Nick Cave: easy money

I'm reposting this- it's from a few days ago, and doesn't seem to have worked properly the first time. I'm really a bit not very good when it comes to computers.



I'm sitting in my attic with the lights off, laptop on my knee, looking out through the skylight at the city, lit up. Drinking wine, smoking illlicit cigarettes. Listening, as the title of the post suggests, to Nick Cave.

I feel intensely sad tonight. I have nights like this; ones where I feel that somewhere along the line I have lost my skin, and my nerves are open to the wind and the air. Sometimes, looking out at the city is the sadest thing there is. I seem to see a network of people struggling to be human; people cutting and burning and starving and drinking and fighting because they are trapped inside their minds and don't know how to get out. Each man an island, bounded by his skin. Every person fighting for something. A fight of desperation; a silent screaming of finger nails and teeth and bared souls, and not kowing where to turn; being backed into a corner and each of us so trapped into our own worlds that we are unable to reach out and touch one another, even when that brief touch is all that we need. All across the city, men are beating their wives. What I am learning is that at the last account the only one you fight is yourself.

This is a truth I am struggling to understand at the moment; which comes to me as something new and startling. So bare with me if it doesn't make much sense.

I long ago lost faith with the rock-bottom solution to woes. The idea that eventually you hit rock-bottom and then there is nowhere to go but up. I lose track of the number of times I have been at the lowest point there is. I can give you a selection from the comedy array. Three a.m. a week before my mum died, cutting up my legs in the cublicle of a hospice toilet. Passing out through hunger and blood-loss the morning of one of my final exams. Spending seven days scared shitless that I was going to die because on a drunken whim I'd eaten thirty paracetamol and a bottle of cheap red wine. Perhaps each time I've been temporarily spurred on to something: to seek better help, to try harder in therapy, to go cold turkey on booze or fags or razor-blades. Truth be told I wasn't spurred I was scared, and fear never lasts for long. You sober up, your wounds heal, your kidneys stop complaining, and you say you won't go there again, but here isn't there, even when here is just a few cuts and a few pills and a few drinks and a few lies away from a gibbering heap on the floor and the ignominy of hospitalisation. Rock bottom is nothing but a series of foothills you can traverse for years.

After I had abandoned hope in the moment of truth cure, I put my faith in therapy. I have believed for so long that someone could say something which would cure me; which would make the pain and anguish stop, which would transfiguure the past, put things into perspective and give me an incontravertible reason for getting well. I have thought that this is what the difficuly series of hours in treatment rooms was working up to; I was playing along until the magical denumount. The denumount whch would turn everything around; make my past vanish and my present into something brave and new. When that happened, I would stand up and say that I was cured, no longer subject to the random grabs of all the world can chuck at your head. I have been waiting for years for this.

I am beginning to realise that it will never happen. I don't mean that therapy doesn't work. I firmly believe tthat it does. That if nothing else it gives you an etiology; you learn to understand how you ended up here, in order that you don't end up here again. You can learn skills, and you can examine yourself and get a degree of self-knowledge which allows you to be useful to yourself. In the end, though, this is all that it can give you. It can't make you stop breaking yourself. There will never be a reason stong enough for that.

I can talk for hours about the reasons for my self-harm. I can say that it gives me power over myself and the world. I can say that it gives me comfort; that it allows me to feel compassion. I can say that it regulates my ooods. That it is simply something that I like to do. All these things are true, up to a point. But in the end, I can either face or not face the fact that the only person I am hurting is myself; that the only life being damaged is my own. I can go on being proud of that damage, or I can put down the razor blade, walk outside, and go and play in the sunshine. At some point you come face to face with the truth that the choice is yours. The sunshine will always be full of voices, ghosts and demons. The light will always be an overlay on darkness, one step away from fear and pain and disintegration. That is part of what it is to be human. I am coming to understand that what I am doing to myself, ultimately, doesn't change a fucking thing. If it proves a point, then it proves a point only in the illusory world of mirrors I have built to avoid the real hard one outside. At some stage in my life, through a whole set of circumstances, I chose to pick up a blade. At some point I can chose to put it down. Just as there was never really a reason strong enough to make me start, there will never be a reason strong enough to make me stop. Perhaps it's about coming to terms; perhaps it's just about growing up. Perhaps it's about giving up my fascination with pain and death and all the shades they come in and developing instead a fasination with what life can give me. With what I can get by turning away from myself and facing the world. Just as nothing made me pick up a blade the first time and apply it to my skin, nothing can make me put it down and walk in the dangerous air. It's as simple as that.

Which is not a simple thing to understand.