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

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.

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.

Discreet apocalypse: H.

He knew it was not allowed.
But God. She smelt like heaven.
There was no denying it.

Discreet apocalypse: other fantasies, fantasies of the other

* He was on his way to DC, and a bit ahead of time. So he decided to pick up something to eat. It was not his first time in this Chinatown bakery. This time, though, he was quite struck by the sullen beauty of the Chinese baker.

* Although he was more used to and comfortable with the back seats, he decided against it, and sat at the very front of the bus. Then she came and sat right next to him. He thought of his wife for a brief second and turned his attention to her bare neck. They stared at each other for an endless minute. He could not think of anything else. He caught her eyes in the rear view mirror a few times after that.

Discreet apocalypses: a few minor fictions

Rangements of private stories/fantasies.

* The first time, they had to fuck each other's brains out. Now, they were discussing Wittgenstein's late work. Somehow, they felt more intimate this way.

* He met her on the street, in Paris. It was spring. She was fifteen and drunk. She came to him and asked: "Do you believe in nothingness?". Puzzled, he took her to his place. He made coffee, which she didn't drink. He enjoyed her conversation and her fragile, naive companionship for a couple of weeks. Then he decided to write a novel.

* A tall Asian, presumably Korean, or perhaps Mongolian, woman. She sat in front of him in the New York underground. And closed her eyes. When she opened them, she stared at him and he could see they were bloodshot. She reminded him of a beautiful photographer he had met years ago. Maybe it was the same person. They nodded and he got off the train at Union Square.

Discreet apocalypse: Lara

He met her at the Starbucks on 75th street. He was working on his novel and was far from expecting this somewhat Baudelerian moment.
She was reading Lord of the Flies. He couldn’t think of anything to say for a couple of minutes. And didn’t come up with anything special in the way of pickup lines, not that he was lacking imagination. He spoke to her for a while, right after his wife called. It was too late, he thought. How would we... how could we meet again, at any rate?
She was quite an extraordinary kind of beauty. Her hair was blonde, too blonde. She was a big deal, but not one for which he was ready. He signed out and didn’t ask for her number.

“Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit ! - Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité ?

Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !”