To write is to err and to err is divine.

I know that you are awake. Your breathing gives you away and it angers me. Although we have become so well known to each other it's paradoxically the small details about you that I despise. Not the casual everyday indiscretions that we all have, immature unhygienic behaviours, willful moments of selfishness. God knows I can be selfish too, but no. These things can and do annoy me but I am perfectly able to put them aside and continue in the charade of togtherness and love that we have tricked into being. Again no, what I despise is your confidence. You're not an overtly arrogant man, you're not prone to bragging, though your tendency to speak a little too forcefully and on subjects about which you know too little embarrasses me but again I have learnt to accept that. Maybe I should say learned as I've had to do it again and again but nevermind. It's the way that your self confidence is tenacious, whatever happens, whatever role you play even if it leads to damage you just sit by and acquiesce without blame or doubt.

I feign sleep to avoid conversation, we have said it all and what is left we know we cannot mention. On these matters we are silent, as we should be after all these years. Yesterday for a while I even thought you attractive again. Not enough to make me want you or even be a dutiful wife but the way you held yourself and conversed causally with people was still acceptable to me. It was a good evening, for a while until I became a bit drunk and aggressive. Slipping in and out of sleep I think about myself. Most days I find myself castigating myself for my lack of control, giving in to temptation. Today I feel good, I am pleased with the amount and quality of food that I have eaten. Portion control and balance are my mantras and it seems to be working. Last night before I had to rush into my pyjamas I'd admired myself in our bedroom mirror. You were coming and I wanted to avoid any advances, with my back slightly arched, one heel flat one raised and my waist tucked-in I felt really happy with my body for the first time in ages, I rubbed my hands across my belly and my waist and stood sideways on to the mirror, hands on hips.

***

Good morning my love I say to myself but I don't touch you or make a sound. I remember back to when we were separated for a while six years ago. I'd gone on holiday alone and was sitting in a café nursing a coffee. I really missed you then and what I missed most was our companionship, before we screwed it up with stress and difficulty I thought we had had such beauty together. I believed that we would have these times again if we could only construct our relationship differently. I felt hurt but I didn't want the pain to drive hasty decisions. I thought about your need for security, I thought we needed each other and that by going through a separation I'd become a better man. But in truth those were your words not mine.

I thought that going away would teach me a lot about myself. I don't think that it did. You had your lover. You asked me if I could cope with the emotions of being a alone while you were sleeping with him, I'd joked that we both swing to the rhythms of different lusts. Sometimes yours for safety, somtimes yours for men to covet and desire you. Other times you need to be loved for your heart and your mind, am I right?

I'd recommended you a song: 'baby, oh baby, you're my drug, come on baby let me get fucked up'. Such a male thing to sing but this is a woman's words. I thought if it came from someone else you'd understand. She understands. Love the high but long to be clean. I hoped that you'd feel some of this too? You wrote to me in explict detail about the things the two of you did to each other and you told me you felt like a whore, giving good value to your affluent older man. I think that it made you feel wonderful to for while, but only once you'd let me in on your secrets, only when you'd linked it to me. I could palpably feel your sexual excitement when you wrote those things.

And then in a flash it hurt you. You didn't want him anymore and the excitement became too much to bear. You spoke of carrying a weight of desire that would crush us if we didn't let it down to the ground. But the exquisite pleasure of being crushed still makes me want to take an extra step. Nothing's changed since. I still wish we could return to that time and for the way that your domination cocooned me to continue. For me you rang the changes much too soon. I didn't get my fantasy. You said that couldn't keep it going until then. It would have hurt me and in a way it always has, even though it didn't happen. I say I love you so much and more all the time. I love the loves of each other's lives, this is us to me.

Clarification of Position

Such incongruity. We correspond
About a book and yet where I am,
Cold and old age achieve an effect
Not unlike the bullets and beatings
They are meting out where you are.

Let us think of who we are awhile.
Distance, culture, peace, age, death
Many dimensions divide another:
You are where it’s real and I am not.
My body's at home safe and sound.

Vanity is a Powerful Drug.

Call me slow, but at forty six I have just discovered that vanity has a number of insidious side effects.

Firstly it hides me from myself. I can get quite angry at perceived injustice, when in reality I am usually at least partially responsible for what I receive. I think that this is partly as a result of seeing myself as being intelligent or attractive**, whilst any self-belief that would result in either description seems to negate the delusion by definition.

Secondly it leads to an expectation of superiority. This is usually expressed as a desire for equal treatment. But the self cannot accurately measure equality, it's a little like the uncertainty principle, the complexity of human equality seems to dissolve into a morass of varying probabilities and potential outcomes. Vanity leads us to measure our experience of fairness with a bias that aims to ensure a better than average success rate.

Much is said about Male and Female vanity, and it now becoming a more common trait amongst men. I think I'll say nothing about that except that men have always been vain, it's just that to hide the implied insecurity they have tended to point the finger at feminine vanity. The painting is titled Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper, the 'last of the pre-raphaelites'.

** Although please note that I oscillate between + and - with an unduly large proportion of my time spent in a limbo of self-medianity. Distinctly different from mediocrity which has connotations of negativity. I cannot work out whether I am electrically charged or connected to the the personality earth.

Something to consider, please?

You seem to find me very negatively placed. You are right that I am not really a sociable animal. I don't really see the point of being with people just to recycle the same trivialities seemingly for narcissistic reasons. I'm thinking of particularly dull people that we know here.

I find that a lot of what happens to me disappointing i.e. the way I can be treated, ignored, disrespected etc. But in truth I am not treated any differently from anyone else, and no doubt I can treat others just the same, and I know that you have felt similarly. I try not to let it get me down, or if it does I can be fed up for a while but I can find enough peace within me to put it behind me. Treating people badly seems to be the way of the world. It's not for me though.

I can see that you see me as being lonely. I'm not. New work when it comes will bring new social opportunities, there's the pub, Mike, the kids, it's enough for now. I am generally happy to accept people as they are and if people aren't perfect, well I'm not either. The temporary nature of work related friendships tends to suit me. If I am to have longer term or more frequent relationships I want them to be based upon something shared and not just navel gazing or Dave and Ted's banal and immature pub crawling pussy hunts. I know that isolates me and I know that being opinionated can compound this. I try to be kind, generous and a good listener; much more so that many I some across, and most people only want their own self to prevail, I guess I get bored with that and that's why I don't see many people.I know that a lot of what you project onto me is a reflection of your past, my weaknesses and faults filtered through your values, our situation with its frustrations and uncertainties. But I think that you fell out of love with me a long time ago and sometimes I wonder if you ever did.

Yesterday I was happy to see you, was happy with my day, there was no problem. Of course life could be better, in our situation that's a given. Like you I cannot be super positive all the time. You clearly want a different life than we have had for some time, with the social aspects such as yesterday's lunch, Julie, your course, Tammy and the kids etc, that's fine by me I'm not possessive (I can be nervous about being hurt but that's a different matter) but please don't denigrate me becuase I want different things from life. I love you, we have until Thursday night before we're really together again. Let's not load it with too much expectation though. I just want you to be happy, if we can be happy together then that's what marriage is about.

A Start of Something?

My name is Richard Mutt and I am not yet fifty though I have made substantive progress in attaining that age by believing in good, in right, in love and beauty. As I get older things pivotal to the enjoyment of the remainder of my days oscillate, my weight, my desires, my kindnesses and commitments all in disordered dimensions parallel to the scales of intent and resignation which weigh my contentment. So does purpose for instance and today I cannot get up. The sky today, a winter dawn, somewhere around eight is intense, a cloud low dark long moves from left to right across my bedroom window, a snake in my eye. Framed with dark red curtains foreboding pink high cloud is eclipsed by rapidly moving wisps of black. The sixteen thousand four hundred and thirty seventh day of my life begins. The cheeky boy with the handsome smile is alone beside his wife, she snores softly, somewhere front or back the cat calls to be let in from the night. Today looms large. I stretch myself, feel the sore muscles of my inactive body go as far as they safely will. Right handed my right shoulder and neck are, together with a spot just above my right hip the most unforgiving. They reflect the tension I display, picking, typing, bowing, touching. I don't relax into these things and even when conscious of my rigidity I find it impossible to become physically at peace.It's almost Christmas too, green and red, gaudy and cheap adorns my world for a few weeks. Both my wife and my mistress love this time. Once I chose my mistress because I thought her and my wife so unalike. Now they are as binary stars orbiting each other and I am their invisible centre of gravity, binding them, tracing the groove in time through which they pass, holding it all together. They shop, I shop, my women I cannot stop. It's quite a blissful place really. Quietly and serenely enabling their consumption. I wonder how many people hope that I have gone from their lives and will never return?

God, Reason and Love

Beauty and intelligence can be curses when they are qualities possessed in isolation, alien to prevailing desires. The profane pursuit of the beautiful, the tyrannical domination of reason by emotion. But what are these if not the common experiences of man?

Imagine science as a route to enlightenment in place of religion, reason and logic as the moral code necessary to control our negative and unenlightened impulses and imagine the pursuit of beauty and love as our goals. For God we would have reason, for naked self interest we would have beauty, love is the human manifestation of beauty, when we act beautifully we act with love, when we perceive only the pure beauty of another, then we are in love.

For God would become reason, reason is reborn from time to time but is sacrificed, reason preaches to us and logic is it's moral code. Success in our search for God is to be measured by the beauty of the answer to each individual question used to lift a corner of the veil. The journey is art and science. We are but tools. Maybe there is no other sentient life but us, maybe there is. Maybe the race is to become God.

Religion is correct in as much as it seems in it's purest forms to seek enlightment, seeks to give answers. Religion is correct in the same way that Newton was i.e. only partly. It only partly lifts the veil because it is based on flawed premises. a limited understanding based upon limited perception. Also Leibniz was hurt because love was not Newton's way, stealing ideas does not lead to truth. Religion steals the truth of God. Religion seeks the rules to guide us. Religion is a less refined view of the universe than the absolute truth of existence and its governing rules, and current science too suffers in the same way. Both suffer because we, in our state of only partial knowledge, are fallible. We seek to know the infinite, but our view is necessarily partial, because of our imperfections we can mistakenly pursue their aims and in doing so amplify them.