I live for the night because it is the night which justifies me. By day, each laboured smile of acquiescience, each exchange of empty phrases, each and every last second of monotony drenched in the rabid dramas of others, tears at any semblance of imagination I may have. I am not allowed to feel this way. The modernists did away with any hope for the suffering, thinking people of the world by writing them into novels. The Hunger-Artist is a cliche, probably played by some Gerard Butler-type in the film version. Yet what people appear - still - not to understand is that those of us not blessed with an affinity with the world strong enough for poetry do not suffer for art. We suffer for consciousness. We suffer for the very fact that our suffering is not art but, instead, a state of being. By day, we stubbornly cling to the fantastical fragments of the imagination we have carved for ourselves from out of the dead wood of the world. Yet, even this state of being is little more than our inheritance from the critics of the arts. By day, their observations on the introverted, self-obsessed, self-(de)constructing art of yesteryear peck at the very soul of those of us for whom the sadness of the highest poetry is an artless way of life.

And yet, night-time! So free of the world, wrapping herself around me like a desperate lover hanging (herself) on my every word or whim. So often, I write myself into tears, fetishising that peculiar brand of suffering unrecognised by those intelligent enough not to think: tedium. So often, I hurt myself with words I shall never speak, shimmering as they do in the light of overt consciousness and meekly rolling against each other in some vain hope of becoming something more than their creator. By night, it matters little that I transpose the weightiest of feelings into kitsch, nor that I stare into the abyss and react by drawing a two-dimensional well of despair with hand-me-down words. I think to myself and only for myself. I snuggle the absence of pressure. I continue this way for hours, waiting for sleep to come, knowing that should it not come, I shall be alive for longer.

I spend every waking hour yearning for sleep. With every ray of sunshine, with every shadow cast upon my existence, the dull ache of tedium slips in between my bones and stings me with every movement as though every twitch of my finger, every slip of my tongue, were taking place beneath the crushing weight of a giant boulder. The more I wrestle with my burden, the more it crushes me. I find that the most beautiful act of pure selfishness that I can perform is to play dead.

My life: a dreadful, monotonous lullaby.

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.