Odds and Ends

Empty time unsettles because it reverberates with death and futility. We sweat in the saunas of spacious hours, groan and shake under the weight of nothing, and service with chapped lips what our slickened soles flee; peace, quiet, rest, leisure. 

Language presents all things upside down. What is commonly said is said to block thought; conventional wisdom, regardless of time, place, and class, is a costume of the naked self. And nakedness, without equally conventional articles of desire, is disgusting and depressing. Even desire is a cloak, not some driving force as some suppose. People pretend to want so as not to appear wantless, to give themselves something to be disappointed about, at the very least.  

When we advise others to figure out what they want, it doesn’t mean discovering what lies hidden in the depths, but finding clothes that fit, covering unsightly blanks and bulges. As it is now nearly customary to ask someone what they want instead of what they do. Going farther than the usual analysis: we don’t want what others want, or want to be wanted; we want to shore up the semblance of others, to maintain the illusion that there is such a thing as desire, and those who possess it. A critical perspective often falls behind, and criticizes geriatric powers, waning habits, slackening attitudes. The materialism of the present doesn’t so much glorify wealth and status as it promotes passion and desire. Not as pursuit of eternal ideals, but as flourishing of animal idiosyncrasies, accidentally sourced yet intentionally owned urges of the body.  

(When I hear someone exclaim their passion for a subject, a line of work, a practice, I don’t hear the rumbling of a core but the rustling of curtains, a coarse fabric of desperation.) 

This empty time engaged to our own absence, this dreary bachelor party before the black wedding, it dilates the passage between life and death, in a sense extending our existence. We take longer to arrive at the end, we are stretched by the seconds. Work, activity, pleasure, thrilling experience, adventure, they abridge time, quicken our pace to the grave.  

That which helps us forget death motorizes the moment, so that in effect we die faster. That which reminds us of death slows our steps, so that we live longer, but with a tension almost unendurable. We must choose between an elongated awareness of what we hope to avoid, or an ignorant and enjoyable abbreviation.  

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The beauty of preceding autumn days has exceeded my ability to appreciate. The impossibility of gratitude grates on my brain. My waterlogged soul can’t drink the sparkling blue sky. A surplus of color and light; a feast for a bloated belly. Maybe next time. 

The bill for beautiful days has come, and unlike manmade credit, nature always collects. The delivery of the price coincides with automated payment. Bitter rains rake the earth, the grey sky suffocates. A chill descends, golden leaves stuff gutters and turn to sludge.  

Not only the brilliance of peaking autumn, but of youth, my youth, which has passed without ceremony. When I look in the mirror, I see the man I was, the men I’ve been, my face layered with decaying masks. Not a complete disguise, not a new middle-aged man, but the as yet unburied ruin of years that once shone with false promise. The beauty of youth; the illusion of a future free of putrefaction, a lure of parasitic time, urging us to provide flesh for a while longer. 

Unemployed, not in the modern American economy. Conceptually unemployed, cosmically unemployed. Ignored by narcoticized Epicurean gods nodding off, bored with the spectacle. Self-effacing and ineffectual before the public but a volatile terror to remaining loved ones. The home is the last place to vent the stale air of impotence. For the public sphere, public life, a life that might lean outward, now seems vacuumed of power, as if strife itself has been deprived of value, and even the facsimile of conflict has vanished. Houellebecq’s extension of the domain of struggle arrives at its end point, the extreme contraction of that domain. The English translation of the title, Extension du domaine de la Lutte into Whatever, appears not as a lazy compromise, but as a transcendence of translation, perfect foresight into the ironic fulfillment of the meaning of the original.