The stories of the world

As children we map our reality using as waymarks the things we touch – the walls of our house, our relationships with parents, siblings, friends, and we map it by the feel of our environment, by the town, city, or green under our feet, by the places we visit – by schooldays, Saturdays, market days, holidays. We map it by the experience of life, and although we are aware of a greater reality beyond what we can see and experience, we feel it more as a strangeness, a reality we can, as children, ignore. And we ignore it because it is a reality that need not be true. Any of it. Truth, rather, is wherever we are in the moment. It is what we can see and touch, right now. It is the story we are living. Right now. This and only this is the truth of us.

My childhood was a small, semi-detached house, built in the 1930’s, bordering meadows which are still mostly there today. It was a village from which the mines had already gone by the 1960’s, fallen to economic ruin, leaving only their sulphurous slag, glowing by night like something volcanic. But mostly it was green. It was corn and it was cattle. And it was big booted farmers selling vegetables door to door. It was duck-ponds in the corners of quiet lanes.

The technology of the broadcast media did not shape this reality much. It was more the window on an accepted fantasy, a world of stories other than my own, and of less importance: Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Crackerjack, Jackanory, The Magic Roundabout. I don’t recall teatime news broadcasts using the lurid language they use today. I presume the bad stuff was held back until after the 9:00 p.m. watershed when we kids were safely tucked abed, that it was then the floodgates opened to dose the adult world with its night-time terrors.

I did not know what sex was until I was fourteen, and then only as a theoretical concept, gleaned from the less fantastical speculations of my fellows, and which turned out in the end not to be too far from the mark. And like the sex, the wider world too remained couched in mysterious terms, its unimaginable largeness filtered into more manageable grains through the medium of the stories others told.

Beyond that which we can touch, the world can only ever be a story. And only what we can touch can ever be the truth of our own lives, a thing verified, crystallised by the medium of an immediate, and tangible experience. The truth, or otherwise, of the wider world is always less certain, yet as adults, like imagination, these other stories – lurid, violent, dangerous, frightening – try to convice us they are part of the truth of who we are.

We think, as we grow, we should leave behind the simpler realities of hearth and home, that the world of immediate experience is not enough, that we should grow up, assimilate more of that which we cannot touch, more of the world as presented to us by the pictures and the words of the various media, that we should become conversant in the world of current affairs. But none of these stories are true, except perhaps in the most simplistic of terms and therefore pale into insignificance when compared with the authenticity of our own lives.

It is like those Hollywood movies that are “based on a true story” in which the details making up the whole of the truth are never allowed to get in the way of the telling of the story. This is not to say it is an outright lie, only that a truth can be spun in misleading ways. And stories always have morals, they have plots, they have a meaning and a purpose of their own, while life – real life – may not. We all know this.

And then the choice of which stories we listen to can itself suggest a truth about the world, one less than authentic than reality, creating false emphasis, pushing centre stage some events in favour of others, suggesting importance, urgency. These are the stories collected, edited for our convenience by the master storytellers, by the BBC, Russia Today, Fox News, events selected and spun, and while they may not be lies exactly, they do not tell the true story of the world, but more instead, and if we listen carefully, the story of the story tellers themselves.

But now we can move away from the edited stories. We can dig deep into the eclectic machinery of the Internet, keeper of all video memory, a marvellous, and quite endless source of story. Here the choice of what to feature large, and what to suppress is ours. We choose the truth of the greater world to suit ourselves. But is this any better?

My choices at present are the stories told by Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, Julian Assange, Carl Jung, Stanislav Grof, Ken Wilber, Eckhart Tolle, but these choices are of stories no more true than any other. I might have chosen 9/11 conspiracies, UFO’s, David Ike, Donald Trump, and from these spun a story of the world as good or bad as any other, as essentially true or untrue as any other, though perhaps one that did not resonate as well with my own preoccupations.

I fell asleep last night plugged in to You Tube. I was listening to a lecture by Noam Chomsky, but a deep fatigue withdrew me from his story. And I woke this morning to a an autumn sun, and one of the last warm days of the year. I pulled a tree-stump from the garden, took a last cut of the lawn, repaired a gate, washed the car, and as the sun set I drank cold beer. This is my only authentic reality. I am not big enough to know the world in all its colour, in all its shape and size, and for me to try is to be eternally deceived, eternally swept from one incomplete view to another. I become lost in what even as a child I recognised, as being of less importance than the day to dayness of my immediate experience.

