notes from (Sydney’s) underground
The author of these notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictitious. Nevertheless, such people as the writer of these notes not only can but even must exist in our society- taking into consideration those circumstances in which our society was formed. I wanted to bring before the public more distinctly than usual one of the characters of the recent past. He is a representative of a generation that has survived to this day. In this fragment entitled The Underground, this person introduces himself and his views, and apparently wishes to explain those reasons as a result of which that generation appeared and was bound to appear in our midst. In the second fragment there appear the actual notes of this person about certain events in his life- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
I have not been living like this for long, dear reader; perhaps for two years or less, but I warn you that you have in your hands a seriously toxic substance, perhaps even a radioactive substance. The heart of the matter is idleness. Yes, here we have a soul that has been provided with insufficient impetus for action, and far too much contemplative power, and insofar as the balance of these two things determines how happy a human being is, I am not only severely unhappy, dear reader, but I am painfully aware. I am aware not only of the unhappiness but of the various reasons for it, how are they are related to one another, and furthermore I am acutely aware of my prospects of recovery. There are none. God has simply volunteered me for some purpose I cannot understand, but he didn’t realise that in so doing he also scarified my entire wellbeing and thrust a devil in disguise into this world. In fact, I lied when I just said he didn’t realise; of course he realised, but I am so wicked that I said he didn’t because I secretly hold the belief that I am myself on par with God, and would even have a chance in a debate against Him so long as the adjudicator were someone with precisely my own mental capacities, though perhaps without the affection of idleness. Idleness. I have unending time and I pour this resource nowhere in particular; one week I am merchant, the next I am reinventing the wheel, later I concede in this closet of a bedroom that my idleness has gone to nothing other than quantifying and describing in precise terms how unhappy I am.
I want to get you up to date. Where should I start? I think now, that is with the current moment; with what is preoccupying me right this minute and has driven me to this desk to write, as if in a fever. Lately I have been feeling like two people combined in one body, for I am acutely and dare I say painfully aware of my circumstances that at every moment it feels like I am witness and a person. I take myself to the beach, but I am also at that moment watching someone go to the beach, and that someone is a lonely someone who imagines that enough sun and poetry will redeem him in the eyes of a society which he has already rejected. Yes, I concede; I cannot stand this city, these people. They are all so similar, but not only that; whoever they have based themselves off is a scoundrel and very stupid. That’s the main thing; how stupid everyone is. I can manage most other flaws, other than perhaps fatness, but stupidity I cannot stand. I walk the promenade and what insultingly mundane and stupid chatter I am exposed to! I even see a beautiful woman and then I hear her talk, and she’s talking about whether Australian’s have ruined the Balinese culture, but not intelligently, only because she has nothing else to say and has always been with other people so only has access to sentences which she has heard off some other halfwit! I walk in front of them, but my soul departs my body. What really bothers me, dear reader, is that I hate myself so much, and yet at the same time I am infinitely superior to everyone else around me. Would you believe that? Would you believe that I have never met a person who combines so many desirable elements as I do? Sure, I may be prone to lash out at stupidness, I might not be the tallest or strongest of men, I might not suffer the asceticism of some more spiritually resolute men, but the ascetic, even if he is strong, is too certain and judgemental to be called wise, whereas the brute falls asleep without querying his character, and the stupid person well… who’s to say? I for one cannot imagine experiencing our world as a stupid person… perhaps they are not even real human beings like myself. Like you, dear reader.
Well, I can hear you asking; what’s the point of all this? What are you trying to get at? I can hear you, dear reader, and I don’t have an answer. What I am trying to do is to introduce my true self to you. Ha! Yes, this is what a true self looks like.
Perhaps you think I hate people. No. I hate no one. I hate only whatever has thrust me into this situation. I am inclined to believe there has been a serious error somewhere; that people were on the whole supposed to be more intelligent and honest than they are, but that someone (not the originator, but perhaps someone occupying a senior role in management) made a mistake with the coding. Look what we have now; a circus.
I realise this might all be too much in the abstract. When you’re like me and you spend your entire waking day- no, when sleeping too- going further and further into the histories of the soul (maybe they are not histories, but fantasies), you are prone to say things that are so far removed from ordinary experience that, even if they are entirely true, sound to others like a foreign language. Yes, I am not so consumed by my mental energies to notice how I affect others when I try to raise certain topics with them. But here is different, dear reader; here will always be different because here I know you as not even your mother or your beloved does! I know the noise of your mind when it is playing loud and clear, without the machinations of gossip or comfort. Oh yes, dear reader, don’t start pretending that you and I are any different. We are alone, and we are the same.
I don’t have a job, and I am entirely penniless. I live entirely on the support of my father, who everyday casts himself like Christ into the windy and grey city centre where, at a sit-stand desk in an airconditioned room he passes paper from one man to another. Yes, he is paid well, but so what? Do you need me to tell you that even if a man can eat a chicken salad bowl which costs the equivalent of an hour at minimum wage every day, he can still be miserable? Ha! Don’t poison me with your ignorance, dear reader. No, riches are no remedy to a sickness of the soul, just as poverty does not make people honest or loving. A man is a man, not his clothing. Chief Operations Officer or the Server at the chicken shop; you tell me if the money has made the difference!
I don’t have a job, or a vocation. I spend every day pretending to read books. That is, I read them, but I am more just sounding out words in my head than forming any coherent idea of a story. I read books so that I can say to myself they are read. No, I do not read to tell that to others; I read because only in classic literature can I find any semblance of my own mind though, between you and I, save for some of the Russians, I still maintain that my mind is fuller of all the energies of man than any of those authors’. No, they were too confident (so lacking metaphysical scepticism) or too condemnatory (so too trusting of reason). Put simply, it is entirely impossible for someone with my characteristics to write, for example, a novel, for the reason that whatever the premise to initiate such an effort would vanish no further than half or even less than half-way into the project. Even this very moment, dear reader, would you believe that I have just returned from a dinner with friends and so am now writing all this in a state of thorough intoxication. What I mean to say is that before that sentence you have just read I was sober, whereas now it is two hours later and I am drunk. Yes, really, such things happen between sentences! And what’s more, whereas before I left for dinner there was a sun in the sky and a silence hanging in the air, now there is only darkness outside my window and the sorrow of Rachmaninoff in my ears. Can one write to such a noise? Oh no, do not be mistaken, dear reader; I do mean to say that Rachmaninoff is a distraction. I am a distraction. It is blasphemy! Such music will shake your soul, that much is certain. You should not listen to it if, for example, you are working a steady job but feel secretly unfulfilled. Why? Well because Rachmaninoff will hit you where your longing resounds; he will open it like a wound and pour into you a beauty which you have not yet known, only hoped for. Yes, he will say; you believed not in a fantasy, but in truth, and here is what truth sounds like. I should mention, by the way, that I am drinking even now, alone in my bedroom, so don’t take any of what I say too seriously. It’s not good to write when you’re like this… like me. No good at all!
But what, I was trying to tell you a story, wasn’t I? Yes- I’ve just looked back- I said something about a strange occurrence, but I was carried away with wine and Russia. Now that I’ve remembered, I’ve also remembered that this occurrence which before seemed so important really is nothing much at all, but it is early, I would like to get more drunk than I am, and I must finish Rachmaninoff’s concerto now that it has begun, so I will tell you nonetheless.
The first concerto, by the way… well, what’s to be said for it? Is it really no more than background music? I don’t know. What I know is that when it comes to the second and the third concertos, well, all that remains for us the audience is to weep the tears of a lifetime’s sorrow. How many tears is that? I will tell you when I reach the end, for each time that spring only flows with more hunger. Oh yes, the second and third concertos are the summit of everything, and you are a monster if you cannot see that what we have is a man- perhaps the only man- who was admitted into God’s kingdom, if only for a moment. I think he was there in the nude, though perhaps with a notebook and pen. I think, and I can’t say why, that when God allowed him to make notes there he also slashed him with a birch stick at the same time, so that the beauty was tied up with the pain; a translation, in other words, for the life to which he would return.
But look at that, it’s happened again! I’m sorry, that’s what wine will do; transport you. Look, about this occurrence. Yes… I seem to recall there was some moral within it, and that was why I decided to tell you about it. It was, so far as I can remember, a small anecdote from real life that said a lot about how it feels to be a human being.
Just… just bear with me, the a tempo has just started. Oh… I…. well, I’m breathing heavier just now. I’m losing my breath. It seems that there is merit, much merit, here also. He was seventeen when it came out of him, and after it was sounded to all Russia by a drunk and incompetent conductor- Glazunov I believe was his name- he nearly put a bullet through himself. Wait. Wait, no, I’ve confused things. No, the disaster related to his first symphony, not the concerto, but it’s all the same. The point is both pieces weren’t received well and still today enjoy less notoriety. Gosh, would you look at that! I seem to think myself a connoisseur of classical music, but I can’t put two notes together to save my life! But this is good, this concerto; it has its merits. It is youthful, about that there can be no doubt. And what’s more, you can hear something precursory in it; something expecting that eventual walk through God’s city which I’ve just been talking to you about. What in particular is to be said? Well, it’s like this, insofar as I can tell: here you have a young man whose been blasting through youth like a steam train, conquering each task laid before him… by all measure a successful and good boy, destined for something entirely ordinary though there can be no doubt; he will be excellent in his performance of the ordinary task allotted to him. No. You spinsters and false prophets! No. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but in this case you were entirely mistaken. There will be no talking of the ordinary here. You see there is a very subtle pivot here, so subtle that most of you failed to notice it. There, right after his heart was broken for the first time… where you would have him heading- that which you assumed to be the natural progression of things- that was in fact a very wrong turn if we are really talking about human progress. A job, an income, a family. What sort of job? Well what does it matter! The ordinary sort! Anything printable on a business card, anything which pays the bills! No… absolutely not. You see, the thing you didn’t expect (and how could you expect it? It’s something you don’t even understand yourself) was that this boy would sit a minute too long before a thing of beauty. Don’t let that happen, parents of this our age, if you want your child to live an ordinary sort of life. If you allow him to sit with something of beauty even a moment too long, all of that which you told him was everything will slowly become meaningless to him, and his happiness, which might now soar to unfathomable heights, will at the same time become unfathomably laborious.
Because, dear reader, that is what is so misunderstood, especially at this present moment. Do I understand it better? The truth is yes, I believe I do. what, does that strike you as conceited? Sorry, but it isn’t. I’ve been living here in sorrow for longer than you have, and like a man shipwrecked I’ve had to make adjustments to survive. Perhaps you’ve just landed here for the first time; perhaps you are one of those persons who wander here every Sunday. I, you see, have been here for two years without pause, and I have an entire house, a garden, even chickens and a dog, with whom I speak when I am especially lonely. I have a writing desk and a pen and paper, and to be frank with you I am perfectly content with my situation; I would not return to the mainland for all the money in the world. But I was telling you about what is misunderstood. Art. Art is misunderstood. What is art? It isn’t easy; you aren’t guaranteed to recognise it. Jesus was here, and we failed to take account of that, so why do you think you can distil right from wrong, beauty from the vulgar, when you have not practiced morality or beauty in your own life? Stendhal said something about it being ok not to care about such things, but it certainly isn’t ok to make theories out of your ignorance. Art is hard work for the audience. It doesn’t mean being told something is good; that is also rubbish. It means a church. Yes, dear reader, good art like this concerto here is always the same, always like a church. First you are overwhelmed. What’s this? you say to yourself, sighting the cupula, the saints in their various poses, a dove in a portrait. Ok, well these are symbols, and here- this is a date, while here- this is a beautiful woman. Ok, so if I sit here, and look at things this way, I can see the woman in this light. Well, but that’s really quite beautiful. Well, but wait a moment, what’s this? Are these tears? Am I crying? Is that Him? Oh my goodness! I see now! Oh, but that’s not quite believable! Oh, but I am so happy!
That is art. You will revisit the church time and time again, and each time your understanding of the church will improve, your sentiments strengthen; in short you will soon wonder how you ever stood before the Madonna without shedding big blue globules all over the marble floors.
And the rest, the fluff; that has a place too. But greatness, that is beyond debate; that is a question of understanding or failing to understand. Here; if you have lifted stones your whole life, and one day a merchant in the street drops a sandbag into your arms, you will be able to sustain the weight. But if you have spent your whole life lying supine or blowing documents here or there, the sandbag will crumble you. So it goes with matters of the soul. Yоu may want to believe otherwise; you may want to believe that beauty is light, because if it is light then it’s departure from your life will be insignificant. So, go on deluding yourself; that’s the thing about truth, it makes you wrong! Beauty is heavy, dear reader; if you lose it, if you are too timid to seek it out, or if you deny it when it arises… if you belittle beauty in the hope of aggrandising yourself well, you will suffer, dear reader. Don’t mock what is beautiful; bear it. Bear it because dropping something heavy will make everything else- the colour of your fence, the contour of your eyebrow… television!- it will make these little habits impossibly light, and you will wander through this life more dead than alive. You will move forward, but you will feel like a dead person. And how many are already dead!
But you’ll have to excuse me. Schumann’s Kinderszenen has just come on. The occurrence? Forget it, I’ll tell you another time.
—PART 2—
You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, ‘Solitude, solitude.’ And You have turned around and thrown the whole world in my lap. You have told me, ‘Leave all things and follow me,’ and then you have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?
