6.11.2012 (a note taken at work while I should be working)

A tired start to the day. Perhaps I already know that writing will not take place today. After all, what is it that has permitted thought - and therefore, writing - to come forth from me of late? That I have been feeling refreshed? That I have slept well? No, that cannot be it. If anything, the opposite has usually been true. I have been using states of tiredness to my advantage, hangovers, sleep deprivation - states undesired by our society, unproductive states, detrimental to 'good health'. Why do I find these states so conducive to writing? It feels as though, in such states, all of the thoughts that usually roam around my head erratically, without the calm and focus necessary to make them intelligible - petty worries, anxieties about day to day life, administration, work, what I'm doing with my life - slow down and grind to a halt. If allowed an attempt at conversation during such a state, as I had with H. the other night, I find that my thought is left with no alternative but to pour forth slowly and calculatedly; it simply isn't allowed the speed to lose itself in the act of speech. Thought is always lagging behind speech in these states, rather than speech lagging behind thought, as is so often the case. It becomes a speech that lags behind itself.

 Could the best writing be slow, painful writing? Unexcited, unagitated writing. Calm, slow, a drudging crawl through thick mud, but a stoic crawl, one that's not annoyed, not angry or cursing its lot. Nor is it hopeful - it doesn't expend itself in anticipation of the future. It cannot imagine an end result, let alone be concerned with it. In this state alone do I truly allow myself to write, allowing myself to pick up on the tiniest urges to write, even when it feels as though I haven't much to say, and I am rewarded with unexpected insights that only reveal themselves to me as they unfold in the process of writing. It cares not for utility, all that matters is movement - as slow as possible.

“Self-criticism [is] clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other, a way to be self-sufficient while reserving for oneself the right to insufficiency, a self-abasement that is a self-heightening."

Blanchot - The Unavowable Community

Blanchot - The Unavowable Community (extract)

I repeat, for Bataille, the question: Why "community"? The answer he gives us is rather clear: "There exists a principle of insufficiency at the root of each being..." (the principle of incompleteness). Let us take note that what commands and organizes the possibility of a being is a principle. It follows that this lack on principle does not go hand in hand with a necessity for completion. A being, insufficient as it is, does not attempt to associate itself with another being to make up a substance of integrity. The awareness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted. Left on its own, a being closes itself, falls asleep and calms down.

Kafka

Again I’m struck by the notion that mankind is completely insignificant. Reading Kafka’s diaries must have something to do with it. There is something glorious, a feeling of the world’s meticulously epic nature, unembellished, completely lacking in grandeur, when reading Kafka. Kafka always feels to me as one whose writing is to be read as that of a dead writer, but that this sensation was there even when he was still alive, even when he was writing it. In my life, at this moment in time, Kafka is to be read while listening to John Maus, to Ariel Pink, to Popol Vuh. Death, death, death is in them all. These musics, though so much more than just this, nevertheless always point to death. They point to lost times, lost worlds, and the cosmic. Yes, that’s what Kafka reads like to me. He makes man kind so strange, so fairy tale-like, that one feels as though this is a different species being documented here, with defunct behaviours and customs. But no, this is mankind and it is still the same. The attention Kafka gives to customs, to social etiquette and to systems is never incidental. He is fascinated by them – legal documents, enumerated tables, lists, manners, the lot. But he seems to always struggle with these systems. Struggling, it seems, not against them, as it may at first seem. The longer I read Kafka I come to realise that what I’m witnessing is not a man raging against confinement but, rather, truly fascinated and perplexed by this confinement – these endless confinements – and trying to understand them and their workings, not simply free himself from them. One gets the impression that Kafka engages with these systems not as his restrictors but as the very prism through which he may reflect upon his own consciousness at all.

Looking at things in such a way, the insignificance, the insectness of mankind, doesn’t seem to sweep everyone along with it. If anything, the meagreness of the multitudes seems to give the individual even more significance. I don’t know why I’m saying this, it just seems to make sense right now. Perhaps this is because in its complete form the above sentence would read: ‘the meagreness, the insignificance of mankind seems to me to give the individual even more significance, because this individual is me. And it is always “me”’.

