Filament.

Those of us who are detached from reality spend our lives searching for the seat on which to sit as the madness unfolds around us.

A seat high above the world, where we can observe the random, haphazard flood of tiny human insects in their billions. I compare their incoherent scurrying from nowhere to nowhere with the propagation of thoughts in my own broken mind.

These are thoughts with no particular purpose, of indefinite origin, which fade to a trace before I get the chance to write them down: it is this way because, until now, I never found my own cogito, the headwind of cogito, ergo, sum, the think in thinking being.

Cogito, ergo, sum asserts: as long as I think, I exist. Oh, for such certainty to govern everything else! I have longed for the seam of predictability which asserts: 'today will be bearable because....,' or worse still 'today will be disastrous because....' I can cope with disaster and misfortune, as long as I'm aware in advance of what's coming.

Then in a flash of realisation, it all became clear. There is indeed one thing upon which I can perpetually rely, and it provides such a comprehensive explanation for so many ills that I fail to see how it can possibly be wrong.

I can count, without fail, on the small filament of self-doubt which shines inevitably within me: it has been there as long as I have. It asserts the prevalence of my own insignificance, persistently pushing the idea to the foreground.

Now I am aware that the one piece of comfort I wished so hard for has been here all the time. It explains the reluctance on my part to embrace happiness, for happiness (in its absolute, perfect and selfish sense) results in the extinguishing of that compass which I use to guide my way.

I stand on my own shoulders, and cast a suspicious eye on the war thousands of metres below. Solitary and half-mad, I resigned from it years ago. Society isn’t for the likes of your author, and now I know why.

Leaving.

I am due to leave the street named after an Australian city for the last time on Sunday.

This street was invented in a dream one night - the co-incidence is too theatrical to be real. Had Bluefish been Croatian, I'd have dreamt of Zagreb Street, and no doubt ended up living there just the same.

Following the path of Eben's Biblical creation (January 2009, links to an earlier post on here) when He derived the two halves of the universe, blue and red, in a long sleep; first I dreamt about an Australian girl, and she appeared to me on my computer soon after. A miracle!

I asked Eben, the gatekeeper of sleep, that she and I should miss each other so much that the loneliness would eat our souls, and lo it was done. We awoke so lonely that the circumference of the earth was as nothing to her - so ripe with love was Bluefish that the distance from antipode to antipode was less than the rotation of a pre-school globe.

Then I dreamt she came to England twice, completing a classic Ebenic dichotomy: we shared the red of summer sunburn in Cambridge; and the blue lips of winter in Budapest.

For my next dream, I visualised the difference between being awake and experiencing the dream-state - there would come a time when she would prove the whole thing was a dream by going and never coming back again. At some point, she would never return, I should be forced to wake up, and I'd then deny Eben, deny the dream. It never happened - I moved to this street because it was close to the train station. What other reason could there be?

I spent much of the day cleaning up the house, and artefacts of what I thought were a dream had leaked into here, this proscenium that framed us. A ticket from the day she left the first time, some four hours before her flight departed and severed our intimacy. A bottle of Timotei which had sat in the bathroom for months - a chess piece which I knew would signal checkmate as soon as I moved it. A sock which contains enough DNA to clone her and return her to me, intact and smiling and convinced by the sanctity of Eben's spell.

These are the last sorrowful relics of Australia, and the end of Eben's path, at least for now. I quietly observe the room where she sat, not like a ghost or a dream or the ghost of a dream, but as redemption from the past with no guarantee of the future; as the couple who flung themselves at Andromeda but mere earth was too much for them; the pair who looked the impossible in the eye, and blinked. Come Sunday, I shall have closure.

Fear (I).

Only in the last couple of days have planes been able to take off from British airports again - the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland continues to spew out ash, and the tiny particles in said ash are, some fear, enough to clog up an aeroplane's vital organs and cause it to come hurtling out of the sky.

It's a reasonable-enough assessment on the surface of it. Clearly, the chances of survival when hamstrung at 39000 feet are minimal, and hence it makes sense to eradicate as much risk as possible.

As a recent Spiked article has it, though, 'we live in an era where problems of uncertainty and risk are continually amplified, and where our fearful imaginations can make these problems seem like existential threats.' (Please go and read the article - it expresses a modern view of devastation as mere revision of an ancient hang-up. History repeating itself again and again, in different clothes, without end.)

