Work in Progress

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.

We read ourselves into what we read. We read our desires into them. What we want. What we crave. What we’re desperate for. We can’t read literature, only Literature. We can’t read philosophy, only Philosophy. We don’t read books, only Books.

We want to be daunted. We want to feel disarmed. We want our reading to overpower us, to wrestle us down. We want our stupidity confirmed. We want only to deepen our inadequacy. To drive it down. We want only to confirm our inability to read.

Which is why reading is a death drive for us. We want books that refuse us. We don’t want to be able to read. We want to be illiterate. We want to lose our way in reading. We want to be lost. Daunted. Stunned into silence.

Defeat – that’s what we want. To sink down. To be brought down. Like wild elephants, stunned by sleep darts.

We don’t want to be allowed to run rampant. We don’t want to do what we want. We want to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Limits – that’s what we want. A sense of the forbidden. Of what is not for us. Of a way forever debarred. We want to be limited. To be reminded of our inability. Our incapacity.

We want a sign: No trespassers. We want to be forbidden to go forward. We want to be told off. Seen off the premises. Banished. We don’t want to be here.

There should be the book equivalents of game reserves. Where the wild books are allowed to wander about. To roam. Where they’re allowed to be themselves.

There should be book reserves, like nature reserves. Into which you cannot enter. Book wetlands. Book moorlands. Into which you can only look from afar. With the equivalent of binoculars.

Remote books: that’s what we want to see. European books, like a a fog shrouded mountain. We want not to belong in the country of European thought. We want to be guardians of difficulty, insistent on difficulty. Banners of translations. Of indexes. Of explanatory prefaces. Of secondary commentaries. Of idiot’s guides. Of paperbacks.

And us, patrolling the perimeter, denying access. That’s what all of our teaching should be: the denial of access. Above all to ourselves! We should banish ourselves! We shouldn’t be allowed to tread the sacred ground! It’s not for us! Any of it!

Let European philosophy rewild. Let it escape from commentary, from being lost in commentary, in books about books about books … Let it escape, European philosophy. Let it retreat back into itself. Let it be shy. Unextrovert. Hidden once again in the thickets of the continent.

Border police, that’s what we’ll be. Content to point at them from a distance, the great books. Content to let them wander in the wilderness, just as their authors intended. Allowed to be rare and strange again. Given back to their rarity.

They’d make some indie film all about your beautiful doomed soul. About your infinite sensitivity. About your too-good-for-this-world delicacy.

They’d dig out these old clips of you. Old baby photos. He seemed like a happy little boy. He was really talkative. Wanted to be the class clown. Then he got more introverted. Stopped talking. Lost his sense of humour …

There’d be your friends, giving sad monologues to camera. moody. As though something had died with you for them. As though they were mourning their lives, too. There’d be talking heads, explaining what your book meant to them. How it spoke for an entire generation, or whatever.

And footage of your fans, making little shrines for you. With your photo. With black candles. With bits of your book copied out on beer mats and fag packets …

 

Maybe you could kill yourself now, before you write anything. Wouldn’t that make it even more beautiful? No one would know who you were. No one would care that you died.

 

Would you be on the film? What would say about me?

I’d say he was a complex guy and I never really understood him. I’d say we  used to meet in the afternoon and fuck in the afternoon. That we spent a lot of afternoons just hanging out, nude. In search of the ultimate orgasm, or whatever.

Your husband would like that.

 

Yeah, I’d really build your mystique. That’s what you’d want, isn’t it: a mystique? A dead boy mystique.

What about you? Would you want a dead girl mystique?

I don’t need mystique. I have a life. I don’t need some bullshit story about me. I’m happy just to go along with the flow of the world.

Oh please!

And meanwhile …

Meanwhile, what?

Meanwhile the world’s doing it’s world thing, the sky’s doing it’s sky thing, the sea’s doing its sea thing. And we’re doing what we do.

What do we do?

This. Being meta. Talking about life instead of living it.

