"The Cage That Kills You"💗
Confessional Letter: The Craft of Writing (possibly a mini-manifesto!)
If you like your newsletters without politics or preconceptions or seeking a break from the norm you may have just found your new hangout
This letter exceeds the email limit..so to read ALL OF IT (((click here!)))
Recorded: 21 JANUARY 2025
the above recording is a snippet from a Members Stream (which I am obviously still a member -at time of writing this) where the incredibly talented writer/artist/film-maker/singer/musician/poet—-fuck it MASSIVE CONTENT CREATOR and fellow creative, happens to throw me under the bus!!! but UNWITTINGLY and for which I am VERY INSPIRED and grateful; because without this little kick of confidence, I would never have corrected my ‘mistake*’ (more about that in a minute) as this refers to my interest (which I shared with Matt Wall) about the Charles Bukowski paragraph in his book On Writing - pictured below:
*my ‘mistake’ was by jumping the gun, getting burnt out, sharing my intention to write about this page and how this page has inspired me, too soon. I ended up cutting all the detail and doing what it said on the tin… I just didn’t take myself so seriously. Which is the idea of what that was talking about right!?? the take away is that; I instantly regretted not writing my thoughts On Writing in proper ‘written’ form. Instead I posted THIS CRAP. :/
If nothing else my 'prose’ is honest, self-deprecating and full of morbid ‘SHIT’ which is why I applied some very random / off-topic music, because when music is playing it shines with exhilarating emotion. ‘That’s what she said!’ LOL xx
I was thrilled that such a prolific AUTHOR (I forgot he wears the Published AUTHOR, SERIAL AUTHOR, cap too!).. I was amazed he might think about taking a look ‘at my take on things’ and IF HE DID see that pile of ‘shit’ (or a load of SHIT talk as it is).. god forbid!
I would feel entirely disappointed with myself and embarrassed too. So, in an attempt to uncover my actual thoughts, or those reactive memories that passage invoked in me, I will write to you in my letter. Nothing will come out smoothly as it never does. Nothing is well planned out and/or thought over. All I know is that I need to just ‘write now…’ I have the open book in front of me and MATT WALLS poetry book fell open at this page too to add to my motivation: Click Images for LINKS.
Leave a comment if you require any further information
ABOUT purchasing any of this guy’s published work which is NOT readily available on AMAZON or his own websites. (imagelinks)
I stand to my word that you DON’T get paywalls, sales, or Ads here..(these are only tip offs, heads up so there!) xx
Subscribe, Join; Matt Wall YouTube channel
if you love writing and creating art in general, this is a channel that has the scope on EVERYTHING AND EVERY CREATIVE - you really need this guidance, motivation, education and ideas and alternative takes on how you do your craft, I swear you need this in your life.. Matt will champion your every step of writing towards reaching your goal. I’m not trying to blow smoke here, more so blowing my own trumpet for being THE ONE to introduce YOU to this CHANNEL. Thanks for checking him out ..xx
Early Hours: 22 January 2025
Dear Chasers💗
This might well be A Love Letter to the Chaotic Chase or at least to my love, life, writing of all time. Ok, ignore that sketchy opening line (one which I can resist to sniff). I’m not high, just a little thrown back by my lengthy introduction (see above if you only skipped or skimmed past it LOL). If anything, most of you may have greedily read and absorbed all of the above information and decided to skip this 'meat-free’ part of it all. I have no idea where to begin yet and a bit fearful that I have prematurely exhausted all of my enthusiasm. Oooh.. quick. Let’s recharge!
A Little Video Pick-me-UP (((Sound On)))
I’m worrying about getting back into the flow state with the actual real reason why I am here. As I always do, sort of a ritual of sorts, I will leave the keyboard for a short minute while I head over the window to smoke a cigarette and blow my dusty thoughts, and smokey lungs into the rain outside. While I go over and shake off the rocks from my knuckles that way. I shall share with you some recent shots taken on a walk with out dog on a different ‘rainy day in Manchester’.
I promise to deliver something at least ‘loosely’ related to what the title / subtitle implied. My moods broadly follow a schizophrenic trajectory (maybe more similar to bipolar but for now in this I mean either high swung on the pendulum or at a stationary level). I am either UP ‘approved of’ or DOWN ‘threatened or nullified in some way’ - and the slightest thing can tip me one way or the other. There seems to be nothing between terror and omnipotence: I’m either stewing in self-doubt or cruising along on the ego’s superhighway, I’m almost never just ok.
If there seems to be no third way, that’s because I’ve never really accepted myself as the fucked up flawed, and comical human fuck face being that I am. I just take myself and life too seriously into me, outwardly I’m either laughing like a madman or standing stiff like a fucking rugby player waiting to kick off or dodge an attack or run to a touch down. Maybe I shouldn’t use a sport that I know nothing of. I just used the reference to how my boyfriend says I look when I am ‘loading’. When stood still on the spot in the middle of a room, in the midst of something I was doing before I forgot. My resting bitch-stance is that of a rugby player, and I’m fucked if I’m wearing one of his sport vest because then I become a truck driver - only with back tits! ha!
