"I refuse all hope, all altitude, all wings, but foreign to the world, and wishing for the cold of your horrid vaults, too narrow and too low, I affirm, seeking your vast and empty nights, that naught survives the warmth of veins!" (Anna de Noailles)
A dream takes place in the darkness and the same woman reappears. Once more: an unreal realm is set alight in the night, shared by the dreamer and dream. In turn, the darkness of night becomes a background to an imagined reality, a reality in which you and I have taken residence.
You had contacted me seven years ago to the day. Your solitude had reportedly become insufferable, and unable to endure those lifeless nights, you invaded my own night. For one month, the realm of dreams became a space of communion between the real and the unreal. Though to what extent these two portals remained separate is subject to some ambiguity. Very frequently, I was convinced that I saw you walking amongst the living, your expression taking form in those whose lives went on after your death.
On one occasion in 2002, you were waiting for me in an underpass on the Finchley Road. What strange beacon was emitted in the world of the living that drew you to this specific place? Your face was pale and your clothes were fading in the electric light. In the darkness, we walked toward Highgate Woods, stopping at a memorial fountain. The inscription read: “The Gift of a Few Friends. Erected 1888.”
That was the last time I saw you. Years of unending daylight had put an end to (y)our dreaming. Your presence receded in the glare of the sun, and my imagination had been replaced by the deadwood of remembering. Voluptuous brooding became a febrile fixation on your absence. Seven years had elapsed. In those years, memory and imagination had fermented, producing a substance quite apart from reality or unreality—yet so impregnated in my body that the substance became entirely synonymous with the texture of everyday life.
I am wading through old photos. Some of these digital photos have never been opened, and those which are “portrait” have yet to be rotated to “landscape,” and vice-versa. Nor have the small thumbnails digitally formed. The effect is like removing the dust from an old frame to find a radiant melancholy shinning through. A new melancholy, a melancholy of a life that existed by my side, and yet one I was oblivious to.
Here is the table I once sat at, its surfaces buried in an avalanche of books, from behind which I was surely working on “The Spectre of Exile,” the fourth chapter of The Aesthetics of Decay. 2002. I was doing data entry work for a charity. I was out of my element in that office environment, flanked on all sides by officious people full of an easy mirth. How did I cope with the burden of being there? I do not think I did. In the harshly lit environment, with partitioned tables, and cups of tea floating around the office, I had my back on my colleagues. In a storeroom, I was reading the poems of Georg Trakl between the pages of a company folder. Once, during a meeting, I complained of “flu-like symptoms” in order to provide an explanation for the anxiety I was experiencing in the face of these people sitting around a table discussing how to battle disease in the third-world. Later on, I found a passage from E.M. Cioran that crystallised my absurd malaise:
So many memories that loom up without apparent necessity—of what use are they, except to show us that with age we are becoming external to our own life, that these remote “events” no longer have anything to do with us, and that one day the same will be true of this life itself (Anathemas and Admirations, 200)
I think I am still reflecting on this passage 7 years later. For me, it is the word “external” that I was then and continue to be haunted by. The fall of intimacy, the feeling as one-self becomes another, as memories of a different era collide with no semblance of a discernable pattern or rhythm. That was 2002. Perhaps I have not moved on. Perhaps the accumulation of time has rendered the problem of “external “memory more pronounced. I will be honest: since then, “philosophy” has become an alibi for the failure to exorcise melancholy from my body. And my mastery was to find an outlet for melancholy in even the most arid places, whether it be predicate logic or epistemic contextualism. My hunger for nostalgia was so pathological, that even the most remote and austere constellations of thought found themselves attracted by its magnetism.
In 2002, I avoided going to university. Back then, student life was an alien world to me. My experience of undergraduate life takes place in the Odeon Cinema on a weekday afternoon. Alone in the dark, allowing the images on the screen to carry me away. Yet even here, I was not fully present. Cut off from the sound of the film, I was watching the screen to a different soundtrack on my headphones—probably that of Arvo Pärt, of whom I was then fixated. Persistent distractions, an enduring refusal to allow the present become present.
Later on, Peter Gabriel's "San Jacinto" became the ambassador for my detachment. Above all, I admired its pathos, yearning, and complete absence of irony, and continued to listen to this particular song on repeat for years to come. Of the Apache Indian working in a hotel in the mid-West, I had somehow placed myself. The language of "medicine men" and "red paint and eagle feathers" articulated an experience at odds with my time and place, yet consistent with my own displacement.
