Doors That Won't Open

Well that was the weirdest birthday on record.

I spent most of my weekend knocking on doors that remain unopened both literally and figuratively.


I spent most of the weekend trying to locate Georgia. This I spectacularly failed at.
As perhaps the one person who really has any understanding of me at all or is even interested in attempting to understand me; she is an important friend. That I tramped up to her house (Far end of Carlisle) no less than four times, twice when she wasn't there, twice when all appearances indicated that she was in, but no one answered the door, even when all the lights were on.

Pauley and Jenny, who I was staying with, on my last but one day I tramped to their house (The other far end of Carlisle) twice, and yet again, lights on, nobody answering, even though I knew that they were in.

I have come to the incredible knowledge that all doorknockers are completely inadequate at fulfilling their job description.

Thankfully Lindsay (How much do I love that girl) put me up my last night.

In other news: The Holy Trinity: Haley, Amy and Sabrina. The three girls from Carlisle I love/care about the most. All made an appearance this weekend. In various ways.

Saturday, I got very very depressed, having lost Pauley, having realised that there was no one and nothing in Carlisle for me any more. I sat in The Source and chewed over my sweet potatos and dip and finally sent a text message I vowed I'd never send.

I told Haley I loved her.

I thought I had been doing well. Hadn't seen her in a couple of years except slightly at graduation, and a couple of hours in Scarborough with Mark. And yet. It wasn't as if I was moving on, or as if I even wanted to move on. She's someone else's girl, always was. Not even mine to lose. Yet feelings are feelings. I'd known for a long time that I had to make those feelings known to her before I could feel like I could look at another woman and not miss Haley. Every day for the past year, I have thought. I'll text her today telling her how I really feel about her. And every day has gone by and I had not done it, and the longer it went on from the very first time I met her, the harder it became to say anything. There were times, I think, that she would have left Mark for me, but I was too chivalrous to take advantage of those times because it would not have been right for me to take advantage of her loneliness or depression.

And I do it now! When she's been back with Mark for two years. When there is not a snowball's chance in hell of her saying anything except what she said to me which is perfectly justified and barely perfunctory. Again, like when I told Natalie that I loved her, or even when I told Kat that I had a crush on her, both of whom I had feelings for, which I'd had for years. Neither of them really grasped what I was trying to say. Neither wanted contact with me really, after I'd told them, and I expect the same with Haley. They assume that whatever I appeared to be to them was something false because whatever I was to them was underpinned by feelings that they didn't know about or couldn't return or whatever.

Maybe it was false, but if so, every single thing we do is false. Every friend we make is false. God knows I've had that proved to me on enough occasions, but I never expected it of myself. Every friend I have is more important to me than myself. There is nothing I ask of anyone, and yet, am I false? With Kat? With Nat? With Hayley? With the women in my life? With those I want to be with and yet not just fail to be with them but actively shoot myself in the foot over them?

More on that later, but for now, on to Amy.

Amy, I love Amy, she's brilliant, she's wonderful. I fancy the hell out of her. No feelings, but by God I could develop some. Or at least I could have until three or four years ago when she got a boyfriend and moved out of Carlisle to Edinborough.

And that was the last we saw of her pretty much. Until Saturday.

I'd already left The Source, having eaten my Sweet Potatos and dip. I had gone to The Sportsman to see Sabs and Lindsay, of which more later. When the absent Pauley, rang me to say that he was on his way to The Source. So I tramped all the way back to Denton Holme.

Pauley was in the back room. Not that I knew this. I was in the front room. When Amy walks in. I only saw her from the back but I'd know her anywhere. She sees me and gives me a hug and kiss hello. And sits in the corner. I would go and talk to her except I'm talking to Jody. (A guy, of whom, more later) So when I finally get rid of him, I have to go and join Pauley as he has found me, and seeing as Amy is deep in conversation with someone else. I tell her not to go anywhere without coming and catching up properly.

Of course she goes. Of course she bloody well goes. Why wouldn't she? It's not like I couldn't stop talking to a guy I'd just met in order to talk to an old friend I hadn't seen in years? Someone whom I absolutely adore and is someone with so much joie de vivre that she's infectious.

No I couldn't.

Jody.

Or more accurately: Jody and Sabrina.

I had met Jody before, not in person, but down the end of a radio set. I was in Sabs room and he was outside and I pretty bluntly told him to go away. My exact words were, if I recall correctly: "Look mate, the lady don't want you and you're just embarassing yourself, so do yourself a favour and fuck off."

Which he did.

However he later came back, and back, and back. In fact, every time Sabrina gets rid of him, he comes back. As Lindsay said. He's like a boomerang. And, not a particularly pleasant one at that. Sabrina has kept us apart for the very good reason that we would kill each other if we ever met.

So we met without her knowledge. Without our own knowledge either. Sat in the Source with no one but each other, he asks me to look after his pint. I do so and he joins me. What then occurs is a masterclass in infiltration. Mainly cos I was depressed and spent half the conversation unaware of who he was, and then the other half wishing he would go away so I could talk to Amy.

He was aware of who I was almost from the off, just my name. He got it. He asked me pertinent questions, which I answered, wondering how he was guessing so much. I was polite and asked him about himself in return. We had quite a lot in common. It was only when he told me that he had gatecrashed a party of Jehovah's Witnesses the other day which had been an interesting occasion as he was an ex Jehovah's Witness himself. At which point I gave a huge mental AAAAHH! So that's who you are.

He was playing a game. I wasn't. Which is why he left, thinking that I was quite unaware of who he is. He also thinks I am a nice guy, which I am, and no threat to him, which really depends on how dangerous he becomes to Sabs.

Sabs meanwhile, is an idiot. A poor self destructive idiot who can't stop playing with fire. Which is all the more annoying considering that I love her to bits and, even though I can't be there to help sort her out mentally any more, woe betide anyone who hurts her physically. Especially Jody. Which should be fun, considering he seems to be bigger than me.

I didn't see her this weekend. Or at least I did see her twice. Once when she was drunk, and once when she was very drunk.

I did knock at her door at one point. She was having sex with Jody. Before we met.

Everything screams out to me, leave her be. If she wants to mess up her life she is gonna mess it up no matter what you do. She is pretty good at messing up her life. On the other hand I will never stop caring about her.

Maybe this too is false? Maybe I care because I am in love with her? It is not hard to be in love with her, every boy who lays eyes on her falls in love with her. Maybe the fact that I managed to walk away from her this weekend is also false, a falsity of falseness?

I think she lied to me. I don't know. I think it. I have been away too long. She does not trust me like she did once. Yet at the same time, she knows that I will always be there for her, always. I felt it when she hugged me, even while barely conscious, I felt it. She used to call me her protector. Debbie used to call me that too once, even though she too has drifted away from me, or perhaps I from her, from both of them.

Yet, once appointed to that position, it stands for life.

Both are dying. Sabs and Lindsay. Smoking dozens a day, drinking themselves sick. Lindsay has a wracking cough that screams cancer. I can't protect them from that. Now or at any point in the future.

And now I am back at home, alone. Essentially, always. I am 25 now and I am, have nothing. No one. I knocked at doors and no one but no one opened them. No one invited me in. No one offered me shelter or companionship, no one even knew I was there as no one could hear me knocking. They weren't in, or they were sleeping. They had other visitors or were having sex.
They might once have invited me. Sometimes I was even guest of honour. Now I am lucky if they leave the curtains open so I can look inside through the windows. And see my friends, happy, not happy, in love or lust or hatred, still alive, a little older, a little dusty, fine tuning their lives.

And I sit outside their door and I hear them. And I am glad that they are happy, and that is why I can turn and walk away from their door, although not without posting them a letter perhaps, as I did with Haley.

My fate is always to be on the outside of the door. I have become so used to wandering out by myself that even if someone were to open a door to me, could I walk through it?

No. I know the answer, doors did open. I have simply and methodically shut them again. Almost as if I have a wish to be a martyr. But the real reason is that I cannot live, cannot survive in just one house. I wander along, looking at each door in turn, noting it's beauty. I knock, expecting no answer, and even if there is an answer I simply look through the doorway for a time and then turn away.

Not content, no, I am not happy. Maybe that is my lot, to be unhappy, to be alone and afraid but mentally and physically incapable of taking that one step.

Georgia, Hayley, Sabrina, Amy, Debbie, Lindsay, Ruth, Natalie, Kat, both Naomi's. I love them all. And what of it? What of my love in a world where no one wants it, where I am of no consequence. These are, or were, some of my best friends.

The answer surely lies in proving that I am worthy, of living, not just of loving. But I have no need for proofs. I am not going to be a person who sets the world alight with his sparkling personality , charming wit or even displays of genius. I simply am, and as always, that is good enough for me.


I am, I am, I am, I cry
Remembered and Foretold.

