Prelude to the Manifesto of Sadness

I stare, despairingly and disparagingly, into the sodden essence of things.

The world has abandoned me because, rather than return its glassy-eyed gaze with the thousand-mile stare of conscience, I shyly looked away and surrounded myself with the highest form of all reality - dreams. In turn, I abandoned the world because it stubbornly refused to let me go.

I am incapable of detachment. Like an irritating (and, potentially, highly embarassing) moth which has settled on my shoulder and refuses the sternest of coaxes, life nibbles away. Perhaps it would be better to say that I abandoned the world because with every rational step I took towards it, I sunk further into the quicksand of metaphor and allegory. All matter repulses me, all life is a film-set. Unable to accept the world on a rational basis, I took shelter in words. Words, those imperious bastions of potential, erected, who knows how, against wave after wave of consciousness, the self-perpetuating sadness of the world. Yet even then, I found that in their employment, the words led me all the way back. Those waves of consciousness had eroded them, torn them up into a brand new landscape of their own making. The most wondrous allegory, the most joyous of all stories, the tallest of tales fizzled out before my eyes and shrank into a pathetic whimper which the Universe never answered back. Indeed, I had told myself the very tallest of tales.

Thus, unable to accept the world rationally, by which I mean through perception, interpretation, or involvement - through consciousness - and, finding that the medium of words was itself but one more metaphor for nothingness, I retreated yet further into myself. A retreat which resulted in my discovery that to venture beyond consciousness was to forego all knowledge. To forego all knowledge was simply to be, to build a golden palace of inertia amid the drubbery of Life.

Yet, even here, I found no release. For, in my loneliness, I found that it was precisely in my failure to apprehend the Universe, rationally or irrationally, that I was wired to it. My golden palace was resplendent with the finest treasures of the imagination, the calm acceptance of the incomprehensible, the absence of the chasm between reality and fiction through the knowledge that, instead of existing to substantiate one another, neither even existed. Yet I had cut myself off from the very ground upon which I had built my palace; my yearning for transcendence had been, all the while, rooted in the realisation that the conceptual is but a bastardised step from the actual - that my thoughts were subject to my subjectivity. In hiding, I had reified myself. Subject only to myself, I was the object of noone and nothing but myself. I had negated myself. I had become like everybody else.

Someday, somebody will read these half-baked expositions of the weightiest of feelings and pass judgement. They will deconstruct my own deconstruction of myself and find nothing. They will catalogue my scribbled, scattershot bits and pieces - properties of my Being to myself, bouts of social dis-integration to others - and stamp upon it the authority of their own interpretation, their Symbolic Order of all that I never was. I shall cease even to 'Be' and to exist as the bastard child of all those wasted hours which bred to form all of which constitutes this, my Manifesto of burning and overwhelming sadness.


I am incapable of deatchment. Life nibbles away.