I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE TODAY

I am not going anywhere today. I am not doing anything. Everything hurts - everything. From my forehead to my legs, everything. Only my toes don't hurt and that may be because I haven't stood up yet. I haven't eaten. I won't eat. I swear, I just won't. It was freezing last night. It's a beautiful day but I'm not going out. The sun is shining cheerfully. Fuck off, cheerful sun. Go and be cheerful somewhere else. I should shave but you know what? - I'm not going to shave. I feel a sense of decay. I think I'm going off. I'll bet I stink. More than half the cells in my body are dying. They are at different stages of dying. From the moment of our conception we start to die. Up to the age of about thirty the number of growing cells in our bodies exceeds the number of dying cells but still, from the moment of conception there are dying cells. Part of us is already rotting in our mothers wombs. Life is nought but a long, long process of dying. That's because we were never meant to exist in the first place. We are an aberration. We are repulsive to nature, and to God. We offend the universe. Darkness is the natural state of the universe - darkness and inertia. We use energy to make light and we spend our lives fighting off the darkness but in the end it overcomes us anyway.

I have always been fascinated by these lines in the Hallel service - the "praise" service which we Jews say on festivals ("Hallelujah" in Hebrew, meaning, "praise be unto you") → "The Dead do not praise you, nor those who go down into silence - but we praise you … etc."

Who the hell are "those who go down into silence", if they are not dead? It's obviously some sort of kabbalistic reference. It really bothers me. I've asked a wise kabbalist about it but he changed the subject. Is it a secret? If so, why is it there? Is it that persistent, ever-present darkness, always out there on the edge of our consciousness, always pressing in on us, threatening to engulf us, menacing, as if to say, "I hide something so terrible that you would not be able to bear to see it, but one day, one horrible day, I am going to wrap this darkness around you, you will be engulfed in it, and THEN - THEN you will see it, you will see the nameless horror within me, the terrible Truth of this existence, and you will become part of it."

 

Once, in a morphine-induced dream, I dreamed that I was rolled up in a roll of barbed wire and lowered into a grave. I was in agony and I was bleeding, bleeding from the barbs that pressed into my flesh. Throughout the duration of this unbearably long dream, I bled constantly. And a small tunnel had been dug into one of the grave walls, and someone had climbed down into the grave after me and he pushed me into that tunnel. He carried a small blue oxygen cylinder and he said, "I am turning this on now, but when it runs out you will suffocate and die". And then he left, and closed the tunnel and the darkness pressed in and I listened as the hiss of the oxygen cylinder grew fainter. And then I became cold, lying in the pool of my blood. Darkness and silence. Silence and darkness. The last two of the vanguard of the Angel of Death.

 

So I am not getting out of this bed, because right now the Darkness has pressed in so far that it starts at the edges of the bed. This bed is all that I have left. I put my hands up and grab hold of my headboard, first of all to make sure that it is still there and secondly to increase my grip on the bed. There is nothing above me. There is nothing below me. There is nothing around me. Nothing. There is no sound at all. Have I gone deaf or is there really no sound anymore?. The darkness does not have hard edges. It has the quality of a cloud. Religious Jews say that the darkness which existed before creation was not merely an absence of light - it was a special, tactile, substantial darkness - and the plague of darkness which swept over Pharoah’s Egypt, was the same kind of darkness. And now this, too, is that kind of darkness - hence the sense of its pressing in on me.

 

There is no happy ending to this essay. (Is this an essay?) Happy endings are illusions for people who cannot face the truth, a sop handed to children and nervous adults. There are no happy endings. There are just endings, and you do with them what you will.

 

I once took a bus trip through a town called BRNO in the Czech Republic. Wikipedia says that it is “known for its modernist buildings” - that’s a bloody euphemism. BRNO - or what I saw of it - is a vision of hell. The ground was grey with dirty snow. The sky was grey from snow clouds. The buildings were unadorned concrete slabs, carbon copies of each other, all the same height, about ten stories high. Nothing moved in BRNO. If I was forced to spend 24 hours in BRNO, I wouldn’t survive those 24 hours. I would slit my wrists in the first half an hour. At least the red blood would improve the colour scheme. Whether you are drunk or sober, don’t go to BRNO.

 

Today is my day in BRNO. Don’t call me. Don’t write to me. Don’t pity me - I want to savour this cold dark hole. You can never know heaven, if you have never known hell. So lets just get this over with!

 

________________________________________   © Harry Friedland 9 June 2022

________________________________________   MY BLOG: MARIMBA