I have lived today slowly, measuring each breath, trying to savour each moment of the smallness of my being. It is the only reality I shall truly know. That I experience it, that I at least know my own story, is what I think I am meant to do here, to perceive at least the truth of that one thing, instead of seeking a somehow bigger, cleverer or more complex truth among the duplicitous tellers of all the stories of the world.

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On my bookshelf – The story of O

With Fifty Shades the Movie opening at cinemas in time for Valentine’s Day, one might be tempted to think it’s now okay for a man to physically restrain a woman and have his way with her any way he chooses, and that there’s something wrong with the woman if she doesn’t enjoy it. So let me begin on a cautionary note and say to all the men out there who might be thinking along these lines, I suggest you discuss the matter first very carefully with your lady, because she may not share your views. Bondage and sadomasochism are among the darker paths in human relations; the psychology is complex, arguably pathological but, in simpler terms, the emotions it arouses, while reportedly powerful, are not to be confused with love.

Let me pause for breath here and say I have not read Fifty Shades, nor will I be taking the good Lady Graeme to watch the movie. I have, however, read the Story of O, the 1955 novel by Pauline Reage, and from which all semi-pornographic bondage bonk-busters are derived.

It tells the tale of a young woman, known to us simply as “O”, a lovely ingénue who is drawn by her posh boyfriend into a secret circle of wealthy men whose sadomasochistic mores see O reduced to the status of a mere possession. O is at first horrified to find herself abducted, then inducted into all manner of degrading sexual practice, punctuated by frequent whippings, as anything resembling an independence of spirit is beaten out of her. The story persuades us she eventually sees the light, becomes a submissive chattel, and begins to take pleasure, indeed to see the very meaning of her life in sexually compliant slavery and regular whippings. The power of the story, and I did find it a powerfully compelling read, is that Reage achieves all of this without the use of a single naughty word. (would-be erotic authors take note)

The story of O is not pornography, in the same way Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly is not pornography, though both these works were ground-breaking in their time to the extent of finding themselves in the courts on charges of obscenity. Of the two, in my opinion, Lady Chatterly is easily the more literary, though O, winner of the French Prix de Deux Magots, cannot be dismissed as mere smut.

The paradox of O is the depiction of a woman sexually liberated by masculine domination, a liberation that can only come through her willingness to submit to anything her master(s) desire, and to revel in their punishments. The men are depicted as unrelentingly repulsive, and the women, including O, I’m afraid, as impenetrably dim. The men take the women however and whenever they choose, they remodel the shape of them to better suit their idea of a sexually desirable object, then brand their bottoms with a mark of ownership when the women “graduate” as fully fledged chattels.

When O meets an ordinary Joe who falls embarrassingly in love with her, she is incapable of responding in the normal way, and her dismissive treatment of him highlights the dramatic change that has been wrought in this former ingénue by her new lifestyle. The suggestion is that she now operates at a higher level of her being, emotionally and sexually, and that an ordinary man, one who would treat her kindly, is too tame and incapable of handling or even arousing the passions she is now familiar with. All this thanks to the wealthy male predators who own her.

But all of this is fantasy, and Reage doesn’t shy away from hitting you over the head with the darker implications of the endgame of any relationship built on such murky foundations. In short, the story of O does not end well. It’s a tale that can be read in many ways, but if you’re only in it for the titillation you’re seriously missing out. I found it rather a cautionary tale, for when the men tire of O, as all possessions are eventually tired of, she is unable to contemplate a return to the banality of her former life as a free woman and a human being, and the suggestion is that in one version of the ending, her then master, in a last act of gross masochism, grants her the wish that she be relieved of the necessity.

Any sufficiently sensitive man reading the Story of O cannot help but examine his own self for traces of the abominable chauvinism Reage depicts, and question any culture, closed or open, that would reduce its women to the status of objects, sexual or otherwise.

I have at times been in the company of men whose vulgar talk regarding the opposite sex has left me in no doubt as to their primitive attitudes. Whether they also share these views with their wives is anyone’s guess, but – and I speak as a man here – there is definitely a tendency in men that would sooner simplify women to the status of compliant sexual vessels, without the inconvenience of having to treat them as fellow human beings, with thoughts and fears and feelings. But again we must remind ourselves it is a fantasy, one we should take care not to let out of the box for too long, nor take too seriously, because, to paraphrase Alice, Nicole Kidman’s character, at the end of Stanley Kubrics “Eyes wide shut” the best we can hope, where sexual fantasies are concerned, is that we survive them.

