Statues made of matchsticks
Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge
-Love Minus Zero/ No Limit by Bob Dylan
I seem to recall having been here before but I cannot recognise myself or this place. Although, the feeling is familiar enough, a former best friend…Desperation, born of long-term detachment. This has to be that odd point I always recede to when the world and those in it disappoint me or fail to live up (or down, as the case may be) to my expectations. It’s also the same holier-than-thou-hill I’ve set my fortress on since I was ten.
The past few months have been spent in a boiling, broiling cesspit of rage. That, is a place I do not recognise and so I haven’t really been able to process it or write about it until I was cool enough to try and compartmentalise and deflect properly. For some reason the only expression that keeps coming to mind to describe my place is ‘I’ve been played for a fool’ and I cannot understand why I haven’t questioned the semantics of this particular phraseology before. Who play’s a fool? The use of verb is completely misleading here, the fool is born to play and be part of play. A fool ought to take comfort in the familiarity of deceit and abandon, surely? I suppose that is my way of saying I have completely lost faith in the likes of ‘family’, such as it may be. And the romance of the Tarot deck is giving way to the reality of feeling small again. One that has hit me back with its usual ‘and why, you idiot, were you expecting things to turn out differently. Have you not learned ANYTHING?’ For once I am ashamed to say I have not taken any of the aftermath in stride.
I have cursed and cussed my way through the streets, while safely locked in my car.
I have cursed and cussed my way through the streets, while safely locked in my car.
I have screamed into my pillow a plenty and yet the tide of rage persists and keeps rising, rising, rising.
That is when I rebuke myself. ‘All that reading, all that practice, all that pretence at patience. And what is it for, if I too, can collapse and bitch like all the banshees I have grown accustomed to hear baying for blood at the slightest provocation’. My mother tells me ‘anger is healthy’ (go figure) because it has provided me with some odd form of initiative and drive to self-start my life trajectory at 28. This always brings to mind that somewhere along the line I lost 10 years of myself. Years that I could have spent being young, stupid and petty were spent being patient, stoic and stolid. They were spent in a refrigerator and now I feel like one of those musty ice cakes that Bashir used to bring out for the horses in Tarlai when I was 14.
Dry ice. The kind that never melts.
I’ve also jumped head first into a new - old obsession ‘Fantasy fiction’ and in one short month have finished six (average 700 page) volumes of the Game of Thrones. The obsession also appears to have extended itself to my recent penchance for employing terms like ‘ser’, ‘jape’ and ‘betwixt’ quite liberally. I find myself particularly admiring a coping mechanism used for the angriest, hapless, female character in the series, Arya. I am beginning to appreciate Arya’s ritual nightly recitation of a list of death warrants that she whispers to herself each night before falling asleep. I have now compiled my own list and even though all my years of fabricating tranquillity have not been washed away enough for me to pray for beheadings and spikes, I have begun praying for retribution and on occasion even, revenge. As much as I wish there weren’t, there is a perverse pleasure in what most people term ‘justice’ or my mother ‘what goes around comes around’ and I find I am not above relishing it. This scares the shit out of me but it beats purgatory any day. Then again, I don’t have the faintest clue who it is I am praying to so that might be moot.
Even more shameful, is my newly awoken greed. For the first time that I can remember, I have begun to miss … money. That security of having not to work for it should I choose. The lazy, ugly, hedonistic self-satisfaction of knowing I can leech off some sire, or spouse in stead. I used to dream of low-budget adventures, journal pages well worn in, concerts and backpacks but now I find myself dreaming about hefty bank balances, foreign accounts and first class travel. Small wonder, I haven’t reached the stage where I crave diamonds and cars but that might come some day too and that day, I fear I wont be able to face my mirror.
I’m walking around like a mousy Dorian Gray these days. Thinking the thoughts that ought to make my portrait pock faced and patchy but my cowardice to actually act on said nuggets, prevents that from happening. There it is again, purgatory…except now it’s this ugly, dank room filled with flies and reserved for ‘cravens’ (another GOT relic to reuse) that only means I didn’t even have the guts to be good at being bad.
That’s what brought me to ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ again. According to Clinton Heylin in ‘Revolution in the Air’, Dylan wrote the song when he himself was drowning in coppers and dimes. He tried to mock the obsession that was taking hold and I can sympathise with the urge. The 1985 ballad, also one of his many portraits of Sarah, rode on the coattails of his other ‘mathematical songs’ like Dime Store, Bank Account Blues and Worse than Money. When asked about his references to Sarah as holy he said “What I mean by ‘holy’ is crossing all boundaries of time and usefulness”. Which certainly puts most of my pretty premises on the back burner. The song offers a mental balancing act, in the style of Keats, and recalls the latter’s notion of ‘negative capability’. What Keats called ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact, reason…or comfort’.
I live that.
It’s called patience.
And it blows.