The Sixth Sense

Still reading Huxley.

In Heaven and Hell, Huxley states that Science is free to look into the knowable world. The world around us. But that no one has attempted, legitimitely, to look into the unknowable world and that certainly no one has ever attempted to catalogue, categorise or improve our ability in that unknowable world. His words are still true today close to 80 years later.

The unknowable world being that of the unconscious. That state in which we exist during a trip, hypnotism, religious experience, dreams, meditation or near death. The actual experiences that the brain goes through, that we consciously or unconsciously experience while under these influences.

No one, to my mind, has found a unifying idea between these seperate states of existence, no one that is except Huxley who wished to expand our knowledge of such experiences and expound them and discover the true mind or universe or supreme being or whatever. Basically he was on the search for Life the Universe and Everything, just as so many people have done. The fact is that he has found a unique path which no one but no one has seen fit to follow since, possibly because the experiences of Mind are unquantifiable, unrecordable, unreliable and unverifiable by current scientific means. Therefore the only people who embark on such studies are, by nature, quacks, even Huxley. Although Huxley was one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, your average psychic is not.

While not aspiring to be Huxley and having no Peyote or Mescalin to partake of the experience myself I just want to record my own thoughts on the nature of Mind, Life, Universe and Everything.

It is blatantly obvious to anyone with eyes to see that we as conscious beings, do not have control of our Minds. We are capable of thought, and this has become such an overriding thing that it drowns out our natural Mindscape.

Human Beings have a Sixth Sense. It is a very obvious Sixth Sense, not at all mystical. We are able to detect Electricity on a very basic level. Stand underneath a pylon, and even discounting the evidence of your eyes and ears you would know that an inordinantly large amount of Electricity was passing overhead. Walk into a room with your eyes closed and most people would be able to detect if an electrical appliance (of sufficient wattage, such as a telly or computer) is operating, even if that appliance is completely silent. But, probably, they would have no idea how they could guess such a thing.

All animals have this sixth sense. In the build up to a storm, animals will become agitated hours before.

Birds are also apparently capable of navigation through magnetism. It is entirely possible that many animals are aware of magnetism, so closely related to electricity it would not be inconceivable.

And yet we do not admit that we can sense Electricity. We have five senses that we are aware of. See, hear, feel, smell and taste. Thus the mystery of the sixth sense that has no apparant apparatus but plugs directly into our brain. We accept that we have five senses and do not attempt to search for what the brain is capable of feeling by itself.

This is what Huxley was trying to find, he takes the theory that the senses/consciousness is a reducing feature. Our senses/mind take in an incredible amount of information. Consciousness reduces that information to what is important to what is neccesary for survival. This is an excellent theory. Humans are not very specialised animals. We can survive in almost any conditions. As our ability to survive has increased, our information intake has reduced as we need less information to survive than the average animal. Most animals have at least one super enhanced sense - Dogs have incredible noses, Owls have excellent hearing and eyesight. Dolphins and Bats have senses that allow them to recieve sonar or radar, certain Lizards and snakes have heat vision, or rather heat taste.

Our senses by contrast are ridculously average. We are capable of seeing in TriChromatic Colour, but that is a freak genetic mutaion rather than anything useful. Most animals get along quite happily in black and white. One day our eyes may mutate into QuadroChromatic organs, which will make what we see now seem very dull and tame. Our hearing is quite good but nothing spectacular, smell is almost pointless, we have to stick our noses into a rose to smell it. Taste is pretty much pointless, having evolved only to stop us eating poison although I am personally glad that we do have it. Touch is not bad for the organs that utilise it (hands) and pretty rubbish in other places. We have no frame of reference for how well other animals sense of touch is developed apart from the Cats Whiskers perhaps.

Now how do we define Sense? Sense is the tools through which we percieve our environment. It is the traditional belief that we have five organs to do so which are then made sense of by the brain.

What may be evident however is that the Brain itself may be a sense organ, that it may be able to sense that which is other. If we look at the physical world, we find several phenomena which cannot be percieved - Magnetism, Radiation, Electricity, Gravity, Light (which cannot of itself be seen, it merely illuminates), Waves (Radio, Micro, Sound, InfraRed, UltraViolet).

Recently there was an experiment conducted in which people attempted to predict the person who was about to ring them on the telephone. The success rate was 70%.

There could be no physical perception of this knowledge through any of the five senses. How then could such knowledge be acquired? There are two possibilities. The Telephoner and the telephonee were in some kind of telepathic contact. Attractive but coming close to the realm of fantasy. Or the electronics connecting the two phones provide a certain pattern which although probably undetectable to the conscious mind, buries itself in the unconscious mind as a recognisable connection to the person calling, reinforced through repetition.

We know that humans are capable of detecting electricity somehow, it is easy for an individual to test themselves, but because we have made no attempt to develop our brains beyond simply an analytical computer, unlike our other senses which we are conscious of and develop from birth; because we surround ourselves with electricity while barely a century ago, humans and other animals experiences with electricity were scarce and confined to lightning (a threat to survival, albeit rare, but therefore a need to sense it) our sense has dulled. We are not even aware that we sense it.

Now for the hypothetical ideas. Our Brains work on Electricity, if we can detect it, if our unconscious can recognise patterns, is it not possible that we can detect each others Brain Patterns? Most telepathic claims are hoaxes, a very few are not, amongst twins especially, Hypnotic regression to a past life? Same thing. Some people have great eyesight, some don't. If the Brain is a sense organ there is no guarantee that everyone can sense to the same degree. Admittedly the electrical output of a Brain is low to very low but this is a suggestion of a possibility, nothing more. We know almost nothing about Mind as a sense or otherwise.

If we are capable of sensing Electricity, is the brain also not capable of sensing Magnetism? Possibly not from an evolutionary point of view, we diverged from birds and dinosaurs probably long before this developed. Humans have never needed to mass migrate on an annual basis. We have had visual clues such as the sun and stars and latterly maps and compasses. But that does not rule out the possibility of sensing magnetism if we know how. Who has not held a magnet in their hand and tried to feel the magnetism with their fingers, tried to push two magnets together and wondered at the invisible force between the two or attracting the two. Magnetism is related to Electricity so again it should at least be investigated. But we live with the Magnetism of the Earth our entire lives, how would we possibly separate a sense that is entirely stimulated all the time that we don't even know exists (if it does exist that is)? Birds know the difference however. They know the difference between two directions and when to fly in whichever of those two directions through nothing other than thousands of years of ingrained instinct.

Here we run into the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, how do we even start to explain something for which we have no words to describe even if we knew what we were describing? What exactly is feeling normal? What senses are operating and are we aware that they are operating? Are there senses which we are unaware of but which are in constant operation and so contribute to feeling normal? Are there senses which we are unaware of and rarely in operation therefore possibly contributing to instinct? Gut Feelings? Supernormal/Supernatural Phenomena?

Thus we come back to Huxley. In this case. We know what we know. We know that we have at least five senses. If a person is deprived of these five senses, what does that person still have? What is that person still able to percieve? Huxley talks of sensory deprivation as a transporting device along with drugs, hypnotism, great art and everything else that loosens the reduction of the brain to survival information. Once the brain opens up through one of these paths to take in more information than is strictly neccesary for survival then the brain experiences a drugs trip, a religious epiphany, a dream or nightmare, a hypnotic regression to a past life, an imagination overload. In all these things clear images become apparant to the individual. There are several possibilities here: That the senses become super sensitive and that what is percieved is in actual fact reality or has a basis in reality; that the brain is recieving information even though the traditional information recievers are partially or completely shut down.; that the brain is capable of creating something out of nothing.

The third option is by far the most logical, but here we run into further questions. Where do we separate Mind from Brain? The Brain is us, The Mind is us. Deprived of Sensory information we retreat from our bodies to ourselves, our innermost mind which gives us? Exactly what we have just retreated from. A dream is a reality only slightly warped from the waking world. We dream within our own experience. Yet how do we see without eyes? Hear while we sleep? Our unconscious Brain takes our memories, or our thoughts and translates them into our own private reality and then delivers this to itself. Either in imagination or dreams, through hypnotism or hallucinogenic drugs. What our conscious mind recieves constantly is reality, whether real or invented by our unconscious mind. If our senses are lost they are replaced by Mind. Does a person born blind, with no conception of vision, dream in the same way we do or are their dreams shrouded in darkness also? Is their Mind capable of vision even if there may be no logic or order to it, if so, this is the man whose Mind is truly free in imagination.

This has one major impact. People in a "vegetable" state, are conscious, however damaged the Brain, we know that the Mind demands a reality in which to exist, even if it has to invent one. A Mind cannot exist in perpetuity without sensing the world except by imagining that it senses the world. If the body lives, the Mind lives.

More questions than answers, more guesswork than evidence but philosophical enquiry is full of such. Hopefully others will tread where Huxley advanced boldly. If we do not try to examine Mind properly, or even improperly, we might as well still be climbing trees in Africa. We have the physical world mapped to such a degree that we can see the entire room and are examining the nooks and crannies. Mind and Brain however we don't even know if we are even in a room, we certainly don't know what the furniture is or how to use it.

Dreams

It's a relief to start dreaming again really. I'm such a heavy sleeper I don't ever remember my dreams, well, not for the past 10/12 years anyway. I can remember maybe two dreams from that period, so to have two in two days is quite nice really. Recording them for posterity.

The first was kind of inspired by my reading both The Conquest of the New World by Bernal Diaz and The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. I was in the middle of a massive forest or jungle and on a road. A massive road that wound through this jungle. There were other people further up or down the road but I was walking by myself. It wound around some buildings and underneath some columns with buildings above I think, there was a large square hole beyond this with what was probably lava there, although the road went past this so you could walk past it and the hole was symbolic, the whole road was symbolic, all the things that were on it. Further up it crossed a river or ran parallell to a river and I could look back and see people walking down the road behind me on the other side of the river with a long way still to go. Other things happened but I don't remember now.

The funny thing is that the whole image is so completely familiar to me that I would swear blind I'd read about it in Bernal Diaz, except I know for a fact that I didn't, nor in any of the other South American set books I've recently read and yet the image and symbolism of that road is so clear in my head I feel that I must have read about it somewhere, for the life of me I don't know where and doubt that I have. This leaves the probability that my subconscious came up with the whole damn thing including the symbolism which I understood and now lies just out of the reach of my conscious mind. The hole in the road is symbolic as is the fact that you can walk past it without needing to jump it. I was also walking the road as a tourist, down a road of the ancients, something that they had all had to undertake.

The other influence was Aldous Huxley, as I read of his Mescalin experience I feel that I know exactly what he is talking about, even though I've never taken drugs, I understand the theory that the senses are actually a reducing device, and I believe it because I know that at times I have broken through that myself when you feel that you hold the entire universe in the palm of your hand and have opened your mind to the galactic consciousness and the eternal void of beauty and however else you might explain or describe it, words being entirely useless in this respect.

To return to the dream, everything around me was in extravagant colour, as Huxley describes his experience, everything took on an importance of it's own that it was impossible not to look at things and actually see them for the first time and find the eternity of things in full view of your eyes.

It's like seeing the whole world in glorious technicolour when previously it was entirely in monochrome.

It was a religious experience, but not a Christian experience, I was walking the path of a long dead tradition, a long dead religion, whether it was Aztec or something made up entirely in my own head, but I felt the power of that disappeared essence. It was a pilgrimmage.



The dream I had last night was different, entirely. We were driving (Don't ask me who was with me) along a road that ran parallel to a soft beach. A turning appears and we turn left down it. There is a pub with a sign saying "in financial difficulties" Further along the road there is a development. A well designed body of buildings with the sign Building for sale - 10 rooms (Or possibly 10 buildings) - £80.

We enter and the place is wonderful. The room we are in is a library of some sort. There appears to be a laboratory around somewhere. Of course I fall in love with the place. There's a couple of people around and I ask them why they are selling. That's where what I remember ended, but the dream seemed to go on. My dad asking what the hell I was gonna do with it (Completely true to life)

I buy the place but God knows what I did with it. I think I had several versions of the dream, doing different things, maybe I was lucid dreaming and kept changing my mind as to what I was gonna do, trying things out. If I can remember it I was certainly partly conscious. I certainly lived there, in this place where there was almost no one else, just a pub permanently on the verge of closing for lack of business. I do something right at least because people come to this place. I think it might have been my friends but I don't know, it'd make sense if it was. And things were happy ever after.

I don't usually remember any dreams, to the point that I haven't had a period of dreaming for nearly a decade or so. I've had one or two, plus De Ja Vu dreams but that's it. So these are interesting if nothing else to remind myself that I do dream like other people even if I don't know I do.

Both dreams were so real that I woke up and for a while thought that I had actually done the events described.

One dream is about taking a journey, the other is about finding a place to be permanently and while I know the influences of the first at least and can guess those of the second, and both were extremely attractive to me, no meaning appears. There may be no meaning but somehow, perhaps I want there to be a meaning but knowing my unconscious mind as I do I know that something is going on in there.

To die. To sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream.