Truth.

An ocean away, but the recurrence of age-old mental tics continues.

They recur here, in San Francisco; even as I hoped they would be left behind in crisis-torn, chilly Europe.

Europe as we know it is set to splinter apart at any moment, that much is inevitable. It is the banks, this time, and those with some sort of knowledge hold out no hope. Nations seem to exist at an almost-permanent crossroads, tipping one way or the other, and the promise made that this hiatus is the last one before glory, before the coming-together of ambitious historicised plans. Hold your nerve, Europeans: the day is near.

I recur in San Francisco, existing at the last crossroads before glory, but the day remains as far away as ever. How many millions of souls have expired without ever crossing the last hiatus, and given up out of sheer disappointment?

Here, the nervous foreigner is not to be understood, and exists as a perpetual outsider. Even the food conspires against him, bursting apart like a bomb. Uncomprehending and unsteady, I take the form of a human but have the essence of something else; something less.

A person removed once; removed twice. Once from the species, and the second time from all that is famIliar.

This is what it is like to be mad - to travel to an English-speaking country, and to emit garbled and incomprehensible streams of rubbish. To your own ears, it makes sense to ask for a specific coffee, at a listed, fixed price, but the look of astonishment tells you the request has not been understood.

Astonishment's half-life turns to pity, and stabilises at disgust. Fucking stupid Englishman, weighed-down by ancient and obsolete values. No wonder your continent's wheezing its death-rattle if this is the sort of citizen it turns out.

Sylvia Plath had it right all along, in her clear, North American tones. How ironic that I should think of you just as your homeland accentuates the banality and churlishness of the tourist.

You can never escape the bell jar, not even for a moment. Its canopy is too enormous and too heavy to lift, and the attempt leads to exhaustion. You can never escape, and so you might as well go back to England - as sad as ever, but at least able to speak there.

Epilogue.

I have over-used the fact that starlight takes a long time to strike the eyes on this blog, and I make no apologies for that.

'Bad news comes from the stars,' I said in the past: by the time I realised that the relationship with Bluefish was in need of repair, it was already too late. Something had broken us long before, and I was only ever aware of the fracture when nothing could be done except to say my goodbyes.

'Bad news comes from the stars,' I said in the past: the domino effect whose denouement was the end of Yugoslavia had been set in motion long before most people realised that Slobodan Milosevic's June 15 speech was more than just posturing. By then, it was too late; too late to stop the movement which had already begun but had not yet completed.

To stop a punch from hitting you in the face, you must be able to anticipate. It is no use moving when the knuckles are inches from your nose. No, you need to duck while the arm is just starting its swing. In such situations, speed of thought is everything.

Even after the fist had made its impact, and Slovenia had announced its secession from the federation, people were still filling in their nationality as 'Yugoslav' on the census. This is to reject the status quo, and to embrace history. It is to look into the eyes of the dead, and smile instead of recoiling.

I wonder what the reaction would be in Podgorica, or Novi Sad, or Split, or Banja Luka, if a present-day citizen announced himself as a proud Yugoslav? You're showing your age, you fucking dinosaur - she's been dead for almost two decades!

In my mind, not only would there be laughter at the fossil making a pledge towards such a long-gone entity, but there would be questions raised as to how real Yugoslavia was anyway.

This post-First World War relic, thrown together to appease various national interests? This is how you define yourself? You are worshipping an accident!

The past has traction, and it is spine-tinglingly exciting when we feel it beneath our feet. Yet answering its call can lead only to misery, confusion, and ridicule. Better to throw the census in the bin than to answer 'Yugoslav'.

Serbia.

Things have never been the same in Serbia since June 15, 1389, the day their empire died.

I'll spare you the details of the Battle of Kosovo Polje, when the Serbs, led by Prince Lazar, were butchered in a matter of hours by Ottoman forces on their own land.

Every June 15 in Serbia sees a commemoration of the events of more than 600 years ago, and, in the minds of at least some, the wish for a restitution of the pre-1389 state of affairs.

There are two things here apparent about the nature of people and their relationship with the past - two things I shall expand upon if the energy to write properly ever returns. Perhaps this morning is the start of that process, but most likely not.

