Author: Lars Iyer

Hoping for a twist in our despair. Hoping for a turn in our despair. And that’s all we can hope for: that our despair might change direction. That our despair might change quality. Might taste different. Might offer itself in another tone. Another flavour.

 

To be absorbed by the black sun. To disappear into the black sun. We’re drowning in the black sun.

A new turn in despair. A detour in despair. A way despair isn’t quite so despairing, for a moment. A novelty in despair. Still despair, but a slightly changed despair.

 

Despair. Basic. A given. The first thing: despair. Waking in despair, breakfasting in despair, walking to the Metro in despair, catching the Metro in despair, heading up to the purple office in despair. What has there ever been but despair?

Unrelenting, our despair. Continual, our despair. How do you get out from under it? From its pressure? How can you make the weight of despair shift? So it doesn’t press down as heavily. Our limbs are heavy. We walk bent over. Spiritually bent over, if not actually bent over.

Do we deserve this? What did we do wrong, in a previous life? What sin did we commit, in a previous life? And where are we going to take this life? What’s going to happen in this life, and in future lives?

 

Outbreaks of evil. A kind of weather of evil. Changeable evil.

The evil is massing, like clouds. Evil, thickening. Covering the sky. My God, is that all there is: evil? Is there only unrelenting evil? Is it really evil from the beginning to the end?

We need help with evil, just as we need help with despair. We need someone wise in … spiritual attacks. Because there are demons out there. They’re quite real. And demons inside, too. Demons we’ve invited inside, somehow. Who’ve come inside, possessed us.

 

Why can’t there be some peace in despair. Some tranquillity. Some let up. Why must it always crowd us? Press itself up to us?

Why won’t it let us get away from it? Establish some distance. Why won’t it make room for something other than despair?

 

Lack of hope – that’s what it means. But the de- of despair isn’t privative. Nothing’s lacking. It’s total. It crowds everything else out. It is itself and nothing other than itself.

 

Our despair – it isn’t even ours. It doesn’t even belong to us. It comes from outside. It’s a curse. It’s an invasion. Somehow we allowed it in.

We need an exorcist. A spiritual expert. Where should we go? To the nearest church? Fall on our knees?

We’re in spiritual need. In desperate need. Is there someone who could cure us? Who could reach us?

 

Does drinking induce despair or lighten it? Lighten it – for the night. But there are hangovers the next day. There’s weariness the next day. Beingabandoned to weariness next day.

Shouldn’t we forgo drinking? Shouldn’t we just stop? But what then? A night without lightness. A night without anti-despair.

We can’t fight despair all by ourselves. We need the drink – don’t we? We need alcohol – that’s right, isn’t it? We need an accelerant. We need an intensifier. Otherwise – what?

 

We need to soar in our despair. Touch despair’s roof. Touch despair’s sky – the limits of its sky. Rise against its gravity. Struggle with it. Against it. Rise – cry. And then sink down again – of course. And then fall again – necessarily.

You rose. You cried. You drank. And drink lifted you. Drink bore you upwards. You were drunk, in your despair, but not, for a moment, defeated in your despair. You rose against. You rose – touched the sky. Fell back.

We gasp like fish at the surface of the water. We gasp into the open air. We gasp, and we don’t know what we’re gasping for. We look up, and we don’t know what we’re looking at. We see the sky, and we don’t know what it is. Are we alive? Are we dead? We don’t even know that. We don’t know anything.

Lost from everything. From ourselves. We don’t know how to take a single step forwards.  We don’t know how to live – just live. To continue breathing. We don’t know how to take a breath. We’ve forgotten how to breathe. How to walk. How to put one foot in front of the other.

We’ve forgotten the simplest of things. My God, we don’t know the simplest things. We’re so estranged from life. Life – we don’t know what that means. To live, just to live – impossible for us. Forbidden – for us.

And so we wander in the world’s night. Without knowing where to go. What to do.

Loss, endless loss. Day after day of loss.

But at least we have each other. At least we have companions in negativity. In utter world-disgust. In world horror.

 

The corruption is cosmic. The degradation is world-encompassing. We scream, inside. We cry behind our eyes.

We know what we do not want – at least we know that. We know what we hate – at least, at least.

And we’re not alone, with our hatred. There are others, with our hatred. We are with others, with our hatred. We don’t have to bear it alone.

Which means the world isn’t so bad. That things aren’t quite unbearable. That there’s a way through, after all. That there’s a path.

And the sky’s so beautiful. The sky, unparalleled tonight, in its beauty. The sky is the sky, and so far above us. The sky’s at least the sky. We can depend on the sky, at least. Things aren’t quite so desperate. The sky remains the sky. He clouds remain the clouds.

 

This isn’t our world. We didn’t ask to be born into this world – into any world. We didn’t ask to be lost here. We didn’t ask to be marooned.

 

We’re in denial. We’re in massive denial. How could it be otherwise? We cannot face what we have to face. We cannot endure what we have to endure. The sky, above us. The clue to transcendence. To release. The clue to be freed from this world. For heading out of this world.

We don’t want to be here. Even to live is too much for us. Even to go on. Even to take a single step – too much.

 

These are disgusting days. These are revolting days. These are lost days. My God …

We’d tear the world up if we could. We’d take revenge. For every botched day. For every disastrous day. For the disaster of our lives.

 

Our prayer: Don’t let us be this lost. Don’t let us destroy ourselves – not yet. Give us time. A little more time. Draw out our self-destruction. Fuck it, we’re not ready to die – not yet.

There are more variations on despair – on our despair.

 

We’d scream if we could. We’d scream and never stop screaming. We’d wake up the dead – all the dead. We’d bring them all back to life – the dead. The murdered dead. The slain dead. We’d give them a voice – a screaming voice. They could scream up to the fucking sky. And so could we. We’d scream, too. We’d raise our voices. In protest. In solidarity.

 

And we’re mad, too. We’re lost, too. We’re fucked too. In the head. In every other part of our lives.

We’re fuckers-up. We’ve fucked up our lives.

We’ve not long left. But who needs long left?

We’ll drink ourselves to death. We’ll throw ourselves into the sea. We’ll do something – something bad. We’ll do what the world wants. We’ll finish ourselves off, which is what the world wants.

Murder! Self-murder! Suicide! Of course! Auto-destruction! What else? What else could we imagine wanting?

 

We’re running out of air. We’re running out of time. We’re running out of road. We’ve outstayed our welcome – we know. We stayed too long.

The bar’s closing. The world’s closing. Time gentlemen please and all that. It’s closing time – of course it is. There’s nothing left for us – why should there be? There was never any place for us – for our kind.

 

Misfits – that’s what we were. The maladjusted. The maladroit. We didn’t know what to do, what to say. We know when to leave. When to take ourselves out. When to pop the bullet into the head.

We know we’re surplus to requirements. We know we’re not needed here . We know we bring nothing, add nothing. We know we’re awkwards. We’re misfirers.

 

Death a thousand times over. Death and then death. Death and then death again. That’s our lives. Our non-lives.

We’re dead, we’re dead. That’s our excuse – that’s always our excuse.

We’re dead and didn’t know. We died a long time ago – we’ve died a thousand times. That’s what we tell ourselves.

Death is our world! Death’s all we know! We’ve never lived, not really. Not for a moment.

We were born dead. We arrived dead. My God! What chance did we have? Born posthumous! No one should have expected anything! It’s a miracle we got as far as we did. But how far did we really get?

Drunken philosophy – our specialism. Bar philosophy. Bar thoughts. That we could not have thought otherwise.

So our drunken nights will not have been in vain. So we’ll understand them as a quest. As a search. So we’ll describe ourselves as ascetics of drinking. As busy with drinking-ascesis.

Ours will have been a drinking search. A search through drinking. A search that can only be undertaken through drinking. That needs drinking. That begins with drinking, and perhaps ends with it, too. Whose means are drinking …

There’s a place for disorientation in thought. For confusion in thought. Errors are necessary. Wanderings off the path – far from the path. Staggerings. Stumblings.

Drinking mustn’t be consolation. Mustn’t be reconciliation to the way things are. The pub is not a place for petty moanings. For gossip. For he said this or she said that. And I said. The pub is a space capsule. We’re exploring. This is a voyage, right here at our table. Right here, with our beer mats. With our pints.

And if it doesn’t happen for us here, there are other pubs. There’s the movement from pub to pub. There’s the pub crawl.

 

Vigilance. We have to watch over our nights of drinking. Less they slip into complacency. Less they fall away into pubism. Into the pub consolation. Into pub comfort.

We have to keep our eyes on the farthest vistas. On the vastest skies.

Drink is a means, first of all: we have to remember that. There’s such a thing as drunken discipline.

See, if we drank ourselves to death now, there’d be no one to say, What a shame. They showed such promise. What they could have been, were it not for their fatal flaw.