‘When you let it in, life can be so heavy... Gravity becomes too great, and you can hardly function. I think the thing is to somehow become a kind of gas and float above it’ - Robert Wyatt
I’ve never heard a spiritual position expressed quite like that - especially by a professed Marxist - but I think it’s what Wyatt was doing when he said it.
“ONCE A PERSON ISN’T HUNGRY, A DESIRE FOR STATUS CAN BECOME AS INTENSE AS THE EARLIER DESIRE FOR FOOD” - Jaron Lanier wrote in You Are Not A Gadget.
This desire sits as the root of all my anxiety, exacerbated now by social media, and the need to stand out from the crowd. Such a desperate hunger to be somebody and mean something - or just to be heard over all the techno-babble-bullshit. I lose sight of the paradox that meaning is only attained by pulling back into solitariness.
Many cultural pundits have pronounced on this melancholy theme in the past. Never before have I heard in history have intellectuals been so worried that the interior life of the mind is disappearing. Bring in the Wonky Unicorn In Pensive Thought the beacon of wonder and love in my sad and lonely LIFE. She’s a whole new world (who broke into song there… sad, I did , still sad!) ha!
Long ago, I decided that I hate modernity but I intend to love all things futuristic, because the future doesn’t involve (with a bit of hope) these sad and lonely relationships I have with people and myself, with everyone I know - except the darling girl in the above photo. She is whole-love, like milk, whereas everyone else is skimmed or at best semi and I myself am sterilised. Nothing original about me, no goodness left, thin and useless and tastes like shit! ha.. I keep making these daft jokes, Sorry not sorry. Jokes.. NOT jokes. My heart just feels black and burned (not yet baron) still, at some point in my life I know that it had served a higher purpose (not stating the obvious job of keeping this soul and body chugging along the line). Now it just sits stoic and resigned and in the darkness, I find myself alive with the urge to write. It’s not so much as putting up a good fight, its a plan to work things out to not die quietly, to make use of a brimming heart full of everything I could hardly ever understand, but a brain relieved from the voices (auditory hallucinations), freed from the constant chatter, chastising, threatening, talks of truths and bullying I used to endure.
I write to drain my brain of built up thoughts so as to keep a tidy environment. Nothing like before. Being schizophrenic does cause some lifestyle problems but once controlled by medication, the most life threatening symptoms are all but cured. I don’t hear the voices anymore. Only when I’m coming down from cocaine; I hear sex noises, and people calling my name from down the street instead of in the next room or under my skin. I see faces in everything. I have that face-thing. I see a face then squint to see what it is I am looking at in - reality.
My Present and Historical Journey:
‘On Writing..’
I remember the days when writing wasn’t even an option. It was those same days of hearing the voices, alone by myself. Trying to cope in a new home, estranged from all relatives, trying to adult in my late twenties as the early ones were spent in between work, mental hospitals, police station cells, sofas of sex mates, the gym and mostly 9 times out of 10 - battered to the bone on drugs.
I remember moving in with all good intentions and a tight grasp on the mantra “fuck em all - I don’t need any of them - I got this!” Crying while folding clean clothes. It made my loneliness seem even more vicious. Then I’d wipe my eyes, and think back to those worse times thinking; ‘it could be worse’ it has been worse. It’s not like I am still sobbing into my ex’s smelly dirty t-shirts.
Write it - or - Write it down
The very word(s) were more than enough to strike dread into me as a child. Like ‘‘cancer’’ putting my thoughts on paper seemed synonymous with ‘trouble’ and ‘emotional death’. There were many stupidly dangerous things I might have done in my life but after what happened* to me, sharing my thoughts with the world, putting pen to paper, word in print, in a journal (we called them diaries back in the day in where I come from, probably still do!). I wouldn’t have ever thought of writing to the world at large in public or online for all to see - Oh NO! God forbid!). Writing anything that originated in the recesses of my mind, especially to do with the emotions I was too ill equip to process, would not be one of them.
*I wrote in a few ‘diaries’ when I was 10 - 16 years old. At one point my step mother decided she had no valid reason to evict me from the family threshold, so she sat down one night and perused my books. All of them, the regurgitated things of ‘disgust’ that she had read in them back to my baffled father. Who, to be honest, was saying ‘look you shouldn’t have read them. It’s my daughter’s private diary, I’m her Dad and I wouldn’t dream of invading her privacy like that’. So, step-mother.. threw it out that I was not even long a teenager and was sleeping with KNIVES UNDER HER PILLOW. So, OBVIOUSLY she is DANGER to HER KIDS. NO! my Dad told her, she is terrified for her own safety. OBVIOUSLY she feels unsafe and now you want to throw her out all because of stuff she wrote down. It’s probably mostly ‘make believe’ it doesn’t mean its Gospel its only her thoughts and feelings. The next day I was packed off on a train to Blackpool to go knocking on my unsuspecting mum’s door, with suitcases, bags of books (no diaries) in hand and box full of music CD’s. No money just a pre-paid train ticket and a memory of my Dad’s gutted face etched into my brain that I will never forget. Hence why I quit my ‘writing career’ even before it took off. Although, looking back it did take off - to have such a response, such a traumatic impact on her! Ha! the knives were for slicing my arms and legs you fucking tit! I wanted to scream at her. I needed help not throwing away (again!)