And yet, I had an entire other life co-existing with the one in the present. As ever, writings and relationships consumed me. As ever: two worlds, two internationalities, one obsession leaking its damaged residue into the present. One would have to travel way back in time to catch sight of the last vestige of that obsession: The End of the Beginning. There is a grim irony to the title of that blog post, a testament to the dormant, aching death rattle of a day without end and a night with no beginning.
That was 2002. Sometimes I am here, within these specks of poignancy and banality, tiny flecks of a lost world rendered concrete in digital form. Some of these photos are untitled: DSC01485, DSC01486, DSC01487. Others are titled: “close-up,” “alley,” and “Anniversary Chair and Flowers.” Scenes of another person’s life, one that is both mine and no longer mine. Mostly, however, I am behind the camera, recording these awkward events for future reminisces. “He is always absent, never present to himself.” Scenes of emptiness, yet full of life and everyday existence.
Sometimes, I think of all the laptops I’ve owned, and how they must all be either destroyed or reconstituted now. Some are in the hands of other people, their hard-drive formatted and put to a different use. Do I haunt the laptop in the hands of those I have touched? Do they sense my presence in its materiality? As for those which have died, what would happen if they all returned from the dead? What if I was to chance upon an old Toshiba 4000, with its grey shell and thick case? When presented with a Dell Inspiron 8200, would I return to the place, in which I last experienced that machine? These beacons of a different era. What would happen once I touched their keyboards, experiencing how each emits a different memory of writing, thinking? Where are these things now? The question can be answered empirically, and yet this resolves nothing.
Where are you? Sometimes, bodies can be animated by people who were not born into that material place, and in the process we lose sight of all that is familiar to this person. Yet the photos exist, like the aftermath of a forgotten civilisation. In several of these photos, places appear that I can see from my window. Yet at no point do the photo and the place outside my window align. What would happen if I tried to trace the outline of the rust on this photographed door with the door outside my window? Would that heal the dislocation I experience in this tension? Would I believe that these photos are in fact documents of a life that actually took place?
Returning to Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? I am again disappointed by his lack of attention to the contingency of place when it comes to unearthing anxiety. Ascribing the Nothing to the experience of anxiety, he thus reduces anxiety to something wholly universal, a state in which consciousness is lost "hovering" in a state whose contents remain wholly occult. Nevertheless, Heidegger is right to correlate the nothing with a sense of the uncanny, into which the “repelling gesture” of being discloses itself, thereby allowing the strange facticity of Dasein to emerge. But that this should transpire through anxiety seems a misguided affectation on Heidegger’s behalf: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing.”
Elsewhere I have criticised Heidegger’s notion that anxiety discloses the nothing on account of the absence of self involved. From my own perspective, an element of ambiguity must arise so that consciousness can simultaneously hold itself out into nothingness whilst still retaining the reflective faculty of self-consciousness in order to gratify itself through gradual negation. I mistrust Heidegger’s reading of anxiety for the reason that he used it as a mantelpiece to extol his fixation on being qua being. There the desire to disclose the ‘totality’ of being through anxiety takes precedence. When Heidegger therefore speaks of the dormant groundlessness of being, then whilst taking Hegel’s “Pure Being and pure Nothing are the same thing” to its logical conclusion, it is quite possible that the term giddiness would have served better, a term which the Existentialists would later use to emphasize the indeterminacy of freedom to their own merit.
Verging between being and non-being, the experience of anxiety must hold itself then, not into the nothing, but into the space through which the imprints of consciousness have already trodden. A poetic sensibility whereby the frame of reference is an experience already dirtied by thought itself. In such a place, anxiety is subdued by the historic guise of memory which in turn enforces the impression of homeliness accordingly. No doubt that this subduing of anxiety permits one to be secure in the spaces that induce a sensory resonance between past and present. What does it mean to pocket ones home, to see that it is firmly attached to the lapel? That is being-at-ease, this is the sense of luxury that familiarity and a faith in stability affords. If they arrive at the exact time and even then align with a specific light, certain odours in foreign lands can implement an aromatherapy of exile through which dislocation is soothed by the guise of comfort. But this artifice of home does not limit itself to pleasurable affects, since it is wholly possible that the reason why we cling onto images of ideals, even when they serve to destroy us, is because they house us in a space that would rather give way…but to what?
It is better to be hated than forgotten. As such the false impressions of ones enemies seething more vehemently than they actually are is an enticing prospect. There a linearity unfolds between the distant light of the present and embossed but withering façade of the past. The hatred glows, and so masks the loss of a identity otherwise in danger of falling prey to absolute dislocation. And here the possibility of anxiety becomes itself. To be housed by a space once trodden, either through revulsion or attraction, is to be accommodated by being. But when memories grow weary, or when the illusion of being hated can no longer be maintained, then there arises the possibility of an experience that is entirely pure, and so anxious. Anxiety disorientates, not because being itself is taken away, but because the being to which we have conceived as being homely, suddenly gives way to a sense of gradual erosion. Therein we are forced to disrobe the place which hitherto has become synonymous with who we are. It is natural that anxiety should therefore arise when pure experience, unformed and barren, no longer situates with the sensory veil of being-at-home. Torschlusspanik can mean a sense of anxiety at life’s passing opportunities. But it can also refer to the dread one associates with the withering of smells, sights, and sounds, until the place itself is no longer recognizable as anything more than a space awaiting an experience not yet had.
An idea takes form when we begin to volatile the page it was written on; when, that is, we sever it from its context and render it our own. Such is the synthesis between the inert space of ideas left on the page and the manner in which they are brought to life through a violent tearing away of their origin, that a peculiar personalisation of ideas transpires – they become characters.
No more does Heidegger’s das Nichte float serenely in abstraction, it becomes something we mould, sculpt and carry with us. Even something as portentous and apparently ineffable as Hegel’s Absolute can be reduced to a mere feeling, a sensation that is framed by the time in which it is approached. Therein, we stow it for future use, occasionally making recourse to the notion when the feeling demands. Living with an idea is becoming that idea itself.
From my own perspective, dividing the past and ascertaining the present in such a way so as produce a topography of meaning, is best done in accordance with the particular notions that held my fascination at the time. Sartre’s nausea, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Kierkegaard’s dread, Stirner’s owness, Bergson’s duration, and so on…. Of course, in time we outmode certain ideas and so they lose their ability to arouse a sense of either pleasure or dread. Others that are entangled to the structure of our consciousness become permanent fixtures that will never be dislodged. But each evoke a specific tone, each associated with a particular context, each invoke a musk of their own: ideas befriend before having a personality ascribed onto them.
Philosophically this intimacy between ideas and events, between abstractions and characters, is injurious. At best it permits an aesthetic pleasure that is framed by either the grandeur or otherwise the minimalist appeal of an idea. I have long since renounced any favour to Plotinus’ enneads and likewise Platonism no longer resonates; but aesthetically they still entice. At worst, this intimacy produces a nostalgia of ideas whereby any pure receptivity to philosophy is annulled by the context from whence it arose. I shall not go into this now: the nostalgia of ideas is a topic which deserves more time. Instead I think of Husserl’s notion of the epoche. Suspension of our presuppositions in favour of returning to the thing itself: it is an admirable aspiration. But as with all methods, especially when they are rigorous, the tendency to stagnate flourishes, so much so that the presuppositions we sought to suspend become indistinguishable from habits themselves, and as such the method falters.
Either way, an engagement with ideas alone remains an impossible desire for a consciousness that is unable not to impose its own being onto it. The question then arises: where am I amongst these notions? It is, I’m sure, a superfluous question since the ideas which we inherit are already hybrids of other philosophies soiled by both the thoughts of thinker himself and the traces of the thinkers inherited ideas. The chain is potentially endless.
How will we begin to measure our worth? Our pathos is misleading. The feelings which emerge in the dead hours, those that allude to the possible, the resonance of echoes – I shall howl the diatribe for as long as it takes…but they are worthy of only suspicion. How many times have I seen voices discharge their passion despite the quality of their content! Be still. For you can rest assured that when a consciousness of self-critique has arisen from the submerged bed of fury and adoration, then your troubles will quieten. It is not enough to read meaning in the meaningless, to craft torment in a scenic guise. You must also give it style.
Surrounded by a summer of heightened sensations, the temptation to ascribe value to passion is inevitable. On the other side, there exists a dreadful impasse. Terror of becoming accustomed to the useless: that is the name I give to honesty. Upon the mantle of divinity one would never question the effect of their speech. And I do not reproach them. For who can begin to enter into a critical dialogue with their pathos without their entire ontology becoming dampened by wood-rot? It is not without a tremor of sickness that the feeling of malfunction encroaches the spirit when consciousness begins to question its own motivations. Particularly in the cases of writers who have now lost sight of why it is they write. Habit commands their actions and a dogmatic aspiration that no longer aligns with who they actually are determines their thought: put simply, the image precedes whilst the content dissolves. Here, I am talking to the masses. Even chroniclers and commentators deem it a service to either record or interpret what exists around them. They are entitled to their vocation and might well eek out a slow living from it. But I want nothing of it.
An attunement to nothingness, even a poetic sensibility to the bizarre, noxious, and ineffable, in itself is no guarantee of worth. Scribbles, fragments, the inept euphoria we feel when faced with an object of aesthetic delight, and the desperate desire to become what you experience – the spectre of the inanimate can yearn even whilst we turn our backs: a cityscape dense in the delusion of appeal, hustle, malodorous hustle, as though that constituted a criteria of worth – to deform the world to your own spirit...things must burn or otherwise be misshapen before they can be bestowed gracefully. A delicate balance between dipsomania and grave sobriety is no doubt required in order to distinguish between pathos and worth. But who can abide such a rigorous discipline or can even divorce the day from the night? The pathos of the present betrays us, demands that we convene, seduce, and in turn reproduce with the dormant.
Saying this, the Roman vomitorium was no doubt a pale sky of aesthetic pleasure on account of the variety of sickness that was produced. No need to conceal the idea under the guise of the picturesque: the thing-in-itself was manifestly enough to nourish even the most remote of minds. But such accolades are rare, and in our own time expunging ones infirmity is seldom worthy of interest. Voyeurism, the surrogating of an absent god, rendered explicit through the sublime void of appearances, takes hold. The look is enough.
By what do we gain by judging our private misery with that of others? This history of comparisons could well extend itself to an entire library, perhaps even a disciplines alone. Here a flash back of Kierkegaard takes hold, the moment simmers in reservation, my lissom fingers quiver whilst the smoke chokes…. the Unhappy Consciousness, stolen from that passage of Hegel which I have already written on at length, aspired to conceive of the most divine misery. In my own nocturnal reading, I read that gloriously moribund chapter of Kierkegaard’s as a means to vouchsafe his own intimate despair, a despair which necessitated justification through both philosophy and history.
But for us whose hold on history has been disrobed either through ignorance or fatigue? Comparisons with history inevitably falters. Our knowledge is emaciated – we are a culture whose voices can barely stutter our own triteness. And yet we desire, with enflamed fervour, to situate ourselves in a context, we want either the feeling of oppression or superiority to transpire. But what context can arise when pure knowledge is lacking? It is the question of voyeurism which emerges: the look is enough, that gaze which takes places as you read these words. Here I ask you a question: what do you demand? You disrupt my solipsism, fetter my appetite and chant burial songs whilst I sleep – or do I delude myself? No, you endure despite my longevity. What’s that you say? Yes, you can crouch a little lower to place your ear against my mouth, for it is true: a singular thought compels and you owe it to yourself to gargle whilst I speak it.
Coveting the elusive, you declared yourself a dilettante. But dilettantism is only admirable when impressions are gargled before being choked up: to skirt around the surface in a timorous manner as the window-dresser would rearrange trumpets, suits, and triangles in the shop, is to affect the pose of timidity.
You tired of yourself: your soul grew dampened by surface appraisals, and so a reticence towards depth arose. Quivering in an anecdotal malaise, plastering the vacuum with yesterdays riddles: without the benefit of a sickness towards impressions, you reduced yourself to an invalid of appearances. Perhaps I ought to stomach this lust for life, this lust that you adopted. But I have been saturated with tribal symbols: inscriptions were conferred upon me when I ate snow and then re-read the evidence. Remember the passages from Huysmans’ Parisian Sketches:
“And then suddenly, I’m thinking of Antwerp, of the great port where…you hear the ‘All right!’ of English sailors about to put to sea. And yet it’s in this way that the most disparate places and things come together, through an analogy that seems bizarre at first sight. You evoke in the place you happen to be, the pleasure of the place that you are not.”