It’s too early to develop a drink problem, really. We still haven’t shown any promise. We haven’t been abroad as serious players. As philosophical contenders.

No one’s cheering for us. No one’s expecting things of us. It’s only once we’ve started to gain a reputation that we should start drinking ourselves to death.

 

If we died now, no one would say, What a loss. What a wasted talent. What a pity. What they could have been. What potential. Where they could taken thought, if only they hadn’t have been cut off in his prime.

Destiny still regards us as randomers. As random fuckheads. Not philosophy-princes in waiting, or anything. So we can’t just give into alcohol yet.

 

It’s not as if we need time off from being a genius. It’s not that we have talent to burn. Potential to waste. It’s not as if we’re half destroyed by the attempt to think – to realise our genius, to see it home. It’s not that there are thought-tasks too vast for us. Too arduous.

We’re not broken by what we’re trying to do. By who we’re trying to be. We’re not destroyed by our efforts. By the burden of our genius. We’re not actually tormented – properly tormented. We haven’t got a fatal flaw that’s stopped us achieving what we want to achieve.

 

There’s nothing tragic about mediocrity. We’re not mad, or even half mad. We’re not alcoholics, or even half-alcoholics. The instinct of self-preservation’s too strong in us.

Mediocrity finds itself all too bearable. Mediocrity wants to continue as it is. It’s not at war with itself, like genius. It isn’t torn, like brilliance.

Mediocrity’s contemplating a long, long life. Being itself for, basically, forever. Just going on, mediocrely. Just perpetuating itself. Cruising on, self-satisfied. Happy enough with itself. Reconciled to itself. Unambitious, in a fundamental sense. Unperturbed. Reaching no heights – no depths.

Never on its knees. Never at prayer. Never desperate. Never asking to be anything other than what it is. Mediocrity’s just fine, thank you. Mediocrity’s perfectly reconciled to the way things are. Mediocrity doesn’t want to change the world. Doesn’t want revolution. It’s happy to persist. To just go on, year after year, being itself. More and more itself. Confirming itself, over and over.

 

Mediocrity, never wanting to sacrifice itself. To let itself burn in service of anything higher. Never reaching. Never craving the most high or the most low. In the middle ground. Keeping things as they are. Preserving itself. Making more of itself. Preserving itself. Making the world safe for itself – for more mediocrity.

 

No one’s trying to snatch the pint glass from our lips. No one’s decided to intervene. No one’s saying, Don’t you think you’ve had too much? No one’s Concerned, capital C. No one’s discussing us with others. No one’s planning an intervention.

We’re allowed to do what we like, which is fine because we’d never really do anything. We’d never actually drink ourselves to death.

 

Self-preservation: our most shameful feature. Wanting to remain in existence, for all our suicide-talk.

We play with suicide. We toy with the idea. But we’d never do anything. Death isn’t real enough to us.

And we’re not mad. We’ve got no signs of madness. Madness isn’t driving us to brilliance. We’re not fundamentally imbalanced. There’s not some basic chemical error in our makeup. We’re sane – terribly sane. Boringly sane. Mediocrely sane.

There’s no Hölderlin amongst us. There’s no Antonin Artaud. There’s no Sexton, no Plath. And we’re not perturbed about that. We don’t mind about that.

We want to plant ourselves on earth for a few decades. To live out a life – a mediocre life. To carry on as we are, undisturbed, unwagered. Unsacrificed. To perpetuate ourselves, our kind. To make more of ourselves, more mediocres. More unambitious.

We want to go on a bit longer. Adding nothing to the world, and taking nothing away, not really. Negating nothing. Suspending nothing. Letting it be what it is. Living at no distance from the world. At one with it, the world.

We read the wild stuff, but we’re not wild. We comment on the mad stuff, but we’re not mad. We always bring it home – to a mediocre home. We always reduce it. Level it down – all the way down. There’s not a flame we don’t want to dampen. There’s not a fire we aren’t drawn to smother.

We’re going to grow old – imagine that! We’re setting a course towards middle age, towards old age. We’ll go on! We’ll continue! And we’ll get fat, too, probably. We’ll grow paunches. We’ll droop. Our asses will sag. Our jowls will swing.

We’ll get comfortable in middle age. We’ll wear big sweaters, or whatever. We’ll love comfortable things. We’ll have comfortable things all around us. We’ll lounge in comfortable chairs. We’ll watch comfortable programmes. We’ll read comfortable magazines. We’ll busy ourselves gardening, and stuff like that. We’ll learn to drive, given half a chance. Drive from here to there. Visit our in-laws, or whatever.

