At home with the lights off

The moon is absolutely pumping tonight. By that I mean, it’s shining very brightly. It’s full. I’d forgotten the full moon was approaching- I was putting my sleeplessness down to hormonal shifts, stress, solar flares.. I always forget about the moon. It’s unusual I suppose for there to be as little cloud cover as there is at the moment. That’s not to say that it’s the light of the moon which has an effect on my sleep- it shouldn’t, really, I have blackout blinds and even wear one of those ridiculous masks. My room is a veritable sensory deprivation chamber (not actually, because I live next door to a house full of baby elephants). 

Anyway, long story short, it’s quarter past ten in the evening and I don’t feel ready for bed- I’ve felt quite restless all evening, even though I’d ticked off all of the Things I Must Do So That I Can Continue to Function.

I wrestled briefly with that title- I thought, Things I Must Do So I Don’t Go Insane, but decided that was inaccurate since I’ve never really experienced psychosis and I felt it would be trivialising the experiences of those who have actually gone Insane with a capital ‘i’. The other title I thought of was ‘Things I Must Do So That I Remain Happy’, but that felt facetious- I don’t really believe in the pursuit of happiness, and to be honest, even when I do all of the Things, of course I still experience these moments of complete and utter desolation. I was getting them quite a bit today- going about my business- in the gym, cooking dinner- they were kind of startling really, some sort of ‘unplugged from the matrix’ moments. It could be because of my lack of sleep. Or the fact that it’s very clear and bright and sunny at the moment and because of the time of year and the sun’s height in the sky, it feels like someone has turned up the contrast on the world and it’s quite surreal. Very Truman-esque.

I realised today that the reason I prefer to travel alone is because i worry that when I inevitably sink into the mires of the afternoon or whatever time of the day that I’m being a drag. Obviously I’ve internalised all of what i was told by my parents on our fraught holidays when i was a teenager- things in the general vein of being ungrateful and ruining the fun for everyone else. I can hold onto this like a dog with a bone and feel like my inner child was hard done by or i can just acknowledge the fact that at times I probably am a pain in the arse to holiday with. At least when I’m alone i can wallow and languish on schedule without feeling like I’m inconveniencing someone else and their enjoyment. Is it somehow more endearing when it comes from a place of concern for others rather than purely indulgent melancholia? I think ‘holidays’ in general just don’t really suit me- i am unable to be at leisure (except for when it comes to languishing) nor enjoy sightseeing and activities without it eventually catching up with me via some crushing sense of tragedy and impending doom, whether it’s at the fate of the planet at the hands of mankind or a more ancient and deep-seated dread at the Transience of Things. An idyllic vista can feel oppressive if I’m caught in statis- right now the call of the cuckoo is mocking rather than cute and i feel like an incongruous townie in my black culottes and shades. Ive tried to sleep by babbling brooks before only for their incessant gurgle to sound like a muffled television and the sounds and words eventually become indistinguishable from my own thoughts and i feel demented and insomnolent. Sometimes on holiday with Karl I feel like a high-class Victorian invalid, being ferried around in the car to various scenic spots in attempts to soothe my nerves and lift my spirits. Maybe I should just embrace that fact and start wearing straw boaters and carrying a gold-topped cane. I have often thought that becoming a full blown eccentric would maybe ease the antagonism i feel between indulging my whims and trying to appear normal. And I suppose that people are more likely to leave you alone anyway when you are visibly Mad. 

I don’t know if my discomfort with holidays is some extension of the fact that my physical being generally feels at odds with my surroundings. Dysphoria plays a role for sure but its also aesthetic- any time I feel I’ve tried to emulate the hippy types I see on the west coast or at festivals, I’m let down by my hair. My straight, dark helmet-like hair doesn’t match their tousled and sun-bleached heads, even if I have a tan and dangly earrings and earth-toned clothing in natural fibres my hair is still lacking this sense of whimsy and artfulness that someone in the Irish countryside should have. I think it’s a question of the landscape. Maybe that’s why I felt more at home in a place of nature that is more manicured and organised, like in Japan. I remember feeling that way too about the Alps which were so pretty and vast  and perfect (not that my hair felt any more at home there, it’s not blonde and ethereal enough), but after some time there I began to miss Ireland’s tangled landscapes of thorn and briar and nettle and its wind-bent and twisted trees, along with its invasive but colourful incursions of rhododendron and crocosmia. That’s not to say Japan isn’t liable to adverse weather but its typhoons and earthquakes have a more purgative effect- all is obliterated-their wooden structures are swept up and scattered into the wind and then rebuilt, as opposed to the slow and dogged attrition we face here, the creeping dampness into brick and mortar and lingering black mold which  drives us to some form of choleric madness.

That being said, the place is being well and truly aired out today by the sun, I’ve just noticed I missed a patch of hair while shaving the back of my leg and even this quip makes me feel deeply dysphoric and women writers who write frankly about the trials and tribulations of owning and maintaining a female body are overdone and that general feeling makes me want to float up, up, up out of my body and away over the hawthorn and the gorse and the brambles. 

This line often floats into my head with a sense of profundity. I know it’s the name of a Dali painting- the famous one with the melting clocks. People wrote that it referred to Einsteins theory of special relativity. When asked, Dali said it was inspired by melted Camembert. 

I think I’m more in the Camembert camp- i find it easier to access and understand than space and time. That was something I found a bit exhausting about art college- on our first day in the sculpture department we were told that sculpture is about ‘space, place and time’, which was all very hefty. Would it have lent more weight to my work if the plaque on the wall referenced Einstein, rather than being upfront about the fact that I was tripping balls and eating cheese? (This is purely hypothetical).

 Speaking of cheese, when we were in France and eating pastries, Molly asked me what the nicest cake I ever had was. I couldn’t just remember the nicest- I could barely remember any of the cakes I’ve eaten. Later, we went into a museum and looked at some paintings. I tried to remember feeling excited about paintings and remembered when I was a teenager and had seen a Dali for the first time. I can’t remember where that was though. And when I thought harder, I wasn’t sure if it was even my memory or the memory of a friend I had at the time. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the painting.

I’ve gone off on tangents before reading about the inconsistency of memory- stories of false witness testimonies and memory experiments. Asides from the practical implications it has in terms of the judicial system, I think there is a certain fascination with the subject that feeds into the cult of the individual- latching onto our memories as an integral part of our identities. I’ll quote Mishima in Kinkaku-Ji second-hand (because I first came across him in a Sylvain Tesson book) - ‘...What gives meaning to our life’s actions is fidelity to a certain moment, and our effort to make that moment last forever...’.

This resonated with me in the sense that I think a lot of the choices I make and the things I care about are silently governed by a sense of nostalgia- things that influenced me in my formative years. The Pinterests I save, the aesthetic choices I make. Some of these choices and interests can be clearly traced back- my most enduring interests have been those I’ve had since I was a child- like anime, art and nature. But this theory is complicated when you consider the fluidity of memory. Some of the ‘moments’ I’m attempting to replicate might not be my own moments at all but something I saw in a film, or something I told myself so many times that it coalesced into something more concrete. With the influence of media and the fact we’re exposed to so much information in a day, it could be considered a tragedy that increasingly, our memories are not our own. Additionally, we outsource our memories- into digital photo albums and archives, and Google means we don’t need to be able to recall specific facts and information. This circumvents the need to process memories, to integrate them into our schema. They become less a part of our inner world and more of a marketable identity- a series of experiences and sensations that can be encapsulated into a pretty photograph. Maybe I’m being cynical here but I’ve felt myself in the last few years, that I am experiencing the world in a more superficial way and I think this comes from the fact that I am bombarded with so much information every day and have less and less time to process it. People advocate for a mindfulness approach in allowing us to be more present, but I think an essential component we’re neglecting is also time to parse this information. 

I try to allay any anxieties I have about this state of affairs with embracing the idea of the ‘hive mind’. I’m coming at this from a relatively uninformed angle- I haven’t read a whole lot about collective thought and how it might be integrated into the digital Information Age. Putting aside for a moment the unsavoury inequity inevitably wrought by capitalism, we can see social media and shared memories as a modern iteration of the fact that humans are ultimately social creatures. Social media is and can be a wellspring of creativity and, at the risk of sounding way too grandiose, acts as a placeholder for religion in secular society- that is the sense of connectedness and being part of something bigger. AI provides the potential to generate entirely new material from our collective efforts and creations (again, if you can put aside the economic implications this has for artists). All our individual thoughts and experiences are delineated into a scrollable consumable, which, via our engagement, feeds into algorithms which aid the creation of further content and clickables, a digital Ouroboros (again, with the grandiosity).

But now, away from the Borg and back to my own individual experience (because that’s why I’m keeping this blog?). A few years ago, I worked for a while on a vineyard in New Zealand. Initially I was working on the harvest- it was fairly monotonous, physical labour, but I enjoyed it. I think I once read in a museum some historic piece of anti-Irish propaganda- efforts to Google it yielded nothing, only some funny and kind of pertinent results- I’ll share them here. Anyway, this piece was of course written from a colonialist perspective and painted the Irish as dull-witted and suited to monotonous, laborious tasks. It crossed my mind in my enjoyment of the harvest work, that maybe there was substance to that theory. In general, I was living at the time in a way that might be more similar to agrarian communities from long ago- we went to sleep every night when the sun went down, rose when it came up and because there was no phone reception our access to technology was very limited. It was a social job and the harvest workers spent a lot of time chatting amongst ourselves but equally there were periods of silence while we worked. It was in these silent periods that I became aware of the fact that my thoughts were operating differently and I found myself often accessing my memories as a means of entertainment. I was recalling specific memories and information I’d forgotten I even had- like I suddenly remembered how to count to 10 in Slovene. These memories didn’t just exist as objective facts or stories or pictures in my mind- they brought with them feelings and sensations which coloured and enhanced my present experience of the world. I remember thinking about Wordsworth, and how when he found himself ‘in vacant or in pensive mood’, he remembered his daffodils and I realised what a source of consolation memories could be. I felt, I think for the first time, an appreciation of a sentiment often espoused by older people, that no matter what happens or who comes or goes in your life, you will always have your memories and now I’m kind of afraid that this is increasingly not the case.

I’m sitting in the shower because I don’t want to disturb Molly, who is asleep, with the sound of  the light or my keyboard. I’d be inclined to romanticise this scenario but actually I’ve just ended up with a wet arse.

Im sleep deprived, I didn’t sleep very well last night in Marseilles. There was also a Giant sitting beside me on the plane so I had to sit at an awkward angle the whole flight so now my neck hurts. He actually apologised for his legs- I felt bad for him, I hope I didn’t give off the impression that I was put out by his size- I certainly wasn’t thinking that. I wonder does he say it to every stranger he sits beside every time he takes a Ryanair flight. That would be kind of sad for him if that was the case. Sometimes I am grateful for having short legs. He sat scrolling through Instagram reels (offline somehow??) for the whole flight and laughing which was kind of endearing, but a baby a few rows behind us cried on and off and every time it started to cry he shook his head and said ‘oh my god’. I thought about saying well that baby can’t help crying, the same way you can’t help being a Giant. Well i didn’t think about saying it, I just thought it.

We walked a lot today-up a big hill covered in rich people’s mansions- we were trying to find a view of the sea but all their walls and tree borders cut off any possibility of this. Both our faces even got a little bit sunburnt. I think we might have been suffering in some way at one point because we both had two very strange moments within seconds of each other- I was telling Molly how I didn’t like the name ‘Fiachra’ anymore and it was because of ‘some annoying lad in my college’ before I stopped myself and remembered that Molly and I had both met at and gone to the same university and we often reminisced (commiserated) about people and events from that time. It was as if I’d entirely forgotten who i was talking to. Right after that, Molly tilted the water bottle she was carrying and my shoe scraped the ground and Molly thought the water had poured from the bottle even though the lid was tightly on and she stopped in her tracks and said ‘was there a splash?’. The proximity of two uncanny moments made it feel like there had been some kind of rift in the fabric of space and time. Or a glitch in the matrix. 

Ive noticed I experience deja vu more when Im tired and i feel a bit unsettled by the thoughts of what strange electrical activity is going on in my brain at those moments.  I think of some of the other strange things that happen when Im extremely sleep-deprived (I won’t say tired, because when I’m that sleep-deprived Im beyond a sense of tiredness and just feel more like a broken robot). Sometimes I get this feeling like I’m turning somersaults even though Im just sitting on a chair. Other times the walls shimmer and shake and then other times again when Im feeling very keyed up and anxious I hear invading aircraft and bombs being dropped in the distance. One night when i was a teenager I heard a strange and ominous sound in the sky outside and looked out and saw lights-  I ran outside into the street in a complete panic at an imminent alien invasion only to realise it was a Garda helicopter, searching the woods. 

I don’t think I was sleep-deprived or anxious then, I had just been reading about UFOs a lot. My dad even used to print out articles in work and bring them home for me.

I think I did see a UFO once. I was walking back from a cello lesson (I don’t play the cello anymore) and stopped at the green near my house to look up at the stars. Suddenly a star flew into my field of vision and did some loopdiloops, then disappeared suddenly, as if it had taken off into the distance. I remember being a bit frightened but also a bit excited. A book I was reading earlier had a paragraph about alien encounters and how they are a contemporary form of spiritual experience- impossible to deny their credibility but at the same time can be read as a means to rationalise inexplicable phenomena. I don’t really know what that UFO was supposed to represent to me at that time in my life but lately I do believe in attributing meaning to uncanny events. Maybe Im missing religion in my life. So, perhaps earlier Molly and I did actually tear a hole in the fabric of space time and now we are wandering an alternate dimension in Provence. We did see a dead toad in the sea which was very unusual. Later we went back and looked for him in the same place but he was gone. I like to imagine he was swallowed whole by a giant fish. I might go outside and look for UFOs. 

I was cycling to work last Tuesday morning, it was raining heavily. Everything was pretty quiet and I thought a little bit about how it felt like some kind of ritual self-punishment to be resolutely spinning forward, to work, of all places, while getting absolutely sopping wet. 

When I got home i went on the turbo-trainer for an hour and a half- it’s kind of like my hamster wheel. On this i continue to pedal and afterwards I get off and I’m reeling from all of the endorphins. I don’t know, I could make some kind of Sisyphean allegory here but I don’t want to be thought of as having notions. I have no such notions about myself. A few weeks ago, i flew too close to the sun (oops, notions) and my wheels fell off- i had been getting so good at doing the thing- getting up, cycling to work, working, cycling home, cycling continuously in one spot for an hour or more, listening to a medieval history podcast, making/eating dinner and then picking from one or more of my interests to cultivate for the rest of the evening. I had a little daily checklist of things I was supposed to do, i read the foreword of Atomic Habits, i found myself on r/productivity and I thought i could feel new synapses forming.

I don’t know what prompted it exactly but i veered off course at some stage and found myself spending my weekends and evenings wandering absently from room to room in the house- I find i spend a lot of time staring out the kitchen window- sometimes i can see a little boy in one of the apartments across the way doing the same thing, I’m pretty sure he’s autistic from the way he rocks back and forth and flaps his fingers. I think I’m probably rocking a bit too, but mostly I’m just trying to take in heat from the radiator, it feels like a bath. I usually have BBC Radio 6 on but then i might switch it to something else. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of シテイポップ which makes me feel nostalgic for memories I don’t have and a bit deranged. I know its bad when nothing is making the lights in my brain blink on and my media consumption mirrors the way in which my thoughts are occurring, hopping haphazardly from one subject to another- I actually don’t know if one begets the other- in general it is a bit of a chicken and the egg situation and I wonder whether my falling off my routine and hobbies is what leads to my being melancholic or if the lack of motivation and greyness is intrinsic. I know that most likely it is a bit of both and I visualise it as some kind of paradoxical perpetual motion machine which gains momentum from my own inertia. 

I don’t need to be more explicit here with the whole cycling and working cog analogy. I suppose that’s why it feels so freeing to me to cycle with no particular direction- I’m still pedalling and sweating but the heat and effort has more of a cathartic effect- while i write this I’m reminded of when i went to Japan last summer after a few of what had been some of the most difficult months in my life. That was really strange- i went from what felt like i was being metaphysically beaten up in a playground week after week to suddenly being completely alone in Tokyo where i wandered aimlessly around the labyrinth in 40+ degrees heat- i was too overstimulated and jet-lagged to eat or sleep, i just sweated continuously and drank litres of ポカリand カルピス. I wondered how much energy it took to keep all of the vending machines powered and how many plastic bottles i had discarded and i also wondered when I’d stopped caring so much about that stuff. At times i felt like a ghost or a floating head on a pilgrimage, undergoing a ritual cleansing, the inverse from the ritual cycle in the rain.