Uncertainty and risk continually amplified, and fearful imaginations dreaming up existential threats? Those words in particular leapt out of the page at me, and I then realised that I am, of course, a child of my time.

As such a child, weaned on (I go back to this) the demons propagated by the Catholic church; as such a child whose self-perception and confidence continues to ascend and crash, it is completely unsurprising that I have trained myself to fear the worst.

To truly fear the worst goes beyond the solid calculation of risk and reward - it means to imagine most devastating outcome, and to convince oneself that not only is it likely to happen, but it is the sole possible future. Depending on what kind of a mind this fear is generated in, sometimes the (negative) strength is there to deliver self-fulfilling prophecies, and sometimes not.

I had an ex-girlfriend who could break the electric mechanism that powered the opening and shutting of the gate at her mother's house - by either concentrating on it hard, or looking at it for an extended period of time (perhaps it's the same thing.) At one time in her life, when prone to flashes of temper, all the lights in the property would fuse as the anger rose through her. Few of us possess the power to shape the material world in this way, but some of us, unfortunately, can deliver self-fulfilling prophecies which are born in the shadow of the worst-case scenario.

Inevitably, then, to Bluefish - no, to every woman I have ever had a romantic interest in. Poor Bluefish is not responsible for this weight, for it is the accumulation of mistake after mistake, worst-case scenario after worst-case scenario made flesh. I recall the sword of Damocles suspended over my head when I was 19. Every morning, I would wake up convinced that my first girlfriend would today throw me out of her life and condemn me, screaming, unto the umbra.

After 49 days, it happened, and at that point I dropped out of the ranks of the sane. The worst-case scenario is that I would lose her and go mad, become autistic, become comfortable in the infinite vacuum of solipsism. The worst-case scenario that I dreamed of one night in June that year was beholden to me in all its four-dimensional, kaleidoscopic madness. I, a teenager who had to all intents and purposes been eaten by a senseless, violent computer game, it did not take long to become desensitised to the alien morals, and accept this new universe as unquestioningly as I'd accepted the one I knew for 19-and-a-half years.

Relegation.

I said before it's important only to know the overall direction of the current in someone else's heart - whether it is flowing with you or against you.

The separate components which make up the flow are interesting in themselves, but even a diligent partner does not have the time to assess each one of them. In the same way that we're aware that individual molecules of gas add to the temperature and pressure of the whole but we still overlook them in favour of the macroscopic view, so it is when I try to ascertain when Bluefish's current changed from flowing with me, to flowing against me.

I've sat thinking about it for most of Monday, and now Monday has bled inevitably into the early hours of Tuesday, but I have now identified the moment when I began to lose her. As seems to be the case with most crises, its roots are innocuous enough, but its long-term impact is significant enough to scar a person forever.

We were walking down one of the innumberable roads named something-üt in Budapest, and we'd found conversation hard going that morning. There were reasons for that other than the conclusion there was no longer anything worth saying. I'm a notoriously slow starter, and the low temperature meant I would be even less inclined to offer much in the way of diversion. (I seem to remember this was the day I'd gone out into an eastern European city in November wearing just a t-shirt and a coat, and expected to be anything other than frozen.)

Our conversation had just begun to pick up, and Bluefish was telling me something about her past, when I was distracted by a man handing out fliers for something or other - I know not what? Was it a nightclub? Something relating to the nearby Opera House? An instrument of political protest? I'd not got the faintest idea, and I began to 'read' the document in the hope of getting the gist of its content.

It was a faint hope indeed, as the only word of Hungarian I'd picked up was the equivalent of 'exit' - 'kijárat,' plastered over many buildings across the city. I tried to read the leaflet, though, looking for terms that might be similar to English or Spanish ones. This made Bluefish as angry and disappointed as I had ever seen her, and it is this moment I symbolically identify as the one where her heart stopped beating for me, even if it has never subsequently started to pulse against me.

She intimated I was ignoring her in favour of slavishly trying to get to grips with a language I had no prospect of understanding, and her logic is so clear that I offer up no defence. Relationships are more likely to turn on issues of money or infidelity, but in this case a printed note offered to all passers-by on that morning was enough to relegate us from the firmament.