The piety of difference

The vastness of a memory’s sky, comforting in its infinite distance from the present, bathed in the beige foam that washes all my dreams. And what is it that evades me in each and every one? Myself, myself, I have never found myself. But then, I was never there. That which is dreamt is a slice of 80s Americana, a neon Hollywood Americana, a childhood memory that passes through golden fields of wheat lit by a sepia sun, where the colours of the air are made up of brown, yellow and a sandy blue, just as much as it passes through the rocky, dry baking roads of Israel and the lone flowers blooming in the desert’s oven air. For even my memories of Israel are not real and seem more informed by the image of Israel as sold to me through television and films than by my own experiences. Could life in the north have been like those movies? Eilat must’ve been a very different place to the rest of the country. And is there not a part of me that for this reason feels that I have not had a true experience of Israel? Rather than feel as though I have had a unique experience, growing up in a unique place among the various places of the world (not more special, just different, just as every place has some difference about it, small though it may be), I feel as though lacking before a genuine experience of Israel. Let it be said that difference is not a given. Everywhere is the desire for sameness – a reactive desire, yes, Deleuze and Nietzsche did not overlook this. This desire dictates my memory, the construction of my own narrative. For if, in spite of his brilliance, Deleuze took comfort in the fact that difference is in everything and saw in it a testament of the world’s eternal salvation and source of hope, then he was but a false prophet and a priest. He may not have been any better than the modernists. Deleuze may not have believed in the idea of dialectic resolution, but he did away with it only at the expense of his own integrity: he did not need to believe in a final resolution because he substituted for it the belief that salvation is already here, happening at every moment, in every human being and in every thought. Yet the truth of difference does not preclude the danger that the Same is forever winning, forever has the upper hand, and that we have not yet even begun to see the horrible potential of The Same and the great degradation to which it can lead.

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Todd Solondz may use large doses of absurdity, but I cannot help but be deeply affected by this film. Maybe it’s mostly that the experience of school as a place of unthinkable cruelty resonates strongly with me. School can be a place of almost surreal degrees of distress, and no amount of passing time can truly help one forget this. The fact that childhood is normally set apart as a formative stage, a phase of non-sense because it is still forming the order, sense, rationality and alleged civility of adult life, allows it to be dismissed as unworthy of serious dwelling-on. And yet, imagine the horror conjured up if one were confronted with a world in which grown-ups are as openly cruel to each other as kids are on a regular basis, a world of name-calling, of constant picking-on and bullying, a place of untamable violence, where it is normal to break into physical altercations and display your discontents publicly.
Yet this film’s handling of the topic of childhood is not summed up by the above. Throughout the film we are reminded of the penal and corrective nature of our lives, particularly the role that schools play in this. Perhaps ‘corrective’ is the wrong term to use here, for it suggests a reform, whereas in fact these institutions are there not in order to reform a subject gone wrong, but to form the subject in the first place. This system attempts to rein in the child’s chaos and ill-discipline, and turn it into a good, model citizen. When Dawn is taken to the principal’s office along with her parents, she is reassured that no-one is there to get her; this is swiftly followed by a reminder that this is the sort of incident that could go down in her permanent record and affect her chances in college and in other ways for the rest of her life. Her brother, meanwhile, is preoccupied with his adult future as though everything he does in the present holds value only insofar as it affects his future as an adult, that point where he will actually get to live life, as it were, where life will finally carry intrinsic value in relation to its present state, unlike childhood, which is merely a means to an end and not an experience in its own right. How stifling for this poor girl, grappling for survival and gasping for air on a daily basis, to have to be confronted with the thought that this struggle must be affecting her future irreversibly and without her knowing how to do anything about it. Worse still, she is incapable of articulating what kind of future she would like to form for herself in its stead.

“I always felt as though God would come into my life at some point, but he never did”, said Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men, and this reflects for me the way I have so often lived my life and still do: forever waiting for that point in the future when I will finally come into myself.

Two very interesting articles on Tarkovsky's Mirror.

On Deleuze and Bergsonian time in Tarkovsky.

And an interesting analysis of Mirror

Of Tarkovsky and the uncanniness of history

We are in the midst of a strange time in history. Well, perhaps this isn’t strictly true, at least not in as much as every time in history is a strange time. A sense of history, of history in the making – that is what’s truly strange. What’s changed for, then, what lies behind me write such an entry, is that I am beginning more and more to feel a sense of history in everything I see. A sense of removal from current events and of an outside perspective looking in. Not quite complete, of course. Not enough, that is, that I can see the precise motivations behind every act and tribulation taking place or that I could have the answer to the world’s problems. Even the best history books, no matter with how much hindsight they are written and how well documented their subject matter it, cannot help but try and impose some sort of sensible narrative on past events. Simply put, I get an overwhelming sense of us hurtling blindly through time, tentatively grasping for some sure-footedness and certainty in what the future holds for us and - for those of us fortunate enough to be involved in such matters – trying to steer history and the fate of empires in one direction or another. Maybe it’s reading history books that puts one in this mind-frame of a sense of history. Adam Curtis’s recent 3 part documentary for the BBC is a good example of something that might instil this sense of history, which is also a sense of awe, and of horror. Regardless of how accurate or insightful his presentation actually is, it performs a magical service by injecting a chain of events from the past 60 years with the same distance and sense of history as learning about the Roman Empire or the two World Wars. It takes huge events, events so large that occur on an unfathomable international scale, events so large, complex and all-pervasive we barely even notice them as events, and breaks them down into digestible components, draws lines between them, makes connections and links dots, so that suddenly we believe we can see something that has actually been in the making for at least a few decades. We suddenly believe that we can spot ideological shifts over the past few decades and actually make narrative sense of them. In an uncanny way (uncanny in the Heideggerian sense), it makes me feel as though I’m watching the machinations of human society reduced to a nature documentary about insects, with David Attenborough explaining their behaviour as part of a dance of life that simply must be so, with every insect falling into a predetermined role and having its behaviour dictated from the start. It makes me feel, when I watch mankind, that no-one understands their own debt to history, to the circumstances and context in which they make their decisions, and that it can only ever be so. Things could never have been any other way.
More so, however, what Curtis’s programme does is not merely leave us at a specific point in the past, as though history has stopped there. Slowly, without us realising it, the events which he is trying to analyse gush forth and spill right into the present. Suddenly, we are shaken and jolted out of our everyday existence, only to look around us and understand that we are in the midst of something that’s taking place right now, something that’s been building up throughout time, that has not yet ended, and that will not end for a while. The uncanny invades our everyday existence and our relationship to our own present and future. It is the historian’s role to piece together the past, but it is the philosopher’s role to both take apart and piece together the past, future and present.


Is it the philsopher’s role, though? Perhaps it is the artist’s. Themes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Much like my above ruminations on the nature of history and of nostalgia, Tarkovsky here appears to operate in a similar fashion. We have memories of the past interspersed in the present, flashes of images, all silent, flaring up indeterminately and with no real chronological sense. Even in scenes of conversation, the camera never focuses on a particular speaker but drifts slowly through the house, from detail to detail, as though to suggest that the significance of the memory haunts the totality of one’s environemtn, every object in the room rather than being concentrated in one person. No, not the totality, for that word would suggest a closed circle. Rather, every object and every instance has the potential of entering and making up a memory or a narrative, itself an open and inexhaustible field of signification.
The preoccupation with the meaning of the film is a mistake, as Grigory Yavlinsky notes. The film is so deliberately opaque that even if some of the scenes are in fact based on Tarkovsky’s childhood memories, they do not actually refer to or represent these memories as such. If anything, the structure of the film tells us that even those memories upon which the film is supposedly based are not Tarkovsky’s own, in as much as he has no direct access to his memories or to a coherent sense of the narrative of his own life. The film, in that respect, becomes something else the moment it is put on film. It resists meaning and interpretation so strongly that it can’t help but become one’s own film as soon as one watches it. The powerful emotions it might stir in some are new each time, as it can only provoke feelings of awe and wonderment, of mystery, and of the overwhelming realisation that we are lost and insignificant in the endless gush of history, which never stops changing and exerting its force on us, and which has always already moved on to pastures new while we still try to make sense of what’s just happened.

No matter how many different names Tarkovsky toyed with during the making of the film, the fact that he settled on Mirror is telling. The film itself might act as a mirror to whomever watches it, not in the sense that someone might suddenly be confronted with themselves as they are, but in our inability to ever fully grasp ourselves. This is not the only time a mirror has played a part in Tarkovsky’s films. Solaris, too, sees a planet attempting to communicate with a space station’s inhabitants by entering their subconscious and replicating what it finds. More than an attempt at self-healing, it perhaps depicts the manner in which we are confronted with the inevitable return of themes, dreams and memories that play a role for us throughout our lives and which are ultimately unassailable.

Watching Janie Geiser’s short films makes me think about nostalgia in a new way. Nostalgia is no longer a case of images, sounds, or any other material, pointing to a memory in a suggestive manner, but a suggestion referencing nothing but itself – pure suggesting. Geiser’s film Lost Motion (to which I haven’t been able to find a link online but which you can buy from the wonderful people in The Other Cinema, San Francisco, on the DVD Anxious Animation) felt more nostalgic to me than almost anything I’ve experienced before; it brought to me the kind of feeling of deaf and dumb opaqueness that makes up my most intense nostalgic experiences. I believe now that what has characterised the way in which I have experienced the recollection of past experiences – what must characterise so many people’s experience – is not a the repeating of certain aesthetic or actual experience that can be repeated, but the way in which the world refuses us in these moments of nostalgic recollection, dumbfounds us, repeatedly strikes us with a sense of awe, bewilderment, of something greater and unfathomable – and, subsequently, a sense of fear… I can remember watching films and, perhaps because I was too young to have a sufficient understanding of this world’s signifiers, my mind would create all sorts of suggestions and inferences from images that otherwise made no sense at all. This might still happen to me when I watch a film without concentrating or if I keep falling asleep. Something fills in the blanks, creates narratives and signification for me. This is precisely the feeling I got from Geiser’s film – an inability to follow any tangible narrative, and my mind, already in a dream-like state thanks to the film’s unique form, entering a state whereby it creates the vaguest and most incomprehensible inferences from the images and sounds that it encounters. Perhaps from this sense of fear comes an introversion, a retreat into oneself, the creation of a bubble where everything makes sense, where one feels warm and protected. Maybe it’s whence that feeling of warmth and innocence so often associated with nostalgia comes? Then perhaps nostalgia can be divided into different – at least two – elements or states: the protective reaction, and the droney, unintelligible sensory experience that leads to it?
In this sense, nostalgia is it not possible that nostalgia is not the re-enactment of an old experience per se, but a re-experiencing of this awe in a way that’s different each time.