We’ll have a partner in life of course. A marriage! Imagine that! Emotional stability. It won’t be all romantic chaos. Lovers. Break ups. Affairs. Monogamy: that’s for us! Very calm! And we’ll have couple friends. Dinner parties. We’ll cook for one another, couple for couple.

And mediocre talk over the table. The unintense talk. Not burning the world down talk. Not destroying the world talk. Not self-murder talk. Not revolutionary talk. Not turn the world upside down talk. Not desperation talk. Not just too much talk.

We’ll unlearn intensity. Adolescent zeal. Even love – we’ll unlearn that. Because we’ll love only mediocrely. And we’ll only hang out with the mediocre – our fellow mediocres. We’ll love only the average. And only love averagely. And only love the average.

 

Our mediocrity doesn’t provoke us: that’s the worst thing. It doesn’t make us live differently. We don’t Desire, capital D.

Drinking our way to what? Drink, leading us where?

 

We’re losing control. And drinking puts us back in control of something again. We know where the evening’s heading.

Do we?

An acceleration into the night. A rushing into nothingness.

Is that it?

 

Our Yearnings, greater than we are. What we Want, greater than we are. What we Desire, vaster than we are.

We drink with tears in our eyes. With tears on our cheeks.

 

God was drunk when he made us. He’s drunk as he loves us. And we’re drunk when we turn to him. When we pray.  Drunken prayers are the most sincere prayers.

 

Drunken worship. We’re the only ones whose prayers God hears.

He likes drunken prayers best of all, we’re sure of it. Slurred prayers. The prayers of staggerers. 

 

When we bow our drunken heads. When we speak our drunken prayers. When we slur our drunken words.

 

Cosmic drinking: that’s what this is.  

Is nothingness greater than God? Is God greater than nothing? Does our atheism devour God? Or did God give us our atheism to purify us, to prepare us for religion?

We’re always at a remove from everything, aren’t we? We’re always stepping out of the moment and looking down at it. Or looking up at it. Or looking sideways at it. But we’re never in it, are we? Or perhaps you are. But I’m not. Don’t get me wrong – I like being here with you. I like our erotic afternoons, but …

One day we’ll …

One day we’ll what? Just disappear. Blow away.

This is what living at the coast does to you. You have all these fantasies.

 

Maybe we’re becoming each other. Exchanging molecules, or something. I’m a bit you and you’re a bit me. Wouldn’t you like that?

 

We’re exchanging molecules with everything here. With the coast. With the air. With the sky. With the sea. We’re all these things. This is a becoming-coast.

I think you’re becoming pretentious.

We’re becoming porous. The air’s entering into us, or we’re entering into the air, one or the other. We’re spreading. We’re becoming diffuse. We’re becoming subtle. We’re flowing. Is that it?

 

The coast makes you passive. You don’t resist. You just give in.

Give into what?

Give into everything. All the great movements. You let yourself be carried along. All the way to death.

Is that where it’s taking us?

That’s where everything’s taking us.

Love is stronger than death ….

Do you believe that?

Love … at the coast … I don’t believe in anything at the coast. It’s all entropy at the coast … dissolution … being stretched in every direction …

 

Tell me about something that happened to you when you were young.

When I was young …

What?

I lived an ordinary life. Compared to you. I did ordinary things. You were determined to be extraordinary. I had ordinary happinesses and God knows ordinary sadnesses. Which is to say: nothing happened. Nothing extraordinary, anyway.

I wasn’t talking about anything extraordinary.

Of course you were. You’re searching for profundity. Something all sublime and revelatory. And I’m just going to disappoint you. You’ll always come up against my ordinariness. I’m just ordinary. Just Jane mundane. Are you disappointed?

No.

What you really want is a European. An East European, probably. Full of Eastern European promise. The inheritor of decades of suffering. And black humour. The darkest humour – forged by all the oppression, or whatever. Full of Eastern misery and resilience stories …

 

You want me to be more European and mysterious. More pouty and moody. Less, like, organisational management. Laughter. You wish I were French, or something. All demanding. All petulant and impossible. Impossible to please. To woo. To get in the mood. That would be a proper challenge for you. That would engage all your intellectual resources. And your emotional ones. And your seductive ones. A European would really suit you. A

I like you the way you are.

Liar.

And who would you rather I be? Who should I be for you?

Fuck, I don’t know.

