Pandora's Box

(in response to a passage from More Useless Advise, a poem by Felix Dennis)

If you open it all up what else is there? So little by little. I studied the classics and can’t always remember the myths as I should and I wonder how the brain stores information connecting to the absolute mechanistic dynamo of experience. Are you just an illusion? Asks Mary Midgely. She’s 90 and a philosopher, living in Newcastle, asking questions. All around me are the questions I’m happy to say. Happy today. Full of love and care and creature comfort. Comfort of creatures. Sometimes you feel the connectedness and understand that the emotions – fear, anger, hate and grief – those negative emotions are just dancing on the surface of the pond, bouncing off the surface like ping pong balls, gaining no traction, bouncing away. Underneath the pond’s surface is the thick impenetrable weed, the silt and stones and murky warmth. Underneath the water’s surface lives the monster you can live with, the hearth, the heartbeat, the deep, deep depths of eternal spring. It is dark in there but seductive, enveloping, still and gorgeous, on and on, infinite. PING PING go the rackety, ricocheting negatives. Stirring below amid the rocks and discarded prams and the jungle of old prayers and discarded bicycles is the new love, visible only in gentle shafts of light illuminating long forgotten pools of feeling, gently inserting the thermostat, raising the temperature. It will boil, ferment, overflow and then settle.

My neck hurts sometimes thinking of yours. I know your Pandora’s Box is only partly open. You sit, enormous, on its lid, weighing heavily on its pain. Time to swim, super baby, time to find the beach, angel face, but you have to work through the choking weeds first, discard the rocks, fight the looming monsters. Reach the surface.

A box full of things. Trapped. Locked away. Never to see the light of day again.I've written about my boxes many times within this group. I've remembered about my father's boxes, about me sitting on the arm of his black leather chair, listening. "There are many things in my head. They are all inside boxes." He told me. "Each box has a lid, but sometimes all the lids come off at once. And that is the problem."I was so young back then. Too young to understand what he was talking about, but I was there for him. I listed when he needed to explain.I asked him once, many years later, why he chose me, why he felt I was the only one of his children he could make a faulty connection with. He told me I was the only one he wanted, the only one he had planned to have. This single knowledge has a box of his own in my mind. Locked away. Untouched. Unthought of. I don't know why it's so painful to look at it. It should make me happy, but the weight of responsibility squashes me, weights me down until I can't breathe anymore. It's a secret I cannot share, as solid and terrifying as knowing that I was one of the three children he didn't really want. What kind of parent admits to that? What kind of person?My head. A Pandora's box of feelings and questions, traits, memories, mixed messages. Reasons. The bundle of reasons why I am the person I am.Can we ever get rid of it all? Will I ever be able to really fully process the boxes I carry? Let it go. Just let it go...The day I moved out of the flat we shared was painful because it was the day I was let out into the world on my own, without back up or an armour. I left home at 18, but I stayed in my comfort zone for much much longer.

Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty mind. Image of emptiness. Box. Back to my suede lined trunk from last session? Not so sure. Emptier still. No suede. Wood. Smooth but unsatisfyingly meagre to the touch. Corners. Planks, strands of wood meeting in a sharp point. Running my finger down the firm line of joining. Linear. Regular. Nothing flows, moves softly. It is all hard and tight, so tightly together there is no light. Darkness – I’m not sure there is the presence of darkness. No light, no dark – what is there? A hovering, a limbo, a finger running along a firm edge. Finger soft, finger hard, pushing into the small space. This is strange writing. I feel tense. Who is writing? Who am I writing for? Whose ears receive these words? What sense can I make of what I write? I don’t know. Just a finger tracing a line. I shudder – two thoughts at once. The recurrent dream of being carried down the wooden stairs, past the wooden panelling, into the wooden room. The men. The muffled-ness. The night, the darkness of musty smells, creaking steps. The open door. The going inside. The end. Nothing more I can hold on to. Tracing, the word taking me back to school and how I’d jump at the mention of tracing paper, thinking it was my name being called. The surge of acidity I feel still, at the fear, the certainty at any moment I was about to be in trouble. Not for anything in particular, just a sense that trouble would descent upon me at any time. A magnet for trouble, irresistibly drawn to my (somehow) defective core. Slamming against me, clamping tight. Hard to prise apart the attraction of fear and anger, aggression. Homing in on each other. Living in terrifying anticipation. Back in the box. The thin sturdy line, the comfort of tracing and retracing what is already there, has already been lain down. This is the path to follow. Stay on the straight and narrow. No deviation. No trouble. No emotion. Bottled up in y, pressing my pain into someone else’s groove.