An Evil Cradling (11 page)

Then it begins, I feel it coming from out of nowhere. I recognize it now, and I shrink into the corner to await its pleasure. What will it be today? That slow down-dragging slide and pull into hopeless depression and weariness. The waters of the sea of despair are heavy and thick and I think I cannot swim through them. But today is a day of euphoria. A day in which I will not walk my four paces but in which I will glide, my feet hardly touching the ground. Up snakes and down ladders my mind is manically playing games with me and I cannot escape. Today it is teasing me, threatening me, so far without the full blast of its fury. I squat and rock backwards and forwards reciting a half-remembered nursery rhyme like a religious mantra. I am determined I will make myself more mad than my mind.

Blackness, the light has gone. There will be none for ten hours.

They have given me candles. Small, stubby candles. I will not light them. I fear the dark so I save the candles. It’s stupid, it’s ridiculous.

There are a dozen or so hidden under my bed. I will not light them, yet I hate the dark and cannot abide its thick palpable blackness. I can feel it against my skin.

I am going crazier by the day. In the the thick sticky darkness I lie naked on the mattress. The blanket reeks, full of filth. It is pointless to try to shield myself from the mosquitoes drooling and humming, their constant buzz, buzz, buzz everywhere, as if it is inside my ears and inside my head. In the thick black invisibility it is foolishness to hope to kill what you cannot see but only feel when it is too late, upon your flesh.

Always in the morning I see the marks of the night’s battle. Red lumps like chicken pox, all raging to be itched and scratched. I sit trying to prevent myself from scratching. The more I try to resist, the more difficult it becomes and the more demanding is my body for the exquisite pain of my nails tearing my own flesh. For some reason I do not understand, the feet and the backs of my fingers suffer the most from these insistent fleas. The pain of the bites on these tender areas can be excruciating. At times I exchange one pain for another.

Deciding feverishly to tear and scratch the skin from my feet, and with it the pain of the bite, knowing that in the morning my feet will be a bloody mess and I will be unable to walk on this filthy floor. It’s all so purposeless. I am naked in the dark and I try to wipe the perspiration from my skin. The night noise of these insects is insidious. I cannot bear much more. I thrust my body back upon the mattress and pull the filthy curtain over it to keep these things from feeding on my flesh. I cannot bear the heat and smell of this rag over my body like a shroud. I must content myself, let the mosquitoes feed and hope that having had a fill of me they will leave me alone to find some sleep.

Another day, no threat of manic torment here. I calmly think my way through old movies that I have hated. I remake them, rewrite them and make them better than they ever could be. This fills a few hours and I wonder how many more hours; how many more old films are there in my head that I can rescript into pristine epics? I never knew I had seen so many movies, and I never knew I remembered so many films which I had considered not worth watching in the first place, but here all the movies I despised are back with me. But now they are all mixing one with the other. The world’s gone mad. El Cid is riding across some Western plain. Images from World War Two films are there, and other scenes are equally historically mismatched. It’s a piece of lunacy at which I force myself to laugh. I am tired of this. I have done it all before. Anger overcomes imagination and boredom begins to set in.

Then another leap. My mind jumps over a huge crevasse and I am taken to somewhere else. I am panicking. Panic is a seizure like a fit. It clamps onto me iron-hard, and will not let me go. I have been impotent for weeks. I am reduced to this animal thing, to this failure of my genitals to come alive in me. What have they done to me, this final

insult and indignity. That most primitive and animal part of me has been ripped from me. Panic becomes rage and rage reinforces panic and then fear takes them by the neck and hangs them up. I am possessed by fear, by what it means not to be potent any more. I have tried for weeks to tease myself into life but it will not happen. I have tried to force into my imagination memories of old love affairs, even reliving those love affairs that were drastic failures. I try to force an instinctual life back into me but still it will not come. Hours and hours, or is it only minutes, of full, voluptuous eroticism. Fantasies half dreamt, half imagined, half forced, half crawling up from God knows where. Where did I get these things that come into my head, but will not make my body leap to life.

