"Klop, Hartje. Klop."

I was reading Clive Barker's Cabal in preparation for a horror-novel review for Halloween in October of last year.
I picked a Barker story because I really quite enjoyed his Books of Blood and because despite the fact that he's on my list of favourite writers, I haven't actually read much by him: The Hellbound Heart, Infernal Parade (which isn't even much of a short story anthology to be honest), the Next Testament comics and the 6 Books of Blood themselves. I wanted something similar to the Blood. I still had Weaveworld on my TBR-shelves, from that visit to the Grim Bookshop, but that seemed a little too big to just pick up and start to read, I'm also vaguely aware it isn't straight-up horror. I promise myself I'll get to it one of these days (And I did and I wrote about it in two separate posts; The Weaveworld Review and Exploration of the Weaveworld Mythology).

So then, because of my experience with the Books of Blood I picked up Cabal, a 200 page novella that I'm hoping will be in the same vein as those books.
The Books of Blood were visceral, gory and memorably horrific and yet... There was an odd beauty to them, a poetry shining through out of a messy and unique voice. And I'm here for that voice, the voice of someone who stands apart from the run-of the mill crowd of horror writers. With horror on the page without it being a choice, because it sells or because it's easy, a chosen outlet, but rather someone for whom it just naturally comes out as horror, the writing without because of the demons within.

And then I started to read Cabal and the first three chapters are about mental illness...

Now, I had had a rough day, in my own head at least. I was just looking for some horror. Didn't expect this, wasn't looking for this, and the question then arises; If I had known this was going to feel so familiar, so close, would I have picked up Cabal to read right now?

You see, as a child I was diagnosed with Aspergers, a form of Autism. Mild.

Personally, I've always rejected that label for myself. Stamped on me by doctors looking from without, unable to look within, because I wouldn't let them. Because I, at the time, thought I was manipulating them, steering them away from where I didn't want them to go. Or from where I did not want to go. I thought this, because, in this time, I was aware of what I was doing, and I thought that I actually controlled my actions. Nothing took over and I still knew myself, I was aware of myself, so I thought I was still in control. I let it happen, because I chose to, chose to go along with the ride.
But these days I have to wonder how much choice I actually had in these moments. Likely, no choice at all.

Intensely introspective, over the years I've reasoned away any and all appellations and labels put on me, because, after all, who can see in another's mind? And besides, I change, like we all do, from moment to moment. Every impulse from without alters the within. Again, this is something I've mentioned before here on the blog; identity as something illusory, man made up out of chemical reactions only, and things along those lines, and so on and on. I've felt, so many times, that I have no identity and only fancies and responses to outward stimuli. Even books, the supposedly so great, magnificent thing in my life, is part of this. It came from somewhere and it stayed out of expediency, out of 'Why not just go along with it, you've got it now...' and 'It's useful at least...'.
But, to cut that line of reasoning right short, the appellations and the labels... Maybe there might be something to them, after all.

Because, despite my determination to reason my way out of all the bullshit, after all those years of self-placating argumentation, all the endless, cyclical reasoning, with all those well-worn tracks, all those roads of hurtful self-knowledge that were supposed to aid rather than pain, I still always end up in mental anguish. Breakdown after breakdown, some small, some severe. Most all of them, hidden, kept to myself, in myself.

It's rough and painful and I know it's mostly in my head. But it's how I respond and I can't help it.
It's how I seem to be.

These days, because of a steady and semi-regular association with a group of individuals in my work-space, I find myself quite unable to cope.
I come home and I crash. A lot. Several days a week.
I come home and I take the day home with me. I take those people home with me. They come in my mind, in my wake, in the trail of mud left by my shoes, like ghosts tracked into my house, on chains strung from my back and, heavily, they settle on my shoulders, like a tormenting spirit, grinning in teeth-clenched, sadist delight. And they are the grievances and the slights, the hurts and the pains. They are all the perceived and imaginary things that get me down because my thoughts never cease.
Emotions rage and howl and when it's done, when I've burnt myself out I find I'm unsure why. I know I do it to myself. I can see the edges, I can feel the cause but it's so unclear and I might as well have, indeed, imagined it.

But what is real and what is imagined? I pride myself on my reasoning and my perception and that I'm mostly right about what I see and what I know, and the conclusions I continuously draw. But maybe I'm not, maybe I'm far less perceptive than I'd even like admit here. It's a thought  that's difficult to entertain.

I don't believe I have autism, I never did. I believe I have something else, but I'll be buggered if I can actually name it.

