Yugen

First, we stop listening to each other; then we stop listening to ourselves. At the same time, we say more and more, but of the wrong thing and without waiting to hear a response. These are mistakes, but they are the precursor to the big one, the one that tips everything upside down. The game changer. At this point we start listening to each other again and really listen to ourselves. Although by now it’s too late. Listening is no longer as potent as it had been. As it would have been if so many cold and desolate, uncommunicative hours had not passed between then and now. And so we fall apart. This is just my opinion and my opinion doesn’t count for much right now. My instinct is to try to tell you my own story, but I’m not here to do that. You and I both know that, don’t we? There is a bigger, better story to tell, with greater resonance.

Stories are the fusion of the moral, personal and contextual. They require unselfishness of the teller. Even the best stories lack voice - but in vocalising it, the messenger could end up hijacking one or more of the three strands of the story in the retelling if they don’t remember their place in relation to it. A storyteller of course carries their own intentions, desires and experiences with them. A fistful of burnished medals and a pocketful of shattered fragments, on varying degrees of display. Some are purposefully hidden whilst others are pinned to the chest, gleaming like badges awarded by time himself. But one skilled in the craft implicitly understands the amount of themselves to feed into the mixer. A listener is an alchemist, distilling the sentences to isolate each strand and record the concentration of the constituent elements. The collective listener/reader (or more appropriately, the diaspora, given the often singular experience of consuming the details of a story) will judge these concentrations to be correct, to the benefit of the tale, or conversely flawed, to the shame of the teller. You may detect that I have had occasion to ponder at length on this issue.

The curious thing with this story; I think I’m probably the only one who can tell it now. But at the same time, I’m not the best person for the job. My lips were for many years sealed by the sworn affidavit I was obliged to sign. As a consequence, I have found that like an underused muscle my memory has wasted somewhat, particularly in relation to the events relayed here. Of course, I have done it no favours with my lifestyle in recent years; I’ve made a confidante of gutter-grade gin and exploited a pharmaceutical acquaintance of mine. I’ll not go into the details here. My mind has revolted against me, waking me in the night to whisper cruel and torturous thoughts. It occasionally pulls the plug in the base of my brain, my entire vocabulary swirling around the plughole and gurgling away, leaving me wide-eyed, slack-jawed. I have taken to repeating my story under my breath in a mirror late at night, giving shape to the words and gently releasing them like so many bubbles that pop on the glass and go no further. I’m scared of the repercussions of revealing what I know, but most scared of opening the drawers of my memory and finding them empty.

If there were an option, I have no doubt that you would have heard this from someone far more…more… I don’t know. Eloquent, perhaps. Or personable. I am sometimes a little sterile, or if I am being kind to myself, austere. But you do deserve to hear it and I can tell that you want to. So I’ll remember my place and I’ll be as unselfish as I can. If I meander, please stop me. I tried to tell this one way, but that didn’t work out. I’ve had to take measures to protect myself from the inevitable recourse of putting these words into the public domain. I mean, I could not know what I know without being close to the action, so to speak. Yes, I am a character who will appear henceforth, not that you will be able to identify me. I’ll be referring to myself in the third person in a stolid act of omniscience. Perhaps if I get to the end of the real story, it’ll somehow negate the need for you to hear my thoughts. What I mean to say is: this could be a fulfilling experience for us both. I’ll give it a try.