Yeah, we’re good at that.

It just means we’re conscious. We’re awake.

It means we’re detached. It means we’re lost.

 

This is a little state of exception. The usual rules don’t apply. It’s time off from the usual rules.

We’ve got an exemption. A pass. We’ve given ourselves an exemption. It’s a time out. A sabbatical. This is a holiday in the day.

 

We don’t have to be anywhere but here.

We’re here because we don’t have to be anywhere.

 

We’ve opened a little loop in time. It’s all our own. All ours.

 

Where’s it supposed to lead?

It doesn’t have to lead anywhere.

Isn’t it just futile? Aren’t you overwhelmed by it – by its futility? The fact that it won’t have mattered.. That it won’t have counted for anything.

 

What if the disaster never comes? What if the world never ends?

What if the world’s what’s left over from ending – that’s the question. What if it’s just some remainder. The thing that never ends. That survives everything fucking ending. That just perdures … What if the world’s the eternal day after? What’s still there in the morning. What hasn’t disappeared in the night.

 

This ordinary, everyday world. The view out of this window. The every – fucking – day. That will just remain what it is, untransformed … All stubborn …

You must really resent it. You must really hate that it’s not full of apocalyptic energy. That it doesn’t actually want to end.

 

The revenge of the mundane. Of what’s called the everyday. The ordinary. What's supposedly the real …

 

I want to blaze. I want intensity. Life lived at the level of life or death. Flames licking up to the fucking sky. That’s our affair, right? That’s what it’s supposed to accomplish. It's supposed to burn down the world.

 

It’s all stopped, the world’s stopped. It’s all quiet. Like after an accident. After a suicide bomb. Just a … holy pause. Like the moment just before the creation. Like the half an hour that passes in heaven after they open the seventh seal.

The world’s forgotten itself for a moment. The world isn’t just going on for a moment. Things aren’t proceeding as usual for a moment.

Take a breath. Hold the world’s breath. It’s a ceasefire. It’s a temporary truce. A laying down of arms.

 

I admire your disgust.

I admire yours.

That’s what we share: our disgust. But we don’t act on it. But it tears us away from the world. It means we’re not part of this. We know we’re complicit, but were not entirely complicit. We have an escape route.

I just want to shout and shout.

I like your anger. An entirely futile rebellion, but all the more admirable for all that. You reject the terms and conditions. The small print. The way we’re supposed to live.

Having to fucking be. Having to exist – the greatest con of all. And we weren’t even asked. We weren’t consulted. We simply found ourselves here, amidst it all. Surrounded by it all. In the middle of all this stuff. The shit of life. The shit of the sky. The shit of the earth …

 

If only we could haul ourselves out of this degeneracy. If only we didn’t have to live.

But it’s such a bother to kill oneself, don’t you think? It involves such unseemly effort. And it’s grotesque, to leave a body just lying there. It’s so embarrassing, just leaving your corpse behind.

It’d be okay if you could explode yourself, like a suicide bomber. Make sure every part of yourself is vaporized. If you could be, like, blown to nothing. To subatomic particles …

 

Such grandstanding, Cicero. Such life rejection. It’s magnificent, in its way. Almost regal. Aristocratic. As though you were too good for life. For the whole dirty business. And too good for death, too. For the whole dirty business.

 

You’re an apocalyptic dandy. An Oscar Wilde of Ragnarok.

 

Nothing ever rises to apocalypse. The world never just bursts spontaneously into flame. The world itself can’t be bothered to end. The universe limps on.

 

I’m, like, transcendentally bored. I’m bored of every possible world. Everything that could possibly exist. The whole order of things. Everything that is and was and could be. The whole prison planet. The giant fucking cage.

I like these bursts of world-hatred. These spikes of horror. That’s when you really come alive.

 

Lifeless things are so grotesque. At least the living can protest. At least we can lament. Lifeless stuff just goes on, without irony, without protest, without humour. I mean, whoever saw a star laugh?

