Addiction to the darker word
“I’m weary. But it’s not a physical weariness, it’s not as if I’m aching all over or succumbing to some debilitating muscular dysfunction. It’s more of a moral weariness. I just don’t know what’s wrong or right anymore, whereas it all seemed so very clear not so long ago. And I’m only twenty-eight! Who’d have thought I’d be this jaded this young?”
“Oh God, that’s not good…”
So the conversation went, in the bookish bar in the depths of the village…
“We don’t talk about love…”
Moral weariness? Imagine, the sense of right and wrong that has been safe in the mind, that has withstood tests of a decade, that has broken temptation… that certainty has become mobile, and seems to be flowing away. Certainty recedes from the centre to the periphery, a surface ripple from the pebble that has sunk beyond view. When do submerged pebbles ever get seen again?
“We only want to get drunk…”
I drank alone in the softly-lit hotel bar a couple of nights ago. It was abandoned but for me. I drew whiskies down, haloed in the bar light as dark corner tables remained empty. It felt like being on stage, and I would gladly have lapsed into a monologue to my silent interlocutor (think Camus, La Chute). But there was only emptiness – my meaning receded from the centre of my mind to the periphery of no-one else’s.
“And we are not allowed to spend…”
I have taken refuge in consumption. I’m working in Newbury, which is 55 miles away from my home, a hellish commute by substandard British public transport. So, I bought a car. It’s German, probably more expensive than I should afford, but it’s fast and I like the colour. And, to be honest, I don’t feel any guilt about the spend – I just don’t.
“As we are told that this is the end…”
Across the ocean, people were drowning. The saucer of their home submerged as the barriers broke and the waters came. I imagined the end of Atlantis, when there were no cameras to capture the wrath of the sea. Perhaps most frightening was the image of sewage and chemical excrement forcing its way to the surface, forming pools of fetid hatred, garishly coloured, beckoning disease.
Sometimes I feel as though I’m addicted to elegiac thought – and it seeps into my written word. It is not as if I am unhappy in life as such, but I struggle to “write happy”. In fact, I feel my emotive space expanding – a kind of diversification of anger into other feelings. I had the first inklings of a tear this week, and it was when I watched the pictures of mourning mothers in Beslan on the news, late evening. Normally robust when faced with such imagery, I was moved, and could not fight a solitary tear… a redemptive tear, perhaps?
“Oh God, that’s not good…”
So the conversation went, in the bookish bar in the depths of the village…
“We don’t talk about love…”
Moral weariness? Imagine, the sense of right and wrong that has been safe in the mind, that has withstood tests of a decade, that has broken temptation… that certainty has become mobile, and seems to be flowing away. Certainty recedes from the centre to the periphery, a surface ripple from the pebble that has sunk beyond view. When do submerged pebbles ever get seen again?
“We only want to get drunk…”
I drank alone in the softly-lit hotel bar a couple of nights ago. It was abandoned but for me. I drew whiskies down, haloed in the bar light as dark corner tables remained empty. It felt like being on stage, and I would gladly have lapsed into a monologue to my silent interlocutor (think Camus, La Chute). But there was only emptiness – my meaning receded from the centre of my mind to the periphery of no-one else’s.
“And we are not allowed to spend…”
I have taken refuge in consumption. I’m working in Newbury, which is 55 miles away from my home, a hellish commute by substandard British public transport. So, I bought a car. It’s German, probably more expensive than I should afford, but it’s fast and I like the colour. And, to be honest, I don’t feel any guilt about the spend – I just don’t.
“As we are told that this is the end…”
Across the ocean, people were drowning. The saucer of their home submerged as the barriers broke and the waters came. I imagined the end of Atlantis, when there were no cameras to capture the wrath of the sea. Perhaps most frightening was the image of sewage and chemical excrement forcing its way to the surface, forming pools of fetid hatred, garishly coloured, beckoning disease.
Sometimes I feel as though I’m addicted to elegiac thought – and it seeps into my written word. It is not as if I am unhappy in life as such, but I struggle to “write happy”. In fact, I feel my emotive space expanding – a kind of diversification of anger into other feelings. I had the first inklings of a tear this week, and it was when I watched the pictures of mourning mothers in Beslan on the news, late evening. Normally robust when faced with such imagery, I was moved, and could not fight a solitary tear… a redemptive tear, perhaps?
posted by nickwong8 at 7:27 am
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