I wrote what follows yesterday evening. In retrospect it seems... melodramatic. But I am somehow endeared by it. Poor me, I cannot help but think. Poor, misguided, valiant me. I recorded it on a dictaphone in the hope that I would be able to post that version. It sounds - so much more sensible when I hear it from my voice. From my self-consciously-publically-reading-Radio4-voice.
...
It occured to me this evening, as I read some McKenna to the scent and flickering of an heroically saved (the wick, thrown into a bag along with the rest of it for the purpose of an impromptu expedition to the coast, had been diminished - dimmed) ylang ylang candle, that my posts here have become, in a creepingly inreasing manner, thoroughly self-interested [I nearly write 'self-absorbed' - to drown in the sea of oneself - 'no waving but drowning'], unhelpful and irrelevant, the soul-sreaming of someone distracted from even the unpleasantnesses of Trichotillomania (considerable as they are) by general soul-sickness. (Or indeed let's be honest - why have I written them? Do you remember the last entries in the records od the Tolkeinian Trolls before the Orcs crashed through the door? Only quite possibly there are no Orcs... Quite possibly the terrified records of near-defeat would continue without my mind succumbing to anything more than hyperchondria. [As I read this, I imagine some poet dying of consumption with duck-egg-blue-sleeves and a wan pain-stricken face - oh Carrie Carrie calm down!] How many times can one be accused - accused? - of madness before, strangely drawn to agree with the opinions of others [hyper-formalism] concerning oneself as though [angst-ridden regression] one expected to be contructed through deconstruction [you are a person not aa building - you can neither be constructed nor deconstructed as a whole for you already exist!], one begins to wonder [Indeed one does!], to wander from the equilibrium of accordance with oneself... [Shades of Wilde...]) To avoid the aforedemonstrated bouts of hyperchondria I will set myself and my unruly mind a subject on which to focus...
THE USES AND ABUSES OF SELF-HARM ANCIENT AND MODERN
The title is tongue-in-cheek (strange phrase) [no - the sound of it in my mind's ear offended me...] - but it expresses the level of formality I must inflict on my thinking if that thinking is not to disintegrate into the wailing and self-pitying emotions of the sort of person I would avoid... [Re a conversation I had last night about how seriously dreadful these posts must make me sound - all sound and fury signifying nothing - and how were I not the person writing them I would probably consider the writer to be seriously avoidable - maybe I do still consider myself best avoided - but how exactly am I to do that?] The sort of person who clings to everything (and everyone) they can (predatorily) catach hold of as though they are afraid of drowning in themselves. [That bit I rather admire, from the standpoint of the unexpected phrase, the elegant lament...] Like Alice in Wonderland in her own tears. [A step too far - and an unnecessary one - now it simply sounds overblown.]
People have hurt themselves [that sounds more darkly-humoured S&M than Madness-Confessional] for much of recorded history - at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks. [Obviousness! Yawn. Pseudo-Precise-ness! Yawn. Empty Pretentiousness! Yawn.] This sounds horribly vague - but my memory retains overviews and dispenses with details. [Yes... So...? Yawn.] I recall a television programme about (I think) Italy, which showed a Christian religious day on which there was a stream of self-flogging [what enthusiam I put into that word-combination! Oh the marvellousness of the word 'flogging'! Not quite entirely matched by the word 'flocking'... 'flotsam'! 'Fentimans'! Oh Fentimans Curiosity Cola... fizz fizz...] penitants. I was supposed, I think, to view this with an admixture [is that a word? I do hope so] of pity and horror. I did not. [Oh how I rose above the expectations of others! Bow before me, oh you other less transcendant people, and worship me at once!] What simpler way of cleanse-ing oneself of the accumalated guilt of the practice of any sort of interpersonal relation [she wrote, as though having anything to do with anyone were obviously reprehensible - how terribly English] (or even one's dreadful betrayals of oneself, or of some dualistic side of oneself) [how terribly Oscar] than to bleed oneself of them, to bleed oneself of the scarlet of one's sins [she screamed into the moonlit night - terribly overwrought creature that she was]. In the ensue-ing exhaustion, I imagine, there would be peace. [Yes.] Peace is what one's body gives one when it judges one incapable of any further action. It is a failure - and a reprieve.
...
It occured to me this evening, as I read some McKenna to the scent and flickering of an heroically saved (the wick, thrown into a bag along with the rest of it for the purpose of an impromptu expedition to the coast, had been diminished - dimmed) ylang ylang candle, that my posts here have become, in a creepingly inreasing manner, thoroughly self-interested [I nearly write 'self-absorbed' - to drown in the sea of oneself - 'no waving but drowning'], unhelpful and irrelevant, the soul-sreaming of someone distracted from even the unpleasantnesses of Trichotillomania (considerable as they are) by general soul-sickness. (Or indeed let's be honest - why have I written them? Do you remember the last entries in the records od the Tolkeinian Trolls before the Orcs crashed through the door? Only quite possibly there are no Orcs... Quite possibly the terrified records of near-defeat would continue without my mind succumbing to anything more than hyperchondria. [As I read this, I imagine some poet dying of consumption with duck-egg-blue-sleeves and a wan pain-stricken face - oh Carrie Carrie calm down!] How many times can one be accused - accused? - of madness before, strangely drawn to agree with the opinions of others [hyper-formalism] concerning oneself as though [angst-ridden regression] one expected to be contructed through deconstruction [you are a person not aa building - you can neither be constructed nor deconstructed as a whole for you already exist!], one begins to wonder [Indeed one does!], to wander from the equilibrium of accordance with oneself... [Shades of Wilde...]) To avoid the aforedemonstrated bouts of hyperchondria I will set myself and my unruly mind a subject on which to focus...
THE USES AND ABUSES OF SELF-HARM ANCIENT AND MODERN
The title is tongue-in-cheek (strange phrase) [no - the sound of it in my mind's ear offended me...] - but it expresses the level of formality I must inflict on my thinking if that thinking is not to disintegrate into the wailing and self-pitying emotions of the sort of person I would avoid... [Re a conversation I had last night about how seriously dreadful these posts must make me sound - all sound and fury signifying nothing - and how were I not the person writing them I would probably consider the writer to be seriously avoidable - maybe I do still consider myself best avoided - but how exactly am I to do that?] The sort of person who clings to everything (and everyone) they can (predatorily) catach hold of as though they are afraid of drowning in themselves. [That bit I rather admire, from the standpoint of the unexpected phrase, the elegant lament...] Like Alice in Wonderland in her own tears. [A step too far - and an unnecessary one - now it simply sounds overblown.]
People have hurt themselves [that sounds more darkly-humoured S&M than Madness-Confessional] for much of recorded history - at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks. [Obviousness! Yawn. Pseudo-Precise-ness! Yawn. Empty Pretentiousness! Yawn.] This sounds horribly vague - but my memory retains overviews and dispenses with details. [Yes... So...? Yawn.] I recall a television programme about (I think) Italy, which showed a Christian religious day on which there was a stream of self-flogging [what enthusiam I put into that word-combination! Oh the marvellousness of the word 'flogging'! Not quite entirely matched by the word 'flocking'... 'flotsam'! 'Fentimans'! Oh Fentimans Curiosity Cola... fizz fizz...] penitants. I was supposed, I think, to view this with an admixture [is that a word? I do hope so] of pity and horror. I did not. [Oh how I rose above the expectations of others! Bow before me, oh you other less transcendant people, and worship me at once!] What simpler way of cleanse-ing oneself of the accumalated guilt of the practice of any sort of interpersonal relation [she wrote, as though having anything to do with anyone were obviously reprehensible - how terribly English] (or even one's dreadful betrayals of oneself, or of some dualistic side of oneself) [how terribly Oscar] than to bleed oneself of them, to bleed oneself of the scarlet of one's sins [she screamed into the moonlit night - terribly overwrought creature that she was]. In the ensue-ing exhaustion, I imagine, there would be peace. [Yes.] Peace is what one's body gives one when it judges one incapable of any further action. It is a failure - and a reprieve.
My problem as a Trichotillomaniac [is Trichotillomania], I have thought, is that I have succumbed to a perfectly natural form of catharsis that is out of sync with the culture in which I find myself. It renders me... odd. (Not, of course, that I am claiming that, apart from being a Trichotillomaniac, I am entirely non-odd.) [What charming modesty!] I wonder if, had my upbringing deluged me with more - conventional - culture (rather than encourage-ing me to despise it, all of it, without exception - so that I was encouraged to transcend all times, all places, all classes, all things outside of the uneasy duality of my fierce-ly possesive mother and myself [I make her some like some sort of beast...]), I would have shrunk from defying it with a form of catharsis so culturally unacceptable/unaccepted. For I knew from the very beginning, when I was very young [A.A.Milne...] indeed, that as soon as people knew, there would be trouble. Which I would have to endure - which I would try to endure - without giving in. For that was my sense of relations between myself and the rest of the world: fear and defiance. To some extent, sometimes, it still is.
The problem with the faint surface acceptance of these things is that rather than being The Strange South-Coastal Girl Who Pulls Her Hair Out (Admittance 5 Shillings), I am The Quietly Strange South-Coastal Girl Who, Though She Pulls Her Hair Out and Hates Hates Hates it and Suffers, is Expected to Lead an Otherwise Ordinary/Sucessful Life. Things simply do not work that way. Trichotillomania, for me, is the first domino in a horrible and vertiginous [spelling?] sequence of unravelling. The almost-constant apprehension of the defective peculiarity (as I see it in relation to myself - not so much in relation to other Trichotillomaniacs - but this is no doubt vanity) posisons - everything. I feel like Withnail & I's Uncle Monty chasing the Cat of Trichotillomania [?!?] out of the room - 'you have ruined EVERYTHING! [A little excessive?] Of course, were I to conquer Trichotillomania, I would be left in the awkward position of not having anything left to blame any failure on... [How terribly pathetic that sounds. Pull yourself together!]
This all sounds terribly hard on myself. [Yes.] Terribly hard in general. But it is to be remembered that I have been faced with the choice between adamantine hardness AGAINST myself AGAINST my own emotions [psycho-babble] - or (as I have experienced it sometimes) almost intolerable suffering. [How pre-post-modern. Nothing is meant to be intolerable anymore. We have - transcended suffering. Or we are meant to have. That is why old tragedies look absurd.] Before I pulled my hair out in a serious way I would actually collapse in a dimmed world of near darkness - literally - so incapable was I of dealing with the extremities of my own emotional states (brought on, often but not always - by the demands of those around me. My choice was die, temporarily, or be cannibalised. [That is the part of this with which I still most agree.]) A more sensible and time-relevant choice now would be - be cannibalised or damn well DEFEND YOURSELF! Fight or flight is now optional. [The rest is irrelevant, really...]
Your blog very much reminds me of the journal I used to keep when I was (figuratively, of course) taking my head apart and putting it back together properly. Don't be bothered too much by how the blog makes you sound, getting it out can be wonderfully therapeutic and even if people think you sound nuts or horrible, well, bollocks to them.
ReplyDeleteI think you are brave and eloquent and more than capable of conquering yourself.