Here's another film by Janie Geiser, albeit not as powerful as Lost Motion.

Attending the Prelinger Archives screening at the AV festival provided some fascinating insights. The idea, in the film Destination Earth, that quality of life comes from increased production, and that this comes from competition, is echoed in many of the other propaganda films in the archive and can be recognised as one of the foundational tenets of our capitalist age. In the film we are introduced to Mars as an inhabited planet, whose inhabitants are ruled by a hated and self-deluded tyrant named Ogg. Ogg does not believe in competition because, you know, competition breeds free thinking. Instead they work, you know, towards a common goal, thus stifling creativity and a natural urge for discovery. He is also unloved by his people because, as we all know, tyrants don’t come to rule by being admired and desired by people. This goes pretty well with the great democracy/dictatorship dichotomy created and permeated by America and its cultural industries throughout the 20th century, where anyone who isn’t democratic in the capitalist sense (because democracy means freedom, and freedom means infinite choice), is undeniably forcing people into an unnatural and oppressive form of living. Never mind the fact that most despots have been unusually charismatic people who were, for the most part, brought into power with the support of the people. This is not to justify despotism, not at all, nor to say that democracy is bad… but this all depends on what we mean by “democracy”. The point is simply that over the years America has succeeded in appropriating to itself certain terms (such as freedom and choice) and changing their meaning so much they don’t really mean anything anymore, and anything that doesn’t conduct itself, economically and socially, in exactly the same manner (such as socialism), is then seen as standing against all of America’s values, which are America’s and America’s alone.
A similar thing occurs in “King Joe”, where Joe is proclaimed to be the king of all workers simply because he has the power to buy more than any other worker in the world.

Also found this a while ago: Destination Earth used as a video for a Kassem Mosse track. Enjoy.

It's been a long, long time since I last gave writing on the blogosphere any importance or high priority in my life. It used to be the case that I easily wrote over 1,000 words each day while at university. Maybe that wasn't always a healthy thing and maybe I don't necessarily want to go back to that frame of mind, but one thing is for certain, and that is that I was always stimulated, so much sharper, with thought and ideas forever at my fingertips, on the tip of my tongue, I could enter a discussion at almost any moment and feel as though I could take on the subject matter in a critical way, play around with it, press it, squeeze it, take it apart and reassemble it. Now that feeling is gone. The ability to write has left me. Even when I try my hardest to set aside time for writing in my schedule, I have at times spent hours before the computer screen with not a single kernel of a thought passing through my mind.

I can't explain quite why or how, but I know that writing is incredibly important to me, not as an artistic tool (although that mustn't be discounted) but as an integral part of my existence as a human being in this world. Or rather, as a means of working through and figuring out the never-ending puzzle that is existence (without wishing to sound too dramatic or self-indulgent). Writing is what allows me to grab an image of thought as it floats in the ether of my consciousness, smack it down on the table and begin to dissect it... No, this is the wrong verb, the wrong way to look at thinking or writing. What writing allows me to do, is to latch on to that flash of thought and let it blindly take me to places I couldn't have possibly predicted at the start of the journey.
Similarly, I can't quite explain why thought has deserted me. I suspect it has a great deal to do with my relationship with time and work. It used to be the case that I didn't have that much to do other than read for write for my degree, which back then I considered to be my 'work'. Yet the nature of this work was so lacking in urgency, that I happily allowed myself to write in an unfocused, undirected manner whenever I wanted. Writing - writing for its own sake, for the sake of thought - was my top priority at all times, and if I was overcome by the urge to write then it would take precedence over any other urge or obligation, usually to the detriment of my course work. I was obsessed with writing; and writing, thus, became a great experiment. Not a means to understanding the world, but a thing in its own write, to be reflected upon by itself, during its own act. Writing about writing, about the meaning of writing, about the effects of writing, and so on...

And so, I feel I need to make some sort of disclaimer. In view of what writing became for me in the past before I lost it, I feel as though starting up this blog again is a way of trying to get back into writing. With blogging there sometimes comes a fear of being perceived as vain. "Why would anyone want to read my stuff? Will I come across as self important?" and so on and so forth. I am a little older now, and I can happily say that I don't worry about these things so much now, at least not half as much as I might have worried about them in the past. I don't feel the need to justify making my writing public, as I feel it to simply justify itself. I am doing this because I feel that this might somehow spur me into thinking and writing regularly once again. I don't know how to go about it exactly, so expect plenty of posts about my inability to start writing, my inability to think, and other such bilge. The results may indeed be vain at times, boring at others, or, if everything goes to plan, downright megalomaniac. And so what? No-one is free of vanity, and vanity isn't enough to rule anyone, or anything, out.

