Locus Solus

Neuroses for the dead
avowed to be
null and a void
allowed to be divided
into ten thousand days

won't last too long

Almost rational

“The real trouble with the world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Non-dreams

And there you go, dreaming about new women. It took you a while to figure out what you wanted from life in general: a little bit of solitude, silence, drinking... doing drugs, and every now and then, a very pretty girl that you'll never see again.

Nietzsche

His war against God was madness of course. Direct war was completely out of the question. Christianity had the genius (the wisdom?) of positioning go-betweens, intercessors and mediators, like Jesus Christ himself. It is better to have to do with the saints than with God sometimes. How wise polytheism was in this respect.

One-way street

Deafening... defining. The shore might not be there any more
among seasons of seasickness and reeling waves.

Discreet apocalypse: bits of avoidance/abstention

He thought about the time when he had slept with them. Both were pretty. One was the daughter of a preacher, and a philosopher at that. The other was a doctor, a cellist with a slow, husky voice. He thought about how he pulled off that one; not how he ended up in bed with them, but more how he actually avoided sex with them.
One of them was a stronger temptation. The other, of course. It always had to be. At some point, he thought he was not going to do it.

Once again, he was falling short of doing the deed, and was blurring the lines between the failure to go all the way and his sempiternal penchant for incompletion. He kissed her goodnight, got off the cab and simply walked home, drunk and dissatisfied.

Discreet apocalypse: no surprises

“No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises please (let me out of here)”
Radiohead

Magritte’s Golconde, 1953 (detail)

So you wonder who you are. You wake up in the morning at 7:15 AM. You need to have breakfast at 7:30 AM, you shower at 7:45 AM and get prepared until 8:20 AM, fortunately you don’t live too far from your office plus you can be 5 or 10 minutes late, don’t overdo it no don’t do it again not too often or else, or else you’ll get some nasty comment about coming in late or be talked down to, or at worse get yelled at, because even if you work for a company that can manage its human capital, everything has to be in its own place and everyone needs to have their limits anyway (otherwise it’s a mess).

So you start asking yourself questions. You produce and you consume, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. You forge your identity, you need to exist and work makes it possible. You live through work, you think about work, you dream about work, work makes you feel fulfilled because work makes you feel free even though work sometimes wears you down and you've stopped dreaming, you are only having nightmares. You are scared of losing your job because you know very well that if you were unemployed you would go through a major identity crisis, you would feel lost. You tell yourself you build things, and maybe yourself, you tell yourself you build your own well-being and the well-being of your children, you like it when people owe you. You don’t like suffering and you don’t like making other people suffer, you often understand how your productivity is a contribution to the greater good of the collectivity and you know how collectivity defines your functionality.

So you are afraid of the day after. You don’t like being noticed as much as you don’t like noticing others, you like to fit in and you’re lucky because this year, these days, it’s fashionable, well grey is fashionable, you stumble along you reel along and you wag along the wet asphalt it is so slippery especially when you wear crepe sole shoes.

So you have so much to say. Things that are no heard, things that are not said, the things that can’t be said but there you go you don’t care you really don’t give a fuck and you want it all to blow up once and for all so you can start all over again, from scratch. All this violence and all this disgust for the other, all this individualism and this materialism, and all this indifference and all this pressure.

Your life is a whole lot like your youthful dreams.

Discreet apocalypse: untitled

A man who was tired of being true to himself decided to deny himself. He had had enough of himself.
It is one thing to decide to deny one’s self, it is quite another to actually do it.
Becoming a traitor to one’s self is not within the reach of everyone.
To cut a long story short, he tried and tried... over and over again, and eventually did it. He betrayed himself.
He was beyond recognition.
He used to be one dirty rotten bastard. Now he was a good man. He used not to like anyone. Now he was becoming some kind of saint. He used not to forgive himself, and now basked in compassion.
He was reconciled.
It seemed to him as though his life was heading straight for a dark, deep, damp undergrowth.

Suspension points

Suspicion point #1:

“I.” is hardly more than a fragment of language.

Nettle and Ivy

And we,
blades of grass biding their time,
weed growing betweeen the lines
of Mycenaean stones
destroy the long-standing concrete

Personal decadence and its physical consequences

He had narrowly escaped an all-day business seminar at which he had felt immediately, irremediably out of place. He wished he had slept instead. She had dragged him there of course.
After a brief chat with M. Choi (whom he could hardly remember), he was feeling somewhat relieved that this nuisance of a man was moving to DC the following week. Sitting next to him: J. Yung. He had seen her before. She looked familiar. And certainly very hot as well (perhaps that's why she looked familiar). She reminded him of Hsu Chi. Must have been her lips.
He thought about the night before:
“Yesterday, dinner with R. and S. L. at an upper west side restaurant. OK food. Was recovering from Thursday night, as I still am, today.” (banality of the notation, he thought right away)
Thursday had been quite a decadent night, now that he was thinking about it. He had half expected this to happen when K. called, out of the blue. He was always pleasantly surprised at the odd regularity of their “relationship”. They seemed to maintain a continuous erotic distance.
Not on that night though. That night was sensibly different. He had spent a good amount of time with his hand down her pants. Then got into a weird (but enviable) “ryo te hana” situation (with H.), to use an exaggerated expression. He was surprised he still knew some Japanese. He had downed a few shots with her. Couldn’t quite remember her name. Came back home around 5 AM. Drunk and sick. Predictably. Predictable.
It was good to see Daisuke though. The name of the manager escaped him. Too bad. He was a nice guy as well.
Been having a major pain in the neck, quite literally, since then. Physical aftermath of this minor moral fall.

Architectural aggressions. 72nd and Sarah Sze.

A small place crashed right next door the building where I live. Feels funny to write that. E.'s brother, F., calle. M. H. too. And S. L. and P. E., obviously a bit concerned. Heard the impact, which I thought was dynamite used in the construction site on 1st. Didn't realized what it was until people called and I turned on the tv. Strange incident.

Saw J. L. again. Was nice seeing her after such a long time. Don't know how I could let this much time pass... Her pregnancy definitely suits her.

Then visited Sarah Sze's studio. Impossibly articulate artist. Labyrinthine compositions in and of space, with mundane objects.