Exile & the Kingdom

 

Exile & the Kingdom

 

I don’t really want to write. I’m forcing myself to because it’s basically all I have, else my life stands for nothing. I remember talking with Tim Thorpe from Triple R about the dangers inherent in over-creating: the danger in winding up making pieces about the making of pieces. & here we are. I’ve run out of creativity. My mate Terry McCarthy, the fine singer guitarist songwriter bandleader, yesterday said “don’t be so hard on yourself. Go for a walk. Do other things. & no doubt in a couple of days you’ll write something.” But the thing is, I have to write every day, or else I fear fall into a psychosis. Writing is my protection against the abyss. & if I don’t do it, my nerves will implode. Art for me is therapy. I create because I have to. You see I battle OCD & so it is an obsessive compulsion to write. Some days the muse has deserted me & so it feels like a nausea when writing. What Jean-Paul Sartre was talking about. Exile & the Kingdom was what Camus wrote about. I’m in exile. That’s what grief from divorce & the dead does. I’m exiled from the human race. We’re not getting along. I find people all too much. They exhaust me & I exhaust them. I feel like God is Dead. When I pray at night there is the same nausea. I feel spiritually stale. I know I’m drinking too much. It numbs me to the feeling. But it also numbs me to feeling. I need to be in the water. I need to be in the water. Submerge myself in another element coz oxygen & me are at loggerheads. Think I’ll smoke a cigarette. A fuck would be good too. Maybe that’s the real thing & why I feel in exile. Is life that simple? It can’t hurt, I guess. Or can it? I’m repelling people at the minute & who knows maybe I won’t be able to perform with this nausea enveloping me? Hemmingway warned against writing such thoughts. He said it’s the only basis preventative of a successful tale. The light of my loins, to trick up Nabokov. She alone lights me up. My forbidden muse. Thinks only of me as a friend. So yes, in yet another sense, I am in exile. Is that it? The absence of love & of sexual gratification? If only it were that simple.

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2024.