Unlapsing

In my thoughts and in my words;
in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do...

    Think mistakes. That is, think or thought can be in error. So we're all advised. Thought as often as not ill-argued. Ill-considered. Ill-received.
    Ah language. What a way to tie your self in knots. This present here and now and ever-ending vanity of the true and over-pondered slip, to think yourself more grand and impotent than you already are. Important, is it? Oops. Then sure and unavoidable slide all the low way down to here where we currently sit. Together you and me. You and I.
    Mourning and weeping. This vale: a brick wall.
    - Hitting or sitting? Think hard now.

    Chipping now, chipping at another wall: it's seven years' worth for God's sake. What the hell happened to you in ninety-three? Fifth year at high school. Highers. You strayed too far for fun and you far too smart and too strong then to be stopped. And between then and now? Changes, variations, semi-fatal inconsistencies. Little deaths. Not so strong or so smart now, eh? But a signal sent is sometimes a signal received. And here we are now.
    - Beggin!

    So chip away those old layers, old son: try to recall. This thing they're all calling conscience could be a tree or an old horse's mouth. You can tell it by sight, but peer with a purpose: don't you go looking all close unless you're altogether ready. Preparations need preparations themselves.

    So I'll prepare so. Sitting fast here awhile rethink your mistakes, that is, if you think or thought a thought can be repeated. Tarry awhile all, said slow: overponder still. Means not too much. Eye up the benches. The pews they call them. Bleachers. There are these others waiting up there ahead. Look down. Old folks. What fear they in their years? What fears. The scared heart. Cast a further eye churchwards. Through the doorway examine all, your own only - weigh them up - evaluate and grade accordingly. The Holy Roman Empirical System. Close familiarity from an early age. A matter of course. First thing the boy learns? Always too late and never too late. A paradox, yes, but a parallel one. Who died and gave you the gift of criticism? Will you raise with me a glass to the too simultaneous? Ah, just a small one. Adjust a small one.
    - Sitting then. Go on. It's a calm enough day the day.

    Sat, on a wall, outside a chapel, smoking. In for a grilling at the grille. Seven years worth is seven times fifty-two times seven again is surely a big number. Times your own daily average makes the subtotal bigger still. SBI: Sins Batted In. What deviances that conjures. What penances. What games. Oh the gentleness will follow, nothing surer, but till then and between then watch your mouth, if you can. Cut out the language still beating and hold it before His face. Through this holy comms link unit admit to and embrace these tender, terminal relations between thought, speech and sight, senses to make us all so scoobied and so - aha! - unhappy.
    Tears.
    - Salt! A cure! Boy, you've had it coming.

    Sitting and struggling under, then, this wait of doubts, of debts.
    I.N.R.I. I.O.U.
    It's enough to make a man sick: sick, sore and saddled. Addled, ladled, all lonely in threes. If one heart alone can be good then surely three hearts together got it in them to go even gooder? I myself know not and that's half the defeat. Go good. Pick up your feet and go face your misgivings.

    - What's the matter? Said literally.
    Not a thing.
    - I doubt it. Said darkly.

    That doubt, presumably, is material thought which remains unapproved, and therefore unadvisable. Inadvisable? Non-advisable? My old doubts seem awful small now, unsignificant. First doubt I doubted - sixteen years old or seven years old, depending which way you work from - was the faith of my fathers, then they doubted theirs, and so on it goes: Eve doubted Adam, and Adam doubted God, and God doubted Himself and collapsed under the weight of His own wisdom. Seven bare years, formative ones, crushing that inheritance consciously under the load of logic, believing (in greenness and in keenness) that I was omnipotent, and forgetting that understanding is a gift of the spirit. What's gone good since then? What's good's gone since then. All years are formative. Ah me.
    And God, revelling in the limits of His own omnipotence, unbound and untroubled by paradox, failed to create a load He could not lift. Either that or He just didn't want to.

    So movement and the body, where must they come into play? And the mind? Base stuff. If every cell replaces itself… every however often it is… are these vintage… ill-thoughts… still… mine? Ach just put your faith in a thing, something, anything, whatever appears closest to home. And must this faithfulness equal obedience? We're all loyal to something at least. What do they teach children these days? Behave with the body, betray with the mind… Youthful pursuits: the old five knuckle shuffle. Keep your hands to yourself. Or rather, don't. Fairly sure on that one.
    Bodily abuse committed any number of times. Aye, this morning. My most recent… No, smoking as well. Join the queue, pal. And drinking. What handle can be got here? A beerglass handle. Bluegrass. Did I not read somewhere that gin means trap. Or used to mean. Shakespeare. All things that may slip slide in and out of usage. Blitzen drunkenness, where will that fit in if fit in it can? A holy crime: I doubt it. A secular one, maybe.
    A rest now.
    Too much of a good thing: all that wine in the twin testaments, it all flows somewhere. It all flows here is where it all flows. These great depths are great deaths and great dearths alone. Infinity.

