Sometimes I phrase in mid-action as a memory, a shard crosses my mind, ephemeral, like a wisp of smoke and as asphyxating.
I stop, I close my eyes, I focus in words, but it's always gone. I can't grasp it.
It's the name of a person, but never the face. Those are circumstances, but without presence. Very abstract, as if I've been reading it in a book.
My experiences are secondhand, borrowed. Not real in any sense.
And this is how I perceive people as dim apparitions, inert characters in a boring novel or a tedious, overlong film, the novel and the film of my life.
People, in my mind, in my perception, people are lifeless, except when they provide me with narcissistic or sadistic supply, at which point they spring to life like so many nutcrackers or gingerbread men.
When they are there to reflect me to myself, when they are there to provide feedback, when they are there to regulate me, when they surround me in a way that gives me succor and strength and resilience.
They become radiant, kinetic, idealized beings, floating auras, almost supernatural.
So people pass through my perimeter, they enter my life, they exit my life, they're in my life, and they're never there, they're devoid of all significance, of all separate existence.
I don't perceive them as real somehow. They're more like simulations.
Their limbs askew, their mouths gaping. They're like cartoon characters, cardboard cutouts, and they invariably exit stage left, never to be brought to mind again, at least not to my mind.
They are people who are like stuttering to mind the game, at least not to my mind. They are people who are like stuttering, then freezing frames in an obsolete film or in a burning celluloid photograph.
People cease to exist when they cease to give.
And I expect to be treated by them the same way, transactionally.
I have nostalgia. I miss. I miss the period. I miss the memories of abundant high quality supply.
I never ever miss people. I never have nostalgia for human contact or relationships, probably because I've never had any.
I don't miss anyone ever.
People are mere sepia memories trapped in the amber of my mind.
And there I walk, within the museum of my life, exhibit follows, exhibit, everything dead, everything inert, everything frozen, everything pinned like so many butterflies.
And I look around and I know that there must be life there somewhere, but it's not within me.
And so I trudge the corridors, I traverse hall after hall, and then at nightfall, I shut the museum all by myself and I go to sleep, surrounded by the vestiges and remnants and relics of a life unlived, rejected.
So today I'd like to read to you two poems that capture the essence of narcissism like no others.
The first poem is The Second Coming. It was written by William Butler Yeats. And it says:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming.
Hardly are those words out when a vast image, out of Spiritus Mundi, troubles my sight.
Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs, while all about it, real shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, itshour come round at last? Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
This is an amazing encapsulation of the genesis of narcissism in early childhood in my view.
The second poem is do not go Go Gentle into That Good Night. But Dylan Thomas, do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage! Rage against the dying of the light.
The wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight and learned too late, they grieved it on its way, do not go gentle into their good night. Grave men near death who see with blinding sight blind eyes would blaze like meteors and be gay. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the said height curse bless me now with your fierce tears I pray do not go gentle into that good night rage rage against the dying of the light and this is the narcissist existence raging against the dying of the light and this is the narcissist existence raging against the dying of the light and going inexorably into a night that is far from good.