Inversion.

Is it appropriate - ever - to laugh (either to oneself, inwardly, or out loud) when the victim of undeserved abuse turns the tables on his or her tormentor?

If not laughter, we have all felt a sense of satisfaction when such situations are played out in literature: when Papillon flings a full pan of scalding water into the face of that bastard Trebouillard; when Milan Kundera's non-Communists limp and walk through their race in defiance of orders.

That's literature, though, and no bony, infinite fist is likely to smash through the pages and into our three dimensions any time soon. It's probably safe - maybe even therapeutic - to afford a smile as Trebouillard goes down clawing at his own face. But what about when you're in a train during a winter's night when the umbra has already fastened itself around the carriage, and there's a woman being subjected to all manner of sexual remarks from a group of drunken football supporters?

The poor woman was unfortunate enough to be carrying a piece of rolled-up carpet - it turns out the purpose of her train journey was to collect this - because in English slang the word 'rug' is used to colloquialise the occurrence of lesbian sex. So she was told enough times that she probably enjoys the rug.

I wasn't confrontational enough to stand up to the men. I never am. So my diversionary tactic was to engage the woman in conversation in the hope that the supporters would lay off her. It's not a surprise that it didn't work as I'd wished: within a minute they'd asked the woman if she'd already fucked me. Some diversion!

The woman's casual indifference to her intelocutors - a smile and a raised eyebrow, as one would deliver to a delinquent child - was hardly the most stinging repudiation. I somehow felt that it was enough to 'turn the tables,' however - certainly enough to cause me secret amusement. When getting off the train, I told the woman she was brilliant.

Western.

I wonder if every person with a western upbringing approaches impending crises* in the same manner as your author.

I spoke to somebody yesterday - I gather such instances as kindling for my flaky hypotheses - who told me: "The first time I kissed someone, I expected fireworks to explode over my head, and for my left leg to dramatically detach itself and make for the sky.

"And every time an important decision had to be made in my family, I would hold my breath as I waited for a dramatic piece of music to commence, audible to all."

Westerners are, then, conditioned to expect the events of our lives to follow a narrative structure in the style of a dramatic television show. We're inadvertently exposed to them at a young age, and it is not long before their plot devices begin to superimpose themselves upon our own 'narrative structure.'

When my father would tell me off for scraping together another appalling school report, I used to wait in expectation for a Superman or some such to propel itself through an open window and drag me to safety. (I hate raised voices. I'd rather be kicked between the legs than endure it.) Needless to say, no comic book creation ever manifested itself. I speak as someone who has never watched much television, having never shown a great deal of interest in it. Nevertheless, its imprint is undoubtedly there.

Even now, the anticipation is there that some supernatural force will extricate me safely from every circumstance. Of course it never happens, but the irrational belief persists.

*Crises is used here to mean 'crises' and also its negation: thus the pleasant prospect of kissing someone for the first time is termed 'crisis.'

Realisation.

That which is re-experienced in a never-ending cycle eventually becomes too much. These are the words I use to describe the pressure exerted on the mind prior to committing suicide.


An event of dubious significance loops over and over again, causing fatigue and sadness for the individual who bears it. Eventually the event, or rather the image of the event, has rolled its wheel across consciousness one too many times and it can no longer be tolerated.


Never-ending cycles do not always result in death, though. I only just realised this as I lay awake in bed thinking about the person I have not heard a murmur from for three weeks. No, the ceaseless stacking of the same event upon multiple copies of itself is not a dead end.


We are not condemned to repetition but nor can we state with certainty when (or even if) the the tower of facsimiles will topple and provide if not always new insight, at least some form of release.


When this release has been earned - I say earned because it always comes at a cost of labour - then the event which gave birth to the release is always subsequently considered in a different light.

A conscious decision, then, to relinquish the person who expanded and filled my head like a gas for the last n days means that the circuitous internal repetition is broken, and a particular weekend re-contextualised. The Buddhist who proselytises letting go has been let go of - the irony!

Futuricide.

There is much debate in Britain at the moment about the problem of assisted suicide - whereby an incapacitated person asks someone else to help them to die.

In this country, the law is not clear about such matters - you might end up being charged with a criminal offence if you aid someone in closing their life, or you might not. See the following link from last month - http://worldfocus.org/blog/2008/10/30/british-woman-loses-assisted-suicide-case/2283/

Even this state of affairs is an improvement compared to previous interpretations of suicide, for it used to be an offence to take even your own life - ie there were consequences if you made an attempt which failed. Such a notion causes me to shake my head sadly, so arcane and cruel a piece of legislation does that seem. You can assume, then, that I support the idea of choosing when enough is enough - but I've never really established whether there are any limits to this, in my own mind.

The question of when enough is enough reduces to or can be re-phrased as: At what point is a situation so intolerable that death is preferable to the situation being prolonged? I have enough times felt that I am in such a hopeless/impossible/unpleasant position that I would rather die than endure another solitary second of it. Yet I am still here, days, weeks and even years later.

This thread is so titled because I have been thinking of an arbitrary (the river of mental symbols I work from mean that arbitrary is always directed into the future) world where it is permissable to ask a doctor to provide 'suicide pills' at any point whatever. A nasty headache; an argument with a partner; a punctuation error in an e-mail, anything. I don't speak of a society where the effacing of the self is actually encouraged, but one where it is accepted and tolerated.

Perhaps in an hour or so when the headache has subsided, I might be posthumously regretting my decision to call a halt to the constituents of life. Your author feels, though, that the momentum which drives suicidal thoughts is derived (in general) not from a novel, equilibrium-shattering hammer blow, but from the cumulative drip of the same event overwriting the same event overwriting the same event.

That which is re-experienced in a never-ending cycle eventually becomes too much. That which I shrugged at in mild vexation yesterday causes a shearing force which separates man from reason today. At that point, I wish to be able to call 'enough!' Of course, I can simply jump from a bridge and spiral into the dark frieze of water below if I choose to.

What leaping from a bridge lacks, however, is the cold absolute certainty of success. I envisage a planet, but do not expect to exist in one any time soon, where certainty is manifested by medical practitioners, and not left in the hands of the likes of me.

Reductionism.

Our eyes are very limited: they can handle neither the extremely small nor the extremely large. This means, then, that our world, our universe, our everything, is perceived in terms of objects which the eye can parse.

The scope of the human eye has been artificially extended, and a good thing it is, too. We can now observe, of course, tiny slivers of living matter beneath a microscope and use binoculars to intrude on Mars during its (her?) occasional visits. I'd argue, however, that such powers are so incidental that they in no way invalidate the premise of the first sentence.

If it were natural to be able to observe macroscopic bodies on an atom-by-atom basis, then I am content to state that such an arrangement constitutes our reality. There is, in that case, no such thing as a macroscopic object, only a collection of n atoms.

Deriving the existence of anything greater than an atom would require a leap of faith, mitigated by technology or by insight, but would not change the 'everyday reality' of what we observe - 'just' atoms, with no greater organistion or purpose. For despite our new awareness that there are macroscopic objects, we are too accustomed to the atomic perspective to see the world any other way.

Back in the more familiar world, scientists who declare that large occurrences (say, an earthquake) can be explained by the multiple interactions of small occurrences (say, the interaction of n atoms) are known as reductionists.
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I am typing at twenty minutes to two in the morning, stranded in a bubble of misery that I've been unable to burst for days now.

Christ, I complain bitterly to myself, I have no wish to live like this any longer. In asserting that unhappiness is the sum total of my existence, am I similarly in need of situations which artificially extend the repetoire of thoughts that I have? Am I seeing only depressive 'atoms' which form part of a superstructure of conflicting, overlapping emotions?

Perhaps the state of mind of being depressed serves, in itself, to make a human being into a card-carrying reductionist? I think there is probably some truth in that. Depressive thoughts propagate a feedback loop which leads to more depressive thoughts. Only when the creative insight occurs to break the circle that reduces every gesture or cognition to a negative one can depression be at least partially negated.

Hindsight.

If I'd known that it was the last time I was ever going to see you, I'd have done any number of things differently:

• I wouldn't have raced for the train with such vigour; putting my drink down at 13:27, and eating up the ground between the café and the platform as though my very existence depended on being there no later than 13:30.
• I'd instead have watched you erase yourself to a flickering dot in the distance, never unfixing my eye from your retreating body. I'd have suspended myself in the one place until the automatic doors swallowed you, and you disappeared into the mouth of London.
• The previous night, I'd not have done anything as tediously human as falling asleep. I should have patiently sculpted an image of you onto my consciousness, one arrived at from long hours of working in the half-light, so that I might invoke you in the same unrehearsed, unthinking manner as I exhale.
• I'd have measured and weighed the significance of every second, counting the last few with the expression of the condemned.
• Would that I had excoriated your mind of every synaptic connection. I thought we had more time to do so - I was wrong. I wished to not only understand, but be permitted to see, the furnace which powered your thoughts.

Equation.

I feel - at the time of writing - that if I am never to see a particular person again, it is as though that person, or myself, or both parties, might as well be dead.


