To truly feel a thing is to attribute to it a significance beyond all comprehension. To be utterly enveloped in one's own sentiments, for feeling to overcome all thought, is tantamount to drowning; the spurned lover commits suicide because the beast of a human being who performed the act of spurning has taken on a value beyond themselves. They have become the sorry receptacle of dysfunctional dreams, a punching bag for the immature philosophy of those who refuse to abandon hope yet think, feel, behave and, occasionally, even write as though they had attained some wondrous insight into the allegory of life. I pity neither.

Yet, it has never been enough for me simply to love. I am constantly in love; I am besotted by the near-photographic idylls I snap in the blink of an eye and charge with fictitious strands of poetry ripped from the depths of my consciousness. I worship the radiant beauty I once saw and smother it in perfume - no! In the smell of lingering perfume in an unchanged pillowcase - for now I have a fantasy (a memory, the ripest of all grounds for such) contained within a fantasy. That radiant beauty is the heart-wrenching splendour of something which cracked into a thousand pieces before my eyes, before I had so much as laid my hand upon it. So radiant are my thoughts that I convince myself that the loss they represent is as real as the spark which created them; I stagger from place to place tormented by passions I have never felt, kisses I have never received! That I love cannot be denied. Yet the very force of that raw, unbridled feeling - so unbecoming of an introvert like myself - throws itself quite deliberately in front of a train of metaphors and dreams. I think so much that such feelings cannot hope to live long without facing annihilation.

So it is that I punish myself for being human. To contradict one's own sentiments with metaphor, smilie or song - that is the root of Sadness!

The mirror weeps with my shameful reflection. I am thinner than the man Kafka thought he was. I would shatter more easily than the mirror itself!

The immeasurable tranquility of absence, which only night-time can bring, dissolves in the inevitable light of day. My very eyes pound with insignificance; sleeves rolled-up as though I have been at hard at toil, surrounded by books half-open as though half-read, my throat sore from the words which it never allowed to escape.



I take a daudling, redundant pleasure at swivelling, like a tired child, in a broken chair at five in the morning. I think: were I able to slice words from the fabric of my material life, to wire myself at once to the throbbing basslines, the empty roads echoing with faraway vomiting, the hysterical giggles and shrieks of semi-conscious sexual desperation, I would be a Thinker. To wed each separate image through a logic not apparent in the bass, the vomit or the giggling - no; not apparent even in the hysteria itself - in doing so, I would become a Thinker. Yet I am so much more: I have placated myself so far into indifference that the noxious spectacle of life acts itself out on a thousand stages before my eyes. Desolate stages staging plays I have seen a thousand times. I have far too little invested in life to simply think about it.



Life may weave itself into little bundles for the Thinker, but for a Poet, every sense, every word, every colour is itself a bundle throbbing with possibility. Yet, alas, the Poet is more of a Thinker than the Thinker himself. For the Poet decorates his imagination with the embroidery of language, and in doing this he binds himself to the imagination of others, those he has read, as well as the voice of language itself. He translates himself into Poetry, and so perishes his imagination. Rhyme and metre sculpt thought into a monument to the banal as language voluptuously revels in itself and teases us away from thought. The Poet is a Thinker who has nothing to say.

I, too, have nothing to say. Yet, bereft of rhythm and lacking the zest for an amourous affair with life, I cannot hope to structure my thoughts into recognisable hills or trees or lakes. I am no Poet. I write in order to think; like the Poet, I translate myself into a language of my choosing - only mine is the tedious language of modernist warfare. Sometimes I feel as though the most vicious of literary cycles plays itself out in me during these dreadful hours when night slips away; my one true desire in life is to think, and in order to achieve this, I write. Yet, in writing, I don that pretentious top-hat of the caricature of great introverted writing I have fashioned through years of half-baked understanding. I surrender my thoughts the very moment I become aware of them.

I laugh: that conscious inertia of which art was made before we became post-it, that multiple selfdom people abandoned in favour of apathy, is me. I have become a caricature of what I want, a student-led puppet show bursting onto a rickety old stage which once housed Shakespearean tragedy.

The chair stops spinning again and I stretch out my legs so as to dangle them and make myself feel like a child.

I make an art of falling in love.

To pierce the drab monotony of a plastic life and fecundate it with the illusion of purpose or progress! - that is the role of art and the role of love. It is the same. The immutable and absolute immersion in an exterior life, all for itself; the radiant, thronging, cheering and triumphant crowds of memories bursting forth as though crying 'Liberty!' in the face of some tyrant; the intermingling of dreams as though meeting for the first time! To fall in love is to fall into art, I think.

And yet, in spite of the centuries of poems begging for love to please indefinitely, it does not. As it withers, so art itches in between our bones, a perpetual arthritis of the soul. We cherish the suffering art brings us, for it is from suffering that we yearn and from yearning that we fool ourselves. To love is to deify the putrid cadaver of what was lost before it was had. To love art is to deify our Selves, for it is that yearning, borne of suffering the weight of imagination, which springs from us and paints us into that which we see, or feel. Oh, for that imperishable burden to live, to, see, to think, to feel, to skulk home with a can of cider at three in the morning!

