We didn't find salvation.

Still here. Still, here.

Wings without birds; the beauty of falling.

The Rapture? Save Yourself.

Now, much as it's proving to be a surprising amount of fun to fuel the hell-fire of publicity for one deranged man who clearly wants to kill himself but is looking to do it by proxy, like a gangland teenager bereft of hope who commits suicide-by-cop, I think it's pretty safe to assume that The Rapture isn't about to happen.

Just to touch on the idea of a catastrophe of biblical proportions, where a catastrophe and a dogtanian would live together? I'd say this is a welcome and entertaining diversion from what's been a pretty hellish narrative in the news lately.

We've got politicians saying there's bad rape and okay rape, which I assume means the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war against Congolese women which keeps mobile phone production cheap and allows us to fool ourselves into believing we need that upgrade every year. I did it, we all did it. My iPhone4 is an incredible tool, but it's built in a factory that has to have suicide guards and includes rare minerals that are mined from human suffering.

I managed fine when I'd write letters or use a telephone and I could still remember things without having to check an address six times on google maps on my way somewhere.

But yes, Ken's right, culturally, we condone that kind of rape. We buy into it every time we upgrade.

Good rape? The police in Canada warned women that if they dressed like sluts they were placing themselves at risk. Well, I know for one, that as a man I just love being treated like some kind of rape-robot by this sort of discussion, as though the flash of an ankle will transform me from a decent human being into some kind of brutal fuck-hungry monster. How's about we change the discourse away from it being "what you wear controls men's behaviour" into one about everyone, men, women and those who define otherwise respecting one another and sex being based around mutual desire and attraction?

The "it's my sexy body and I wear what I want!" kind of thing I find a bit sad; yes, bodies are sexy, but surely that kind of competitive pride is vulgar if the implication is that others might not have the sex appeal you are flaunting.

The whole thing of judging anyone on what they wear comes back to issues of money and power anyway, like the scorn poured on 'chavs' as though all people who dress one way must be stupid and undeserving. Tribalism like that, again, smacks of a brutal lack of empathy.

The Rapture is based on a similar arrogant sin of pride, that only the most faithful, the most pure, the most righteous will be chosen by God to be taken away from the Earth to miss out on the trials of the Last Days. The truth is, I suspect, that it's a lot easier to resist temptation if you've not been in terribly difficult situations, but also that it's also easy to fail to find empathy if you've not had the same trial by fire. Drug use can be hard to understand, for instance, if you've never done it, so you find yourself saying, "I'm high on life!" without really knowing why people drink, smoke or do other things to abnegate the self.

I can certainly see the appeal of The Rapture, though. The thought of being lifted up and away from all of this is kind of what I was after when I was in the depths of depression; it's what I was trying to emulate when I'd overdose on painkillers. It was what I'd get a taste of when I'd take tantalising risks with drugs and sex. It's the feeling I had when I was lifted by gloved hands when I'd passed out from a suicide attempt and the world was just sparks of light in front of my eyes and a paramedic said: "It'll be alright."

The electric charge that burns through every cell as the drug hits you and your favourite song ever (of that moment) comes on on the club and you forget everything.

That feeling of lightness as the seizure finally breaks from the confusion and panic into unconsciousness and sleep and time melts away and I feel nothing but the peculiar sensation as if ants are crawling across the right side of my brain.

It's freedom that The Rapture represents: a severance from all of the burdens of the guilt and consequences of this world and the thousand tiny cuts that flesh is heir to. The grief and pain that we shoulder and ignore that erodes our ability to empathise with one another. We need that phone for our job, so we ignore the screams that made it. A line of coke will help to deaden the cries, but the taste of blood that lingers in our conscience about where that's come from kicks with the comedown. 

We're all caught in a vast web of cruelty that if we stop to examine it we cannot condone easily, so we joke about the loons who want out of this into the arms of some illusory father figure who'll lift them up from their suicide attempt onto some hospital bed in the sky and tell them that they'll be okay, fit them with some morphine drip of Christ's love and immortality and an eternal distance from everything they've left behind.

So, yes, I'm going to have a giggle about the thought of being beamed up to some sky citadel where I could laugh at all the losers with my smug-father, but secretly I'm wishing there were some hope for the world that things could be better.

Things can be better, but I think the secret is to start small and remember that you're the one who has to live with the things you do.

Stop Doing This To Yourself

   "I give you ideas in abundance."

It was a curse that Morpheus levied on a man who stole a muse and locked her in his loft so that she would further his career. It was a kinky setup, but I'm sure that if he'd just been a little nicer then they could have had a wonderful Tie Me Up thing going on, but sadly it was a bit grubbier than that and Morpheus had to come and get her out of there.

