Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli

It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

-John Berryman


I write this from the depths of one of the most unpleasant hangovers it has ever been my privalege to endure. I feel repulsive, like my brain has shrunk a centemetre all round, been shrink-wrapped, and the resultant space between cellophane and skull has been stuffed with rancid cotton-wool. Wandering grumpily down Oxford Street at ten am in search of coffee and a paper I saw a man with elephantitis of the testicle. This was an auger of evil; my hangover has just gotten worse from there on in. I am listening to Palestrina because it is the only thing my poor pickled head had can take.

Actually, I seem to have been hungover for most of this week. That is, in the spaces between being asleep and being drunk. Many of these spaces have been mercifully short. I can't say I have done anything exciting; last night was a rather glorious experience, but the preceeding ones have been in the main solitary affairs, whiskey soaked and angry and sordid. One night saw me on my knees scrubbing the floors at three am, a whiskey and soda my permanent companion. Last weekend I decided to stop eating. An outpouring of anger and self-loathing, a sudden inability to look at myself in the mirror without shame and hate, led to this strange gesture of rebellion; as a result I have been survining on apples and mustard and scotch and black coffee. By yesterday morning, day six of two apples a day, each sliced int thirty six pieces, the second dipped in mustard because the strong flavour kids your brain into thinking you are full, I was so hungry that I couldn't stop shaking. I dragged myself downstairs and drank two glasses of ribena, trying to get the sugar into my bloodstream. I called a friend. He came round with food. I fell on it in an undignified manner and devoured every crumb and then felt like crying. I got drunk instead.

I'd like to say that I don't know where this is coming from, but I do. I know very well. I can trace the process through the days and ways of my thoughts. It goes a bit like this: I don't like that I am not self-harming anymore. I am angry with my therapists. I hate being angry at other people. I turn the anger againnst myself. I stop eating as a way to punish myself and as a petty act of rebellion against the people who are so patiently trying to make me better. It's terribly fucking transparent and I know it's a bad thing in the same way that I know that not eating is a bad thing. I know it's bad but I don't care; for myself, for those around me, for my therapists, for anyone. I am a big bundle of incohate rage and I am using my body as a weapon in a war that no one else is really fighting. I fight it anyway, because it makes me feel strong and safe and seperate, even when I can't walk straight and there are black dots dancing across my visual field.

One interpretation says that I have reached a point of suspension, the moment of weightlessness the runner feels when his back foot has left the floor and his front is yet to reach it. My therapists have patiently unpicked my mind and laid out the pieces before me. They have taken away my old, bad habits, the concurrent circles of thought which I have owned for so long. They have yet to put anything in their place, and so I fall, and, falling, clutch at straws. Without the palliative of self harm the noise in my head is unbearable and I try anything I can think of to quieten it. Food restriction gives me something to focus on, some definite goal, a thought around which all other thoughts can be construced, so that the feeling of infinite chaos goes away. The resurging hunger pains are a testament to my strength. For the rest- I just want to run, and drinking is only a form of mental running. You can run away from yourself through booze in a way that is utterly unique. Besides which, it passes the time, and time seems an infinite burden these days. I'm not sleeping much.

There is another interpretatiion, though- a darker, flip-side. The one in which I am not the shell-less crab striving to find a newer, better set of lviing arrangements, but rather the stroppy and self-sabotaging child. I am self-harming less because the focus of the therpy on this behaviour means that it isn't mine anymore, and there is a large part of me which resents that bitterly, and which has no interest in being treated or cured. A part which is angry as hell with every single person on the planet for what has been done to me. A part which looks on every person it meets and says: you never lifted a fucking finger. This is the thing in me which needs a secret, which needs to claw something back from the world, which is angry because it is also deeply, deeply frightened. As am I- of every person I meet and their capacity to hurt me. There is a large part of me which is still utterly intent on self-destruction by any means possible, and you can't therapize that bit. Therapists can teach me skills but they can't do shit with the bit of me which is determined not to use them.

Self-harm, anorexia, bulemia- it's a cliche that the sufferer gains a sense of control through them. While everyone knows this and excepts it as a truism, I think they rarely consider what it actually means. The control is of a very particular sort, and is something you seek when you simply cannot control or predict anything else. I grew up with an alcoholic manic depressive for a father- a man both intensely violent and deeply kind; a man who was charismatic and fun and dangerous and terrifying. Who shouldn't have been left in charge of a goldfish, let alone a young child. Nothing was predictable. Something which one day would bring kindness would another bring a smack in the face. I grew up with no idea how to behave, which of my actions were good and which bad, with no idea how to relate in an ordinary manner to other people. It's Wittgenstein in action- without consistent responses you simple can't learn. It's not control I was after so much as predictability. By controlling your body you at last find something which is consistent and predictable. If I cut myself, I bleed; if I starve myself, I lose weight. If I drink, I get drunk. The relief this brings is absolute. The world of human interellations is too complicated, is frightening and unitellegable and you never know what will happen next; here, you have found an area in which there is certainty; your actions are finally given meaning. It is for this reason, I think, that as a breed borderlines often seem so self-obsessed. The self, and the manifold ways of controlling the self, is the only context in which our actions gain sense.

So I find myself in a position where my props have been removed, and I am angry and frightened and everything feels too intense. It feels like I have had all control wrested from me. One day I look at myself in the mirror, and I think -you fucking ugly bitch. And I think -I'll show them. And suddenly I am exhilirated. I can do this. The hungrier I feel the more I feel that I am winning; the more I feel that I am hurting other people, and the more I am hurting myself. That's the paradox revealed.

And so it begins again. I am tired and I am fighting myself on more fronts that I can keep track of. I've given up trying to find any sort of philosophical point in all this. I'm not even capable of spinnning a line, I can't give my thoughts a structure and my prose has gone haywire. All I know is that this is ridiculous place to be.

It's not a good position I am in. If I had to do the whole thing over again, I wouldn't.