Barbelo's Blood

Not much to say right now, going out for another beer, but I want to get this blog rolling with something, so … something personal, perhaps.

I was recently asked in an online interview what the three best words to describe my writing are.

I replied: skulduggerous, paranoid, dichotomy.

Admittedly, I did not give my answer much thought at the time, I just liked the combination of those particular words, but thinking on it now, that kinda nails it.

Throws me back to my first week in secondary school, age eleven, sitting at the back of English class after my first fight in the corridor – and my first dichromatic epiphany. Is that a word? It is now. Let me explain.

Confusing time for me back then, London in the 70s, a lot of racism, NF, skinheads, and I suppose I was still trying to get my head around English (my first language is Spanish), or even what English was, even though I was born there. Seemed for a time I was getting it in the neck from both sides; the white racists ‘cos of being perceived a foreigner, and the blacks for being white. And I remember sitting beside my new friend, David O, and suddenly gripping the desk with my mind screaming: What total fucking bollocks! What white people, what black people? Doesn’t exist!

Fair enough, I know everybody uses those terms, and if I hadn’t of been in that heightened state you sometimes achieve after a fight (AKA paranoia), I’d of probably missed it.

You see, my friend David was from Nigeria, we’d only just met in the corridor outside when he attacked me. I don’t have a clue why, never asked, maybe that’s how they make friends in Nigeria. Either way, he was huge for an eleven year-old, already had a beard on him, and I was half his size – a fist pummelled in my solar plexus, ended it quick enough. And then doubled over, I found myself gasping for breath, and laughing my tits off! I dunno the why of that either. Seriously. But I suppose the paranoid dichotomy of our situation is we immediately became friends because of it.

Have to laugh about that again now, but point is, back in the classroom I’d realised he was not black – the blackboard behind our teacher’s desk was black – David was deep brown, a rich mahogany. And I was not white, pinkish maybe with blotchy bits, but definitely not white – though I do go quite brown myself in the sun.

That was my first dichromatic epiphany. There is no black, there is no white. It was like suddenly finding the colour control on reality, but when I tried telling David, he snapped a derisive wide-eyed,‘WHAT!’ clucking his tongue – something we were all learning from the Jamaicans – and then patiently explained that being black was a matter of pride, of who you are. I apologised before he attacked me again.

I was never so confused in all my life. How does calling yourself something you’re not, provide identity, or give any meaningful expression to the world and your place in it?

It doesn’t, and yet we all do it. Otherwise sane and rational people die over it, kill over it. And as I later discovered that year too, in art class, there really is no black and white in nature, there’s always some colour in there somewhere.

But … we’re still not talking skulduggerous paranoid dichotomy here, not really, just boring old cognitive dissonance: holding two contradictory thoughts simultaneously and being driven bananas in the process.

Does do funny things to your head on an unconscious level, and we’re all easy to manipulate when we’re bananas …

No, skulduggerous paranoid dichotomy is a practice, I’d call it, a remedy even, leastways it’s mine. I’d even go so far as to say it’s a martial art, or should be developed into one, Sku Pa Di, for short – a cut through the bullshit spiritual endeavour – a verb, an emancipation. Leastways we’re no good to anybody fucked up. Have to keep your mind on its toes, continually, because everybody around you is almost certainly insane. Have to be skulduggerous and go along with the pretence you’re just as bonkers as the next person. Flow. Never meet stupidity head-on. Keep your paranoia honed, because very often it’s the only thing standing between your sanity and The Grand Delusion: the dichotomy of mutually exclusive, opposed groups which do not fucking exist.

Nothing is mutually exclusive in nature. Everything is interdependent, whole and integral.

Even male and female is a silly notion, that’s why men have nipples, even life and death becomes ridiculous when practicing deep Sku Pa Di meditation – but wait! Can these ancient secrets of the High Initiates, be so readily divulged to the profane?

Fuck me, dichromatic is a word after all …

I’m going out for more beer.

JF

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