Finding art and love irreconcilable, I decided to make one of the other. My love would be Romantic with a capital 'R'; it would exist in thoughts, sheer thoughts bursting at the seams with symbols and meanings only I could ever hope to understand. It would be the Thing above all Things, Sartre's Nauseating roman. My love would thrive on its own negation, and I would seek it everywhere.

And so it is that I find myself staring hopelessly into the abyss. She sits and smiles, smiles and sits as I rise manfully from the slumber of a thousand years of inertia and self-servitude and tear from her blissful presence the cloaked figures of a thousand suitors. From the Heavens, from across the seas I cannot see; from the ditches, from upon the roaring hills, a gargantuan orchestra spills a symphony of all that I never was into a weeping, sighing valley. The wind rips through the endless darkness about me, grips me by the skin, yet on I walk, through my very own symphony and her! Her, above, below, all around -who cares? My parched and stinging lips traipse through a million memories in search of hers and, finding but a nervous smile, quench themselves with the tears of thoughts I have never really had.

I stare hopelessly into the abyss, as she smiles at me in a not unfriendly way.

My soul: a delicate piano melody, snuggling warmly the backdrop of fierce rainfall breaking on a windowpane...

It is not uncommon, should one be inclined to search for me on any given day, to find an old wooden chair supporting my meagre frame in a particular establishment in town. I use the word 'establishment' in order to avoid using the word 'Cafe', for fear of conjuring up images of Paris and leading you, imaginary reader, down conceited streets. The establishment I so frequently frequent is one of many such establishments in the rather odd city into which I appear to have flung myself and not unusual in any respect other than that it is the only one, to my knowledge, to have the word 'Cafe' in its name.

I have become attached to this little building because the first coffee I drank there was one of the best I have ever tasted. Not that I am snobbish in this regard - I can distinguish between good coffee and bad coffee, but little more. No, this one, the first one, tasted (or so it seemed to me) of the girl sat in the corner across from me, her whirling mane winding its lavish way across part of her worried face. I, the stickly flaneur, legs crossed as though preparing for a story about a boot to the groin (such is life), dreamily drinking up the subtle contours of her feline figure, nonchalantly draped across a table. She was Fairtrade.

Yet, I ask myself, how could each of those dreary sips possibly draw from a cup so mundane, so utterly cliched? Cliches, by definition, are prior to reality. They are the sworn enemies of dreams, ever reductive, ever sapping away at our will and our illusions of freedom. I think: the elation of that first cup of coffee was my own fantasy. Whether the girl was beautiful or not, I could not say, but I could say that the snapshot, in my mind's eye, of her languid posture, the vacant brilliance of her autumnal face, partly traced by windswept locks, was itself a motif. It was my own vivid, heaving version of a Gaugin, a Manet bursting at the seams with the imprints my own psychological traumas. My mind had made a masterpiece of that scene, but even now demonstrably lacks the artistry with which to immortalise it in a fragment, or an image. It was the impossibility, that inaccessibility of the beauty I find in art and life, which flowed into me and shocked my central nervous system. The caffeine was stronger that day.

I think: that empty seat mourns the absence of my fantasy. This sickly black dross tastes fouler by the day, yet I each day I return. It is a form of melancholia, such as life, for each day brings that vintage sense of loss - the loss of something I never had, defeat by some unknown force I shall never tame.

Goethe's Fire

Raised in a society in which God was long dead and even the thought of an 'individual' was becoming suspicious at best, it is only natural that I, a charicature of a thinker (think of an exiguous shadow, like in a German Expressionist film, emanating from the figure of a ponce like Wordsworth), should invert my dreamy gaze and question selfhood. I used to believe that the 'self' is simply the image we convey to the world. For me, if I could not apprehend myself, then neither could any other individual. However, that was to evade the point; there could still be a self, even if it lacked a sensible quality. My self could be exterior to me, so I thought, it could exist as a collection of fragments, images, voices, sounds, feelings, expressed by me and captured in the world like flies in a web. I transcended myself in projecting myself into the world.

But the more I attempted to acclimatise to this absence of 'sense of self', the more self-evident it became that self-awareness was too important. How could my legacy of being-in-the-world be exterior to the consciousness which shaped it? In other words, I wished to have some responsibility for my 'self'. Shuddering, as I so often would, as my words drowned in a sea of tedium, battered against the rocks of dialogue and buried beneath a thousand years of cigarette smoke, flannel shirts and apalling music, I reflected on the perceived pretentiousness any utterance in opposition to the binding of my thought might arouse. I shudder at this reflection.

I'm not pretentious. I'm lonely.

Thus, I found that any self I may have could not possibly be exterior to what I thought of it. For surely, my private thoughts about myself cannot be projected into the world. They are mine and mine alone - they are the scraps of evidence that I have been abandoned in the world, that I can even follow this very train of thought, bravely and alone.

I have never assumed myself above or exterior to humanity, so I can only assume that the impossibility of shaking my 'self' from out of myself applies to all. Yet I find myself confronted with a world in which exteriority defines, moulds and creates. I am reminded of a writer, whose name I forget - in which case, I may as well say that I am reminded of a piece of writing, which I also forget. He or it wrote, of Goethe, that landscape was his 'central carrier of meaning'. Young Werther's sorrow spilled out onto the valleys, he or it might have said, inundating the hills, dripping from the branches, seeping into the ditches. I remember how his beloved valley wept for his beloved.

Nowadays, no valley will weep for a broken heart. No spring will blossom in the hearts of the automatons staggering from rotten building to gloomy, rotten building, juggling work, sex and crises like bombs in the greatest circus to be banned for a breach of health and safety regulations. Please, do not misunderstand me; I do not yearn for Goethe's fire, for that rage which burns and tears from within us until it threatens, so we think, to singe the leaves of trees we have never even laid eyes upon. What I would like, if I permitted myself the luxury of desire, would be to understand how others can survive on self-projection. It seems such a silly way of coping with this dirty, ambiguous world.

I have realised that the world is not my canvas, ready for me to project a million instantiations of a self which is not even there, as though I were a creaky old stage consisting of a revolving door of acts, each hell-bent on outperforming the last in some bizarre Cubist experiment. I can't paint myself, not even by accident. The world is too full of sorrow, the sorrow I have invested in it, to even find the room.

Outside, as I write, the rain taps lightly at my window as though knocking politely, imagining me asleep rather than wide awake, describing their endeavour, now twice as fruitless for being mocked. The evening envelops the world, with its street lamps, its clusters of old newspapers and its basslines and, with an almighty shove, pushes the sky away, weeping, like a flooded valley.

The group, or the collective, is the breeding-ground of inanity. Ideas, art, beauty - they are all negated by the lowest common-denominator, the standard around which the group transfixes itself. Words ravish each other before they're spoken. It is the burden of those who think, those for whom life is a dour springboard for the wonder of thought, rather than a wonderful thought bound by dour preservation, to carry; to be forever gagged by the cackle of ignorance and desperation and to be accused, in many quarters, of medicority for stubbornly refusing to submit to it.

Is it not true that a group contradicts its own noise? For all the natter, one cannot hear a single word. Such is our need to be heard in the herd that we abandon thought to the abyss, cast off any semblance of logic and toss words at each other like tomatoes at the Tomatina. We lock ourselves up in our own little festival of forced conversation, of stinking beer breath and sore throats.

We truly are the most absurd species to have ever insulted this planet with its presence. Some would blame Catholicism, but I would go further and suggest that our entire evolutionary process, that apparently beautiful, logical series of steps which led us from caves to bedsits has bestowed upon us a sort of gag reflex, a sense of shame in our own sensibility which causes us to behave more irrationally than any 'animal'. We are petrified of thought and will go to the most obscene lengths to avoid its glare. Rather than form connections with each other, we dilute the fabric of our co-existence with...each other. No authority, no oppressive government, no tyrannical monarch, has ever forced its citizens to huddle together in places where they cannot hear each other in order to express joy. Nobody ever told us we were not allowed to be social animals anymore. We simply convinced ourselves that we evolved out of it.

We evolved the 'group'. The group knaws away at thought in that its exclusivity is self-perpetuating. Contributions must be made to it in order to guarantee an individual's presence; to ignore the concept of the group, to behave as though it were not there, is tantamount to treason. It is, essentially, a horrific form of Communism in which need can be substituted for kinship, shouting for talking, speaking for listening, prose for poetry. In the group, the purpose of speech becomes to take, rather than to give, as the frenetic need for self-preservation becomes all-consuming and individuals realise their value is exceeded by their place within the group. The group is what is wrong with all ideology.

Such is our burning shame and fear of thought that we will undergo the most frightfully dull social procedures in order to avoid it. Drugs and, ultimately, mobile phones, were invented in order to make our sense of timing, our delivery of speech and our style of listening so impeccable that all but the most rigid of group members ultimately drop out.

Result: where once the great seducer was Byron, we now have the man of patience. The man of patience will behave impeccably. He will contribute to the group and he will sip his drink at the most opportune of moments. He will, of course, be endowed with a heroic capacity to engage the group as a whole, as well as its individual members, on a variety of levels, predominantly those generic ones which are acceptable to almost anybody. The man of patience will have no virtues as virtue, in the group, expresses invidiuality without individuality itself becoming a chief concern; it marks the individual out as a threat to the stability of the group. No, the man of patience will be bland. The blank canvas of modernity: everyman. The hero of Eliot, of Joyce, and of the greatest romantic comedies. Dour as dishwater.

Result: where once the great leader will have been a master of oratory, an individual with aura, presence and, crucially, thought, the leader of the group is precisely the opposite: mundaneity. And before the socialists get angry, I am not attempting to suggest that we, as humans, function better when lead; I am suggesting that the group leads itself - not as Marx may have had it. No self-determinism. No freedom. No. The group is personified by the everyman alluded to above. The will of the everyman represents no individual member of the group. It is simply the compromise each individual member accepts as the replacement for true thought.

Were we able to think, we would speak much less. Were we to speak less, we would love more.