Slowly the idea of writing or sharing my thoughts and inner world - of chaos, confusion, madness and a touch of mordant wit, changed as I moved further through adolescence. Not that writing became more alluring, but it began to beguile. I could be doing similar ‘softer’ forms of sharing my inner world, and opening up - like just talking to people or writing poetry and showing it to others. Sketching then explaining what was happening in them or telling what the sketches mean to me, and I’d be aware of the ‘King Author’ - the writer I’d always wanted to be, and as James Brown personified heroin, I have applied it to the craft:
“It is the preserve of the damned and the formerly beautiful, a diabolic deal on which you cannot renege”
As I was becoming unhappier leaving my adolescence, not making the same journey in the way the majority of people do, I too was seduced by drugs (not heroin, never smack!) but the vision of not being scared to ‘write my shit down’ not being afraid to do what I believed I could do so well. It came natural to me, at first it seemed easy, as long as I didn’t pay too much mind to what words were spilling out in front of me; and ahead of my brain. Still, at the time ‘writing my own story’ was the most frightening thing I thought I could even attempt to do and was more scary than anything else I was doing. I found myself shovelling more and more things inside me, not limited to chemicals and other people, pumping poisons into my system as if, subconsciously, in an attempt to barricade every ounce and essence of my being already within me, and bury it in. ‘’That’s what he said… blah blah.. Yay!’’
I AM CROSSING OVER TO SOME FUTURE SIDE -
I am happy to be joining the scarred and the damned. I gave up on the art or act of thinking about what it is I am writing down. Stopped trying to understand or even know what I was trying to say or why! Who cared? Not me.
I have learned the hard way that Having a Message Means Jack-Shit! Even the most simple and bold statements can be made, and STILL. BE. MISCONSTRUED. Can and WILL be used against you.
Then I realised that from his writing, his poetry mostly, Charles Bukowski’s written world reflected mine, or to play with his term: gave me a route or a pathway through the mirrors at the pier. They were my guiding light to remind me where I have come from, where I have been, and which way I should be going next or how to stay here without turning around. Reasons to go through not backwards. I sat reading that paragraph (from waaaaay back at the top of this monstrous letter / essay!) reading it over and over again, and gradually accepting that it did make me feel very uncomfortable. I loved it, but it made me uncomfortable.
Like modernity. Like the future. It represented a world that I had looked forward to becoming part of but that I didn’t or couldn’t begin to understand. Writing and writer’s woes we share, but knowledge, education and culture - I have not. I didn’t know the opposite of where I was back then in early adulthood. The drug use, the embarrassment, and the loneliness. In a way writing promises me that there is a world out there somewhere, that isn’t stained with sadness and resignation. Somewhere out there is a world that is sensual, poetic, hypnotically happy, soulful and clean.
Sitting in the silence on my own.
I imagine a gleaming future a lifetime away from the grotty super-tiny size shit-hole that I call my home. It is my sanctuary. I do think I will be safe here. It feels safe in this building. I have been here for 16 years. I’m no longer chasing excitement, or taking extreme risks or chances on things that are unreal and unseen. I don’t seek to escape the place where I am living. I don’t even seek to escape my soul or myself. There is this calling. To write and writer’s who come and go, show up unexpectedly and leave without a trace, or flicker of a shadowy memory.
I see myself moving confidently through the gleaming daydream. The future should be clear but from where I am standing the Writing Is On The Wall but its smudged and murky, still dirty like those old clothes I wiped my tears on then folded up neatly and rolled into a sausage to fit in my stuffed drawers.. Please don’t let me say ‘that’s what they said’ .. fuck it, I said it. I was doing so well. So, here I am still in a moment of silence, shattering sporadically on by the slapping of my fingertips on the soft flat keys of my chromebook.
IN this instance, as I am finishing up this spree of rambling words on a screen (which has caused my Substack to crash already, I got the 502 Bad Gateway error message!) not taking it to be a sign to not publish this thing. In fact it’s a green flag to put my foot down and hit send now. I am thinking right now, “I know I can actually do this writing malarky!” Even though I am aware of being still only at the edge of a precipice, I know how ‘wrong’ I could get this, I berate myself a bit more before, as if trading my soul - I go for it.
Thanks for being here with me listening to me by reading my ramblings which are sometimes bonkers and borderline ‘toxic’ existential meanderings.! With that I send you BIG soft HUGS!! EXIT SONG at the very end of this letter. Don’t miss it!x
Warmest Regards,x
{{{ }}}
EXIT SONG(s) click image for link to my most recent mixtapes:
