Extract from ‘Reflections From a Ditch’ – The Preface.

PREFACE

I sometimes write books. I don’t know why. I started off wanting to change the world. I had a dream that I could escape from this career of mine. I harbour an illusion that I can shed light on the human condition. I fool myself with dreams. I write because I enjoy it and it is cathartic. It stops me going mad.

Maybe that’s not true – perhaps I am mad and it stops it manifesting itself so that it is obvious to others.

Anyway I write books.

Things are different now. I know I cannot change the world. There is madness at work there that will likely have to run its course towards its inevitable conclusion. No amount of shouting will wake the drivers up. The directors’ sit back and give out their instructions and the instructions are always – ‘Faster’.

Even when they have more opulence than is good for the eyes; more possessions than they can digest; more power than they can control they still scream for ‘More’.

I am a little like that. It frightens me – but I am human.

I thought I wasn’t. I wish I wasn’t. And I still dream that I can change the world. I still think that warnings can be listened to, drivers can be woken, and directors have intelligence. As for my writing – it is harmless. They have already calculated for it. I fulfil a role. It is poor enough to be laughed at and idealistic enough to incite ridicule. The content will be ignored. The electricity flowing through my neuronal synapses will generate no revolutions. I sometimes think that unseen hands control me; I am manipulated like a puppet. I am part of their master plan. I am contributing to the ‘Faster’ ‘More’ philosophy and actively precipitating the very destructions I am seeking to prevent just as work increases entropy.

Yet I do not believe that – that paranoia. An idea can change the world. Despite the proof of countless genocides, extinctions and the stench of terminal pollution we are capable of poems. But then I can now see that books should be banned – all books. They have become complacent. Each word is a land mine. A sentence is made of a million different explosions and a book can go off in the mind with the force of a nuclear bomb.

And I am a liar. I know that nothing can stop this mad career towards ownership and opulence. But I don’t quite believe it. I believe in the power of words.

They change things. They do. They alter minds. They eat their way into the soul and work on the very fabric of existence like hungry maggots feasting on living flesh. They threaten the stability of civilisation – these words. They shake the foundations of sanity and leave one standing on air.

Slippery words; like eels wriggling through the waving fronds of thought; insinuating themselves in the Sargasso seas of the mind. Those becalmed areas of mindlessness where life is so tranquil and easy; with just the bills to think about; just the work to do – everything so simple. The daily routine, with all its myriad of worries, is none the less a linear series of stepping stones through the bottomless bog of mundane life.

We are safe and secure.

Then one is confronted with a single word; a slimy eel weaving its spell through the tangled mass of order. And as you reach for it, to grasp it, to tie it down into the pattern of today’s breakfast, it slips away and explodes in your brain with a million nuances.

And you know that life is different.

It will never be the same again. There is this chain reaction going through the whole of your being. You may look calm and peaceful but the tendrils of a subtle explosion are eating their way through your existence. You know that nobody else can understand that word the way you do. You have cracked open its code, reached into the guts of the beast and opened up a monster. It is spread-eagled before you, its viscera still vibrant with life, laughing in your face.

This word has detonated.

Its inner meaning is resounding through your head like mental shrapnel; wriggling its way through your mind.

How come you had never understood all this before; that each word has a million meanings; that nobody really understands a single thing anyone has ever said. The words shimmer and change before the eyes like chameleons. They seem to say something. They seem to communicate. But all that is just on the surface. It is the appearance of sense within the confines of this moment, this mundane existence, when there is no sense. Beneath the surface they are laughing and swirling through a million disguises.

DNA does not use words. Fucking is the only pure communication.

I have come to realise that every word I have ever written is a lie; every thought I have dreamed, every deed I have executed badly, every utterance I have committed to vibrating air. – All of this a lie! All of it. It makes no sense. It is based on deceit – conceit.

Once the nuclear bomb has cleared the mental tangles and the words are free to dance on a clear stage where they can be seen in all their glory the universe is bared and the stepping stones sink out of sight.

You are truly alone. But nothing is different. You live. That is the only thing you can be sure of. You cannot communicate. That is an illusion. You have a life and you live in the instant of your being. Even your memories play tricks with you. Your whole life is a transparent tapestry of half-truths, innuendo and supposition created by yourself. I write about what is real in my head. That is why I write books. I communicate it to you. But even in the instant of its creation I know that it is a lie; that I no longer believe that what I have written is accurate; and I am certain that you cannot understand it even if it was. All the words would mean something slightly different to you.

When we are gone all that is left of us is the words, the memories and the ripples you left in your wake.

Words are only symbols for other things. We each live in a private universe. Who knows what colour your blue is in my head?

I offer you a word or two. Beware. Beware!

Explosions can be so slow. Now I am standing on air. I look through the air to see what I think is my life. This is real. This is my life.

But I am standing on air.