The first woman. Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom. Not her though, she was dragging a heavy vase or jug, a pithos, which mistranslated became a box, behind her. Heavy with dark matter, dark energy: stuff that used to be known as evil. The colours blaze out from the dark loam and have something of the jealous tang of the dead about them. But here’s the question: are the flower and the fruit held out to us in love or merely thrust out at us, their masters, like a fist.
Steal our fire and we’ll show you who is boss; show you where the power lies – yes power lies! We know where your family lives, we know your soft vulnerable bits. Bush who would be Zeus but wasn’t (needless to say) sent his thunderbolts in a display of shock and awe. But hang on, you’re not showing the appropriate gratitude. Our attempts to introduce the joys of gangsta capitalism and get rid of the dead hand of the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . come on, show some gratitude. We can all go to heaven now.
If the post-war period was called the ‘age of anxiety’ and the 80s and 90s the ‘antidepressant era’, we now live in bipolar times. A diagnosis that once applied to less than 1% of the population has risen dramatically, with almost 25% of Americans estimated to suffer from some form of bipolarity. It gets worse. The spillage from Pandora’s box jug flows without hindrance. Or is it simply that we get more mad as we go on? Darian Leader goes on: mood stabilising medication is routinely prescribed to adults and children alike, with child prescriptions increasing by 400% and the overall diagnosis by 4000% since the mid-90s.
How bipolar are you? I say, darling, how bipolar are you today?
Will bigPharma take over the world? Dragging the medical profession with it . . . Hang on a second that’s the thing about corruption – you don’t have to be dragged, you go willingly, a sick grin on your face, and lo! you stick your snout in the trough. Don’t worry there’s plenty more where that come from. We’re up to our necks in the shite.
Can we turn back the clock?
I don’t think so.
Can we do anything at all?
We must wait and see what they’re teaching at Eton these days. Meanwhile some among us will get straight down on our knees and embark on some fairly solid prayer.
I’m sure it’s all for the best.
Our senses cannot fathom this night.
(Some of these words came from Rilke via Paterson and another chunk from Darian Leader’s new book Strictly Bipolar)