The ethically elected ego is both already obligated and never sufficiently obligated, and such is the very structure of time.
- Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other
The social world human beings think they know is set up and maintained by connivance, manipulation, and craven self-seeking. The mad are not bad because they are bad or because they are mad, but rather because there is no easeful entering into communion with highly abnormal people and so they may tend to get on the commoner’s nerves. “My temperament was not much suited to socialization,” confesses trans artist and writer Paul B. Preciado in their book Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, finding succour and filiation instead in books like those written by “Giordano Bruno or Galileo” that “put an end to geocentrism.” For Preciado the next horizon of sacred upheaval is the logical, heteronormative binary apparatus which saturates mainstream culture and psychoanalysis both; it also seems to make all kinds of decent everyday people impatient and hostile, often out of the blue, the words out of their mouths an oil slick of ick. When I started smoking cannabis as a young man I remember that that particularly amiable and agreeable psychoactive-psychedelic plant suddenly gave me the belief that I could explain myself clearly and as simply as possible instead of becoming hostile, belligerent, and reactionary. This method has worked in fits and starts and largely depends on set, setting, and sufficient cooperation from man, beast, and utmost higher power. Our problem is that communication is dead and it’s us who put it coldly to bed. That the dying thing is forever going to die while looking death in the eye and calling it all a crackpot conspiratorial lie. Why do people want to live forever? Inertia and dumb hope. A Hungarian philosophy professor I had back in the Carleton days would regularly remind us of Deleuze’s assertion that the only question the philosophical supplicant really needs to find a way to answer is what can I hope for? It’s true, but only if you are a bourgeoisie and only if you aren’t flung out of society for reasons that have never been properly explained to you. In the near future all of us are going to have to start acting a lot more like Japan has done after the total collapse of its economy, slow and ugly, throughout the 1990s. A few years ago I chatted at dinner with a business executive in the oil and natural gas sector, though energy diversification is the full-on mandate now, who had just returned from Japan and told me that he honestly thinks Western business interests need to look at Japan as the only salient model out there for zero-growth economic sustainability. (He didn’t say anything about the birthrate concerns.) I accepted this as exciting, even emboldening news. And I definitely hadn’t been expecting it. People surprise you.
Though he was married five times and probably had lots of experiences none of us could even fathom, it seems to me that the person for whom actor, art collector, photographer, and filmmaker Dennis Hopper most pined was his friend James Dean, the meteoric movie star who died young in an automobile wreck which was something the rock musicians were doing a lot back then but not so much the movie people (R.I.P. Jayne Mansfield). From Dean’s death in 1955 to his own in 2010, Hopper spent a lot of time talking in interviews about Dean and their sordid goings-on. They ran with a crew, and there isn’t any doubt they were thugs every bit as much as they were actors/artists. I remember one interview where Hopper chuckles about how reckless and insane Dean’s Nietzsche phase became. There are implications of bisexuality and bondage play. I’m not sure James Dean figures here at all, but in a couple of interviews with Dennis Hopper I have heard him reminisce upon the discovery and influence of Saint Thomas—A.K.A. ‘Doubting’ Thomas—and especially of two core precepts: never tell a falsehood and never do anything you don’t want to do. If Dennis Hopper can live to seventy-four on that shit, saltines, and filtered water then you can too.
Pierre Guyotat
A core part of the legend of the queer French writer Pierre Guyotat, who died in 2020, is the beat-sheet or branlante, short pornographic writings Guyotat composed as a teenager in order to get himself off. Here we have yet another great instance where I have walked the same path as a great literary lion operating at the most refined frequency of existence even before I’d so much as heard of the piker. This will explain for some the title of the opening track off my album Yevgenia. You may not be surprised to hear that my beat-sheets tended at least a little toward sadism, gothic dungeons, and torn bodices, slashers with black gloves. I never wanted to do any harm to anybody but my heart craved dirty, salacious, freeform fun. Nothing causes me nearly so much displeasure and concern as the pain of a creature whose pain is immediate and the swell of which short-circuits my hardware and takes me out at the knees. The swoon of romantic love has nothing on the swoon of violence and premeditated terror. I had the advantage of seeing some very awful things when I was younger such that I, Self-Will-Run-Riot (the only teacher I’m taking on is me), crossed a whole bunch of things off the list early and never even had to try them. Beyond the zone of interest is the refugee camp you never thought you’d need. One of the last major works Pierre Guyotat completed before his death, Idiocy, brought to North America by New York Review Books last year, is an autofiction recounting the period of time Guyotat spent in Algeria with the military when he was still very young and inexperienced. A grim, absurdist fable with no small amount of dry deadpan humour: labelled a dissident shortly after arriving in Algeria, Guyotat was placed in prison soon thereafter, where he’d spend the bulk of his compulsory service. “I, who have dreamed since puberty of brothels overflowing with the seed of melancholy captive adolescents, of the adult patrons who delight in it,” muses the Pierre Guyotat of Idiocy, “and of the male-on-male couplings their seed excites and lubricates? Nothing, as of yet, and nothing for a long time still: at most, a few sacrilegious words, whose mere utterance to myself annuls their organic reality."
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