- Thomas Merton
Hello, it is me again. Yes, I who wrote to you yesterday about torment and despair. Hello. Well, looking back on it, perhaps yesterday was all a bit too much? I really was quite drunk, you see. It is morning now- a grey and still Sunday morning- and I have just been talking with a friend.
Who’s to say what Sunday means anymore? I used to wake up at 7 am, run until I was happy, and drink coffee in the sun. Now? It’s already 10am, and nothing has been achieved, I have a thundering headache, Medtner is yelling through my headphones (I wear them so that I can’t hear my parents argue), and I haven’t even performed the most rudimentary functions such as brushing my teeth or drinking water. In short, everything is not as it should be.
But I did have the chance to speak with a dear friend over the phone. He’s in Italy, you see. Well, for some unknowable reason he actually seeks advice from me. Don’t worry, I offer him the appropriate disclaimers. Stop. No. I will not allow myself to become distracted as I did yesterday. I really have come here to tell you about that occurrence, because you see I had reason to mention it this morning also, while I was speaking to my friend.
I must confess something. Yesterday, when I set out to tell you about this occurrence, I was going to lie to you. You see, yesterday the original story seemed to me insufficiently exciting, so I planned to mix into it various other fantastical elements so as to maintain your attention. Now, of course, that strikes me as a stupid idea. Oh, don’t be mistaken, dear reader; if I refrain from embellishing these fantasies of mine, it is because they are stupid fantasies, not because I am afraid of lying to you.
Would you believe, by the way, that it is now almost midnight. Before, when I was writing that paragraph you have just read, it was not yet four in the afternoon, and in the meantime I have spent hours searching for a house in France, and afterward at the cinemas watching Gladiator (2000). Put simply that is a most magnificent film. Yes, a true masterpiece. Strength and honour. Well, I am weak, and I am inclined to think I am not honourable either, though truth be told I don’t even know what that word means. I do remember a Frenchman using it. Who was it? Ah, yes; that’s right. It was the French ambassador to England. Cambon, I believe his name was, who asked whether the word honour had been struck from the English dictionary! But that’s hardly relevant to us, dear reader.
Do you see what is happening here? Yes, I am sure you’ve noticed it by now, my proclivity to move between things. I mean, christ, you must be thinking, how long is it going to take him to tell that story? I’ll tell you how long; longer than a lifetime. You see, dear reader, only just today have I finally understood my own nature entirely… well, perhaps not entirely, but for the first time am I able to explain my own behaviour. I have called myself so many things over the last year; a lawyer, a writer, a romantic, and I have been each of these things in turn. No, there is certainly no conscious deception on my part; I am not malevolent, or at least not consciously so… The thing is, however, I have only been a lawyer, a writer, a romantic for brief periods, and even then not entirely; I never gave my soul over to any of those roles. I was all the while weeping. Yes, I would say with a straight face; I am a lawyer, and I would watch as the faces of those venerable old men lit up, but when I returned home; when I was allowed a brief stint of solitude in my bedroom, I would weep at this sacrifice. Because that is the truth which eclipses all other truths, dear reader; my soul longs for freedom. It does not want to be one thing or another, only to wander unceasingly at this life. My soul wants for space to breath and realise, and when I tell it, ‘you are such and such,’ it’s protest is agony. ‘No,’ it counters, ‘you cannot define me. You must order your life so that at every moment I, and not you, can determine where we should be, in whose company, etc. Yes, we will write, but we are not a writer. I am unending, without boundary. I am something beautiful, and you are only that sometimes.
Well, how is a man to deal with such facts? What is the appropriate response? Mind you, dear reader, this is all very recent. What I am thinking right now, in this very moment, is that my soul is God Himself.
Sand, despair,
In my cupboard, a strand of her hair
Twenty-three years He has slept within me
Slept, on sleepless nights snoring
I causing I misery
There is less of me in beauty
And more when I think I know
How a man is to live
When he does not know
There are elements interior
my voice or given to I; this soul
And when the voice is loud
Hurting, I sink
I sink into the noise below
So here, on a Monday evening,
My vicious hand bleeding
All that remains is nothingness
and confess
confess always unknowing
confess always young
For yet am I to know
Whether tomorrow will rise a sun
Jesus! Sorry! Would you look at that, was I just now about to call myself a poet? Well, what do you expect from a drunk? What misery, what waste! Forgive me. Today, as I wandered the ocean shore, I had such plans for you, dear reader, for us, and tonight.
