Frozen

marcin-owczarek_05

I’m scared of thinking about the bad thing and so I’m trying not to. I’m shit-scared in case I slip up and do end up thinking of it. I’m frightened in case I find myself thinking of it but I don’t even know what it is. I’m actually terrified – that’s how bad the bad thing is! The bad thing is so bad that any chain of thought relating to it, either leading to it or away from it, automatically becomes as terrifying as the bad thing is itself. Thought is no insulator against fear, no matter what you might have heard. Thought conducts fear just as readily as copper conducts electricity. Thought is a living conduit of fear; it is a veritable highway for terror…

 

Is there any thought that is not part of the recursive chain of fear, I hear you ask? Is there any part of the Kingdom of Thought that is not plugged directly into the fear-supply? No. No is the short answer to that question. The only answer to that question. The entire system of thought is only there in an attempt (in a failed attempt, I might add) to escape from the bad thing. That’s the whole point of the system of thought, that’s what it’s for. And even if we try to STOP thinking, in the hope of putting a barrier between us and the contaminating source of the fear, this doesn’t work. Our attempt to stop thinking is just another form of thinking – a slowed-down form of thinking, a retarded form of thinking. It is ‘thinking in denial of thinking’. It is ‘thinking disguised as not thinking’ and so it still conducts the terror. Fear spreads through thinking and there’s nothing thinking can do to bring itself to an end. That would be like trying to imagine what not imagining something would be like…

 

 

Although I have just said that thinking can’t help us escape fear, and have been quite insistent about it in fact, there is a way in which it can almost help us, albeit a not very satisfactory one. Albeit a very unsatisfactory one, I should say. Thinking can work as an insulator in a temporary way, by which I mean to say, we can outrun the fear if we keep on thinking, if we keep on creating thought-worlds as fast as we can. This is what I have discovered, anyway. That is what I am busy doing at the moment – running away as fast as I can from all thoughts of the bad thing. From all thoughts about thoughts about thoughts about the bad thing. This is my tactic – to run away from the rapidly-spreading fear-contamination in a helter-skelter zig-zag chain of thinking. An evasive chain of deliberately dissociated thinking. It’s not easy – I have to keep on inventing new levels to the game, and then quickly creating new levels on top of those levels as the fear contamination spreads, like wildfire in a dry forest does when there’s a brisk breeze to help it. Leaping as it does from link to link at lightning speed, hot on my heels, relentless in its pursuit…

 

I’m running in a dream and my dream-legs just can’t seem to run fast enough. My dream-legs aren’t working. I’m running on the spot, running in slow-motion as the time runs inexorably out. I’m running in a dream and I’m getting nowhere. I’ve reached the end of the line and there’s nowhere else to turn. I’m screaming inside but I can’t make a sound. I’m trapped in the nightmare. Trapped in a stretched-out moment of unlimited terror. Frozen in my own private bubble of forever-fear. Aren’t you glad you’re not me? Of course you’re glad! Only you are me really and that’s where the irony comes in! You are me – you just don’t know it yet…

 

 

Image by Marcin Owkzarek

 

 

 

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