“We are all made of stars”
Moby.
“She was Aphrodite, Helen, Thetis
Eve among the satyrs
She was Venus in a v-neck sweater
She was all that ever mattered”
Mike Scott
The Long Strange Golden Road.
Words.
I’ve been told i’m good with them...in that I can string them together. However I am not really that good with them. I am especially bad of late...at finding the right ones I mean. They seem to hover just out of reach...to be clutched at like straws in the breeze. I’m sitting here in Poyntzpass waiting for my daughter to come out of the tutors...rain is hammering on the windscreen. I sit for about an hour and a half with no internet...just my thoughts. Words drop around me in the same way...or I wish they did...tumbling out of the sky to earth..More words are a swirl...inside my head...never quite forming in the way I need them to...never settling out in a way that i’m satisfied with...that convey what I want them to. Words are friend and enemy...often both at the same time. When I write I try to put down what I feel...but I rarely do. I’m not honest enough maybe...or rather i’m afraid to be. Honesty is seeet poison. Sweet but potentially lethal. The problem of course isn’t the words but the feelings and emotions behind them. It’s those I struggle with and the words ...or lack of them...are the outworking of that. The feelings run very deep and seare the very core of who I am...they twist and turn and rend my emmotions...they play havoc with my imagination...they scorch the very deepest part of me with fire that burns harder the more I try to douse it...like pouring petrol on flames. My whole being (not a term i’m accustomed to using but that’s another story) is writhing in those flames...I torture myself with thoughts and images that I cannot bear to see but that I cannot keep from my imagination. It’s something that was awakened inside me a long time ago ...an almost physical ache of love and longing...and pure, burning, outrageous desire...it hit me like a train at the time and parts of me are still lying on the track. But it was worth the rending of flesh and bone...I needed pulled apart and reassembled...and I wanted it...the need was so strong at times I could taste it...I wanted to give myself over to it utterly and be consumed by it. To be lost in it...in her. Flesh and bone and mind and soul. The intensity of the feelings shocked me...stunned me. They also opened me up...exposed me to the full glare of my own emmotions perhaps in a way that had never happened before.
The above probably sounds over the top...i’m not used to putting such thoughts down in words and I may not even post this. I don’t really believe in the soul...well not in the religious sense ...I turned my back on all that when I divested myself of religious faith. It’s to big a subject for here...for now...I guess i’m with Bertrand Russell these days when he said that love is no less real or meaningful because it’s not eternal. Well that was more or less it...I must dig up the original quotation. We are our brain chemistry but those synapses and chemical reactions can take us to remarkable places...in our experience of the world our emmotions and feelings do not require a spiritual dimension to be real or intense. Passion is passion...desire is desire...love is love..it matters little what label you put on the framework around it all. . God’s or devils are an irrelevance...a point on the margin not really worth arguing about. It’s likely that Mobys succinct song line is as near to the truth as anything...if so I will take it.
As for the aforementioned feelings...well
their grip has never really loosened...i’ve just managed to keep a lid on them...press them down...keep them just beyond reach. A strategy that is always doomed to fail...but I know this and always have. I’ve accepted it. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Especially now.
I once had a star named after me...as a gift...it was some time ago now. I didn’t realize at the time you could do that and was slightly taken aback. It was the loveliest most imaginative of things to do...and i’ve never forgotten it. The fact that it would even enter anyone’s head to do something like that for someone like me was...well it was a bit humbling to be honest. It was and is special-well it is to me. Nothing anyone ever does for me will mean as much.
I’ve never been the romantic sort...not the flowers and chocolates type. Maybe it comes from being a bit of a loner ...maybe not. My notions of love...in so far as I had them...were more weighty...or so I liked to tell myself. Not that I had much experience of it...I fancied girls at school etc but I was the one with girls who were friends rather than girlfriends. I was incredibly self conscious ...shy...awkward...wracked with self doubt and not comfortable in my own skin. Not much has changed. From an early stage in my life I recall that I tended to avoid looking at my own reflection...I didn’t like what I saw. And I was pretty sure if I didn’t like it no one else would. Especially not the female sex. So it was easier to simply be friends...to be around women in a way that took the pressure off...if you have no expections you cannot be disappointed. Of course nothing is that simple. All you do is internalise the pain you are striving to avoid...i’m no psychologist but i’m pretty sure that’s what I did. You make do with how things are but it eats away at you all the same...at your self esteem. You are doing it to yourself in the main...to protect yourself...but you know deep down that it is necessary. That fundamentally no one could want you...not really. Maybe being a man made me focus on the physical...or maybe the absolute certainty that no one would want to be with me in that way underscored the emmotional neediness. I learnt all I knew about sex and lovemaking from the pages of young adult Marvel comics...or from books. I was fascinated by women and often in awe of particular ones but I was well in my twenties before I embarked on a relationship...and that was with the the person I married. Oddly...or perhaps not...I was besotted...almost obsessional at times. Looking back now i’m pretty sure she didn’t feel the way I did...and if i’m honest I probably knew that at the time. I also don’t really understand why I felt like I did...maybe it was because I had an obsessive personality or
was just too intense. Whatever it was it’s a mystery to me now as I’m sure it is to her. Or perhaps I was attracted to the idea of love...or was in love with love as someone once said. Or I just wanted to be wanted...possibly. Whatever it was it all seems a bit alien to me now...like it was a different person in a different life. Maybe i’ve just wised up...had a sharp dose of reality to bring me to my senses. Or maybe i’m just a bit screwed up emotionally and always was. I do know I am selfish. I tell myself it’s because of fear and that I try to protect myself from hurt and rejection but that’s only partly true. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about myself and selfishness probably tops the list.
But back to the star. The person who gifted it to me is simply extraordinary. Way more than she realises. She will probably read this and I’m not really sure what she will make of it. She has moved on and will perhaps be disconcerted ..even angered...by my clumsy and somewhat incoherent ramblings. Where she is concerned I find a lot of my words are inadequate...they are brittle and unwieldy and somehow lacking the substance to convey what I want to. They only skim the surface of feelings that are not easily or neatly expressed...or suppressed. They are at times worse than useless. But words are all I have. Their inadequacy and futility seem to mock me...especially now.
Or perhaps after all I am just mad. That is a distinct possibility. A madman with a star named after him. Perhaps that will have to be enough