Some people like to have a good time and avoid rustling up any form of discomfort or conflict. These folks finesse in order to forestall a mess. There are two kinds of oversexed people, good sports and bad sports, and the kind of people I’m addressing are for the most part oversexed and good sports about it or trying their Sunday damndest to be. There are hot and cold lovers and everybody for the most part prefers a hot one because they are dependably fun and high-energy…at least when all’s going good. Hot water bottle lover, buried beneath weighted blankets, please and appease me, lover dear. In order to be the kind of person a whole bunch of other people can justify sleeping with, however, you need two primary characteristics and fun ain’t one of them: 1) you have to be low maintenance for extended periods of time; 2) you have to be good at agreeing with people, or at least appearing to, even when you don’t. We are handcuffed in this world when we stand on principle because even having principles at all immediately condemns us. What the people-pleasers and placaters of this world really and truly want is to shake you hysterically and yell incomprehensibly until you lose consciousness or are dead. When I was much younger, quite dashing, and occasionally sleeping with a few people at a time, I learned the most cloyingly obvious lesson more than a handful of times (because stubborn and selfish): other people have feelings too; stop pretending the world is your oyster, you aren’t even a property owner. When you lie to somebody and then are subsequently pleased with yourself for tricking them…that’s when you know it’s time to seek some form of council higher than your own.
Once when I was a young man a slightly older woman put on fancy lingerie in an effort to startle and, you know, stimulate me, throwing me off pretty good as I entered the bedroom a touch tipsy and genuinely surprised. I figured I had better stand there and take it in as throughly as I could manage because I was absolutely certain that nobody else was ever going to do such a wonderful and harebrained thing for me again. Did I break that woman’s heart? Well, no, not then and there. As for what ultimately happened: I know for a fact that we both know that we were each culpable. Communication could bulldoze a better, less thorny path if people would stop putting themselves in the way of everything that isn’t them or their adopted lifestyle politic. Not even you are who you think you are. It’s a large part of why you dream. At no point or node along the fabled political spectrum is anybody practicing pattern recognition at all effectively. Not every synthesis is a solution and not every fool is worthy of a say in the matter. Convictions, stipulates Robert Anton Wilson, create convicts. When I defended my master’s thesis back in 2004, one of the auditing professors asked me what we are supposed to do if ‘politics’ is just another word for ‘division’ and there is no foreseeable stabilization in sight, and my answer was that we should interrogate our own presuppositions daily. In the town where nobody talks about anything, people get their feelings hurt all the time for no good goddamn reason. Sometimes I’m far too principled and I really lord it over people, but sometimes I’m pleasurable to be around, and that is largely because I tend to find new information much more exciting than I do threatening. This is another thing I share in common with ace French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What’s got me most hooked in Art and Life is the capital-N New.
The sun is both the furnace and the forge. We are here on its leniency. We cannot understand the scale of the sun, which fuses in the neighbourhood of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. You can damage your eyes by looking directly at the sun but your imagination cannot do anything with the fusion of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second or four million tons of solid matter being turned into pure energy every second. “The image of consolatory gestures,” writes Antoine Volodine in Radiant Terminus (a book whose title very much is an unsubtle reference to orgasm), “was overlaid with wanton images and sensations of skin, of flesh, of pawing, of masculine gropes, of possibly shared breaths, of tumbles on the bed, and urgent penetrations. The physical nostalgia of coupling, handed down over two hundred million animal years. He suppressed all this as best he could, this surge of salacious filth. But, in his consciousness and beyond it, the filth overflowed.” Maybe down there in the depths of the human orgasm is a little, flaming window into hell that doesn’t even really give you much of a picture of hell the same way we don’t currently have much of a mental picture of the sun. Is a mushroom cloud a cartoon parody of human orgasm? Is the joke at long last on us? This is of course the of age of porn stars with direct knowledge comparing the penis of the President of the United States of America to a mushroom. It sometimes really blows my mind how much online life today seems like an old J.G. Ballard story in living colour!
One of my favourite lines from 21st century literary fiction comes to us care of the 2017 Javier Marías novel Berta Isla: “we never really know if someone has been harmed until their story is complete, and that takes time.” When the motion and commotion cease for a moment perhaps there’s a chance we’ll breathe. Life is a moving target and that’s how it sneaks up behind you and knifes you. With the right practice you’ll learn to stare at a dangling hood ornament for hours at a time. “This book owes its life to death,” concedes the great Hélène Cixous in 2016’s Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal. The name Los connects both to loss and the Spanish definitive masculine article, but it also harkens back to William Blake for whom Los was the fallen or earthly form of Urthona, suggesting the inauguration of an archetypal trans identity, though one should be careful to grant to the prefix trans its full capabilities with respect to combination and passage, including but extending far beyond mere considerations of gender and sexuation. Cixous: “One doesn’t die. One comes and goes between two absences of memory.” In his book on his friend Hélène Cixous, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, Jacques Derrida ruminates on the eternal made available to mortal beings by cycles and substitutions, resorting even to biblical metaphor (both he and Cixous were/are Jewish), musing on the list of sequential Jonahs, one Jonah ever replacing another Johah in the forward march of time. Of course, if the triumph of life over death rests in the suspension of the centrality of the individual then the individual Jonah is no longer a thing of all that much cosmic significance or relevance, presumably, from a research standpoint.
The heavens. At long last. Unmade in spite of our gaze, the parallax of perspective stomach-churning. Bound notebooks, lockboxes, apartments, cities, the individual languages colloquially called tongues. Our arms protecting our chests like family crests. Everything is clutching itself in and fastening itself up in wait of whatever stage of entropy it is, as depicted in The Wizard of Oz, whereby that which was fastened steadily to the earth is fastened there no longer and anything of inconsiderable mass, such as yourself or your loved ones, goes flying off into the wild blue yonder with hardly a first whisper of complaint.
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