God's Dramatist

I’m a pretentious writer, if one at all. This is, at least, the adjective to which can be applied whilst reviewing any entry from my weblog. I think what exists there most particularly resembles the convoluted submissions for which a fifteen year old would have overemphasised a thesaurus. Without having a focused or complete idea to elaborate on, I transform a timid notion into some kind of farce expression of vocabulary (one I am unsure about claiming to myself). Instead of taking time to furnish off, and polish, and perhaps train what of which I hope to one day become an ‘accomplished’ authority, I hide behind delusions of grandeur that place unreasonable expectations over every single word, syllable, letter; all my instincts to write and to tell, to create, are murdered by this crooked social inhabitant, this villain inside of me who only wants for himself what masterpieces are predicated to birth from inside.

This is absolutely, unequivocally preposterous. Over the years, over time, over life and growth and death and over myself, I have spilled away the fleeting moments of actual, honest writing for something that for which only exists a naive illusion. I want to write because I want to write, because of what comes out from inside of me when I do so, and I want to write about more than what comes out from inside of me! I want to write from inside the world, about what inside of it. I want to write without the predication of perfection, I want to write absent of those stipulations into which my most iniquitous self censors the truth; I just want to sit down, every single night, at this black plastic keyboard, beneath the bosom of an overbearing white light, oppressed by night’s dark veil and wrapped into it’s cold and peaceful blanket, and I want to write. Half a page, thirteen, fifty, ones I submit, ones I don’t, ones I throw away, ones I lock up, ones over which I weep and ones over which I cry out in hysteria, ones out of which I grow and ones under which I hide, regressing. It doesn’t matter. The athlete trains, night and day, dieting and fighting for the prize towards which he or she missions, and that prize is no golden trophy or blue and red ribbon; the prize is built into the struggle itself, the fight, the constant and ever-engaging need to compete, to move forward. Is this not the common ground for all hopefuls in their secluded time of ambition, of meditation in achieving a set goal that beckons their every breath to roam the great distance between? This is for me, this is the struggle I yearn to endure, and not so regrettably do so at every single corner and curve, the treacherous road towards no particular end that bends and shapes, a ship that maroons me only to return, begging me to board and row so desperately, a sailor boy sinking his way into oblivion by means of his need for movement. This is precisely what it means to be in the mind, to be a thinking thing, a calculating, callous, scandalous thing that latches upon life as a leech to suck it dry of whatever feeling, sense, consolation it can spare; all in pursuit of not satisfaction, but of what it means to pursue, because no fisherman, no honest fisherman, would drop its net if he or she knew that it would mean to catch all of the fish. Only those who chase satisfaction cannot ever be satisfied; only those who are eager to catch all of the fish will go hungry and starve. Only the writers who sit down to exclusively produce masterpieces will find themselves completely out of touch with what it means to write, to create, to speak, to think, for god’s sake, to be! I am here to be, and my writing is only a reflection of what my being knew and saw and tasted and loved and hated and everything, every last thing my being was to be. To write, not to write, but to make, and to feel fulfilled within the voyage to fulfilment, not fulfilled at paradise. To write what comes as an example of me, and what surrounds me, not what is expected or necessarily wanted to be.

This is the first time in a long time that I feel as though I am doing something, as though I am actually being and not merely pretending to be. This is the writer without his inner social inhibition, but his drunken banter and his boisterous inebriation; his every slipping word, syllable, letter; his moments, dreams, his abilities and his inabilities. This is him, in all his imperfection and all of his insecurity, his immaturity, giving himself up and pushing away to be shredded apart by society’s vultures, captured and caged in their own false worlds, raping each other with immaterial delusions, the unfortunate public orgy of all people incarcerated to their own commercial lust and vanity. This feels more real, more of what is, this writing makes me a happy sailor boy crashing down his brave ship, with a fleet prepared to join him down the oceanic slope, slipping, drowning, fading into a vast black nothingness, smiling, without regret, knowing that before there was the light of struggling existence there was the dark of peaceful absence, and this dismal voyage is maiden only inside of him, but the fate of all timid ships racing to a race, and not to an end. I think the ship’s name is God’s Dramatist, christened in the bay of angels who bless the journey with harmony; the privilege of strife and famine, but also of joy and ecstasy, with contention and absolution, questions and answers, understanding and confusion, a sailing ship endlessly burning, neither sunken nor afloat.

A Letter To A Young Man

Dear David,

Your optimism precedes you. As you wander in your juvenile frivolity, you only graze the plains of discovery your mind has already observed. This summer, under a humid midnight moon, you have eaten the weeds around which you once nourished a latent and thirsty valley of comprehension, and modest understanding. A youth to behold, one yet who asks only that he drink from the God’s goblet of truth, saturated by the power and honesty of reason. Why you, weary explorer, to taste the tangy treacherous watercress in your mind’s most abundant supply of illusion? Why dare to dig in the furrows and troughs of the malicious and devious deviance that cheats its own conclusions? Your absorption of adolescence has only forgotten you in the same time it remembered you could be consumed. It ate you up and spit you out so vindictively, but left you begging with possessed eyes, on your broken hands and knees, calling out for but a mere moment more with what it told you was ecstasy. Fear not your susceptibility, but your eagerness; for all of mankind is damned to an infinite void that conflicts desires and necessity. Success is but a travesty in the language of your person, for what can satisfy a compulsively unfulfilled being? Two vast pastures exist at opposite ends of understanding towards which you can place your passionate pursuit, but you cannot forget the line that draws them. You caught in a persistent tugging between the planks of an enigmatic dividing fence, with spectators eyeing your every move, perceiving your insecurities with outlandish gossip, taunting you to plant your seed on one of the competitor’s prospective sides. Dear young man, foolish young man, synthesise their feuding beliefs! Unify the land so that all can embrace a fundamental division; harmonise the beauty of both sluggish fiends beating their fists on the foreground of peace. Show the foreign the munificence of the domestic, and force the domestic to embellish themselves the traditions of the foreign! Let not these weeds poison your mind with habits and convictions; cultivate the fruits of knowledge and nurture the vines of progress, exalting both with love and devotion. Let your valley grow with experience, and narrow not your opportunities; for as age weighs down, so it turns around the slope of time and your end is the final luminosity.

Sincerely,

Your Hearts Content

Our Own Hopeless Selves

Dad,

Thirteen years of our lives to make up for your pathetic excuses at difficult pain medication and your sudden realization that perhaps you are okay without an excessive amount of them is hardly a model to overcome. Your factitious claims of reliance upon your children have with themselves stitched a bad odor of which, in lieu of your stubborn nature, we can only be cleansed through ignorance. There is much, much work to be done on your part before anyone lifts a finger to the string you struggle more every day to pull.

Like a courtyard lawn that has been improperly irrigated, so you saturate your own mind and ours with muddy falsities and a vast lake of lies. I am dumbfounded in believing anyone who subscribes to your perspective, save your “attorney” whose name you so conveniently have yet to mention. You are quite possibly one of the most selfish men I believe I have ever met, and in this selfishness you are blinded. All you want is money; all you have spoken of since I returned is money, money, money, me, what about me, and what about money? The five of us have offered you an enormous tantamount of gracious and compelling opportunities, at every corner have tried to pick up a wish you dropped, and have exhausted ourselves trying to please a greedy and iniquitous man whose true desires can only be satisfied through the loss of everything, and the moans he then shall protrude. You only want what you want and what you can get your own way. We, and specifically I mean your children, have become entirely irrelevant and it is obviously clear that what we need of you is about as important to you as a vegetable is important to a lion.

Any sensible, reasonable person in this situation truly in an attempt to do better and make change would have first heard the desperate calls of his already damaged children what was needed of him for their slow repair. Unfortunately, your actions were now and I imagine mostly only ever have been based on yourself, which is why our family fell apart. A family is a decentralized connection of sharing and willing unconditional love; I realize now that this is impossible for someone as narcissistic as you are who needs to be the irrevocable and unequivocal center of everything and everyone. Like a virus, you continue to consume the minds and lives of your loved ones, draining them of their inner and outer selves until they bear no more and you prepare to move imperviously onward. The matters of another human being are of so little concern to you, and I get the lingering sense that even this very text will be received with deliberately deaf ears.

Your writings are wrought with your expectations of us, both your children and our mother. I regret to inform you that since we have done so much for you already, to act another time on your mocking and pretentious demands would be to continue to hack at our own scabbed necks. You have gone too far. It is over. As far as I am concerned, the house is worth enough for you to sell it on your own and make enough of a profit to leave and live comfortably for a very long time. It is solely your mess nonetheless, and though we had dreamed of you cleansing this enclave of filth yourself in an attempt to show us wrong, you instead handed your mess off to another family. And when that didn’t work out, you returned crawling on your shaking and frail knees, begging once more for a finger to be lift in your fake absence. It is your mess and your mess alone. No one damaged your things, only you. Your lies know of no boundaries, and your manipulations only further drive a splint between you and the recovery of a relationship with your soon-longing children.

I made you yet another offer two weeks ago, saying we would help you with everything; finding a place, cleaning your disgusting chaos, and selling the house to a gain for everyone. You declined this in a showy exaggeration and in the process, have released any grip you once had on my feeble and young mind. There is no one left to help you but yourself. You had a wealth of moments to let your family help you do the right thing, and you spit upon our heads! Our names! Our dignity, you disgraced us and now you have severed the bond that once was considered unconditional. You should be ashamed, though I suspect you aren’t and shan’t ever be.

