I started off my 12-volume epic poem with the powerful lines ‘The Satanic Mind rises to the occasion and crushes all that stands before it,’ but then lost my footing after this. I faltered and fell, my creative genius petering out all too quickly, leaving me stranded there on the estuarine mudflats of my own exhausted imagination.
There’s not much I can say about the estuarine mudflats! They stretch on and on in all directions, fairly featurelessly. They are very flat, although this is of course inherent in the name. That’s why they’re called ‘mudflats’, after all. Far, far away I can hear the lapping of tiny waves. They’re wavelets, really – not proper waves. Fiddler crabs scuttle this way and that, doing whatever it is that fiddler crabs do. They have their own lives to live, after all!
Do you know that feeling when you are trying to recapture the glory but you can’t and it gets so that you’re not even sure if there ever was any glory in the first place? Perhaps your memory of former glory was false – perhaps you fabricated it? Perhaps you fabricated it out of pure desperation? Because you’re so damn desperate to have some kind of meaning in your life. That’s very understandable, after all, isn’t it? The utter lack of meaning in one’s life breeds an intense desperation for meaning and that super-intense desperation for meaning is fuel for all sorts of delusions. It’s rocket fuel!
Delusions arise thick and fast then, in my experience. They arise to create a veritable jungle – fecund and brimming over with rapidly proliferating life-forms of every shape and hue. You are back in the thick of the primaeval jungle now, I can tell you. Boy are you ever! Flying creatures, crawling creatures, hopping creatures, burrowing creatures, creatures that corkscrew their way through the undergrowth; chocolate-coloured centipedes a meter long and as thick as your wrist swarm over your bare feet. They are loaded with poison in every claw. Iridescent green lizards scuttle up the tree trunks as you pass them by. They move in sudden frantic bursts of energy. The intense tropical sunlight filters down through the thick canopy above, illuminating a world that is profoundly alien to you, and full of dangers that you cannot comprehend. There are many ways to die here and not so many ways to live.
You’re trying to recapture the glory but it has long since fled – you’re left only with a memory of a memory of a memory of your former glory. The original memories of the glory have vanished. Maybe it was all just a fantasy? Maybe you were always merely mediocre, which is the way you find yourself to be now; lacking any genuine inspiration, having to make do with well-rehearsed gimmicks. You’re floundering; you’ve lost your way. You are trying to bravely bluff it but the bluff is wearing thin. People can see through you now. You can see through yourself!
Grinning shamefacedly you continue on your endless trek across the vast featureless mudflats of your own impoverished imagination. You’re stuck at the bottom of the giant entropic sinkhole, you realise. You’re in the bargain basement. You’re in a null world. You’re dancing the entropy tango. Creativity doesn’t exist here; in this realm when you try to express yourself you have to use words that are not your own. They are second-hand words, they are dead words, they are words that have been supplied to you by the evil world-machine and this is a gimmick that soon wears thin…
