This book is not a suicide note.
For reasons that we don’t need to go into, my life has dissolved over the past year or so, like sugar in hot tea.
If life is a gift from God, then God must allow for the possibility of suicide as the rejection of that gift.
“Is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”
- EM Cioran
“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.
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.
I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.
I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.
But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.
I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.
It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.
I am vertiginously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.
The general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error.
We are the same, all of us. We look the same, we write poetry, and we come to a bad end.
Nothing happens. It’s as though I’d ceased to exist.
At 36 I’m nothing.
Like the man in that photograph, he had once been someone, was now no one, and might here, in this small wild country on the edge of Europe, discover who and what he would become.
