Excerpt from 'Undressing Alone: A Life in Pieces' (On Fernando Pessoa)

I

When I was young - so long ago now it seems like a different life – I would walk along the street, moving, but only physically. Shrouded in an ancient fog of forgotten meaning and swept along an invisible stream, I missed the shadow of my horizon form.

II

Unfeeling and unthinking, to this day I extract the elements that keep me dreaming. In reading, seeing and hearing, my blueprint is absolute and entrenched, and I never seek. I lean on each challenge with the same sallow strength, dwelling in miniature, a puddle isolated from the ocean I never knew.

III

One morning, I found myself undressing alone, digging up the layers of a heartless life, discovering endless depths that disappear into the mist.

IV

Unravelled with the expectant hope of a butterfly at birth, my wings tire under the heavy glare of the midnight sun. A travelling ship without a port to sail from, I am lost on the infinite sea. I mistook the sand for castles in the sky. My angel crumbles among the choppy waves.

V

Anguished, I go out the same closed door each morning, not knowing if it’s the right one, for reasons I will never know. The darkness is the light I wake up to. It clouds the beginning and the end of the day, and any light that intercedes is a fleeting reminder of what we once had.

VI

Illusion is reality for everyone. Conceived to be the actor in a pivotal narrative, the deluded individual is integral to everything he knows, fulfilling his own self-selecting prophecy. Unconscious and unreflecting, he is utterly confident in his own meaning and rejecting of all other narratives. As the sea catches at his ankles, he finds himself trapped on an island, specialized, but with no special significance.

VII

Our lives are consumed by desire and the world ends at our window. Slaves to external circumstance, we adapt to unknown elements with armoured, agonized resistance. The control we must have is forgotten as fate and treasured in narrative. The truth less palatable embeds the tangles and cracks glossed over in our precipitous madness.

VIII

I look at life through a solitary window in this, the grandest of mansions. The walls of the house have come unstuck and the words in my heart have broken. Each non-existent step is measured in fragments and it passes slowly. It hurts to live and to think this way, but the pain is hidden.

IX

Humanity acts within prescribed norms that it doesn’t even know exist. Everything we believe, feel and do is unconscious. The flash of a torch is as much a reminder to batten our eyelids as it is to penetrate the gloom. Sometimes the walls we cling to aren’t there and we fall in a common tragedy.

X

A storm is brewing overhead. Blackish clouds accumulate in the uncaring sky, breaking out in oppressive dullness. Everything I see has a greyish shade, behind restless eyes that recoil from unshed tears.

XI

Disabused of the fallacy of my infancy, I marvel at all that I was and now see I can never be. Glib certainties sustained by so much torturous reasoning sour in the poisoned sea. A veil has been torn from the perennial night and my mind floats free in a world perverted by questions, devoid of meaning. I was the role that got acted - patterned, fake, I was never myself.

XII

I harvest the memories I retain with a sigh of nostalgia, investing them with mute happiness. My fondness for the past is a love of history; a lovely illusion protected from anxiety, stable and sheltered in a cushion like soft animal fur. I remember tenderly the first time a book made me cry, my passion for music and my scrupulously honed identity. Dead and vanished, I wilt like a dead flower, glow like an extinguished lamp. Between now and what I’ve lost, what I find is me, all me.

XIII

Forgetful of the fact that reality is often a humdrum array of things that mean nothing at all, my mind strives for perfection in incommensurable events that extend back centuries. Abstract thought and disinterested emotion have taken hold, confusedly interpreting nothing at all. A profound awareness of everything that could ever happen has settled on my soul, along with a futile, endless probing of words for their singular significance.

XIV

My reflexive thoughts are debilitating and I have no valid means of redress. My perspective is unworthy and each suggestion is undermined by its own inherent dubiousness. We can never finish, can only evolve. I decay silently, fearing for the loneliness of my limited, finite self and its infinite imagining of perfection.

XV

I believe I want to think of everything so as not to think anymore. But if I don’t know something, how can I think of or even recognise it? Everything is external, illogical, and not in my power to change. And if all our perspectives are limited, then so are our perfections.

XVI

Savouring nothing but complete, tyrannical control, my obsessively analytical mind cannot adjust to the reality that there is no such thing as complete understanding. I fixate on flaws, imperfections, improvements. But everything is contingent, bracketed by contexts that conflate and contort like shapes with unseen dimensions. I cannot understand that I cannot understand. Long silences make up my inner speech. I am interested by everything, but flicker continuously. How did I get here?

XVII

Work is the locus of all my suffering. Thrown out into a world that has been revolving for some time, I meet a blistering array of interpretations, a nauseous consensus of accounts and satiety of discontents. I can no longer think, and I’m distracted all the time. So devastatingly unintelligible is this environment in light of the soul’s attitude to inner truth, circumstances feed back and accumulate, tormenting me in vexed alienation.

XVIII

I know that today will oppress me and weary me as when I cannot grasp anything at all. Every word is hollow and emptied of significance. Today I am older and wiser, more experienced, but somehow diminished. Who, I ask myself, would ever enter this struggle, knowing what we know?

XIX

Whatever I think, I quickly try and square with what I think I know. This takes the form of arranging things into words, dusty sentences and bloodless classifications. I’ve lost that rapt interest in all that I was, and the passion I no longer feel is sadder for its uncertainty. I hope that the pain will become clearer tomorrow, that I’ll find some cover. Sometimes I look around and wonder what it’s all for.