Wounded Arms Must Carry the Load

“Dark, dark places shall be none. Shes’s melting houses of gold.” - Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs

I am 28. I am collecting the dead body of my cat from the road. I can’t comprehend his death, my mind and body struggle to accept the immovable fact. His back feels broken as it rests against my arm.

He was alive less than an hour ago.

It’s a simple leap. Common sense. I am to blame for my beautiful boy’s death.

This moment is the full stop at the end of my sentence.

Sacrificed through my weakness. Too lost to do the right thing or make the right choice. I let him out, I was too busy numbing myself, trying to control my OCD by playing computer games.

These are the facts.

I am lost in a job that is killing me. I am depressed, I am overweight and I have been prescribed the maximum dose of paroxetine to manage and control the urges of my obsessive compulsive disorder. Life is out of control. I clean all the time. Sometimes in the night. In the hope I can somehow change the environment I exist within. Control. The uncomfortable sensation is that I am nowhere near who I am supposed to become. This sickness is the destination I have arrived at. The result of relenting to what others needed me to become. I can’t find my way out. I am trapped in this life. It is a living hell. There’s not a moment that goes by where I don’t consider what I have become, I am filled with anger and disappointment and a sadness that could fill an ocean. I can’t watch TV without feeling the bile raise inside, in my hypercritical assessment of others who I perceive as having been gifted the luck to be able to fulfil their role as storytellers and artists. I am in an oblivion of my own making.

Later that night, in the depths of darkness, I bury my cat inside my mother’s small garden at the back of her prefabricated council house, that was only meant to exist temporarily.

When we return home, my wife Karen and I discuss life. Its swift and subtle nature. How brief is the time we have together.

Life is a brief flash of light.
A momentary illusion.
An unfolding wheel of love and suffering.

The very next time we fall into one another, my first son is conceived.

Finn Vast Harrigan: A gift from the divine nature of the cat. The sacred connection humanity has shared with a creature that domesticated itself and still managed to remain wild.

Bast: a goddess that has held me since I was four.

I am 4. My father has died. My mother cares so deeply for me, that she can never find the strength to tell me my father is dead. It is left to children to reveal the horror.

I am 37. I am creating an immense spell. A thirteen month hyper-sigil. I return to my bone home, my childhood house, to write the final two cycles of the spell and during research I find the letter, from the headmistress explaining from the perspective of a teacher, how I learnt my father died from my friends in the school playground. My teacher expresses confusion. Why didn’t I know my father was dead? It’s been over a year since my father died of a brain aneurysm.

My mother is not interested in discussing the contents of this letter. She rages at me for having left Karen and my sons in the pursuit of the truth I was born to inhabit. She picks up a knife and threatens to stab me with it. Says she can sense something inside me. I wonder now if it was me or my gift she wanted to end. The same gift I now believe we shared.

I am 4. I am told by my friends in the school playground my dad is dead and two paths open. My mind breaks apart and something magical enters, I cannot say if this was an attempt to save or claim me. In this moment, the memories are taken from me.

I am still 4. I am alone in the garden. A black cat emerges from the bushes and sits with me. It comes every day to be with me in the garden. Experientially even at this young age I witness the importance of my relationship with the cat, this is all I remember from the time my dad died apart from one other vital experience.

I am 4. This is my first memory. I am crying. I close my eyes partially. I focus on a tear in my eyelashes. I stare deep into the liquid and I see a river. I see reeds. I see a long necked creature emerge out of the water, it terrifies me, I pull back from the apparition, back into this world. I feel the elasticity of reality and its unreal nature. The thing I saw felt more real than anything I ever experienced before.

I am 50. I am collecting the spirit of my familiar from the road he died in.  I Look at the house, the home we stayed in a year or so more after the birth of my son. A home, that not only held the first moments of my eldest son’s life, but also instigated the genesis of who I am today.

I am 27. I am running up the stairs. Towards the immense sound of a crash. I run into the bedroom, it sounded like something lifted the bed and dropped it. No one is in the room. Only the residual energy of an unknowable spirit. I ignore what my gift tells me. Attribute what I am being told is imagination and go back down stairs, ignoring the portent.

