18 06 2024 evening
Looking up at the windows of my childhood home: like being served some beautiful rustic multi-course meal the day after your stomach had been surgically removed.
A mixed-gender paramilitary squad jump you on your way to the airport train, throw you in an unmarked nineties removals van, blindfold you, gag you, stop up your ears. A couple of hours pass in mystical silence and they toss you down on the bed of your impossible childhood. I would pay about five thousand dollars for this service.
I sacrificed so much for you, the father says, thus confessing to having sacrificed nothing, nothing that would touch his self-identification as one who sacrifices. But thereby sacrificing, from your perspective, the only thing he could really sacrifice: his right to discretion.
Dying alone: then I could manage, I think, a last-minute conversion. Casting the net of my ‘newfound belief’ about one centimetre in every direction, feeling it land on familiar ground. But if she came, at the last moment, naked, to my bedside? How to believe that I know, suddenly, where the light of her body is coming from? And she doesn’t?
19 06 2024 evening
The moment in The Brothers Karamazov where Dostoevsky introduces the figure of the farting corpse, signifying that now he really means it, all the previous work was preparatory. Without this farting corpse – without the possibility of its inclusion – there is no Christ, no cross, nothing, only a free-standing fissure through which the odours of materialism would immediately return.
“Philosophy begins in wonder.”1 And where does wonder begin?
Certain Themes Begin To Emerge
A few short stories, little publications here and then, all seeming very independent at first. Each its own pocket in the world, how could I create something so discrete! This for several years, but then, dishearteningly, certain corollaries, certain themes, begin to emerge. It’s strange, someone says, how the characters in all your stories are actually the same, are all actually you, are not merely you, but a very particular you, you of a certain day, a certain meal we had together. How you were then, they explain, for those five minutes, is the point of origin of your entire creative output, it all refers back to then. Variations on a theme, I guess that’s what we’re all condemned to, they add in contrition, looking to the side. Or not everyone, but you specifically, you lack the vital force for any kind of psychosocial rupture, your friend observes, you survive by binding yourself to this one particular moment, which you must have decided, for some reason, had a certain paradigmatic quality. Aren’t you bored by it then, you ask your friend, by my work, given that my entire creative output to date is an elaboration of a certain five-minute period with which you’re already perfectly familiar? Yes and no, your friend says. There’s a certain comfort, when I see you’ve written a story, to already know what it will be about. Death this, death that, it’s kind of soporific. And I’m sorry I had to go, by the way, I didn’t even have time to finish my crumpet, did I, but without the suddenness of my departure, no doubt you’d be writing about something else. Not about death, perhaps, but about life, you never know.
I was a tireless spiritual explorer, that’s what I thought, I was pressing the skin of my heart against the outermost limit of the zeitgeist, I was feeling out the contours of the time-spirit, I was rubbing myself up against it like a dog, probing its tension and texture, that was the impression I was under until she let me know – that’s what she said, just letting you know – that in my creative work, I’ve done nothing, for nearly a decade now, but recited, with some mild formal variations, a few abbreviated ‘death reflections’ I’ve had, all referring back to a certain aborted meal. I’ve got some business to attend to actually, she’d said, a fleeting brightness in her eyes, looking down at her plate. One of those traditional English crumpets, hard to find these days, and the broken ring of her bite, with a bevelled, almost jewelled quality to it in the afternoon light. I guess you must have footed the bill then, she said, perhaps I should pay you back for it, I always like sharing the bill, especially after many years have elapsed. Yes, I love these sad little duties, she said, that time serves us in our moments of strangest need.
20 06 2024 morning
Breath swelling in her chest, and thinking of that line from Cioran: the only achievement of my life was not to have a child. And experiencing the two, the swell and the memory of that line, as if they were being weighed relative to each other with my brainstem as the fulcrum. Suddenly I’m so conscious of it, this brainstem, running down the back of my neck and into my spine, and continuing down. As if the split subject referred not to any psychoanalytic concept but rather to the single line of vertical symmetry which is the condition of conscious life.2
21 06 2024 evening
An incredibly fat man from Peru tells me two things, a pause of about twenty minutes between them. First, that his father died before his first birthday. A political murder, he says, which he’s started to investigate, forty-five years after the fact. Hasn’t found anything yet, he says. Second, he describes a certain chess game. Eight by eight, so there should be sixty-four squares, he says. The two players must be wearing Apple watches. They should look at each other, eyes on eyes. Like water into a cup, or into four cups, from four water sources, he says. Four by four, I say. No, eight by eight, he says. When the players’ heartbeats are both at sixty-four, he says, I mean when they’re finally properly relaxed, then the game starts. On the way out I see the couple from yesterday, who I’d sent M a photo of. Or rather, I’d sent M a photo of the ambiance, and within one point five seconds she’d sent it back with a red circle around them. They’re so young, she says; they look like they’re from the southwest somewhere, maybe Yunnan. Her t-shirt saying special boy, his saying golden army of the left. So I take another photo and send it, but I don’t mention the Peruvian man because what I’ve written is only about sixty percent true. To tell her I’d have to bring it up to ninety-five percent or so, that’s about my current level, which already seems far too low (at first, I was aiming at a hundred and five). I’d have to say that I was completely uninterested in what he was saying, that I listened to it only because I had no choice, that he wasn’t, in fact, talking to me, but rather to a Moroccan gentleman, who was listening to him, I thought, much too astutely (Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!)3. And I’d have to say that all I wanted was to watch the football, the France-Netherlands game, in peace, with the sound down, as it always is in backstreet casinos of this particular type. Because the commentary would remind them that they’re going to lose, that they came here specifically to lose, that this world of glorious interpersonal banality – they’ve just got to get further down the pitch – misses them, wants them back.
Overheard in London:
“Quit it with the vicarious Scheherazadianism, man, this isn’t the desert…”
22 06 2024 evening
Raise a child in total isolation. Perhaps a light Bohemian atmosphere, comings and going, but everyone in on it. Teach them nothing but “Art History,” the Venus of Willendorf to the Black Square4, but teach it backwards. The child would find nothing at all strange about the chronology, probably wouldn’t even mention it –
But mention anything that happened after the Black Square and the child will write, the next day, in their diary: “modern art destroyed itself because it could no longer tolerate its constitutive resistance to historical time”.
A short film which tells the story of the Fall from the point of view of this deer. For the first twenty-five minutes, the camera is in the grass, poking around. VHS-filter, Blair Witch style. Then the organic click of a plucked apple – overdubbed for extreme clarity – and the camera looks up: Eve at the other side of the garden, looking up at the tree. The camera swings left and right as the deer trots over. Eve’s face fills the frame for a moment, perhaps a meaningful look in her eyes, perhaps not. Sudden close-up of an apple: the camera lurches in but can’t get there, something pushes back. The camera turns about and disappears into the nearest bush, swinging rapidly, steadying when it’s in the foliage. Twenty-five more minutes, poking around in there. End.5
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‘Aristotle’s Metaphysics)
Paraphrase of Cioran, ‘To have committed every crime but that of being a father.’ (The Trouble With Being Born)
‘Hypocrite reader - my fellow man - my brother! (Baudelaire, quoted in The Waste Land) .
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kazimir-malevich-1561/five-ways-look-malevichs-black-square
Lucas Cranach, Adam and Eve, Courtauld Gallery
He gave up his discretion to create something so discreet.
My head is spinning. In a good way?