It seems there is a psychological tic which causes us to mark the end of events, when everything is almost played out and only the tragic denouement is acknowledged. The point in history where the decline of some system or other set in, presaging an inevitable conclusion, is usually overlooked, perhaps in the case of Serbia, the death of Dusan the Mighty some three decades earlier,

Secondly, the longing for a return to the pre-1389 Serbia: without Kosovo, there exists but a trepanned microstate, embarrassing in its illegitimacy. Only the restoration of the 14th-century borders can cure it.

Again, we (because the brief history of Serbia is an analogy for the history of everything) are guilty of selecting an arbitrary point in time, and declaring that it represents a zenith.

Thus affected, the only aim of the future is a recapitulation to a specific past. Macroscopically, the politics of entire nations can be fuelled by this mania. Zooming inwards, the lives of individuals can roil on similar private, internal drama.

Progression.

In life, the illusion of progress is one of the things which sustains us: indeed, sometimes it's the only thing.

A new concept or way of thinking allows us to vault effortlessly above and beyond our certainties or fears - these have been insurmountable in the past, and yet we overcome them as though they are made of air.

Yet still, at a given point later in time, the old concerns push themselves back into our dreams, and we are then back at the point where we started - all our work for nothing!

This is the illusion of progress; we are dogs on leashes who emerge so far from our shelter, and howl with joy at the daylight, only to return surely whence we came.

I too am its victim. I have fled the kennel, progressive creature that I am, but my master calls me home.

I shall once again make the effort to vault over myself. I shall once again make the attempt to be brave. For three years, I have written alone, a shaft of light which can hurt the eyes if you let it, or which you can ignore if you please.

Nobody is self-contained, though, and I can no longer create alone. It is with this, then, that this blog comes to an end. I am, though, not gone, and nor am I diminished by the new path that I - we - are about to take.

I can put words together, and I often do it badly. Why, then, should I refuse to collaborate with someone who can do such at least as well as I am able, often better, and who brings to the task of expression an additional, visual, layer which is well beyond my capabilities?

When we were discussing the idea, I laughed: if we go ahead with this, we are fucking Communists! I meant it in the sense of division of labour, and recouping only what our talents permit, but we are furthermore implementing something unnatural (collective writing as opposed to atomised, mapping onto Communism when compared with western political systems - not that the latter works well, either.)

We are fucking Communists, and we see ourselves carrying the torch of expressive, as opposed to human, progress. It is for us to ensure that it does not burn out.

We are fucking Communists, elusive and delicate.

http://theelusivethedelicate.tumblr.com/

Tension (I).

The meaninglessness of our lives and the non-existence of God: never proven, particularly the first one, but we can make a pretty good case for the plausibility of both, based on circumstantial evidence.

If I am important, and I presumably am if I am an offcut of some heavenly manifestation, then the events which change the course of this existence for better or worse must be massive enough to cause a part-god to shudder, either with pleasure or with horror.

For your author, though, the inevitable death of a cat or an old woman; the mistaken belief that I could pick up a handful of impenetrable Hungarian words; these events are enough to make the self plummet through the veneer of the self and reveal the void which lies below. Each time I confirm my own mediocrity, it is a little suicide. It is the tragedy of an insect accidentally killing itself with its own venom. It is the hilarity of a police officer's incapacitation as he turns his pepper spray on himself.

There are three or four moments which have come to define me, which, in the absence of everything else can stand quite nicely for what I am:



at the age of four, I was told under no circumstances must I put my hand into the exposed mechanism of the vacuum cleaner which my father was fixing. Do you understand? You don't go near it! The next thing I recall was my own scream as I was dragged away and/or struck, with my fingers edging ever-closer to the parts which would have severed them.

when I was expected to declare my undying love for my partner, in the form of a declaration that I would 'fight for her', and I not only refused, but said the opposite, precipitating the end of our relationship.

when I took the leaflet from the man in a Budapest street, and tried to read it. This entirely innocuous act changed Bluefish, and changed me.

In each case, it could have been otherwise. In each case, it was the difference between thought and action - even my four-year-old self knew that the rumbling, ancient vacuum cleaner was a clear and present danger.

Knowing, and not acting on that knowledge, is what condemns us. It accelerates the banal and the nondescript, and its new, temporary weight changes lives irreversibly. I am a vacuum cleaner part, a leaflet, an act of desertion, and these are not the concerns of a god-fragment: thus I contend it all counts for nothing.

Height.

In the last two weeks, I have become more like myself than ever.

More like myself than ever: scared to make progress from where I currently am, and yet thinking about very little else.

So, with the deadline of April 15 to get in the second of seven Open University assignments, it was at 5am on the day itself when I finally sent it off to my tutor.

It went, as did the first one, not with a feeling of relief that it had been completed at all, but with a sense that it's a matter of time, just a matter of time, before one of them doesn't get submitted. It isn't that I lack the willingness to do it, or arguably even the talent - it is instead the case that I am paralysed by fear.

I can no longer write, am incapable of study, and find myself thinking so much that I end up exhausted, and I hold that it is the result of being scared.

Scared of what, exactly? I could write for hours about the things that terrify me, if only I had the energy to actually do so.

There is a sense of shame when I send off a piece of work which is less than perfect. If it fails to astonish and delight, then I want nothing to do with it. Not in my name.

I return to the point of departure of a thousand, a hundred thousand, depressive thoughts: I am not a machine, and am thus unable to turn out perfection, over and over, without apparent effort.

Why demand perfection from one whose species persistently demonstrates inbuilt flaws, from nasal passages which fail to drain correctly, to faulty decision-making?

There is a lack of confidence in your author, attenuated by a paradoxical arrogance - as usual, the two contrary ideas co-exist quite happily in the mind. There is utter certainty that I was born for a purpose, and the simultaneous tension which states it was all an unhappy accident.

I am one who feels that everything must, at some point, come to an end. Like Kundera's poor Teresa, I am indeed scared of heights.

Fickle.

Where is the boundary between what is categorised as normal behaviour, and something more uncommon?

I remind myself here of when I studied libel as a journalism student. I don't know what the standard is these days, but when I was learning, the benchmark was set at whether the 'reasonable man' would be likely to find that something written had exposed the complainant to hatred, ridicule, or contempt. If this hypothetical creature answered 'yes' then the seeds of a defamation case could theoretically be sown in the English or Welsh civil courts.

Similarly, the 'reasonable man' is a useful tool when trying to answer the question I pose in the first sentence. It is obvious, but worth stating - normal behaviour is characterised by a lack of extremes. From this simple premise, there is more to be said about the word 'normal': yes, it implies that someone acts within accepted parameters, but furthermore that they do so consistently.

Such a lack of consistent action causes no end of concern to your author, who seemingly lacks the means to remedy it. Perhaps a lack of certainty, of conviction, and of priorities which fluctuate without reason, is indeed no more than can be expected from a flung-together bag of DNA.

There are times, for instance, when the excitement of constructing Platonic syllogisms (it's part of what I am expected to do for my next assignment) is almost overwhelming. I am at those moments replete with a devastatingly accurate vision of what the completed work will look like. The inner eye is capable of scanning the pages, and I more-or-less vibrate with anticipation at the thought of being able to leave work and set about it.

Inevitably, though, I freeze with fear when the time comes to actually start doing what I expect of myself. The grand vision is no more, and I sit as heavy as stone with the blood whooshing uselessly through my head - I can hear it.

Similarly, one would only need to ask the American girl - the one who complains I never write about her - for evidence of my own fickle sensibilities. Would the fictitious 'reasonable man' see it as normal that, over the course of x years, I have been able to cease communication with her at will, often for weeks, and yet at other times it is more than I can stand to not send her an SMS which just reads: I am thinking of you.

There are numerous problems here. I have a limited attention span, an interest in others which fluctuates from being non-existent to all-consuming, and my ambition to write, to learn, is visible in my mad eyes one morning, and tomorrow everything will be extinguished.

If this is normality, then I have no wish to be normal. If it is not, I wish to be fixed.