So, the mess in my head comes home with me, and it defines my days and I find I have no control.

But I cope. Somehow.
Like everyone, I have things I do. Things I seem to like, things that bury the day-to-day angst and anxiety:

Alcohol. Comes with its own problems. But I can cope.

But mostly: Fiction.

For the thing I want most: books, stories, long-form fiction, I need to be clear-headed. With my head unfilled by a day like today. On the days off from work, uncluttered by the fallout from social interaction and all its myriad pit-falls, I have no problems. The prose flows off the page and I drink it in and it fills my mind.

Comic books and visual media I can imbibe any given time. 

As an addendum, because it's not that relevant here: from comics and television series and movies it is gaming that stands apart.

Gaming is good. In and out, consume and grind, the worries get put on the back burner and with time apart from them, diminish or even evaporate. But the act itself is weak. It is cowardice. It's a blindfold for the mind. It lets me settle into the role of responding to impulses only, without thought and without much consideration. It enables a shut-down that isn't present in visual media in general, where you take in what you see, but it gets judged all the while, subconsciously, on every level; acting, music score, dialogue, larger story, set-design, on and on.
In gaming you have to approach the world on its own terms and what it wants to show you, because there's such an obvious barrier between it and real life. Unlike anything with real people in it, it's not even trying to be a perfect simulacrum and thus it plays by its own rules.

These things help, but above all, what matters most, what helps most, is the blog, I've been typing here for several hours, after all, it's taken away the stress of the day, and even my tiredness has been shunted aside in favour of this thing I desperately want to do, maybe need to do.

The blog is an amazingly good outlet for me. I helps, it means something and it matters and gives me something to cling on, to go on for. It fills my time and lets me look at books with a critical eye and with an insightful agenda. It's also intensely about me and the things that matter most to me, in a way that nothing yet has been. It's my way of communicating thoughts that I'm unable to share otherwise, stuck inside my head as I usually am. I write it down here, even though I don't share everything. What I do share is for the record, as honest as I can give it, whether these are times, worries, anxieties I'll grow out of or not, photographs of this moment in time, of my self. The blog helped me open up in other day-to-day situations as well. There has been growth and I'm not as closed-off as I once was.
This blog is what made that happen, but I'm worried it's a dead end, a stalling mechanism against the final day. And that some time in the future, the words will run out.

This is mostly how I cope.
Drown it out, literally or figuratively. To put a dampener on the insinuating voice that is wholly mine. In the end you either get off the bus, or you stay on and cope, somehow.

And here we are, back at the beginning; the reason for this unwanted and unlooked for figurative opening of this inverted Pandora's box, where hope has fled, but the demons remain.

At the start of the novella Cabal, Aaron Boone, one of our main characters, has a severe, as of yet undisclosed, mental illness. He speaks of his time in and out of hospitals and mental wards and of how, during that time, he has continuously met people who, to keep sane, to keep right, who to cope, cling to a talisman. An object or keepsake to safeguard their hearts and minds from suffering. A ward against chaos.
A memory of better times perhaps, a hope for the future.
Some object that will get them through, or some mantra that strengthens.

I was reading this and I thought to myself that despite all of the pain I went and still go through I didn't actually have anything like it. That I never picked up a keepsake along the way.

But, as three words suggested themselves to my mind, I quickly found that, in fact, yes I did.
I do.

"Klop, hartje. Klop"

It's not a keepsake so much as it is a mantra. It's from a dutch translation of a book I once read called Het Lied van de Raaf by Per Nilsson, a Swedish writer. In English it is called Raven's Song

Roughly, the line translates as:

"Beat, little heart. Beat."

It is a mantra that is an invocation, it's an almost literal kickstart to the heart, a beseeching for a continuation of life for the sake of that life itself, despite the loss of any and all hope.

The book is about suicide and coping with it. It's about a man who gives lectures on environmental issues at schools and who ultimately, insidiously, talks young, malleable minds into committing suicide. It's about love and being young and growing up. A typical loss of innocence story, but with a little extra.

I can't remember if it was that good, but I do remember it. Because it gifted me with those words, because that scene where they are put to use is so powerful, and yet so gently written. At least, it is in the way in which I remember it. And occasionally, but sadly not occasionally enough, those words get dredged up from whatever errant compartment of my mind they've managed to snugly nestle in, and they let me continue on.

It is my ward against the chaos of uncontrolled thought. The call to halt the downward spiral of inner grief. It is the call for life in and of itself, just because.

No reason. Just to keep going on, just because.

"Klop, hartje. Klop."