And back I drift into a more mundane fear. I might never be a father, might never hold a child, things I never before thought about having for I never wished for them. I am bereft, riven with self-pity and grief.

There might never be a part of me living after I have gone. I might never teach a child of my own to be and do all the things that I thought to be and do. These things trouble me and with each day they are driven deeper into me. I cannot let them go.

Now I am hurtling down the back streets of my youth and into childhood. All comes flooding back. So many unremembered things that panic me, surprise me, delight me, grieve me. All these emotions rising and falling, they are pistons driving and beating into my head. I have neither time nor energy to put them into focus. I am driven to distraction; this is the beginning of madness. All order has gone from my world, I am invaded at random by unwanted and unknown images. In this place where there is nothing, full-fed fantasy and craziness are my frequent tormenting visitors. I try in desperation to bring some order to this carnival of lunacy which memory has become. I am dragged and pushed and torn with every emotion known to me and some previously unexperienced. I try and try to find words somewhere to bring logic into my head. Here I quote some of the words that I remember having etched on the wall with the charcoal stalks of matchsticks, as if in that chunk of verbal madness I might put a screen between me and that emotional onslaught, so that those images from the deep might not possess me.

A blot,

A burden

A life’s time dismembered

Nor logic swelled with imagination Can control

The image

That haunts my brain

One serpent arm

Pythonic at my throat

Suffocating.

You are sickness in me

That makes the body

Despise the mind

Crushing metaphors

As they rise to ensnare

To create you there

Mythical beast

Then,

Remove the tendril arm

Amputate the detonator

Threatening

Implosion in my mind.

Collar you in my consciousness Lead you to some dark and Primal place

Unseen

A vision in a shroud.

I take up one of the magazines, Time or Newsweek, and tear one page from it. I set it on the floor beside my bed and squat down over it. I defecate on it. I defecate on the reason why I am being held in this asylum of a place and then I carefully wrap my excrement in a parcel and push it into the corner, knowing that if it is found I will suffer.

Tomorrow I will lift this piece of myself and carry it with me in my pocket and cast it into that cockroach-filled hole in the ground. I cannot relieve myself at a fixed and set time. I am reduced to sleeping in the smell of my own filth. Excrement, sweat, the perspiration of a body and a mind passing through waves of desperation. All of everything is in this room. I am breaking out of myself, urges, ideas, emotions in turmoil are wrenched up and out from me; as with a sickness when nothing can be held down. I tell myself again and over again that this will pass. I convince myself at each day’s down-plunging into an abyss of crushing despair that there will be an up day.

I have forced myself to believe these doldrums will be followed by a few hours of euphoria in which the mind, tired of its own torment, drifts off to walk in some sun-lit field. I feel the soft pleasure of it, as a child must feel when its mother or father gently cradles it and rubs its tummy. Ups and downs, the tidal wave and undertow of days and hours of unending manic shifts.

Swaddled briefly in this soft loveliness, I am careless of my cell. The world that has forgotten me has no meaning for me. In a half-blissful state, my mind caresses and delights me and I am content with all that is about me and I do not want to leave it. I am reaching out and feeling an ecstatic embrace enfold me. Now I am thrust suddenly into agonizing torrents of tears. I am weeping, not knowing from where the tears come or for what reason, but I am weeping and weeping is all that I am. I cannot think or feel, this thing has possessed me. I weep with a great rage, with a slow deliberation, these tears seem to tear the skin from me. I cannot stop it, though I crush myself against the wall to assure myself that I have a body, I cannot quell the grief. It comes, with no premonition, no warning. I exhaust myself.