It is true: a certain grey pleasure arises when the thought of a projected absence fills the space of an immediate presence. When the desire is sufficiently virulent so as to induce a fit of barking, then quite often the two worlds can compound. Here, the surface, rotten through dampness, upturns whilst its gaze lingers in suspended decay. What you thought was a stream of consciousness prided in the veil of progress, movement, and motion, emerges as only a space devoid of a centre occasionally defined by either a recollection or an anecdote. That was the delusion you maintained. Still, do not be disheartened: hallucinating is exhausting and its collapse is inevitable.
Mallarmé’s Grand Oeuvre: an entire corpse, into which the totality of energy can be distilled, every thought laid bare, reconstructed like an architectural blueprint. That he failed to achieved the task does not lessen his ambition but only renders the failure more sublime. The same is no less true for Nietzsche who submitted to madness before finishing his Revaluations. In the final pages of Ecce Homo the terrible truth is softened by manipulating his already written books into the frame of an unfinished project. Goethe, notably in his conversations with Eckerman, concerns himself with the implications of the Grand Oeuvre, suggesting that any such absolute dedication weakens the soul. For Mallarmé it wasn’t even enough to become himself, let alone limit himself to sketches. In a letter to Cazalis he writes:
“I am now depersonalized; I am no longer Mallarmé, but simply a means whereby the spiritual universe can become visible and can develop through what was once me.”
Clothing the invisible in the visible is a familiar Symbolist theme, and so it is not surprising that Mallarmé should justify the task by regarding himself as the transmuting agent (Rimbaud prefers his ‘Je est un autre’, but is nevertheless content to expunge rather than expound). For Mallarmé the word depersonalization becomes vital: the Buddhist aspiration towards emptiness so that the spirit can unfurl is reminiscent of both Hegel and Schopenhauer who both make recourse to the Holy Spirit for their guidance.
Thirty years were spent of Mallarmé’s Work. In that time only ‘preliminary studies’ emerged. Regarding himself as an alchemist ready to sacrifice himself so that the Work would be fed, he maintained his silence in the hope that the furnace would be catalysed. A remarkable letter to Verlaine hints at what the work might consist of:
“What is it? It is difficult to say: a book, quite frankly, a book in many volumes, which would be a book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of random inspirations however marvellous that might be…I will go further; I will say the Book, for I am convinced at heart that there will be only one, I am tempted unknowingly by anyone who has ever written, even the Geniuses.”
At nights he may well have been haunted. For it is quite likely that when a writer takes it on to compose a work of great proportion, then he feels compelled to inscribe the smallest tremble of pain onto the page. Dreams, unlike the clear expanse of daylight, are suggestive and tangible, and unlike daylight they can be tasted. The advantages of insomnia? They are too many to reference: but in the least insomnia amplifies the dream in a passive coma able to resonate clarity unfettered by the hustle of activity. One needn’t sleep to become enthralled in the dream world. It is a passion unlike any other: acts must be committed to page lest they perish and grow unsung. Can shadows promise anything other than illusion? The Work presses and possess. And its failure beckons.
Dr. Dylan Trigg teaches philosophy at the University of Sussex. He earned his PhD at the same university, submitting a thesis on memory and place. He has published on space and place, continental philosophy, and aesthetics. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2006)
You had contacted me seven years ago to the day. Your solitude had reportedly become insufferable, and unable to endure those lifeless nights, you invaded my own night. For one month, the realm of dreams became a space of communion between the real and the unreal. Though to what extent these two portals remained separate is subject to some ambiguity. Very frequently, I was convinced that I saw you walking amongst the living, your expression taking form in those whose lives went on after your death.
On one occasion in 2002, you were waiting for me in an underpass on the Finchley Road. What strange beacon was emitted in the world of the living that drew you to this specific place? Your face was pale and your clothes were fading in the electric light. In the darkness, we walked toward Highgate Woods, stopping at a memorial fountain. The inscription read: “The Gift of a Few Friends. Erected 1888.”
That was the last time I saw you. Years of unending daylight had put an end to (y)our dreaming. Your presence receded in the glare of the sun, and my imagination had been replaced by the deadwood of remembering. Voluptuous brooding became a febrile fixation on your absence. Seven years had elapsed. In those years, memory and imagination had fermented, producing a substance quite apart from reality or unreality—yet so impregnated in my body that the substance became entirely synonymous with the texture of everyday life.