Sex of course is one of life’s great pleasures, but by far the more valuable is the companionship of another human being whom you love and respect, and whose mere presence makes you feel bigger than you do when you are alone. I don’t want to pour scorn upon Fifty Shades the movie – there’ll be plenty of people doing that no doubt, as they did with the books – but I cannot help feeling a sneaking admiration for its author, a fellow indie, and a rare example of our breed who made good, made the crossover to the big time. So do read the books and go to the cinema and revel in the fantasy, if you think it might be your bag, but don’t lose sight of what’s real in human relations; remember it’s rather the exception to make love using ropes and whips and sticky tape, than the rule. So guys, don’t make your girl do what she’s not naturally inclined to do. That she wants to be with you at all is a prize in itself, so don’t push your luck.

Fifty Shades does not pretend to be literature, but if  you want to take a more literary view of the erotic you could try the story of O. But be warned, like O, you may get more than you bargained for.

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The most vital issue of the age?

My dream takes on the sound of the sea and the feeling of a warm night. At some point Rebecca and I have spooned up, and even through my closed eyes, I know her by her heat and by her scent. And keeping my eyes closed I carry with me the impression of dawn breaking, and of waking with her beside me still.

My spirits lift.

It’s enough, and I don’t care where we are now, nor what point in time we have emerged back into an ordinary waking reality, so long as we are together. But the sea is still washing on the shore, a reminder of last night’s dream, also harbinger of the fact I have not truly woken, that I am likely still dreaming. Then someone is touching my arm and I open my eyes to see Emma crouched in the sand, looking tenderly down.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says.

I turn to Rebecca but she’s no longer there. She’s waking, somewhere, and I find myself once more alone in the dreaming, with Emma. I’m afraid, because Emma is usually the herald of much strangeness, and I can bear it no more. I want simplicity. Pray God, I want the coherence of a single line in time. I must escape her.

I must!

I cannot force myself awake, and dare not ask it of the dream to take me back in time again, though ironically this seems the easier thing to do if the last occasion is anything to go by. Instead, I do the next best thing, the safer thing; I close my eyes and ask it of the dreaming for a change of scene. But even as I feel the giddiness of the transition, I am aware of Emma’s hand upon my arm; it is therefore no surprise when I open them to find she’s still there.

“You must be wide awake to loosen my grip,” she says. “And you are not for waking yet. You’re so tired of the world and all that’s in it; it’ll be a while longer, I’m afraid. If ever. But what is this, my love? Anyone would think you did not trust me any more.”

I do not like it, the suggestion I may never wake up. I wish she would go easy on me, but that is not her purpose.

We are back in the mythic levels, as we were before, the pair of us seated in Sunday best, upon a cold flat rock by night, facing the lake. I did not ask for this location, and why the dreaming thinks it is important I do not know, other than the fact it is but one step removed from Rebecca and her prayers for deliverance. Is that where she’s gone now? Is she not waking to a fresh dawn somewhere, but still sleeping, like me? And is she still dreaming of delivering the world, through her ministry?

I need the protection of my girls.

They are already disembarking from the skiff; bronze breastplates glinting beneath cloaks of Phoenician purple. They draw swords and fan out cautiously, prepared to do my bidding, but looking all the while hesitant, unsure, as if afraid I would command them injure a vital part of my self. Then Emma’s own entourage emerges from the shadows, all leather Basques and straps, and fishnets and whips, like a comical teen fantasy.

My girls draw swords, Emma’s unfurl their whips.

Emma laughs. “Gracious, what a curious stand-off. How shall we resolve it, I wonder?”

She yields, lets go of my arm. Her girls withdraw into the shadows. My own sheathe their swords and step back to the shore. I see the glitter of relief in their eyes.

“There,” she says. “That’s better. Now we can talk.”

“Please,… no more talk, Emma. Can’t you see how overwhelmed my senses are with all of this?”

“Then let me show you something,” she says. “It shall make all things clear at last. And afterwards, I’ll let you wake up. I promise.”

