Fountainhead

19^th Feb, 2011

I have long been feeling that I am living in a fog. In my younger years it was a narcotic fog, herbal, filthy chemical, whatever could create the fog. Recently, in somewhat more sober years, the fog has seeped out since witnessing the damage I do to myself working therapeutically with people, holding them in their trauma, walking, sometimes stumbling out of the horror, the crippling pain and the decimated self worth. All those workshops, the sledgehammer to my body and my delicate energetic system, I am done with it. Done with it. I put a further 6 months into iDecided, which is a website where people working with trauma can swap sessions, debriefing and supervision, but that lay down flat on the African earth in December last year, and has refused to rise. I realised I had to flog it, to chase people up and down badly designed corridors, be stood up for meetings, pursue communications with no response from the very people I was trying to help. Sometimes, the message comes loud and clear.

I have just closed the yellowed, worn pages of a badly printed book, the cover long fallen off, depicting a platinum blonde who one would expect to see perched on a red Ferrari, or in a Bond film. The designer of this cover had clearly never read the book, the most extraordinary fiction ever written, with the most important message I have ever read. The Fountainhead – Howard Rourke’s opus. It has cut through my fumbling attempts to live this life given to me, and what I discover is that the very thing I am offering to others, Activating Genius, is the very thing I have been longing for, all my life. What a mess of a life it has been, surrounded by humans who believed they knew how to develop an individual. Occasionally ham fisted family, beautiful intentions but blind to individuality, sworn enemies of anything inner, firmly committed to pruning, clipping, moulding, beating the impetus out of the little animals in their care. Constipated contracted school, clueless, posturing, hopeless in any capacity to nourish something more delicate than fictionalised history and formulaic mathematics. Religion, friends, work, you know the drill, the waiting passageway of humans busy with other humans, determined to shape humanity so that their very own genius never gets a spot of airtime.

What was it I wanted to do? I wanted to sing, to write, to create music. I just hope its not too late to make contact with that of me, like it was for Peter Keating, when he finally painted, it was gone.

I also understand my devotion and admiration to P now – he was fiercely, uncompromisingly individualistic, but I also suspect the violence of his creation was to scare people into submission. Compared to him, J is a  mere man in a suit. A second-hander. In his brother’s shadow, brilliant, I do believe it was a fight all his life to stand out. Genius, but I wonder what his real genius is?

And what mine will be? How about I approach The Enterprise Powerhouse not as an altruistic project, but a piece of work that is to serve my genius, my individuality, my unique configuration. Yes, this will be good. All the altruism didn’t feel right, it was the fog, and I think that’s part of this hunger for a partner, a man, that disowned part of me created a hunger for it in someone else. I served J, disconnecting from myself around him, in his space. Perhaps he picked it up and was repulsed by it, perhaps that was the key that set me free from him, it would have been so horrible to be with him, had he said yes to me in January.

The song I discovered this week, the tablecloth that holds the map of the singer's desire, tells him, “You’re the wrong turn, a big fat no, the fifth drink before a long drive home …. You’re the bars to my cage, you’re all I think about every day … every time you walk by, I am drawn to you. Desire, such a wicked little high, when the one you want, is blind to you ….”

His blindness, or clarity will set me free. It is a feeling I have that we would be great together, but he will destroy me. As will altruism destroy me.

My intention that I put out to the universe: An investor will come on board, and want me to start The Enterprise Powerhouse as soon as possible, latest September 2011, and will generously renumerate me to do so, with 12 extraordinary, motivated, committed geniuses enrolled to the course.

Thank God for Ayn Rand, thank God for The Fountainhead. What I wrote down this morning from the hallowed book:

The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life.

And ….

There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

How different might my life have been if I’d have realised this in my twenties? But it is how it is, and it is not too late.  I will make music, and I will write, and I will be successful with The Enterprise Powerhouse, in shAllah. I have licence to be myself, to abide by my own barometer of “yes” or “no”, and even though other people are hovering around the project, the shall be great wide open spaces for lateral stretches of creativity to breathe in four dimensions and expand into something brilliant, breathing genius.