I will tell them of sin,
And of stranger’s false delight
I will tell them I am here
I will stand as a light.
Now, though, I understand I wanted that only insofar as some eloquent critique of society would frustrate the sadness that is eating at my soul. What am I? Who? I paused as I wrote that, and there was nothingness. I is nothingness. Since
I cannot even fathom my own hand.
I, meandering
through foreign foreign land.
Breast or suckle
Sheep or lamb.
What does it matter?
When not I, I am.
Francisco Goya. A Way of Flying. 1816.
I mutter aloud, ‘let me speak honestly with them.' I say this as Mendelssohn comes through the speaker. I, sunburnt and hungry. But I cannot speak honestly, dear reader, for the reason that I do not know anything myself. I suffer, therefore I am. I am-ing. Beyond that, look, and I agree; you will find nothing here of merit, only a series of responses to things. There is God within, of that there can be no doubt, but the problem when it comes to a person like me is that God has been frustrated in his purpose, and I cannot believe that he was entirely correct in his calculations. That is to say, perhaps some of his calculations were off… perhaps he did not account for the hollowness of this chamber which muffles his voice. I don’t know, but that’s what it feels like. And that’s all we have, dear reader. Feeling.
—Part 3—
I have reason to suspect, dear reader, that you and I have nothing in common. In fact, at moments my entire life seems reducible to this fact, for there I sit on a bus, heading from a well-paying job acquired only through nepotistic instruments to a loving home in a wealthy suburb… what’s more I am healthy, I am not ugly, I am modestly intelligent and I have nice friends. And that’s not all! What’s more, dear reader, is that put together the elements of my existence are exactly the elements which I am inclined to believe are cause for the most pure and enduring human happiness. Well, how do you suppose I feel? I feel like I do not exist; sadness and torment rage like a blooming flower and obscure my soul.
I carry this feeling, dear reader, to those successful men who surround me; I ask them, if only with my eyes, but are you not also sad? And all my life has led me to understand this; that something is broken inside me, dear reader; that other men simply do not experience this loss. I am inclined to believe, dear reader, that my soul is a tyrant who, the second he is even partially oppressed by circumstance or narrative, simply bursts from those confines and, with threat of force, demands to be re-established as the supreme ruler in my life. This hunger, this incessant need for expression, it would not be a problem if it was only so in the general sense- that is, if my soul demanded freedom over time, so that he was willing to subside or sacrifice such freedom momentarily in order to obtain a greater freedom over the course of a lifetime- that would not be a problem, dear reader. The issue here is that my soul will not accept even a moment of quietude. If even a finger is placed upon him, he immediately lashes out and destroys whatever organism dared lay such a finger. And so it becomes essentially impossible to live, you see, because a finger can even mean (and has meant) the stories which I tell myself so that I can live for a day without incessantly questioning the nature of God. Sick, sick, sick!
So there I sit, on the 5:15pm bus, a stranger to this world. These men are so limited in my eyes and yet I understand they are infinitely better than I am for they are able to sacrifice themselves in a way that I am simply unable to. And do you know the sickest thing about it, dear reader? The sickest, most cruel aspect is that there is no solution but to be in a state of perpetual suffering, for what relieves suffering? A story, dear reader, told honestly to oneself… that is the only remedy to suffering. But the moment I conceive of a story, dear reader, and I answer to some slick suited appendage that I am so-and-so, doing such-and-such, then my soul immediately understands that I am commanding it to become a thing and it brandishes the whip against me.
No, he says, you have misunderstood the dynamic here. I say where we go, not you. And what have I chosen? To be all things and nothing at every moment because at every moment I might finally realise what it is that I am, and then what? You will have already said that I am something else, and so you will have prevented me from becoming that which I am.
But all of that is wasteful; I understand that. I understand, dear, dear reader, that I am simply wasting my breath and your time on such monstrosities. Oh no, don’t mistake me dear reader; I do not perceive anything romantic in my situation, nothing at all. It is a monstrosity that I could not have envisioned in my wildest fantasies; this state which I presently exist in. Don’t you understand? I condemned everything, I left it all behind, for my soul suspired for air and poetry and what do you suppose happened once I had such air and poetry? My soul rebelled! It does not want for peace, dear reader, it wants only to rule and so to contradict my desires at every living moment, and so, as I have just realised, I must make my desire this; to kiss the feet of my imperial soul, to want for nothing other than to be led blindly by my sorrow. What a life! Bring it on!
Anyway, let’s talk about something concrete, shall we? Let me tell you a real story; something comical that’s happened to me just this afternoon. Where I work, dear reader, is in an office above a bookstore. Well, as far as I am concerned, that’s just Babylon again. I read papers about nothing, compiled by persons of nothing, for purposes which, despite all argument to the contrary, amount to nothing. Oh, lavish your CV’s and corporate structures and ethical frameworks thick… you will not fool me! No amount of standing desks and free mineral water and cake on a Tuesday will convince me otherwise; these are but babies in suits, dear reader, with the only difference being that the teddy bear has been replaced with the two storey stone abode. Oh, call me a cynic if you must; laugh at me, you have my permission. I do not care. This might seem very trivial to you, dear reader, but what does it mean that we are living in a society where the most respected and most influential persons are capable of precisely nothing? It is nothing more than a reorganisation of wealth and a preservation of the social structure, for if the men who knew how to use their hands were in charge, then what would the likes of you and I do, dear reader? Do you seriously suppose that ‘engaging external stakeholders’ is reality? Are you going to stand before my face and say that a man should be paid a fortune because he is able to keep a hand on the pulse of trends in the industry? To you I say; taste before you serve it! But I play the game; I pretend, because I must. Well, below the office in the bookshop there is a cafe and a very beautiful European woman works there. She is… well, how can I explain it? She is tall, slender, with blonde hair, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is she makes me inexplicably happy. I am utterly taken with her, to the point where she is the only reason I eat at that cafe, the only reason I even go into the city some days. Well, today I finally understood that to talk to her wouldn’t be so difficult. Yes; I suddenly realised, sitting there in the cafe with my borscht, “well, I could just say hello! Hello, how has your day been?” And I flicked a bit of sour cream into my hair by accident, so sternly did this thought strike me. But no, dear reader, the timing was simply not right. As I was leaving I muttered thank you in her direction- she was standing with her back to me- but as I said this there was a sudden burst of flame from the kitchen and the old woman cooking yelled something out and so my little hiccup was lost. She turned to me, but all she would have seen was a strained and reddened facial expression as I awaited my fate. No use! I scurried off, even tripping over my own coat which I was carrying, thoroughly out of sorts but nonetheless hopeful. Hopeful, dear reader. If nothing, we have hope!
That was all a bit hateful… you must excuse me…
But then again; yes, I am hateful. What of it?
Then it was 5pm. I always leave at exactly 5, dear reader, not a minute later. Well, what do you suppose happened? As I was walking to my bus I saw her; she was also walking somewhere. Goodness, I thought, now is the time. Ok. She paused, waiting for the bus. Ok, I said to myself, but first let me buy some sushi. So I said; here, I will quickly buy these two rolls of sushi from the shop just down this escalator and then if she is still here in 30 seconds I will introduce myself. And I was feeling good, to tell the truth. So I went down the escalator and I purchased my sushis, but when I turned around to resurface (the sushi was procured from one of those subterranean food courts), the escalator had suddenly been closed off. What’s this? I went up to the Lebanese man guarding the escalator and I said, “what’s this? I just came down this escalator, how am I to resurface?”
He looked me once over and said, you must go left and then right and then left again.
Goodness!
I took off at top speed, passing a cohort of sinking bodies. Sinking into burgers, pizza. Sinking into their phones; into phantasms of living; into yoga videos and Pokemon.
Sink, sink! Chants the devil, himself rising.
I slid across the grease grimed floors and I found the other escalator which rose me up to… well.. but hang on, this is David Jones! I found myself, dear reader, as I clutched my sushis- I found myself in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by a thousand perfumes and a blizzard of white tiling and white lights. I was almost blinded, and I could not distinguish an exit for myself…. Armani and Jack Ford and goddamn Gucci. Help! I squeaked, and all the attendants ran off. No, not all of them; one pointed north. I bolted in that direction and soon enough I emerged onto the street, but not the street I had left; I found myself in a completely new and unrecognisable street. Where is she? Minutes! It’s been minutes! I broke into a full run and, recognising the state theatre, I found the corner where she had been standing.
She was gone, in her place a Chinese man selling fruit.
Gone, and for all this grey city computes,
Still it cannot imagine my souls repose
Were I her small breast to suckle, to hold
For she has wandered, wandered away
And here before ink I kneel and pray
For you
…
God, if it be not love that liberates me from myself
Then this is a mind which merely living through
Should impress you in itself.
For I have heard two things from you in all my life:
I love you,
I will love you though all this strife.
***
Francisco Goya. Saturn Devouring his Son. 1820-23.