But, you will live with the consequences of your conceited decisions and manipulations. I am employing the advice that no one in this family lifts their broken fingers to help you; may it be physically, emotionally, financially, etc. We presented to you with ourselves as gifts in exchange for mere compliance, and you sold us out from underneath our own hopeless selves. Besides, if a man can fish and play golf, he can hold even the most innocent vocation. Your income is of your own concern, since you are your own person.

There is yet another blow I am obliged to deal to you. In regards to that “troll” of which you speak, he has been more of a man in the month I’ve spent around him than you have been a man in the last decade I’ve spent with you. Only a fool speaks on matters of which he has no knowledge. This likely phrase sums up a good amount of your personality.

I think perhaps the most concerning thing to me in this situation is not the reality of you and your actions, but of my response to them. Beneath some of the anger is a being who stores no guilt for the path upon which he is about to place his diligence. I don’t feel the sense of abandonment, because I believe in the midst of a gloomy horizon, you will shine your colors of truth and they in themselves will be of abandonment. You are the only one who has deserted anything, and your desertion stretches vastly across the totality of our lives. Now, the absence of presence will not be yours, but ours, of waiting at your every need. I have seen people much older and more decrepit than you work jobs and make incomes for themselves. I am not going to support your viciously needy behavior, and I doubt anyone else in this family will continue to do so as well. The time is now, for you to claim your life!

Wield this and I imagine you shall flourish beyond that of which we comprehend. I suspect that, however, as your tendencies recommend, that you will only allow this to push you into defeat, and you will continue to beg like a fool, bending your knees at the turned cheeks of a beaten dog. I only want what is best for the father of mine whom I do indeed love and for whom I much care. My nimble finger only extends to a length where it cannot be bitten by the monster whom it need feed.

The mould of a Christian is a many righteous doings, none of which you have ever displayed. From any usual man of himself, I would expect such a negative and degrading character, but never from a man of God. This is where I do not understand why you consider yourself a man of an absolute, when you so clearly and so dearly only live for your own unjust self. I have heard many miracle stories of men in despair stricken suddenly out of it by their letting go of all vain and immoral things; exclusively, the ones that you hide beneath a shell of like a hermit crab in a its own seclusion. Keep your ungodly confounded beliefs and bitterness, for it is nothing of which neither the Christians here nor my own conscious need. Their God holds to them their goodness for letting go and moving on, with their faithful prayers and tearful sorrows.

In these final concurring lines, I connect the advice to which I assure you the lot of us will adhere. Attorney or not, threats or violence, beyond anything you may muster to your defense I maintain that your responsibility in all of this is yours to keep; you only want yourself, thus you can keep yourself. We want you only so far as it does not poison our lives with your continued games and tricks, lies and like a broken record I proclaim; manipulations. Like an amputated and quarantined limb, you are cut off and will rot away unless you heal yourself in time to be healthy enough to become reconnected. This is not a healing that anyone can provide to you, only your own mind thus upon itself. A moral and distant support will continue to exist from your evolving children, one which will ascend with your adamancies regarding this process. This is a certainty of which to be sure, that we always route in your favor, never against it, and with admiration and always with a glistening eye of hope. The only chains to which you are bound are the ones in the dungeon of your own being.

And with that final thought, my influence shall faithfully depart. I love you Dad, more than I think you may appreciate, and every word, every action, every thought, is motivated by the passion by which you have endowed me. For that, I am indeed grateful.

From the one who knows not but understands,

David McDonagh

Our Own Calamitous Selves

It’s a difficult thing to realise the reality of your most calamitous self. This is the self that forces your hand blindly over matters exclusive of your concern, and grants a grand imposition of your will and senses. This is the self that barricades how you really feel in the corner of a gossip cellar, near to where the factitious wines you store ferment contrived bottles of pseudo-speak. This is the self whom pours the poison in those bottles around into the glasses of the gala that you gloat upon, without regard to the manner and distaste of which you so boastingly perform. Everyone sips it down, wondering about the connections they keep with the portions of your more modest and subtle self, who can display a much more munificent character than this cantankerous beast of a man. Beasts that confide within us all, each with our own calamitous selves, slipping away in the moments it appears and returning with a shameful grin.

I fear that I am more often than not unable to discern this calamity from what I really am. I fear often more than that that this calamity is not a trait, or characteristic; but rather, a more wholesome aspect of my being. This is mortifying. I see myself attempting to puppeteer those around me, and for them to puppeteer me. I feel trapped in this intricate network of lassos and loops that have snagged the edge of each person around me, and we all try to escape at our own strength, pulling and knotting the web at each pulse. This is also a decentralised network, where all must slip together away in an aggregate agreement of departure, for otherwise the responsibility of the entanglement is not shared; and thus, there becomes exemption. There is no one exempt from this colossal disentanglement, and we must all understand this in order for our caught necks to find breath again.

