The tail of the dragon is long,
Bearing ridges, serrated edges, the marks of a thousand vanquishings.
Would it covet the length of its appendage so much as reflect on its provenance?
But the dragon is unfeeling, we know... and unthinking
Didn't I read today about dinosaurs
And their inability to recognise, from sight or smell,
The toxicity of the flowers that would bring about their demise.
Are we better off
In the now, then, and forever more,
When we barely ward off the danger of our potency
While we revel in the puzzle of our mortality?
Why do I see the mentally ill, the psychologically wanting, the pathologically inclined
In every little morsel of 'content' that I consume?
Are we becoming better at recognising the germ of our own self-destruction
And describing it... in song, dance, and animation
A little too vividly for anyone's cultivated comfort?
After all we are creatures of the gag reflex...
How else would we have survived
The terrifying exigencies of war,
The stark emergency of grief,
The lonely abyss of existence,
The narrow, stifling fact of form?
What is normal, anyway?
The usual and comforting facade of fear?
The car in the driveway, the bloodied knife at the butcher's
Hidden from the prying eyes
Of kids who tallied too long at their first dissection?
Would I the luxury of perpetual arrival
In foreign lands at the dead of night
Staring down a forked road whose outlines barely to discern
One way to defeat
And the other, to a benumbed despair.
Showing posts with label Depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Depression. Show all posts
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Thursday, June 9, 2016
The Shape of It
There are warning signs. There always are.
A pattern is slowly established from innocuous occurrences that build up frustration at things that you would otherwise regard as the natural wages of living - inadequacies on a professional or familial or personal level, disappointments at the pace and progress of life, the expressed troubles of members of the family unit that have nothing to do with you but that you tend to view subjectively, as if it is a personal failure of some kind that's being superimposed on the other.
This is most often followed by an unconscious preparation - chores that are left undone until the last possible minute, inane things that distract the mind from what's coming.
And then it inexorably hits; first as an explosion that is often directed at the original source of the frustration that was its first herald, and then the revelatory aftermath that redirects at yourself the realisation that it has, indeed, struck again and is determining the course of your life independent of the will.
It is always a submission then; at the self-pity, the rage at historical slights, and always, always, at the razor-sharp focus on the inadequacy of others - how they are perceived to have let you down, how they could have prevented that letting down from happening, that they could have so easily been better: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, managers, colleagues, other human beings that you had actually met too briefly to impose such a world of responsibility for your current fate on. (So yes, it does take on the qualities of a grand fiction for a time.)
The submission is total; it clouds everything. A television show that's on only to shame you into remembering that that writer, director, producer, actor could have indeed been you and that you have failed to take advantage of the opportunities that came your way. A book whose every sentence is reminding you that you did not write that still-born tome of yours and that you would have, if only you had expended the effort at the chance when it arose. The customer service attendant at the service station, newsagent, liquor store, or supermarket reminding you of how hard she's working when you're totally slacking off and mired in self-pity at the fact that you're so totally slacking off.
Communication with loved ones becomes a tiring exercise in camouflage - feigning interest in what they're talking about, their trials and successes, their failures and hopes, when all you can think about is how whatever they're telling you reflects on you.
It is a monster of perception excess. It is monumental scrutiny of the subjective. It is a microphone and a stethoscope and a camera and a mirror focused wholly on you, picking up all the minutiae of the parts of you that you that are the most vulnerable and showing it straight back to you without the benefit of a space-time analytic distance. It is a relentless cycle. The body feels weak, the mind shackled, the day long, the air thin... Until all you can do is wish and will and pray and plead for it to be gone, to go back from whence it came, to disappear just as organically as it diabolically appeared, to rise and leave you and not look back at your quivering, sniveling, pathetic self when it does.
And then you wake up, sometimes days, weeks, months, years since you began to think of your life in this way, and it is not there.
A pattern is slowly established from innocuous occurrences that build up frustration at things that you would otherwise regard as the natural wages of living - inadequacies on a professional or familial or personal level, disappointments at the pace and progress of life, the expressed troubles of members of the family unit that have nothing to do with you but that you tend to view subjectively, as if it is a personal failure of some kind that's being superimposed on the other.
This is most often followed by an unconscious preparation - chores that are left undone until the last possible minute, inane things that distract the mind from what's coming.
And then it inexorably hits; first as an explosion that is often directed at the original source of the frustration that was its first herald, and then the revelatory aftermath that redirects at yourself the realisation that it has, indeed, struck again and is determining the course of your life independent of the will.
It is always a submission then; at the self-pity, the rage at historical slights, and always, always, at the razor-sharp focus on the inadequacy of others - how they are perceived to have let you down, how they could have prevented that letting down from happening, that they could have so easily been better: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, managers, colleagues, other human beings that you had actually met too briefly to impose such a world of responsibility for your current fate on. (So yes, it does take on the qualities of a grand fiction for a time.)
The submission is total; it clouds everything. A television show that's on only to shame you into remembering that that writer, director, producer, actor could have indeed been you and that you have failed to take advantage of the opportunities that came your way. A book whose every sentence is reminding you that you did not write that still-born tome of yours and that you would have, if only you had expended the effort at the chance when it arose. The customer service attendant at the service station, newsagent, liquor store, or supermarket reminding you of how hard she's working when you're totally slacking off and mired in self-pity at the fact that you're so totally slacking off.
Communication with loved ones becomes a tiring exercise in camouflage - feigning interest in what they're talking about, their trials and successes, their failures and hopes, when all you can think about is how whatever they're telling you reflects on you.
It is a monster of perception excess. It is monumental scrutiny of the subjective. It is a microphone and a stethoscope and a camera and a mirror focused wholly on you, picking up all the minutiae of the parts of you that you that are the most vulnerable and showing it straight back to you without the benefit of a space-time analytic distance. It is a relentless cycle. The body feels weak, the mind shackled, the day long, the air thin... Until all you can do is wish and will and pray and plead for it to be gone, to go back from whence it came, to disappear just as organically as it diabolically appeared, to rise and leave you and not look back at your quivering, sniveling, pathetic self when it does.
And then you wake up, sometimes days, weeks, months, years since you began to think of your life in this way, and it is not there.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
The stinky, black and fetid pool that Narcissus looked into
I can't get over the fact that the world is literally unravelling (by specific design in the Ukraine and most of the Middle-East, and as a by-product of myopic consumerism all over the rest of the world) exactly while I am at my most tired, strung-out, anarchic, riven by compulsions of violence towards my fellow-man and yes, depressed that I have probably ever been with the possible exception of those few moments of sobriety while surviving my late teens and early twenties.
Money is an all-pervasive driver to these markers of despondency, but so is a futility at striving after the signposts of a successful existence. It is as if I have decided that I will have a life of pseudo/bashful/unjustifiable/pitiable materialism while compulsively exploring the pseudo-ism, bashfulness, unjustifiable-ness and pity of that desire through every waking moment.
Being a father definitely has something to do with everything I feel, but there again the escape-clause inherent in that admission is almost an invitation to forsake blame for a very real state of dangerous personal turmoil while not redirecting that blame to another on account of her inability to accept responsibility for the condition because of her current dependency. In other words, a cop out.
The job I have these days is a natural agitant, of course - menial, repetitive, devoid of meaningful social interaction and devoted to and sustained by the very consumerist ideal that I naturally recoil from, at least during those times when I do have a choice about it. But it pays the rent, and in doing so sustains a chance at fulfilling that ultimate goal of creature comfort and bragging rights encapsulated by a future photograph of a happy teenager wearing a mortarboard and graduate gown while posing next to a late-middle-aged grey and/or balding man in board shorts and unmarked white t-shirt who is, in turn, posing next to a red Ducati Monster in bright sunshine, smug grins all around.
Life is short, they say. Four Palestinian boys on Gaza Beach yesterday probably hadn't heard that from them.
Money is an all-pervasive driver to these markers of despondency, but so is a futility at striving after the signposts of a successful existence. It is as if I have decided that I will have a life of pseudo/bashful/unjustifiable/pitiable materialism while compulsively exploring the pseudo-ism, bashfulness, unjustifiable-ness and pity of that desire through every waking moment.
Being a father definitely has something to do with everything I feel, but there again the escape-clause inherent in that admission is almost an invitation to forsake blame for a very real state of dangerous personal turmoil while not redirecting that blame to another on account of her inability to accept responsibility for the condition because of her current dependency. In other words, a cop out.
The job I have these days is a natural agitant, of course - menial, repetitive, devoid of meaningful social interaction and devoted to and sustained by the very consumerist ideal that I naturally recoil from, at least during those times when I do have a choice about it. But it pays the rent, and in doing so sustains a chance at fulfilling that ultimate goal of creature comfort and bragging rights encapsulated by a future photograph of a happy teenager wearing a mortarboard and graduate gown while posing next to a late-middle-aged grey and/or balding man in board shorts and unmarked white t-shirt who is, in turn, posing next to a red Ducati Monster in bright sunshine, smug grins all around.
Life is short, they say. Four Palestinian boys on Gaza Beach yesterday probably hadn't heard that from them.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Sunshine
The day has ended almost before it has begun. A colleague remarked yesterday that the pressure of work wasn't allowing him time to assimilate the myriad victories and defeats of the day, so that he could arrive at a rhetorical assumption about how life was progressing for him and the world at large. The perpetual news cycle doesn't grant the bemused cynic any latitude to indulge a theory of social progress or decay when he is blindsided by the next big story that is always about to strike. The pace, the freneticism, the gratification, the mission of - release, has overshadowed what was once a binding narrative, even in confusing times of war, that one can base one's judgment on when confronted with a metaphorical mirror that you could hold up to virtue and its comeuppances. The sense of comparison is dead... in this age when there is really very little material available to use to relate anything to a sense of triumph... which is, I think, a psychological imperative for the justification of life - ours and everyone else's.
I should solicit help posthaste.
I should solicit help posthaste.
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