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.