Taking Flight

It’s almost a year ago now that I thought I was dying. 

And as is my self-evident pathology against finishing pieces of writing, the account has been left to fester in this forgotten word document. Fernando Pessoa once said that anything he sent out into the world to be published, to be read by another, constituted a personal failure on his behalf due to its necessary imperfection. The blank page favourable, unsullied by the word. It is as a sort of quasi-therapeutic exercise then, that I’m publishing this exactly as I originally wrote it, restraining my insatiable desire to continually rework the first sentence. 

It was early morning, and I was on a red-eye flight from Dallas to San Francisco, yet to sleep or eat, instead fuelled by three, large gas-station coffees. A delicious, yet disaster-inducing cocktail that I probably should’ve foreseen. The first half of the flight went relatively smoothly, with the cramped compartment and general air of irritability failing to penetrate my relaxed, studious refrain as I struggled against the almost comically dense prose of Hermann Broch. It was with a sense of vitriolic pride that I waded through page after page of social bureaucracy, refusing to concede to my felt impenetrability of this hermetically sealed tome. 

This is the last thing I remember before I began the descent into total, spontaneous blindness – an almost cinematic fade to black. Rather amusingly, it was embarrassment rather than shock that I first felt; a uniquely British dread that I was about to inconvenience the entire plane. I mumbled something incoherent about a personal medical emergency to the lady two seats to my right, before unceremoniously crushing her fur coat as I fell between us into the middle, soiling any air of cordiality or comradeship that otherwise may have existed. My lack of sight proved a blessing in this regard, preventing any mutual recognition of her disdain; though, the air became tangibly more oppressive, the presence of the pesudomatter infiltrating even my fallen state. 

A flight attendant approached and asked if I was okay. I still didn’t feel comfortable revealing my now total blindness, so I responded positively, again murmuring something about a medical emergency and requesting only several ice cubes to chew upon. The blankness of my stare coupled with this strange request must have hurried him into action, for he bought me an entire cup worth. I proceeded to pour them straight into my mouth, surprised at their sheer number and slightly disappointed when they began tumbling down my face, dripping onto my new-found fur pillow in the process. 

I hoped that the ice-cubes, coupled with meditative deep breathing exercises, would be medically effective enough to return me to a state of equilibrium. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred, and my heart began to beat faster, the internal temperature inside of my head fusing into a truly horrendous migraine and perhaps rather dramatically, if not wholly unreasonably, I then settled on the conclusion that I was experiencing a pressure-induced brain aneurism and was going to die. I remember at this point that my savouring of the ice cubes took on a wholly new dimension; no longer were they my cure, but my vestige of sensation and therefore, of life. Ten minutes or so passed in which I drifted in and out of consciousness, before the fateful moment struck and I ran out of ice cubes. 

Arthur Schnitzler, perhaps the most prescient psychological novelist that I’ve had the pleasure of reading, writes in his appropriately named novel Dying, of the pretending and pretension that he perceives surrounding death. The freedom fighter who smiles down the barrel of their executioners' gun; Socrates smirking as he gleefully sips on a vial of poison; they’re cultivating an image until the end, internally terrified but too proud to allow the mask to drop. For Schnitzler, primal terror is the appropriate response, both internally and externally, to the occurrence of death. The domestication of the experience, our absorption of it into a sort of stoic self-acceptance, is wholly contrary to our nature as humans. I know that I didn’t die and thus my reflections hold negligible weight, but I think he’s wrong. 

For amidst the pain, the blindness and the overwhelming heat, once I’d accepted that perhaps this truly was my end, I felt nothing but serene calm, as though all my affect had been released into the world in a singular moment; a complete emptying out of this small container of subjectivity. Within the darkness, shapes began to form, and my vision became geometrical; a series of purple hexagons that pulsated, danced and formed various patterns, not unlike the hyperbolic space geometry that popularly accompanies an acid trip. Whilst I was lulled into a state of hypnotic trance, the hexagons ceased their dancing, formed one huge perimeter and engulfed me – a moment of union, or consensual obliteration. As I was fading, I had one final thought: it isn’t true that we die alone, for we die with everyone who has ever died. I lost consciousness for around 25 minutes and eventually awoke with my sight restored, overwhelmingly impressed at my ability to remain poetic until the end, and thus also slightly disappointed that my ego remained intact.   