How long have I wept for? I drift into exhaustion and into melancholic sobs. For many days now I have tried to scream, but nothing will come out of me. No sound, no noise, nothing. Yet I try to force this scream. Why can I not scream? But no noise comes from me. Not even a faint echo of a cry. I am full with nothing. My prayers rebound on me as if all those words that I sent up were poured back upon me like an avalanche tumbling around me. I am bereft even of God. My own words becoming bricks and stones that bruise me. I have been lifted up and emptied out. I am a bag of flesh and scrape, a heap of offal tossed unwanted in the corner of this filthy room. Even the filth here has more life, more significance than I have.

I have been and seen the nightmare exploding in the darkness. I am in the charnel house of history, I am ash upon the wind, a screaming moment of agony and rapture. I have ceased being. I have ceased becoming. Even banging my body against the wall does not retrieve me to myself. , I am alone, naked in a desert. Its vast expanse of nothingness surrounds me. I am where no other thing is or can be. Only the desert wind howling and echoing. There is no warming light. I am the moment between extremes. I feel scorching heat upon my skin and feel the freeze of night cut me to the bone, yet I also feel empty and insensible.

Many times I think of death, pray for it, look for it, chase after its rapturous kiss. But I have come to a point of such nothingness that even death cannot be. I have no more weeping. All the host of emotions that make a man are no longer part of me. They have gone from me. But something moves in this empty place. A profound sense of longing, not loneliness, simply longing.

In my corner I sit enclosed in the womb of light from my candle-flame.

I lift my eyes and see a dead insect held in a cocoon made by a spider and I know that I too am cocooned here. Nothing can touch me nor harm me. I am in a cocoon which enfolds me like a mother cradling a child.

Another day. The Shuffling Acolyte and I take part in our daily ritual, that long short walk to the toilet. That same walk back and I am home again. I don’t look any more at the food, knowing its monotony will not change, not even its place on my filthy floor. The door closes, the padlock rattling, and it’s over again for another day. With calm, disinterested deliberation I pull from my head the filthy towel that blinds me, and slowly turn to go like a dog well-trained to its corner, to sit again, and wait and wait, forever waiting. I look at this food I know to be the same as it always has been.

But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There’s a bowl in front of me that wasn’t there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana.

The fruits, the colours, mesmerize me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly, I am intoxicated by colour. I feel the colour in a quiet somnambulant rage.

Such wonder, such absolute wonder in such an insignificant fruit.

I cannot, I will not eat this fruit. I sit in quiet joy, so complete, beyond the meaning of joy. My soul finds its own completeness in that bowl of colour. The forms of each fruit. The shape and curl and bend all so rich, so perfect. I want to bow before it, loving that blazing, roaring, orange colour… Everything meeting in a moment of colour and of form, my rapture no longer an abstract euphoria. It is there in that tiny bowl, the world recreated in that broken bowl. I feel the smell of each fruit leaping into me and lifting me and carrying me away. I am drunk with something that I understand but cannot explain. I am filled with a sense of love. I am filled and satiated by it.

What I have waited and longed for has without my knowing come to me, and taken all of me.

For days I sit in a kind of dreamy lethargy, in part contemplation and in part worship. The walls seem to be singing. I focus all of my attention on that bowl of fruit. At times I lift and fondle the fruits, at times I rearrange them, but I cannot eat them. I cannot hold the ecstasy of the moment and its passionate intensity. It seems to drift slowly from me as the place in which I am being held comes back to remind me of where I am and of my condition. But my containment does not oppress me. I sit and look at the walls but now this room seems so expansive, it seems I can push the walls away from me. I can reach out and touch them from where I sit and yet they are so far from me.

The moment dwindles and dims like a dying fire. I begin again to plot and plan and try to find a direction for my thinking. There are strange occasions when I find myself thinking of two different and completely unrelated things simultaneously. I can grasp and understand the difference and the conceptual depth in each. They neither cross over nor blur into each other. They do not confuse me. I can ask and answer questions on each of these very different subjects at one and the same moment. My mind now moves into strange abstractions.