Talking of Which, 20.12.23

Fish, Bread, Souls and Snakes

Dec 20, 2023

∙ Paid

My monthly selection of notes, observations, poems, gossip and wotnot. The first half is free for all, the second half is for paying guests…

The Twelve Days of Christmas

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me;
Twelve souls a-rotting,
Eleven screens a-numbing,
Ten fears returning,
Nine colleagues moaning,
Eight years a-vanishing,
Seven lovers yawning,
Six evenings wanking,
Five… Cheerless… Friends…!
Four crochet kits,
Three bare facts,
A pair of novelty socks
And nothing astonishing at all.

A Whiff of Spiritual Putrefaction

It is difficult to tell if your soul is dying because the consciousness to realise it dies too. While it lives, the terminal soul sends its last-gasps bubbling up through a troubled consciousness, bad dreams and a problematic life, situations that you just can’t ever quite seem to get on top of. But the mind effortlessly justifies these away, blaming something or other, or someone or other, or it picks away at itself in sterile self-pity, until the soul drowns in the grime of the self, which then sinks into the ordure of the miserable mass.

But how can I know my soul is suffocating? There is a crack in the mind’s armour through which a whiff of decomposition can be detected, tell-tale signs of the soul’s decay. Again, I cannot sense this with the self, the ordinary ‘me’ that I know I am, for that is the very clay which is smothering the truth. Something else must feel out the rot, and then right action is inevitable. When you detect that your soul is rotting, just as when any other really terrible smell hits your nostrils, you do something about it. Until then, it’s just worry and futile discontent.

Action, however, doesn’t just mean stopping the rot, but further sensitising the self, pummelling the inner senses into tenderness, so that the self can discern spiritual putrefaction in ever earlier stages. If your nose is a finely tuned receiving instrument, you’ll feel sufficient disgust at the merest whiff of putrefaction, whereas if your awareness is so numbed that no smell can penetrate it, you can be sitting on a sewer and ‘feel’ that everything is fine. Reality first taps on the doors of perception. Then it knocks, harder and harder. Finally, if there is no answer, it will break down the doors with an avalanche of excrement.

Is Your Soul Dying?

Nothing really seems remarkable. You can go whole days without ever being astonished. People all seem the same, days all seem the same, dreams too.
You have very little curiosity. You’re interested in novelty, food for the restless me, but genuine curiosity, and discovery of the genuinely original, this is not something you seek or experience very often.
You don’t notice much, and therefore you don’t recall very much. Nothing is very vivid, so nothing really impresses itself into your depths. You remember facts with your surface mind, particularly the useful ones, but there are few qualities to recollect in your heart.
You don’t sing and dance. You can go days, weeks, without wailing with joy or throwing absurd shapes. You don’t draw, either, or write poems, or make beautiful and difficult things, a bit of craft perhaps, dib-dab, dib-dab, but just as a hobby please.
You laugh infrequently. The last time you cried with laughter, holding your sides, begging it to stop — when was that?
Your love life is problematic at best, disastrous at worst. Probably tamely okay, alright, you know, can’t complain! Love affairs occasionally inject some excitement into your life, some romance, but it soon fades, after six months usually, sometimes after a few minutes.
In fact opportunities for love, for opening your heart, seem to be rather thin on the ground. You cannot tear yourself open at school or at work, that’s for sure, but your friends and family are not that interested in your soul either.
The days pass slowly, the years quickly. Nothing really happens, and so time concatenates into the few vague happenings the year offers.
Your mind constantly returns to the same subjects. You go over and over the same old junk. You love to complain, and you love even more to get together with others who love to complain, so you can all wank yourselves up into a lovely big lather of moaning.
Anxiety rules you, or, the cannibalistic indulgence of the moribund soul, despair. These two feelings never touch the intensity of profound self-contempt and shattering horror at the grim condition of your existence, because that would mean real change.
You are becoming numb. Bright lights, loud noises, clashing colours, violence and porn do not cause you great pain. Indeed you seek them out.
You cannot be alone without stimulation; without chatter, shopping, televisual entertainment, giddy excitements. You are afraid of looking into the cellar of your heart, and seeing the dead body you’ve got hidden down there.

(More self-assessment guides here)

A Brief Ecstasy of Courtesy

A supermarket aisle was momentarily blocked either side by large stacking trolleys with enough space for one person to pass through the middle. Four people, I one, were behind the trolleys and all stepped forward at the same moment to pass through. We all stopped as one, and as one offered everyone else to go first. We then all laughed at ourselves, recovered, then looked around for who most deserved to go through first; an old woman. Three of us then, again simultaneously, gestured to her, she passed, and the remaining three then did the same again, offering the younger woman to pass, before the younger man allowed me through. I was so happy about all this I went on to recite a D.H. Lawrence poem about a fish in the Frozen Food aisle…

Fish

I saw, dimly,
Once a big pike rush,
And small fish fly like splinters.
And I said to my heart, there are limits
To you, my heart;
And to the one God.
Fish are beyond me.

They are beyond me, are fishes.
I stand at the pale of my being
And look beyond, and see
Fish, in the outerwards,
As one stands on a bank and looks in.
Fishes,
With their gold, red eyes, and green-pure gleam, and
under-gold,
And their pre-world loneliness,
And more-than-lovelessness.
And white meat;
They move in other circles.

Outsiders.
Water-wayfarers.
Things of one element.
Aqueous,
Each by itself.

Cats, and the Neapolitans,
Sulphur sun-beasts,
Thirst for fish as for more-than-water;
Water-alive
To quench their over-sulphureous lusts.

But I, I only wonder
And don’t know.
I don’t know fishes.

D.H.Lawrence (extract)

The Devil’s Bread

Not far from where I live, between here and my mother’s house, lies a town where one can gain access to hell. A town whose name will live in the annals of diabolic infamy. It is Chorleywood, eponymous birthplace of the Chorleywood Bread Process, the technique of bread-making behind all the bread and bread-products, we consume today (over eighty percent here in the UK, and up to a hundred percent in many areas). Chorleywood bread is made with low protein (and therefore nutritionless) flour which is leavened with CO2-saturated water instead of yeast, and then mechanically mixed, with the addition of various emulsifiers and enzymes (not to mention the stripped-out vitamins and minerals), at ultra-high speeds. The result is the flavourless, fluffy, substanceless loaf (and rolls and muffins and crumpets) we are all familiar with, which clags at the roof of the mouth, and passes through the gut like toilet paper. Many of us know this, hence the addition by bread manufacturers of a few seeds and colourants for middle-class consumers who want ‘healthy bread’. Many market stalls selling ‘artisanal’ breads buy their bread from factories which use the Chorleywood Bread Process, which is why they are so strangely vague tasting, floppy when ‘fresh’, sawdusty when stale, exciting, reassuring, pretty and, if you are paying attention, somewhat slightly evil.

Talking of which…