19 03 2024 evening
Two categories of dirty talk.
The manically deictic: that’s it, like that, you like it like that. As if the tongue were tracing the lineaments of the hour’s enclosure, sealing it with a line of spit. This type is fundamentally unembarrassing; public morality, after all, demands that sex be a private act.
And the opposite: ‘role play.’ By squeezing sex through a series of social abstractions, it risks catastrophic embarrassment, above all when it touches categories belonging indelibly to the public sphere: police officer, nurse, teacher, etc. To avert this, simply select a category which has slipped out of the public consciousness: farmer, cobbler, carpenter…
Like that, carpenter, like that.
All ‘argument’ necessarily involves detaching something from its origin, and if something can be detached, then of course it can be detached a bit more, and so on, until it falls off. This proves something about the nature of decay, but nothing about the nature of knowledge.
The only thing I would confess at confession would be that I had come to confession in the hope that it would provoke in me the desire to confess. But wouldn’t this be perfectly correct? Doesn’t a protestant have a God-given duty to test the limits of recursion?
The ‘other’ is either a stick with which you tickle God, or a rock with which he smites you. There is no third term.
Every act of expression is triplicate: not only the feeling, but the feeling as represented, and, therefore, a gap between the feeling and its representation. What is ethics? Forgetting the gap.
20 03 2024 afternoon
The periods of my life which I remember most fondly are those which were most traumatic, when I was living in conditions in which it was not possible to think. My memories of these times are, therefore, always available, nearly empty, and the very least so spacious that it is always possible to return to them. There is always something left to fill out, to fill in. But the times in which I was happy are already complete; to think about them brings real pain.
It is precisely this mnemonic logic which allows one to accelerate at the greatest possible speed into the mire of human evil.
Capitalism’s method: one, deform the spirit, and two, ban acknowledgement of spiritual deformity. A certain moment when the second prong took over. The best guess is Virginia Woolf’s: December 1910.1
‘Modern’ music takes its orders from time; ‘classical’ music takes time as an object, on which to test its powers of seduction – of giving orders, that is.
Last Ever Terrorist Organisation (LETO)2
They had pictures of Viktor Tsoi all over their WhatsApp profiles. Just look at his face, they told me in an email, if you start having any doubts. And they were right, there was something very persuasive about his face, it had a certain steppe quality, a certain extravagant breadth. Only therein does the spirit of modern-day terrorism reside, they said, in that physiognomic expansion, which takes in too much of the world, which refuses any kind of synthesis. When the spirit does not encounter any resistance, it begins to move inward, they said, it begins to scrunch up around the nose. More and more job advertisements, you must have noticed it, demand breadth of experience, it’s a social phenomenon, and another social phenomenon, they said, is that their applicants are getting narrower and narrower around the nose. Give it ten years and they won’t be able to breathe, their experience will be just too wide. Think about it next time you take a bath, they said. Just as water gathers, swirls, and eventually drains away, they said, so the zeitgeist is slipping away, down the spiritual plughole of the ever-contracting human nose.
We’re not going to train you in any particular way, the assassination and/or kidnapping/other of Jeffrey Bezos is an infinitely complicated task, they said, so it makes no difference what you choose to specialise in. Ballet, geoscience, ‘international relations,’ aerial photography, the Pentateuch, ecology, algebra, modern languages, romantic languages, ancient languages, archeo-etymology, how to build a pyramid, it amounts to the same thing. And no matter if you fail, they said, no matter if your studies of pyramid construction come to nothing. We have an equal need of idiots and geniuses, they said, it doesn’t matter which category you end up in. And the ratio of geniuses to idiots isn’t important either, what matters is that we have some of one and some of the other, they said. Just be sure to tell us which you are, before the day, they said.
The most remarkable thing about working for LETO was the amount of downtime I had. There was almost nothing to do, in fact, and although I enjoyed this, it became increasingly disconcerting. Eventually, I contacted them for clarification, hey, is there anything I can do, I asked. After about three minutes they replied: the work begins when you kill yourself, the moment of your self-inflected death is the precise moment that the work, if we must call it that, will begin. The gate of possibility opens with a slight click: the sound of a loving soul going out. But when it opens, believe you me, we’re ready, we’re going to charge right through the breach. Yes, we’re absolutely ready to do the necessary work, the complete reconstruction of reality, no more, no less, they said, but the moment is yet to fruit. In the meantime, continue to check your email regularly, “always keep your finger on the digital trigger,” they said.
After an explicable lapse in the communication, which I had come to rely on for a certain type, or sub-type, of emotional comfort, I sent a follow-up email, header ‘Now?’ Less than a minute later they replied: ‘Death cuts through life like the light of a distant star and you’re asking us, ‘Which star? Which star?’ Brother, light is light, or will be. Just choose your specialism, like we said, if you can’t decide then why not go with ballet, we’re very interested in ballet, and try not to have any opinions about anything. You have to meet capitalism where it is, squatting down in an endless field of human death, you have to look it in the eyes, just stand and stare, no opinions, that’s all we ask. No opinions, not about it, not about yourself, not about whether you have an opinion about it, just keep on looking. And we know from experience that this is only possible if you’re completely secure in the knowledge that you’re about to blow yourself up.
It takes an unholy amount of time to write this; under ‘prevailing conditions,’ it is only as possible to write it as it is possible to monetise it. Of course, insofar as the conditions ‘prevail,’ everyone else is subject to them, so…
Big discount, entirely intended to win some kind of always-already-lost algorithmic victory, on the green buttons. If not, please share with someone who might be interested!
‘On or about December 1910 human character changed…’
the way it started, the way it ended... :) <3