Losing a partner in this manner is the equivalent of slipping on a banana skin located precariously close to the edge of a cliff, and falling to one's death. It is the equivalent of running a marathon, and dropping dead when walking to the shop for a pint of milk. It has a comedic element which would be hilarious if it wasn't so serious, but because it is so serious I can only conclude that it is tragic.

Secret.

An anthropomorphic way of explaining the force exerted by gravity is in terms of desire: no sooner had I thrown the ball into the air than it wanted to come back to earth again.

Extending the analogy of wishing, then, we can say that the ball feels more comfortable on the ground than when airborne or that the ball belongs on terra firma.

Anthropomorphism is useful - it presents a shortcut to explaining ideas which would otherwise defy words. It is, no less, a branch of our old friend associative learning. When I cowered at the sound of thunder as a child, I was told it was because God was moving his furniture about. When Danny licks the meat-covered fork that I just broke his breakfast up with, and purrs loudly, I assume delight, but can never really progress from assumption to certainty.

The dictionary tells me that anthropomorphism is especially applied to deities, but I want to stretch its terms of reference again by asking what else I might apply it to.

By far the most significant event in your author's life since the last blog update is the gradual unearthing of a secret by an enthuiastic digger. I'd not intended to reveal it, but the work of another has made it so.

Is it the case, then, that secrets want to emerge into the light, that they are more comfortable without the only characteristic which separates them from any other conjecture or opinion? My little 'known unknown' (apologies for this by now very well-worn cliché) had a unique beauty and life which I cherished. It seemed to have a regular, predictable breathing pattern that matched my own, not so much an illness that I wished to expurgate, as an alembic.

Now the cat is out of the bag, my secret's tiny cathexis is temporarily drained. I can no longer be thrilled by its existence, even though its subject continues to cause endless interest. That is to say although I knew something that nobody else knew, and this knowledge made my heart beat faster, I somehow longed for its release in order that my heart would slow down to its normal rate again.

The secret seems to abhor its privileged position up high where the air is thinnest, with the downward collision course its preferred option. It prefers to join the vast pool of public information - this is the meaning of the word alembic; here is a list of the countries that comprise the former Yugoslavia; to calculate 5!, you multiply five by four by three by two by one.

I am attracted to a co-worker, and the secret is out as of Thursday afternoon. I write those words with the usual tightening of limbs and shaking of the head that I normally experience when she comes to mind, but now the emotions are directed entirely towards her, and not divided between her and the upholding of that (her unknown other self which I have internalised) which lived within me and mediated the frequency of my footsteps and the ratio of spoken words to the number of times I exhale.

Portents.

I am always eager for portents, and they pointed to us re-writing the very definition of love itself.

This would be the emotional equivalent of having the boldness to write down the first irrational number; proving that the ether does not exist; banishing the phlogiston.

The three ideas above - the denial of irrationals, and the promotion of the ether and phlogiston - were once so self-evidently true that I don’t imagine many people bothered to question them. History judges, of course, that the collective truth was wrong.

Bluefish and I were going to write the fundamentals of love, splitting its atoms, sequencing its DNA, discovering its periodic table and then extending it artificially. We knew this - it was irrefutable - because the signs told us so.

What more clap of thunder could any pair need than for one to unmask the other’s greatest fear in their first conversation? Out of the December umbra, the word ‘autism’ cleaved the morning, and the game I’d played for 30 years was up.

Portents - an Australian girl coming to the street named after an Australian city: how could such a synthesis ever result in failure? Portents - I may well be autistic, but I bleed words when I set my mind towards you. Picking relentlessly at the gaping maw of the wound you made on the night you arrived, I never gave it the chance to heal. Portents - your gentle face fixing the boundaries of your webcam in communication of the incommunicable. Portents - in Geneva, in Bratislava, in Budapest, in Vienna.

Like scientists, our destiny was to lever ourselves up onto the shoulders of that which had been before and, suspending our disbelief, rewrite it properly, with our own names on it. A treatise of love, complete with a lifetime of empirical evidence to back it up. If either of us were ever going to acheive anything, it would be such a document.

Now, less than a year later, the theory has not been so much challenged and revised, more obliterated and proven to be false to its very bones. The one who staked his future on it being the truth is exposed as a Newtonian, a Lamarckian, one who refused to believe in the Matriosha construction of the atom.

What happens to the lover who gambled everything on a theory which turns out to be a lame duck? Not only its conclusions, but the observations which led to them - a mish-mash of fantasy, extrapolation and assumption. Well, of course the falsehood must be abandoned, but the lover must abandon the mindset which led to the errors in the first place, and this is the most important thing.

In the normal course of events, this means an extra dose of cynicism and impenetrability. Your author, though, would be hard-pressed to ramp these up any further, and it occurs to me anyway that the greatest cynic is the most porous, and I remember reading that certain top athletes actually perform better with a virus in their bodies.

I can now see the arrogance which powered the Theory, and I discard it as the workings of a man who was sick with love. Love itself, though, complete and in need of no revision; which slips through empiricism’s bunched fist with a shimmer; love which is not an illness but an innoculation against love as madness - this is the thing, and it will always defy being bent to the rules of the alphabet.

Events.

My father walked back into the house, his whole body shaking.

"Get me a whisky!" he demanded of my mother, "and tell that bastard" - pointing a trembling finger at me - "we're never going out on another driving lesson!"

We'd driven about two miles from our home, and I was coming up to a junction.

"You need to start braking around now, son."

"Paul - slow down!"

Then, screaming: "Put the fucking brakes on!" as I went straight through the white line and into the middle of the road. Luckily, nothing was coming, otherwise we'd have been annihilated.

That was at least 10 years ago, but I've never lost the blindness that comes with failing to react to events - I can see disaster coming, but do nothing to avert it. I watched Bluefish shatter into a million pieces on a stone of uncertain origins, and didn't even close my fingers as she trickled through them. Now the wind has taken hold and carried her away irretrievably.

(I remember when my grandmother's ashes were scattered - for various reasons it remains perhaps the most deflating day of my life. When her grey powder was cast into the breeze, my father got the blowback in his hair, in his mouth, over his clothes. Old bugger's still troubling me now, he remarked.)

I can do nothing, except freeze, and wait for the moment of impact. When I was hit by a van at the age of 14, I stood open-mouthed, leaden in the middle of the road, waiting for the red block to eat my flesh like a carnivore.

With Bluefish, I woke every morning with a sick feeling, waiting for the contact that would send us spinning in opposite directions for evermore, never to coincide again. To begin with, the sickness is a weight dragged by time itself, but then the new, dilated, clock becomes routine - to be pinned to the ground by dread itself, eternally relapsing, a thousand times a day.

I can see it coming, but there is no stopping its progress, and I can't get out of the way. I drink wine from a plastic cup to blur what the eye can see, and then wake with a head of stone, and sure enough, when I check, my uneasy sleep has caused no impediment to that which growls and turns over in the distance, but less distant than before.

Arrogance.

As below, then, humans regard love as in some way fundamental - it matters not whether that's strengthened because of a religious belief, or encoded genetically, or some mixture of the two.

The sentence above refers to 'love,' but I suppose I'm thinking about specifically romantic love, when the light from a distant star reflects an image of the beloved back into the eye; when the tightening of fingers around fingers can deliver the woken back to sleep.

We cannot, though, express the beloved in a sufficiently moving manner, so we acquire representations of her; these flowers, this poem, this music. In doing so, we are satisfied, because we equate the beauty of the acquired with the beauty of the beloved, and associate one with the other (Milan Badelj requires us to do so.)

What if we aren't satisfied, though? If flowers and poems and n other gestures fail to fill the gap between love felt and love experienced, what are we to do next? Of course, failure to find satisfaction in the infinity of symbols is symptomatic of arrogance - only the arrogant can hold that the strength of a poem is inferior to the strength of their own feelings for the beloved.

The answer, of course, is that love must become ever-more difficult to realise, for the greater the accomplishment in realising it, the more we confirm its authenticity. So, when I say I prefer foreign women, what I mean is: I am interested in finding women who are far away from England, because the accomplishment of succeeding in such a relationship would validate beyond all doubt the nature of our love.

There has been the mystic, spiritual Zimbabwean exiled in South Africa; there has been Bluefish; and both succeeded in the hitherto impossible - the unification of feeling and experience. From the tent raised in Marloth Park that was the only layer of protection between ourselves and the wild animals of the night that echoed in the distance, to doing my (limited) best to help fit out the shop she had dreamed of; from drinking the sun under a tree in Cambridge, to running through Budapest as fast as we could when pinned down by luggage; these are the symbols of love earned and not love given. Were you worth less, I'd have handed you a flower and muttered that I loved you.

