People love to enact their unexamined automatisms in your face, don’t they? It annoys the hell out of me. Stop enacting your stupid fucking unexamined automatisms in my face you dumb twat, I feel like saying. Have some bloody dignity, would you? I feel like saying this but I never do. What would be the point? No one would understand what I was on about. People aren’t aware that they are forever acting out their stupid unexamined robotisms whenever they get excited. They just don’t get it – they think that these ridiculous ‘acquired automatisms’ – as I like to call them – are a valid expression of their intrinsic individuality. They think that the acquired automatisms are them. That’s the sad illusion we poor human beings are afflicted with, is it not? What a truly ridiculous spectacle we are making of ourselves – and yet we just don’t know it…
Do you know that thing where you’re sitting at a table in the canteen having something to eat or whatever and someone comes over and sits down at your table and then they just won’t stop talking? Well I don’t. I don’t know that thing at all. That never happens to me. No one ever comes and sits down at my table and starts talking to me. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to actually have friends. I wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of people sitting down with you at a table and to feel like part of the group, to be part of the conversation that’s going on. Other times I don’t wonder so much.
Have a bit of dignity for God’s sake, I say to myself. You’re only making a holy show of yourself. Suppose your words belong to someone else, what then? Suppose they aren’t your words at all and they’re turning against you, taking your power away from you, turning you into some sort of grotesque pathetic gimp? Suppose they trap you in a world of lies and sordid deceit? Suppose you languish there, tortured and despondent, wracked with self-loathing and self-disgust, wondering over and over again how you ever let things come to this? Suppose you just can’t forgive yourself for that? Suppose you just can’t let go of all that toxic self-recrimination? Suppose you just can’t help yourself? You just keep on acting out those toxic automatisms over and over again because you don’t have the power not to.
I can hear strange space noises coming at me from all directions – from directions that I didn’t even know existed – and I am afraid. I am terribly afraid. There’s nowhere for me to hide, no comfortable corners left in the universe. I’ve been caught out in the open. Strange and terrible space noises, strange and terrible space noises. Coming from everywhere, coming from nowhere, leaving me nowhere to hide… These noises frighten me so much – I never knew that it was possible to be so very frightened. I never knew a person could have so much fear. I never knew. I never knew. So much fear, so much fear. Who could have guessed it? How could anyone be expected to guess it? What a revelation, what a revelation. It’s a revelation I never wanted to have. It’s a revelation that I wish I could unlearn…