David Lynch, amazingly, says that he will never go back to using film. He admits that film looks better than digital but insists that the highest importance should be placed on the capturing of ideas, for which a giving in to rhythm is required. Digital cameras, he says, allow the director to, first of all, shoot with a minimum amount of people and therefore allow connections to manifest themselves that would not do so in a busier environment and, secondly, to shoot long takes without interruption and allowing one to mess things up without worrying, to talk to the actors while filming, and therefore capture any ideas that might come up in the moment.

My love, still, for all things smacking of Blanchot, nearly forces me to agree with him. However, just as profoundly I carry a strong mistrust of all allusions to immediacy, particularly from artists. Yet Lynch can’t be dismissed as a mere artistic romantic just as the lovers of film cannot be branded mere nostalgic purists. Lynch recognises the beauty of film, but he is willing to sacrifice it. Has he lost something, though? Is it just a coincidence that Inland Empire is my least favourite Lynch movie? It does feel to me as though Lynch had lost some focus with that film rather than gained it through the uninterrupted technique of shooting in DV. He is too free. He needs restraint if he is to produce something truly great again.

19.6.10

- I had a very interesting walk home last weekend after Road to Rimini; let’s see if I can remember it. I took a pill that didn’t quite get the chance to spend itself in a positive manner, and so, as is often the case in these instances, triggered an unpleasant and somewhat schizophrenic trail of thought in my head, albeit a highly lucid one, which is almost always the case. In fact, I find the lucidity of my thinking when taking pills overwhelming, and perhaps it is this that is partially responsible for what we term a ‘comedown’. Some say, of course, that the drugs are to blame for my experience, but that is a gross over-simplification and misunderstanding of the experience.
It’s very important that we understand, first of all, that it is a mistake to divide this experience into independent factors such as ‘the drug’ and ‘the individual’. What occurs at such an intensification of self-reflective thinking is not made up of separate factors, but is in fact one experience, and whatever factors might be said to be present in the experience operate together and off the back of one another. The pill does not trigger an effect that is in some way contained within the pill and operates on the subject. Rather, the process that can be observed during the experience is one which is always already occuring within the subject as an inextricable part of the very fact of being a subject, or of the process of subject-formation, which is in itself a never ending process, but a continual process of layering, holding together, and breaking up of multitudes. There is always, at the same time as - and as part of – the will to stability, also present an undermining process of disintegration. This process, we understand from Nietzsche, Deleuze, and many other thinkers, must not be seen as a negativity, but as a crucial drive in a healthy psyche. Any identity can only maintain itself as identity, paradoxically, precisely through its capacity for disintegration and reorganisation. Too strong a tipping of the balance in the direction of this drive, however, can be dangerous, and it is perhaps true that only certain souls are fortunate to be strong enough to withstand such trials (although I’m wary of siding with Nietzsche’s opinion that these characters are in some way ‘stronger’ or higher individuals, or rather, some people’s interpretation of Nietzsche to this effect. One must ask ‘stronger for what?’ But we shan’t dwell on this point here). What occurs during the comedown is one experiencing the removal of the defence mechanisms that occult from view the fact of drives balancing off one another, and are exposed to the lie that is our life (this experience is necessary for one to learn the secrets of acting). Walking past a group of lads I heard one of them talking about Jermaine Defoe. Defoe, of course! England had played that evening the opening match of their world cup campaign and got off to a demoralising and disillusioning performance, drawing 1-1 with the U.S. Months and months, nearly two years of the most meticulous preparations, both mental and physical; the expectations of millions and the instilling of self-belief, cultivating an unshakeable faith, a strength, the strength to believe that they are, in fact, world class players capable of the ultimate feat in football – winning the world cup. All of these beliefs explode in one night of doubt. A few minutes where things don’t go their way during the game might trigger a chain reaction of self-doubt: “what if we lose this game? What if we fail to achieve our goals? What if we’re not good enough, not as good as what we’ve led everyone to believe?” And suddenly they find that they can’t answer those questions other than by forcing themselves to believe them, which they no longer can. How will they recover the belief in their stability and unshakeability? How do you do this once you’ve been exposed to the fragility of quotidian efforts for sanity? This is a call of conscience. I believe that most players might experience an instance of anxiety, in a Heideggerian sense, and hear the call of conscience, yet the majority must overcome this precisely by ignoring the call and reassemble their strength again around their identity as per its role within the sport of football. It must be this ability, after all, that makes them champions and others losers. They sacrifice a certain questionning in favour of social achievements, and I don’t intend this as a criticism. There is something awe-inspiringly impressive and strong about this, but it is a strength driven by fear – fear of disintegration – a fear of death. I wish to desire a stronger, truer strength. I wish to know what desiring that strength feels like. I wish to know what that strength is so that I may even begin to desire it. What would this strength be, this strength born from the embracing of death?
I kept walking past towering buildings in the sobering light of dawn that seemed to reflect the gradual awakening of my soul, its attention pointed towards its own frailty. A new Generator Studios building, not even finished yet, the product of Labour investment in this area and of so much waste. What will become of this building now that we have a Conservative government? What will happen to this city? It will be opened up to the folly of its own existence, the façade that Labour had managed to put up here for such a long time, the image of sustainable prosperity.

Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil", 261

“Among the things which a noble human being perhaps finds hardest to understand is vanity: he will be tempted to deny its existence where a different type of human being will thing it palpably evident. For him the problem is to imagine creatures who try to awaken a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not hold – and thus do not ‘deserve’ either – and yet subsequently come to believe this good opinion themselves. This seems to him in part so tasteless and lacking in self-respect and in part so baroquely irrational that he would prefer to consider vanity exceptional and in most cases where it is spoken of he doubts its existence…. The vain man takes pleasure in every good opinion he hears about himself (quite apart from any point of view of utility and likewise regardless of truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he submits to both, he feels subject to them from that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks out in him. – It is ‘the slave# in the vain man’s blood, a remnant of the craftiness of the slave – and how much ‘slave’ still remains I woman, for example! – which seeks to seduce him to good opinions about himself; it is likewise the slave who immediately afterwards falls down before these opinions as if he himself had not called them forth. – And to say it again: vanity is an atavism.”

11.6.08

- What? What the fuck is life about?! The kind of thoughts that go through my head, I can’t make any sense of them. I feel stuffed after my dinner, and I feel my bloated belly and think about my dad; I think about his slight stature, his bald scalp and his droopy belly. What kind of physique did he have when he was my age? Am I doing well compared to him? I’d like to be fitter than he is when I’m his age. It’s hard to get fit though; I’m not a naturally athletic guy. Or at least, I didn’t have the right habits instilled in me to be more athletic and have more of a tendency towards it. Because potential, that may be in almost anyone, but potential means nothing without the right habits, and without the desire and dedication to achieve something. But first habits, mostly habits.
I think about my dad, and how he didn’t instil the right habits in me. And why not? Because he didn’t have those habits himself, and it seemed he never learnt their importance, or if he did, then he never managed to instil them in himself. Was it a question of strength? Was my dad just not strong enough to overcome himself? Would I be strong enough to overcome myself? Oh, but that’s surely not all it comes down to. To say that a man is or is not strong enough to overcome himself – is that not to answer the question with its own presuppositions? If we say a man is strong enough to change himself, then we are not talking about true overcoming, but about a gift he’d been endowed with by nature. Overcoming always appeared to me to consist of cultivating strength in oneself. How, then, may we ask whether a man can be strong enough to make himself strong? How are we to even phrase the question? Where are we to find this strength that precedes strength?
Then I think about my future children. Do I have the right habits to instil in them? God, no, I’m a mess. What kind of person thinks they’re ready to have kids? People who don’t feel any trepidation about the possibility of offspring horrify me; to become a parent is to be guilty of the greatest arrogance, and the greatest harm towards one’s children. Our original sin was against our Father, when we ate from the tree of knowledge. But we commit another original sin, an original sin against our children the moment we bring them to life; did not God himself commit the original sin when he planted the tree’s seed in the ground?
To return to your question, no, I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. When will I get there? Have I not been striving for this my whole life? To reach that point where I can finally say – I am fine, I am complete, I don’t need to change anymore. But that point will never come, and I’ve accepted it long ago; so why can’t I just live with it? Why do I keep racking my brains about what it is I’m doing with my life? My life, my life; what does it come down to? Philosophy is great, but sometimes I wonder if my life goes beyond these kinds of meaningless, sporadic thoughts, these little niggling anxieties and uncertainties that go almost unnoticed through my mind in never-ending loops, unable to break out of their own vicious cycles; breakthroughs come when these cycles exhaust and spend themselves. And I wonder if my preoccupation with philosophy doesn’t miss the point sometimes? Is there not something behind philosophical questions which is obscured by those very questions? Does my life not consist in precisely those little anxieties and niggling uncertainties, regrets and accusations, that are so common-place we do not even bother to consign them to our memory? I will sooner remember a trip to the local corner shop than give a second thought to the thought I had about my dad earlier.
If this was a story, a ‘proper’ narrative, would I not be recounting to you my trip to the shop, how I bought a pack of tobacco and the huge Asian man behind the till who looked ready to crush me for interrupting while a game of football was being shown on television? Some people call this kind of story ‘stories about nothing’, and tell us that those stories are about real life, as though the role of literature was to be as true to real life as possible, and as though life could be ascertained or pinned down to one quality or tendency, as though is was the tendency of life? So is life about nothing? It seems to me that this nothing, even in the most banal and repetitive of daily tasks, is a loud, noisy grind, an endless stream of thoughts and struggles, always taking form, shaping up, looking like culminating, but always disappointing, always failing.
So what is potential? Potential is nothing without actualisation. Potential can only be claimed in retrospect, after one has exerted one’s potential.