It’s interesting to reflect on this now as there are multiple layers of mediation that now separate me from the experience; the ego that enjoys embellishment and narrativization, the guiding fictions that emerge from such and then the inherent, painstaking struggle of representation that accompanies my choice of the written word. This frustration is nicely surmised in the autobiography of the Greek poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, who writes you are a nanny goat, I frequently told my soul, trying to laugh lest I begin to wail. Yes, a nanny goat, poor old soul. You feel hungry, but instead of drinking wine and eating meat and bread, you take a sheet of paper, inscribe the words wine, meat, bread on it, and then eat the paper. 

I’ve been eating this specific paper for a while now, mentally experimenting with various permutations and explanations, but nothing satisfies, and everything separates. I suppose it could be considered a form of masochistic self-denial that I’ve even taken to writing this – all but ensuring my own alienation from this experience of true self-sovereignty, of attempting to enshrine in language something that burst beyond. This piece isn’t in the service of some grand theological or biological conclusion – I don’t really care if this was a moment of touching the absolute; I also don’t really care if this was a moment in which my blood sugar was too low. 

I remained throughout all of this; that’s the disappointing fact of the matter. I thought that I was dying and absorbed the experience to be jubilantly or somberly recounted as one anecdote amidst many. I allowed for no opportunity to decentre the ego or shake the foundations upon which I’m writing. I didn’t step into the sliver of the unknown as it was revealed to me, but rather stepped over it. This account itself can therefore be read as an attempt to master and integrate – to translate and metabolize – to resist the rumblings of the foreign within oneself. And thus, can also be read as a confession of sorts. A sad inditement of my own ability to do so.  

For I got off the plane and continued to live as I always have.  

This is a blessing or a curse dependent upon who you ask; I’m still making up my mind. 

 

Waiting for Noddy

 I’ve spent my life waiting to wait properly.  

This may sound unnecessarily obtuse, but I’ll tell you what I mean. For I was recently sitting in a café opposite a dilapidated bus stop, condemned to sip on an espresso that I hadn’t ordered but mutely accepted, hoping that the trace of disappointment in my smile would be enough for the barista to realise their mistake. It wasn’t. Whilst I was chewing on the bitterness, contemplating whether this was an act of exceptional politeness or exceptional cowardice, I noticed a man sitting and waiting for the bus. There was nothing exceptional about him at first glance, other than perhaps a pronounced stoop that made sitting look difficult; a bulky backpack upon each shoulder that continually threatened to conspire with a gust of wind and topple him forward onto the pavement. As I continued to watch, silently entertained by the morbid possibility that he would tumble, I was drawn to the way that he was waiting. He didn’t fidget; he didn’t glance at a watch; he didn’t recourse to a book. This was a man sitting outside of time; a man sitting outside of the world.  

I’ve spent my life waiting to wait like this.  

After a few minutes, the bus arrived and I was left alone with my cold espresso, caught in that brutal bind between shot and sip. I chose the former, resigned to the pleasureless brute-forcing of caffeine into my system, but there was slightly too much liquid and I loudly spluttered; a thin layer of espresso hermetically sealing my lips and karmically reinforcing the maxim: stop romanticising old people. Since then, a few weeks have passed and I’ve continually held off from writing, as though allowing the thoughts to mature – to rich and ripen into something tangible, something worth our time together. Predictably though, I’ve forgotten most of the initial curiosities that brought me to the page. Nonetheless, I have the man and I have the title; I’m sure that’ll be enough for something or rather to unfold. 

We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Noddy, waiting for . . . waiting. All evening, we have struggled, unassisted. Now it's over. It's already tomorrow.  

The problem of time has set on the pen of every writer and in the mind of every reader; the inevitability of growing older and passing through, of failing and regretting and delicately reconciling everything that we aren’t. And then dying incomplete, but necessarily so. I promise that this isn’t a desperate recourse to pessimism, but rather the opposite. For it calls to mind a novel that seems to continually resurface throughout my life and has thus become an old favourite of mine, Mount Analogue, by Rene Daumal. It details a group of young explorers who set out for a mythical mountain, attempting to locate the door to the invisible that will unite heaven and earth as one, a quest for the absolute.

The specifics of the story aren't particularly relevant, for whilst the prose themselves are poetic and engaging, my rather macabre fascination lies in the circumstances surrounding the ending, as Daumal died of tuberculosis before he finished the novel. He left his writing desk mid-way through a sentence and never returned, leaving it suspended in time, destined to remain incomplete. The relevance of this lies in the power that it grants the work. It isn’t a failure or anything lesser because it remained unfinished, because it could have taken numerous alternative narrative paths, but rather it is precisely the ambiguity of this incompleteness that captivates the mind. The frayed ends of the cable, as John Berryman writes, are revealed to us in all their messy contingency. We must simply learn to accept the fraying.  

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.  

Whenever I decide on a refrain to write around, I initially have a dig through the old favourites; a necessary recourse to my trusty arsenal of philosophers and psychoanalysts, the heavy hitters with which I can obfuscate and dance around any stable truths. I’m always captivated by Emerson’s assertion that the purpose of his essay writing wasn’t to arrive anywhere or convince anyone of anything, but to unsettle and trouble the waters of the mind. A thinker who embodies this sentiment and has (conveniently) written about the phenomenon of waiting is French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot.  

As for Blanchot, the experience of waiting is to enter a peculiar form of temporal paradox. We are simultaneously deprived of time whilst grappling with it in the form of pure excess – an image of non-being is inserted into being present – meaning that the waiter isn’t fully existing in their place of waiting. There is a movement of separation, or alienation, from the conditions of selfhood. To wait is thus to enter into the margins of time, outside of ourselves. In a sense, this entails an escape from life. We wait for our relationships to improve; we wait to start living; we wait for the barista to realise their mistake.  

The ways in which we attempt to escape from the confines of material time are numerous; Schopenhauer preached the virtues of internal ascetic retreat, Camus the leap into action and vigour, and then the majority of ourselves, a necessary skate along our phone screens as we enter temporally into the eternal scroll. This is how my last hour or so has passed, or perhaps hasn't really passed at all. And as for Samuel Beckett, whose words have cut through and vitalised this short piece, the act of waiting is both the ultimate means of escape (as expressed by Blanchot) as well as the perfect metaphor for our lives as human beings.  

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Noddy to come. 

The esoteric lead singer of Current 93, David Tibet, once had a vision of Noddy being crucified. He was laying atop of a house in East London, LSD coursing through his system whilst he gazed at the sky with its varying psychedelic permutations. He patiently waited for his visuals to concretise into something tangible; to grant him anything at all and eventually it was a tattered visage of Noddy that he saw, nailed to the cross and bleeding profusely. He treated this vision akin to a revelation, taking to the streets of London in an amphetamine induced frenzy, buying up every Noddy related item that he could find. And thus, the first acolyte of Noddy was born.  

He even had the hat.  

This is the sort of seismic life event that I’ve been searching for; that I’ve been waiting for. The dream of escaping the responsibilities of living through a necessary recourse to something greater than myself. I’ve pored over mystical texts to no avail, forcing prophecies into dreams and dreams into prophecies. Anything to take me outside. Of course, the process of my writing this piece has made me aware of the crushing irony inherent in this mode of desiring. In that true escape doesn't arise from the eventual arrival of the desired experience, of Noddy, but rather through the process of waiting for it. The time spent desiring there whilst being here.  

I think that if we wait too long for something, that thing will never arrive. It will be clouded by the brutal confines of expectation and projections of fantasy; it will be doomed from the outset. Therefore, Noddy will never arrive, at least in the form that I want, as long as I continue wanting. Perhaps that’s been the point all along, the maxim that has hovered over my fingers as I’ve gotten this far. To wait without expectation; to wait for nothing.

I’ve come to the end and realise that I should have entitled this: The Noddyssey.  

Unfortunately, it’s too late for that now.  

 

A Lover's Fantasy

 I’m sitting on a train and thumbing through Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse.

I remember buying it for the first time maybe five years ago now, sniffing out some semblance of wisdom and thus approaching it with the aim of devourment. It was with a level of almost desperate insatiability that I attempted to burn the words into my various modes of living. And as I’m sure you can foresee, it was with a sense of disappointment that I withdrew, the only prize a new intellectualised sheen to my facile romantic musings.

Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Remember, I’m trying to stay irony free.

In hindsight, I realise that my fundamental mistake was in attempting to read the book, in the harbouring of an expectation that I could simply sit back and allow the words to do the work for me. The title should’ve been my initial clue, as the text unrelentingly demands discourse – though not between people, but different parts of the self. This is what the psychoanalyst, Thomas Ogden, refers to when he talks of dreaming a text. It isn’t the author who harbours the bulk of the creative load – hammering home philosophical propositions or literary refrains – but rather, the text is the starting point of a new dream for the reader.

