Negation.

I have always been my own worst enemy - a human paradox whose weaknesses more than cancel out his strengths.

When I was very young, I fell in love with numbers. I enjoyed making lists of times tables, sitting with my head on my chin as I scribbled away at a small white desk. Numbers plucked the strings of my soul - they were my friends in a way that stale, sweating children never could be.

It is an over-exaggeration to state that I was a child prodigy. Irrespective, though, numbers, books and writing all captivated me endlessly. This drew the attention of other people to me; and the more attention I had, the smaller and more insignificant I became. Other people eroded me - I wasn't even ten - until I became a grain of sand or a pinhead or an atom or a quark of self, retreating far into the airless vacuum that had become my body. A cavity, an absence, comprising a single quark.

Everybody loves a freak show. The man with half his face obliterated with MRSA; hirsute females; a child who spent his first years being reared by dogs; the boy who thinks numbers are his friends; the seven-year-old with the cynicism and weariness of an adult.

I blame nobody for acting in accordance with their nature, but the density of these adults' fascination sealed me shut. Not only the demand that I would spew out numbers, perfect, correct, their little abacus, but I would do so with the confidence and poise of a grown-up.

I returned, sick, to the evacuated chamber I had become; pretending to dispense cups of tea from a brick wall rather than turn around to speak. Descriptions, images hurt more and persist longer than real events, and it is because I shrank away, meek and insigificant. A video of John F Kennedy being shot through the head haunted me at the age of 11, grey leaking out of the stricken president and onto the seat below.

The Turin shroud, the mask of Tutankhamun, an anti-smoking advertisement displaying a charcoaled lung. All terrified me, and I refused to sleep in case I woke up enveloped in Christ's blanket, in case all the lights in London and Cairo simultaneously went out, in case the drawling southern American accent talking about the spillage of brain matter should be referring to me. In case my lungs had been plucked out and replaced with hideous black bellows.

I flirted with the past, and with the unlikely, permitting the possible to sweep by as I stood suspended in history and supposition, directing Howard Carter in my sickened astonishment. I pored over relics, dumbstruck, as adults pored over me and cried: he's a genius! It was only numbers, comprehensible ones. I could no more state what x * y is than I could prove Fermat's Last Theorem.

Truefish.

A third leaked extract from "One Fish, True Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," publication date July 2009, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in the last week of January.

Four days of indefinite duration had passed by now; four long dreams in the mind of the being who turned symbols into fish.

Eben was aware that the transformation of thoughts into true objects was a divine privilege: the creatures to whom he gave birth would never have that right.


Those dramatic subsets of the Bluefish Calculator would long, however, to be able to act so definitively. For instance, there is no guarantee that the bluefish and the redfish will ever co-incide, despite the creation of both.


The desire for distant, ungraspable objects, indeed, would be both the highest expression and the first seed of downfall, of the new species. In distant future days, art and science would, in their separate languages, speak of the necessity to theorise (about things that might be true) and wishing for things that they wish were true.


Theorising is all well and good, mused Eben, but wishes are dangerous. They focus minds on things other than their creator, and I am very jealous. The first principle of a theory is an observation, and thereafter evidence, while the seed of a wish is a dream or madness. Such a discontinuity will forever separate the realms of science and religion (or art).

Enveloped in steam and rage, the divine Entity realised that he had just invented sin. Those who observe, and collect, are untethered from this new sensation. Those who build towers from fragments of mad dreams - their fins and scales ooze sin.

What was once awareness that the transformation of thoughts into objects could never take place then took upon the nature of an imperative: even if the laws of the Fish Tank were such that these transformations could take place, the scowling lack of co-operation from Eben expressly precludes it.

Violate that will and you are no longer one of the Truefish, the empiricists. The moral barrier transcends any physical bulwark that Eben could put in place. And this realisation, this schism, the dividing line between Truefish and iconoclasts, was the stone which shattered the simple unity of the universe on the third day.

Proximity.

The sinusoidal curve model of human emotion outlined some time ago is a useful one, but it is not applicable - even approximately - in every case.

You will recall that the model suggests the fluctuation of mood in a fairly regular pattern: or everything that goes up must come down. 'Fairly regular' gives us some leeway, but there comes a time when we must accept that our thinking is flawed.

The idea of moving towards and away from something still holds good, though. If we take the zero line of the curve as the reference point, then any mood swing at all moves us away from neutral, and towards either complete ecstasy or bottomless misery. Only the rate of motion - its predictability - changes.

I woke up on Tuesday morning feeling extremely 'close' to everything. That is, when I looked at the cat, for example, I could not only detect his excitement as we went through his routine - showing him just enough of a finger or hand to arouse his attacking instincts, the rest of it hidden beneath a cushion, then withdrawing it just in time to miss the slashing, destructive claws - but his determination and playfulness became part of me. I was overwhelmed by a simple, feline joy, suspended in a cattish frame of mind as we did battle.

