Though I have not read Søren Kierkegaard’s 1849 book The Sickness unto Death since I was a teenager, it is the kind of book that is likely to stay with a person, especially the kind of person, myself being an example, who was once upon a time a pubescent male prone to fantasizing about suicide as often as sex. Kierkegaard was a highly unusual sort of ironist, the authorship of many of his most important works attributed to pseudonymous personages, incorporeal emissaries sent into immaterial trenches to file their exhaustive—and very often harrowing—reports. The name signed to The Sickness unto Death is Anti-Climacus, which I am sure you’ll agree is pretty funny. The book is a disquisition on the subject of despair, and though I do not have a copy on hand, I am confident that my recollection is more than halfway adequate when I summarize matters by locating its conception of despair in the problem of the self. We might allow ourselves to overshoot the mark concision-wise and just go ahead and claim that Anti-Climacus argues that there are really two kinds of despair: 1) the despair in the self at the having of a self; and 2) the despair of the balkanized self that insists to the desperate last on its constituting a self. Early in the book, Anti-Climacus does a pretty famous thing. The suggestion is posed that the self is a relation which relates to itself. Okay. Well...sure. However, if this conscious self is its self-relation, the thing and the relating to the thing, then the proper site of the self exists at a supplementary tier, which is to say the consciousness of the relation, the relation that relates to the original relation. It is a perfectly sound formula. The thing is: it’s extremely abstract. Everything I have just written ultimately pertains to ideality and the domain of the transcendental. Not much here of the earth and the glands—of organs and odours or objects organic. Let’s toss aside the pretence of addressing Anti-Climacus and acknowledge that this line of discursive development finds us precisely where Søren Kierkegaard wants us. Kierkegaard takes us to the abstract realm of immaterial or impersonal despair (the impersonal despair of the person who insists on being a person), because he is above all a spiritual philosopher and his conditional irony aspires to venture as far into a vacated and arid transcendental as it can manage before it is ultimately time to take a leap of faith, turning our will and our lives over to God, or, if you prefer, eternity, the open field of fullness and potential, categorically opposed to the pitiful and finite self that clings to its habits and pretences as though they were a life preserver (when in fact they are despair its very self). The relation that relates to the relation is not God. It is very much not the bird of the air nor the lily of the field praised in Christ’s sermon on the mount. It is not even shit (no odour). This is despair. Have you been through the wringer? Really and truly been wrung? Do you suffer from one or another form of brain sickness? Have you done the ring-around with the therapists and psychiatrists? Is the list of medications you have been prescribed over the years a large one? For those of us who answer yes to all these questions and have lived to tell the tale: we might well counter, okay, yes, all well and good, Søren, but my problem is not the transcendental overseeing of the self as a relation with itself; my problem is the central nervous system. Something happened to me just about two years after I got clean and sober. This was in the fall of 2015. I experienced my first major depression in sobriety. It had very little to do with sadness or despond. Yes, the mood is basically a disaster, although it mostly tends to feel like a pronounced absence of mood. Additionally: you are in physical pain, you have zero energy, your digestion is shot, cognition lags, manual dexterity is pitiful, and presiding over all is a generalized experience of ongoing atrophy. In 2015 I didn’t know what had hit me. My psychiatrist gave me a note, and I was able to take a month off work. I sat in the thing and I progressively adjusted. This is the thing, here I am with the thing, and this thing too shall pass. This is what I told myself. As I have subsequently done every fall. September or October, every year since 2015, like clockwork. This may sound incredible to you, but at this point it is basically a cakewalk. I am a low bottom drunk and former drug addict. What do I mean by low bottom? A nightmare you cannot comprehend unless you’ve lived it. People like me, serial alcoholic visitors of emergency rooms, were once thought hopeless. We were consigned to death. Nothing can be done for a poor soul so far gone. So what happens to me in September and/or October every year is eminently livable. As such it is a thing I don’t mind observing. You know, like a journalist, say, sure, but also in the manner the Jewish people observe Passover on the mirror-side of the calendar. Sometimes I reflect. People I have met, people no longer with us, survivors and fatalities both. The first of five treatment centres I went to was in San Clemente, California. Back in 2006. One gentleman staying there walked off the property, rented a hotel room, and proceeded to get drunk. He severed the ulnar arteries in his elbows, had second thoughts, went to the front desk for help, and died on the lobby floor. I think of the young woman in the last psychiatric ward in which I was held. This was in 2009. She had stepped into a cold shower fully clothed and came dripping wet and shivering into the common area, mute, saucer eyes wide with horror. I shan’t ever forget her. Then there is the woman I met in detox in 2013 who told me the story of how she may or may not have stomped a man to death with her heavy boots in Tokyo after he assaulted her on the street. These are my people. This is a lived experience of the world I know intimately. I am not doing well this week, but my bad days now are incomparably preferable to my best days then. I got clean and sober through twelve-step recovery. I am in a position to know that there is actually helpful material in Kierkegaard. My salvation is in fact right here in the living eternal immediately at hand. In his recent book At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Fenton Johnson seeks to understand and to consolidate his own spiritual practices by way of consideration of famous solitaries. He takes a basic precept from Marianne Moore: “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” This is exactly right. One passes through the struggle and suffering of loneliness in order to arrive at the solitude that gives and keeps on giving. Johnson: “The measure in which your solitude is hard is the measure of the reward it offers.” The works of both Emily Dickinson and Eudora Welty bear testament to this, progressively, over the course of their lives. Both Dickinson and Welty pass through longing and arrive at the “fountainhead” of truth. What did Henry David Thoreau discover through silence and solitude at Walden? In his own words: “I have more of God.” Zora Neale Hurston, inventor, so to speak, of her own hybrid religion, came to believe foremost in “the eternal in beauty.” Of the great painter Paul Cézanne, Johnson has this to offer: “I can say he’s crazy—perceiving a soul in a sugar bowl?—or I can listen to what he’s telling me, in his letters and in his work, which is that the sacred exists in every particle and atom, the sacred is what is, and my job is to pay sufficient attention so that I too can perceive the psychology of the earth—its living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Indeed, yes, when I speak of “observance” it is precisely just this “sufficient attention” to which I direct you. Is it pantheism? Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. This is what my practice looks like. It is my way. I have to do it alone, and certain kinds of reminder cannot help but serve me. Depression, for example, the lassitude that enters uninvited to once again teach in its efforts beyond mercy. A living poetics, an engagement with the eternal, already presupposes an expansion beyond the bondage of self and a reconfiguration of the transcendental, the problem in Kierkegaard that coordinates the conditions for the spiritual solution. Both Fenton Johnson and I had many lovers in the past but, at a certain point, became provisionally celibate. Anybody with a cursory grasp of either psychoanalytic theory or the reason the French are wont to call the orgasm “la petite mort,” will know that sexual intimacy, like a profound spiritual experience, will have a tendency to precipitate the dissolution of self/ego, the experience of a folding, and/or the collapse of amorous parties into one another on the other side of a threshold. I often think that the best sex is like electroconvulsive therapy. It is not certain who it is that will emerge. Maybe Dr. Jekyll, maybe Mr. Hyde, maybe a sputtering codependent wretch. This is part of the ecstatic terror at the heart of the work of Geroges Bataille, especially as regards his fiction. In his own preface to the short story “Madame Edwarda,” the piece in question originally published under the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Pierre Angélique, Bataille writes of “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress” and an “unbearable surpassing of being.” In “Madame Edwarda” itself there is a moment when the narrator writes of how “the pungent odor of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart’s utter exhaustion.” The same heart. A heart that now incorporates two people. Then later, as Madame Edwarda, organ of God, fucks a cabdriver: “little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails.” From two to three (with the addition of the cabby). The heart fails. The three-headed heart fails. Bataille’s famous short novel The Story of the Eye likewise stages multiple chronotopal scenarios wherein three participants are drawn into the anarchic eddy of an intensive transference. It is not only the disincorporated elements of the individual participants that may happen to pool together in the whirlpool. In order to elaborate, I direct you to Robert Altman’s 1974 film Thieves Like Us, an adaptation of the 1937 novel of the same name by Edward Anderson, earlier adapted by the great Nicholas Ray for his debut feature, They Live by Night (1948). The themata in play here are already operative in earlier Altman films. Take his first proper feature, 1969’s That Cold Day in the Park, in which a solitary played by Sandy Dennis invites in a boy and by extension her dissolution, or the monumentally great Brewster McCloud (1971), in which a young man who aspires to fly discovers sex and crash-lands in the Houston Astrodome. In Thieves Like Us, Bowie, a young man from the Ozarks, recently escaped from prison and played by Keith Carradine, meets Keechie, played by Shelly Duvall. The young Depression-era innocents are to make love and play Hullygully all in the same day; the socializing subduction through sexual coupling—elevation to a fatuously adult level of interaction—is made evident during and after the couple’s first sexual experience. Bowie playfully sings “keechie-keechie-koo,” repeating the incantation his brutal and drinking-toward-void fellow-prison-escapee friend Chicamaw, malign elder, has previously employed to indicate the teenage girl’s sexual organs (and their implied mediation). Keetchie only assumes that Bowie is being playful; she grins ingenuously. During the consummation of the relationship there is also the ever-present radio, here transmitting the broadcast of an audio drama in which the male narrator reports on how “Romeo and Juliet consummate their first interview by falling madly in love with each other,” the young couple’s as yet jejune bond interpenetrated by the civilizing strain of a “popular” narrative which insinuates into the bedroom the socializing mandate, what the scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “heteronormative reproductivity” (not to be confused merely with the normativity of sexual reproduction involving a male and a female). It becomes immediately clear that this interpenetration of commercial radio colours the childish-intimate bond and ultimately ensures the film’s devastating finale, in which Keechie watches helplessly, two bottles of Coca-Cola in her hands, his and hers, as Bowie is bombarded by a veritable police arsenal. The whole of the social apparatus is indexed in this shattering tableau, bound up with the Coca-Cola bottles. In the subsequent epilogue, Keetchie ultimately disavows Bowie, to whom she refers, speaking to a stranger, as effectively a deadbeat dad who ultimately just weren’t no good and who died of “consumption.” The ever-present bottle of brand-name cola in her hand, once again displayed in the epilogue, contours the polyvalence of that fatal word. Consumption. A sickness unto death. Sure as shit.
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