Disastrous Combination...

Being in love and having writer's block. Good God, why don't you just club me over the head and/or chloroform me up, right now?

I feel like the Modernist agenda made flesh. I AM the failure of language. My ideas drift, well-fed and complacent in my head, like a blundering lot of sheep. No sheepdog of logical structural framework will surface in order to corral them into sense, into expression.

As if to ram home the insult - to thoroughly augment my distress - a multitude of memories keeps throwing itself against the straining walls of my mind. It wants out. It will not abate until I find myself, sprawled in my blanket, eyes unfocussed and mind in flight towards HIM again.

I thought that healthy love would make me feel like one of those battery-powered flashing pens; frivolous but paradoxically justified by the very fact of my frivolity. In a world of ruthless linearity would come a dancing rupture. In the cynical Eden of progression - studyworkhouseholdtaskscareerADULTHOOD! - would arrive a snake offering me the most ironically important knowledge of all. The knowledge of an event beyond my control, beyond my understanding and most thoroughly beyond my rationalisation.

Yet in my feeblest moments - I find myself naked! Robbed of my critical capacities, endowed with an art that leads me back, always to HIM. Him, him, HIM! I find myself divided into an unholy Trinity: the Admonisher, the Sufferer and the Artist. The Artist seeks to further the capital of distraction, banking as she does on the antagonism of Admonisher and Sufferer. I see the Admonisher stood over the Sufferer, curled at her feet. Here we have the classic mother-daughter dynamic in play. The elder warns the younger that great things are stake. The younger, attempting to direct her trembling lips through reluctant weeping, concedes - accepts the remark - but her heart is rebellious. It whispers its fears that the elder is perhaps not as experienced as she might like to say, that perhaps there is a certain wisdom in the foolhardy courage of inexperience that well-travelled cynicism lacks.

Schizophrenic is the experience! Surrounded on all sides by the doors of obfuscation, I knock like a game-show contestant: tentative, beating regular like a tiny, desperate heart. My own desperate intelligence is paralysed by a Freudian crisis, meeting such phrases as 'self-reflexive text', 'settled cultural authority,' 'fissiparous': to kiss or to kill? All the while, the hounds of love pursue me, waiting their chance to drag me into somnolence, overcome as Cerberus by Orpheus.

During the the day, he held me to his chest; during the nights, he pursued me like a gender-bent Actaeon - should not I be Artemis? - claiming me again, again and again. 'Enough!' I tried to scream. 'I love you!' The words refused to come in my state of animal panic. If I could, I would have supplicated him: 'O beloved, come as my handsome prince! Deliver me from the state of sleep and inexpression whence I suffer!'

Then, I recalled, Sleeping Beauty was no feminist. The spell broke, I fell back; into an affliction of the most Modernist inarticulation; my prince looming in the shadows with my fleeing last shreds of inspiration - and the tears welled in me for want of confidence.