Part II of First Draft of Day

by in_earth

Posted to Stories on 2003-07-09 12:36:00

Parent message is 480788
I cannot see any blue in the sky. It rests in a single sheet of irregular greys now: from light flat ash to patches of dark murk, all mingled in one smooth interplay of light and shade – no hard edges. And I think there’s something distinctly Irish about that. I immediately chide myself for being so foolish, for being a nationalist. Irish… what is that?
I put on Afrocelt Sounds System’s album, Further in Time, and play ‘North’.
Why am I sitting here? But, I haven’t answered the first question yet – who am I? Being Irish isn’t good enough. The concept – the problematic – of Identity. Yes, I need to know what I see in the mirror of my mind. I need to identify it. But why? Ah, enough of identity… enough of everything, enough of Being! I’ve had enough of the West. I want to go due east – south-east and north-east and far east. I want to spread my mind out like a light over those mountains and those deserts. I’ve had enough of industry and entertainment and Christianity and western psychology, of the western – mentality. The closest thing in the West to what I want seems to be this Irish music! This Irish music. How ironic. This haunting, hallowed composition of the Gaelic celebrant – the rapture it induces by evoking a mystified nature: landscapes, topography, deep terrain.
You dig.
And I realise the room is hot and stuffy: I can feel each bead of sweat form on my forehead as my pores open, and release. I swallow, with an effort. I look at my black computer desk and see on its protruding shelve seven cigarette sticks, emptied of their tobacco; an ashtray full of roaches, almost overflowing; the grey keyboard, the silver mouse to its right, a navy Panasonic mobile recharging on it left; above this shelf: a dry-looking wine glass, stained red at the bottom; behind it, an empty pint glass with Coco-Cola scripted on either side in primary red; to its right, the grey monitor; beside it on the left, a silver CD player (turned off); in front of it, a large pink and white tube of Betnovate™ RD Cream (for the contact dermatitis on the tips of the middle and third finger of my left hand); in front of this, a Nicorette® Gum package and an empty CD case; and all about, flakes of tobacco strewn here and there. The chair stands in front, waiting for my presence, waiting for me to once more curve my back over creativity. An impulse to construct strikes me, and for a moment I’m consumed in a sort of craze. I see vast designs bubble and appear before my eyes, fading as quickly to be replaced by newer images, equal in their intricacy, equally symmetrical. I plot the course of what I could create, and it seems infinitely complex. In the back of my mind a voice assures me that such thoughts of completion will abandon me when I actually take to the page. That voice has been right the last 10,000 times, but, perhaps not this time. Know where you’re going to go, I say to myself, plot your course… my head furrows and I blink my eyes away as if struck by a sudden noise. I turn my head slightly to the side, curious about the peculiar, phantom glitch. Perhaps it was the CD skipping once. Where was I… where was I…? Alanis Morissette sooths my desperate heart – ‘Flinch’.
I look at my desk again in its dishevelled state. It’s like everything else in this room right now. Things are just lying around, as if sleeping, yet at the same time awake. A white shirt (in fact half-cardigan) lies fatigued on my couch listening to the music in a tranced-out state. It looks to the white dappled ceiling of my room in a frozen reverie, and I sympathise it, I empathise! I miss the blue sky. As if in painting, one of its sleeves has slipped over the couch’s arm touch the floor. I inhale, and sigh, and look out my sitting room window to see the suburban neighbourhood still unchanged. It reminds me of The Labyrinth, but made of red-bricked houses and grey, concrete streets instead of natural features, a man-made maze. But, if out there is a labyrinth, who, what, and where is the Minotaur? A sparrow darts past my line of sight. I become self-aware again.

Is it that I’m slipping in and out of being? Am I hearing? When?

In my imagination the street darkens as if light were being swallowed up by every cold hard surface of stone and slate. A wood-like groan creaks through the air, and my soul, pulled by a force, sinks deep into gloom. The streets darken again, with another groan, as if light were solid, and could be sucked out of the air. Ahead, about 100 metres down the road, I see a murky horizon of housetops, with an oak tree’s dark silhouette rising up behind, back-grounded by a bleak and rusted cloud cover moving fast from right to left as if lit from below by fire. The bleak, stormy sky seems to burn and crack. The wind whips round the street. A rolling boom of thunder tumbles towards my window, and crumbles above, booming away smoothly, fading, grumbling.
Then, the light returns, and my imagination relaxes; a normal, light grey overcast sky sheets the sun.
But, wasn’t that a warning? Wasn’t that a prophecy? Wasn’t that a signpost? What ghost haunts me now? Come! Come! I’ve had enough! No more tentative shows of significance; I want it all, all, all! All at once! Everything I say, Everything All at Once! I want it… I want it… I, “I”… always I….
So nothing happens. Nothing comes. The neighbourhood’s unchanging face mocks me. I am spent.
I turn around my room and see a drawing of this beautiful woman I once had the pleasure to observe. The drawing isn’t perfect, but it does show my potential coming through. It is the best work of visual art I have ever had the joy to sketch. But that damn piano, being plucked so sadly, up and down the chords in pain…
The sun comes out from behind the clouds, and a wave of heat descends into the air. My armpits begin to perspire, and my flesh begins to flush. Crisp dark shadows appear on the concrete from beneath the parked, middleclass cars. The damn clock, still wrong. And as I think of my predicament, I feel that stabbing pain in the chest, my throat closing up as I swallow stiffly, and I try to push back the tears, while the street beyond blurs. My hands want to clench. I want to get angry. Is there any escape? It seems like I tear down one obstacle, to be immediately faced with another; wall after wall, after wall, after wall… the exacerbating endlessness I feel like screaming! I feel like the world’s against me (perhaps it’s not the world; perhaps it’s me). I want out, I think, and with that, for a brief moment, thoughts of suicide flash through my mind. Then I could annihilate both at the same time, then I could annihilate everything all at once. No pleasure, no pain. No thoughts, no senses, no experiences. No world, no self. Nothing.
The sun blazes as I hear a lawnmower rev into life suddenly, and I light some incense, listening to the dogged engine grumble and whir. The combination of scent and sound evokes a childhood memory somehow, of summers when I was young, smelling the cut grass and listening to the lazy work of late, middleaged human beings. Christ, I miss that, that simplicity! I push the tears of frustration back. And that’s what it is! Frustration! I’m immensely frustrated! I realise that I want to fight, fuck, fly! Frustrated… I want to boom upwards, away from this throng of disturbances. Boom… upwards. All this perceived paranoia, and anxiety, this imagined antagonism – I want rid of it, now, this black void.
Perhaps it’s all the consequence of the self-annihilation I seek (and perhaps have already found), a black void only, my self just a ghost, a shade on Nothingness, the death of Western Man. Thusly, my story begins. I look down and see my bare feet sticking out from my tracksuit bottoms. I see my white t-shirt and despair. I look out the window of my sitting room to the unchanging facade of streets’ red-bricked houses. They look so solid, so physical, so concrete. With the sun behind the now overcast sky, they stand open the grey horizon like sentinels, standing to attention! Stern and hard and unwavering. I inhale their texture – “Son of Life” by Leftfield plays on my stereo – a potential smile energises my lips. Gerard, my almost-anonymous neighbour, walks round the corner in an office suit. He too has been made solid, made physical. We hide colour with colour; we cover-up our immaterial, five-fold light, in material opaque colours; we hide the five-fold light behind curtains: like cloths or redbrick houses, like absolutism, how it hides in dogma, and like anxiety, how it conceals the light with hesitations and inhibitions. We feel forced to “cover up”, after we fall. And with enough time we forget what it’s like to be naked. We forget the light.