In keeping with this slightly esoteric current, bibliomancy is the process of literary divination; the act of approaching a text with a question and then opening it at random, gleaning an answer from the page before us. I’ve been treating this paperback as a flicker-book for a while, hoping that a chapter will graze my eyes and I’ll feel inspired to write about it. Though, the woman sitting across from me is staring at my increasingly warped book with the eyes of a concerned mother, so in order to alleviate her fears, I’ll return the decision to the source.

I’ve asked her to pick a page number for me, so I’m no longer the only bibliomancer on this train.

In the other’s perfect and “embalmed” figure (for that is the degree to which it fascinates me) I perceive suddenly a speck of corruption. This speck is a tiny one: a gesture, a word, an object, a garment, something unexpected which appears (which dawns) from a region I had never even suspected, and suddenly attaches the loved object to a commonplace world. 

This is from the chosen fragment, Alteration. 

I remember a time when I once had a crush as a young boy, she was a few years older, and we never spoke. My feelings were perfectly preserved within this silence. Though, I once stood behind her in the queue for a lunchtime panini and whilst she was talking to a friend, a perfectly formed globule of spit flew out of her mouth and hit the adjacent wall. Neither of them acknowledged it, perhaps neither even noticed it. The only wounded party was myself. The entire edifice of this childhood crush, the fantasy that I had created, came tumbling down and was never to be resurrected.

The concern of Barthes here that can be aptly illustrated through my crush is that of narcissistic fantasy. I had never spoken to this girl so I constructed an ideal through her – she was a blank screen onto which I projected. All it took was a momentary glimpse of reality, something extraneous and foreign to the ideal, for it to shatter. I think that we’ve probably all been here, enamoured and enchanted, wistful and wanting, until the emergence of a frilly sock or a name from the past (these are nonspecific examples) allow reality in, so to speak. An irredeemable tear in the surface of our canvas.

I spoke this all through with the woman sitting across from me, Philippa. She listened with an acute intensity, her eyes interrogating my words and locating them within a pain that I didn’t know. After I’d finished, I broke into a silence, which she punctured with the words;

           Growing up is realising that everyone is corrupted.

I didn’t question her. These words deserved to stand by themselves as the dreary, Warwickshire countryside flew by. I do wonder however, if we can ever truly grow out of fantasy. For being with people involves the reconciliation of the anxiety that we cannot know them and therefore, cannot control them. What then takes the place of this unknowability? 

I suppose that Philippa was hinting towards growing up as the maturation into loving the Otherness inherent in the Other. It is the building of relationships, whether friendly or romantic, upon these specks of corruption. They are our connection to what is real, that which we can truly share – our existence as singularities.

I recently watched Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse and in a state of anger, one of the characters utters this pronouncement: I’m most attracted to the flashes of ugliness that cross your face. Whilst the speaker is an abominable artist, aiming to wound our protagonist in the film, I think that it offers an interesting inverse to Barthes’ refrain. The love of that which falls outside of the frame – the love of that which we can never control and never truly know.

I’ll leave this with one of my favourite lines from Emerson and a thank you to Philippa for choosing the right page and then having all of the right words:

If you love me, what is that to you? It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know. 

A Grasp at Truth

 

There are multiple explanations as to why I’ve left this blog out to die; a failed creative project quickly lost in an internal tumult of aesthetic perfectionism and therapeutic baggage. You’d think that the medium would get tired and discard me, another young man added to the canon-fodder of jaded, and thus inadequate, bloggers.

God, I hate that word.

I suppose the most pressing reason is that I no longer recognise myself in anything that I’ve ever written; the word contains no truth – in fact, I’d go even further and say that my words contain nothing at all. I’ve always found it hard to allow a sentence to breathe for me, preferring instead to suffocate any authentic trace of myself through my use of language. I wish that I had a grand explanation for this; a Derridean analysis of differance to somehow justify my excessive verbosity. But I don’t. And I’m very much aware that I’ve done it again.

