“Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by.”
“It's about what you've got to put yourself through to make anything worthwhile. It's about going to the dark places and using what you find there.”
"Wind coming easterly. That's the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you'd get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn't be right after it.”
He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn’t want to sound too French about it.
He stops up—he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.
He is pleasantly surprised by her spelling and syntax. It is much better than he would have imagined from the way she spoke. The comma between 'Die' and 'fucker' is full-on grammar-Nazi.
"We are the defeated - and we are thousands. We are searching for a way."
The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.
The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.
It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism.
Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.
The hysterical liberal call-out produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC, typified by charismatic figures like Milo. But after crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls. When this happened, nobody knew who to take literally anymore, including many of those in the middle of this new online far right themselves.
Twenty or so people were waiting outside a grey little apartment. London was cold tonight. It was a “rental viewing” and the agents were late. Even so, given the shortage of accommodation in the city nobody was going anywhere. Including myself. Each of us needed somewhere to live. And fast.
A black BMW pulled up and two suited men stepped out. Mmmm. Men? Both looked about eighteen, more like boys. The British rental market is deregulated and anything goes, so this wasn’t surprising.
“Hi guys”, the two agents beamed, unlocking the front door as the throng clambered to get out of the cold.
As I entered my worst fears were confirmed. A complete shithole — but one that would still suck up nearly half my monthly salary.
I asked one of the “boys” if the apartment had central heating. “Have no idea,” the youngster replied. He was darting from room to room, seemingly without purpose, high on some fashionable amphetamine no doubt.
The other bug-eyed youth demanded to see everyone’s passports. He started to photograph them on his phone. The government’s new “Hostile Environment” policy concerning illegal immigration meant rental firms had to check everyone’s papers.
I pulled out my New Zealand passport and bug-boy froze. “You better have a valid visa buddy”, he hyperventilated. I did as it happened, which he scrutinised with suspicion. “Bit funny looking, isn’t it?” he commented. New Zealand passports have a black jacket.
I continued to wander through this glorified cave.
In the bathroom — it hadn’t been cleaned since the previous occupants had left, in a hurry apparently — I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The person before me was pale and exhausted. My eyes darkened as I surveyed the damage.
The suited boys were still bullshitting next door. I looked down at my hands. They were tight white balls. Here I was, a forty-four-year-old man, betoken to those two coked-up little shits, begging for an apartment that wouldn’t look out of place in Midnight Cowboy. Jesus, was I a contemporary manifestation oWhen I arrived in England in 2003, it was so much easier to take the brutality. Conditions were rough back then too, of course. The rent was outlandish and the city resembled a rubbish tip as today; but London’s possible overthrow was a unique part of its internal narrative, a radical vitality that reached its darkest corners, breathing life into its wasted infrastrucf Ratso Rizzo?
I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Jesus Christ, what happened? My body had not only visibly aged, but become grotesque too. I looked like a distorted Francis Bacon painting. Fat and pale, with tinges of bluish pink.
As I turned away in disgust, I remembered the swollen, unhappy people I’d seen after first arriving in England a decade before. Somehow, I had become one of them, working too much and not exercising.
I decided to visit my doctor for a check-up and he took a blood pressure reading. “Mmmm, that can’t be right”. He took another, “Impressive”, he muttered.
He gave me that look you never want to see from a health professional, something like, “I don’t know why you are wasting time talking to me, you should call an ambulance.”
Milton Friedman famously argued against Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Focus on profits, he said, and let the stateand churches deal with human welfare. However, CSR became popular nevertheless and is now big business. Almost every corporation has a CSR programme of some kind. The concept is fundamental to neoliberal utopianism because it peddles the falsehood that capitalism can be both ruthlessly profiteering and kind to the planet. Have its cake and eat it too. As a corollary, governmental regulation is deemed unnecessary. CSR provides an excuse for corporations to regulate themselves, and we all know where that leads. It is no surprise that CSR is most visible in controversial industries like mining, oil and gas, arms manufacturing and tobacco (often involving glossy brochures and websites depicting happy African children playing in green rainforests). Moreover, the tax benefits enjoyed by billionaire philanthropists are another good reason they like CSR.
Revolutionary pessimism practices a speculative negativity that goes too far… much too far. It perceives in this decomposing world both a taste of things to come and a way out. When unhappiness is weaponised in this manner, we will have very little to lose. And our survival depends precisely on that loss.
A message To the children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants -and DESERVES- is a parent who is SPARKY!"
Ah yes, and something else again. Because what I am trying to tell you… What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had.
Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't.
But he never makes a call to ask for help. He cannot put his finger on precisely what is stopping him. He has had time to think about it. It remains an enigma. He scoured the internet in search of advice for pathological procrastinators. He drew up lists of what he had to lose, what he would be risking, and what he had to gain. It made no difference. He calls no-one.
And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young — still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city.
Slave revolts, especially in Jamaica, were a far more regular feature of life in the colonies than history books have ever cared to reflect. Indeed, Christianity was eventually accepted for no other reason than it was the only route to literacy, as the Bible was the only book slaves were allowed, and in order to read it they had to be taught to read. However, the first black preachers immediately adapted the scriptures to acknowledge both their people's sufferation and their resolution to remain independent. And as for manner of worship, it was going to be as gloriously, vibrantly African as possible.
In a nation as small as Jamaica, you can never hope to put much daylight between business, politics and art, or the potential commercialization of art.
Nor does the society of positivity tolerate negative feelings.
Consequently, one loses the ability to handle suffering and pain, to
give them form. For Nietzsche, the human soul owes its depth,
grandeur, and strength precisely to the time it spends with the
negative. Human spirit is born from pain, too: “That tension of the
soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, . . . its inventiveness
and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and
exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity,
secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted
through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?”
The general consensus of the society of positivity is “Like.” It
is telling that Facebook has consistently refused to introduce a
“Dislike” button. The society of positivity avoids negativity in all
forms because negativity makes communication stall. The value of
communication is measured solely in terms of the quantity of
information and the speed of exchange. The mass of communication
also augments its economic value. Negative judgments impair
communication. Further communication occurs more quickly
following “Like” than “Dislike.” Most importantly, the negativity
that rejection entails cannot be exploited economically.
Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything
inward in order to transform it into information. Under today’s
immaterial relations of production, more information and communication
mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast,
secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles for communication
without borders. They are to be dismantled in the
name of transparency.
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.