Thus the scene is set for the denouement of my story. We’re a hundred and fifty thousand words in, so it’s been a long time coming. What will Emma show me that’ll make everything clear and lead me into the final chapters? I can’t say, and for the simple reason that, although I am the author of this story, I don’t know, because she has not told me.

What she has told me is that a damaged life is not a ruined one, that it is upon the whetstone of adversity the human spirit is most keenly sharpened. Yet, naturally, if given the opportunity to invent our own realities, we would edit out all forms of adversity, all forms of pain. We would invent for ourselves a paradise of pleasure. But pleasure is a thing we do in resting. Adversity, suffering, is the thing we do for a living. We cannot help ourselves. Lives are broken on its harsh anvil, while others are made more meaningful, and rise more beautifully from the ashes of suffering, redeemed, enlightened,…

And eternity is a long time to be spent merely resting in pleasure.

Is any of this true?

What’s true is the world is a place of immense suffering, and at times it’s impossible to see the good in it. Our ignorance sows an ever more bitter harvest, one spotlighted with brutal efficiency by our global news media, which shall surely one day put a camera on the very tip of a bullet. A hundred years ago, we were less aware of the suffering in the greater world, unlike now, when there is no end to the live commentary by which we might probe its ills, from the very comfort of our living rooms. And our analysis reveals what? That the innocents run from the juggernaut path, that it careens blindly, scorching vast swathes of the earth, returning them to barbarism. Our capacity for the creation of suffering immense, yet seemingly the work of mere moments of madness. Conversely our ability to subvert the suffering of the world is pitifully weak, itself fraught with conflicting opinions. And it is the work of generations.

But if we could realise the dream, what kind of earth would it be? Easy, one might say. There would be no living in fear of our neighbour; there would be plenty to eat, and everyone would possess a secure roof under which to make love and nurture children. Returned to such an Eden, we might then vent our energies and our intellect in the creation of what? Great works of art to uplift the spirit? Contemplation of God’s will? In such a world no man need fear being anything other than his true self, and he would certainly not fear his neighbour might rob him of his goods, or his life.

From such a secure foundation, a man might then exercise his ingenuity, coupled with his spiritual instincts, and all so he could explore the million and one ways he might do good, and express his loving nature in the world.

But Eden has fallen.

In schizophrenia, the sufferer experiences a breaking through of unconscious energies from deep within the collective mind. They manifest as voices, as a dire urges, as a debilitating cacophony of destructive thought that burst with uncontrollable fervour upon the defences of the personality. They overwhelm us. Literally, they swallow us in madness. And these energies are amoral, grotesque, irrational, the very antithesis of order and calm. We see this too in the world, this breaking through of hitherto unimagined disorder. We see it night after night on our TV screens – a veritable daemonic orgy of death, destruction, and the ever more imaginative ways one human being can do harm to another.

One might have thought ten thousand years of civilisation would have yielded some defence, a key, a wise philosophy by which we might all live in harmony, and in doing so turn back the tide. But if such a philosophy exists, we have rendered it in so many layers of myth by now we can do no more than argue over its interpretation. Meanwhile the earth burns; and the pace of this awful breaking through of banshees from the dark depths accelerates.

As with schizophrenia, there is no cure for what ails man’s dominion over the earth. It might be controlled somewhat, moderated in its worst excesses by targeted therapies, but the overall prognosis is rarely positive. It is something we have to live with, something we must manage as best we can.

Is it this, the thing Emma would show me?

Would she take me on a tour of Bedlam to show me only the hopelessness of it, the absence of any cure to mankind’s most pernicious malaise? One might be tempted to say yes, except there are some humans who dare to look the daemons in the eye as they tear screaming though the gates of hell, and to ask them their names. If these are the denizens of the nether world, their residence in that abode seems only to have rendered them all the more destructive to a higher purpose. And the more we dream of Utopia, the more we seem only to feed their appetite for chaos and destruction.

But is Emma not herself a daemon?

She has all the qualifications, existing solely in imagination, her form rising from the archetypal foundations of the psychical sub-stratum of experience. Semi-autonomous, she draws me into her world, reveals to me forms that are infinitely malleable to my will. Meanwhile her brethren invade my own realm to torch the forms I cherish, to torment the living even as they flee from the shadows. And she reveals to me how readily I would escape the world, escape the madness, when my place is still firmly rooted in it.

“It is as Lao Tzu taught us,” she says, “that a man stands most strongly when he has one foot in the outer, and one foot in the inner world.”

