Read Gut Symmetries for Free Online

them in your nakedness and in your fear. There is no one who will help you and help is not a cry, it is still the deep ache of millennia, before humanness, before love.
    The fool in his folly thinks that time before time is gone. He thinks pre-history has sunk into its swamp and we have long since drained the land and built on it. So we have, towers all, hygienic, raised up, electric lit. The horror of pre-time is a Saturday night special effects show, until I discover in my own body the swamp, the smell, the dark.
    Where am I that the wind whips against the ledge battering my face and hands into the indifferent rock. No one will come to take me home. There is no home. For a little while, at least, there is sleep.
     
    Dream. Dream myself into what I might be, out of what I have become. In the dream there is a tall mirror hinged into a case. The woman in the mirror has an unknown face. There is a sadness about her but at the side of her body, a bright light, as though the skin will burst and something alive tumble out. When I put out my hand to touch the mirror it is as warm and thin as a membrane of skin.
    Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes. The sun has kept his promise and risen again.
    Part of you or one of you responds to this; wakes because the sun wakes, just as the earth wakes, and what can grow will. Nothing has changed this, no matter how technic, nor how remote, I go on opening my eyes to the sun.
    This gives me hope. It connects me when I am most in need of connection. The grey city and its lost hearts force their way between myself and my healing. I cannot be still, wait for an answer, I can only hear the roar of the traffic and the misery under it. I am one more noise, one more pain, each locked off from the other.
    Let the sun come. Break sense into nonsense, I have lain caught in the lunar crayfish night in blue waters too deep for me. I swam but there was no surface. When I fought to come up for air I came up into other waters. Where was I in the night where two dogs howled at the moon and a ruined tower reflected down at me?
    In the grainy night I could not understand. Strange portents from another life opened at me. I felt delirious, absurd, these messages were unreadable or I was.
    Too fast. Too soon. When a fissure opens up in the self, half-known beasts climb out of it. The sane sensible clock-driven day has been bloodied to death.
    Now other laws apply and this place does not respect yours.
    Nervous breakdown? Doctor, pills, rest, shh, shh. The crazy lady who frightens children. Why does she frighten children? They can still see what she sees.
    'Mummy, Mummy, I saw the lady who drags the waters at her feet.'
    'Don't be silly.'
     
    I am being silly but am I any sillier than when I trusted him?
    Pull yourself together.
    Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?
    You look better.
    Thank you. I dumped the broken bits and varnished the surface. Not bad is it? And now I can be released back into the community, encouraged to join a dating agency, and invited to speak about my experiences at a Transcendental Self-Lobotomy seminar for the prematurely smashed.
     
    No. There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night. My whole self is in hiding, not daring to get too close, for the fissure