Hey all. Sorry if this seems self-indulgent. It's a cross post of something I wrote for my blog today.
While I was writing it I was looking back through all the links that I reference, and I realised that I never really told you guy exactly what was going on with me when I wrote my posts to this thread that you're reading now (and may have contributed to back in the day). I kinda promised myself back then that one day I'd tell you guys the full story of what happened, and having just written as complete an account of it as I'll probably ever write it just feels kinda right to include it here.
This is the full story. Read it if you want.
It's Christmas Day and I'm currently sitting at work. The wait between calls is currently pretty long so I can happily sit typing at Word without anyone minding, and I've decided to ration my book a little so that I don't finish it all in one go. It's called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami, who's pretty much my favourite author. He writes about things that no other author seems to be able to manage, using a style in which he under-writes almost everything. He's a master of omission and has a knack of being able to write about moments in life that are momentous but in a manner which can't quite be bought to the surface.
I've nearly read everything of his that's been translated. It's not all been great. He's steadily improved as a writer over the years, getting better at exploring his obsessions of identity, loss, memory, vaguely leftist politics, sex and relationships and music. I've enjoyed reading him even when he's clumsy, when he shows his hand as a writer a little too much. It gives context to what he does, enables you to see how he creates what he creates. I imagine he operates by a number of simple rules that have become almost instinctive now, and from the configuration of those rules almost any story can be formed into a peculiarly Haruki Murakami-ish tale. I don't know whether that's actually how he writes, it's just how I imagine he writes.
This collection of short stories is the last of his work that has been translated, so once I've read it I'll probably have run out unless I do some digging for obscure stuff or something new gets published. I wonder whether there's any fan translations that you can find online, a literary equivalent of those kind hearted obsessives who write anime fansubs. . . anyway, I'm nearing the end of his English body of work and I want it to last a while, especially considering that as this collection has progressed it's steadily improved, to the point at which the last two have been amongst the best I've read.
In particular, Chance Traveller has inspired me to write something. It's a singularly Murakami piece, in which a thread of barely understood synchronicities leads to a change in the central characters, the kind of story that happens very frequently but sounds made up. If it weren't prefaced with, "Based on a true story" then most critics would scoff at the use of deus ex machina, or would make comments about the writer clearly being visible pulling the strings. It's tough to write stories of this type, because on the one hand things like this actually do happen, and there ought to be some acceptable medium in which to write about them which doesn't spark criticism. Murakami gets around it in the same was as the film Magnolia, with a lengthy introduction explaining the nature of synchronicity and a breaking of the fourth wall to directly address the audience to put the story into context.
Which exactly what I'm doing here, I guess.
I've found that it's usually a little known fact amongst users of the term "synchronicity" that it was originally coined by Carl Jung in his paper Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle. Wikipedia has some useful context for the term that you can use as a first port of call if you're interested in finding out more. I mention this only in passing because Jung himself is one of my favourite authors who I also highly recommend. There's a general sneeriness when he's spoken of in some circles which I think is based mainly on the type of following that seemed to spring up around his writing. A lot of credulous occultist types namecheck him in order to justify their own pet theories. Jung himself has a lot to say on a lo lot of subjects, and in my experience he has a kind of holistic wisdom that would do a lot of people a lot of good, particularly when it comes to dream interpretation. If you're interested then read a lot of his stuff and make sure you get it in the context of the man and his life. It galls me to see the word synchronicity thrown around as though by naming a phenomena you have explained it, especially in this case when I'm not entirely sure that there is a phenomena that properly exists in order to name in the first place. About the most I can say for sure is that sometimes these bizarre things happen that seem to resonate in ourselves in a manner that’s inexplicable.
Anyone who has experienced it will know that it's not an intellectual exercise but almost a physical, visceral thing, as though the alignment of circumstances in the universe has aligned inside you as well, and there's a strange and fulfilling (or eerie) sense of congruence or rightness. It's a bodily sensation, or at least it's experienced as such. So much thinking on psychology misses this out and it's really important, because it's fundamentally not an experience arrived at by analysis after the fact. Indeed the odd thing I've found is that this sense of congruence sometimes precedes the events that are later interpreted as synchronous, which is something that I don't understand at all. Of course I have my own pet theories and fun little models that might account for such things but they're all pretty interchangeable and don't actually matter that much in the long run (I think I mentioned my main pet theory here a few months back as a kind of response to a conversation with Bex Bennett). The super-annoying thing about this intuitive sense that something significant is about to occur is that it's only usually mentioned after the fact, causing people to say very rational things like, "Convenient that you only mention your precognition in hindsight, never before the events." It's the job of rational people to say things like that, that's why we need them. Still, most of the time it's not anything fully formed and so it can't really be spoken about easily. It's more like a tangible cloud of sensation that shows up around events, sometimes before, during or after, sometimes all three or any combination.
As you've probably guessed, all this rambling is a prelude to an account of a series of events that caused me to change my life significantly. It's the story of how I came to leave my wife.
I guess I should start by saying that it was partly my own confusion caused by an odd chain of events that caused me to think my marriage was divinely preordained in the first place. The events that led to us getting together were experienced in a state of reaction and confusion whereby I felt like a powerless agent and wasn't happy about the direction that I thought I was supposed to be headed. The circumstances in which I got together with my wife were fatalistic and disempowering, but due to being generally mixed up about my Christian upbringing, especially surrounding my experience of prophetic ministry that my Dad is so heavily involved in, I believed it all to be divinely ordained.
To anyone who doesn't know, I grew up in a Charismatic Christian church in which the Charismata, or Spiritual Gifts of listed somewhere in Corinthians are still believed to be available today. Those gifts are things like prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, word of knowledge, discernment of spirits, etc. Problematic, eh?
The marriage having been initiated under such circumstances, it required an equal or greater force at the opposite end to break apart. Perhaps no one can understand this apart from other people who have lived with a sense of divine will, no matter how imaginary that might have been. The sense of the spiritual is held at the top of Robert Dilts' logical levels (inspired by the work of Gregory Bateson) for a reason, because it directs everything about a person from the top down, even their own identity. That's one explanation for why conversations with the devoutly religious can be so frustrating, as there are conclusions that they understand but do not accept because of this sense of the divine which overrides everything else about them, no matter how unfounded those conceptions of the divine might be. I know this better than most people.
I've been involved in a number of unhealthily cult-like situations over the years because of the kind of Charismatic church I grew up in. Because of some yearning for the divine and the manner in which authority in a group is wielded the individual gives up their own free will deliberately for some kind of group and/or spiritual sense, no matter how spurious or unrealistic such authority might be. It's a trade-off that might even do some good in the short term (there are many religious converts whose lives are immeasurably better as a result of conversion, see my fascination with Chrissy Moran's blog for an interesting possible example. Jury's out as to how positive it'll turn out for her.) but is ultimately about giving up personal responsibility for your own life and your own decisions. Some religious types argue that when you are significantly attuned to God (whatever that is) then your will becomes synonymous with his will (whatever that is). From some of them it comes across as a hard-won response that they genuinely believe because the manner in which they understand their experience bears it out. From others it's a trite answer. From my perspective it's such a slight belief as to be useless in any practical considerations and it always has to be broken down into specific instances in order to see whether it holds any kind of weight. To paraphrase a song that Johnny Cash either wrote or covered, "It's so heavenly minded it's no earthly good." Beliefs like that require thorough questioning every time they're uttered. In my experience such a belief often becomes a stick that people use to beat themselves with, as they notice their will diverging from what they believe God's to be and beat themselves up for it because they're not good enough. Ask them to evidence how they know it's God's will and ultimately the answer will boil down to faith, at which sometimes the only thing you can do is bow out and say, "Good luck with that."
I need to find a Haruki Murakami quote regarding Aum cult members involved in the Tokyo sarin attacks to fit in here. It goes perfectly. Ah, here it is:
In his own book, Aum and I, he (the surgeon Hayashi) writes the following about the image he had at the time of Aum:
"In his sermon Asahara spoke about the Sambhala Plan, which involved the construction of a Lotus Village. There would be an Astral hospital there, and a Shinri School that would provide a thorough-going education (. . .) Medical care would be so-called Astral Medicine, which would be based on Asahara's visions of another (astral) dimension and memories of past lives he would see during meditation. Astral medicine would examine the patients' karma and energy level, and take into consideration death and transmigration (. . .) I'd had a dream of a green, natural spot with buildings dotting the landscape, where truly caring medical care and education were carried out. My vision and the Lotus Village were one and the same."
Hayashi thus had a dream of devoting himself to a utopia, undergoing strenuous training unsullied by the secular world, putting into practice a kind of medical care he could give all his heart to, and making as many patients happy as he possibly could. These motives are indeed pure and the vision outlined here has its own beauty and splendor. Take a step back, however, and it's clear how completely these innocent remarks are cut off from reality. In our eyes this is like some strange landscape painting that lacks all sense of perspective. Still, if any one of us had been a friend of Dr Hayashi's at the time he was considering becoming an Aum renunciate and we tried to give him some convincing proof that his ideas were alienated from reality, it would have been very difficult.
But what we should say to Dr Hayashi is really quite simple, and it goes like this: "Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that, by following language and logic that appears consistent, you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge."
I doubt Dr Hayashi would be convinced by this line of argument. Using technical terminology and a kind of static logic he would strenuously counter-argue, outlining how proper and beautiful the path is down which he plans to travel. So at a certain point we could do nothing but fall silent.
The sad fact is that language and logic cut off from reality have a far greater power than the language and logic of reality — with all that extraneous matter weighing down like a rock on any actions we take. In the end, unable to comprehend each other's words, we'd part, each going our separate ways.
Reading Ikuo Haysahi's notes, we are often forced to stop and think, and ask ourselves such simple questions as: "Why did he have to end up where he did?" At the same time, we're seized by a sense of impotence, knowing that there was nothing we could have done to stop him. You feel strangely sad.
That's from Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Very much recommended.
Anyway, that was the situation that I'd found myself in. Believing that my marriage was preordained by divine will and beating myself up for my doubts about it. My wife wasn't a Christian when we started going out. I joined a youth work organisation called NGM who did Christian missionary work and they stipulated that in order to join I had to split up with her, because she wasn't a Christian and we were "unequally yolked." That's a reference to a frequently quoted scripture which says that Christians aren't supposed to go out with people who aren't of the same faith. I guess it has a kind of rationality to it, in that religion can be such an overpowering force in a person's life that it makes them incompatible with someone who doesn't share that (see my observations above concerning the placement of spirituality at the top of Dilts' logical levels). That seems obvious as a general observation but becomes vile and inhuman the moment it becomes an unbending law.
I split up with her and joined the organisation. Why? Because I'd given up control of my own life to what I thought was the will of God. I believed joining the organisation was right because at the point in my life when circumstances were made it possible to join enough money was available to allow me to buy by own cymbals to complete my drum kit and therefore have the sufficient equipment. A space had opened up as the drummer in the NGM band Bleach, who after I left were renamed Steve (dreadful, dreadful band). I still have the ride cymbal and you'll see me use the hi-hats if you come to Hunting Lodge gigs. The idea was that we'd go to towns with nothing for kids to do, set up a youth night in conjunction with a local church and they would keep it running after we'd gone on to the next town using local bands and DJs. The point I'd like to make here is that I made a common religious error in that I believed that because the circumstances had made something possible then that possibility was also desirable, and I attached the notion of divine agency to the possibility. This is frequently used to justify all kinds of things. Truth be told I hated my time in NGM. Almost everything I learned there I learned despite them, not because of them. I didn't want to be there and it was the loneliest I'd ever been. I've always found evangelism to be hugely problematic in most forms even when I was a practising Christian, and most of what NGM are about is a particularly wrong-headed form of "cultural relevance," as they'd put it: seeking to evangelise off the back of lame DJs playing crappy big beat and rubbish house as it was at the time, rather than enjoying those things for their own merit. Even back then I thought a lot of what they did was a depressing and useless dead end.
While I was there I wrote to my ex-girlfriend (who would become my wife) frequently. Neil, the singer with Bleach, put it to me that I should set a faith goal for her to become a Christian, some kind of divine deadline. So I did. Meanwhile, for reasons of her own, my ex started going to an Alpha course, which are a forum set up by Christians to explain the faith and are geared towards evangelism, in other words so that attendees become Christian. Again, problematic (I could write a ton about my issues with these courses, but that's for another time). Amazingly she became a Christian exactly on deadline, in a meeting in which my Dad was preaching and my Mum prayed the prayer of the acceptance of Jesus as her saviour with her. Again, do you see how this works? I interpreted the circumstances as meaning that she and I were meant to be together, because she had become a Christian in a manner that made her seem as though she were meant to be a member of my family. So when I left NGM I got back together with her and a year or two after that we were engaged.
NGM still exists by the way. Bleach/Steve do not. This is a simplified account of what took place, so I guess I should also mention that I was under pressure to split up with her before she became a Christian because of people within my own church, most significantly a mentor of mine called Bev. I did as she said because I'd viewed her voice as having a measure of divine authority. I don't blame her for it or NGM, although I question things about them from my experiences of them. At every turn I made my decisions based not on what I wanted, but on a deferral of personal responsibility to individuals, a group of individuals, or my own spurious interpretation of God's will via circumstances. It was a trap and I increasingly found myself mired within it as decision piled upon decision, consequence upon consequence. But the only real cause of the trap was ultimately me.
Anyway, we got married and almost as soon as we did the problems that had been there from the beginning became apparent. I won't detail what they were. They're not especially private. If you know me more than just a little then chances are you'll already know exactly what happened in my marriage. It's just not something I want to put on my blog because it involves things that my ex would not wish to be made known in black and white on a web page.
In some ways the problems that we experienced together are pretty unique. However, those weren't the real issues. The real thing was that my wife and I had totally different attitudes towards change. There was something very wrong with our marriage that she refused to acknowledge or address, let alone take steps to set right, and it was the fact that she didn't take those steps that made me realise that we were incompatible. The actual problem was left for eighteen months to deal with, until I had to fake having a breakdown in order to get her into marriage counselling with Relate (I ay "fake" because I was almost completely emotionally numb at the time). The problem was difficult enough in itself. But it was those eighteen months of refusal to acknowledge it or deal with it that made it clear that the relationship could never work.
Of course, there were plenty of other incompatibilities. Plenty. I won't go into them here, as it's not the point of this account. Suffice to say that in all the problems of the marriage I was mutually culpable, because as a relationship it's part owned by both parties. Many of the problems I myself had helped to create. There were sexual, cultural and religious incompatibilities as well as ones of personality. I mention her inability to adapt as the main issue, because I adapted far, far too much to compensate.
It's necessary that I ask at this point, "How is it possible for a person to get to this stage? To throw away their responsibility for their lives to a religion that cannot be proved and a marriage with someone who any clued up person knew from the outset was completely unworkable from the beginning?" I mean, even I knew it wasn't going to work. I fantasized about my wife dying even before we got together, because then the relationship would end but I would be left off the hook for being the one who decided to end it. I would be innocent in the eyes of God and the church and I would never have to take responsibility for anything. Of course I didn't really want her to die: it was my unconscious flashing me up a warning sign.
I refer you to things I've already written for this blog. A couple of posts ago I mentioned meeting a girl in the local indie disco who I was totally infatuated with, and I hurt myself badly by being with her. Up to that point I'd been developing pretty well as a rebellious teenager who believed in doing what I wanted, when I wanted to do it. Then I'll refer you to a post I made in the Barbelith Magickal Spaces and Cultural Signifiers thread. When relationship with indie disco girl ended badly I rebelled again from that self-directed worldview into a chaste Christian denial of sex and sexual relationships, so that I couldn’t be hurt in a similar way again. I came to believe that nothing good could come of living my life in accordance with my will. I was a little hurt and lost boy terrified of the messiness and chaos of real life. Probably all this stuff has roots back earlier to my childhood and parenting and whatnot, but at that point it become like chasing my tale (pun intended). If something major comes up in future that clearly has its roots that early on then I’ll do my best to get to grips with it when it arises. Any clever reader who has followed all the links will be able to read between the lines and probably diagnose pretty accurately some of what went wrong with my marriage that I'm not going into detail on in this account.
Throughout all this time I was almost completely numb emotionally. I didn't realise how much so until I got out of the whole mess, and I guess it was a defence mechanism so that I couldn't feel the pain of all these decisions to give up on myself and what would make me happy. It certainly made it a lot easier to carry on that way.
As I'm now the kind of person who looks for the good in most situations let me balance the account a little. I loved my wife very much, she was clever and funny and honest and stubbornly adhered to what she thought was right (she was also extraordinarily beautiful which helped, something I'm still shallow enough to get a kick out of). Bev, the mentor I mentioned, is a fantastic person with an incisive wisdom and an amazing clarity of thought. During my time with NGM I formulated most of my technique and theory for meditating and speaking in tongues, which I still do. During my time in church I played drums most weeks, which taught me far more than I ever visibly use now in Hunting Lodge (which only uses very particular parts of my range). In the first weeks of my marriage I had the experiences with dreaming that I shared with Lothar Tuppan that I mentioned here a while back, which kick started my explorations of shamanism, magic and psychology and led to me learning NLP, which was of immeasurable help in putting myself back together again which subsequently led to what I'm currently fascinated by, which is Reichian work and bioenergetics. My understanding of shamanism enriched what I'd learned about drumming in church, enriched what I knew about myself. And the girl from the indie disco was above and beyond the call of duty in helping me put back together the things that she'd helped rip apart so many years before. My Dad and Mum supported me immensely and are the best parents I could ever have wished for. Although being my father's son has bought its own problems don't ever think for a second that I wish I could change that fact that he's my old man. He's always believed in me and always invested me. I love them both. I had great teachers (Terl Bryant, Lyn Swart, Jim McNeish, Robert Dilts, Ian McDermott, Suzie Smith, Tim Hallbom, Bev Webb, Phil Orchard, Caroline Kennedy, Lothar Tuppan, Maura, Danny Lowe, Steve Grasso, Phil Hine, Emma, Jason, Cass, Andrew Lyall, Nnonald Nnuck, Ben Cooke, Sophie Cooke, Mum, Dad), of which I was also one. I learned things about myself and the world and how to change and all sorts of cool stuff that I'd never have learned otherwise. Implicit in the design of any prison is its means of escape. It's a cliche but it can have truth in it.
Right. Now for the story that I intended to tell. This is The Fall and Rise of Seth Cooke. You've had the downer and thank you if you've stayed with me so far. Now for the upper.
As of late 2003 I was working for HSBC, married and two months into my first NLP course. I had also fallen for a girl who wasn't my wife, or rather I'd fallen for the kind of person I believed her to be. It was Halloween and I had two major things that I needed to do that day; go to London for The Financial Sales Awards, in which I'd been nominated for my mortgage sales; and go to my brother Ben and his girlfriend Sioux' place for their annual Halloween fancy-dress bash.
The former took up most of the day. It was a massive dinner event in which Jackie Charlton was presenting the awards. He was pretty funny. I came second in the country for selling mortgages over the phone, which is ironic because I'd chosen the job at the bank to keep my head down and not get noticed after I had such a horrible time with whatever small amount of responsibility I'd had at British Gas (another story for another time). What was especially funny was that I invested nothing of myself into the job, didn't care about sales targets, and that my sales became unexplainably high after I used magic to manipulate the probability of getting good leads. I didn't care about making sales, it was an experiment in seeing whether sigil technique worked for me. I won't go as far as to say that it did, but my intent to become best in the department certainly came to pass.
On the train back from London I felt thoroughly awful. I didn't care about the job but was doing brilliantly at it. It seemed symptomatic of my entire life, in that here I was again excelling at something I didn't want to do. I'd attempted to form a decent band so that I could make music but every attempt had been fruitless and discouraging (bad, bad musicians). My marriage was awful and the only reason we were in counselling was because I'd forced the situation.