If we shut ourselves off from the inner world, it’s excesses will lay waste to the physical, to the world of forms. Its energies exist, whether we believe in them or not, and their natural tendency is to flow into the world, through us, regardless of our will. If they do so, untempered by our communion, the result will be a world always falling to chaos, no matter how carefully or rationally we have built it. If we turn our backs on the physical, sink back into the inner world from whence we came, seek escape in our dreams, we will lose our selves, and our purpose, and all meaning, in its infinite possibilities.

I have betrayed my kind. I have betrayed my self.

“Time to wake up,” she says. “You’ll be late for work.”

And then, as she said to me at the very opening of my story:

“The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo 1872-1950

So, after all of that, am I any nearer my conclusion?

Don’t count on it.

Thanks for listening.

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Letters to my muse.

I’ve been trying to define more clearly this idea of an inner voice or, what in more traditional religious parlance, might be called a guiding spirit. The evidence suggests these entities do not serve only the religiously inclined, that you can be entirely secular in your outlook and the inner voice will still speak to you. It’s simply a question of knowing it’s there, respecting that presence, and having the courage to talk to it.

It’s just a pity that talking to yourself is something that’s not encouraged in adults. Even children who claim kinship with an imaginary “friend” are likely to have that relationship beaten out of them by parents keen to raise perfectly sane and normal offspring. After all, hearing voices in your head is a clear sign of mental illness, isn’t it?

 Well, yes and no.

 Certainly the schizophrenic sometimes hear voices. They’re usually negative and critical of the sufferer, and those voices will seem quite real. But to the non schizophrenic, the voices are not taken as being literally real; they always belong to the imagination, to the mysterious unconscious realms and do not break through into reality as auditory hallucinations. The non schizophrenic does not believe in their literal existence, but rather he accepts their non-literal reality. And the conversations always take place in the imaginal hinterland of some form of controlled fantasy. It is in the safe middle ground, the rich liminal zones of such imagined realities, that we meet our daemons.

 Of course, it helps if you’ve gone off the mental rails at some point: suffered from depression, or dodged the symptoms of anxiety for the best years of your life. If you have, then you’ll more easily appreciate how readily the mind can have a physical effect upon your body, manifesting dramatic symptoms than can convince you you’re about to have a heart attack, collapse in a fainting fit because you can’t draw breath, or they’ll pump the sweat out of you and have you dripping wet and embarrassed to be in the company of other people.

The question is why? Why does the mind do this? Is it purely pathological, or is it something else?

Is the mind trying to tell us something?

Depression and anxiety tend to go hand in hand with a negative self-image. We also tend to see the world in negative terms. Life is shit and then you die. But life doesn’t need to be like that, indeed the only world that’s coloured dark with such negative hues is the one you’ve invented for yourself. It’s tricky territory; your unconscious mind is apparently attacking you, trying to overwhelm you, but if you could only see your way towards engaging with this seemingly mad beast, then things can suddenly get a lot better.

 But how do you develop this relationship?

 The nature of the unconscious is hidden from us. We don’t know what it is, nor even for sure where it is, and in order to get any sort of handle on it, we have to start personifying the various bits of it that we encounter. On the downside this has the effect of oversimplifying it, while at the same time running the risk of our over-literalising it, and imagining little fairies running about all over the place, but we have to start somewhere.

 For a man, the most frequent and reliably identifiable emissary from the unconscious is the soul image, or the anima. We see her in dreams as an unknown woman. Of course the actual nature of our soul, the shape of it, the size of it, most probably doesn’t look anything like a woman, if it looks like anything at all. More likely it’s an abstract nothingness, a twist of psychical energy rising like a solar flare from the the ground of being, but in order to make sense of it we imagine it as a woman.

When I first began to get a handle on these ideas, around the turn of the millennium, I was doing it out of necessity, trying to burst the bubble of existential angst I’d been living in, and to salve the rat-bites of my last major blow-out. I was doing this mainly by reading Jung. Inspired by what I read, and amongst other things, equally strange, I began writing letters to my soul. I gave her a name that sounded right, invented a look borrowed from dreams, but one that was allowed to morph over time, and I placed her in another time, made her a Victorian lady who wrote and spoke with a peculiarly Victorian vocabulary.

We kept up our correspondence for several years.

