much so, I took it for granted. I forgot to pay it back. I kept it all for me. We were so close. Yet I loved her from distance. I could never give myself over to someone. But somehow she always felt like home to me. She even offered to pick me up after the operation. That broke my heart. Not even the perfect girl could pull me away from myself, from this wretched freedom I’d cultivated over the years, that amounts to little more than dull thrills and uncertainty. So far from the quiet idyl of the bohemian-in-the-wilderness kind of freedom that was the original seed of all this. At some point I gave up on life. All I know is anguish. Now there’s no thing and no one I want or need. Nothing I’d like to see or do, I’d just as gladly not see or do. Instead I’m holed up in this halfway house of hedonism, biting my nails, waiting around to die, fanning myself and my vanity. In the end Afari came to see me after the operation. We went to the cinema, and she held my hand. The next day I sold my cat and slept with a girl I hardly even liked. |
AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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