Dialogue 17

1                 Poor me, I am the victim and I am in great pain. Stop torturing me.

2                 I can’t. I’m not doing it deliberately. Honestly. I can’t think why anyone would want to put anybody else through such distress. It is not me.

3                 But there’s only two of us here.

4                 That’s all very well but I’m telling you I’m not the torturer. Or at least if I am, I’m not aware of it and if I’m not aware of it I can’t stop it.

5                 And if you were aware of it, could you stop it?

6                 Probably not. There is something about pain that seems inevitable.

7                 Oh come on

8                 One pain hides another

9                 I don’t agree

10             And in this instance the ultimate pain that we are trying to hide from ourselves through self-destructive behaviour is just the pain of dying, the pain of knowing that soon you won’t be here – yes, for everyone, it’s that word “soon” that freaks them out.

11             Oh.
Anyway, I want to win. I want to achieve behaviour within my psychic biological unit that is the least self-destructive, the least pain-inflicting possible. I want to stop smoking.

12             Oh well, that's not my area.

13             What do you mean it’s not your area? Whose area is it then? Surely we have agreed you and me all these years we’ve been working together, I thought we had arrived at a kind of tacit agreement that we were equally responsible?

14             I remember talking about equality and thinking about democracy but I don’t suppose I ever really envisaged that what we were talking about would, could actually apply to little ol' us.

15             I don’t see why not.

16             Because no matter how you look at it or which way you stand, you are the active voice and I am the passive one. That’s why we get on so well together. We are not in competition for a slot. You have the active slot, you start the ball rolling, open the conversation and I am the passive one, delighted to be asked to tag along but not really all that – IMPORTANT. I don’t feel important. I don’t feel as if my word counts for anything in our dialogues, I’m just there to show you to advantage.

17             I’m sorry. I don’t intend to make you feel that way. I’m sorry if I have so much self-worth inside me that I fail to realise when other voices don’t feel so justified in their existence. I am the standpoint of a soul for a soul, each human soul has the same intrinsic worth at birth and I am one of them so am a human soul and I was born so I have the same worth as everyone else on the planet, as anyone else on the planet.

18             And I don’t have any of that. I am not adamant about being here. I don’t know why I’m here or who I am but I know that I can slip out of existence in the blink of an eye – you might forget to invoke me one day and I would have no more voice, I would fall into silence and anyway sometimes I think that’s all I want, silence, to get back to the silence, you started this dialogue for you, not for me, and to begin with I thought I was getting something out of it but it isn’t going anywhere, it is going nowhere, round in circles, with you standing so bloody straight and tall on quicksand and me lying down really, not even got the spine to stand up, I’m a low life, an insect, I scavenge and take what's left...

19             We’ve been through all this – it is in your ultimate interest that “we” – that is “I” – go on existing. Ok so you may not be responsible for our bad behaviour, you may not have the power to turn it on and off or affect it in any way, but you most definitely are involved.

20             That doesn’t really get us anywhere either. We are just chin-wagging here, going through the motions of communication but it’s all just idle chit-chat and it is not helping us to stop self-destructive behaviour and act out of enlightened self-interest.

21             Maybe our hope is that by just talking, putting it down in words, the one who knows and the one who can are actually listening and will help us – silently, mysteriously, in an invisible, intangible way – help us. Do it for us.

22             Ask and ye shall receive.

23             Yes, something like that.

24             Ok, I’ll go along with that. I'll join my voice to yours and say for Christ’s sake could someone – anyone – help us to stop smoking.

25             Now you’re talking.

26             Yes but is anybody listening?

27             That’s our bet. Pascal’s wager. Act as if. It certainly can’t do us any harm.

28             But it might not do us any good either…

Written 23^rd March 2008. Stopped smoking on April 14^th 2008. Still stopped, October 2009.
Started again spring 2010. Still wanting to stop December 2010.