Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 May 2008 16:12:50
I read a book.
It was the scariest book I've ever read. I read a lot of "horror" stuff in my late teens (including, to my shame, Stephen King's complete works up to that point) all of which I just laughed at - the only horror they contained was stylistic. The only thing that came close to being as scary was "How late it was how late" which was truly disturbing. (And brilliant, by the way. Jim Kelman comes across as a complete paranoiac in recent interviews talking of the London intelligentsia's patronizing attitude to anything north of Watford, but when you read that book, and then compare it with all the fuss the press made when it was published about the language, then you see that actually he's talking a lot of sense. And when the paranoids are the ones talking sense ....)
How late is actually a good point of comparison because the book I read those years ago, whose name or author I have no recollection of, was about a deaf lad. What felt really significant was this lad had the same name as me. I have always had a problem of identifying too strongly with protagonists in novels (except in those books which are so 1-dimensional as to prevent a 3-dimensional person getting inside any of their characters' heads). That's great for getting an emotional punch from a book, but not good for one's sanity. Anyway, somehow the isonymous protagonist made the book more uncomfortable for me than otherwise - it felt like the book had become a prophecy - the idea of a deaf me was inescapable.
I could cling on to the objective facts that I wasn't deaf, but they offered just as little comfort as the idea that when on a precipice I need not jump - objective and factual possibly, but meaningless and pathetic nevertheless.
And now that I have deficient hearing I find that book coming back to haunt me. I don't know if my hearing is going downhill - it may just be a result of all the gigs I went to in my late teens (see, I did something worthwhile with my time back then (well, okay, don't ask me what gigs I went to - I need to look after what little street-cred I may still have)), and it may just be that I'm noticing it now more than I used to, or even just that I'm less in denial about it than I was. Or it may be that it's getting progressively worse and that that prophecy is coming true. That's not a nice thought, but I wonder if this interim stage is actually worse. It's really quite silly, but I'm realizing that a major concern of mine is how stupid I must seem to people, because quite often my responses to what they say don't make much sense at all, or sound like I'm not all there. Whereas it's simply that I haven't been able to discern what they actually said. After you've asked people to repeat themselves once or twice, and especially if you haven't had the nerve to ask in the first place, and you can't understand, then what do you do? My answer, which is certainly not a great one, is you fumble. You mutter something inaudible, or vague, or you smile vacantly. That, at least, comes quite naturally to me.
Either way you get yet more confirmation of your feeling that you're not connecting with people, that you're isolated, that loneliness is closing in on you even in the times when you're surrounded by friends. And you end up feeling that John Donne was quite wrong.