On any given day, I love the cat. I love him with a big, blank adoration - gestures of my feelings towards him are so conditioned by now that I do them without thinking: talking to him as I'd talk to an adult human, buying him food fit for human consumption. Gestures of love, in this case, are framed by humanity.

It is not the case that, on any given day, I replicate his experiences. It happens only infrequently, on the days when everything is proximate. L is close, transcending her gender; man and cat share the same small space, and neither are uncomfortable. The indivisible wonder and intricacy of nature is apparent, even though I do not claim (like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) to be able to see the interaction of every atom.

I refer to a vision, a sentiment, which has its limits, but my eye worms in as far as it can. I can no more predict the days when my vision will be enhanced than I can predict the weather - so I treat their occurrence as akin to a gift, albeit one which perishes quickly.

Daisy.

I always knew you would come back to me.

You, the perceptive younger woman who forced me to communicate verbally at a more than superficial level; my amanuensis. You, who in a day tied the severed vocal cords which had been cut off since birth, and gave them some sort of function.

A grating voice emerged from the strands of flesh you had pulled together. We both nodded and agreed - yes, it's not bad. It doesn't have the booming presence of an orator, but it strings words together well enough for you to pass as a human. Don't overdo it - for a while you'll cough up mouthfuls of blood when you try to speak. That's quite normal, but you'll probably find it unpleasant.

If you're sensible, you'll not try to say any tonguetwisters just yet. The repetitiveness of the sounds has been known to reach the resonant frequency of vocal cords, and shatter them like glass. Then you'll be back to square one, broken and silent.

I urge you to remember that all I've done is operate on you. You're not perfected, and nor will you be. You have the (limited) gift of speech, but you must be sparing. I remind you of the right leg which inevitably gives way when you run on it too hard, and you pull up with your blank face for once expressive, pleading for the pain to stop. So it is with the cords - they're delicate little ligaments and take none too kindly to being stretched.

A fortnight of post-operative attention, and you had gone. There are other voiceless ones to fix, and fix them you must. The reparation of voice boxes is your vocation - no time to waste talking to those who have been mended as best they can be.

Like the inventors of the computer, doing computation held no interest for them once they had proved it could be done. For you, conversation with the newly-articulate is a pain, tedious. Empowering others to make sounds is what it's about; the sounds they make are just so many vibrations. Only L is interested in the precise arrangement of sounds.

I always knew you would come back to me. I didn't know the form would be so obvious; another dark-skinned female with similar looks, similar views. Randomly asking me questions as I waited to go home following (ironically) the pulling to the point of breaking my infirm right leg. Such things are co-incidental, yet we make so much of them.

You - your likeness - sat with me the whole length of my journey; telling me about God, and how you're under pressure to get married, and how you jump into bed with anything at all because you don't like yourself. I'd never seen you before in my life, and you spoke to me as though you'd known me forever.

It occurred to me when I reached my stop that you were the doctor's representative, her simulacrum. Now that I've had one final visit - you've not experienced any complications, nogomet? - then I am finally discharged and allowed to cast you and your medical paraphernalia into the receptacle of history.

Invention.

When something isn't fully understood, the gap which stretches between our minds and the truth can be filled with anything at all.

It is a bridge of adultery, monsters, gods, ghosts and myths: atheists contend that man invented god precisely to prevent any other idea being poured into the chasm. I think I said before that the progression of science continually takes bites out of the body of god, and pares down his territory until he is an endangered species.

The atheist bible, when somebody is brave enough to write it, it will state that man created god in his own image and not the other way around.

(Modern atheism is gradually accumulating its own list of tenets and literature. It used to be defined simply through its absence of belief in a deity or deities. Now atheists proselytise, the most significant example of this in England being the advertisements on buses which state that there is probably no God. Disparate concepts of atheism will one day be laid down in a book of severe gravitas.)

Lack of understanding about the way the universe works prompted the birth of polytheism - one god who delivers thunder (and whose anger must be appeased); one god who regulates crop growth (and must be pleased); one god who distributes sickness to those who have sinned (and so those who are ill are heretical) and so on. By Occam's razor, it makes sense to reduce the ever-growing crowd of beings, multiplying so rapidly that they press at the edges of the world, to a single one.

There is another advantage conferred by stating that monotheism can do the job once carried out by an uncountable number of polytheistic inferiors: the synthesis of an infinity of reticulated images of the creator of numbers (who is distinct from the creator of fish; who is distinct from the creator of planets; who is distinct from the god of war, who is....) weaved into the likeness of the monotheistic rainbow.

It takes an artist of rare genius to depict such a creature: at once meek, terrible, loving, jealous, calm, vengeful, simple, taut, light, horrible, human, vain, comprehensible, nihilistic, glorious, appalling. Where does a composite image of sharp contrast come from? In what furnace is it born?

What machine, similarly, churns out the composite, dizzying images of the nightmare, where a horrendous snake sucking greedily upon the putrefying corpse of a lion, twisted in and out of the dead creature's ribcage like a long, sickening thread, represents the unfulfilled desire for carnality?

The machine is the same one, of course. What is a complicated image of monotheism is the psychotic implosion which causes us to wake up as though fitted with electrodes. I am unsure whether art begot the nightmare, or the other way around - but the visibility of terrifying monotheism and the vulnerability of the sleeping human have sustained each other for millennia.

Writing.

Is the process of writing inevitably always one of compromise?

I ask myself this question in the light of a recent posting on here which irritated and upset L. I refuted her suggestion that one person could efface the loneliness of another with their mere presence, and L considered this to be a refutation of the relationship we have.

On the face of it, to write is to exist in a state of compromise between being able to say anything at all, and saying nothing whatsoever: a compromise between freedom and legislation (I cannot state that nogomet is a murderer, unless it is true, without expecting to be presenting him with a cheque for all the money I have.)

It is a compromise between truth and concealment (if L is not aware that I love her, then it is perhaps better to tell her first before writing about its consequences); a compromise between what I know and what I suspect; a compromise between conscious thoughts which I can detail at leisure, and the roiling undercurrent of unconscious ones which make the shadows of their presence felt; a compromise between creation and enumeration.

To write without compromise, without barriers, what would it entail? If we start with the emptiest phrase I can think of, the one used by children when they are learning so speak, it will hopefully be possible to build on that and make it speak the truth, force it to reflect the unconscious etc:

"The cat sat on the mat."

To negate compromise in the first instance, we can amend the above in order that it is libellous:

"The cat sat on the mat which the perfidious nogomet had earlier stolen."

What about revealing anything that may have been concealed? In doing so, we exacerbate the libel:

"The cat sat on the mat which the perfidious nogomet had earlier stolen. It was not out-of-character for him, for he had a criminal record as long as your arm."

And where are the elements of the unconscious? (Not being a psychoanalyst, I can only mimic this.)

"The cat, and the mat upon which it sat (which the perfidious
nogomet had earlier stolen - it wasn't out-of-character for him,
for he had a criminal record as long as your arm) were
representations of unfulfilled and latent sexual thoughts in
the mind of the dreaming nogomet. The intersection of cat and mat is the most depraved sexual fixation."

Alone.

To be human is to exist in a state of perfect and inviolable isolation.

I realised this some years ago when I was in a crowd of more than 55000, and felt as though I must be the loneliest and most detached person present.

Crowds gather because of their shared love of the same idea - music, protest, art, film - but I was painfully aware that I didn't have anything in common with any of them. Any pleasure I took from the event was a private, personal relief.

Loneliness is inevitable: it is a bleak thesis from which there is no escape. We infer the emotions of others by indirect methods - if we did not, then lying would be impossible. Do you love me? Of course, I reply, with eyes as flat and unmoved as a calm sea.

One day, it may be the case that lying will no longer be feasible. Reading the excitation patterns of my brain might result in the answer: of course he doesn't love you. I envisage that very expensive excitation-state machines will see their price bottom out as the technology becomes more widespread. Everyone will have them, little hand-held devices capable of reading thoughts.

Part of what humans have always taken for granted - the potential to conceal things - will no longer be an option. Is it the case, though, that the ability (or imperative?) to share someone else's thoughts also brings an end to loneliness? If someone else can reveal my private, internal monologue, what stone is left unturned? Is such a surgical laying-out of thoughts, one by one, like stamps or car number plates, enough to banish the lonely forever?

If the answer is no, then loneliness is not the simple sharing of thoughts or opinions. It is a feeling, a certainty, that this is how the world is supposed to be experienced; each event undertaken singly. The excitation-machine does not remove the conviction that this is the case, even as it exposes thoughts in all their nudity.

If we accept that we are alone, even in a crowd of 55000, even when inviting another person to crawl underneath our skin and sleep there, then there is truly no escape. Society becomes a weird convention, invented by others long ago to subdue the inclination to act alone; a mark of shame against those who propagate it. Solipsism is rejected because of its feeble convenience.

No, isolation is truly the lot of humankind. We are creatures of conviction, for even impossibly sophisticated tools are insufficient to tease out the hard-wired skein which states: if I cannot be another, as opposed to inferring them, then I am forever alone.