Such sentiments motivate the serial killer. I'm not a serial killer because my mind is too strong (or too weak, depending on your perspective) but the motivating factor is the same. No, I don't wish to be associated with that class of people: I am in fact the antithesis or the nemesis of the serial killer.


Thus thinks the serial killer: "If I cannot have you, then nobody else might have you!" and the act of killing commences. The serial killer relishes the (real) death of another.


Thus thinks the antithesis: "If I am not yours, then nobody else is permitted to have me!" and the sudden withdrawal from situations which might entail meetings with women begins. The nemesis partakes in the (partial or virtual) death of the self.


Oh, the same mechanism is at work so frequently! I imagine that millions of people tolerate it, but don't accept the conclusions they draw if they ask themselves what's really happening.


Depressive people function asymmetrically - that is, their idea of causality has been skewed in some way. This skewing is the defining characteristic of depressive behaviour: positive events are ascribed to extrinsic causes; negative events are the whole responsibility of the person concerned.


Cognitive behavioural therapy attempts to correct the asymmetry, so that the former depressive is capable of enduring a difficult event without reasoning that he or she brought that event about with their own actions.

We can form a series of 'word equations' which link the properties of (anti) serial-killing with the asymmetrical thoughts of (non) depressive people:

• (1)If I can't have you, nobody else can have you!
• (2)If I can't have you, nobody else can have me!
• (3)If I can't have you, somebody else can have you!
• (4)If I can't have you, I'll do for somebody else!
• (5)I've had a good day: that was lucky!
• (6)I've had a good day: that was my doing.
• (7)I've not had a good day: it's all my fault.
• (8)I've not had a good day: that sometimes happens.
  

I think that statements 1 and 7 express broadly the same sentiment, as do 2 and 6; the other statements are there for the sake of completion. (1+7) is the mindset of the depressive/murderer, while (2+6) is its negation.

Nightmares.

In recent days, the nightmares have started again with a vengeance - I fear that my consignment is to have them repeated eternally.

I started having them when I was four years old: innocent, everyday images which held no obvious threat were subverted, causing me to wake up screaming in the small hours of the morning. A girl sitting smiling beneath a tree was sufficient to invoke terror.

Similar to one of Dalí's confusing paranoiac works, the obvious surface image needs some thought and attention devoting to it before its disturbing counter-argument is pulled into the light. Such is the case with the girl and the tree: I suspect that she represents life and vitality, overwhelmed and undermined by the tendrils of a crisis - death or misery or conflict - which is rooted in herself and exists dormantly.

The nightmare, then, always needs work before its full horror is revealed; and its constituents are always a handful of the same half-forgotten experiences, latent ambitions, and the transience of existing as a human.

As the unconscious slab of meat that I am strives to unravel the puzzles that my own mind is setting for itself, one characteristic is apparent - the more difficult the 'puzzle' which has been set, and the more effort needed to solve it or part-solve it, the less I am able to remember when I snap back into the real world. All that remains is a fuzzy certainty that something caused a lot of discomfort, and shook me back to life before its narrative had been concluded.

Conocer.

The Spanish have two verbs which both mean 'to know': they decided at some point that the weight 'to know' carries is too much for a solitary verb to bear, and divided the responsibility.


The bisection is accomplished in the following way: saber is used when one wishes to talk about the retinue of accumulated facts - do you know which city is the capital of Chile? Is 7/24 greater than 15/47?


Conocer, meanwhile, indicates familiarity with another person. Do you know Reg Lightwriter?


My Spanish isn't yet advanced enough to have deduced which one I should use when I'm thinking about or discussing my own internal states: 'this much I am aware of....' Is it an established fact, or a question of knowing the self?

I'm certain I mentioned before that the Spanish also have two verbs which both translate as 'to be' - one (ser) emphasising that which is immutable; the other (estar) representing that which is transient. Again, my Spanish isn't yet at a level to answer the question, but is it permanent or transient when I declare that, for example, I am a person who hates music? Or loves a particular woman?

Regardless the Spanish way of constructing verbs, can the more general point be made that there is are psychological mechanisms which are triggered when language is left 'open' in this way?

If it is natural from a very young age that I state that my thoughts are subject to revision (estar) as opposed to recalcitrant (ser), would I hence be more willing to amend my point of view in the light of new evidence? Would regarding my internal states as mere fluctuations - I feel as though I hate music today, but that might change tomorrow - be healthier and more liberating than asserting that what stands now must stand forever?

How much energy do we expend holding onto views whose veracity seems to be receding with every passing hour? What psychological constructions do we build to support ideas whose time has come and gone - not a priori, but placed there arbitrarily? It is better, surely, to declare that our stances are estar. In so doing, we move a step further on the long, never-ending road marked freedom.