Being-Towards-Death

I see why so many people stick with 9 to 5 jobs – it’s the easiest thing in the world. Running your own life, your own career and trying to direct your own productivity is crippling and takes much trial and error. There are so many possibilities at any given moment that one loses sight of any clear future (and therefore any clear present) and becomes paralysed with the weight of abundant choice. I don’t know what I should be doing, I don’t know where I want to go, and I also don’t know when to just give myself a break, when to say to myself “You’ve worked enough, now rest”, and therefore I just burn myself out.
A person in a 9 to 5 job doesn’t have to worry about the future, about where they wish to steer it – they allow it to come to them. No, not even that. They drag it alongside their present, limply and straight ahead, almost hovering forward through space in undisturbed inertia (Wait, this is pure Heidegger, isn’t it? An authentic Dasein, in that case, would be one that opened its own future possibilities, even without knowing what it is that’s being opened. There is a link here between Heidegger and Deleuze).

They go to their jobs, work their hours, have their breaks, and when the day is done they are left with a few entertainment-designated hours – time in which they are free to forget about work completely. They can actually enjoy their free time, because it is truly freed by dint of the structured sacrifice of the rest of their time to work.

Herzog’s films are full of individuals who live truly solitary lives. Why is it that whenever I think about my life in terms of qualitative worth I think about its benefit to others? Why does something in me instinctively berate some weirdo who’s dedicated his life to living on the edge of the Sahara desert and study an elusive species of lizard for not taking an interest in the world? After all, perhaps in doing so he takes more interest in life. If life isn’t actually about or for anything, then what harm is there in exploring its oddest, most unusual, and even seemingly inconsequential paths? It is the sick, Judaeo-Christian gregarious instinct in me that reacts to this refuser of common sense.

Dylan

I'm currently rereading Bob Dylan's autobigraphy and it's inspiring me more than any philosophy book I've read in years. Inspiring me to write, to play music, to get up and leave, and just generally making me restless.
You get this great sense out of reading Dylan’s autobiography that he had an insatiable thirst for learning. In some way, you sense that to him, living life to its fullest potential meant creating as diverse and colourful an identity as one possibly could, by observing, imitating, absorbing everything you encounter that’s of any interest to you, anything you find original and fascinating, and then toying with it, shaping it some more, pounding it like dough, really getting your knuckles stuck in there until you’ve managed to turn it into something, well… Your own. Although precisely what “your own” means, I don’t really know.
But Dylan, clearly driven into momentum by reading On The Road, wanted to go into every big city out there like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything in his path, drinking the Mississippi dry. If something was happening out there or if someone had a new trick up their sleeve, he wanted to know about it, wanted to be there when the trick was being invented, if he could, wanted to be present in the moment and then move on as fast as he could, like some hungry monster devouring town after town and needing a metropolis to satiate his hunger now. I can almost see him with fire in his eyes as he grows bloated with life, shoving more into his mouth when it’s already crammed full of building and shacks and people with juice running in purple streams all down his chin and way down his shirt, which is itself already bursting like the Incredible Hulk.

On sexism

What sick impulse is it in me that makes these lost causes into lost souls in need of salvation? And salvation – is that really what I want to give them? After all, what would this salvation consist of? Would it mean bringing them back into this world? Back onto the path from which they’ve strayed? No. No, this isn’t it, even if I tell myself that’s what I would like to do. For do I not at the same time contradict myself by wishing to keep them away from the path, away from this world, which I come to see as too callous, cold and cruel for these souls? These souls I exalt as being too good, too pure not to be overwhelmed by this world and the monsters that inhabit it. As though most people were corrupt! Ha! As though it is they that have strayed from the path! As though it is they who are lost! But in my perverse, absurd and infinitely sexist little mind do I not convince myself (How?! How do I convince myself of such absurdities?!!) do I not convince myself that humans are not corrupt, contaminated, but are merely naturally malicious, and that it is the lost souls that are corrupt, those young girls (and it is always young, vulnerable girls) are not whole – they are pure through an inverse corruption, their goodness emanates from a lack: they lack the maliciousness of most people. Their goodness is a form of impurity. Oh, and how by doing so I do them a disservice. How I rob them of any agency, of any face and will of their own. They are there, not to live in this world, but to be sheltered by me in perpetual fear and active blindness.
What scum I am. What a confused, mislead and ridiculous cretin. But don’t worry, I haven’t the power to make things worse. For in the end the joke is always on me. When you try to help these lost souls ward off this cruel world you are being cruel to them tenfold; and besides, the pure, lost, innocent, virginal and angelic lost souls are the ones most liable to hurt you. “For they know not what they do…”.
And you can’t blame them, as you created them that way.

#

Lessons learnt this summer:

A) Escape from oneself is the best one can hope for in this world. Philosophy is self-indulgent, all philosophers are self-indulgent, and excessive exposure to philosophy breeds nothing but harmful self-absorption.