If you met someone else, I’d be jealous. Which makes me think you should be more jealous of my husband. Unbearably jealous.

Do you like that thought?

I like to matter – everyone wants to matter. Make a difference in the world. Be someone for whom someone else would live or die. I want you to want me, anyway.

I do want you.

I want you to want me more. Not to be able to go on without me.

Come on.

See, it’s your work. Your so-called work comes between you and me. You think you’re doing something more important than anything we could possibly be.

You want me to choose between my work and you?

See, you think you’re exceptional … that you’re better than the rest of us … to stay up here in your eerie and write your stuff … You and your philosophical muse.

Maybe you’re my muse.

Stop it.

Maybe I’ll dedicate the book to you.

Would you do that – really? Anyway, you’ll probably never finish your book.

Says who?

Says me. You’re too perfectionist. It’ll never be good enough for you. It’ll never be good enough for your idea of you. Because you have an idea of yourself. A lofty idea. Of what you should be. Even if you know it’s what you can’t be … It’s tragic in its way. But of course it’s comic, too. It’s laughable. That you could even dream of these things. Some … suburbanite.

You’re a suburbanite, too.

But I know I’m a suburbanite. I know my limits. I know what I can and cannot do.

Organisational management: is that what you can do?

And being a lover, maybe. Being your lover. Being the lover of a would be philosopher.

A muse, in other words. An organisational management muse.

You take me seriously because you find me attractive or whatever. Because you think I have allure. I’m fascinating for the moment, right? Because I make you think things. Because I’m the occasion for your thoughts. Because you like to be in love, or whatever. You like to be yourself in love. You like to like yourself like that. It’s a novelty to you, philosopher … Is that how you think of yourself: as a philosopher?

It’s for others to decide.

Do you think you’ve earnt the accolade?

It’s for others to say.

Who, like, a philosophical committee? Journal editors? Like, whose approval do you seek? Who’s actually going to read you work and deem you worthy?

No one reads my work. No one gives a fuck about anything I write.

 

Do you ever dream one of your readers might fall in love with you? That they might fall for the genius they know you to be? Someone who’d appreciate you? I’ll bet you do … Well, I’m not that woman. That’s not – fucking – me.

You don’t say.

You must take yourself very seriously.

Hardly.

But ultimately, you do. Ultimately you think you’re a serious man engaged in a serious task, and that it’s the only thing worthwhile.

I think it’s the only thing I can try to do. Because I don’t like anything else. Because I feel like a stranger on this Earth …

How melodramatic.

Well I do.

That does that qualify you for philosophy? Maybe it does.

It just disqualifies you from anything else.

Like I said: melodrama. But strangely attractive melodrama. Maybe I’m with a genius after all …

 

I’m trying to get into the head of a philosopher. I’m trying to think like a philosopher thinks. I’ll bet you think I’m too stupid for that.

 

Is there such a thing as a comic philosophy? A philosophy that laughs?

 

You should want to leave it, philosophy. Leave it all behind. Do your own unnamed thing.

Not to philosophise is still to philosophise.

Do you believe that? That philosophy swallows all? That it always has the last very serious word? Fuck.

Time doesn’t seem to matter here. It doesn’t flow at the usual speed. It doesn’t flow, really. It’s, like, an interlude.

Between what and what?

Between life and life.

You mean this is death.

This is another kind of life.

 

I feel like we’ve got lost in the afternoon and we’ll never get out.

 

The afternoon labyrinth. The afternoon maze.

Are you looking for an exit?

I want to get more deeply lost.

 

What’s the rest of the world doing, while we’re doing this?

The rest of the world’s busy.

I’m sick of being busy.

 

What does all this add up to? Our days together. Our affair. What does it mean?

 

I always feel half asleep here. It’s the sea air. Its tiring.

 

What next? Is there going to be a next?

 

I could just fall asleep here. It’s the sea air, I think … The ozone, or whatever … I could just pass out. And dream of wonderful things. Of even bigger skies. Of even wider seas. Of a horizon that goes right out – for fifty miles … a hundred. Where you can see ships coming in from the infinite. How about that?

 

I could fall asleep here. And dream of … Expansive things. Big things. And things coming apart. Into their atoms. And atoms coming apart into … whatever atoms come apart into.

Subatomic particles.

Yes, those. Tiny, tiny things. Maybe things just get smaller and smaller forever. And maybe things just get bigger and bigger forever. The universe is infinitely vast and infinitely tiny, both at once. I like that idea.