I’ve just made myself a cup of tea, and I am a little calmer now. I have Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto on. Now that I look over it all, especially those few verses, I realise it’s all nothing but a bit of rubbish, sinful rubbish. That isn’t poetry; that’s indulgence… though it is misunderstanding too, and I’ve always viewed poetry as nothing but an attempt to straighten out misunderstandings.
But you know, now that I am reading it a third time. Well… maybe it’s not all rubbish.
What does my soul suspire for? I do not know. Whatever, whoever you are, I wait for you as a flower awaits spring, for perhaps inside me something beautiful is asleep.
But now, dear reader, it is time for me to sleep.
—Part 4—
Can I redeem myself in your eyes, dear reader? Or have I lost you, do you think me insane… Because, you see, I really have calmed down today, I feel much better. I feel normal. I can talk, I want to talk. What’s that? Yesterday, you say? Yes, well, what’s to be said? I was unhappy, but I spoke honestly. What’s important, dear reader, is that at last I feel ready to tell you about that peculiar occurrence which I referenced at the start of this novella… but wait… there’s a fly in my room, terribly noisy. Just give me a minute to capture him… Nevermind! He evaded my attempts, and I really don’t have much motivation to write to you at the moment, so I must be quick.
I was in my room, you see… but what sort of sentence is that? I haven’t managed to tell you anything! I was in my room, this being three days ago, and I was staring absently out of my window at the tradesman across the road (there are many tradesmen where I live, dear reader, and they are an unruly bunch), when I received a message on my phone… but, goodness! Do you know that just then I was lying through my teeth? There was no message! There wasn’t anything! Here is what really happened…
I met a girl. This was a few years ago. You must understand, dear reader, that this was the lowest point of my whole life, and were I asked of my most severe sin, it would be this… I met a girl, she was a Christian. At the time I was suffering and over the course of a few weeks (I had been living alone in a small studio apartment) I managed to convince myself that I was a monk in hiding. I attended mass every day, I took seriously the Scriptures and I even read Aquinas and Merton… not in the full, of course, but that goes without saying. Well, I gathered that this devout Christian girl was quite taken with me and…
***
I wrote that two days ago, on Sunday. It is Tuesday now, and I have just returned home from the office. The sun has set, the dog has been given his provisions, the poos have been picked up from the lawn, the rubbish is not yet taken out. In short, everything is as it should be. Perhaps you are wondering why that story above is unfinished? Perhaps you even wish I had finished it? It will be finished one day, dear reader, and as to why it is unfinished I can only guess that on Sunday, when I was content with life, I lacked the impetus and went off to do something more pleasant than sitting here before you and howling. Now? Now the impetus has returned; there will be plenty of howling… but I will not finish that story, dear reader, for the reason that it is of no interest to me at this moment. What interests me is to record some of the entirely useless impressions that greeted me today in the Central Business District. Following this, I will outline the state of my health by reference to a persistent loneliness, and in conclusion I will lay out the argument that has tormented me for the last twelve hours, namely that I don’t actually exist, not even in a Cartesian sense… that’s right, dear reader, I am beginning to doubt that I am even something capable of doubt because I am beginning to doubt that I am.
I will not be the first or the last to remark on the sad state of affairs that one visits on the commute into the city. Orwell, if I’m not mistaken, told us to imagine a boot on the face of humanity, but to that I say, what about when the beast lifts his shoe? Yes, dear reader, it seems to me that we are well beyond any talk of a boot on the face- that time has long passed- now we must start thinking only in terms of squashed faces. What I mean to put to you, dear reader, in the form of a question, is what does a squashed human face look like? Does it look like forty or even fifty year old women scrolling through tiktoks on the 8:27 bus into the city? Does it look like men doing the same? Does it look like a person ordering Chinese manufactured ‘stone grey’ linen shorts (2 for $80) for same day delivery while next to him a grandmother, withering like an autumn leaf, waits for a stranger to give up their seat to her? Does it look like the four school children I saw arguing over a boost chocolate wrapper, and finally deciding to through it out of the window? These men of the universe, with their perfumes and their shaved chins.
Mark, senior managing director for the south east Asia finance division of the finance division of the southern hemisphere. Incorporated. Leader.
The commute, dear reader, is where you should go if you would like to visit a people who have given up completely on the beautiful life; they are, for all intents and purposes, dead people, and to my knowledge that is utterly unprecedented… though, not the children, dear reader. Never the children.
We are simply a tin of sardines, and things do not improve once you are in the cubicle. Oh no, I have said it before; a thousand free diet cokes and all the sparkling water from a tap or cheese and pickle sandwiches… nothing, nothing will turn my gaze from the truth! I went to the bathroom, dear reader, for no reason other than boredom, and what do you suppose I encountered? A man pretending to relieve himself. Yes, I swear it, and a fully grown man too, not a man-child like myself, but a man with grey in his hair. This is a portrait of death, dear reader, for as I see it there can be nothing under such darkness, no talks of boots and human faces. There is a boot to the floor, or there is a face deformed permanently, and I am inclined to believe that all of this has happened very quickly and almost unnoticed.
I believe I have already dispatched with the argument put against me that I think myself an übermensch or something of the sort. No, dear reader, these observations arise not from strength, but from something that, though it resides inside me, is not mine at all. A soul. If it were I alone, dear reader, there would only be a loose conglomerate of tissue, a bundle of tears and sweat… in short, a total retardation of the human condition. No. This agitation which demands expression, that is a noble impulse precisely because it is not my own, but God given. What? You think its strange that a man such as myself believes in God? It is not strange, dear reader, not in the slightest. You see while it’s true that I believe in God, I don’t believe in him the same way others do or have done. I believe that in his infinite goodness, he was slightly to generous towards our species, made assumptions that we have defiled, for instance. God, I mean to say, couldn’t really have fathomed that we would do all this, because for all his wisdom it remains impossible for a good thing to contemplate the machinations of a bad thing. Am I making sense? Here, I will illustrate the point.
Take me for example. I have reason to believe that I was endowed with something Godly, as I have mentioned; the impulse to write. Of all things in my life this impulse is strongest. So, then, why is it that either I do not write, or when I do write, I write only this sort of rubbish? Why is it that my novel will never be finished? It’s simple; because God did not imagine that I would be so wicked and lonely… so wicked and lonely that the wickedness and loneliness are actually louder than the noble impulses bestowed upon me. That’s probably something you don’t understand, dear reader; that even in the most minute movements… even in, for example, my impulse to perpetually check my appearance in a mirror, I have allowed my evil to rise above what small seed of holiness was planted in me and so in the shade that small seed has not been able to grow herself. Can you possibly understand that, dear reader, not as a matter of facts, but as the very essence of what it feels like to be living? After all, we are interested in exact sciences here, dear reader, in the perpetual tearing apart of fabrics, in agony…. Oh, I am so lonely! Don’t laugh, dear reader, my soul aches as I confess this to you. I am so tired of being alone, so exhausted of the effort. Do you know, dear reader, that it is those who appear proud who in fact have the most fervent dreams of another’s embrace? Why? Because with every breath they are trying to convince themselves that they do not need that which their soul suspires for; love. Oh, they say to themselves, I can do without others; others have only caused me injury. I say to you, forget your pride, it is sin! Forget it if only because you are lying! I know the feeling, dear reader, I live with it every day. Why do we go on pretending that we need not, when need is our whole existence? When we fast for too long, the muscles wither, and then the organs. When we are alone for too long, beauty fades, and then the soul!
I have promised to speak honestly with you, dear reader, insofar as I have promised to try in earnest at every moment to describe how it feels to be alive. It is hurting. I will live a whole life like this, though, perhaps it will not be a long life, for who is to say ultimately how long a human being can endure such a state as my own? Oh, don’t put me on a pedestal. Please. If you really thought I was referring to suicide just now, we have misunderstood each other. No, if I do not find her, or having found her, if she turns her cheek away from me, I will fade like a candle until I exist like those men on the commute; lifeless, stern, ignorant to the setting sun. I will wither, wither, until like the final cough of a candle I go out and am known only by a faint and indistinct smoke that rises and mixes with all the smoke of other dead men, and the dead men will say of me; he is, and when I die, they will say nothing. My eyes will lose the ocean, my ears the sudden Rachmaninoff, and I will remark many things of good sense, for I will be without sense. Either this, or I will perish in a monastery, known there as a man of profound mysticism though a man without discipline. Were I to enter the monastery, dear reader, I would disturb the monks.
And were I to find her? I say find, but she is already here. Then, dear reader, my life- all the attendant circumstances, the whims of fantasy, the hollow torment, those endless nights spent looking to the ceiling as if awaiting an angel- my life would be justified. I wait. I am waiting. For all my sin, dear reader, still I am ready to love. Please.
Ilya Repin. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581. 1885.
I’ve just looked back… I seem to have referenced something in the beginning about not existing… I… well, I still hold that conviction, but I will tell you about it tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow. Goodnight.
TBC…