Language.

To fall in love with another person is to access, alter and eventually complete a verbal and non-verbal private language to which all others are barred access.

Each individual possesses a river of symbols, mental imagery and private historical motifs through which a whole life is modulated. This much is apparent, obvious even - but I for one don't always appreciate the automatic or schematic nature of much of my existence.

(What are apparently conscious decisions are probably derived more from memory; the same thought processes and gestures resulting in the same actions. The loop which psychiatrists attempt to break in depressives is nevertheless the notional framework of much non-depressive behaviour.)

When the rivers of two distinct individuals intersect, we can examine (in a limited way) the symbols, mental imagery and private historical motifs of which they are in possession, and compare them with our own.

In carrying out such a comparison, we are in a position to introduce, discard and persist with specific aspects of the private language mentioned above. When I am lost for words in your presence, you will know for what reasons I am lost - it is the set repertoire of my gestures which gives everything away. When I am loath to discuss how I am feeling, you'll read me as easily as a child's picture book, because non-verbal cues persevere when verbal ones cease.

Unemployed.

After ten days without regular employment I have by this point more or less taken leave of my senses.


Such joy greeted the morning when I left the company I'd been with for some four years: at last the never-ending pendulum of train journeys had been halted; lonely hours reading newspapers, books, magazines - anything to make the journey appear to progress more quickly.


I was sick of standing about on freezing platforms, eyes glancing helplessly at the sky when another delay was announced (there's something about the sky, about the stars. You may have already guessed as much.) Oh, for the inhumane nine-hour turnaround to stop - home at half past nine on a good day, back out of bed at 06:30, temporarily ill and temporaily blind.

At that time of the day, food was a toxin - I'd no sooner let it pass my lips than I would swallow hemlock. I was and presumably remain nourishment-intolerant during the hours when my mind/body have convinced themselves they should still be sleeping.


In general, then, the breaking of the strictures that bind my life to employment was something to be relished. It is a psychological as well as physical cutting of ties - I used words like 'coming out of prison,' or 're-emerging into the light' to describe how I assumed I would feel.

Yet after a week-and-a-bit, I find that having destroyed the structure of my days and interrupted what is - sadly - the rhythm of my life, I am short-tempered, frustrated and silent.

People without talent, people without direction or purpose, people without a first principle to reduce themselves to when absolutely everything else has failed or is incapacitated, turn to the monotonous predictability of their work in order to progress from one day to the next.

Without that bulwark of predictability, whole lives are emptied of purpose and significance. Such a gross humiliation to confess that it's all that ever sustained me in the first place. It's probably not too great an exaggeration to state: people such as myself would almost rather work for nothing rather than do nothing at all. This is who I am, and I hate myself for it.

Starry.

What a cliché it is to look up at the stars and immediately contemplate the woman I am lucky enough to now have in my life. What a particularly excavated mine of the collective consciousness this is!


Like hearts, like flowers, stars are for some reason inextricably connected with the idea of feeling strongly for something; they stand in quite nicely for that which we are unable to articulate.


It is at this point that we encounter the limits of language, and arrive at the end of the creative process: whilst I am of course convinced that the undiluted sentiment I keep in your name is stronger than any man has felt before, I have no fresh method of conveying this to you. Instead, I fix my eye upon one of the distant stars, a milky point of light indicating nothing at all.


Akin to a religious metaphor, the light at once becomes the carrier of everything that you are, have been, or ever will be. The idea of you is the light - ancient, fragile tendrils of energy that endure. This is truly the most powerful drug of religion; associating our own lives with that which is beautiful or inexplicable.


With such chains of reasoning - realising that the (apparent) characteristics of stars are similar to the (apparent) characteristics of love - can we examine the shadow of what we feel for another person, without ever being able to entirely access the full range of its properties.


I think of you as you travel towards me on a derivative path of starlight: millions of women have arrived in the minds of men this way over thousands of years. Light-years are traversed in a fraction of a second.

It is a challenge indeed to freeze the starlight and expel it from the firmament (here we go again!) of imagery trapped inside my head. I long to replace it with something new; something so that I can truly declare: you have liberated my mind, hence I belong to you.

Pedestrian.

I am increasingly certain that English cities are designed in such a way as to kill pedestrians.

I don't drive, and have never driven, but this conjecture is not motivated out of a sense of bitterness, as I don't think I'd ever wish to test myself behind the wheel of a car. Those of you who can, I wish you well.

No, it's motivated by the tightrope walk I have to endure every time I go somewhere unfamiliar: slaloming crazily through bright lines of traffic suspended like jewels on an invisible thread; measuring the Doppler effect as I judge whether it's safe to make a move yet.

The cynic in me asks: so what if another non-driver dies? Walking everywhere, or taking public transport, will never yield the same revenues as being trapped by a GATSO or being clobbered for sitting on a double yellow line.

I suspect we are accelerating headlong into what will inevitably be called post-capitalism, a system which will work by delineating the instruments of production and those who wield them from those who are beaten into submission by them ever-more sharply.

From this perspective, then - I am not suggesting that cities were designed with the post-capitalist era in mind, only that such structures are inevitable as a consequence of the mindset which conceptualised them - the thumbprint of the motor vehicle will embed itself ever deeper into the scalp of those who choose to be pedestrianised.

Those who wield cars - the instruments which produce millions of pounds of revenue for a fixed outlay - beat each other, and the pedestrian, into submission, and do the work of the post-capitalist whilst going about their everyday business. It is perfection if the majority sleep-walk into the clothes laid out for them, for they act automatically, and with abandon.

Writing.

I find it difficult to write anything - in the sense that it's a struggle for me to even open a web browser and begin to to type - when I am not in the state of enduring an emotional or ontological crisis.

That is, the process of writing is one of catharsis, or of resolution, as opposed to a carefree exercise of diversion. This is more akin to to the travails of academia as opposed to literature, yet I write without the critical authority or evidence of the academic.

So my thoughts float airily in a space untroubled by the weight which requires truth or the unmasking of untruth; a space the size of their author's talent, vocabulary and prejudice.

Psychiatric.

I spoke with a friend earlier about whether 'they'* could ever make a machine which completely destroys the last shreds of human privacy.

I read, or I dreamt, that a device had been built which could, 60 per cent of the time, predict which of a series of cards a volunteer was looking at in an adjacent room. This time a drawing of a tree, this time a mechanical digger, this time a child, this time a building with a red door.

The machine derives its ouput from examining the excitation of particular brain cells, and associating the excitations with the likelihood of a particular card being presented. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to conceptualise of that which can associate any particular 'card' - or 'abstract card' or 'mental image' - with a particular sequence of cells firing.

Such a contraption, if it could be realised, would be the dream of many governments, not least the one which I live under. It would, at a stroke, negate any notion of a private internal world, with no discontinuity between what is thought, and what is said.

It would furthermore do the job of my psychiatrist, untangling the Gordian knot of ideas, prejudices and censored material - the things which I am aware of but concealing, and the 'unknown unknowns' which reside in what Freud would call the id. All classes of mental processes are lit up on the screen, able to be analysed in a few simple steps, and my psychiatrist's job is done for her.

Release.

I have been working with someone who repeatedly encourages me to either 'let go' or 'just be,' or other words which suggests the negation of all forms of censorship.

Here are some of the things that she's suggested I let go of:

• stop using humour as a defence mechanism;
• be prepared to vocalise whatever it is that is occupying my mind;
• cease the endless analysis of concepts and ideas - accept them for what they are.

The person I am working with is a Buddhist. I am frequently told to let go.... let go.... when I demand a single sliver of empiricism to aid my understanding of how chanting works and subsequently enriches her life.

Seek to understand nothing, request no insight whatever, and eventually all will be revealed.

Just be. Flick the switch that holds back the torrent of the unconscious mind, and permit the torrent to erode the constructions which signify a lack of understanding.

Like the automatic writers of the Surrealist movement, or the proselytisers of the sportswear industry, I am being encouraged to eschew conscious thought and action, thus catapulting what remains of me into the formenting id.

Such a release! Such an incline in order to be released! Yet according to the received wisdom, I need do nothing but close down my faculties to be transported, almost by magic, or on the breath of my would-be psychiatrist, to the top of the hill.

Travelling.

Soon, then, the travelling will stop.

After more than two years of incessant shuttling in between a distant home and a distant workplace, the peripatetic man will be forced to grind to a halt, catch breath, and look upon the environment in its astonishing, unfamiliar stasis.

It will take a while for the accustomed kaleidoscope of events to slow down and assume a more predictable pace. It is a lesson for the mind as well as the eye. No longer will fields of sheep or cows rush past at a hundred miles an hour; no more will the hurtling desperation to catch this train or that supercede whatever beauty or interest I might otherwise be absorbing.

When events accrue with such rapidity - as they do when spending most of life travelling to or from somewhere and never seeming to arrive - the tendency is to ignore almost everything. This advertising hoarding, that irate man, the greenish, trilling pigeon staking its existence on being able to navigate a safe passage through the mad stagger of innumerable human feet.

There is much to re-learn: it is not a crime to stand quietly and observe whatever is unfolding in front of the eyes, even if it is not momentous in its significance. It will take a while for the idea of slowness to cease being a surprise; a while before the appreciation of the mundane and everyday occurrence re-emerges.

I long for the moment when I am officially told: this is the hour of your redundancy. For more than being made redundant from this job or that, I am being presented with the leaving gift of my own eyes, own ears, and own internal clock marking out real time, that I handed over to my employer when I agreed to become such an insane, blind pendulum, swinging up and down the country for the hell of it.

As my eyes and brain apply the decelerator, so will in time my body become more comfortable with the idea of existing at low speed. No longer is there the need to sprint from one side of the road to the other as though pursued by the characters from a nightmare made flesh; no need to respond to every text message within 30 seconds; no need to swallow food as though it's the last bite in the whole of humanity.

In ten days, a more sedate life will begin - that is the theory, anyway. Discipline and difficulty lie ahead in dousing the urges that would have me complete n tasks simultaneously. Such hard steps are required, however, if I am ever to lift the fog of confusion and haywire activity that has attenuated all things of interest and vibrancy.

Secular.

Whether I like it or not, I exist under the auspices of the kingdom of God even in early 21st-century secular England.

This much was made apparent as I climbed the steep hill which leads from the train station to home last night. The word of the Christian god spread outwards from its voicebox of stone and filled my ears with a message of dread.

The message was thus: even two millennia from his memetic origins, Jesus still has the power to fuse groups of humans together and inspire frightening loyalty. Even if you, apostate/infidel, expunge every atom of religiosity from your body, secular England still has no choice but to run its business to the background noise of worship.

That is apparent, even when we consider only the milder strains of the disease - for that's what it is, a disease of the mind. Shops couldn't open on a Sunday until very recently because of Jesus - or the Jesus that is propagated by a select band of devotees.

In this character's name, all manner of liberties are curtailed and arbitrary rules created - don't eat before speaking to him, don't invoke his name in vain, consider homosexuality to be improper (very improper, something worth killing over), pretend that you're going to hell unless you've been dipped in a particular container of water.

Yet for all that, I only dwell upon the voice of God echoing across the town and through my ears when I've endured a particularly sobering day. The presence of the bells registers otherwise, but does not cause any protracted thought processes. When I feel anguished or hurt, though, and the anguish or hurt co-incides with the repetitive thump of God's proxy, the overwhelming sentiment is one of hopelessness and despair.

Is this what I've been pared down to? The conduit of the morbid bells, exalting their jealous patriarch? The vehicle by which they copy themselves, handing on misery vertically and horizontally?