The feeling of alienation seems to be fairly universal; that occasional presence of the lightning rod, cleaving apart the self from the body and its surroundings, until we can somehow stand apart from both in abject horror. I mention this because I was recently reading old diary entries of mine, indulging in old indulgences, when I realised that they were full of lies. For some inexplicable (or perhaps crushingly obvious reason), my diary didn’t contain a shred of recognisable truth. Any genuine feeling, any connection to bodily experience, had been buried beneath pure style – sad signifiers floating around, used and abused. I’m sure you can imagine the bodily sensations that followed this realisation.

I suppose that this piece of writing can be thought of as a means to move past this; an attempt to write about that which concerns me most. And more pressingly perhaps, to preserve some feeling in the text. A task that has always seemed too impossible for me to attempt.

For several years now, I’ve thought that every life can be measured by a series of encounters – supple stains upon the self. These can be interpersonal, literary, filmic – it doesn’t really matter to me – but they are demarked by their ability to tangibly introduce otherness into our lives. A psychic home invasion perhaps, the introduction of an unsettling current of life that not only has the potential to take us outside of ourselves, but further inside, too. This isn’t to say that they necessarily reveal how things are, akin to some entry into the light of Platonic truth, but rather, how things aren’t. They reveal the profound contradictions that animate our lives. The fact that the Other – the invader – has always already been here.

It is a mark of my newfound honesty then, which I hope isn’t reading like a desperate confessional, that I want to share one of the encounters that I’ve had recently.

In the 1980s, Christopher Bollas coined the term known unthought to refer to experiences or introspective gleanings that we know, but we cannot think. These are the thoughts that continually threaten our psychic housing, teasing the delicately poised edifice of the mind. These are the thoughts that laugh in the face of the Socratic injunction to know thyself, for they reveal the impossibility of such an endeavour. Anyway, I recently stumbled across the poem, A Girl in a Library, by Randall Jarrell and I’ve been enamoured by a singular line, which may be the known unthought that I’ve most struggled to grapple with over the course of my life.

And yet, the ways we miss our lives is life.

This is the fundamental fact of self-formulation; in being ourselves, we are not that which we could have been. Written into the fabric of our lives is the lives that we don’t have. I’ve yet to meet someone who I think isn’t somewhat haunted by the possibilities of the alternative future, the enclosure of space, time and selfhood that arises simply through being ourselves. And yes, I’m aware that I may be projecting. The lovers we missed by a minute; the conversations caught by the tongue. We continually have to grapple with the presence of unrealised selves, a perpetual haunting, in which mourning becomes commonplace. This is impossibly crushing. And yet, the way that we miss our lives is life.

The writer and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, says that we live our life through a set of quotations. They form an interior text through which we relate to the world. And then one day, if they are ever truly integrated, our minds can release the mystery and they dissipate back into the text. A parallel can be drawn here with the words of T.S Eliot, in which the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. The moment Jarrell stops reverberating around, stops infiltrating the dark corners, is the moment that I’ve understood him. Not that I truly believe in the possibility.

I think that the importance of the poem for me, the stark reflection that it encourages, is that in our new economy of self-creation, this fantasy of could have been sometimes operates on an almost transcendental level. The self that walked the other path; the self that is the best version of who we could be, is the idol that we begin to worship in our dreams. And the idol constructed with mental matter (ghostly ectoplasm) is a lot harder to crush than that of clay. In his text, The Ideology of Modernism, Lukacs writes about our tendency, post Gods untimely death, to focus our hopes upon a transcendence conceived of as a pure absence. We cannot dispel this metaphysical shadow, grasping in the darkness, moving our hands outwards and attempting to claw back something that can exist in this absence. We clutch at alternative futures, comfort ourselves in the sheer fact of their (once) possibility, that in Beckett’s words, aid in this obliteration of an unbearable presence.

This reflection frames my diary in a new light.

The total collapse of any recognition arose from the fact that I was writing from the perspective of one of the men that I’ve missed. A fantasy at the end of a lofty detour around the potential possibilities of my life. I was writing as someone that I was not, in order to not be who I am.

I'm afraid to say that there’s no lofty conclusion here, or any distinguishable lesson. There’s simply a collection of disparate words that I’ve tried to make as honest to me as possible. Though, I can already foresee the picture in a few months’ time. I’ll be sitting and reading this in a state of shaken disgust, recoiling at the presence of the ghost who guides the hand. The ghost who has ascribed these words.  

Anyway, I don’t want to end on such a heavy, dramatic note. I’ve always enjoyed the line that the reason we know Hamlet isn’t mad is because he had more thoughts than one.

And in that vein, I need to stop thinking about this now.