I made the point the other day - Holiday season is somewhat unpleasant for me, but also rather productive…I’ve found it promotes reflection on one’s own life and fortunes, past, present and future - that I am very aware that I appear to be dwelling on the sins of my own past. When I first returned to writing - and established a personal brand on social media - I disclosed on more than one occasion that I felt as if I were a ‘‘haunted house’’. I realize that seems needlessly melodramatic, and I am not infrequently embarrassed about my own emotional and psychic sensitivity, but I’m trying to mitigate these feelings owing to what a lady who I know loves me advised me of. She stated that the reason why people read my content is because it is honest to a fault, and that it conveys my emotional pain and psychic distress in a way that does not try to mask its severity and crippling effects; yet at the same time is not gratuitous. I take this very seriously. Women see things that men do not; and a mature man does not disdain their guidance.
At present, there are times when I am reluctant to disclose the degree to which I owe a mortal debt of gratitude to our Mob - this community of ours. The primary purpose of our ‘‘intentional community’’ (as sociologists would refer to such things as during the Cold War) is to be an intellectual and ideological Vanguard. No such Vanguard can flourish however unless its foundation is rooted in genuine social capital; and in our case in particular, the cultivation and re-establishment of social capital is inextricably tethered to our Politics - not merely on grounds of the peculiar features of 21st Century modernity but on grounds that the Enemies of our people have quite deliberately targeted our peoples’ bonds of Faith, kinship, labor and cultural activity for destruction.
I believe one of the reasons why I self destructed so completely, and availed myself to such horrors (proximately caused by my addiction and the utterly macabre style of living that attends addiction of the type that I was mired in) owes to the fact that the annihilation of bonds between people, and the literal ‘tearing out’ of the individual from his historical situation generates a crisis within the sensitive personality. I’ve been told by people who enjoy my Science Fiction brand that they believe I am attempting to convey a Jungian sensibility to the reader, and pay homage to this (now quite antiquated) intellectual tendency. I understand why people believe this to be the case - and I certainly do not take any offense to this sort of speculation - but this is not my ambition.
I never ceased believing in God, even when I most morally and psychologically ill. What did in fact be-fall me was a realization that was similarly terrifying. Any man who suffers any iteration of schizophrenia and related pathologies, abnormalities of mind, will reflect upon his ‘‘inner’’ experience of the world, as he not only realizes that his abnormal thought processes and state of mind sets him apart from his fellow man, but he also must constantly labor to manage a phantasmagoria of delusion and dream-like visionary experiences as well as a primitive and consuming fear. The fear that I describe finds an analogy in drowning - or feeling like one is at risk of drowning. The metaphysical and psychological ‘‘rooted-ness’’ that Man relies upon to mitigate knowledge of his own inevitable, impending Death involves linear consciousness as an inherited trait - I mean quite literally that the individual man cannot face death alone, as one who has been torn out of a shared - and perennially enduring - experience of mind.
Thus my own literary alter ego of Victor von Leers - a man who becomes the monstrous war machine Zartax. Shortly before my Mother left my Father and myself, she discerned - owing to both a feminine tendency towards deep empathy and the fact that she and I shared an incredibly strong psychological bond - that I was enduring psychological terrors that I was not yet equipped to manage. It was at this time - in the years 1988-89 that I first gave life to Zartax. My Mother suggested that the only way to come to terms with my inner terrors and impose rational order on my shattering mind was to describe what I endured and experienced in narrative form. She would scold me when I did not write, and she was my greatest champion, defender and impassioned follower of the literary life of Zartax.
When my Mother left, my heart was shattered - but my mind was not. Because she had taught me to give form to a theretofore formless terror. And in addition to salvaging my mind, she forced me to accept and abide what God had insinuated into my psychic and moral constitution. People tell me often that they are surprised to learn that I write fiction - let alone that my first published efforts are genre fiction. I’ve yet to explain to the un-initiated that I do not in fact write ‘‘fiction’’. I impose structure on that which is most deeply felt and which moves Man (severally and collectively) to his most sanguinary acts. Sometimes the process results in the description of historical events, sometimes it results in a visionary description of possible futures and histories only ‘‘lived’’ in places beyond the limits of temporal vistas.
What do I do? I document possible futures, and the past that ‘‘shall not pass’’. - T
merry Christmas thomas
Having a read back and this one hit me as someone with somewhat similar experiences. LOVE to you T7.