I am 29. I am looking down at my perfect little boy, laying on his back on the bed, a thought comes into my mind, a concept of self. How can I permit the man I am today, a sick broken phantom, to raise this perfect child? I know instantly what I must do. I know I need to do all I can to try and get well and I know that the only way possible to collate what I am means returning to my path as a writer and storyteller.

I am 50. I take a photo at the wall I climbed over, from the perspective from which I first saw my cat’s dead body from. I step into the shock and horror of that moment once more, paused in the amber of time. A forever present echo. Pulsing through the story of who I have become.

Two deaths hold me outside of time.

Something is wrong, the spirit of my familiar died young, and in a deeply traumatic manner, only memory is here, an aspect of the original essence. Emotion as raw ghost.

I don’t fully understand where this is leading me. I am following a trail of ghosts. Following the spirits calling to me. I am preparing. Collating. Collecting a menagerie of echoes in time before I leave this world.

This gift makes me feel lonely.

I am 17, we are burying my dog, in the back garden I grew up in.

I am 50, I am standing at the back gate of my childhood home and calling to the spirit of my first friend, inviting him to join me, to leave this place and come home with me. I turn and see him in the car, so utterly happy I finally came to collect him.

The bones of my cat reside next to the bones of my dog, I buried him deep in the ground next to the blanket my first friend was wrapped within. I had imagined that my mother would be around for a long time and I’d always be able to visit them both there. I taste Jack Daniels in the back of my throat, from the bottle I drank as I clawed at the earth until it was deep enough to place him in.

I am aware that I always knew I should have dug them up, taken their bones with me. It would have been the most natural thing to do. I can’t explain how I knew this at the time, even before I learnt the etiquette of this path, the language of death, spirit and the mysteries.

A silent lament behind the structures of the material world.

Perception is limited here, it’s not like this in the landscape spirit inhabits, everything is connected at its root. The spirit cat collects some essential aspect and joins us in the car. He’s barely cat anymore. More sensation that spirit. My dog Sparky is so present and formed it takes my breath away and makes my eyes sting. I breath deeply, emotion and magic and ritual contain us as one, within the street that I grew up in that we now haunt.

In the darkness of one, am I what’s left? - Spitting off the edge of the world - Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’s.

Mama retrace your steps, what have you done?

I feel the pull of my home turf, the cemetery I grew up in, weekly visits to my father’s grave, special visits on birthdays and holidays to the graves of my ancestors. I’m not sure if the spirit of my mother is calling me, or the landscape itself. I choose not to answer the call. I stay in the ceremony. In the shock of its immediacy. In the questions around belief and faith and story and desire and the forever overwhelm and rawness of life.

No matter where we are in our story. We are assailed and called upon, it’s up to us if we choose to listen. I wonder why this is all resurfacing now? What’s behind this unfurling tapestry of story?

Any sufficiently adept magical system will have elemental practices that run completely counter to how the modern world and material reality presents itself. Truth will call on us, awaiting our answer and then move on. And in these moments, if we are fearless and meet the potential for that conversation head on, the modern world will be forced to bear witness in its inability to confine the sacred or divine. I believe this is where we experience a breakdown; a psychogenic fugue. Break throughs require that we break apart. They all come with the territory and you need only survive once to begin to learn the languages the mysteries speak in.

I’m collecting memories and spirits. Mapping my world and the landscapes that created the story I inhabit today.

This collection, this methodology of archiving occurs with no thought or consideration. No planning. I find myself driving to a locale and then I learn why in the act. It’s as close to pure pain and wonder as is possible.

Wounded Arms must Carry the load - Spitting off the Edge of The World - Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.

One song accompanies me through the experience and the whole day feels like a lifetime as I follow the path set out and I experience what awaits.

I am 30. I am riding my motorbike home. I am gripped with despair. It is too hard. I cannot do what I am required to do. It would be easier to be dead. I turn the headlights off. I no longer see the winding road. I accelerate. Waiting to hit the bank of the country road. A cocktail of fear and exhilaration mixes in my veins and as I wait, I do not feel fear. Only a terrible nightmarish exhilaration.

Nothing is happening. I am sailing into darkness, no end. Finally I emerge from the pitch black into the pool of meagre light the street lights on our road offers.

I am still alive.

I am still lonely.