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| The Search For Something Beautiful | |
| By erinburger | ||||||
| 20 January 2008 | ||||||
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Hi , This is one of the first proper pieces that I've written . So any comment or criticism would be great . Thanks. Erin Autumn 2001 Lately we had been indulging in a comprehensive alphabet soup of illicit and possibly dangerous substances. At 16, my curiosity was compounded by the fact these chemicals were illegal. That even in the grimiest clubs they were spoken about in hushed whispers. Despite what better qualified agencies might tell you it wasn’t peer pressure or a broken family, rap videos or economic depravation. It was curiosity, plain and simple. The lists and leaflets given to us by schools and youth clubs served not as a warning but as a challenge, a list of opportunities. ‘Ahh, yes.’ The world’s awash with drugs you can have for unhappiness and pain. Prozac, Zopiclone, dainty blue Valium prescribed by tired NHS doctors, made by filthy corrupt multinationals. Or Speed, MDMA, LSD, Cocaine, Heroin. Prescribed by the street; sold by small time thugs and drug dealers, who were obviously crooked too. But at least they never lied about it. From the first clumsily rolled spliff, I was enthralled. It opened up a whole new world that was full of semi-insane laughter and pretty lights that had its own rituals and laws and ethics. This was a space distant from everything. Somewhere quiet. Where everything else stopped. Sometimes, it was glorious. Everyone laughed and even in the dingiest flat light was iridescent. Sometimes it was harsh and cruel. The hunger in my belly and the cold in my toes were unbearable. It was a world of persecution and fear even the friendly voices of TV game show hosts dripped with mocking. It wasn’t quite heaven and hell. But then it wasn’t quite reality and maybe that was the point. Got to be careful though, watch ya step, don’t get high off your own supply. Never let them see how scared you are, head up, handle it. The casualties of this life are everywhere. There’s a fine line between pleasure and insanity. I remember watching speed freaks, bundling in and out of flats and bed-sits. Manic, totally manic lost in some deep veined psychosis .No happiness, no pain, no fear, no love, no joy. Just uncontrollable, self-perpetuating agitation. It all seemed so cold, so impersonal. Talking blindly into the wind, jabbering about past abuses and traumas for the benefit of anyone that would listen, or at least pretend to be interested. No one ever did though; it was just another 100 lines of bullshit.Then there was the smack heads, different faces, different stories but all with the same shuffling walk. Pushing beyond their exhaustion and hunger. Battling. Searching for something to fill the gaping open holes in their chests. Always searching for that little bit more. But there wasn’t enough. There’s never enough. Somewhere between the smack heads and the civil servants, between stolen TVs and Caribbean beaches. Between the ravers, the gypsies and the top shop clones. Between toothless, tattooed thugs and well-meaning pop-stars who try to save the third world. Somewhere between being high and being tired, between working and being fired. Between originality, love and warfare. Somewhere between all this begun the search for something beautiful. “Acid is wasted on the young”.That’s what he told me. The friendly old hippy with colourful clothes and even more colourful ideas about the universe. I can’t even remember where I knew him from, but there he was anyway. He’d welcome me into his house with gratitude and firm happy handshakes. Acid in this house was always treated with an enormous sense of occasion. He and his friends would play old Pink Floyd records, light candles and put on the most extravagant costumes. Batman outfits, flowing Victorian dresses and multi-coloured silks all added to the festivities. Today he is dressed as a nun.I suppose in situations were your sanity’s at stake it is important to foster a sense of the ridiculous.“Acid is wasted on the young”, The Nun told me again firmly.He was right, I never told him but he was right. All the truth and religion and vanity. The truth’s all bollocks of course, but that’s not the point. Before acid was always about something else. In the 60’s it was peace and love. Kaleidoscopes of colour and Jimmy Hendrix. In the 70’s it’s the earth gods and stone circles. Today, you neck a tab and you’re most likely to see the end of the world. Sneering capitalist faces burning into your eye sockets; cuts of Threads running through your mind, hiding from low-flying planes. The world’s too real. Since September we’ve all been waiting for the flash. Nuclear missiles don’t have lights. That’s what I told myself. Trying to edge away from the idea these were my last minutes on earth. But of course if you can’t see them, that opens a whole new world of terrifying possibilities. The love’s lost nowadays besides, it always seemed undignified to me; to look for spirituality in a world of fear, concrete and cheap lager. It would be some kind of subtle submission. Kids just want to get of their faces, dance and forget they exist. Not try to unravel the intricacies of the universe and see God. The world is ugly, we are ugly and infinity’s a fucking long time in a place like this. So we neck pills, dance, fall in love with each other and celebrate our mortality. Savour the sweat and the beauty of our own short lives. Ecstasy though truly was a revelation. The most touching, beautiful, tragic parts of your life are crushed into small pills that fall like candy through your fingertips. They dissolve with a bitter taste on your tongue but transform it all into a night of bliss. Each moment is divine. And everyone is beautiful, you look in the mirror and realise that Shit, you’re beautiful too. The joy is pretty and delicate but lays heavy on your chest as you proudly proclaim your love for absolutely every motherfucker in the room. Walking down the street everyday sights stop you in your tracks. A Street light slinging a tepid neon glow behind a sycamore tree becomes a sight of insurmountable beauty .It disables you because of the green and the light and the photo fucking synthesis. You are transfixed. Whoever said the drugs don’t work never saw this. All the knowledge and ideas in the world are at your fingertips. Falling around you like small sharp shards of glass. You could define death, destruction and creation in one sentence if only you could find the words. But the words are never there; this is not because we are uneducated or inarticulate. We are lost in a content frustration, a wonderful incoherence. Words stumble from your tongue with inertia, heavy with sentiment and meaning. In the bright lights of the nightclub, we scream and cheer and shout. But simple human language cannot define this. It is too coarse, too shallow. This probably has no meaning, but tonight we are Gods. We are enlightened beings, this is our eight hours. Nothing else matters. Here, now, we are eternal. The night becomes a series of moments that are intangible but that must be devoured. We gorge ourselves on simple pleasures, the taste of a menthol cigarette, ice melting in our feverish mouths, an embrace from a friend. Satisfied, we smile and move on to new tables and new delights. Before resting in the corner, exhausted from the evenings sensuous feast. The music finally finishes despite numerous protests from the crowds. We leave quietly with a cohesion that is rare but welcome. Tonight, we do not spend 45 minutes locating various members of our group and trying to coax them into the car. Even more miraculously we find the car straight way, walk straight up to it, no problems. We jump in the battered ford sierra, seven of us in five seats but it’s ok because we are smiling and happy. And soon some one rolls a spliff and we are enveloped in blue-grey cannabis smoke.Cannabis smoke is what the world would smell like if you could capture its scent and decant it in little glass bottles. Indian spices, Jamaican forests, sea, sky and Iraqi deserts all combine with a sweetness that has me reaching for the rizlas before I stop and realise I don’t smoke it anymore. Chilled out bliss being replaced by indefinite paranoia months before. It smells good though, really good. We head home down the back roads, swiftly but with care. We arrive at Dan’s flat around 20 minutes later. I’d lived here with him for about 6 months now, my best friend. Didn’t even bat an eyelid when I turned up at 4 in the morning with a bin bag full of clothes. Just threw the keys down and racked me up a line. It’s warm and comfortable with big worn leather armchairs that take up most of the space. You can pass a can of beer or a cigarette without having to stand up. This is a great advantage. We’d wasted many weekends here. Weeks too in fact, in brief periods of unemployment; buying cans of beer 8 for a fiver, smoking cheap baccy smuggled in from fuck knows where, getting stoned and playing computer games on cold Monday mornings laughing at the commuters. When we were working or had money we snort lines of cocaine off the glass coffee table we’d bought from a Kosovan refugee in the flat above especially for that purpose, chatting shit and tanking vodka. Winters were sometimes cold, the choice was between beer and drugs or heating, and we were hardcore. Hedonists. Even in the cold the walls cocooned us from the world outside and the lagers at 9 in the morning finished the job. Some would say this is just being young and stupid, but it’s just your comforts change, as you get old. Besides I always had far more fun being stupid than I ever did being sensible. The electric would go sometimes and that was a bastard, but it allowed for moments of greater intimacy between us. We’d play cards or monopoly and drink brandy, the room dimly lit by candles and we’d laugh. We’d always laugh. The best thing in this flat is the sky. A bedroom window opens up unto the roof; there’s just enough space to climb out and wander about 3 storeys above the streets below. A patch about half the size of a baseball court nestled up between old Victorian buildings with slate roofs. It’s by the sea so the sky goes on forever, right to the horizon over the bay and on clear nights there’s 1000’s of stars. In summer, we’d somehow manage to manoeuvre chairs out there and have barbecues at 3am. I lit a cigarette, grabbed a can of export and clambered out onto the roof. It’ll be a while before anyone noticed I’d gone and I can just sit in the cool and the quiet for a bit. I took a deep pensive drag on the cigarette and looked up to the sky. Gazing into infinity with a mind that’s suddenly able to emotionally grasp the concept was never going to be the wisest idea. But I look up and I’m in awe .Real terrifying speechless awe. The stars are beautiful; they glow with a slight hue, metallic shades like Christmas lights. An externalisation of the MDMA. Crystal clear but far far removed from the real world. I look at the stars but I am captured by the space, the dark. There’s so much space in between, so much nothing. Most of the universe is just nothing. Empty Space and I’m falling. I’m falling up, into the sky. In spring, we will drive for about an hour up the coast, like we do every year. To a spot where the fields lead right down onto the beach. Cliffs cut down one side of the fields about 80 feet high and when the tide was high enough we would run down the fields and leap off into the sea. For a moment you’re frozen in the air. Screaming but still. And it’s the water that’s hurling up to meet you. This is what this feels like; I’m flying up into infinity and infinity’s flying up into me. Plunging into space with dilated pupils. This is probably what death feels like; no poignant last words, no declarations of love to faint strains of classical music. Just emptiness and silence. A void denoting what once was. Real death, the kind that is quiet and sad and devoid of meaning. But here we are, alive. Existing in a brief snapshot of time throwing ourselves into nothingness. There are millions of stars, millions of planets, millions of worlds. So many possibilities just out of our reach. Millions of beautiful things we can never know anything about. The distances between us are too great uncomprehendingly vast. There is too much nothing and tonight I can reach out and grab the emptiness in my hands, swallow it, inhale it, engulf it inside me, gulp it down in giant panic breathes. I am lost in nothing. My thoughts are too fast, speeding troubled through my mind. I am lost and I just want to go home. I’m aware something has joined me on the roof, I don’t know who or what it is but I feel invaded by its presence. A strong arm around my shoulders tells me it’s Dan; I relax into him comforted by the warmth. I suddenly realise I’m freezing. I’m so cold but my cheeks are warm, tears have been falling down my face. They flow with life but have no form. I am not sad. I am not sad, it’s just for a minute there I was really, truly alone. I turn and tell Dan about the stars and the nothingness. He laughs and tells me I’m a silly bollocks. I laugh and he tells me he has Vodka. We clamber back inside the window and crash out in the big leather chairs. Everyone else has gone home or is sleeping; I’ve been out there for an hour he says. We sit drinking cheap vodka with not quite enough coke in it. Later, we make cups of tea and put vodka in them too. And we laugh deep happy human laughs. Laughs that only come from knowing how fucked up the world really is. Time passes and the drugs fade. At 6am we are caught between exhaustion and sleep. I want to crash, pull the duvet over my head and delve into my own little bit of nothingness until at least Wednesday. But I can never sleep. Not for hours yet. There’s a tired desperation that clings to the air at that time in the morning. No one ever mentions this. But its there stinking like an old ashtray in the corner. Threatening to pollute the room with its thick yellow smoke. The last remnants of the pills are clattering there way through my already nervous nervous system, making me edgy, paranoid. But my heart rates falling and slowly bringing my body down. A grey morning creeps through the windows, over the 70’s wood panelling on the walls. Over the obligatory posters urging the reader to ‘smoke pot and fly!’ and more recently to ‘legalise it’. The fear always creeps in with the sunlight, the morning sucking the marrow from the vibrant night before. Momentarily stealing our souls. We cling desperately to our warm glasses of vodka, to our conversation. When the early morning news comes on the channel is swiftly changed, because in this house we are trying our best not to think of death. Instead we watch cartoons, and we giggle. But by now our laughter is fragile and we must be careful not to break it with our clumsy fingers. About 9 we walk to the shop for rizla and lucozade. The world has returned to normality. Mums take their kids to school, commuters cram on buses to get to work. The colour comes back far more robust than it was in the hours before and gradually life begins to feel like life again. But we are apart from them now. Fucking miles away. Driven apart by a mixture of serotonin depletion and our own cynicism. But all is calm, not exciting or euphoric. But calm. Everything is ok. I will go home sleep, eat toast and tomorrow everything will be fine.
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