The Black Crown Project was like pulling something spongy from its root, millimetre by coming millimetre, so I will try to do this as quickly as possible.
The Black Crown Project pretended to have a tensile strength, an artistic torque built on girth, and deep permeating foundations. In reality, it was a thumb-thin network, a shallow breadth, multitudes next to multitudes with little underneath. It attempted to compensate for this lagoon-like significance with expanse, and a stupefying dreadlock of words. So, I will try to lay everything out here naked, like tools for oiling. It was, after all, somewhat of a tool.
The Black Crown Project was an opisometer for pacing out something that I thought was my soul, but which was far more temporary. I wrote about it without ever visiting it, though I have visited it since, and have disappeared it with my visit. I have marked it with trigs, fingered it and posted it, almanacked its unquantifiable interior, its dark and far-from-African heart. It was smaller than I expected, and nowhere as interesting a place as I had made it out to be. The cuisine repeats, the locals are sadly harmless, their taboos lacking in juice.
The Black Crown Project was all about quarantine, stymy, barrier, regulation, distance and membrane; about holding itself, and myself, together at an apotropaic arm's length; of being terrified of union and Loss all at once. I am trying to give it some union, but some things have been lost, and I am sorry. It is nobody's fault, not even my own.
In one way, The Black Crown Project was created to be an archive of itself. It was about stasis, immortality and ruinenwert. If anything so tremulous as a plot occurred, it revealed how dead it really was. It lived in the preterite, and really was a capitulation; if I had had my terrible way, I would have written about something I had done without ever having done it. This was always the state in which it was meant to be left; its brief existence as a live thing was a shame, really.
The Black Crown Project was an accidental, medieval way to reconfigure my psyche, like a trephination, to let out an illness which even today is building up the pressure in my skull. In many ways, I am happier, and I write less, and probably less well, and at less-auspicious times. It takes me fewer circuits to leave the house, and to love those around me, and to tell them what is wrong. Considering how easily I avoid plot and drama in my work, it is very tempting to be causal here, to irrationally credit the Project with an exorcist quality, drawing out that something-that-wasn't-a-soul like a boggart. It is tempting to say that it made me a better person, in the making. But it did not. I can view it with a detachment now, but when I was writing it it was parasitic, chewing when I chewing, hiking when I hiked, moving up my spine inexorably. Even putting together this archive, and writing these words, has awoken some shard of it that still sits underneath my lap, squeezing itself like an inbred python, and making me agonise. I am glad that I am near the end. It has taken me a year to lay it all flat like this, to disentangle it, and I am worried that it is making me ill again.
The Black Crown Project was a very fortunate nightmare, one of which I am proud and which had its moment. Perhaps its use came in making me so unwell that my life reached a point in which I could either leave it, in a cardiac or geographic sense, or could stop writing about hills and suitcases and decide what was really wrong with me.
The Black Crown Project, in another way, would have loved to have remained buried, to have stayed interred in some variety of soil, the perfect memorial to itself; people always knowing where it was yet unable to desecrate it, to catalogue it and reveal its weaknesses; leaving behind only the negative of a robust skeleton, revealing only its genotype and not its phenotypic failings. It would rather have remained as forgotten as it is possible to be whilst still being familiar. I had that opportunity, to leave it where it was, disintegrating slowly, and beautifully. I considered it. Perhaps it would have been more noble; perhaps it would have shown how much progress I have made, how much healing I have undertaken, to be able to leave it alone for one last time.
However, neither I nor The Black Crown Project are noble undertakings, nor have I healed completely.