Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy

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comedy, Louis CK

intimacy-possibility-time

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dance, desire, intimacy, life, living, love, man, music, poem, poetry, precariousness, relationships, woman

I read the book she has lent to me; Conditions of Love: the philosophy of intimacy. Violin and acoustic guitar slowly rise from the damp earth of silence. I am thinking of today and of tomorrow. My mind wants me to think about the months to come and to the time provisionally scheduled for her taking leave of this small, modest city. I don’t want to think about these things. I find myself for the first time in a long time unwilling to confront the impermanence of things. Everything is temporary, for how long have I been fond of saying this? And now it isn’t that I want our time in that same damp earth, broken only by the sounds of flesh and minds extending out to one another and by the immediate laughter and demands of her child, to be eternal or endless. Simply, I can’t conceive of such an ending. I find myself refusing to believe in such an ending.

I remember crouching in her garden alone in the night, composing a poem to the stars about their distance and their destiny, speculating on how many might already be dead. I remember telling myself to keep hold of the line: we’d be miracles were we not accidents. I betray these thoughts when, inevitably, images of her are aroused in my imagination; when suddenly everything appears right and just and full with necessity. What new illusions am I happily cultivating? What new joys might they pierce through the arid parts of this indifferent earth?

Here I am. This vanishing singularity. A precarious and fragile system. The meaning of intimacy: showing to the other one’s fragility, one’s catastrophe, the wounds of one’s tiny history and the offering of these wounds as the wellspring from which some beautiful music might emerge. To be a passionate but unhurried duet in a world of mournful solos and the terrifying grandiosity of symphonies. The music of the two instruments submerged in each other, trying to find a rhythm and a pitch. And I imagine her dancing to that melody, any dissonance offering the chance for an innovation in how we might move together.

I don’t love this woman, let’s not get carried away. Our duet is young in its composition. But what dance might it generate? We met one night by accident, under conditions dictated by separate (if not finally separable) trajectories. The conditions of love? I don’t know… but the conditions of its possibility?

Finished typing, I return to the book. It’s covers are smooth and cold in my hands. I will read for a few more hours. I will sleep and dream and rise and go to university where I will talk and learn and teach and…I will be waiting for the hour when she sends me that text: F. is asleep, you can come to my place whenever you want.

And she will show me her fragility.We will show

one another.

Candle glow.

Cold of night.

Music.

All music.

A pessimist psychology

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'terror management theory', death, happiness, life, living, pessimism, psychology

Reading Thomas Ligotti I came across the existential psychological approach called Terror Management Theory. It immediately appeals to me and echoes much of the content of my thinking, some of which appears on this blog. TMT seems to form the pessimist’s contribution to the psych-disciplines, a voice that is often excluded from those disciplines. Whilst the theorists state that fear of death (thanatophobia) is the our prime motivation in living I would prefer to think in a more modest tenor of a kind of ‘thanatamnesiac’ project. I’ve written about this elsewhere on this blog as the basis of human civilisation (without previously having felt the need to coin an arsey word for it). Here I’ll simply quote the opening of an essay by Jeff Greenburg:

Humans live by existential illusions. These fictions about existence help us cope with the

Big Five existential concerns: death, identity, meaning, social connections, and freedom

(Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Koole, & Solomon, 2010). They allow us to feel like we are

significant and enduring beings in a meaningful world, even though science tells us we are just

material organisms with a brief lifespan in an indifferent universe and members of a species that

sooner or later will likely become extinct. Death is inevitable. Our identities and meanings are

cultural constructions that don’t amount to a hill of beans in the context of billions of years of

time and the vast enormity of space. Our most cherished relationships are inherently limited; we

can never know the inner life of another person or reliably expect someone else to put our

interests above their own. We strive for freedom while we are all imprisoned by our cultural

upbringing and largely dependent on following others’ rules for survival. If we have too much

freedom, it causes us anxiety and stress and we often don’t know what to do with it.

Lately I have been feeling very good. I’ve met a wonderful, interesting and beautiful woman. I’ve been really enjoying spending time getting to know her and her son. I state this here simply to emphasise that there is no necessity in thinking that pessimism is coextensive with the negative passions (depression or sorrow being the most common association). Pessimism as an intellectual orientation or tenor ought not be conflated with a deflated mood. It seems to me, right now, that it is even possible to be a happy pessimist.

