Bob Dylan: buckets of rain
I spent the afternoon sitting in the Pride of Spitalfields, trying to bring a friend down. Turns out he went to a reggae party in Brixton last night and took many worming pills, the active agent in which is some distillation of black pepper. The effects of these turned out to be suprisingly long lastting; by eight pm he was still buggered and I had to admit defeat and send him home, as he was starting to scare the punters in the Pride- quite an achievement given that the Pride's usual clientelle are elderly coockneys with fists of steel and probable members of the BNP. Half way between a conversation about Angelina Jolie (I'd do her, he wasn't sure) and the wisdom of re-reading the Wasteland every april (in general a good idea, but I should be banned from reading all Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Beckett and anything even a little bit Russian- and that means you too, Nabokov- until I have shown that I can be trusted to behave myself in a manner befitting my age and status) he said that it was a fucking mercy I've never taken to drugs. He's right, of course. The utter dedication I have shown to the cause of self-destruction means that if my forces had been chanelled that way I'd be dead by now, my old school tie in my teeth, a needle hanging out of my bicep. Or eyeball.
After saying good bye I sway gently towards the station and return to a question which has bothered me for years- why, of all things, did I light on self-mutilation as a way to deal with my disintegrating mind? Part of me thinks that if I could answer this question- if I could understand why selfharm rather than cricket, say, or smack- then I would have the key to controlling my desire to destroy my body.
It wasn't like I didn't try other things. I toyed with promiscuity (when, at the age of fourteen, I had my first consensual sexual encounter, with a twenty-three year old physics student whose name I can't remember, he asked me with some suprise where I had learned to kiss that way. I answered in all seriousness that I'd learnt it round the back of the Brixton Academy), over-eating, self-starvation, bingeing and purgeing. I was, to be honest, a bit crap at all of them. The trouble with promiscuity is that you can't be promiscuous on your own, and no one fancied my gauche and bespectacled teenage self. Over-eating left me feeling repellant and I had better things to spend my pocket money on than white bread and nutella. I'm too lazy for anorexia, which requires a dedication and self-discipline I utterly lack. I still think I could have made an ace bulemic, but sadly my body was against me on that one; I just don't have the gag reflex. My throat will bleed before I vomit, and there's nothing more unpleasant than a bleeding throat.
Self harm, though. That was something else. My first time wasn't elegant; we didn't know one another that well; we hadn't started out with the little scratching foreplay and then worked up to going all the way- it was dirty and sudden and without the grace of introductions- perhaps I should have waited; I didn't even hold out for an implement I loved. I sat on the kitchen floor and hacked at my forearm with a steak knife. I seem to remember reasoning that if it was designed to cut steak then it would be perfect for cutting me, for what am I if not steak? Fucking tough steak is the answer. The whole episode was ignominious in the extreme, but I remember thinking "I can do this. I have found what I am good at." And oh, christ, but I was good at it. I threw myself into it as into clear water, as the starving man falls on bread. I was infatuated, overcome, bourne away. It wasn't just that it was right; it was that it was perfect. Between me and the razor there was the sort of dead-on click that usually only exists in hollywood romances of the old school; the eyemeet, the half smile, the knowledge, simple and pure, that this is where you were always meant to be. Even now, years later, I could almost cry when I think of that moment. There's an echo of it every time I pick up a blade; a sudden certainty, an indescribably sweet feeling of being where I belong, but it never matches that first time looking down at an arm which, previously simply a lump of flesh, had suddenly and unexpectedly been claimed as my own.
I still don't know why self-mutilation and not some other thing. I am sure that there is a key in the mental disorder from which the need for this behaviour springs. Although borderlines often have, as I do, an unhealthy relationship with food, a degree of impulsivity with respect to spending, sex, fast driving, fags and drugs and booze and anything else which you were warned against in school, the vast majority of them come back not to these things but to the purity of razor on flesh as their first love. There must be reaons. There are, or at any rate there are for me; they're complex and shifting, and hard to pin down, rooted in the complex interrelation between self and world, mind and world, and both with the body, the skin, placed between subjective and objective as territory to be fought over. I'll come back to them, to my theories- peppered, I hope, with jokes.
For now, though, I wonder this- if I could go back to that first time, to my younger, as yet unscarred self, sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor with my left arm resting lightly on my thigh, would I tell myself to stop? Would I stay my hand and take a different path? What scares me most, more than the possibility of death, more than pain, more than the sight of my naked body in the mirror, is the fact that I wouldn't. I wouldn't miss this love for the world. Now I am faced with the task of giving it up. I have to, if I want to survive beyond the next year. I truly don't know how I will live without it, but in some twisted, fucked up, bat-shit crazy way I believe that it iis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
After saying good bye I sway gently towards the station and return to a question which has bothered me for years- why, of all things, did I light on self-mutilation as a way to deal with my disintegrating mind? Part of me thinks that if I could answer this question- if I could understand why selfharm rather than cricket, say, or smack- then I would have the key to controlling my desire to destroy my body.
It wasn't like I didn't try other things. I toyed with promiscuity (when, at the age of fourteen, I had my first consensual sexual encounter, with a twenty-three year old physics student whose name I can't remember, he asked me with some suprise where I had learned to kiss that way. I answered in all seriousness that I'd learnt it round the back of the Brixton Academy), over-eating, self-starvation, bingeing and purgeing. I was, to be honest, a bit crap at all of them. The trouble with promiscuity is that you can't be promiscuous on your own, and no one fancied my gauche and bespectacled teenage self. Over-eating left me feeling repellant and I had better things to spend my pocket money on than white bread and nutella. I'm too lazy for anorexia, which requires a dedication and self-discipline I utterly lack. I still think I could have made an ace bulemic, but sadly my body was against me on that one; I just don't have the gag reflex. My throat will bleed before I vomit, and there's nothing more unpleasant than a bleeding throat.
Self harm, though. That was something else. My first time wasn't elegant; we didn't know one another that well; we hadn't started out with the little scratching foreplay and then worked up to going all the way- it was dirty and sudden and without the grace of introductions- perhaps I should have waited; I didn't even hold out for an implement I loved. I sat on the kitchen floor and hacked at my forearm with a steak knife. I seem to remember reasoning that if it was designed to cut steak then it would be perfect for cutting me, for what am I if not steak? Fucking tough steak is the answer. The whole episode was ignominious in the extreme, but I remember thinking "I can do this. I have found what I am good at." And oh, christ, but I was good at it. I threw myself into it as into clear water, as the starving man falls on bread. I was infatuated, overcome, bourne away. It wasn't just that it was right; it was that it was perfect. Between me and the razor there was the sort of dead-on click that usually only exists in hollywood romances of the old school; the eyemeet, the half smile, the knowledge, simple and pure, that this is where you were always meant to be. Even now, years later, I could almost cry when I think of that moment. There's an echo of it every time I pick up a blade; a sudden certainty, an indescribably sweet feeling of being where I belong, but it never matches that first time looking down at an arm which, previously simply a lump of flesh, had suddenly and unexpectedly been claimed as my own.
I still don't know why self-mutilation and not some other thing. I am sure that there is a key in the mental disorder from which the need for this behaviour springs. Although borderlines often have, as I do, an unhealthy relationship with food, a degree of impulsivity with respect to spending, sex, fast driving, fags and drugs and booze and anything else which you were warned against in school, the vast majority of them come back not to these things but to the purity of razor on flesh as their first love. There must be reaons. There are, or at any rate there are for me; they're complex and shifting, and hard to pin down, rooted in the complex interrelation between self and world, mind and world, and both with the body, the skin, placed between subjective and objective as territory to be fought over. I'll come back to them, to my theories- peppered, I hope, with jokes.
For now, though, I wonder this- if I could go back to that first time, to my younger, as yet unscarred self, sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor with my left arm resting lightly on my thigh, would I tell myself to stop? Would I stay my hand and take a different path? What scares me most, more than the possibility of death, more than pain, more than the sight of my naked body in the mirror, is the fact that I wouldn't. I wouldn't miss this love for the world. Now I am faced with the task of giving it up. I have to, if I want to survive beyond the next year. I truly don't know how I will live without it, but in some twisted, fucked up, bat-shit crazy way I believe that it iis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
posted by tattybluetrees at 3:54 PM
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