B) The only cures for the self-absorption bred by philosophy are as follows: alcohol; drugs - not depressants; incessant immersion in the company of others, to the point where you no longer remember how to be with yourself - you have to reach the point where you feel scared of your own company, and see this as a blessing; dancing; seemingly superficial music; stop reading anything "profound" or "intense". If possible, stop reading altogethe; take up a manual/physical occupation - this helps you to forget yourself and forget thinking altogether.

C) A and B build up your confidence; they allow you to get on with things without having to make recourse to writing. You no longer need to ask yourself why it is that anyone would even bother talking to you.

D) Ultimately, you are something of a social retard, and cannot help but inevitably fall back into the same vicious loops of self-doubt and paranoia which you have only been staving off; meaning, no matter how hard you try to distance yourself, remove yourself from yourself, to have no regard and even forget yourself, you are only putting something off, and you will eventually be sucked back into yourself and your own despair like some shitty black hole. Certain fundamental insecurities, phobias and paranoias are permanent, and you will never, ever, remove them. Do not be fooled by power trips. Do not fool yourself into believing that you can in any way have control over yourself or that you can make your life better at all, as you'll only be disappointed. The harder you fight it, the more painful it'll be when you are crushed, as will inevitably be the case. And yet, not fighting is simply not an option.

Conclusions:

There's still hope. I don't know why, but some masochistic drive in me keeps me believing, struggling, and refusing to give up hope. It's all a lie, of course, and we are doomed to nothing but self-contempt. You can never fully break out of yourself, and that's why we're all doomed to go around in circles till the day we die. I recognise my being fucked up, but am powerless to do anything about it.

Pffft...

Is it coming back to what it was before? Another round of the same old shit. Something you begin to notice when you write regularly over a long period of time is how the focus of your writing changes and shifts from certain vectors and carries along new ones, and even returning to old one’s every now and then, trying to find a footing, some stability, a certainty. I felt like I was on to something interesting last year, at least for me, when I began to write about nothing in particular, writing about wasting time, wasting whole days, weeks at a time – wasting my life away in inescapable inertia, trapped inside myself, wanting desperately to change that self, for no particular reason, really; not because I don’t like myself or because my life is particularly horrible, nor because I wasn’t happy with the way things were going… On second thought, it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, I just wasn’t satisfied. Always restless, but never quite sure why. Looking and groping, slowly, hesitantly, tentatively, reaching out in the dark, and knowing all the while that some veil is right before my eyes, but I didn’t know how to remove it. Or maybe it wasn’t a veil; maybe it was a prism, distorting the view and disorienting me. I had no good reason to be restless. All I knew was that I wanted out, anyway, anyhow, shatter myself and smash my life to pieces, just so I could remove myself from myself, look outside the senseless, confused and paralysed mess that is my consciousness; I’d forgotten how to breathe.
What’s happened since? Too much. So the writing has changed; stopped, really. Too many things, too hectic a year.
That bloody cat is in heat, and she’s driving me insane. All I can think of is squashing her fragile little skull in my hand. Just watching her rub up against me, presenting her behind and hearing her constant pleas for some cock, my skin begins to burn, like a horrible itch I can’t scratch and that’s growing worse by the minute. It’s making me restless and horny, and I resent the cat for it. When it comes to the crucial moment, I have no sympathy for anyone. All my purported understanding and compassion – no, fuck that word. I prefer ‘empathy’, though that’s not quite right either. Anyway, whatever it is, it goes out the window; I forget all my lessons and understanding, and lose my temper. My patience fails me. I forget, I forget. I forget all too often. It’s always a disappointment, a failure on my part. I can’t even have sympathy for a cat in heat; how the fuck am I supposed to have sympathy for a human-being? What, just because I’m human too? That’s not the answer. I feel I have a much better understanding of what it’s like to be a cat than to be human. Cat’s are easier to forgive (not this cat, though. I want to squash her fragile skull in my hand).

How can I go back to writing the same stuff as last year? Has my life really changed that much that I can’t bring myself back to that state of mind? No, not really. This year has, in many ways, been one of change. Lots has happened. I started the year writing more than ever, then making the decision to cut down significantly on writing; a conscious decision. ‘Let yourself breathe. Let your ideas breathe.’ And in many ways I feel like I’m breathing again, like I’ve torn down some walls, smashed some mirrors. Not as suffocated as I felt a few months ago. Things, I feel, are going somewhere. But have I not missed the lesson? Things never really go anywhere. Maybe that’s all I meant. Yes, that’s all I meant. Things are becoming just a little bit easier and a little bit lighter every day. Yet here I am again: I have deadlines. I can see opportunities being lost again just on the horizon. ‘Next year, next year, I’ll change. Next year it’s serious’. And once again I’m not stressed about any of it, except for the odd jolt of panic here and then, but those are more like unpleasant farts or trapped wind than a crisis. And now I feel myself going back to writing about nothing and about wasting my life. And, strangely enough, at the same time I’m regaining my will to write. I feel as though there’s much I have to let out of my system, much that I might not have realised was building up. So I’ll go back to writing about wasting my life – it seems to be the only thing I can do at the moment. I’m looking forward to it.