clinging to the wreckage

Once the war begins there is no turning back. A war against time, a war on the mind, a war against one’s self...   raging within. It’s war all the time. The guilt that we feel (or should feel... or possibly shouldn’t feel, depending on which way one looks at it) from suffering from issues that are merely bourgeois luxuries such as writer’s block or pining for the love of a lost lover. People in different walks of life do not have such concerns, they are concerned with finding enough food to survive or with the health of a terribly sick child or the loss of a family member. Our capitalist culture dictates that we consume and consume and consume so we are forever left feeling that something is missing from our lives. You’ll notice that those who have millions and millions in the bank, cars in the driveway of their paid for mansions are all out trying to do something for the starving... this too is simply a personal need. They are told by society that they should care for those les...

An oppressive heat consumes the land at the end of September and, I must confess, we celebrate it somewhat as we have had very little summer warmth this year. For me it is one of those days of great emptiness of the heart... a day upon which the memories of the past infest the mind and heart and begin to devour their way back through to the skin like carrion in a corpse.  Corpselike I venture into Guildford in the hope of buying one or two items of clothing but also with a thinly disguised desire to see some human life on the planet whilst enjoying possibly the last day of sunshine and heat. Drifting along beside the river I see nothing but couples, they swarm like locusts upon the grass beside this sad river and gaze at me amazed that I am alone on a Sunday in such weather and in such a place. I escape their glare by drifting back towards the theatre and into a department store... but this offers much of the same; wives helping their husbands to choose clothing for work, husbands ...

I saw a film about a writer but I couldn’t consider him a writer at all. He was one of those perfectly built, slightly idiotic looking men who become renowned for their ruthlessness in sport or their greed to get ahead in some non-scientific region of the corporate world. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and was clean shaven each day. It was a farce. Then, towards the end, he lost his girlfriend and grew a beard. Finally he showed some pain in his eyes and started to take on the look of a man who may be capable of writing something other than cheap romantic fiction.                 I turned to the woman beside me, someone else’s partner, and admired her naked body in that dusky candlelight. Wine and beer bottles surrounded us and the room was filled with the smell of soul-destroying deceit. Because of what we are taught we believed that what we were doing was wrong... but the teachings are wrong. Everything is wr...