An Evil Cradling
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 mo
ment 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.
The idea, the concept of time enthrals me. I build a complicated and involved structure which redefines what time is. Time is different now. Its flux and pattern is new, seeming so clear, so precise, so deeply understood yet inexplicable. I am calm and quiet. The manic alternations between despair and euphoria seem to have less potency.
When I feel them coming I can set them aside and prevent their theft of my understanding. They can no longer master me, nor drive me where they will. Now I know them and can go with them and hold them in my control.
Today I am returned to my cell and as the door closes I sit in my corner and wait for the guard to go. But today the door is opened again. I sit, my face draped in my towel. The Grim Reaper squats before me and with his faulty English asks ‘Why you don’t eat?’ I look down to see his hand hold the bowl of fruit under the towel. ‘Why you don’t eat?’ he asks again. I feel the hopelessness of trying to explain to him. He doesn’t have enough English to understand. How can I, in any case, explain to him what is only understood in my senses and not in my mind? I shrug, I say I do not want to eat. There is silence. Then I feel him rise and move as if to leave my cell and take the bowl with him.
I reach out, grab his hand by the wrist and say anxiously, angrily ‘No.’ He stops and stands looking down at me. There is silence and I try hand gestures, pointing to my eyes blinded by the towel, and pointing again to the fruit saying ‘I want to see, I want to see.’ Again the silence and I know he is confused. He cannot understand that I will not eat but that I do not want this fruit taken from me. It is now rapidly softening and becoming over-ripe in the heat. I tell him again ‘Leave’
and gesture the fruit onto the floor in front of me. I feel slow panic rising. What if he should take this from me. This thing that I have become obsessed with, dependent upon. I try to hold my anger and my rage.
He sets the bowl in front of me and the door bangs and the padlock is rattled into the lock. The force of the bang, the loudness of the key in the padlock tell me he is angry and I quietly think at that moment we have shared something of the same feelings of anger and confusion about this bowl of fruit: he for his reasons, unable to understand mine, and I barely able to explain them to myself.
Ready as I’ll ever be,
With some support.
Face them.
Stern, authoritarian;
Clutching the tools of their importance To twitching, twelve-year-old egos.
Eager to fill their daily tasks.
T’is their life.
Facing them.
So many.
As the blur of so many others In coming to this place.
Blink back nervous swallows.
Steady now.
Clutching tight
The deep-etched pages of my mind.
These hallowed pages, do I mind Turning them over to blind Insensitive appetites-for-more?
Doubting now.
These precious distillations from the deep, Oh deep, deep, unspeakable, unspoken Places will I keep?
Jealously?
And not feed like offal
To this sheep
-like, mart-like arena of the world Press upon me?
Ready now.
My days now seemed to a pass in a slow, gentle delirium; like the comfort and reassurance that a child must feel as its mother rocks and sings it a lullaby. I found myself sitting on the floor and gently rocking myself back and forth, for how many minutes and how many hours I cannot tell. I looked wildly at the dead insect hanging in its cocoon. I felt a strange contentment. I derived reassurance from it. A new quality of strength pervaded me. I imagined I was moving inside that cocoon and I liked it. I was suspended in space. Minute and insignificant things in my cell intrigued me. I sat staring at them with fascination. A small mark on the wall. The flickering flame of my stub of candle which I occasionally lit, not that I might eat by it, but just so that I could sit and look at it, entranced and captivated. I felt no desire to leave this place. I found myself thinking with the shadows of panic rising in me that I was not ready to leave, that I did not want to leave.
I began to dread my freedom, if it should come. But then as if the coin of panic and fear had been flipped over I began to dread my growing attachment to this tiny cell. Something in me sensed danger and I told myself that I should not surrender to this temptation. I found an enemy within, powerful and insidious. I felt him caressing me and growing stronger, seeking to possess me. I had to find a way to take control, master my own mind, reasserting myself. I returned to an old strategy of thinking through the books that I read as a child, and which I remembered so clearly now. And began again to recall films and make them different or simply use them as a stepping stone to direct the mind away from this desire to remain captive.
