Bonnie 'prince' Billy: grand dark feeling of emptiness
It's a beautiful morning. The sun is shining. Children are playing; I can hear them. My bedroom window is open and I can smell cut grass and fresh toast. I am having trouble recognising the substance of this, though. It's a less good day; a day which is more reminiscent of the bad days, when I feel further away from other people and from the corporeal world they inhabit. I feel distracted, caught up in a place with different rules.
There's something about assuming the mantle of depression which is like stepping sideways into a different world, a feature excacerbated by the concurrent presence of a personality disorder. Although it is a world which is mainly made up of big spikey lumps of PAIN it is not without its appeal. The other world, the one you've left, ceases to mean very much to you. It is strangely one-dimensional and although you can see people's faces moving you have to concentrate very hard to hear what they are saying, and then you don't really care. When I had to go and do things in the real world outside the door it seemed alien- a mixture of dream and fantasy and reality, in which people had strange faces and odd sounds came from their mouths, and things were at once too close and too far away, and everything seemed to be disconnected. When I stepped through the glass again, into the new quiet place I had found, nothing in that world had any power over me, and I was free.
In the new world, everything is black and grey. Everything is a thousand times as large. Gestures are vast. This is a world in which determinaton by fate holds absolutely. You become in your mind a sort of doomed hero, a bit part from ancient greece. You are doomed and there is nothing you can do about it. You stop trying to remove yourself from difficult situations and start trying to endure them. The ability to endure pain and suffering gives you a feeling of power. In the new world, there is no need, there is no loneliness, there is no requirement, no connection to unpredictable others; there are no daily tasks to drag yourself through. There is only self-subjugation, martyrdom, and ultimately a glorious end. You are self-sufficient. You need no one. You become oddly weightless.
There's a downside to all this, even from the point of view of someone so buggered as to actually think it is a good idea to live in such a plaace. In this new world, the one behind the mirror, you are on your own. There isn't anyone to see how amazingly strong and in control you are. No one praises you, and you want praise, because you are doing so well, you are becoming so strong. There isn't anyone to walk by your side and join in your games. Self-destroying games, although you can't see that. And so you turn to books, or songs, the vast literature of depression and glorified human misery and you find what you are looking for. Me, I found John Berryman, Robert Lowell, John Donne. Partly, you just want to know that you aren't the sole inhabitant of this brave new world; but it's more than wanting company. You want the words to express what you can't fiind a way to say, but it's more than wanting to tell people where you are. You have fuck all interest, to be honest, in telling people what you feel, because feeling is exactly what you are trying not to do. You want the words to tell people, not how you feel, but how fucking exhillarating it is here. How fucking marvellously free and defiant you are. You want the words to say "I am not coming back". You'd sing it from the roof-tops if you could. I've escaped, i've left, and I'm not coming back.
I'm not kidding about this. That world is very seductive. It's hard to explain, just because all the reference pints are the same, how everything seemed (seems, still, most of the time) different to me. To other people I was perhaps a bit of a worry, an odd and irrational being, intent on a series of petty and grubby acts of self-destruction which escalated a bit too far. II don't honestly know what other people thought; people were unfailingly nice to me, long beyond the point at which they could have walked away, and it is only occassionally, in a chance comment, that I get an inkling of what I must be like to watch. To me, I was... what? Not quite human. I was shimmering. I was in control. I was pure and strong as steel or bone and I was laughing at everyone from the other side of the mirror. Well, I was bonkers, obviously. Except that I wasn't, not from where I was standing; my behaviour had an absolute logic to it, a perfect simplicity and order. The only way I can explain it is that I had stopped being real and started being a part of a game which I had constructed for myself. And I was winning. Well, you know, obviously I was winning- I made the rules. What's the point of inventing a game you aren'tt supremey good at? Admittedly, it was a game with shifting goal-posts. Everytime I got close to what I was trying to achieve, I had to raise the bar. But from such a self-contained and self-controlled world, why would I want to come back? Why would I want to start living in a world where the rules were proscribed by someone else and required abiding by such incomprehensible pronnouncements as "thou shalt eat three meals a day" and "thou shalt apply antispetic to thy wounds". Oh, I know that it was nothing cleverer than running away, a sort of abnegation of all reponsibility. I know it was childish and rubbish and self-indulgent and annoying. But it felt grander than that. A lot like emo, in fact- a depth to which I have always tried not to stoop.
I am coming back, now. The real world has started to take on a more solid aspect. I think I will always live with one foot in either place. I wont ever see razors in the same way; will still think of injury in the language of desire. I don't know if I'll ever be able to view my body as wholly mine, or as somethiing to actually like. I think I will always be too ready to dismiss need. I am coming back, though. I do things I wouldn't have done before. I am more enthusiastic for mundanity, less eager for grand gesture. I care more about other people.
The trouble is, although I am coming back, I miss it, particularly on days like today, when things are difficult and I feel ucomfortable in my skin and can see nothing good in myself or the world. Lonely days. I know all the reasons I can't live there, but then it isn't really a place where you live; it's a place where you explode in a glorious burst of colour. It would be so easy to slip back. I want to. I really, really do.
There's something about assuming the mantle of depression which is like stepping sideways into a different world, a feature excacerbated by the concurrent presence of a personality disorder. Although it is a world which is mainly made up of big spikey lumps of PAIN it is not without its appeal. The other world, the one you've left, ceases to mean very much to you. It is strangely one-dimensional and although you can see people's faces moving you have to concentrate very hard to hear what they are saying, and then you don't really care. When I had to go and do things in the real world outside the door it seemed alien- a mixture of dream and fantasy and reality, in which people had strange faces and odd sounds came from their mouths, and things were at once too close and too far away, and everything seemed to be disconnected. When I stepped through the glass again, into the new quiet place I had found, nothing in that world had any power over me, and I was free.
In the new world, everything is black and grey. Everything is a thousand times as large. Gestures are vast. This is a world in which determinaton by fate holds absolutely. You become in your mind a sort of doomed hero, a bit part from ancient greece. You are doomed and there is nothing you can do about it. You stop trying to remove yourself from difficult situations and start trying to endure them. The ability to endure pain and suffering gives you a feeling of power. In the new world, there is no need, there is no loneliness, there is no requirement, no connection to unpredictable others; there are no daily tasks to drag yourself through. There is only self-subjugation, martyrdom, and ultimately a glorious end. You are self-sufficient. You need no one. You become oddly weightless.
There's a downside to all this, even from the point of view of someone so buggered as to actually think it is a good idea to live in such a plaace. In this new world, the one behind the mirror, you are on your own. There isn't anyone to see how amazingly strong and in control you are. No one praises you, and you want praise, because you are doing so well, you are becoming so strong. There isn't anyone to walk by your side and join in your games. Self-destroying games, although you can't see that. And so you turn to books, or songs, the vast literature of depression and glorified human misery and you find what you are looking for. Me, I found John Berryman, Robert Lowell, John Donne. Partly, you just want to know that you aren't the sole inhabitant of this brave new world; but it's more than wanting company. You want the words to express what you can't fiind a way to say, but it's more than wanting to tell people where you are. You have fuck all interest, to be honest, in telling people what you feel, because feeling is exactly what you are trying not to do. You want the words to tell people, not how you feel, but how fucking exhillarating it is here. How fucking marvellously free and defiant you are. You want the words to say "I am not coming back". You'd sing it from the roof-tops if you could. I've escaped, i've left, and I'm not coming back.
I'm not kidding about this. That world is very seductive. It's hard to explain, just because all the reference pints are the same, how everything seemed (seems, still, most of the time) different to me. To other people I was perhaps a bit of a worry, an odd and irrational being, intent on a series of petty and grubby acts of self-destruction which escalated a bit too far. II don't honestly know what other people thought; people were unfailingly nice to me, long beyond the point at which they could have walked away, and it is only occassionally, in a chance comment, that I get an inkling of what I must be like to watch. To me, I was... what? Not quite human. I was shimmering. I was in control. I was pure and strong as steel or bone and I was laughing at everyone from the other side of the mirror. Well, I was bonkers, obviously. Except that I wasn't, not from where I was standing; my behaviour had an absolute logic to it, a perfect simplicity and order. The only way I can explain it is that I had stopped being real and started being a part of a game which I had constructed for myself. And I was winning. Well, you know, obviously I was winning- I made the rules. What's the point of inventing a game you aren'tt supremey good at? Admittedly, it was a game with shifting goal-posts. Everytime I got close to what I was trying to achieve, I had to raise the bar. But from such a self-contained and self-controlled world, why would I want to come back? Why would I want to start living in a world where the rules were proscribed by someone else and required abiding by such incomprehensible pronnouncements as "thou shalt eat three meals a day" and "thou shalt apply antispetic to thy wounds". Oh, I know that it was nothing cleverer than running away, a sort of abnegation of all reponsibility. I know it was childish and rubbish and self-indulgent and annoying. But it felt grander than that. A lot like emo, in fact- a depth to which I have always tried not to stoop.
I am coming back, now. The real world has started to take on a more solid aspect. I think I will always live with one foot in either place. I wont ever see razors in the same way; will still think of injury in the language of desire. I don't know if I'll ever be able to view my body as wholly mine, or as somethiing to actually like. I think I will always be too ready to dismiss need. I am coming back, though. I do things I wouldn't have done before. I am more enthusiastic for mundanity, less eager for grand gesture. I care more about other people.
The trouble is, although I am coming back, I miss it, particularly on days like today, when things are difficult and I feel ucomfortable in my skin and can see nothing good in myself or the world. Lonely days. I know all the reasons I can't live there, but then it isn't really a place where you live; it's a place where you explode in a glorious burst of colour. It would be so easy to slip back. I want to. I really, really do.
posted by tattybluetrees at 2:36 AM
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