If I was going to write, how would I start?
I had the beginning of a poem earlier when I was watering the plants, if I can remember what it was:
If you could see me as I am…? Something like that.
But it’s gone now. Bugger.
Anyway, no one sees me as I am. That’s the point. The old chestnut.
If I keep picking and picking and picking away at this, will it ever lead on to something else, some kind of breakthrough or revelation?
Wish I could remember that effing poem. It’s gone now. It had a good rhythm to it, and some internal rhymes. Something about: ‘…where the broken rivers run…’ I remember thinking – how can a river break? But it didn’t matter because it fitted. Bloody obscurity for its own sake, that’s what it was. And ‘through the cracks between the pavement…’
About the real me who is inescapable and always torments me but no one can ever see it/her.
You see, the myth is that when you find your True Self, everything will make sense and you’ll find peace. Except my True Self is a bitch. The more I get to know her the worse it all gets. She’s the one who makes me cry in the night with despair, but I can’t stop her or ignore her or get away from her because she’s me.
And if I say: ‘I will accept myself as I am’ that means accepting her. If I can’t root her out I can never find peace. But the more I dig away at her, the deeper the wound she leaves. So what does it mean to accept her?
Accepting loneliness. Accepting anger. Letting go of the dream of ‘love’, but without resentment.
The path of acceptance feels like the path of papering over the cracks. Or perhaps a better metaphor, filling in the cracks in the pavement with wet mud, which dries out and crumbles or washes away in the rain. I remember doing that as a child, over and over again. It never worked, but I kept on playing at it. Till I got bored and gave up. Which, of course, is what I always do.
Can I escape into meditation? How deep into that despair do you have to go to find a place where you can rest in emptiness?
The woman who cries in the night is trapped – labyrinth, hall of mirrors, which is the correct metaphor? Or that one from the Cat Stevens song when you end up back where you started?
Whatever, she is in a trap: she cries for love, but when she cries no one can love her. So she cries for the knowledge that she will never find the love she craves. Because love is always partial and conditional: ‘We will love you on condition that you stay happy and don’t give in to despair.’
So the despair has to be hidden away. The Madwoman in the Attic. She’s still there.