Reversion

Reading back over the last nine months postings makes for pretty grim reading. Last august I was in the workshop, talking to my colleague when a sensation overcame me. I have moments where the impossibility of existence breaks through. I can only compare the feeling to the one some may get when looking at the stars. If you accept what you are looking at you are plunged in to madness. Sometimes the meeting point of thought and flesh overcomes me. How this animal, this mass of meat can be considering its own awareness. This is mental illness. We are supposed to live acording to a narrative, a story we tell ourselves. You may be reading this thinking 'I'm a pretty cool sort of guy, love my family, love my work', etc. not thinking how can this meat puppet that these thoughts form within and without be?
I could not follow the conversation. My artiface broke down. I could not coordinate my body. Reality warped and protruded sharp corners. I tried to get in to my car and drive home but the vehicle had become disproportianate to the surroundings. The sides of the road sucked in as the surrounding hedgerows and walls distorted, ballooning towards me. Forced to abandon the car I made my way through the streets of the town where I live. Pedestrians muttered words to one another, passing on information to a network of subterranians operating a communication system beneath man hole covers and other pavement covers. Two, ostensibly working on BTs fiber optics system clearly discussed information on my brains workings. Tapping this in to the fiber optic network that mirrored my own neural pathways. Scaling the stairs to my flat was an escalater of mushy, organic machinery and once inside my eyrie it blew sideways like a skyscraper in the wind. Looking down, lorries cut through grey pathways like mud whales , barking out horrific moanings in a monotone miasma that had routs in the hate machinery of Auschwitz. Mud and human hair matted in my throat. This was not in the area of acid hallucinations which, usually are pseudo hallucinations, you know you are seeing what is not there, like watching a film. No, it was far from that sort of change. This was entirely real to me. Its' most frightening aspect was that in all my lifes wild and fantastical headstates I had always retained a sense that it was me, my personality seeing the world change. This was like a crumbling of the self. It became fact, and this part has not left, that personality, soul if you like, is a construct. A survival technique. Something peculiar to all of us as we differ like snowflakes but an organic survival construct.

I have recovered now and am putting things back together. Looking back I now see how much I was crumbling before the major breakdown.I can remember very little of the last few years. All that we do is us and I ask for no more than understanding but this experience has given me an understanding of why the law is as awkward as it is. If a man hits you does it really matter why he did it? it hurts just the same. Does it really matter if Anders Breivik is decided to be mentally ill? It clearly matters in how we cope with his actions as we seek to understand but locking up in a prison or a hospital is a semantic difference.
I didn't kill anyone but I did say and do things that I can not imagine coming from me.
After the worst, and this lasted several months, I hit ground in patches. Days and weeks even I would make sense. I could not work for over six months. Rarely have I missed a day off. Decisions I made during this period are coming hope to roost. Selling off my kit, though financially forced on me as I had to eat, was perhaps the most stupid. At the time I felt it was unlikely I would work again. Picking up tools has been as liberating as it was when I began. I have not been this unfit since the lazy days of college which were spent in a cannabis haze. Though it feels like I have taken a beating each day it is a noble pain. One I feel proud of. And the hand eye coordination is better than ever. Finding a speed and accuracy I have rarely had in sustained periods. It is impossible to describe tacit skill. Perhaps this is its' magic and why we pay footballers so well but I will say this. When you are doing it well it is loose and fluid. The beauty in Gascoigne and Best and other tacit skill legends was in the ease. Overly laboured craftwork is no achievement. Anyone can do it given enough time. True majesty comes in the nonchalant flick of the wrist. I think of my forced efforts at drawing where it takes me twenty lines to find the right one and then I look to those rare hads with rewal flair who effortlessly convince with minimum effort.
But now the storm has passed and I am glad it came. My brain is still reforming and days are not easy but I have learnt so much. Stuff I can apply everywhere. Seeing a world unable to shake off political belief, religious faith and admit they were wrong when it is clear, that if we are to survive, they must. It is only after accepting that your entire world view was wrong that you can change. We all seek solid ground on which to walk but our understanding is slim. A breakdown can mean that you can change. By the age of thirty most have their reality framework in place. Their fixed narrative is set up and from this standpoint they then judge all new things. Rarely is the narrative broken down. It is common to see people struggling with the world, trying to squeeze uncomfortable new truths in to their old framework. The bitter, tangled middleaged desperately rounding off corners to get the awkward through the door. Many die in this struggle. It is far harder yet so much better to accept that the framework of understanding, the narrative is wrong. It is not the awkward new facts that are wrong but the observer.