Auto: Chapter 5

Autosuggestion

The hypnotic or subconscious adoption of an idea which one has originated oneself.

Is it real? Before you panic for me, before you gasp, before you shed a tear, you must realise that there is a very real possibility that this was not a very real happening. It is nebulous beyond the point of elucidating (and yet my physical response was visceral to a similar degree of incommunicability). I am an imaginative, creative person — prone to invention, prone to explanation, prone to imposing a pattern, a meaning, on things. (Hence these words, an effortful stringing of slippery symbols in search of tenuous coherence.)

It is, quite conceivably, something I have suggested to myself, a myth built from some deep psychological need. I will not plumb this further: it is too early to do so. I can only deal with things that possess a sufficient distance from me. I am short-sighted in real life, but long-sighted in my interior vision. I am a slow processor, like an aged computer. And the implications of such accusations are far-reaching and have an ethical dimension. So it must sit there, for now, as a half-truth, a may be, a maybe.

I find impressions overwhelming, bewildering, frequently too much. Ordinary impressions: the information gathered by my senses and relayed to me in jagged snippets. It is too random, too diffuse. It discomfits, depresses. I cannot order it; I cannot shape it; there is a constant threat of being crushed by it. Of the deluge breaking, the dam busting. It is a state of constant tension, constant excitation.

And it makes reality (a word that has very little meaning, if you actually think about it) ungraspable. It makes everything seem like it could be autosuggestion. Nothing is solid; everything is built upon sand. Sand which is notorious for shifting: for being quick, abrasive, or running out completely. How much of what I accept, believe, understand, is — purely and simply (as if such a thing could be pure or simple) — autosuggestion. Everything originates from me. Everything in me comes from me. Everything outside of me is filtered by me. Me is filtered by me. Me is understood through the lens of me-ness.

And this is how this me-ness frequently expresses its experience:

I. I.

II. I cannot.

III. I cannot trust.

IV. I cannot trust anything.

V. I cannot trust anything or anyone.

Autosuggestion means I do not sleep. I do not remember the last time I have really truly slept. Deeply, with no concerns, with thoroughness. I sleep lightly. I sleep fitfully. Sometimes I don’t sleep. Often I don’t sleep, for my mind will not stop suggesting, inventing, interpreting with an insistence that makes the word suggestion seem woefully inadequate. I am tired, tried. I am exhausted. I am constantly exhausted, and do not know how to be any other way.

I do not know rest. I have not come across it. I am a stranger to repose, and find myself hoping that somebody will introduce me someday, somebody who is acquainted and would not mind helping me to make the first contact. If I could sleep like I can only dream of sleeping, this would guarantee some sort of solace, some sort of break, a hiatus in thinking.

I am suspicious of anything that claims it originated outside of me. When said baldly like that it sounds like paranoia. And yet, really, I have no evidence of anything that is not me. Of any idea that comes from outside. Of life on the outside. Of freedom to roam, to move.

Even my mind, which I took to be free,is fettered and feathered and chained unto me.

Auto

The word “auto” makes me think of self.

Though what doesn’t make me think of self?

Auto-Da-Fé

I have a distinct eschatological bent. The future is present to me. I feel it is approaching, though maybe it won’t. That would be nice. The future promises judgement, finality, the end of days. And I despair of getting out unscathed. A cosmic beating awaits around every corner. A gigantic cosmic beating waits around the final corner — flames, a punishment, burning, melting, dissolving, which would be a comfort if it was real.

But the real horror lies in being intact, in the certainty I feel that I am eternal, indestructible. So far, no one has destroyed me. I am like a cockroach, oblivious to nuclear fallout, hard-shelled but mushy inside. I can be bruised, I can be bent, but I cannot be broken. And this brings despair. I cannot cease. To be, to think, to experience.

I am burning now, in anticipation. I am engulfed, but not consumed. What will be left is what is always left — a kernel, a nugget, a gem. Is there beauty in this? I do not know.

I know what it is to feel hunted, to feel already caught — ensnared, to feel no future, or the future as a closed system, a foregone conclusion.

There is an annual conflagration, a yearly celebration, a tall aspiring monument to the past and to tradition — a red, white, and blue cylinder; firing at the sky; a Babel-like construction, culminating in an orgiastic babble of songs and voices and screeches; a bombastic blaze that brightens the night, that fires prejudice and keeps it alight; that happens a mere stone’s throw from my house. (Let him who is without sin throw the first stone.) I can feel the heat of it on my bedroom window. My palm outstretched is heated and blistered. It fascinates and repels. It draws in and it expels.

It happens on July 12, a day before my birthday, a reminder that hell predates earth, that death encompasses life, gives birth to life, necessitates life. Each year I’m drawn into the heart of that fire, in hypnotic suspension. It makes me shudder.

Why do I feel that it is a fire lit for me? There is no smoke without a fire.

It is my removal from the mob, from the mass — my refusal to accept the self-evident claims that are not self-evident at all, my desire to remain open and not closed, to let my mind be made over rather than made up. And it is an isolating endeavour — one that will draw attention, one that will attract imposture and imposition.

The inquisition are — aurally — inquisitive. Relentlessly so. They will find me. They will find me out. And do me in. Whoever they is. Whoever it is. Whoever. God. God, I guess.

And I can only guess. I can only follow my automatic instincts. They are heresies by nature, if not by name. To be me is to live in peril. To be me is to live in shadow. It is to inhabit the auto. It is to resent the auto. It is auto. Irreducibly auto. Just, auto. Auto.