PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Including Totally Optional Prompts and Three Word Wednesday.
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Something became obvious about my research many years ago. I’m an optimistic kind of guy, perhaps a little eccentric, but my deepest writings always seem to concern the more bizarre areas of life.
I’ll write about anything, but I’m in my element when the subject concerns the paranormal, cults, conspiracies, criminals, hoaxers, disasters or atrocities. How can I have a bright side when so much of my work concerns darker areas?

It began one day on a train.

I had been suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome for some six months. Of course, it was hardly known in those days, and the medics sent me off for relaxation therapy.
The day it ended I caught a train, which then decided to catch fire, resulting in a two hour delay. When this was announced, I sat back, perfectly relaxed. But it wasn’t long before I noticed something quite strange.

The people in the carriage were changing.

Slowly, any sense of normality disappeared, replaced by what can only be described as a form of communal neurosis. These people were becoming angry, worried and suddenly under confident.
This had been caused by the fact that they were to be late, and in no time at all I could see perspiration, feel headaches and they seemed to be communicating anxiety to each other.

I had realised there is a madness below the normal.

And even more interestingly, I had only noticed it because I had been temporarily taken out of normal human interaction. Clearly, I had previously been one of them and would never have noticed it.
Outside my family, this was the most important moment of my life, and sent me on a quest to understand the human condition, and the madness below it, which still fuels me over 25 years later.

Which brings me back to the bizarre.

I very soon realised that in looking to the extremes of human behaviour, you are more likely to identify this ‘madness’ because it is more pronounced – more open to observation. Which obviously leads to another insight.
If a madness can be easily identified in the extreme, then it must also exist, in a lesser form, in the normal. So could it be that practically everything we do as humans holds a touch of insanity?
When I look to more ‘rational’ subjects such as politics, environmentalism, science and religion, it seems to be so. After all, how else can we understand war, bigotry and intolerance?
This is why the study of such subjects is so important; and the way they are shunned by academe is perhaps another indication of this ‘madness’. Unless, of course, I simply produce the rantings of an eccentric – in a normal kind of way.

© Anthony North, January 2008

GOD SCRIBE

What insanity, this writing thing,
creating people, plots that zing,
after a time you become inured,
thinking it real with every word

It’s so true, I give my word,
reality created from man to bird,
dripping life, no need to rehearse,
it comes natural in every verse

Ending with your own uni-verse,
you’ve started life but it’s often a curse,
plots so real, your life you crop,
only ending with a full stop

It’s unlikely you’ll ever stop,
a magician, you will never drop,
your ability to make those characters grovel,
with twists and turns in every novel

And once you’re a writer life is novel,
even if poor, living in a hovel,
scribbling away from brunch to tea,
you’ve created your own personal entity

(c) Anthony North, January 2009

MOLLY THE MEDIUM

Molly the Medium
descends into tedium
whenever she thinks of fakes;
From where voices come
be it the dead offering a crumb,
or from deep in her own open mind
she hates the deception
the total inception
of schemers who are not very kind;
The bereaved often need solace
of afterlife a promise
and Molly does therapy for their sake;
She stops their inner panic
makes them calm, not manic
and hardly any money she makes;
So …
… spare a thought for dear Molly
she’s not off her trolley
and remember, they’re not all fake

(c) Anthony North, January 2009