High Thoughts in the Attic Forests

All those whirling thoughts lost in the bed sits and garrets, clichés of existence in the modern, academic world. They have their lists and their ideas of who really means something in this world. It rains against their windows and they lie back in the warmth and ingrained scents of their pretty beds, dead to the world outside. They live only inside their heads, with no sense of tense; everything is in the present except that day sometime in the future when they might end it all in some pretty way and start a book about how mad they are. They like pink but wear black to fit in with their empty-skulled boyfriends and try to talk about the right things. Dancing is not for them. They like passion but going to bed with someone is so mechanical, not like their idea of gentle scents and caresses. The boys never feel guilty; I feel guilty for them but can do nothing to make it better. One of them is writing on the Industrial Novel, bashing away night after night, creating the ultimate comment on a thing gone by and irrelevant to her existence.

Up the stairs come the ghosts of her past. She likes to think that she has been affected by her mother, beaten into depression by not being understood. In reality she is understood too well. "We have spoiled that child.,” her parents might say privately but only to each other. “She is at college, she has passed exams and now she is well on the way to being a Doctor of something. We would prefer it to be medicine but you can't have everything." She hates bodies so there is no way she could have been a medical doctor. Real doctors have a light behind their eyes; they have seen how fragile we are and how wonderful we are as machines. They divorce the mechanical study of bodies from the passion and the love they have for everyone. That is the way it is. They love everybody in some way, except the gutted bodies they slice into to learn how much they love everybody. They smell of chemicals, yellow fluids in jars. They are not real.

We walk a tightrope between madness and catatonia. We like to think we are the sane ones, the ones who understand everything and know how to react whatever we are presented with. The truth is we are all mad in some way; we have our own ways of existing, of handling the world. Our successful friends have worked out how to gloss over the complexities and to ignore the 'right' ways of doing things. We would be shocked to know everything that a politician does to get his position. They take in what they need to know as we all do. I want to understand everything and the world whistles by me as I stop to smell the flowers and define their colours and understand how they make new flowers. Flowers are irrelevant and I will never know all there is to know.

These mad girls in their attics know everything. This knowledge is a gift from God. They do not need to study. This girl got 21 out of twenty for her English essay and all the mathematicians protested. She kept her extra point and we saw capitalism and blues walk hand-in-hand. I dreamed she kissed me and gave me diphtheria, passing it through until my throat swelled. I loved her at the time and suddenly, growing up made me hate her. The dream seemed so real for I had kissed her once, a short adolescent, meaningless kiss and now she was back to haunt me. I see her now and wonder if she asks herself whether the extra point was worth it. Is she publishing those stories, those potboilers about her love and madness? She is silent in the world now. I am the noise in my life. Turning my head, I hear music louder, as if some mechanism in my ear was loose. It is a legacy of that sore throat. She would tell me it is the loud music I have listened to. She is lying.

Up in the sky, the attic forests stretch to the horizon, a city without staff, without shops, sustained by the odd cigarette and convenience food left on dirty corners. There is poverty in knowledge. I could not live without understanding but I could live enough with warmth and food. Poverty has shifted from its base to the empty-headedness we are fed. The music ends in my ear and I return to skyheight, a repeat of yesterday's happy dreams. The rain beats on the window still and I have become one of those ingenue professors, happy with my knowledge of the world. I love everybody. One day I will look out of the window, across those roofs to the hills and moors and trees and sky but for now, it is enough to write and think about those flowery gardens where I grew up.