On the way to Ben and Sioux' place I stopped off at the Spar in London Road to buy cigarettes and beer. Two girls on their night out saw the award under my arm and the suit I was wearing and laughed. "You go!" they said. "Smash those targets!" If I'd been in a better mood I would have laughed. As it was I felt even worse.
I got to the party and was one of the first to arrive. I was still wearing my suit which I'd purchased for the awards ceremony. Nothing flash, but it was the most expensive I could afford. I joked to the party goers that I fit the Halloween horror theme because I'd come as a corporate whore. Many a true word said in jest. I had a beer and told people how the day had gone.
The girl I'd fallen for was there. She was dressed as Little Red Riding Hood. My wife wasn't there. The Red Riding Hood costume was an eye popper. Low cut and a very short skirt, with painted on scratches on her chest and arms from where the wolf mauled her. She told me that it didn't matter that I'd come second in the awards because I'd always be number one to them (meaning the people at the party). It was a sweet thing to say but totally missed the point of why I felt utterly dejected.
There are a few things that I'll miss out of this account, partially because I don't want to do an injustice to anyone involved, and partially because it's not essential. Relevant perhaps, helps the story out a little maybe, but not the kind of thing to write on a public web page. Sorry.
Anyway, things developed and there seemed to be some kind of charge between she and I that night. And then she started openly coming on to me. In a manner that left no room for misinterpretation. Previously I'd thought any feelings were unrequited. The reality of the situation and the fact that I was so emotionally stunted to even know how I really felt about the person were beyond my grasp. All I could say for sure was that at that moment I was receiving attention that I had been lacking and craving for a very long time.
I asked her whether she had feelings for me in general, or whether it was just about that evening. She said the former. And I told her that I felt the same way, and that if she was interested in doing something about it then I'd be happy to meet up with her in private another time. But not at the party.
Not my finest hour. I'd essentially told her that my ethical sense was dictated by what I thought I could get away with, that I was interested in her but not in public, that I didn't mind cheating on my wife but God-forbid anyone should see.
So I left things there, with an agreement that we would go no further that evening. I carried on with the party, trying to divert my attention elsewhere as much as possible, when my friend Emma came over. We started chatting, mainly small talk, when she asked me whether I'd mind if she spoke honestly with me. And I had that feeling. The one I mentioned above in relation to synchronicities, that sense that something was about to happen. So I told her that yes, I was interested in whatever she had to say, but that we should go somewhere private.
We moved away from the party to the back door of the house.
And this, almost word for word, is what she told me:
"I know you're unhappy. You know you're unhappy. You wouldn't even be looking at other girls if you were happy with your wife. I don't want to see you in this same situation in ten years time. You have to realise that the only person who can be responsible for your own happiness is you."
Emma knew the full situation between my wife and I, warts and all. She had seen what had been happening with me at the party and knew that I'd done next to nothing to discourage the attention I'd been receiving. And she'd delivered a message to me of which she couldn't possibly comprehend the significance considering what was to happen next. None of the three people who were to deliver the same message could have known.
This was in the early hours of Saturday morning. It's important that you know the timings. The Halloween party started on the Friday night and went on well into the rest of the weekend, but I took my leave at around five or six am on the Saturday.
Before I left I took the woman dressed as Red Riding Hood to one side. I told her that I wasn't going to act on my feelings for her, and that the only circumstances under which I would act on them would be if things ended with my wife. I told her that I had a lot to think about and sort out. And then I left and walked home. At least I did that much right.
I spent the whole of Saturday in bed. I was pretty wiped out from the party. I had these strange dreams in which there was a planetary core surrounded by mists and that I was anchoring my memories and experiences to it with thick chains that were miles long. A core with fragments of memory tethered to its surface to stop them flying into the void, with me hammering them into place with these thick, thick chains.
I barely spoke to my wife all day. I told her I was ill and hung over. I was too knocked sideways by the night before even to think about what had happened and get it straight in my head. But one thing was certain. A crack had a appeared in the prison I'd made for myself. There was a possibility. Some glimpse that I could be happy. I was in turmoil and my emotions were coming back, but the fact that crack had opened was undeniable. I kept all this from my wife. I still think she wouldn't ever have understood, but then I set the frame for that by talking down to her throughout the whole relationship and helping to contribute to all the imbalances. I was clueless and I'll do my best never to repeat the same mistakes. I used to complain about my wife never really understanding me, but now I understand that was at least half my fault.
One Sunday I met up with Andrew, one of my best friends, for a drink at the Standing Order. I had tons to tell him. I poured out the entire story from start to finish in much more detail than I've gone into in this account. Andrew did that cool thing he does where he listens. Too few people know how to do that. I know that he's good at it because he can ask exactly the right questions. If I'm half as good at it as he is then I know I'm onto a good thing.
Just as I'd finished speaking to him a stranger invited himself to join the two of us at the table. He was plastered and clearly an alcoholic. He had a strong Scottish accent and introduced himself as Kenny. As soon as he came over I had that feeling again. Something was about to happen.
Kenny was the type to talk without letting anyone get a word in edgeways, and we were both too polite and too concerned about the consequences of telling an alcoholic stranger to leave us alone to, well, ask him to leave us alone. He went on and on, and it soon became apparent that most of his account was dubious at the least and more likely downright fabricated. He told us he'd written a film script that was going to make him millions. That his family were all rich but wouldn't speak to him. That he'd spent time homeless on the street and been suicidal. That there was a woman who he'd always loved who he knew he was destined to be with and that he knew would one day rescue him. That he was just trying to get his script to George Lucas, who he knew would snap it up instantly and make him rich.
And that in everything he'd been through there was just one thing he wanted us to realise: that the only person who can be responsible for your own happiness is you.
Saturday and Sunday. That's twice in two days. And it's important that you know that up to that point in my life I have no recollection of anyone using that particular phrase. No recollection at all.
He soon left the table of his own accord. Andrew and I parted company and I was picked up by Emma and Cass to watch Cowboy Bebop at Emma and Jason's place in Lordswood. On the way home I called up Mum and Dad. They were both at home. I walked back in the pouring rain. They lived three minutes walk from where I lived with my wife and I went straight to my parents without going home. I told them everything. That I was thinking of ending my marriage. After I'd poured my heart out Dad said absolutely the best thing he could possibly have said:
“So son. I guess this means you should contact a solicitor.”
Dad, I love you so much. There's all sorts of things that you could have said, what with your beliefs about marriage and God and covenants and whatever. But you came through for me and not only agreed with what I had to do, but instantly were about the practicalities of how I needed to go about doing it. No word of judgement, no word of reproach.
Mum was the same. Total support shown at that moment. She told me later that she was devastated because she loved my wife like family, but she knew I was doing the right thing and never let it show that Sunday.
Dad was different. I'm pretty sure that he knew from the outset that my marriage wouldn't last. But he didn't intervene, knowing how much of his ministry in prophecy was bound up with his identity and not wanting his parental role confused with his religious role (they so often are with monotheists. Parents are the easiest metaphor to use when attempting to understand the concept of God, and many twisted elements of religion can be boiled down to that simple truth. I'm convinced it's a truth). As I said, my Dad is way, way cool. Even a normal parent would have had a hard time intervening here, if there's any such thing as a normal parent. He left it up to me to make and learn from my own mistakes.
I went home. My wife was already asleep in bed. I went to bed myself.
I dreamed of my ex-girlfriend, the indie disco girl who I went out with when I was seventeen. She and the woman who dressed as Red Riding Hood were one in the dream. It's so long ago that I can't recall what happened, and I lost all my journals of that time in a hard drive failure. But my unconscious had merged them, and experience taught me that when that happened it was important to pay attention.
The next day was Monday and I couldn't work. My wife was a primary school teacher went to work before me so she wouldn't know if I called in sick. Now I come to write this it's awful to think how much of this went on without her knowledge. Well before this point in the marriage I felt as though I'd split and become several different people, none of whom shared the same space in the same relationships. She didn't like the person I was when I wasn't with her, not that there was anything wrong with that person, more that it wasn’t the person that she wanted me to be. So I compartmentalised rather than address the fact that there was something startlingly wrong with the marriage and simply became someone other than me. Because to end the marriage would be to end what I thought had been ordained by God, and would mean me taking responsibility for my own life. By shirking that choice I had already disowned myself, so what difference did it make if I continued disowning myself?
I called my manager, telling him I wouldn't be coming in. Having the flat to myself, I sat down at the computer to check my emails.
There was one waiting for me from the indie disco girl, now a mother and in a long term relationship. It was the first I'd had from her in nearly a year, the very morning after I dreamed of her. She was on reading week in her last year at University. I emailed her back. She responded almost straight away. I started filling her in on what had been going on. That was how she and I got back in touch.
Late in the afternoon I made sure to leave the house before my wife got home. That way she wouldn't know that I hadn't been to work, and she was expecting me to be out that evening anyway. I met up with Andrew and my brother Ben at Southampton Central Train station and we set off for Hammersmith Apollo to see The Flaming Lips. It had been booked months earlier and I wasn't going to miss it despite all the weirdness in my life.
At the time The Flaming Lips were one of my favourite bands and Wayne Coyne one of my heroes. I still love them, some albums more than others. I've purchased more copies of The Soft Bulletin, given it away and then purchased it again than any other album apart from Massive Attack’s Blue Lines. The Lips' live shows are like nothing else on Earth. Fans on stage dressed as animals, aliens, robots, Santa. Fake blood. Glove puppets. Glitter. Balloons the size of beach balls, balloons the size of living rooms. Video projections showing naked women, real life execution footage, superheroes, Battle Royale, people cutting up and snorting their own brains. Hand held smoke cannons. Sirens. Strobe lights hung around necks. Audience members grinning from ear to ear, dancing, crying and hugging strangers. It's one of the most amazing live spectacles you're ever likely to be part of.
They finished their first set and left the stage, and when they came back on for the first round of encores Coyne didn't introduce the next song right away. Instead he started talking to us. And that feeling came over me for the third time in three days.
