Curses

I should take a moment here and introduce myself as narrator of this story and take the focus from its current location and shift it a little. You see, I am writing this from a comfortable future and not only have memory and timeline issues but also benefit from the added bonus of removing associated trauma from my head with each victorious completion of a chapter, thus removing my associated limbic response and fundamentally altering the, already shoddy, memory, allowing me the blessed peace of having that particular incident in my life finally stored properly and no longer haunting me with flashbacks or intrusive interruptions to what should be (but isn’t ) regular cognitive function.

Impressive sentence isn’t it. But do I have any real idea about what I am saying or doing these days. Not really, suffice to say I am so far removed from where I had travelled to that I can honestly compare it to travelling to the moon for a distance. I still battle with my demons and healing is slow to come but it is coming, and I am finding solutions, but they are a difficult process and push me to my mental limits regularly.

So this is the future, the time in the years after the events that I am trying to capture elsewhere and I am partially along the road the healing but blessedly free is the psychosis that gripped me for so long. I have myself grounded in reality and firmly gripping my place in the world as I stabilize from the experience. I am writing these words in my best effort to capture the events surrounding my insanity as an outlet for my trauma whereby I can reissue and control the event, shaping it as I see fit and responding to it as I wish which provides a new experience and memory of the event. It’s not easy and takes weeks of time for each chapter followed by months of inactivity but has honestly helped me put issues to bed that have not only plagued me years but also more recently terrified me beyond measure. Regaining rational thought has been probably the single most difficult thing I have ever accomplished. That’s my perspective on rational thought by the way. I have always been skewed and now, after years of hyper mania my ideology is even more firmly entrenched having been reinforced through the most bizarre set of experiences and coincidental collisions that I am attempting to collect here.

And that’s why I need to interrupt the story in order to confess and explain some of my writing conundrum. I am attempting to write to the past as the present which provides some difficulty into getting it in the right order but more importantly puts me in the position of having, not only hindsight, information and knowledge today that I simply did not have back then. I am noticing that that gives me difficulty in capturing how I was reacting to the experience at the time and writing about it with so much more understanding, or at least so much more by way of surreal coincidence.

I am sharing some of that information right now and it’s about curses. Or did you think that because I regained my sanity that I realized it was all hallucinations and a figment of my imagination. Ha, I think not, and today’s revelations have just added a remarkable amount of fuel to the fire. Luckily, I view this with a more detached eye than I used to because if I knew then what I know now, who knows what might have been the response. I have often felt that it was that small, detached, voice that questioned each new thought or conclusion that I made that ultimately helped me regain my senses. But then again, I must admit that the overall change in my core belief structure leads myself and any who read this to question my credibility when it comes to my protestations of sanity.

These stories are about the storyline I experienced while suffering from a complete psychotic meltdown and the reality I experienced was unlike anything I had ever read about, thought of, planned or can even remotely explain knowing. Too the best of my descriptive ability and lack of subject knowledge I concluded that I was cursed and that the curses were personified in my daily life by caricatures of the unseelie court. As in pagan Celtic mythology. That sort of unseelie court. I am sure it was them. I am sure I never would have survived the seelie. At best they were kindly malicious in their interactions with me. The darkness of the seelie court would have simply discarded my broken essence when they were bored with their play. Whomever it truly was who invaded my mind that summer they felt that their actions were to my benefit as opposed to my degradation. The more I have learned in the intervening years the more I have come to understand that the earliest laws created to govern this reality are the laws that still stand fast today. And I know next to nothing about these laws. I do have a guess that rings so true in my mind that I simply know it to be correct. I laugh. The knowing. Something I have carried my whole life and have only come to feel it in my middle age. I would dismiss it as simple age-related hubris if it didn’t send such coursing waves of Adrenalin through my body. These entities, this energy, this sentience, this being, completely envelopes life and forms and reacts completely with the form it interacts with. It does so with the complete ability to make form of every thought, action or belief that crosses their massively broad reach that crosses time through its imprinting on the genetic memory of each successive generation of a bloodline.

. Further to that was the dancing plague and the religious visions and extasy that accompanied the gyrations. I believed that the beings that were haunting me came to me through my ancestral bloodline and had been accrued over the centuries through each ancestors life. I further believed that these curses had culminated in the destruction of my life and the loss of my family and were manifestly tearing at my throat in their endgame to destroy my bloodline. They did not know about my daughter; she was off grid to their sights due to being hidden in records, but I was certain that the curses would pass to her if I died and that’s when I began to think again. I needed to dominate these issues for her sake. I needed to pacify them but most of all I needed to understand them in order to emerge from the pit I was covered in. What do I know now that makes it so difficult to get this story out is also a major, major potential catalyst for pulling this whole story together with a “and they lived happily ever after,” and absolutely proving to me that this world is a place where every possible thought has a reality, and that reality has form and substance, within our dimension and within our scope of vision.

In my own circular studying way, I have been worrying at these curses for some time with the aim of capturing them in my historical timeline so that I might understand the context in which they were issued and maybe get some ideas as to how to manage their existence. Getting rid of them doesn’t seem to be an ability I have. (Aaaarrrggghhhh, again I cannot grasp it). In short, I have looked for a why and a how I might have gathered my collection and firmly believed my own life’s carriage accounted for the heavy baggage that had gathered over the years. But then I find something like today. I mean it only covers a small smidgeon of timeline, similar my own personal contribution to our story but of profound interest to me. It also adds the further twist of being in my direct family tree and has the benefit of written record to back up the objectivity of its existence.

The curse. The mother of all curses. Right there and coming on the heels of other curses. Curses and excommunication by the church. Curses bringing on the sins in history to plague my earthly life. Curses to eternal damnation in the pits of hell. Curses on my family unto all generations. Refusal to be granted any of the ministrations of the church and to any who might provide aid or collaborate with my name. Curses on my hair, my nose, my belly, my wife, my children, my livestock, my home Inside and out. It is over 1500 words long and is still active today.

In 1498 my family was excommunicated and cursed by the Prince Bishop of Durham.

In 1524 my family was cursed by Cardinal Wolsley.

In 1525 my family was cursed by the Archbishop of Glasgow with a 1500-word, tirade that was pronounced throughout and along the entire Scottish English borderlands.

It is a very dark and bloody story that has been given the romantic treatment in literature but is little known today mainly due to its deliberate erasure from history back in the early 17th century. My family was one of 77 families so cursed, and we were named reivers. We operated without regard to either the crown of England or the crown of Scotland and paid the church no heed either. Our way of life was to raid into either country for whatever we could carry off and it was the basis of our economy.

At least, that is what the common denominator of data repositories tells me. Months later and I have a glimmering of understanding, possibly at the nature, or origin of that curse. The protestant reformation. It is highly likely that my ancestral conflict with authority originated in the disagreements brought about by Martin Luther and his 95 theses. Rebelling against authority while also embracing authority…sounds like me. It really does.

The further along I get in my story telling, the Clearwater my direction becomes and with that alignment in place, understanding flows. And I was off base, yet again, in all respects down to the motivations, the reasons and the origin of what I now come to term, a unique fate brought by decisions made that were strategically sound, but resulted in devastation like unto scorched earth. My writing has helped heal my soul to a degree that I am reaching out into the world once again, from a position of planning, and dealing with the unseelie court…is just a matter of making sure they…

—-by way of being a teaser for my up coming novel: When Tigers used to smoke. Available when I catch up on all these projects and finish editing my beast.

Tips are appreciated, they are allocated for art supplies…or a pizza if the universe is generous.