Brett Graham has been updating his blog with his adventures in the world of mental health. Latest posting contains this gem:
I get some different medicenes from my doctor too, because I am a bit too important for just one kind.
My dad put me on Prozac and some other anti-depressant, when i was 19. As far as i can tell they just made me want to kill myself. i can’t remember why he put me on them in the first place, probably he was just curious to see what they’d do. Back in the 60s he fed psychiatric patients LSD and then sat by their beds taking dictation. He’d also smoke a pipe while examining patients. Them were the days.
i’ve never really got the point of cats. Yes, they’re pretty and graceful and cruel, like certain women i know, but dogs are, well, just better, especially large, German dogs. However, in the following, sent to me by Bonehead, i realise i am more cat than dog, when it comes to human society; in every place i’ve worked there have been cats and dogs, the temps usually cats, the managers dogs of some variety – servile idiots.
The Dog’s Diary
8:00 am – Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am – A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am – A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am – Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 PM – Milk bones! My favorite thing!
1:00 PM – Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 PM – Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 PM – Dinner! My favorite thing!
7:00 PM – Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 PM – Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 PM – Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!
The Cat’s Diary
Day 983 of my captivity.
My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects.
They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my
strength.
The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an Attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates my capabilities. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a “good little
hunter” I am. Bastards!
There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of “allergies.” I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.
Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow, but at the top of the stairs.
I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and Snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released, and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded.
The bird must be an informant. I observe him communicate with the Guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an Elevated Cell, so he is safe. For now.
A story i wrote a few years ago; one reader liked it, everyone else thought it was boring shit.
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The Good Repairer
He has a secret he will never betray, a secret to which he returns each night. It is a figure in his room, mutilated in the dark when he is gone, curtains closed, door locked. The door will always be locked and the curtains closed when he is at work. He leaves the room each morning at 0720, taking care as he washes, shaves and dresses, not to even lightly brush the figure. It is asleep when he awakes, when he leaves to get the bus. He travels to work thinking about his sleeping, deformed captive, the figure in the dark.
He travels to work looking at faces. He is uninterested in most faces. He is looking for faces he can use. Most are no good. But sometimes he sees something, a nose or forehead or chin, an angle of the cheekbones, unusual lips, savage or quiet or lovely eyes. He is curious about faces. He needs faces. There are so many, though most are no good for him. He would like to have these faces; they would be useful. He looks for faces while his captive sleeps.
At some point during the day, when he is entering data or tidying his desk or making tea for his colleagues, the captive wakes up. However it is, each evening when he returns he returns to find the figure awake, waiting for his touch, his hand inevitably gentle but always abrasive and defining.
At work he often wonders about the captive. But he is good at his job, conscientious and unflagging and blandly good-natured: he does not betray his secret, their secret, with a distracted gaze or sigh. He is thorough and he doesn’t make mistakes. His colleagues do not suspect him. The secret has kept him apart; it takes him into its shadow as he logs off, as he leaves, returning to his anonymity and his reality. He arrived with the secret already established, a towering but featureless presence. It has him in its ward, under its protection.
He is well suited to data entry: he is pleasant, thorough, and bland. He makes good tea. He does not excite particular curiosity. There is nothing much for the gaze to catch on. He has no personality. He has no distinguishing marks. No characteristics. A no-face. A void. Pleasant and meticulous.
Those qualities are of great relevance to the mutilated figure he leaves behind. He can make, perhaps, very small mistakes, but now his involvement is so close, unsparing, his margin of fallible humanity is very narrow indeed. Conscientious, thorough, unfaltering: the secret makes strong demands, but it gives him the strength to meet them. A quiet everyday desperation keeps him lucid. If he makes a mistake there is no undo or backspace key. If he makes a real mistake, if his fallible humanity strays a millimetre, he destroys himself. This is his heart, this terrible, majestic creature, this demanding slave.
So when he returns each evening he is anxious to see it awake. No one else could tell, but he sees the life in it at once, living and incomplete and needing his cutting touch. He changes into worn, comfortable clothes, then takes the chisel and walks around the figure feeling the edges, knots, scars. The scars are harbingers of completeness. He must unmake the scar and stroke the life from under the stone. He must unmutilate the stone. It arrived as a perfect monolith. It was everything and so nothing. With his first cut he unmade everything and nothing; he made something; he deformed the everything.
He is cutting it back to perfection. It will not be everything nor will it be nothing. It will be itself and perfect as itself.
It is almost perfect, he thinks, though in a way it is as far from itself as it was in summer. Only the face remains unreal. It is cold now. He shivers a little but the cold keeps him lucid. When there is no personality there is no ballast and so it is sometimes difficult to stay lucid. When there is no personality there is everything and sometimes this comes close to being insane.
He drinks some water and then starts stroking the stone with the chisel, sometimes closing his eyes and feeling the resistance, the give. He starts to cut, shivering, but always working with a steady hand, with a surgeon’s fingers. The statue is eager tonight, so he works until midnight then takes a couple of steps back. It is almost finished, almost itself. Something in him aches for it.
He goes to bed and sleeps easily, without dreams.
When he wakes up he turns off the alarm clock, which has not yet sounded, and sits up in bed. It is still dark outside. Something calls to him and he sees the statue is awake. He is surprised but does not know how he should react. So he turns the light on and because it is very cold he gets into his clothes and makes a cup of tea, avoiding touching or looking at the captive. When he is fully awake, lucid, he puts the cup down, picks up the chisel and stands before the figure. It is awake and almost alive, like him. From all the faces he has seen, a unique face is possible.
The statue shows him how to unmutilate the last damage. He looks into the eyes and feels something exquisite in his heart. He gently cuts the last scars away, carves some emptiness about the living line. It is done.
He looks into the statue. He has made himself; he is at last himself real, after so long without.
Posting may be interrupted for a few days, as i’ve come down with some kind of Black Death after walking for hours in a Lear-on-the-heath style storm yesterday. i woke with a sore throat, temperature, wooziness, and a mysterious pain in my abdomen (i’ve had the latter for about a month, intermittently, but getting worse). i don’t have medical insurance so i’ll just have to tough it out like the man i am. If the abdominal pain turns out to be appendicitis, as of course it will be, well then by God i’ll just have to operate on myself using a rusty can opener.
i was nearly run over while walking to my interview yesterday. In Germany, the little green man means it’s safe to cross as long as you don’t mind being run over. It’s not that the Bosche jump lights – there seems to be some rule that they can turn at 90 degrees through a red light; i imagine they’re supposed to give precedence to pedestrians but they often don’t. i’ve had to jump back a couple of times, but this is the first time i was nearly hit – the car came to a halt about 6 inches from me; the closest i’ve come to death since my last asthma attack, in May.
i was pleased to find myself unperturbed. In the past, i’ve at least experienced a physiological response to danger, the adrenaline shakes. Yesterday i felt nothing. i hope i have attained equilibrium at last, a calmness of spirit. When you have the right view of life, physical danger, death, are of no real importance. It doesn’t make any real difference if i die today or in three more decades. i hope i can hold fast to this clarity; it is important not to be distracted; but it is very difficult not to be distracted from the essential.
i picked up a copy of a Bosche tabloid the other day – very like England’s beloved The Sun, a mix of soft porn and sport. i was surprised by how much i could understand, given i’ve only been properly learning Bosche since leaving my last job, about 5 – 6 weeks ago. German grammar is weird but perhaps because English is, in part, Germanic, i find written German quite easy to understand, superficially at least – much easier than Italian.
Each language has its own character. i find German fiddly but enjoyable, it feels like a real language unlike French, which has always struck me as a comedy language, musical though it is. Today an email from Bonehead, on Spanish:
Am learning some Spanish at the moment – a funny language, like Italian but not as clean and logical, like drunken Italian or Italian conceived by an Irishman.
| WordPress is fucking up so i can’t post properly. This is via email.
i have a new TEFL job, working for some guy in a suit. The bitch who fired me from my last job used to work for him, till he fired her for being a robotic American with shiny teeth. i have tea-stained teeth so i got a job. However, i think he’s just trying me out at first, so if i fuck up i’m back on the street where i belong, dancing for pennies like a fool. |
A story i wrote a few years ago; i think only one reader liked it, all others contemptuous or merely indifferent; so it goes.
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Prelude
In his tower the last man makes his tea with the slow, economic method of one who has survived everything, and no longer knows haste or reason for haste. He stands outside of everything, because everything has gone.
The tower was called The Tower of Maps, a matter-of-fact name since it is a tower full of maps; every map that survived to the last days. He loves maps. He has the kind of eye that can gaze at a satellite photograph of grainy dots and smudges and say, This is an ISBM, this is a landing pad, this is a bunker. He has the kind of mind that can see a city map, a tourist guide to Padova, or Durham, or Edinburgh, factor in the date, and then imagine the traffic, the clothes worn, the river, the large movements of the human, in their living. His imagination is a depth in which he can see worlds; which is just as well since there are no worlds left save those of his imagining.
He carries the tea up from the bare kitchen to the highest study, My nest, he calls it. The stones are cold so he wears thick socks. He darns the socks every now and then, when the stones wear through. In the study there is a thick rug, a bit bigger than the room so folded generously on itself along one wall. There are always candles, because there is no daylight. He usually keeps the heavy curtains closed; not to block out the outside world, but the abyss. Sometimes he wants to open the curtains and fling the windows open and breathe in clear daylight, but there is nothing outside. If he opens the curtains, as he sometimes does when his body tells him it would be night were there a sun, he would see nothing. It is like a starless, moonless cloudless night, only even that blackness would be something to this. This is a nothing absolute of privation. A very dark night would be the blackness of no-light; this is the blackness of no-light, no-air, no-thing, no-night, of non-being. PNGs could make nothing of this. It scares him, though sometimes he opens the curtains when it would have been night (his body is the only clock there could be now), and tries to imagine it is only a dark night outside. In the early days he used to open the curtains and stare out, in defiance and interest. He has never opened the windows – he imagines the oxygen rushing out into the abyss, the candles blinking out, his body exploding.
Each time he snuffs out a candle he is held to it. He watches its uncertainty, and then watches it – what? disappear?: where to?; it simply ceases; it ends. He does not understand how something can be and then cease to be. He cannot understand a universe comprehending both. And yet here he is, the last man. Where does the flame go? He knows that the light and heat energy proceed of the latent energy in the candle fat; he knows that no sane man, no scientist, would wonder. But he wonders all the same.
Candlelight is warm and tender, but he misses daylight. Most of all he misses the blue. He has blue things about him, his shirt, his teacup, but they are only diminished wastrel of the violent blue, the master blue of a summer sky. Sometimes the hunger for blue wastes him. And he misses green, the green textured of leaves and grass, the green deep of forests, the green of eyes even. Candlelight can only remind, it cannot be. But the sun was a discreetly flooding illuminator, it showed how things could be; it brightened. He misses brightness.
There is the consolation of the maps. He spends hours every day looking at maps, remembering places he has been, reinvoking his memories of the cities, the hills; and the rivers and seas. He wishes he had photographs, but perhaps their indisputable clarity would be too much.
He didn’t notice the world disappearing at first. He was by then happiest alone, and kept the outer door and lower windows locked and barred. Sometimes he happened to hear of troubles, civil wars, genocide, man-made plagues and poisoning. It did not touch him, no not even as the citizens slaughtered, raped and tortured each other outside his walls. He kept the windows and curtains closed, until the bodies were taken by the resurgent wolves.
When he looked again, he thought his eyesight was fading. In the distance utter blackness, raggedly eating through the visible world. He watched it encroach upon the daylight, eating through all there was, swallowing the sky till finally it gnawed through the dead streets outside; then stopped at his walls; as if an arbitrary God had drawn a line for his avenging angel. And outside the dark that was no dark of mere absence or night.
This was a long time ago; he is old now, though seemingly indestructible. He sometimes looks into a mirror, curiously. He has grey hair now, and his face is a map of the lines he has made. He considered growing a beard but it annoyed him and he shaves every morning now. He marks time in this last enclave. Although his body has aged, it is no weaker, and he fears he may live forever; that he may have to.
If it were not for the maps he would not want to live. If he traces a finger along a map, and if he concentrates, the vanished world comes gladly about him; he sees the mountains and though he cannot taste the mountain air, or hear the wind, he sees what he touches, as clearly as he sees the candleflames. At first he called this hallucinating; but now he says that if the world could simply disappear, why can it not reappear if only to his imagination? All standards of strangeness are suspended.
