Eros (Death) & Thanatos (Love)

The guitar intones on a half note, as if the track began recording at the end of some long-lost intro that we will never hear. Dylan sings out the opening lines, deadpan—

Darkness at the break of noon,

Shadows even the silver spoon,

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon.

To understand, you know too soon,

There’s no sense in trying.

I love that song. My facial muscles twitch a wry smile as I step out of  #5 Hurdwick Place in Camden Town—my new residence (at least for the next six months.) It’s a new day in London, my first of many to come, and as Bob desperately sings into my ears I can’t help but feel an overpowering sense of possibility — the feeling that underneath the lugubrious, gloomy sky that hangs low above London I can do anything and be anyone; blaze a proverbial trail through the streets of Londinium with Doc Brown in my wake telling passersby: “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious shit!”

Dylan keeps singing. The chorus, now off-beat, is juxtaposed beautifully with his manic strumming—

So don’t fear if you hear

A foreign sound to your ear.

Its alright, Ma, I’m only sighing.

            There is a palpable amount of fear that comes along with that sense of possibility I can’t seem to shake — people fail to reach their goals all the time. More often than not, if you ask me. Self-actualization is a tricky beast, hindered by innumerous feelings of self-doubt and idiosyncratic insecurities, many of which I am guilty of harboring. They hide in the basement of my psyche like runaway slaves in the sanctuary of Harriet Tubman’s home in Philadelphia. I’ve seen what happens when these insecurities are not released to freedom, to stand up and fight against injustice at Harper’s Ferry… its not pretty.

The disease and fear of becoming no one runs deep amongst the forever-young people of my home in Bermuda. We playfully call Bermuda “Neverland”, summoning images of the Lost Boys in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, but its symptoms are far worse—

Temptation’s page flies out the door,

You follow, find yourself at war,

Watch waterfalls of pity roar,

You feel to moan but unlike before

You discover that you’d just be

One more person crying.

            —Arriving home to my island this summer I found, as I often do, my generation’s state far more depraved than when I left it. In the late hours of popular binge-drinking nights, people stumble through the dimly-lit streets of our capitol with an increased urgency and wobble in their step — designer shirts, soaked with sweat and booze, seem increasingly torn and unbuttoned to reveal its owner’s bronzed chest (of which they are always proud.) They are investment bankers, insurance mongers, party-boat captains, stay-at-home wives in waiting, wombs-for-rent, and they all seem to be searching for something. Something that for the life of them they cannot find. They are residents of the Hotel California, able to check out but unable to leave.

Advertising signs that con

You into thinking you’re the one

That can do what’s never been done,

That can win what’s never been won,

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you.

Boys and girls that live year-round on the island (for you cannot call them men and women) mash lips and grope each other more and more in between trips to the bathroom to expel their evening’s glut. A scene in the cinematic realization of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the only allusion I can draw—when “Raoul Duke” is waiting for his room to be ready in the lobby of the hotel with a head full of acid, his hallucinations reaching a crescendo: “Terrible things were happening all around us…” He finds himself abandoned by his attorney at the bar. Tearing off his hat he looks around wildly, his gaze falling on a bowl of mixed nuts that morphs into grubs. A slimy limb dives in and pulls out a handful. He looks around and, as the camera zooms out from a close-up of his wild-eyed disbelief, he finds himself surrounded by oversized beasts bending each other over and guzzling their drinks: “I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things… It won’t be long now before they tear us to shreds.”

Good ol’ Gonzo had it right and I find it hard to argue against the depraved weltschmerz he so beautifully portrayed. Whether watching or reading that scene, I can’t help but feel I know what his acid-addled mind was manifesting. I feel I’m constantly surrounded by human-sized reptiles doing nothing but reproducing and guzzling grain alcohol in some half-assed attempt to find meaning in their lives beyond their evolutionary desire to spread their DNA. They are the ones that have given up, succumbed to Darwinian theory with nothing to live for beside the hope that one day they will find a suitable womb to fill or sperm to fertilize their precious and fleeting eggs. So they drink… perhaps to forget or distract from purpose and responsibility, all while fruitlessly searching for something—

While one who sings with his tongue on fire

Gargles in the rat race choir,

Bent out of shape by society’s pliers,

Cares not to come up any higher

But rather get you down

In the hole that he’s in.

I’ve managed to escape the atavistic orgy that occurs on my island throughout the year, much to the squelch of my mother’s wallet being purged. I’m unemployed, without a degree, and desperately clinging to the idea that hard-won experience is a lot harder to come by these days than a piece of paper saying you’ve done everything asked of you by your respective institution of so-called higher education.

So I carry my torch and wave it wildly at those that try to douse it—a modern realization of Mary Shelly’s beast, pieced together from the watered-down DNA of ancestral scribes like my estranged grandfather whose name I share, my humble and late father, on down to the man who wrote Treasure Island.

A question in your nerves is lit,

Yet you know there’s no question fit

To satisfy, insure you not to quit,

To keep in your mind and not forget

That it is not he or she or them or it

That you belong to.

            It’s a tricky beast, self-actualization. I’m on my way to finding it, I hope.

I step from my stoop, shirking mohawks and tight jeans, Italian suits and homeless boots. A car honks its horn, I cross the road to Camden High Street. Dylan hoots—

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards

False Gods, I scuff

At pettiness which plays so rough,

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs,

Kick my legs to crash it off,

Say okay, I’ve had enough

What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen,

They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

But its alright, Ma, its life and life only.