Fail again…

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'problems with living', depression, life, pessimism, psychiatry, psychopathology, quote, Zapffe

Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life’, refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced- correctly- as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.

Zapffe, The Last Messiah. Full text.

the bad point

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crime, desire, monstrosity, poem, poetry, the past

The past refuses its status. Over the telephone it begs for explanations. I’ve been there before myself but there isn’t any dignity in this. The same looping conversations. The same answers for the same questions. She wants to know a new thing: how could I move on so quickly (the time since already longer than we were together for), how could I give this stranger a chance when I couldn’t give it to her. There is no good answer but I give the only one I can.

And I fear for a moment that this is my bad point that L. has been looking for: that I destroyed a young woman. But I remember I didn’t destroy her. It just didn’t work, the timing was all wrong. I was a broken thing then, still hurting from other situations. I am no monster and she is no victim.

My mind turns again to tomorrow. I will allow nothing to ruin this feeling. I really like this woman who is in love with my arms. I must rein myself in, not jump ahead, let flow what will flow. But I like her. And perhaps it is a terrible crime; that I want her more already than I did this past that refuses to let go.

Is it such a sin to leave behind those you cannot love?

Is it so wicked to explore someone you one day might?

But rein it in.

Rein it in.

Everything is new here.

The past can sleep.

Music for an electricity

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desire, sex, music, being, TV on the Radio, lovers, Levi Bryant

As the bodies of lovers desperately grasp one another, the desperation of their embrace is borne of this beyond, trying to reach this beyond of the real behind the sensuous, yet without ever being able to do so. This is why the love making of lovers oscillates between aggressivity where it is almost as if there is a desire to rip the other apart to find within them this withdrawn real object and the tender as if the real, due to its fragility, its perpetual precariousness of disappearing behind sensuous qualities and objects, must be delicately cared for to be sustained if only in its glance.

- Levi Bryant

Electric

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anticipation, consciousness, music, sensation, woman

I sit at my desk. I am listening to music: right now ‘The Leanover’ by Life Without Buildings lolls with that stuttering vocal breaking in and out of melody, in and out of sense. My head is empty of concerns or miseries. I have a vaguely pleasant sense of hunger. Down in the car park outside my bedroom window a kid is hitting a ball off the walls with his hockey stick; a pointless metronomy, a soothing repetition. The only thoughts I have lean in to tomorrow. Cinema and drinks. And later, in an excited hue, we will undress once more. My every moment is now anticipation. I let this consciousness drift.

Don’t despair!

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despair, Ostrich Pillow, public transport

 

I like to imagine its for hiding your tears and muffling your screams whilst you are caught by an attack of despair whilst on public transport. That’s just me though.

date

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art, bodies, date, life, pleasure, poem, poetry, sex, woman

We meet in town. She is reading the book I left in her house and looks engrossed, her glasses reflecting the gentle dull grey of the clouded sky outside. She looks beautiful there. I approach. Video art: the architecture of faces as enmeshed in the architecture of the megopolis, the non-place that spans the permeability of the blurring zones- airports, hotels, identical corridors connecting identical rooms. We’re sitting on the floor. She is as engrossed as I was a moment before I broke away to steal a look at her body arching back, her hands pressing into a black carpet behind her in keeping her upright. She is beautiful. And wandering around photographs of Pripyat, a place I have longed to see in reality, a non-place I have written about as desolate but flooded with faith (is it so easy to confuse faith and radiation?). She is beautiful. I hold her in the dark of the viewing room. Then coffee and talking about art. Then back to mine and all bodies contorting and eyes pulling one into the other and the moans and wet sounds of pleasure- the noises that form the truest communication. And sitting on the bed she tells me ‘I really like you’; and sitting on the bed I tell her ‘I really like you’. She has been gone for 20 minutes give or take but tonight I will see her again. The smell of her lingers in the room. I inhale deeply.

Only Strawdogs and Austrians

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Freud, John Gray

John Gray write on Freud in this article.