All entries for Tuesday 31 March 2009

backlog

Files, and more files. He recognises very few of the documents more than two years old.

           And this is what he wrote, on a brand new laptop, aged fourteen. Not so very long ago, in the greater scheme of things.

           What begins to frighten him doesn’t come from the lapses into obvious plagiarism- frequent sentences carry Chesterton’s exact rhythms- or the tendency towards explicit thematics, to the point of lecturing, repeating in piece after piece ideas like ‘We live in a world of illusion’, as if covering fresh ground.

           Sentences unravel and burst. There’s no control, and the character of an ‘other’ begins to recur, a demonic alter ego who tempts the Christian, hormonal hero into sexual desire, religious doubt, murder, and manipulation. Every story ends with a falling into unconsciousness, into water, into forest. Maddened, adolescent writing. He’s been reading a neurologist’s casebook, and begins to wonder- have I once been insane?

           He is aware, but does not yet fully admit, that his latest story depicts, as if from the outside, a lunatic who transfers one half of an internal dialogue onto a puppet, and who later attempts to gain ‘independence’ from his own psychological creation by diving repeatedly into a murky pool of water.

           What’s the phrase? Against these fragments I shore my ruins…

           A lie. I am the thought of the lichen coating the stone which once thought. Something has passed over. But I’m not the same man today I was before.

           He will not write for the rest of the day; his mind is wide, and he feels like a child.

: 31 Mar 2009 12:47 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem