It’s just gone midnight and here I sit in the semi-silence of my dead grandmother’s old bedroom, having moved in to self-isolate when I contracted coronavirus a few weeks ago. All I can hear is the rumbling of my stomach, the fuzzy buzzing of the radiator, the pitter patter of rain gentle hitting the roof beyond the thin glass windows on either side of the room to my left and right and the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard as I type. The light in my new room is ambient, a haze of orange light is emanating from the halogen heater, bolstering the dimly lit lamp sitting upon my bedside table. I feel rather disconnected from that deeper aspect of myself which I came to know so well when I was plagued by nightmarish depression and stuck my head in the sand pit of my mind to try and find some sanctuary from the pain, alas I should have known that my mind was ironically the very source of my pain, but even more unexpectedly I now think I had to go right to the source of my existential suffering and in doing so save myself perhaps decades of denial or evasion from the root of my anguish, my trauma, or at least my lingering dreamlike memories of trauma. Moreover, I feel as if the long fibrous branches of my mind are swerving off in many different opposing directions, stretching out into the unknown, away from one another, leading me down multiple paths at once, into different mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual states and spaces all at the same time, as if I my brain were chopped up into different pieces and were somehow coexisting within multiple spheres of reality all at once, as if my mind has fragmented and each shard has travelled into a different universe. This is a most peculiar sensation, one of looming peril and a diffraction of the soul.
Meditating on the bed, sitting cross-legged and naked but for the cosy knitted turtleneck jumper wrapped loosely around my torso, the bright white computer light shining through my closed eye lids creating a warm red hue, into which my mind’s eye gazes, smoky incense smouldering away, prickling my senses, tinging my sense pallet with scents and sensations that make me think of my wanderings in India and London, where I visited many cathedrals and churches and temples to meditate, even reminding me of Sunday’s at church at boarding school sitting in the dusty pews as the reverend drolls his sermon with a low murmuring voice about the teachings of Jesus and the sun shines through the stained glass windows decorating our stiff grey and black corduroy suits with technicolour light, imbuing the scene with an almost psychedelic atmospheric quality, though at the time I could hardly articulate the nuance of the surroundings in which I found myself mesmerised, the rapturous, rhapsodic organ music echoing through the cavernous hall, bounding off the stone columns and wooden rounded ceiling, all I could do was sit and enjoy the morning, then walking back through the tiny quintessentially British, almost archaic in its storied loveliness, village in which my school was situated, and we, a long line of youngsters eagerly troping back to school to change clothes and ramble about for the rest of the day. Though I certainly didn’t care to admit it at the time, those quiet moments in the church as we kneeled to pray were intensely special to me, though I never really prayed but, in my naïve own little way, sent out thoughts to the deeper aspects of myself, with no expectant sense of yearning for a reply, but rather as a form of expression, not knowing that those deeper rumbling areas of my mind were churning away all the sensory stimulus my eyes sent down into that great cauldron of personality and identity.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou