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Authors: D J Wiseman
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slow-motion parody of conversation someone also said that they loved the other. And someone else replied that they loved the other. And then me, probably me, asked what did love mean? And yes, there are many kinds of love but what kind is yours. And I listened for an answer as she [breathed] slower and deeper and [snuffled] in a way that she only ever does when she is asleep and I waited and listened again until there was no possible [mistake] that she had gone away into whatever she dreams of and there was still no answer.
But I do have an answer. It is the kind of love that cannot see how important it is to give an answer. It is the kind of love that does not see love coming the other way. It is the kind of love that cares not a jot for the other, that can’t smell the burning flesh. It is a [destructive selfish loveless] love that wears the clothes of love over the [torso] of a corpse. It mocks the word and the feeling, laughs at sentiment and anguish. When did it slither in and make its rotten home in that other love that once was there, I can’t see through the fog. I need an [antiseptic aerosol] spray to clean it away and wipe it clean again.
14 th entry
It doesn’t count if you have to ask for it. Love doesn’t count as love if you have to ask if you are loved, even if the answer is yes. I do not want a love that is there when [demanded] but absent otherwise. I want her love and everything that goes with it completely unasked, completely voluntary and more than [volunteering] she must want to give it. I dream of making love ina million places in a million ways and I dream that she would have those dreams too. Not because I dream them, but because she dreams them, not because I have a [fantasy], because she does. My fantasies can only come true if she shares it without knowing that I have it. It is a cruel fantasy to have, it can never ever be made real. I am [marooned] on an island from which there is no escape, never a hope of escape, and I cannot even wave at the [passing ships]. I must hide from them and wait for them to check my island for lost souls because they want to, because they see the island and think that there could be someone there in need of [rescue]. And while I wait my mind becomes fuller and fuller of every thought [imaginable] until it is unable to cope with volume, the [complexity] of every tiny nuance of every particle of thought and races madly away in a [vortex] of [ ]. And amazingly there is a tiny cold [unblinking] point in the centre which sees all this chaos of thought and [synapses] sparking. And the tiny cold centre does nothing, can do nothing to stop it relentlessly churning in my head.
Is it the tiny cold centre that does this scribble in the journal? It seems not, it seems as if that is another person altogether, the scribe who works once removed from the [master’s] hand. The master watches this pen write and these hands move just as it watches everything else. Sometimes it does a little more than watch, sometimes it plots and schemes to free itself of the chaos, to do away with the [cacophony] of nerve ends spitting their messages to and fro.
15 th entry
Sleep. There is no sleep, only snatched minutes in the darkness. I want to sleep a dreamless, blank, dead, numb sleep for a hundred years. I want to lie in suspended animation, maintained but [comatose] like the film, hanging by a wire unseeing and uncaring and unthinking. How long would forever be? Until the electricity failed or the wire broke. Or someone got bored with the idea.
I half fear and half relish that I will lose the job soon. It is becoming so difficult to [concentrate] on, to make sense of the [nonsense] that I write and the nonsense I am asked to write. It is trivial beyond imagination, who gives a shit about anything that comes out the process. It pays the bills and there is not another single thing that can be said for it. And this nonsense, this blurb for today’s rubbish, today’s toothpaste,
But I do have an answer. It is the kind of love that cannot see how important it is to give an answer. It is the kind of love that does not see love coming the other way. It is the kind of love that cares not a jot for the other, that can’t smell the burning flesh. It is a [destructive selfish loveless] love that wears the clothes of love over the [torso] of a corpse. It mocks the word and the feeling, laughs at sentiment and anguish. When did it slither in and make its rotten home in that other love that once was there, I can’t see through the fog. I need an [antiseptic aerosol] spray to clean it away and wipe it clean again.
14 th entry
It doesn’t count if you have to ask for it. Love doesn’t count as love if you have to ask if you are loved, even if the answer is yes. I do not want a love that is there when [demanded] but absent otherwise. I want her love and everything that goes with it completely unasked, completely voluntary and more than [volunteering] she must want to give it. I dream of making love ina million places in a million ways and I dream that she would have those dreams too. Not because I dream them, but because she dreams them, not because I have a [fantasy], because she does. My fantasies can only come true if she shares it without knowing that I have it. It is a cruel fantasy to have, it can never ever be made real. I am [marooned] on an island from which there is no escape, never a hope of escape, and I cannot even wave at the [passing ships]. I must hide from them and wait for them to check my island for lost souls because they want to, because they see the island and think that there could be someone there in need of [rescue]. And while I wait my mind becomes fuller and fuller of every thought [imaginable] until it is unable to cope with volume, the [complexity] of every tiny nuance of every particle of thought and races madly away in a [vortex] of [ ]. And amazingly there is a tiny cold [unblinking] point in the centre which sees all this chaos of thought and [synapses] sparking. And the tiny cold centre does nothing, can do nothing to stop it relentlessly churning in my head.
Is it the tiny cold centre that does this scribble in the journal? It seems not, it seems as if that is another person altogether, the scribe who works once removed from the [master’s] hand. The master watches this pen write and these hands move just as it watches everything else. Sometimes it does a little more than watch, sometimes it plots and schemes to free itself of the chaos, to do away with the [cacophony] of nerve ends spitting their messages to and fro.
15 th entry
Sleep. There is no sleep, only snatched minutes in the darkness. I want to sleep a dreamless, blank, dead, numb sleep for a hundred years. I want to lie in suspended animation, maintained but [comatose] like the film, hanging by a wire unseeing and uncaring and unthinking. How long would forever be? Until the electricity failed or the wire broke. Or someone got bored with the idea.
I half fear and half relish that I will lose the job soon. It is becoming so difficult to [concentrate] on, to make sense of the [nonsense] that I write and the nonsense I am asked to write. It is trivial beyond imagination, who gives a shit about anything that comes out the process. It pays the bills and there is not another single thing that can be said for it. And this nonsense, this blurb for today’s rubbish, today’s toothpaste,
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