I particularly remember many hours spent thinking about the story of Robinson Crusoe. Even to this day I will always watch a film of it or listen on the radio to this story being retold. I made my own version, finding the original too simple and already having exhausted the story so many times. I thought of the story that the native called Friday would tell. How he found this white man so strange, so unpredictable, and I tried to tell this story from Friday’s perspective: how this white man’s world and white man’s thought seemed part lunatic, part comical. I wrote the story of Friday and Crusoe’s return to London: a London and an England that Friday found to be a fantasy that his mind could not comprehend or contain. I told myself the story of Crusoe’s return to his island many years later, to seek out his friend Friday and how they would meet and what they would say; all the turmoil and impressions that Robinson might experience, having known freedom and then returning to the island. I was able through the eyes and the mind of Friday to blast the inconsistencies of the European society that confronted the ‘natives’. It was a kind of pastoral romance. But it protected me from that dangerous friend who seemed to creep up and want to take me off with him somewhere.
I sat upon that foam mattress and it became for a me a raft in a vast sea. All around me was nothing but moving water. No land, and without land, no hope. I was stranded on this tiny piece of floating rubber and subject to its mercy. I dreamt of dolphins riding along beside the raft. They would roll out of the water and look at me with their mystic eye, and roll under its surface. And I wanted to reach out and touch them and know their comfort. There were other creatures that came to look at me and I wanted to fall into the sea and roll with them into its depths. And then alone without food, without water I would rage at the sea and rage at my thirst and hunger and helplessness.
I dreamt one day a bird came and landed on my raft from out of nowhere, suddenly this other living thing was, sharing this floating raft with me. He stood and looked at me and I was filled with fear of him and then with hunger so filling me I thought to take him in my hands, to break his neck and rip his flesh so that he might feed me. In my dream I found that I could not do it, for as I took the bird in my hands and held him I could not crush him in spite of my hunger. His flesh I could not eat nor think to eat. I sat alone again floating, and moving but never moving anywhere, always about me the same grey expanse which seemed to
emphasize my hopelessness.
As I think back on that dreaming raft and myself afloat and the bird that came to me, I remember other birds that came to that cell when my mind had taken flight in hallucinatory fantasy, yet not as in a dream for I remember being conscious of the place I was in. It was momentarily filled with birds flying erratically and crashing into the walls, to fall broken and bloodied at my feet and then they would
gather themselves up again in furious Might, flinging themselves again into the wall. The cell seemed to be littered with feathers and the dying and broken bodies of birds. Their frightened flight seemed endless.
These birds flew backwards, flew upside down, with broken wings they would seem to walk the walls and I would try to brush them away from my head knowing that there was nothing there to brush away. I remember one of those backward-flying birds flying upside down into a fire. I saw its feathers flash and watched it decompose as if melting in the flame. I found myself hissing ‘Enough, enough’ as I tried to flail my way out of that insane aviary.
I needed anger to pull me back from these moments of madness. I spent many days in those morning hours while we had some light hunting the night’s mosquitoes and squashing them against the wall. I watched the blot of blood that their crushed bodies would make and cursed them and wondered that such a tiny insect could hold such volumes of my blood. My nails grew long and filthy, my beard unkempt. And I wondered would I ever be able to cut them.
It took many days to explain but eventually The Grim Reaper came with a pair of nail clippers. He would not let me cut my own nails, for fear that I might attempt to injure myself with the clippers. He held my hands and cut my nails and I sat in silence wondering what thoughts were running through his head and half convincing myself that there were probably none. Occasionally I would hear voices shouting from the street and I would spend the time imagining that they were voices from my own streets in Belfast. I would imagine what they were saying, what they were arguing about. It was as if I could hear the voices of my friends. By effort of imagination I simply translated those voices into the voices of my own people, and created a safer world outside, than I knew it to be in reality.