 

Still alive, still alive! Life goes on! I really would prefer not to bother. But existence makes us bother, which is rather cruel. And we can’t do much about it, can we?

 

The usual no how on. The usual, flop on. Jog on. Roll on. Carry on. My God. What’s a modern day gnostic going to do?

 

Existence is making us stick around to see what happens. But nothing’s actually going to happen, is it? We know that by now. We know too much. We know everything. We know what can and cannot happen. Which is to say, nothing of any significance.

 

The great joke of it all. The joke of the whole world, which is worse because the world doesn’t even know it’s a joke.

 

True, the odds we’re entirely stacked against us. The house always wins. The world always wins. In the struggle between you and the world, back the world, right? Bet on the world. Because it will win, which means we’ll continue to be subject to it. Which means it will still be everywhere.

 

Apocalyptic dandyism

 

Cicero is my chosen name. My apocalyptic name. You get new names during the apocalypse.

It’s not the apocalypse yet.

It will be.

Your room. Your thinking place. Here’s where it all takes place.

You’re taking the piss.

You must think what you’re doing is really worthwhile. That must be your motivation.

I’ve got nothing better to do, that’s all.

Is that it?

I just wanted to find things to do alone in a room, that’s all. Other than masturbate, I mean.

Don’t try and be funny. Don’t try to pass it off.

I like staying in. I’m doing this because I don’t like it out there. Because I don’t like … life, or whatever it’s called.

So this is a consolation.

You’re a consolation.

 

I don’t know what to do except write. Read and write.

I think it’s because my life is essentially empty.

Or perhaps you want it empty – so you can do this. Whatever this is ….

 

Do you mind me being here? Am I a distraction? Do I get in the way of your work? Ha – I quite like getting in the way of your work.

 

Your studio. Laughter. And this is all your stuff. These are your books. These are your notebooks. (Reading) My God, the way you address yourself. You take yourself so seriously. Someone, at some time, must have told you that you were great. That great things were expected of you. God, you have such confidence. Like the world wants to know your thoughts …

I wrote it for myself.

You wrote it for posterity. I can tell. These aren’t just notes. You actually think you’re great – or could be. That all this is worth preserving. Like Francis Bacon’s studio, or whatever … I’m lucky to be here. To be admitted into the studio of a genius …

 

Face it, I’m just the interruptor of great work. A regular villainess. You’re so profound, so melancholic, so romantic … And I’m just shallow, selfish and full of basic needs.

 

You’re holding out for someone who’ll be fascinated by you. Be in awe of you and think you’re a real genius. Someone who doesn’t just want you for your body, like I do. But for your – mind. For what’s in your head. (Laugher.) For all your thoughts. (Laughter.) For your desire to be some world-leading intellectual. Wouldn’t that be something? She’d be quite in awe of you. She wouldn’t disturb you when the Muse visited. When you needed to be alone to think. She’d tiptoe around you.

 

See, your dream is to be taken very, very seriously. For there to be documentaries about you. Special editions of journals on your work. Conferences to be held in your honour. My God – I can see it now, the vanity. Which would pose as anti-vanity, of course. In a refusal to appear on camera. In turning down awards. In refusing to be a guest of honour … But all the while enjoying the attention …

 

Share one of your ideas. Or some idea. Or anything. Show me you can think. Do your thinking thing. Think, pig.

 

God … I have a thinker for a lover. (Laughter.)

 

Would you rather I not be here, needling you? Would you rather be left alone? Couldn’t you make great use of this time? Imagine what you could be writing now …

 

Here I am in your most private sanctuary. Your thought refuge.

 

We actually have his and her studies.

How bourgeois. Mr and Mrs academic … What do you get up to in your study?

Learn German.

Is that right?

I’m rather good at it, actually. I’m going to become fluent. I’ll bet you think German’s wasted on me … All the Germanic things I could be reading …

The void is thick inside us. The void is choking us. We choke on our words, which are void words.