Arrogance says: I am superior, and therefore entitled to seek a superior, difficult love whose price is the complete excoriation of the self. The paradox comes when I am screamed at by the mirror, unshaven and fraught and sad - superior, exactly, to what? To no-one, and to nothing; just another collection of flesh and misery who dared to dream the undreamable.

Atheism (I).

A person must undergo revision after revision before he can declare himself an atheist. By this time, I imagine it to be a learning process which is never quite finished, or, at best, a skill which is lost through lack of practice - atheism is not the proverbial bicycle which can be ridden proficiently after six months out of the saddle.

This sense of having to practice at not believing is intensified when exposed to religious sentiment at some point in the past. My grandmother was an unapologetic Catholic until the last breath; my mother less so, but still as a young woman saw the high, looming figure of a white-robed Jesus standing more-or-less floor-to-ceiling in her bedroom. Terrified, she clamped her eyes shut, hoping to dissolve the hallucination, but He was still there when she prised them open again.

These kinds of stories, delivered in a low voice full of foreboding, punctuated my childhood: nun-bitches who would tear out mother's hair in chunks, and later a religion which expelled her because she dared to marry for a second time. (Their logic, then, is that it was preferable for her to remain with the man who, when drunk, would smash her head into the wall over and over. She was told by a priest she'd never be buried on consecrated ground, to which my blunt-speaking grandfather retorted that some bastard would bury her. How many fucking bodies do you see propped up in the street?)

Religion, when administered in this way, has nothing to do with the eradication of misery or the creation of a moral narrative by which one can live a good life - it is instead about imposing order and stubbing out devastating questions before they have truly formulated.

I know this, but still I suffer guilt, like any good Catholic. That is, when something goes wrong, I tend to blame myself, in the harshest-possible language. It is unequivocal.

So, then, to the agony of Bluefish. Oh, Bluefish, if you are gone it is because I failed you; failed us, and I pray for the imminent coming-together of the two halves of the universe in deliverance of the annihilation of the scrap of flesh which is I. An atheist am I, with a creation myth and a stick with which to make the self suffer every shade of punishment under the sun.
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If I am incapable of doing mathematics, few people will ever think less of me.

Why? The strange thing is I was thinking about my number-blindness last night, and then opened the newspaper this morning to see an article expressing some of the thoughts I'd had, only far better.

Numbers, so the mathematician author claimed, are only about 10,000 years old - their first purpose was to ensure that people weren't short-changed by unscrupulous dealers of animals. If you barter for three pigs, receiving only two is a disaster, and so our species learned to hold quantities in their heads. Three pigs are greater than two pigs, but less than four.

In an evolutionary sense, then, numbers might as well have been born this afternoon, or a few seconds ago. They are so recent an addendum that not all of us feel them in our bones. They are strange objects, foreign and difficult, and we mishandle them often. It is easy, then, to forgive me for clumsiness where numbers are concerned. I can calculate how much change I am owed, but working out the forces which balance a chandelier is met with a shrug of the shoulders.

What if the ability to sustain a relationship is a similarly modern affectation - am I then to be exonerated from that as well? As much as an unyielding love is desirable, how much of the notion that it is essential has been fostered by a latent religiosity? Perhaps this is what I mean when I say I don’t belong anywhere; the world teems with coiled, delighted couples, who find in each other the solution to themselves, their other, and the assuaging of at least some guilt: I don’t believe in you, but in letting another subsume me, I have anyway appeased you. This is the settling of the Pascalian wager.

There is no need, then, for love. There is a need for sex, if you think Dawkins is anywhere close to the mark, because I require a bag to carry along some of my genes into the future, and the imperative, supposedly, of my existence is to go ahead and make one or many. Love, though? Love is akin to the invention of numbers - it is useful, but we can do without it (although I do not want to.)

Those of us fitted with retro-brains, though, must take what comfort we can - I failed because of my urgent wish to scramble for the zenith of a religion I never believed in. I have been knocked out of the clouds by a pretend God, a God who is nothing more than a shiver across the collective consciousness, yet the pain is real enough.