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.