‘Do the happy things that you do when you want to be happy’, my mind told me. Obediently, without question, I did what it instructed me to. I thought about the happy times that I could remember, or at least that I thought I could remember, I wrote plenty of stuff down in my gratitude diary and tried my very best to feel grateful, I came out with endless droning self-affirmations, like a monk at his prayers, but all to no avail, of course. All to no avail. Nothing ever works, nothing ever could.
The juggler stood on the corner of the street – laughing, singing, dancing, juggling… Hour after hour he stood there, laughing away, singing away, dancing away, juggling away. He never grew tired. He is the Master of the Universe, I realised. He is the Timeless One, the Eternal One. Businessmen in drab suits passed him by on their way to work. Then they passed him by again, on the way back home again. They took no heed of his juggling, having other – more important – things on their minds. Everyone on that street ignored the juggler.
My mind became highly excited at what I had just witnessed – ‘I have seen the Timeless One’, I said to myself. ‘He is not of this world, but nevertheless he sustains it’. But then I looked again, and he had gone – gone as if he had never existed. I had got excited over nothing, I got all worked up for no good reason. The street was deserted – no pedestrians, no traffic, just the ever-present wind which howled around the corners of the office blocks, making eerie sounds as it did so. I stood there disconsolately, unsure of myself, pondering what to do next.
Fragments of newspapers, empty plastic bags, crisp wrappers and chocolate bar wrappers and so on, chased each other around and around in futile circles a few feet above the ground, captured playthings of that ceaseless wind. ‘And so it is for all of us’, I told myself sadly, ‘we fondly imagine ourselves to have life and volition, but in reality we are nameless bits of flotsam, blown hither and thither by the uncaring wind…’
‘Special things happen to people who buy the special products’, my mind said brightly, out of nowhere. Special things, special things, all those wonderful wonderful special things…’ It tailed off after that, obviously losing momentum. It pipes up like that from time to time, full of vigour and enthusiasm, only to fade away again, becoming little more than an incoherent mumble vying feebly for attention with all the other incoherent mumbles that fill my subconscious. As a helpful guide, it leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. Back in the olden days it had been a beacon of hope and good cheer – relating humorous stories by the dozen, coming out with all sorts of interesting facts and figures, snippets of advice and delightfully witty comments on whatever happens to be going on at the time. Nowadays however it is full of static and random incomprehensible utterances. ‘The days of his Glory are gone’, I enunciated carefully, hoping that someone of stature and consequence might overhear me, ‘and now we have entered the Days of the King’s Senescence.’
The part of us that wants to be free, the part of us that needs to be free, is on the end of a short leash. Feverishly rehearsing the routines and protocols of freedom. We need at least the pretence of freedom, if our lives are to be meaningful to us. Without at least the illusion of freedom, the illusion of creativity, the crop will fail. I am surrounded by figures, looming out at me from the mist of my delirium. Faces appear and disappear – some happy and some sad, some gleeful and others full of despair. There is music and people are imbibing drinks as fast as they can. In the corner, in a collapsed state, is my mind. Amidst discordant whirring and grinding sounds, it is coming out with endless self-contradictory statements: ‘That’s right, that’s wrong’, says my mind. ‘That’s good, that’s bad, that’s correct, that’s incorrect.’ It is talking nonsense as usual and that’s how it makes the world.