This, almost word for word, is what he said:
"Some of you in the crowd might be fans of the music of Elliot Smith. We were good friends of his. Our sound engineer was working on his new album. Steve Drozd was doing some of the music, putting down some guitar. Then a few weeks ago we heard that he'd died. It was the middle of the night and we just heard rumours. Then the rumours were confirmed, and we found out he'd killed himself.
"And it just makes you realise that the only person can be responsible for your own happiness is you."
Then they played Do You Realise?
Three times in three days. Once from a friend. Once from a stranger. And once from one of my heroes onstage at the Hammersmith Apollo at a show that was like a child's birthday party in some intergalactic humanist zoo. The message couldn't have been any clearer if it were written in ten mile high letters across the moon.
There was no turning back. When I make a decision I'm ruthless to the point at which close friends become alarmed, and I set myself to creating my new life with a vengeance. The next day I planned out exactly what I was going to do. I was going to become responsible for myself and find my happiness. This wasn't some abstract fantasy: I knew what would make me happy. Become single. Get my own place. Get a better job. Get a band. Make music. It was specific, measurable and I made sure that when I achieved it all I would know that it was achieved beyond a shadow of doubt.
By that Friday, exactly a week after Halloween, I had told my wife that I was leaving and moved into my brother's house as a temporary measure. She and I separated that evening. It was horrible. I can still remember her through her tears repeating, "You can't leave me. You can't leave me" and me looking at the flat from which Dad, Dawn Lyndsey and I had removed all my possessions earlier that day and responding, "I already have." I made sure that I left her at the point when the tears ended and she became angry with me, so that I knew that her defence mechanisms had kicked into place and she was starting to define herself against me. I can't begin to describe how those memories make me feel. There was no other way I could have done it and weathered the awfulness of it. I planned my exit like a military operation, bills, finances, moving possessions, the lot. I told myself to be cold and efficient because there was no other way I could bear it, and once everything had been moved out I started my vigil in the lonely flat waiting to break my beloved wife's heart. Irony of ironies, she chose that day to go for her first ever unannounced drink with colleagues after work. She never went out for a drink, and she never anything without telling me where she was going to be. And so my wait, rather than being two hours, stretched out to four, with me not knowing where she was or when she was coming back, and knowing that the coming back would temporarily destroy her.
It was during the week that I was leaving my wife that I started this thread on Barbelith. I'm actually really glad I documented all of it at the time. If you read the link, the person who talked to me through my asthma attack was indie disco girl, who later posts to the thread as Photine. The friend who helped me move was Dawn. The death/rebirth ritual I performed was some of the most intense magico-psychological work I've ever done, which took place in the third module of my NLP Practitioner course and almost totally remade me from the ground up. Some of it I'm never going to talk about with anyone, and an account of the rest of it turned up in this post to the thread. Boy, link fans are having a field day with this post.
The day after splitting up with my wife was Saturday 8 November 2003. I went to see Melt Banana for the first time in London and all the stress and pain of the previous week, the sleeplessness, the asthma attacks, the nausea and the inability to eat, all the horror of the preparation to leave my wife melted away and I felt a kind of primal euphoria take its place, a surge of ecstatic happiness I’d never felt before but have felt many, many times since. I'd done it. Finally, I'd done something for myself. All my emotions came rushing back at once and it was a mad, mad feeling.
A month or two after that I stopped calling myself a Christian. Now I only self-define as "Seth."
Three months later I stopped working for the bank and started working at Goblets, my favourite pub in Southampton. This was around the time I started taking my Master NLP Practitioner course.
Three months after that I started playing drums for Hunting Lodge. Shortly after we recorded our first single, a split 7" with Mugstar.
I moved back to the parent's for year, then got my own place at around the same time I passed my driving test, bought my first van, and started working for the police.
That same year we recorded our first album as Hunting Lodge.
Two years to the day after seeing Melt Banana for the first time I supported them with Hunting Lodge at the Firkin in Bristol. Two weeks after that I met them when we promoted their show at the Joiners in Southampton, where we played to people I'd known from every part of my life. Work friends, church friends, pub friends, family.
Since then we've played with a bunch of great bands and gone on tour in Europe. We were number eighteen in the Radio One Festive Fifty last year. We might play some dates with Chris Corsano in February, but nothing's definitely booked. That'd be a bit cool.
Two of my grandparents died in the last two years. My parents broke up. Now Mum lives in Scotland with her new boyfriend and Dad lives in California. My sister lives in Cali too, with her new daughter Evey (my niece!) and her rather cool husband. I visited Mum a few weeks ago and I'm going out to see Dad, sis, Mark and the baby in April.
My ex-wife and I haven't spoken in about a year. That's her choice and I respect that, although I wish it weren't the case. The divorce was final in March. She's awesome and I wish her every happiness. Go Snapping Turtle! I'm truly sorry for all the hurt I caused you. I should have done better by you and I'll probably never get the chance.
I'm still friends with the woman who dressed as Little Red Riding Hood. We were seeing each other for about a week after I broke up with my wife but realistically that wasn't going to last now, was it? It was weird for a while but is all history now and things are fine.