The never ending flow of ideas led the man insane, writing words on his walls with just the bloody nubs of his fingers as a stream of drivel fell out of his mind, ablaze with a fevered genius he couldn't temper; couldn't slow down.

Luckily, I think that if I've got some nubile girl wandering around in my flat somewhere wearing my old shirt, it'd fit her a lot better than she managed to fit into his skanky moob muu-muu, so all I hear of her is the occasional skitter of a squirrel on the roof (I assume she doesn't like my cooking) and when my passport goes missing (which I suppose I should take as a sign that she's quite fond of me).

I have days, though, where that buzz of ideas definitely leaves my fingers a little bloodied, but that's when the taste of it is like nothing else and you just hunger for more. It's good to have people around to tell you when to stop, when to look away, when to go and walk and when to eat.

It insults the dead when you treat life carelessly.

I've had a mad couple of weeks. For the first time in a long while, I'm pretty sure I don't mean that in terms of me being a batshit fruitloop, at least not in a way I'm in the slightest bit ashamed of. As if I ever was.

I've indulged my emo duty with a diet of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability back to back giving me quite the existential crisis just after the confusing news that all my scans were clear (which should be good news, but I'd kind of rather know what was going on with these seizures). The whole thing of getting to grips with the idea of there being times when I'm not properly present in myself, or that my sense of self is not reliable is quite chilling.

Oddly, rather than spiral into woe from running blades or the sharp turn of beautiful poetry, I've found solace in remembering the Circle of Zerthimon:

"There is great strength in numbers, but there is great power in one, for the strength of the will of one may gather numbers to it. There is strength not only in knowing the self, but knowing how to bring it forth in others."

The Nameless One, reflecting on the lesson of the fifth circle of Zerthimon

Things like that keep bringing me back to that idea that has been floating around for a while from Alan Moore and, oddly, from the Church of England, where both argue that religious teachings shouldn't rely on absolute but poetic truths and that it doesn't matter whether the source of your teachings is something that's real or not, but whether it's something you learn from and whether you grow from it. When CoE people argue that the questions about archaeological evidence or otherwise for Jesus' life distract from the beauty of the lessons of the beatitudes, I think they're saying the same thing as Alan Moore was getting at when he said Superman was one of his moral compasses when he was growing up.

There's a power in symbols that's not to be ignored, and it makes me wonder if artists, writers and designers understand that they're often skirting into the same territory as priestesses and shamans of other ages. That, in itself ties back to these moments of transience that I have, where some shudder takes me out of myself and away from a sense of what's real.

The power of symbols, though, is raw in a week of births, deaths and marriages. The Obama birth certificate, the Royal Wedding and the assassination of Bin Laden all within one long weekend. The inane nonsense around the nationality of Barack Obama makes me wonder a little bit about how others must view Britain at the moment if this is the kind of thing that America's projecting. We're telling the world that we support democratic reform around the middle east, but we're having pre-emptive arrests, slaughtering our welfare state, taking a machete to the NHS against a 96% vote of no confidence and over half a million people on the streets in protest against a government that no-one voted for. This is not fair.

A month ago, half a million people went out in London to protest to ask for a fairer society, to ensure that the rich understand the idea of noblesse oblige through fair taxes, welfare for those who need it, healthcare and education for all. The newspapers described the gathering as anarchy intent on destroying society and causing criminal damage and the police attacked people and MPs demanded that laws were passed to ensure the police had even more powers to arrest and attack people who they suspected might possibly disagree with them. You know, people. The people who the MPs work for. The people who pay their wages.

This month, a similar number of people went out in London to celebrate the wedding of two wealthy people, paid for out of the public purse, harming the economy enormously with a day off work. There were raids around London on anyone who might be want to protest against such a craven display of gratuitous wealth in the face of national poverty and distress, people were arrested pre-emptively to protect the peace and the papers declared the day a triumph of national unity and identity, while so many of the people I know just felt like bunting lepers, waving neither a Union Jack or a black flag, but feeling more inclined towards the latter by the end of the day at the reports of how many mass murderers were in that church and wondering to myself how poorly the two roles as head of the church and head of the army sit together.

And to close the long weekend, after visiting my boyfriend in Brighton who'd been kettled with his shopping bags for the crime of going to buy dog food in Sainsbury's and stopping to talk to a friend in the street at the weekend, I hear that we're now meant to be awash with triumph because Osama Bin Laden has been assassinated in Pakistan. My friend Claire put it best with this quote, which is all I think I want to say on the War on Terror at the moment.

"Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that"

Martin Luther King