I make this my personal admission to the entanglement of my calamitous self inevitably into a barren, envy-ridden social experience that has corrupted the propensity of my goodness, and my frame. Let us all endeavour to make no longer these excuses, and to further step into the direction of giving up the tugging of this tangled web that only constrains us further upon ourselves.

Our Own Delusional Selves

That old phrase 'I'm beside myself' has never been more true than it is now, in this decade, and in this generation. Do we know ourselves? I mean - do we really know ourselves? Internet networking websites, digital cameras, glossy windows and shiny car panelling; we are bombarded by mirrored images of what we are, and we feed into it. This, however, just builds a gap between who we are and what we perceive ourselves to be. We don’t spend enough time within ourselves, within our own thoughts. We are now connected to the idea that is portrayed from us, not actually the idea within our heads. We don’t care how we progress as who we are, and we really don’t care what we see ourselves as, only others. We just move through the images and expectations that are held in some kind of model up above our heads, and we stretch an arm’s length out; disappointed that we cannot reach.

Well, of course not. Infinitely, we are unsatisfied beings; our food becomes dull, our routines must be managed and changed, our bodies transformed. When the song has been played enough, we change it, and when our lust becomes too much for our spouses, we find a fresher fancy. Then, one can understand how living against the image and the idea of oneself in a social performance can be not only completely ridiculous and naive, but regressive to any real potential growth. If we spent more time inside of ourselves looking out onto others, then how marvellous our social activity would truly be! We would no longer be beside our own delusional selves, trying to see what everyone else sees of us and just being happy that we can see those magnificent others that pace our company time after time. This is to me why the concept of individuality within the ethics of a social being must be trained, and must be disciplined. Otherwise, we place value only on what our clothing looks like to our companions, and not the real person who fits into those clothes. We only care about how our bags look against the bags of those around us, rather than caring that we can be one who owns a bag among many. Or even that we can be among many. This is the detriment of culture; this pursuit of values that exist only on our placement around objects and conceptual connotations of taste and class. I pity Baudrillard for spelling it out so clearly, and pity more that not everyone wants to challenge his ugly but honest words. We attempt to allow external arguments and material things to sculpt our ‘persons’, and then patch the label with that word, ‘individual’, or those other hypocritical two, ‘free-thinker’; rather, we are individually letting things and people think for us freely.

So here we sit; beside ourselves, attempting to catch a glimpse of how we look next to our name-brand and lifeless things. Our soon-becoming a godless people puts us closer to these inanimate objects; or rather, just the omnipotent visions we place upon these objects to replace the necessity of our yearning for that being beyond that we have just ignored. “I don’t have ‘god’, so just give me some things to make up for it.” Even worse are the ones who claim the deity without providing a reason for one to believe their belief. What a mess.

We don’t see ourselves. We see what it is that is near to ourselves, and juxtapose our satisfaction around that vision of being beside who we are. We need to come back down, and back around to seeing what we really see. I really see this screen, and this keyboard, and I am really hearing this music, and it really is almost midnight, and this is really being written. There is no one to see this for me, but me myself. And I see it, and I know it, and that is where the value lies.

Our Own Unreasonable Selves

Many believe unreasonable people are difficult to deal with because; they allow their emotions to overcome them. I ardently disagree. I think unreasonable people are difficult to deal with because they are unreasonable. I think the way you feel is more of a method; it’s more a mode of reason rather than the effect itself. Someone calmly not using the cognitive logical faculties within their minds is vaguely different than someone screaming out at you in the same frame of mind. And it seems as though appeasement is the only (if perhaps just abrupt) liberator from such daft social interactions. I would consider myself (in if at least most situations) a relatively reasonable person, especially in my actively and less intimate social experiences, but then I also consider myself more emotional than many others. But I do not serve these emotions, and I think perhaps that is the fundamental difference in how it is I interact versus those who most find insufferably difficult to bear. A person unable to acquire their reasoning to endeavour around the arena of thought and discourse I would rather think as lacking the necessary emotions required to be considered an “overly” sensitive person. But then, perhaps there is a problem in assuming the relevance between someone’s sensitivity and someone’s reason. Are these mutually exclusive? Do my abilities of reason play a separate role than those of emotion?

April Perhaps

I am unsure as to whether I am hopeful or wishful. Perhaps both. I am connected. I am hungry. I am prepared to live check-to-check. I am prepared to beg, and prepared to command. I am here. I am there. God is everywhere. I am not. Perhaps neither. Perhaps. April is deep, but May isn’t shallow; so where shall I be?