I got back together again with the girl I met at the indie disco, and we went out together for about a year. It was a good relationship, but we haven't spoken in over a year now. Things got a little weird again. She was absolutely brilliant in the two years after my marriage ended, a fantastic friend and a good girlfriend. Maybe we'll get back in touch at some point, maybe not. I have no idea. All I know is for sure is, "Not now."
I still live in the same place. It's a brilliant studio flat overlooking the Itchen in St. Denys/Portswood, Southampton. I have a balcony and can see right across to Fawley. All three bridges can be seen from my wonderful view. I write a lot, listen to great music and watch anime with my friends, or go to the pub. It's very peaceful.
I still work for the police. I just got home from my ten hour Christmas Day shift. It was pretty quiet today. One nasty domestic. That was it. Occasionally people I know call up and don't know it's me they're speaking to. That happened last night. Poor dude. Road traffic collision but what he doesn't know is that his car registration doesn't match his vehicle and he's not listed with the DVLA as the registered owner. Unless he just doesn't understand the phonetic alphabet or wasn't listening. I can't tell him, either. Still, a great job if you're a nosey parker like me.
I'm ecstatically happy. Everything I set out to do has been done and now I'm asking myself what happens next. I'm single with no ties to anyone or anywhere, apart from the band. I love my friends in Southampton so can't see myself moving, but you never know. Sometimes I think it might be nice to have a girlfriend, but as I indicated here the next time I get involved with someone it'll be very different to how it has been in the past. I'm a whole person now and enjoying it immensely. My next relationship will reflect that and I won't settle for a partner who will be there to compensate for my faults or complete me as a person. I am a complete person, becoming more complete by the second.
So what has been the point in writing this? Well, it's been good to revisit it, warts and all. To tell it honestly, an account in which no one, least of all myself is perfect. And the point initially seemed to be about the synchronicity, to tell an amazing story about some things that actually happened to me. And then I wanted to tell everyone how great life is at the moment and what it took to get here.
But none of that is the real point, now I come to write it all. There something I definitely want to communicate to you if you've got this far. Perhaps I've just been watching too much Paranoia Agent. Thank you if you've got this far.
This is it: up until now you may have been reading this as a story that happened to someone else. It couldn't happen to just anyone. All that stuff about religion, right? Well, that's someone else' life. It has nothing to do with yours. You may even have found it hard to identify with me and my spiritual crisis that effected every area of my life, rolled your eyes at my accounts of growing up in what was to all intents and purposes a large cult-like environment.
I want you to know that that line of thinking is bullshit. Utter fucking crap. Read this now.
At some point in your life you will be faced with decisions. It might be with friends, with family or with your partner. It might be to do with your job, or your faith, or a band you're in or a community or social group. It might be to do with a war if you're unlucky enough to be fighting. It might be to do with police, or neighbours or a piece of legislation.
It could be a hard decision. People's lives might be at stake. Your reputation might be on the line. You might lose face. You might lose friends, or your partner. You might feel like you're severing a part of yourself. It might be like dying.
At some point you'll be faced with a choice. Do you take responsibility? Or do you shirk it? Do you pretend that your life isn't your own? Do you place the blame at everyone's feet except yours?
You see, anyone can end up in my position. It was all my own responsibility. It wasn't even the fault of religion. Yes, the organisational aspect of religion played its part, the one that sets up the authority dynamic. But I still had to accept those things. I am responsible for my life. I set up my marriage and was a part owner in its failure. Those were my choices.
Every day working for the bizzies taking emergency calls and crime reports I listen to people place blame. They blame police, they blame each other, they blame neighbours, they blame the government, they blame the media, they blame kids in hoodies and alcoholics and wife beaters and paedophiles. They set out a stall in which they are the innocent aggrieved and the world has collaborated against them. And yes, sometimes they might have a point, at least in part. But the vast majority of people lie to themselves and their massively inflated egos threaten to break the phone line with their horrendous weight.
Another of my heroes, Hayao Miyazaki, said something recently about the need for someone to blame being like a weed that has taken root in the mind of humanity, that as soon as we look to place blame we are in a terribly impoverished situation.
If you think you're immune to this stuff there are a number of interesting psychological experiments that have shown that the human need to fill a role or belong to a group may have horribly subversive effects on the sense of self. Look into group psychology, the generalised shared thinking behind movements or people groups, mobs or riots. Look at the history of wars, the atrocities that people have committed against each other. How many people have to be involved in an act of genocide to carry it out? These are people, no different from you or I. It's just at some point they did as they were told and gave up on themselves. They deferred responsibility for themselves onto something or someone else and made excuses. Go back and reread the Murakami quote earlier in this post. We think these people are something other than ourselves, we pretend that there's some huge fundamental difference between us and them so we never have to think about these things. But there is no huge difference.
You are not immune and this can happen to anyone. It might be happening to you right now. Do you know what things in your life you can take responsibility for and what you can't? Make a list. Be honest. There are things you think you can't change, and many of them you can.
When did you last ignore your personal responsibility in the midst of situations that seemed absurd, but you went along with them anyway?
The point of this story is that it can happen to anyone, any time, anywhere. I am not alone.
Only you can be responsible for your own happiness.
You're still alive and you still have a chance.
Do your best. |
