Work in Progress

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.

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!