I don't know who to tell...

Wednesday 18th September; 

They're torturing people for food, whoever 'they' is and wherever 'there' is.  It's been going on for some time.  I've just ignored it, it's sort of an error.  I suppose the wisest option would be to up and leave, but I'm not sure where to go or what to do.  

I drove around yesterday looking for local churches.  There's a church a short walk from the house, and others around the town.  Took a few of the phone numbers and made a few calls.  The church of Waltham Abbey called me back after a missed call and the Rector agreed to meet me on Friday at nine thirty am.  When I asked for an appointment he said 'I'll just get me booke' in the kind of accent an old friend used to use.  Old friend was always saying that about whatever novel he might be reading at that point.  Long time since we've met.  They might be in touch with one another in whatever way I don't know.  All I know is that I'd like to inform someone and churches in the locality might be the wisest option.  I called a few others and got mainly voicemails.  I got the numbers for 'St Mary great Parndon' (nearest church to the house), 'St Thomas More', a modern looking church near to the hospital, 'St Mary at Latton' which had some kind of church community centre nearby, 'St Lukes' (been there with the family for some kind of mass), 'St Andrews' in Stansted Abbots, and St Thomas a Beckett at Narthaw.  

Someone answered the phone at St Thomas a Beckett, might have been the vicar I'm not sure.  At the outset of beginning to hear voices I spent a bit of time there at the church.  It was always empty.  I asked to meet and was informed that contacting the local Parish of Harlow, where I've been living for some time would be the correct course of action.  I tried but hit only voicemails.  

I called a few others today.  The rector of St Marys was home.  I told them about the appointment with a Waltham Abbey priest on Friday and she told me to let her know how it goes.  There's a mass on Sunday at 10 am, it's days away and there are people being tortured for food.  But I'd really like to go.  Makes sense to me to inform the nearest church.  I also called St Thomas more, where the hall hire receptionist gave me the number for 'Lady Fatima'.  The two churches are a short drive apart but must operate under a the same governance.  I asked if we could meet because I was 'hearing voices' and he asked if I was a catholic.  I never made communion or confirmation but I said I sort of was.  The guy agreed to meet me at half twelve tomorrow.  I'd rather inform St Marys or Waltham Abbey but I figured I'd keep the appointment so that I've at least informed a parish priest. 

I have a doctors appointment tomorrow with the psychiatrist at the Derwent centre, Harlow at eleven thirty and short medical prior at eleven.  Just in case I never tap it all up, I sort of informed the local mental health people but had to retract when I thought they might keep me institutionalized while the food was going on.  I said at an initial appointment that I was being threatened with body possession, possibly to be used for a crime and that people were being tortured for food.  I was sectioned, held at the psychiatric ward.  I thought they might not let me go, so I completely retracted, appealed through a supplied solicitor and was set free.  I didn't want to retract but I had to get away from the food. 

A friend told me not to mention the food to the doctor.  Who knows what kind of crazy shit they might do to me because of it.  It's the danger of informing anyone.  Who knows what the consequences might be.  

I'll keep the doctors appointment and the appointment at the church tomorrow.  Friday I can inform the rector at Waltham Abbey.  I'd really like to attend the Sunday mass at Great Parndon so that my closest parish preist is sort of aware.  I have no cash til Monday anyway.  I might stumble into city on Monday to try to inform someone else.   

The back pain's ominous and my mind is feels pretty screwed.  God knows what'll happen.  

Other entry tomorrow.  

Thursday 19th September; 

I had a doctors appointment with the Harlow psychiatrist.  As advised, I didn't really tell the guy anything.  He was friendly and polite.   

Afterwards, I met a priest named 'Slavik' at the Lady Fatima Presbyterry.  I basically said I was receiving telepathies and that some kind of organisation was going to break my back via body posession and that people were being tortured for me to eat food at my mothers & late fathers house.  The guy, a big guy, from somewhere European had kind tears in his eyes.  He said, 'what am I supposed to do with that?'  He asked if these people were here about some kind of event in my history.  Who knows I'm not exactly a saint.  While he said there was nothing he could do... ( I told him about the other appointments) he said to let him know how the other appointments went and suggested that he knew the phone numbers of a couple of priests in London who may be able to perform some kind of exorcism.  I thanked him kindly and left.  The church is in Harlow, I don't know how such things work. I could say at least I'd told someone but it didn't really feel that way.  Decided to maybe return after the other appointments but I don't see what it can do.  I don't know how the underneath works, it's not impossible that it'll help in someway but also, nit impossible that it'll hurt in some way.  Alas, at least I told someone.  

Friday 20th September;  

Kept an appointment to meet the head rector at Waltham Abbey church.  It's a big imposing building, maybe that's how the church works.  Basically told the guy the same spiel.  He said to persevere with the mental health.  I'm on quitiapine.  I think all pharmaceuticals are placebo at his point.  Either way I don't believe that the medication will stop the voices or people watching from eventually possessing my body and imprisoning me for torture.  I have to be honest, this priest looked as though he sort of hated me.  But hey, it's a big parish church that I used to live near, at least I met and tried to inform someone.  He said he'd email the my local parish.  I thanked him kindly, he was a nice polite fellow and departed.  Still didn't really feel like I'd told anyone.  It's a heavy weight, I should have somehow made a noise about this stuff.  

I kept another appointment at a church in Hertford at 2.30pm.  I tried to contact a church at Stansted Abbots, a small village near Hertford I found a few years ago, but the parish priest was away.  I was contacted by someone in Hertford, covering the leave.  Drove over to Hertford.  The guy sat me down and I told him in reasonably thorough detail.  He said that he couldn't help, and said he'd email my local parish.

So I sort of wanted to attend the service at St Marys on Sunday, it's only a stones throw away from my house.  Literally a seven minute walk.  

Sunday... 

Missed the service.  Gave up on telling anyone.  Still living in a house with people being tortured for food.  It's not funny, I can guess what they're going to do back.  

The level, Brighton, aerial view.

Crossed pathways...

aesthetic

".. His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had been acquainted with nobility.

 

 - To finish what I was saying about beauty - said Stephen - the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad- pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?
- Of course, I am - said Lynch.- If you think I have an exerementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.-
Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head.
- Look at that basket - he said.
- I see it - said Lynch.
- In order to see that basket - said Stephen - your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.-
- Bull's eye!- said Lynch, laughing - Go on.-
- Then - said Stephen - you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.-
- Bull's eye again! - said Lynch wittily.- Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar.
- The connotation of the word - Stephen said - is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter was but the shadow, the reality of which it was but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas was the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine ~its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase al-most as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.-
Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thought enchanted silence.
- What I have said - he began again - refers to beauty in the wider sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition. In the market place it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the second sense of the term our judgment is influenced in the first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are. the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others. -
- That you told me a few nights ago - said Lynch - and we began the famous discussion.-
- I have a book at home - said Stephen - in which I have written down questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the answers to them I found the theory of the esthetic which I am trying to explain. Here are some questions I set myself: Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical or dramatic? If not, why not? -
- Why not, indeed? - said Lynch, laughing.
- If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood - Stephen continued - make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?-
- That's a lovely one - said Lynch, laughing again.- That has the true scholastic stink.-
- Lessing - said Stephen - should not have taken & group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. lie who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero, which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.-
- Trying to refine them also out of existence said Lynch."

The suburbs

I've moved to the suburbs.  I'm used to urban deterioration.  It isn't easy...

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