On reflection.
Separation, that's what they called it. I used to live in a smack-house
brothel in Norwich. In those days I was guided by the force that drives the
green fuse: intuition, knowing without knowing; my sharp dart of longing love
pierced the cloud of unknowing and through the world I would safely go, even
though I lived amongst killers and the already dead. Nowadays I have to work
everything out for myself and I'm not very good at it. I am asked unsolicited
questions by the oblique angel I prayed for a muse and in doing so she actuates
upon me the sharp privilege of plutonic visitations to the cancer ward of my
shadowlands; the land of grizzled abortion and fetid sociopathy. Not a sunny
place, the contents of my arse. Let's not go there you and I.
The nunnery was a place I'd happened upon for want of having any other
wonder. It was the former cell of St Julien of Norwich, our very own mystic.
Look her up. She was the first woman to write a book in English: "All
shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be
well." That was one of her gems. She survived the Black Death three times
and never left her room, visitors would speak to her through the bars of her
little cell window and she would throw them crumbs of spiritual comfort as
though they were little baby birds what had fallen out of their nests and were
wandering around with gaping beaks.
In a cozy room of this nunnery I would hang out with drug addicts and
other wastelanders to contemplate the phenomenon of separation which was taken
as a synonym for sin, aka the "sin disease" - that's what we were
recovering from, separation. Separation from wholeness, from sanity, from
health and wellness and all that twaddle. As ever in this case, it's all
important to get out of denial and face up to the fact that you have a problem.
Usually if your mantra is "if you haven't got a problem then you haven't
got a problem" the probability is that you have got a massive problem.
In my case the problem (of being schizoid) was actually my best friend
because the elision and drumbeat between horror and moonbeams was a hinterland
of synchronicity and revelation which no theatre guru could devise. Every
seemingly domestic incidence was liable to be tinted with a sheen of
metaphysical translucence like a frying pan glinting in the moonlight as
alluring as the grail and as transmutable as communion. Once, when I was poorer
than I had ever been and had fried my last unleavened batch of flour and water
in a hot pan with no butter, I went to sleep on an empty stomach but the air
that I breathed was full of moonlight and Dolphins; the next day I didn't know
what I would eat but wasn't tempted to bemoan my fate, instead I pulsed and
beamed my transcendental course into the arms of Morpheus and when I arose next
day I found that a letter had been sent to me containing exactly enough money
to buy breakfast, dinner and tea that day and the day after that my dole cheque
came! What's green and get's you pissed? Your giro. Ha ha. I still dunno who
that letter was from. It wasn't sent locally. Nobody knew I was eating
play-dough. Luckily I had a part time job I'm a local curry house so on those
days I ate like a king.
Hunger makes you appreciate food no end and I lived in a world where I had
sweet F.A. and a concourse of angelic entities tending my desperate needs.
Poverty was such a gift, I've got dozens of miracle tales from that time. I
might have been separated from my girlfriend and the insatiable demands of my
fat stomach but in every other way I was more whole and enriched when I was
poverty stricken than I have ever been before or since.
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