 

We shouldn’t even call it the void. It’s far too grand a name. Far too prestigious.

It’s sordid … It’s disgusting …

 

The void adds another dimension, that’s all. An … echoing. The sounding of all things into futility. Into nihilism. Into nothingness.

 

The void, like an old friend. A comforter. Even though it offers only the opposite of friendship.

 

The ultra-void. The void, multiplied by the void.

 

God? No: the void. Faith? No: the void.

The anti-God. Where God’s dissolved. Where the creation’s impossible.

 

God can only hold it back, the void. And only for a time. But time’s been called. Our time is up. It’s void-time now. It’s voiding, now.

 

The great hollowing. The great erosion from within.

The hollow, echoing. The infinite reverb of all things. In echoing futility.

 

A wandering out and out and out. A falling of all things.

A wind, blowing through us. Through all things.

An echoing. A doubling. A dragging behind. A slurring.

 

Our anti-cosmology. Our non-cosmos. Our anti-stars. Our non-galaxies.

Our echoing hearts. Our voided hearts.

Our voided words.

 

All the words we feed to the void. The words we offer it. And that’s how it speaks to us: in our own words. In our echoing words, that echo in the void. In the words we lose as soon as we speak them. In the words that sound strange in our throats.

The music people. Why do our hearts always lift when we’re near? Why do we breathe more easily?

Because they have the cure. Because they don’t have to traffic with words. Or they do so only occasionally.

 

The music department offices.

Laughter – in the corridors? Is that possible? Joy – at the edges of work. Because they’re not all about work. Because they don’t take work seriously. Because they have a life outside of it all.  

 

They aren’t weighed down with would-be seriousness. They aren’t crushed by supposed seriousness.

Haven’t we been too serious for too long? All our lives …

 

The music people. Blithe. Insouciant. They play with philosophy. They do what they like with it.

All of philosophy: a toy to be balanced on their noses, like seal. All of philosophy: a kind of fun to be had.

 

The music people, looking up and down our bookshelves. Picking up this book, that one. Flicking through them. Putting them down again, with a smile.

 

And there’s nothing morbid about their drinking, the music people.

It’s not death-bound, their drinking. It’s not a plunging into the Abgrund and the Aufriss.

They drink like innocents. They’re not worried about the morrow. They drink because they drink, just as they live because they live. For no other reason.

 

They know how to Eat, the music people. To cook!

Food talk, with the music people. Ingredients talk.

Their southern European connections. Their Mediterranean sympathies.

They know how to entertain. To give a day away to feasting. Lunch – and then dinner, at the same table. And then the spirits come out. A highland malt, a lowland malt.

They’re not broke like us, somehow, the music people. They have money. Money comes to them. It just flows in, for their hospitality.

 

Do they understand our gloom, the music people? Our northern European pessimism? Our tungsind. Our fear of being charlatans?

They look at us, concerned.. They want to help, but are not sure how. They ply us with drinks. Invite us to their dinner parties.

 

How free of worry they are, the music people. They’ll live until they’re a hundred and eight.

It’s a difference in temperament. In bearing. In fundamental outlook. They’re attuned differently. They’re light. They have the gift of lightness.

 

Our books. Our bookshelves. They look along them. Pick out this book, that. Read a few lines. Nod their heads. Put the book away.

 

Perhaps, around them, we can be a little like them. Perhaps we can learn a little lightness. Perhaps we can lose a little of our Weltschmerz.

 

The music people.

They haven’t got our thirst. Our alcohol obsession.

We crawl through our days, waiting for drinks. We crave drinks all day, until we meet them for drinks.

 

What do the music people know of the void? How do they avoid it, the void?

Music must banish the void, in some sense. Playing music, thinking about music. And particularly Mediterranean music! Particularly music from the warm places of the world! Flamenco! Zydeco!

Of course we only listen to void music. To northern European music, heavy with itself. Just as we only read void literature. Just as we only look at void art.