Like a needle sliding along a record’s groove, interpreting the encoded music, the packeted voice, his finger summons the disappeared to him again, more vividly than he can control. He spends hours following the coast of Canada, and Alaska, to Juneau, all these things he has no more, the green of the waves and the lash of the spray.
Does the magic inhere in the maps, or in him? And if in him, in his finger or his mind? He examines his finger curiously for signs of magic. But any other finger does as well, and the hand (he uses his right because it feels comfortable) is as a whole quite unmagically normal. Is the magic in the paper, or the ink, or in those who drew or programmed the maps he lives through, the dead cartographers?
He has favourites. There are cities he loves, like Durham or Padova or Edinburgh, cities he spends whole days in, remembering faces and conjunctions, though there is no human or animal life in these welcomed hallucinations, these lordly visitants of an eaten reality. Grass, flowers, trees, but no birds, no mice or dogs. He follows his finger’s print along cheap tourist guides, along the girdling rivers of Durham, the cobbled hush, the Cathedral and the green, the green and the blue. Only in these hallucinations does he see such blue again, such skies.
He sated his curiosity in other cities, those he never saw in the living world: Moscow, Baghdad, New York, but he soon found cities oppressive, in their deadness, life ending in smashed windows, burnt cars and dirty fly-posters. When he is not in his favourites, he is in the wilds. He is fascinated by the lands he never visited, Russia, China, America, Africa; but he returns most to England, to the small wildness, the hills and secrecies of Yorkshire where he once walked.
One day he let a map catch fire, in his carelessness. The old paper gave itself to the flame too quickly for his slowed reflexes, and he was left with ash, a part of the vanished world gone beyond recall. It had been a hiker’s guide to a corner of Scotland. He had the same area on a dozen other maps, but not to this detail. Different maps gave differently. And the vision was lost.
He sat staring at the ash for a while, then an idea came to him. Quickly (for him) he went down the cold stairs in his thick socks, past the libraries (full of rolled maps), the kitchen, and down to the basement. He opened the door at the top of the basement stairs, and looked down into the dark. The air was humid and cold. He descended with his candle (and another in his pocket just in case, with a box of matches) and came to the room he had found once, on his earlier wanderings. Blank sheets in sealed vessels. He took one upstairs, locking the basement door behind him.
In his study he took the blank paper out and smoothed it out onto the wooden desk. It was fine paper. He took a pencil and after a moment’s thought began to copy what he remembered of the burnt map, settling into the state of focused blankness with which he read the maps.
The pencil moved and gave and he realised something was happening. He was not copying the map. He had begun to sketch the edge of the treeline, and then the paper, something in the expectant blankness, drew other lines from him. He followed the lines, he sketched with the same lucid abandonment with which he read, a new land. A hill, a rick, fields and trees as windbreak. As he drew he thought it the kind of land where there might be a man with a dog, a shepherd perhaps, a farmer, a warden. As yet the lines were only lines; he was not reading.
The map kept him for only fifteen minutes, then it was complete and he sat back to look over it. He was not yet sure what he had done. Where had this little world come from? His unruly imagination? It was a simple, crude map: some vague woods, field outlines, a stream, a hut, the kind of map that children make.
He put his finger on the map and this world cohered in him. It was late March, early afternoon, a steep hill, trees, and a man walking down the hill. He moved closer and saw the man was as he had dimly imagined him, but with a life beyond his imagining, with details he could not have invented. This man was living. And a dog ran about the field, yapping excitedly at nothing.
It was night when the map released him. He had watched the man mending a wall. And he had studied the land, which he had never seen before. It extended as far as the margins of the map, where bordered the abyss. How had the paper taken the suggestion of a man with a dog, and made him, realer than he could have envisaged? And was this in the real world, the ocean of emptiness outside the tower, or just in his imagination?
He opened the curtain and gazed out into the emptiness, trying to imagine other worlds. More and more he left the curtains open.
He did not try to copy other maps for a while, fearing any change, fearing that perhaps his maps would all be taken from him, or the abyss might broach the wall. Then one day the desire for blue overcame him and curiosity ran vivid in him. He took another sealed sheet and unrolled it on his desk.
There was a mark on the paper already. He leant to peer at it and saw what looked like a castle in the very centre. Tentatively, he laid a finger upon the castle, and realised even as the world took him, that the castle was his Tower of Maps.
He saw himself as from outside, he saw the tower, and he moved through the walls and saw a hill on which the tower had once been, a hill in the midst of a city. The abyss began where the city had been, but on the hill was sunlight and grass.
He came out of the map and saw sunlight in the room, through the open curtains. The study was sleepy and disshevelled in the light. He blinked, adjusting his eyes to the brightness. He opened the window and let the faint breeze in. It was disconcerting to see the abyss border on the bottom of the hill, an exact but not straight line.
He came back to the desk and gazed quizzically at the map. He did not need to read this map: he had made it real, it was all about him, as bright as vision but with continuance. It existed beyond himself; it was the more precious for not being a part of him only. If he closed his eyes it continued. That was it, the magic, not that it should be startling and beautiful, but that it should continue, a thing secure in its own making, a thing made, that could now be itself and strongly exist against the abyss not as his inert toy, but as his world, his clarity, of which he was a living part and delighter, opener of light.
He went down into the basement, returning with a bottle of good red wine. He opened it with some difficulty and poured the dark wine into a glass that held almost invisibly, shaping the wine to itself, into itself. The aroma rose about the bottle, the glass, the desk, like the accompaniment to sunlight.
He had not drunk alcohol since the last days, the old world. But now he needed the scent, dark and bright. He might only drink a sip or two, or not at all; what he most wanted was the smell, to lean over the broad giving brim and taste the smell, as ghosts are said to, in their invisible thirst.
The sun fell about him. He breathed the wine and leant to the almost empty map, to draw a city about the tower, a city of old stone, rivers, bridges, and a people he guessed one by one, face by face, living and playful, stronger than the abyss; and a blue blue sky over.
After writing my last post i walked across town for my class with Student 2. Crossing the estuary i saw a small black and white ship called Odin.
Student 2 wanted to focus on the linguistics section of her exam, so we spent the hour talking about linguistics. i’ve never studied it before but it’s similar(ish) to logic – an attempt to break language down to its elemental components, like stripping a machine. We chatted about linguistics and logic, while her three small boys yelled and ran about throwing things at each other. It’s the first time, i think, that i’ve talked about logic while ducking inflatable toys, Bertrand Russell eat your heart out. Linguistics (and logic) is strange stuff: one part of me finds it enticingly exact and central; another part (actually, more like 95% of me) wants to just wave a hand and say, “what a load of bollocks”.
Student 2 planned to analyse the first (long) sentence of Paradise Lost in terms of linguistic components. We had fun going through it, trying to decide exactly what was the subject, agent, object etc. of each clause, and if “Restore us” was subjunctive or, as i thought, future, with the “will” elided. She surprised me by saying Milton seems to be setting himself up as a judge who can stand not only above Eden and mankind and the Devil, but even over God and Heaven – so he and he only is fit to justify the ways of God to Man, like a parent arbitrating in a child’s quarrel. i was a little unnerved by her insight: Milton’s most recent life was as a High Court Judge (fairly recently dead). i’ve often noticed that some people seem able to glimpse true things by their imagination alone; though they wouldn’t know it – i suspect the imagination adjoins onto the “visionary” mind.
i then went home to read Philip Roth’s Indignation; the uppity full-of-himself adolescent narrator quotes lengthy tracts of Russell as a proof of the non-existence of god, and i believe refers to Russell as a great logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Russell was clever, but he was only really concerned with things that don’t matter. He didn’t love or need wisdom; he wanted a doll’s house of the mind, so he could feel himself to be surrounded by order and neat answers. Because he was an intelligent man he was not easily satisfied – it wasn’t a cheap doll’s house; but all the same, it was a doll’s house.
The TEFL boss offered me an interview today. i thought “he’s looking for a TEFL daddio, someone with 2 years’ experience, who’s worked in finance, someone who hasn’t been fired from every single job he’s ever had: i need an edge.” So i asked if we could reschedule for Wednesday; and so the interview is tomorrow instead.
In Germany for some reason the day is called Mittwoch (“mid-week”), but in France and Italy it is named after Mercury, the god of magic, writing, and the descent to the underworld (Mercredi and Mercoledi); and in England it is named after Woden, the god of magic, writing, and the descent to the underworld.
The Germans need to sort themselves out.