    Ach, none of this is helping, all is play. Until…

    Another voice comes to one as if in the wilderness: Hark.
    At last I hear you. What's to be done?
    - Stop killing yourself, get off your arse, cross the road, rejoin your people.
    My people? Who's that? Far does that get us?
    - Don't think, it says, just do.
    Easy for you to say, chief, you're neither on nor up against a wall, merely in my…
    - Merely is it! Heh, my arse is on the line here too you know. He thinks his mind is wallless, hmmph! Besides, how'd you guess me?
    Easy. No-one else in here now.
    - We're all in this stew together son; stirred, collected and amassed.
    A collective term is it? How's about a mass? A mass of catholics.
    - Then reassure yourself in numbers. It all adds up. Outnumbered in this miserable place, but still kicking ass worldwide. The original and best, since year dot, as it were…
    Ah, but there's a career in this somewhere. Note to self (if grips can yet be got with self): future vocational sloganeering: it's stupid but it works. Look to the future once you've dredged the past. Billboard posters, bus-stop hoardings, the long pitch. Seven years and you'll be thirty. If the whole advertising thing don't pay try teaching…
    - Concentrate!
    Back to the rowing boat, is it? Can I walk… Yes, yes. Teensy reassurances. Scales and more scales. Salter: a Question of Balance. What have I done these past seven years? What have I failed to do?
    - Them's the very questions. Examine me careful now...

    And the voice is gone, temporarily not to doubt. Hard to think these things, in't it? Harder still to consider. Ah, memories are frail little things and volatile. Our memories.
    We burn down softly, inclining towards the filter.
    - Getting a little woolly there, kid: less of the F.P.P.
    The whit?
    - First person plural. Keep your focus on the task at hand.

    Right. Misuse or unsanctioned use of others' intangibles. Wrongdoings and illdoings. Cruelty and laziness, in the main, in thought and in deed, in the word and in the world. Indeed I can confess already, that my thoughts have slipped, that the latent cruelty swimming in this now-crammed cranium may yet have manifested itself directly or otherwise in the wide world. I am or may be helpless yet complicit in this.
    - Choose your words with care of coarse.
    Of course. I can confess and now must. Errors. One thing to acknowledge, another to accept, and yet another to beg. Threes. Who'd put their self in his position?
    Mine. How goes it now? I forget the words.
    - Concentration please, the task is still closer at hand. An ongoing process, this unlapsing. Think your self back. There was then (as ever) guidance going but you (being you) thought you knew what was wanted (and how). On the fair few occasions you descended to care. Skipping merry through the holidays, consumed by and consuming what you cared without a care or a hope in the world.
    Holy days, all obligation. I cared the whole time. Too much hope on too many occasions and now I'm needing cleaning. The mop and the bucket. That's what priests are for then, is it, the janitors of the soul?
    - Ach the priest just finishes the job you started: you clean up your own mess.
    And is that it then? All there is…
    - Come, it says. Prise us apart and let's be getting on with several things.

    What if I should croak on my way across to the chapel? A busy road. This soul should have been dusted down and delivered a long time back. Clear as a bell to me now, for clean as a whistle it soon shall be. A bit of spring cleaning, just the trick. The spick and span. Live not for the day, they say, live for the morrow. You could be hit by a bus and die, said one. Well be you careful when crossing the road, said the other. Enough. It all seems to make sense. Not that that's anything to go on. To base things on. Listen.

    Nothing at all now, not a dickie bird. Silence once more, finally, and all's calm in the once hurly-burly Partick noontime. We each stain the air around us.

    This last lapsed cigarette burns down. Is not that an error, to let it? Aye, and another to flick it on the floor. There are certain measures, some preventative, some of which proscribed. Don't even think prevention now: think cure before you think curtain. Then prevention after. Consider the procedures at first: they may have been changed in the interim. The hiatus, the break, these witless wilderness years. And what if these present words are wrong as well alongside my former thoughts? Then it all goes tits up. Watch the smoke. Wait and see. You don't have to give your name.

    Forgive me farther, for I have signed…
    - Seven years! You'll better sit down son.
    I'm kneeling all ready…

    Preparation. Prayer nets and political nets. We choose between the nets and now I must let mines cling to me. The world be damned. Ah, liberty at last, liberty from logic. What was that words? I can't be punished any more. Be forgiven now instead. These fabrics have it in them to end me. And that man's ambitions to fly wary tween twiny nets of church, tongue and state. Kirkyard, Kailyard, Kierkegaard. All things social. Accept it: expected. How does that work? Instructed, is it? Advised? Exempted? Who knows what line they take these days. No answers here.
    - What line we take. I hear it now, calmly. - Just start with we again, that's a start.

And I'll ask Blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you -
my brothers and sisters - to pray for me to the Lord our God.

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