Destruction

For those who have crossed my path and to whom I have promised things yet not delivered upon those promises, I am truly sorry, you know who you are...

One of my traits I am guilty of, and painfully aware of my own culpability (yet do not know how to undo) is a desire to please people, friends or simply those who cross my path, and make rash, foolish promises that I cannot always live up to.  I keep telling myself to stop making such promises as, ultimately, I fear that I will just let people down and in the ultimately, they will end up abandoning me.  I have no wish for this to happen, as I have been told that I am a good person; that I am likable, personable and that I am enjoyable company.  Yet, despite such favorable attributes, at this point in my life, not many true enriching and loyal friends are to be found in my life for me to share such qualities with.  And I do not know how to change the dynamic of this status quo. Where does one meet such people to enjoy such an existence with?

Amongst the attributes I used to believe I had was and is an ability "to communicate at all levels".  I feel no longer in possession of this quality for the simple reason being that I have lost patience, confidence, and faith in myself, rather than in people. It is too easy to blame others for one's failings, where ultimately the blame rests upon your own shoulders.  This has been down to my missing opportunities, and making rash and foolish errors of judgment.  Such traits would appear to be a permanent stain on my being, my soul.  It feels rather like I am sleepwalking through life, damaged, stained, much like Lady Macbeth "What, will these hands ne'er be clean. . . All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand".  Despite my best efforts to start afresh, again and again - at this point in my life it appears that the sins of the fathers are finally catching up with me.

Does not Dionysius make it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms? (Cicero)

If this is true, I'm screwed...

I have made many a faux-pas in trusting and counting on the people whose paths I have crossed, in some instances the friendships I have made, and the paths I chose to follow.  Recent events have included my trusting someone who ultimately stole from me, and this damaged my self worth beyond words.  Other unfortunate mistakes have been my inability to not express feelings, good and bad, when perhaps I should have done and instead played the diplomatic card.   This article you are reading, dear readers, is not written to wallow in self pity but as an apologia to those I have disappointed and let down, whether on a small scale or one of a more grand scale. I never mean to break my word, my promises, but I feel I will invariably disappoint.  This will result in my losing you as a friend for I shall never live up to what I perceive to be your lofty expectations of me.

For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be in careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17: 8-9)

However, I do not want to continue to walk life's path like some sort of Via Dolorosa, feeling a profound sense of regret at every turn.  My wish is to feel strong enough to express my yearnings, my true feelings and my desires.  Yet, owing to this inner turmoil, I feel regret, I feel remorse, I feel lonely.  I find myself meandering along this path with a sense of inner disillusionment with an unkempt mop of hair to hide behind, wandering with worn down shoes, an empty belly, a fractured heart and a soul that yearns to cry out how it feels.  I feel the need to exorcise the demons and purge the disappointment that lingers in my heart.  I am too scared to express my thoughts vocally, in an obvious manner, for fear that there will be no response to my plea.  And if I do express them, that no one will open their eyes to see, their ears to listen; and by extension open their arms to embrace, support and encourage, me.  Those true friends out there will not run from reading these words, my cry in the dark, but listen and understand.  You are needed... so much!

So, despite such inner conflict, from me, there will be no talking of love for fear of rebuttal, no expressing and sharing knowledge for fear of being mocked, despite this intrinsic need to overcome this sense of loneliness and to be loved once again...

To conclude, in the words of Swinburne:-

But half a man's days--and his days were nights,
What hearts were ours who loved him, should we pray
That night would yield him back to darkling day,
Sweet death that soothes, to life that spoils and smites?
For now, perchance, life lovelier than the light's
That shed no comfort on his weary way
Shows him what none may dream to see or say
Ere yet the soul may scale those topless heights
Where death lies dead, and triumph. Haply there
Already may his kindling eyesight find
Faces of friends--no face than his more fair--
And first among them found of all his kind
Milton, with crowns from Eden on his hair,
And eyes that meet a brother's now not blind.

Body and Soul

A recurrent motif that used to regularly feature as part of my dreams resurfaced from the Subconscious and back into the Conscious as I was walking down the street the other day on a pleasant balmy Saturday morning on the way to the bus stop to head into town (a frequent Saturday ritual for me).  Between my late adolescence (troubled years!) and my mid to late twenties, I found myself able, during my dreams to be able to separate my body from my soul.  This imagery and attribute still occasionally features in my dreams, however it is more of a guest appearance to one which I am habitually allowed to revisit.

The Lovecraft-esque inscription in Paura nella città dei morti viventi.

Generally, such an occurrence would take place if I was meant to be in two places at once, or i had made a promise to do one thing but had been made or encouraged to do another.  In order to do both things, I found myself able to divide myself up into two separate entities, both aesthetically identical however one of which was my body and one of which was my soul.  The body side of my ego retained all its human attributes and possessed neither special powers nor any apparent and evident differences which separated ‘me’ from any other person; except I would be bereft of most of my feelings, and was emotionally/physically numb...  I could talk and communicate but I would be subdued, removed.  “A shadow of myself” yet without a shadow, so to speak.   By contrast my soul could fly, and though I could be seen, this side to me was more like a ghost.  I was also more in touch with my feelings within my soul, and it was my soul I would end on my more emotionally charged assignments, seeing loved ones, doing tasks and duties that required feeling rather than simply automated attendance, or just my presence.   At the end of the day, body and soul would rejoin, able to share in experience and memories, and be as one again.

These dreams became less and less frequent; indeed all my dreams followed a similar fate, when my doctor put me on strong medication in an attempt to combat a severe bout of depression that plagued me during this time.  After attempt with two particular types of anti depressant, neither of which worked, my doctor placed me on Venlafaxine.  Initially he started with 75mg a day, then 150mg, and finally I was on 225mg a day to combat the deep melancholic depression that was affecting me in such a pronounced manner.   To their credit the pills certainly worked, I no longer felt such deep Depression, instead I felt a degree of neutral ambiguity to my existence, and to that of the world around me.  However, there were side effects to taking these pills, none of which really seemed to matter as I wandered through this haze like existence; these included a complete loss of sex drive, an extreme change in my metabolism and when sleeping, an infrequency in dreaming therefore my Unconscious never seemed to surface and my thought patterns were limited.

At the time however, the worst side effect was the change in metabolism.  My waist had previously been a mere 29, which admittedly was a complete nightmare for buying jeans and only Armani jeans seemed to suit my then-build and slender frame.  My waist went up and up, and finally I ended up with my waist being somewhere between 34 and 35, with a rather pronounced Akhenaten belly (for the first time ever) and a rather fat arse.  I remember the weekend I saw the light and what had happened to me, in that I was sitting on the common and it was pointed out that I had become rather podgy to say the least.  I must confess I initially dismissed this statement as it was being pointed out by someone who sees an inch of body fat as being overweight.  It was only the following day when going into central London and not being able to fit into a pair of rather nice shorts (and being told I needed size 36) that it dawned on me what had happened to me. 

Venlafaxine

So over a week I weaned myself off these pills.  Upon reflection I should have done it more gradually, but, other than the last night where I had rather vivid dreams once again, and I had the equivalent of ten nights’ sleep, I managed to do it.  I say ten night sleep, because my body clock kept on waking me up every hour, on the hour, and I would awaken, refreshed, ready for the day and then realise it was only 3am, then 4am, etc.  Since those days, I have lost a lot of weight, my waist is back to 30-31 and I have most of my sex drive back.  There have been times when I thought I might be better going back on anti-depressants over the years but I like being in touch with myself, my feelings, and I have no desire to balloon in weight once again and become rather podgy and rotund once more.

However the greatest loss is one that cannot easily be explained.  After this time I felt that at some point or another, somehow, my body had become separated from my soul and somehow the two had never quite become conjoined again and that I had lost some of my soul along the way.  Admittedly a lot has happened since then, not least failed relationships and disillusionment at myself, my path, and to an extent others, so that could have affected things in the subconscious as well.  But somehow I still feel numb, lost, disheartened, and like I have lost some of who I am and that my ka is out there in the void, trying to find its way home.

For now, I feel like the Traveller in Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners. Both in body and in soul, with my soul representative of the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door, and the seemingly empty house, representative of my body.  The attempts to enter, or at the very least to illicit a response, but though one senses a presence, other than the sound of the bird flying out of the turret, there is nothing.  Nothing other than a sense, a feeling... I first heard this wonderful poem when I was entering my teenage years, and the words have resonated through my mind ever since.   The closing stanza of the poem is as enigmatic as the one with which it opens, leaving it’s reader none the wiser to the Traveller and the reason for his coming to the remote house.  T.S. Eliot, in his poem to Walter de la Mare, added to this sense of mystery in his words below:-

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse
No sleeper by his call; or when by chance
An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incarnation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

Hélène Martin

The same poem was later covered by Etienne Daho (who sang it, when I was at the Olympia in Paris; July 2008) and Raphaël on his live DVD.  Yet this rendition of the poem by Jean Genet as sung by Hélène Martin, remains stark, minimal and effective, even now.

Kalevala

Today, a delightful parcel of goodies arrived from my dear friend Heidi, all the way from Pori, Finland.  Within the box was to be found a small cornucopia of various Finnish sweets, mostly differing brands of liquorice, which for those who have been reared on either Bertie Basset's Liquorice All Sorts and the only alternative has been the liquorice stick in your Sherbert Fountain, well, you simply don't know what you have been missing out on.  When not making Mars bars or jelly babies, the English confectionary houses tend to have a tendency to attempt to make English renditions of continental sweets and generally, not always to do it especially well.  A good analogy in this instance might be when one hears the English tourist in Paris or Rome, armed with their trusty Lonely Planet phrase book, endevouring to ask directions.  No attempt being made to disguise one's thick English accent  nor nuance and every word, be they French or Italian or otherwise, pronounced and enunciated in that uniquely English way, and generally not terribly well.  After all, to pronounce French with a French accent would sound either pretentious or contrived, surely...(?!)  Never mind that the accent tends to play an essential part in the pronounciation of the various words.  Therefore English variants of foreign foods have been created.  Some are honest copies (such as the terribly sweet Greek dessert Baklava), others are actually better than the originals (such as Bombay mix, which when compared to the bland Indian original is far more spicy and tasty), and others simply fall flat on their face.  For example, take nougat.  I love the stuff, especially that made in Motelimar.  Rather sweet, rich and with chopped almonds, cherries, or pistachio nuts. Although Greek in origin, and with the French version (probably) dating from the 1600's, one gets a real taste of something earlier, almost able to imagine bars of this being brought along the trading routes into France and Italy in mediaeval times by the exotic Greek traders together with spices, olives and fabrics.  The English have created in the wisdom their own version of nougat, which is, in a word, revolting !!  A travesty of the original.  The English version is pink and white, soggy, soft, gloppy and inedible.  Best avoided completely.

I don't know where the English tradition for liquorice came from, but it is certainly nothing like that of the Scandinavian variety.  I suppose that most of the English, when tasting some of the Scandinavian liquorice would probably find it unpleasant and distasteful.  The worst denounciation I have yet to hear for the much loved, iconic, Ga-Jol was the disclaimer that "they sort of taste like cough sweets".  In Scandinavia you get so many different sorts of liquorice, yet somehow very few of them seem to appease or appeal to the English palette.  It seems so strange as the nations are not that geographically distant and I am sure most English would find somewhere in their geneological pasts some sort of Viking blood.  That said, the French and English are such opposites "the old enemy" and have made a subconscious decision not to embrace each other's cultures too strongly.  Anyway, the parcel itself contained wonderfully named sweets such as Pantterri ("Panthers"), Salmiakki Mix (proclaimed as "The Original Finnish Salt Liquorice"), Bis Bis Bis Bis, and two different varieties of Tyrkisk Peber ("Original" and "Volcano").

Shunted to the side of these sweets was a copy, in translation, of the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala, which I must confess that, until I had spoken to Heidi, I had never heard of.  The translation is over 600 pages long, and though the printed version was first published in the mid nineteenth century, it harks back to the oral tradition as far back as prehistoric times.  The translation appears to be more literal in nature than poetic, which, in certain cases, as a matter of preference, I do tend to prefer.  I am not especially fond of such poetic translations (such as Dryden's of The Aenead, which, although masterful, tends to jar).   I feel they are, as I described above, mere renditions that, yes, conserve the original idea, some of the flavour, but lack the panache and mood.  This is not always the case as I say, I can revel in and find entertainment a-plenty in reading out loud (to myself) Simon Armitage's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; yet, even in the original Middle or Early Modern English, prefer the choice of words of Donne, of Spenser, of Chaucer, of Wyatt, etc - over a modern translation.

I have so far, admittedly briefly, leafed through some of the various cantos therein.  I can't wait to start to read through this.  Sibelius playing in the background, nibbling on some salt liquorice, with rain pattering outside and wrapped in a snug blanket.  Sounds idyllic and delightfully escapist.  So, to Heidi, in conclusion to my ramblings above, I want to say a heartfelt thank you for this wonderful, and unexpected, heartfelt and uniquely Scandinavian gift !!

And so, in "Kris Finnish", I will conclude...

Kiitos siitä sydämeni pohjasta tästä ihanin lahja!