I’d write to her about my anxieties and I’d sound her out on my half baked theories of the nature of consciousness. The really spooky part is that she would reply. All right – I know it was me actually penning her reply, that in playing her part, I was writing from inside the head of a fictional character. But the thing about my fictional characters is I never think about what they’re going to say. They just say it, and I’m often surprised by what they tell me.

Those letters would be very embarrassing of course, if they ever fell into the wrong hands; and anyone reading them would see only a middle aged man going steadily off the rails, while in fact what they reveal to me now is a middle aged man changing track and getting himself properly in gear for the first time in his life, leaving his demons behind and making the acquaintance of his daemons. And daemons are a much nicer bunch to have inside your head, but they bring changes in your conscious outlook, and you have to be prepared for that. For a start, you might just end up making friends with yourself, and seeing the world as an altogether brighter place. Some of those letters also brought with them a very real presence, and a sense of inner comfort I’d never known before. I remember penning one by lantern glow while camping by the shores of Ullswater, and it felt as if I’d only to turn my head and she’d be sitting there, watching me, smiling her reassurance. 

In my last blog piece I introduced you to Elizabeth Gibert, through her lecture on creativity, on You Tube. She spoke eloquently about the idea of a personal daemon, a muse, or a genius, being responsible for our creative output – a sentiment I agree with entirely. But these beings are not exclusive to artist types alone. If you’re comfortable with the idea of imaginative play, then these characters will come through to you, and they will help you.

You’ve only got to ask.

The reductionist human-behaviourists will scoff at all this psychobabble. They’ll point out my lack of relevant qualifications, and they’ll tell us our imaginations are nothing more than a biological mutation, one that gives us an evolutionary advantage over lesser creatures. In those dim, prehistory days, they’ll explain, we were able to plan our hunting expeditions in our minds. Our imagination therefore enabled us to place ourselves in a possible future, and to work through the “what ifs”, so preparing ourselves in advance for any eventuality. The creatures we were up against had no imaginations, reacted instinctively and in a largely predictable way. They became, literally, easy meat. My own rational training tells me I have to accept that this much is probably true. My personal experience of imagination however suggests it’s not the full story.

Okay, let’s get morbid for a moment: in the great scheme of things it makes little difference if I live or die. In all the pullulating turmoil of mankind’s petty presence here on earth, my own humble contribution to human endeavour is neither here nor there. Yet for all of my inability to influence human affairs, I do sense a possibly inappropriate importance to my presence, if not exactly to the world as it is, but at least to the world as I see and experience it. There is also a beguiling quality to the worlds I create inside my head.

My own interpretation of this apparent paradox, after over a decade of letters to my muse, is that I’m alive in two places at the same time: there is an inner and an outer world, and the inner world is the more abiding of the two. My daily existence is real enough, time-bound as it is, and filled with the nonsense of man’s making. My purpose in the world is to make my way as best I can in the circumstances I find myself, to discover a way of liking myself and seeing the world in a positive light – because only then can I manifest personal happiness and, through that, be capable of both giving and receiving love. It seems a tall order at times, because at times circumstances can be testing, but although I’m physically alone here, I am not without back-up. There are voices I can call upon. Their counsel is always wise – and not necessarily of a spiritual nature.

It can also be surprisingly prosaic.

Six months ago I developed a peculiar rash on the backs of my hands. It wasn’t painful, or itchy or anything, just a little unsightly. I took it to show the sawbones who had no idea what it was. He gave me some cream, which I tried for a month, but the rash continued to spread. Was it stress? Was it some kind of allergic reaction?

I remember turning to my inner self one day, to that imaginary daemon, and saying: Look, I’ve tried everything here and this rash is really bugging me. Is there anything you can suggest? And the following day, while my head was off chasing butterflies in some other place, the answer came; it wasn’t a voice exactly, more of an idea, a flash of inspiration: you’re eating too much tuna fish.

 Tuna fish?

 It was true. When I thought about it, I realised I was eating tuna-fish every weekday at lunchtimes, because I love tuna fish and it was easily the tastier of offerings on the work’s canteens rather limited sandwich selection. I’d started doing this at the beginning of the year, due to a change in work routines, which was roughly when the rash had begun. I’d simply got into the habit of it, without realising it. So, I stopped eating tuna fish and the rash had gone in a couple of weeks.

An inspired guess? Sure,  but where does inspiration come from? I’m happy personifying it.

For me the daemonic are fast becoming a non literal reality.

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