Mercy…Mercy…Mercy, Mandy K…

I remember in early nineties when I was squatting in London’s King’s Road (always squat within the land of the posh!!) I met the purest of girls in a luxury of style:

Invariably, her black eyes were heavily underscored as if it had been weeks since she had last succumbed to the weaving hands of Morphus. As the days went by, an always whiter and whiter skin, wider and wider eyes, as if there was never enough light, avid pupils hungry for more light. It is always the beginning of the habit that is the most beautiful, because of the strangely ethereal transparency the skin takes on in the early days of the pristine dawn…

As the life of the body dwindles, the soul tries to ascend the valley of the body. She was destined to lose, but oh boy! (her favourite expression) what a ride…She ascended and ascended… double, triple, quadruple, the white light…Light and more Light…a translucent angel flapping in a luminous void…

There is always a light, neither inner nor outer, to reach…and it is of course, never enough; a perpetual falling in a gravity of cotton, that is neither ecstasy nor the negative of ecstasy, but rather, the underside of ecstasy. It is almost ecstasy turned inside out. If ecstasy had a shadow, this would be its experience: it is not “take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you are still nowhere near it” but rather, a total subtraction, neither addition or multiplication. Take all the best orgasms you have ever had, subtract them to the power of a million, and you are still nowhere there: a collapsed ecstasy under the weight of its own gravity – the ecstasy of an infinite density.

“I was bored” she told me “I decided to experiment. For 3 months I’ll take, and then I’d stop. I wanted to experience this rush that people laid down everything for it, the experience of an extreme purity on the edge of chaos, and then I’ll stop”, yes, yesss of course, sweeter in hell than the heaven they give us…

Eventually, if you waited long enough, an afterglow of a halo emerged, an angel out of the gutter, and then back again…never saw her again, except her crying mother. Always running with the quicksilver flow of life, thinking one can be swifter than death, but I guess not… The shadows of death catch the good, the bad and the high in equal measure.

Mandy K, R.I.P…Somewhere, beyond or nowhere…
…if nothingness or the void could be experienced we would forget to die…