The morning drifted by gently and relatively uneventfully, until I walked by the sea with my toes curling to feel the soft sand between them. It was a gorgeous day until I took that walk on the beach, up to which I’d felt undeniably blessed by the mysterious energetic forces of the universe and the immovable motions of cause and effect, rippling on through eternity both spatially and temporally. The state of bliss I felt had somewhat to do with my feeling as if I were on another planet or in an alternate reality and had been unknowingly transported through the multiverse. I felt I was free from the scourges of humanity and our lust for death, decay, illusion and the whole huge dystopian array of nightmare addictions, sewn brutally into our corpse-like collective unconscious. But, as my feet felt the sensuous sand crumble beneath me, my eyes were slammed with the horrific sight of piles and piles of indifferent litter and all kinds of filthy and abominable plastics and materials designed to fane immortality and be unyielding to the natural forces of biodegradation. Instead, the soul of humanity and the solemn heart of our mother earth is raped and degraded. It was all piled along the shoreline for hundreds of meters and more still was being slowly washed ashore by the once proud and holy ancient waves which have now been transformed – by the monstrous hand of human greed and short-sighted gluttony – into nothing more than a water-taxi for garbage, soon to be put in landfill or burned and have their cosmic energy transferred into toxic fumes that rise up into the ozone layer and enclose the children of our next doomed generation in a poisonous bubble of deadly gasses to boil and drown within for the entirety of their dismally short and sickeningly morbid lives.
I feel as if some vile demonic creature has crawled into my skull, clutching maniacally at my fragile psyche, tugging out the mess of wires that connect my sordid mind to reality, pulling unbearably at my synapses, slicing my hippocampus and prefrontal lobe into sumptuous slithers of sizzling steak, a banquet of tears, to feast upon the malevolent whispers that swirl frantically through my head … it’s all so abstract now, like a cubist jellyfish floating ominously in a stereotypical high school cafeteria, demonstrating the process by which a helpless and innocent insect is horrifically tortured into an endless cycle of madness. This alternate reality my mind seems to fade into is dark and cruel, full of malice and hate. Deep down, where even I dare not tread, there is an unquenchable hunger for my soul to be slashed into a million monstrous pieces and put together again, like a terrifying broken mirror, viciously reassembled and cast out into an indifferent matrix of sadistic, haunted streets full of ghastly demons that bore into our sentient skulls and contort the very fabric of our reality. In these states of temporary psychosis, it feels as if I am inhabited by one of these creatures, as if it lurks in the darkest depths of my mind and has poisoned my soul against life and beauty, against all that’s holy and wonderful in this surreal dimension of reality. There is an unearthed abundance of dark and twisted insanity gestating in the deep caverns of my subconscious mind, my soul, which have not yet been uncovered in my explorative and introspective expeditions below the surface of my waking consciousness, like a placid lake, seemingly serene and peaceful, yet hiding below its murky surface a wild torrent of tempestuously raging stormy seas.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou