Dip Me in Honey and Bury Me Someplace Nice

I wonder sometimes about what to do with myself after I die. 

Or maybe not myself. I think I mean what to do with body after I die, because maybe myself will be off somewhere else at that point. (Fingers crossed.) But there will still be this BODY just hanging out there, in the place where I was when I died. Someone will stumble upon it, or someone will already be sitting there next to it watching me leave? There will be a body. For a while, too—the body takes a while to go away. So you have to do something with it.

And you get to decide! You get to tell the people around you what to do with your body after you are gone. And they, mostly, do what you ask, I guess. You can even go to a lawyer and get a piece of paper that tells people what to do with your body, and if they don’t do it, they get in trouble. Like, legal trouble. With more lawyers. Lawyers get involved.

It sounds awesome.

There are all sorts of options! I can get put into a box and then that box gets buried under the dirt. And the box just hangs out under there, surrounded by dirt. Seems dull. Seems like a waste of dirt—dirt with which you could do other things. Why waste dirt? Why get buried and surrounded by dirt? In a box that will way too slowly fall apart, while your body way too slowly falls apart, too.

I should mention that in that case, they drain your body of all its liquids and pump a bunch of other liquids into you. Which, why? That seems like a waste of two kinds of liquids: Your liquids, which you used all through your life, and their liquids, which only get a little time to act as your liquids before they throw you into the dirt and they just settle into the bottom of your body until you fall apart and they leak out into the wasted dirt.

My dad died. (I’m sorry if I mention that a lot.) We burned his body. (Well, not “we” as in us, his family. We asked someone else to do it.) His ashes will go in a wall at a church. That’s a way you can deal with a body after the person in the body has left it. You can set it on fire and let it turn to a little, more manageable pile of ashes. It takes up less space, and if you know it’s the body of someone you loved, then it will always feel like the body to you, even if it doesn’t look like the body.

Maybe that’s what I’ll have done to me after I die, but maybe I’ll ask that my family—my wife and my son—NOT just put it in a wall. They could scatter the ashes somewhere nice. It might feel like, in my final moments knowing that my family is going to scatter me around somewhere then maybe I might be able to move around. Travel. See some places. That seems better than being stuck in a wall.

When you are stuck in a wall, other people can visit you, I suppose. My wife and my son. But I’ve read that on average, a grave is only visited twice after it is filled with a body. Give a body a resting place, stop by once, stop by a second time, and let it sit lonely for the rest of forever.

Scatter me in the air, and this is a possibility: my wife and my son can pretend that wherever they are, there I am. I mean, why not? A clump of ash is tossed up into the wind. It breaks apart and follows the eddies of air, maybe up and out and around the whole wide world on jet streams, and there I am, a little pinch of ash anywhere and everywhere you are. You can visit me always wherever. You’ll breathe me in and won’t even know it. We’ll be traveling companions. We’ll never be apart. Maybe I’ll be in all of you. And you’ll never get rid of me.

That seems like a nice fiction. One I can work with, anyway.

§

You could be dumped in the sea. You can get a permit. I spent some time considering this as an option after I learned about whale fall. “Whale fall” is a beautiful phrase, and often naming something in a beautiful way can convince me to connect myself to a thing. I would also like to fall!

Whales are resource rich, though, and I am not. As I get older, I become more resource rich, but no amount of age-related weight gain will make me truly valuable to the sea. I will never be abundant enough. Not abundant like a whale. I’d be a meager meal to crabs and fish. Hardly worth the gas it takes to sail out to a nice place to dump me.

Also, when I really start to think about being buried at sea, I become nervous about how cold it would be. This is, I am aware, totally irrational. This is an irrational argument against burying myself at sea—this idea that I might be too cold. That down deep in the water, it gets colder and colder and my body will get colder and colder. Blue and chilled from skin to marrow. But I will be dead. I will not feel the cold.

And yet.

And yet rationality is rarely a part of my calculation when it comes to the way I contend with my own mortality. My death scares me, so I allow myself some irrationality. I allow myself, in this case, to veto a burial option for an irrational reason, and not for the sake of the corpse that I will be, but for the sake of the person contemplating the corpse that I am now. It’s self care.

§

My friends Stesha says she wants to be a tree. That seems nice. Not for me, I don’t think—I think I would like the option to move. Again, irrational. But again, I allow myself the opportunity to let the living me make decisions the dead me won’t ever care about as I tell myself that the dead me would appreciate the decision the living me has made. This is what we talk about when we talk about our corpses.

§

Andrew wrote to say that I could feed mushrooms after I die. This seems like a nice idea. The site says that it would clean out all the “toxins” from my body. I’m not sure what that means. I probably have toxins, I guess. I hear a lot of people talk about all the toxins in my body. In their bodies. In all bodies. The modern world fills us with toxins, they say.

I’m betting if there are toxins, my body has its share. I’m pretty sure whatever toxins are, I enjoy having them in my coffee in the morning, or on my pancakes. I likely enjoy dipping my french fries in toxins. I bet toxins make all of those things delicious. Every food company in the world is right now running a lab that makes toxins that hit our tongues and light up all kinds of pleasure receptors in our brains.

Doing something that gets rid of the toxins sounds nice, but also sounds so vague as to mean nothing.

But being a mushroom feels like it would be remarkable. I imagine that a nice benefit to dying and becoming a mushroom is that there are all sorts of people who really enjoy going out and searching for mushrooms, finding mushrooms, identifying mushrooms, picking mushrooms—so all kinds of people would be out searching for me, finding me, identifying me, picking me. Who doesn’t want to be picked? Who among us is not, at our basest, at our more fundamentally psychological level, not just wanting to be picked?

My family could come and visit my body, but also strangers would come and find the mushrooms fed by my body. My resting place could be a place of sadness for the people closest to me, but a place of discovery and joy for the people with whom I have no relationship. I once wrote a whole story about becoming a mushroom. Sounds great. I’d like to be a mushroom.

Maybe.

Probably.

§

I received a postcard in the mail last week. I think my wife recycled it, otherwise I could take a picture of it for you.

It said that if I wanted, I could be mellified. It was from a company that offered that service. They have a hospice you can check into. They have a bed for you when you are close to death. A few weeks from the end, you can check in, get a room all to yourself, and wait there to die.

And they will feed you nothing but honey. Your body will expel all the other things you have eaten within 72 hours, and then nothing in the belly, nothing in the intestines, nothing enters or exits except honey.

And then when you die, they seal you in a honey-filled bag. They have a storage space reserved for all their clients. They will note the year and day of your death. In 100 years, they will pull you from storage, cut you to pieces, and then?

You can, and I would, opt to have your remains given to your family. Whoever is left gets a box of you, mellified, turned to candy, edible.

My son’s son’s son? My son’s son’s daughter? Someone?

I might go nicely with a soft cheese. They can enjoy me on a cracker.

People can get together and all consume me at a party. I’ll be a party guest, one last time.

That’s what I want.

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January 27th, 2023 / 4:40 pm

Rememberer of Things All the Way in the Past

We’re on the right side of things, or perhaps the wrong.

We’ve got a lot of great ways in which to be right or wrong, and we’re often able to go ahead and make those ways public to you and then also to yours.

How are yours, by the way? We feel pretty clear about you, but yours remain a mystery to us. We should maybe connect with them a little more.

Maybe a call? Maybe an email? Maybe we could go over to their houses.

Probably not that last one. Probably we shouldn’t go out to the houses of yours because we aren’t really sure if yours have been staying home and staying safe and staying away from all the places that one should stay away from at a time like this.

Hey, it’s a time like this! Have you ever felt like you were in a time like this? Feels to us like the first time there every was a time like this.

Such a time.

Such a time.

Maybe it’s not possible to be on the right side of things in times like this, though? Have you thought about that? Because we very much have not.

Hey, great, though! Great to see you! Let’s get in touch.

Random / 1 Comment
February 4th, 2022 / 8:30 pm

8 Poems

Art Poem

I was invested in a life of destruction

I was sending a message to the abyss

It was like all of the birds screaming at the cold

It was like everyone thinking about death at the same time

I am feeling amiss

Supposedly due to how the planets are arranged

It is like a map of daffodils

Some words are coming out of my mouth

Like a planet nobody asked for

Wanting to figure into your astrology

It is like eating the same meal for sixteen years

It is like disappointing people through art




Love Poem

I am secretly wonderful like a lost letter or a black pie

I am tired of being a lot

It is like cutting the arms off a tree

And you are left with knots

It is like knowing what everyone is thinking all the time

It is like being a woman

I would hate for you to write a long song about it

It would be like the end of a long vacation

It would be like a world without Courtney Love 




Ice-Cream Poem

We were as proud as mathematicians

We hated each other frivolously

I kept on wondering

Why everything had to be so stupid

I loved it when we used to say

I didn’t ask for this

It was a kind of victory

Exactly the size and shape of an ice-cream dish




City Poem

The city is like a photograph of a painting of a city

Some days it is not very hard

But sometimes it is like being part of a vast system

Where there is no one to talk to

The cat is licking its dick politely I guess

The rain barks like a scary dog

The moon has never seemed so full of itself

I understand this is a life of mediocrity

I have prepared in every possible way




Cloud Poem

I am sorry I am like this

Remember how I said that all the time

You should have said it too

And you did you did

We were both so sorry

We kept looking at each other

Wondering what the other one would do 

Love was a pink cloud we were standing in

It was a good excuse to walk off a cliff

Now I am as light as 10,000 magnolia blossoms

That is what you do in my memory

You and your fabulous fetishes

Which I miss sincerely




Dog Poem

I am like a dog with a pearl in its teeth

It is a kind of precious thought

That bends but doesn’t break

We are like two cities with different moons

There is no way to know the time

We are like two elephants at a dinner party

We must really learn to be more delightful

Sometimes I will just drive into a parking lot

I don’t know where to be in this world

We are supposed to live and die at the same time

It must be like falling out of a jeep 





Wolf Poem

You have to be more cautious with beautiful things

Or anything that is wonderful

I was not made to be understood

I am walking out on a limb

It is like teetering on a high branch

I am going to act really greedy

While rising dramatically out of a puddle

It will be like being struck with terrible melancholy

Right in the middle of washing the dog




Kansas Poem

Every building seemed possible

And I was enjoying the performance of it

We were not as evil then

But thick as thieves and sick as dogs

I hadn’t the slightest suspicion

The story of us is like the story of Kansas

It is like swallowing a fist

It is like when your sanity comes crawling back to you

In the middle of the night

And you hold it out again like a tooth




——

These poems are from Laura’s next forthcoming book, Salad Days, available for preorder now from Maudlin House.

Author Spotlight / 1 Comment
September 30th, 2021 / 2:41 pm

TEEJAYX6, SCAM RAP, and the NONVIOLENT FLEX

I distinctly remember when I discovered the rapper Teejayx6.

I associate the rapper Teejayx6 with the period of my life that I first discovered him.

With what I’d been on during that period.

It was 1.5 years ago and I’d just pulled up to NYC. To Harlem.

Had emptied out the bank account for first last security. Recklessly.

Banking on being able to start scrapping, stacking, the minute I pulled up. 

I remember listening to that shit pulling up to the first job I got, as motivation. Sparking a string of gigs over a month, August 2019, in which I’d make the same amount of money I made the entire previous year living in the hood, in Philly, doing bike deliveries for Postmates (~$6K).

.

.

My homie Randall put me on to the rapper Teejayx6.

I remember Randall, who is from the greater Detroit area, where Teejayx6 is from, had sent me his shit—the video for ‘Dark Web,’ the one that would go viral, in which he talkin high level scamming techniques, how to download VPNs, Tor browsers, in another vid that vid linked me to physically doin credit card fraud. 

Randall sent me this vid that today, 31 January 2021, has 4.2M views, when it had like 300K. 

The OG scam rapper. 

Or—the usherer of scam rap into the mainstream. 

The mouthpiece, to the masses, of the message scam rap OGs had been pushing, but localized, for a minute. 

.

.

What Teejayx6 was on was, he was on that nonviolent flex. 

Like look—y’all gon box us young boys unfit for your schooling, your free markets, out the game? 

With your linguistic classism, your fetishization of state-sponsored academia?

We gon get it. 

We gon fkn ball, bruh. 

Gon find a way, somehow some way. 

And hitting licks, robbing mfers. Sure. 

We been doin that, and . . . 

That’s a wave.

But this scamming shit?

With this scamming shit, no one dies. 

Here’s how, says Teejayx6.

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February 2nd, 2021 / 1:51 pm

Books I Read in 2020

What follows is a list of all the books I read in 2020.

(What follows that is a series of statistics regarding this list, and some other things.)

  1. The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) by Ishmael Reed (Jan. 2–5)
  2. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) by Ishmael Reed (Jan. 6–8)
  3. Mumbo Jumbo (1972) by Ishmael Reed (Jan. 9–14)
  4. Chattanooga (1973) by Ishmael Reed (Jan. 15–16)
  5. The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) by Ishmael Reed (Jan. 20–22)
  6. Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed (Jan. 23–25)
  7. Imaginary Museums (2020) by Nicolette Polek (Jan. 26–27)
  8. The Novelist (????) by Jordan Castro (Jan. 28–29)
  9. *$50,000 (2020) by Andrew Weatherhead (Jan. 30)
  10. Infinite Hesh (2019) by Thomas J. Gamble (Jan. 31)
  11. The Network (2010) by Jena Osman (Feb. 3–4)
  12. Where We Go from Here (2018) by Bernie Sanders (Feb. 4–7)
  13. The New Jim Crow (2010) by Michelle Alexander (Feb. 12–16)
  14. Black Against Empire (2012) by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. (Feb. 17–21)
  15. Incognegro (2008) by Frank B. Wilderson III (Feb. 22–28)
  16. Bring the War Home (2018) by Kathleen Belew (Mar. 2–6)
  17. Barn 8 (2020) by Deb Olin Unferth (Mar. 6–10)
  18. *Revolution (2011) by Deb Olin Unferth (Mar. 11–12)
  19. Will and Testament (2016) by Vigdis Hjorth (Mar. 13–17)
  20. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) by Olga Tokarczuk (Mar. 18–22)
  21. Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens (Mar. 22–Apr. 11)
  22. Flights (2007) by Olga Tokarczuk (Mar. 23–31)
  23. A House in Norway (2014) by Vigdis Hjorth (Apr. 1–7)
  24. Speedboat (1976) by Renata Adler (Apr. 12–13)
  25. Reuben Sachs (1888) by Amy Levy (Apr. 14–15)
  26. For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (1982) by Takashi Hiraide (Apr. 16)
  27. Discounted (2020) by Erik Stinson (Apr. 17)
  28. The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton (Apr. 17–21)
  29. Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton (Apr. 22–23)
  30. The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton (Apr. 26–30)
  31. True Suede (2020) by Jon Leon (May 1)
  32. The Prick of Noon (1985) by Peter DeVries (May 2–4)
  33. Amazons (1980) by Cleo Birdwell (May 6–11)
  34. *American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis (May 12–21)
  35. *A Book of Common Prayer (1977) by Joan Didion (May 22–26)
  36. *Salvador (1983) by Joan Didion (May 28–June 2)
  37. *Democracy (1984) by Joan Didion (June 7–10)
  38. *Miami (1987) by Joan Didion (June 11–16)
  39. The First Civil Right (2014) by Naomi Murakawa (June 17–18)
  40. The End of Policing (2017) by Alex S. Vitale (June 19–20)
  41. After Henry (1992) by Joan Didion (June 23–28)
  42. *The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) by Joan Didion (June 29–July 1)
  43. Political Fictions (2001) by Joan Didion (July 1–4)
  44. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003) by Joan Didion (July 5)
  45. Where I Was From (2003) by Joan Didion (July 6–8)
  46. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T. S. Eliot (July 6–10)
  47. Four Quartets (1943) by T. S. Eliot (July 6–10)
  48. Hellbox (1947) by John O’Hara (July 9–12)
  49. Audition (1997) by Ryu Murakami (July 14–15)
  50. Death in Her Hands (2020) by Ottessa Moshfegh (July 16–17)
  51. Mountain Road, Late at Night (2020) by Alan Rossi (July 18–19)
  52. A Rage to Live (1949) by John O’Hara (July 20–31)
  53. The Farmer’s Hotel (1951) by John O’Hara (Aug. 1–2)
  54. A Family Party (1956) by John O’Hara (Aug. 4)
  55. Baseless (2020) by Nicholson Baker (Aug. 6–10)
  56. U and I (1991) by Nicholson Baker (Aug. 13–14)
  57. Vox (1992) by Nicholson Baker (Aug. 15–17)
  58. The Fermata (1994) by Nicholson Baker (Aug. 18–22)
  59. Vernon Subutex 1 (2015) by Virginie Despentes (Aug. 22–24)
  60. Vernon Subutex 2 (2015) by Virginie Despentes (Aug. 26–29)
  61. Frantumaglia (2016) by Elena Ferrante (Aug. 30–Sept. 3)
  62. Coin Locker Babies (1980) by Ryu Murakami (Sept. 4–9)
  63. Popular Hits of the Showa Era (1994) by Ryu Murakami (Sept. 10–12)
  64. The Lying Life of Adults (2019) by Elena Ferrante (Sept. 12–17)
  65. Afropessimism (2020) by Frank B. Wilderson III (Sept. 18–22)
  66. The Shock Doctrine (2007) by Naomi Klein (Sept. 23–29)
  67. Different Seasons (1982) by Stephen King (Sept. 30–Oct. 3)
  68. The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (Oct. 9–10)
  69. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, vol. 2 (1840) by Edgar Allan Poe (Oct. 12–13)
  70. Tales (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe (Oct. 14–21)
  71. The Silence (2020) by Don DeLillo (Oct. 21)
  72. Yellow Grass (2020) by Josh Barber and Stephanie Hurtado (Oct. 22)
  73. *Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (Oct. 22–24)
  74. The Cipher (2020) by Molly Brodak (Oct. 23–25)
  75. Instructions for a Painting (2007) by Molly Brodak (Oct. 25)
  76. Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (Oct. 25–30)
  77. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson (Nov. 1–3)
  78. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820) by Washington Irving (Nov. 4–10)
  79. Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978) by Ishmael Reed (Nov. 11–17)
  80. Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier (Nov. 12–22)
  81. Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon or The Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful (1970) by Ishmael Reed (Nov. 19)
  82. God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982) by Ishmael Reed (Nov. 19–21)
  83. Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison (Nov. 23–26)
  84. Jazz (1992) by Toni Morrison (Nov. 27–30)
  85. Paradise (1997) by Toni Morrison (Dec. 1–5)
  86. Long Live the Post Horn! (2012) by Vigdis Hjorth (Dec. 6–7)
  87. Vernon Subutex 3 (2017) by Virginie Despentes (Dec. 7–11)
  88. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë (Dec. 12–18)
  89. *Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë (Dec. 19–25)
  90. *Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (Dec. 26–28)
  91. The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) by Jean Rhys (Dec. 28–30)
  92. Midwinter Day (1982) by Bernadette Mayer (Dec. 31)

*Previously read

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Roundup / 1 Comment
January 2nd, 2021 / 12:03 pm

you must build the rocket // vin tanner

𝖓𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖈𝖊: 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖌𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙 𝖍𝖆𝖘 𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖒𝖊𝖉 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖎𝖘 𝖆 𝖍𝖔𝖆𝖝. 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖉𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖔𝖗 𝖍𝖆𝖘 𝖆𝖕𝖔𝖑𝖔𝖌𝖎𝖟𝖊𝖉. 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙’𝖘 𝖊𝖝𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖑𝖞 𝖜𝖍𝖞 𝖞𝖔𝖚 𝖘𝖍𝖔𝖚𝖑𝖉 𝖇𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖊𝖛𝖊 𝖚𝖘.


Below you will find a small archival selection I have recovered from a network of unknown terminals linked to the materials preserved within the [REDACTED]. Unfortunately some of these files have become corrupted in the process, but their unusual static can still provide an aesthetically fascinating experience. This small spread incorporates “An Excerpt from ‘A Vampyre’s Manuscript; Vol. III’“, the uncovered poem “annihilation beings“, “Schematic No. 39“, and a poetic recruitment collage by the Eukaryotic Spiritualists. [Eukaryotic organisms are the lifeforms to which the mushroom and fungi families belong].
Here is a snippet of the history between supporters of human evolution and the Catholic Church offers us a unique perspective on the concept of time. If these documents are to be believed, the Church invested into the creation of time and universalizing time standards in opposition to members of the population who have realized humans were meant to destroy the Sun. Centuries of battling ideologies show an aversion to the realization that the Earth itself is an orbital weapon which was once capable of collapsing the hydrogen of the Sun and containing the resulting singularity. However, it’s not my role to convince you of the truth of these files. I simply felt it
essential to submit my findings in relation to the abolition of time.

This collection is known as “you must build the rocket”.

“glitch 5”, 2020, digital art
schematic
Pseudo-scientists believe underdeveloped thermonuclear weapons would be capable
of initiating solar collapse. This greatly misunderstands the composition and
operation of the sun.
To adequately collapse ‘​ Sol​ ’ you must extract, eradicate, or neutralize the hydrogen
(roughly 76.1% of the sun’s makeup) and erect some form of antimatter containment
to prevent the black hole/supernova response from wiping out the solar system.
Very little is known about the weapon within the Earth’s core outside of vampiric
preserved documentation. Environmental collapse has rendered the weapon useless,
but some understanding of its intended function can be extrapolated.
We do not know who made the weapon or how, but we can assume from this
schematic it was a beam capable of collapsing the sun’s hydrogen and containing the
following response.
“schematic no. 39”, 2020, digital art
recruitment poetic collage
the measure of a person without regulation is every-nothing.
consider present-centuries of languages at the wayside of gone-here. when is
when-ever. the sun will be destroyed for telling lies.
the rocket will free us from forever and for-gone withers into one more promise
made that can be fulfilled eons now-later.
meaningless. and we rejoice in that! we cheer brave pilots saving life from limitation.
everything is here-there; gazing with safe black glass eyes into the shadow of the star
we must murder.
one lie for the always is a fair price.
in the always, nothing is missing and all moments have vanished. if you are lost at
our suggestion, then look away from the moon. she is reflecting the sun into your
face to spread its propaganda. we will save her too.
you must turn from the announcements. run into the welcome of the always, who
cannot reject you. no hidden passages in the always.
say goodbye to the delusion of tomorrow and the practice of yesterday. today does
not exist.do you fathom it? in the always no answer is unknown. we are always. it is that
simple.
requisite awaits in the watching of the eternal voyage. the rocket has already
succeeded and the sun died as soon as it was born. there is no-difference.
in always we build the rocket which launched before its conception. in the always we
remember the future exactly as it was. there is no future, because it is here-there and
now-later. this is the best way to describe it.
you are exhausted with solitude and isolation. always holds your salvation. we are
inevitable, and we have already happened-begun.
“glitch 1”, 2020, digital art
In order to abolish time, we must rid ourselves of '​ Sol​ '; the star we orbit. The
study and theoretics of time have based themselves around the description and
observation of the sun. This evolved from visual notation, the use of sundials, and
medieval measurements of passage, into the contemporary calendar. This obsession
with analemma and the celestial sphere have come to dictate the schedule and
arrangement of human functionality. The harshest truth of them all is the
connection between time and the Catholic Church and its fear of vampirism.
The Church has maintained an iron first on property ownership that rivals
the collective wealth of other sources we also dread. Much of the religion focuses on
analogies between light and dark that have filtered into other sects of Christianity.
However, no Protestant denomination holds the longevity or history Catholicism
has when you analyze the documentation of the battle against vampiric evolution.
The Church has always considered evolution a threat to its power and superiority,
but the vaults of the Vatican hold tomes that catalogue an ancient feud. The creation
of time as an aspect of religion was a weapon in combating Vampiric Doctrine. This
even accounts for their opposition to Galileo and heliocentrism.
The astronomer was never aware of the private struggle regarding the survival
of the sun, but his observation conceded Earth's orbital position as a solar threat.
The Sun itself was preventing the next stage in human society, which the globe was
meant to stop. The issue which plagues our routine-centered structure stems from a
dogma which has sept into the foundation of colonial nations. Environmental
destruction has rendered the mechanism within the Earth's core incapable of firing,
and so the annihilation of the sun must be carried out by manual space-faring
methods.
Immortal beings without the dictatorship of Sol will find that time is
meaningless when we have evolved into our destined life-death forms. Suspended
decay similar to the eukaryotic organisms of the fungi family is a necessary step in thedissolution of time-based hierarchies. Do not regard the symbiotic collaboration
between religion and science set against the eradication of past and present with
much thought. Our enemies simply seek to preserve their own domains.
Excerpt from; ‘A Vamprye’s Manuscript: Vol III.’
“An Excerpt from ‘A Vampyre’s Manuscript Vol. iii’”, 2020, digital art
annihilation beings
we must rid ourselves of
the study and theoretics
of the
contemporary calendar
obsession
come to dictate truth
property ownership focuses on
longevity
when considered a threat
to power and superiority
a weapon astronomer
preventing dogma
within
Earth’s core
annihilation beings
will find
when we decay
our enemies preserve a manuscript
“annihilation beings”, 2020, digital art
“glitch 2”, 2020, digital art
“you must build the rocket”, 2020, digital art
“animation 1”, 2020, digital art
“animation 2”, 2020, digital art

Vin Tanner is a writer, poet, and illustrator who specializes in the fusion of science fiction with other genres. They created and hosted “Poetry Jam; February 2020“, which resulted in 90 free and public chapbooks in varying forms from an amazing spread of under-published writers. You can find them on twitter @hologramvin, their available prints here, and learn about their ongoing projects via their patreon.

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December 30th, 2020 / 11:23 am

Dancing Star: An Interview with Lars Iyer

Iyer-and-books

Lars Iyer emerged in the early 2000s as a leading scholar on the work of Maurice Blanchot, publishing Blanchot’s Communism (2004) and Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical (2005). In 2003, he began performing creative writing experiments at his blog, posting fragments of fictional narrative influenced by his work in philosophy. The result of these experiments was the Spurious Trilogy (Spurious, 2011; Dogma, 2012; and Exodus, 2013), a series of short, episodic, and brilliantly funny novels about two gin-loving UK philosophy professors, Lars and W., who await the apocalyptic event or messianic arrival that would mark the end of our end times. 

Iyer’s new trilogy (Wittgenstein Jr, 2014; Nietzsche and the Burbs, 2019; and Simone Weil, in-progress) also depicts characters struggling to live and think during and beyond the end, and it continues his experimentation with combining fictional narrative and philosophical thought. In Wittgenstein Jr, a group of Cambridge philosophy students refer to their professor as Wittgenstein, having noted similarities between him and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The philosophy students, like Lars and W., are looking for a leader, someone whose way of life might serve as a model for their own — they may have found it in this 21st-century Wittgenstein. In Nietzsche and the Burbs, the conceit is similar. A new student, formerly enrolled at a private high school in London, has transferred to a public school in the suburbs. The novel’s narrator, Chandra, along with her friends Paula, Merv, and Art, begin calling him Nietzsche. They’re drawn to this 21st-century teen Nietzsche’s unconventional answers to questions in class; to his aphoristic posts at his blog (“last-philosopher-dotcom”); and to the smile on his face as he listens to a teacher read from a novel about a Wittgenstein-like character building a cone for his sister in the middle of a forest.

The following interview consists of emails that Lars and I exchanged in October–November 2020.

Evan Lavender-Smith: I especially enjoyed a sequence of scenes near the beginning of Nietzsche and the Burbs. In the first scene, Chandra, Paula, Art, and Merv sit by a river and discuss their experience of life in the suburbs. They lament that their intelligence has been “crabbed … turned in on itself … squandered on movie trivia … on the ranking of favorite albums and films”; they say they’ve been “overstimulated … overprogrammed … grade-inflated … infotained”; they call themselves “the most useless generation that has ever lived … the most pampered … the most unchallenged … the most unhappy.” In the next scene, the friends have returned to school for free period:

It’s like Groundhog Day. We’re living the same day over and over again. We’re living the same free period over and over again until we learn some lesson.

What lesson? I wonder.

That life sucks, Art says.

We’ve learnt that, I say.

That nothing’s ever going to happen again, Paula says. That we’re marooned in the suburbs forever.

We’ve got farther to go, we agree. We must annihilate all hope. We must expect nothing—nothing.

Hope? What’s hope? I ask.

We must forget the very word, hope, we agree. The very memory of hope…

Bill Trim, sitting down with us.

You’ve found us at our lowest ebb, Bill, Paula says. We’re full of nihilism.

These adolescents are in a state of despair — but I’m still laughing here, as I am on nearly every page of the novel. In the historical Nietzsche’s writing, laughter serves as a figure for an “active” and “affirmative” nihilism: a courageous acceptance and affirmation of the loss of belief, followed by a creative redefinition and restoration of belief. In your manifesto (“Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss: A Literary Manifesto after the End of Literature and Manifestos”) you write, “It is an image of farcical life that shows its hand in that literature which comes after Literature,” and you refer to a “cleansing painful laughter that splits your sides and your heart.” I wonder if the laughter you describe in the manifesto is comparable to the historical Nietzsche’s laughter. Would this laughter — the laughter of active and affirmative nihilism — allow the adolescents of your novel to overcome their despair? 

Lars Iyer: The adolescents of my novel live in a world that has no room for negativity. It’s totally managed, totally processed, totally realized, and all under the banner of happiness. Nothing actually happens — pseudo-event follows pseudo-event. There’s nothing new — the future is programmed, prescribed, totally modeled. 

Everything other has been categorized and absorbed. Everything’s visible — in hi-res. In high-definition. In pure-self-evidence. There are no secrets left, no shadows. Everything’s taken straight. There’s no irony. The world is what it is and nothing more. 

Instead of politics: quantified management. Instead of the ethics of self-cultivation: the entrepreneurial self. Rebellion is prepackaged, clichéd. Disobedience runs along obedient grooves. Education is indoctrination, little else. 

This is the void of post-history, in which every attempt to bust out is neutralized in advance.

On wild, drunken, drugged-up nights, my characters wax apocalyptic — they want to negate this overlit, oversaturated, overdeveloped world in its entirety. Theirs is a total laughter, a laughter that finds everything ridiculous. It’s liberating — freeing. It loosens the hold of the present, of all worldly hopes. It accepts that nothing in the world is going to help us. It’s a laughter unto the death of this world, this system. Of the world’s self-inflicted death at the hands of climate catastrophe and financial collapse.

Such apocalyptic laughter laughs at itself, too. At its vanity, its hyperbole, its excess. It laughs at itself as all too human, all too finite …

Only faint echoes of such laughter remain afterwards. Sure, you can ascend to the plane of apocalyptic laughter on wild nights of drinking and drugging, but there’s always the descent, the morning after; there’s always ordinary life, which is, for my characters, privileged, middle-class suburban life, and dull, dull, dull. There’s just boredom, suburban ennui, and the vague nihilistic desire to say no to the world …

The historical Nietzsche hoped nihilism could be transformed — that it could become active and affirmative, not merely saying no to the world, but saying yes, thereby overcoming despair, at least for a time. We are to accept fate — everything that’s happened — as though we wanted it thus, as though we wouldn’t have wanted anything else. What a task! 

My teens think this might be possible through music. Create the right kind of music, share it with others, and you can affirm the path that led to this act of creation. You can gather up all the contingencies of your life — that you happened to be born here, that you went to this school and hung out with these people — into a kind of necessity. The suburbs, and everything about your suburban life, can be affirmed as the condition of music-making. This would allow my characters to triumph over their hatred of the suburbs and thereby overcome nihilism.

But can you really affirm everything exactly as it is, without wishing it to be different — better? And if so, would you be obliged to include cruelty, bullying and all the humiliations of school life in your act of affirmation? Indeed, how inclusive would the affirmation have to be — would you have to affirm everything about your life; about the lives of those around to you; about your parents’ lives; and those of your next-door neighbors? Where would you stop? Would you have to include everyone and everything: the whole world; the whole universe, all of history? 

(And why is affirmation the model, anyway? Isn’t it more appropriate to condemn parts of our lives? And wouldn’t it be better to simply escape the suburbs and find somewhere else to live — a queer bohemia, perhaps, as Paula suggests?)

You quote from my manifesto. “It is an image of farcical life that shows its hand in that literature which comes after Literature.” Such farcical life is what’s left on the eternal day after, the eternal hangover, when apocalyptic laughter has died away. And it’s marked by a bathetic writing, which, as Pieter Vermeulen has explained in his Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel, is neither resigned to the soft triumphalism of our overmanaged world, nor able to rise to the tragic heights that, according to the historical Nietzsche, might allow us to transfigure it. 

Lavender-Smith: Music’s potential to transfigure nihilism reminds me of another figure used by the historical Nietzsche: dance. The epigraph to Nietzsche and the Burbs (“You must have chaos in your heart to give birth to a dancing star,” from Thus Spoke  Zarathustra), reappears later in the novel as the chorus for “Dancin’ Star,” a song composed by Merv. As in your previous novels, which also frequently reference music, there’s a trancelike quality to the prose. Repetition, ellipsis, consonance, and any number of other devices contribute to this—including a particular technique that involves rapid alternations between direct and indirect discourse, a conflation of Lars and W.’s voices that, to my ear, creates a continuously surprising prosody. I’ve just now closed my eyes, opened Spurious, and placed my finger on a paragraph. Here it is:

How’s it come to this? W. says. What wrong turn did he make? He was like Dante, he says, lost in a dark forest.—“And there you were,” he says, “the idiot in the forest.” I was always lost, wasn’t I? I didn’t even know I was lost, but I was lost. Or perhaps I was never lost. Perhaps I belonged in the forest, W. muses. Perhaps I am only that forest where W. is wandering, he says, he’s not sure.

Vermeulen, whom you mention, describes your technique as one of “never allowing the first-person narrator, Lars, to speak for himself; instead, Lars mainly renders W.’s verbal abuse of him, mostly in free indirect discourse (in which Lars is referred to as ‘I’), sometimes directly (in which he appears as ‘you’).” Like Vermeulen, I’m interested in the relation between the narratological and metafictional features of your writing (e.g. conflating the voices of two characters, one of whom shares your first name), but I’m more interested in the relation between the writing’s narratology and its music. As Vermeulen notes, your novels are often compared to those of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. I wonder if this comparison follows, in part, from a shared appreciation of music’s value when it comes to conceiving and creating form and language in narrative writing. How do you imagine the relation between music and the form of your writing? 

Iyer: I don’t believe in novels that don’t know how to dance! 

Rhythm, in particular, is central to my work. There’s a spring to my prose. Clipped sentence fragments, all run together, with the use of italics for emphasis … Ellipses opening within sentences, trailing off at the end of them … Blanks between sections …

I’m always after a sense of flowÉmile Benveniste tells us that the Greek word rhuthmos did not originally mean a pulsed beat, a regularity imposed upon chaos. For pre-Socratics like Heraclitus, the word suggested something fluid or in motion — something flowing, improvised and changeable that swirls around regularity, opening it up (think of drummer Tony Williams in Miles Davis’s second great quintet). 

Two millennia after Heraclitus, Nietzsche revives this sense of rhythm in his account of the Dionysian drive. In The Birth of Tragedy, this drive is linked to both death and chaos on the one hand, and eros and the affirmation of life on the other. It is both creative and destructive. The Apollonian drive, by contrast, is focused on the clarity of form, of beauty, throwing a veil over the Dionysian flux and constructing the necessary illusion that there are individuated entities that are part of an intelligible and stable world, rather than just dynamic processes of becoming. 

Nietzsche makes use of the Apollonian and Dionysian forces in his discussion of rhythm. Rhythm as such is a breaking up of undifferentiated flux into regular intervals. The Apollonian places emphasis on the even division of rhythm, on a wave-like beat. The Dionysian is linked to the use of stress that allows rhythm to be felt much more viscerally — to become danceable, to approximate the ancient sense of rhythmic flow. 

In my novel, I often work with stress, accentuating the rhythmic meter of my prose with punctuation and italics and deploying repetition at the level of the sentence, the phrase and the word. It’s my way of continuing the lyrical flow I find in the real Nietzsche’s prose. (I discuss the role of music for Nietzsche and in my novel in more detail here.)

I often seek a relentlessness — a fairground careening not dissimilar to The Fall’s 14-minute “And This Day” on Live in Reykjavik. But I want this relentlessness to be broken, too — to be undone by brief hiatuses. That’s the role of ellipses and interruptions between sections. 

Here, I think of Miles Davis’s magnificently funky “Aghata,” on the album of the same name — rapturous, funky, but also smashed into periodic breaks, where we hear the held notes of an organ. The music seethes and boils propulsively — it’s a real bitches’ brew — but it opens periodically into sonic equivalents of vistas — into unbound flux, where relentlessness rests, and, for a few moments, you can close your eyes, before the funk starts up again … 

You mention the epigraph to Nietzsche and the Burbs, which chimes with that of Wittgenstein Jr (“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there”). Both novels concern the necessity of engaging with chaos — a central theme of these novels and the one I’m working on now, Simone Weil. Order is security, structure, pattern — but it can become fixity. Chaos is freshness, novelty, but it can also upset, overflow … The question: how to balance the two in a living form — a “dancing star” (Nietzsche and the Burbs) or in a way of life (Wittgenstein Jr)? How can their dynamic enliven the world in which we live?

In my novel, Wittgenstein’s brother takes his life because he cannot embrace disorder. My Wittgenstein, with the help of his students, learns that the flux of becoming isn’t necessarily to be feared. Sure, he won’t be able to finish his Logik — his masterwork, which was supposed to answer the cosmic order. But that project, as he learns, was ill-conceived. He lets himself embrace friendship and love — and with them, the chance of imbalance, of chaos. Will he be spared the madness that enveloped his brother, or will he find a way to live with what he hitherto feared? 

My Nietzsche also fears madness, which is a kind of chaos of the brain. His band seeks to unleash Dionysian forces in music, opening out the song-form. They admire Can’s Future Days — Damo Suzuki’s feather-light vocalizing; music as mist, as spray, as shimmering expansiveness. They’re lovers of Pauline Oliveros, who lets us hear deep trance, the aum of the universe. 

Nietzsche’s bandmates seek to unbind traditional song structure, surrendering compositional control in a communal and improvisational music practice. But is such surrender too risky for Nietzsche, who might have preferred, like his historical role model, to master chaos through the rhythmic progress from dissonance to consonance — to the production of harmony? Wouldn’t he want to turn chaos into something beautiful and complete, seeking the Heraclitean unity-in-strife of a “dancing star”? 

Lavender-Smith: We’re alternating between referring to “your” Nietzsche and the “historical” Nietzsche. Obviously, anachronism is present in both Wittgenstein Jr and Nietzsche and the Burbs: we read of 21st-century characters named Wittgenstein and Nietzsche who say and write/blog things similar to what the 20th-century Wittgenstein and the 19th-century Nietzsche said and wrote. But there’s something special about the anachronism: the novels recapitulate — and perhaps even enact — the contemporary experience of reading the historical Wittgenstein and the historical Nietzsche. Following the students in your novels as they attempt to come to grips with contemporary life under the influence of these philosophers’ thought isn’t far off from my own experience in reading philosophy. I’ve been reading Foucault on biopolitics in consequence of the current pandemic and US election; like your characters, I find myself looking to philosophical thought I admire with the hope of being led toward a more rigorous conception of how we live and think today, how we might better live and think tomorrow. I’d be interested to hear more about the thinking that went into your decision to “recast” these philosophers in today’s world. Why Nietzsche?

Iyer: Nietzsche never felt he was part of his time — he had been born too early. His philosophy, he believed, belonged to the future — to the “new philosophers” he evokes in Beyond Good and Evil; to the “future nobility” he mentions in The Gay Science

The late Bernard Stiegler agrees: it’s only we, who live more than a hundred years after Nietzsche’s death, for whom his notion of nihilism becomes clear — who can really experience what the “death of God” means. 

For Stiegler, ours is the period of the “apocalypse” of nihilism, in which it is unveiled in a commonly felt despair. This revelation is the result of a civilizational collapse in the sense of possibility — of the very basis of our projects, initiatives and motivation. 

Until recently, according to Stiegler, this despair was concealed by a positivity and can-do-attitude that determined our sense of ourselves. “I can do it all” — this was the premise of the entrepreneurial self at the basis of our “achievement society,” as Byung-Chul Han calls it. But such positivity didn’t last; and the apocalypse of nihilism arrives:

When despair becomes the most common experience, the most widespread, it is no longer possible to ignore the specific questions raised by the death of God, the questions, dare I say, worthy of the death of God.

(“We Have to Become the Quasi-case of Nothing — of Nihil: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler”)

The characters of my novel know all about despair, which is why they are receptive to my Nietzsche’s proposed remedy. He exhorts his bandmates to drive their despair deeper, to really experience their unhappiness — as he puts it, to complete nihilism and, in so doing, overcome it. My Nietzsche tells them to say yes to suburban reality exactly as they find it, in all its dreariness. Even the cruelties of school life are to be embraced and affirmed. This is what inspires the attempt of my teens to achieve amor fati, embracing their suburban fate, through music.

But despite Stiegler’s claims about the relevance of some of Nietzsche’s analyses, there is also real anachronism in reincarnating him in the contemporary world. There’s little knowledge of, or interest in, figures like Nietzsche in the UK — perhaps it is the same in the USA. Philosophical thought of this kind, which is embedded in the spiritual life of the thinker (I’m thinking of Pierre Hadot’s analyses) is no longer part of our culture.

This is why I felt I had to present my Nietzsche in the burbs as a rather ghostly figure. My teen characters already feel themselves to be posthumous. Well, my Nietzsche’s even more dead, if that’s possible. He whispers, rather than sings. When he talks — he’s very reticent — it’s as if from a great distance. He hides himself away; he doesn’t make himself available for friendship. He does drink, but refuses drug-fueled Dionysianism of the others. He never seems really joyful … 

Lavender-Smith: Before writing the Spurious trilogy and teaching creative writing, you studied and taught philosophy, wrote books on Blanchot and articles on a wide range of topics in philosophy. I’m wondering how you conceive of the difference between reading/writing philosophy and reading/writing fiction. I often think of the way Deleuze and Guattari’s distinguish philosophy and art — philosophy creates “concepts”; art creates “sensations” — and I find myself on the lookout for works of philosophy and art, especially fiction, that trouble this distinction. Do you find it worthwhile or possible to think in categorical terms about the nature of reading/writing fiction and the nature of reading/writing philosophy? 

Iyer: Perhaps it’s a question of renegotiating the boundaries between the two — of reflecting on how fiction might be said to think philosophically, and indeed of the philosophical use of fiction. 

In recent years, there has been talk of film being a mode of philosophizing, of thinking, for example, in Robert Sinnerbrink’s recent book on the film director Terrence Malick. This might seem an odd claim — after all, film is a visual narrative art, and doesn’t make arguments or draw conclusions, so it isn’t obviously philosophical according to our usual understanding of the word. But this assumes philosophy must refer to the standards of professional, academic thought — to the framing of arguments, analysis on concepts, articulation of objections, etc. 

Sinnerbrink argues that philosophy should be understood more broadly than that — as a kind of ethical reflection, which might deepen our capacity for imaginative moral experience, even lead to moral transformation. Film — but we can extend Sinnerbrink’s point to encompass all the arts — contributes to human flourishing in this capacity to philosophize in this way.

But the arts, fiction included, are not only about expanding the horizons of ethical meaning and thought. Look what, for example, Beckett’s The Unnamable shows us about selfhood and language. What about the way Woolf helps us rethink time and perception?

You mention Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between philosophy and art. I think of Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca’s suspicion that it remains too schematic since they do not allow artistic practices to constitute modes of research in their own right, and has constituted a network of artists and thinkers engaged in “performance philosophy.” 

Lavender-Smith: You’ve reminded me of John Ó Maoilearca — Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca’s partner — specifically his writing on film and François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy.” Like you, I’m attracted to the possibility of dissolving boundaries between philosophy and fiction; I’m also attracted to Ó Maoilearca’s proposal, via Laruelle, that we rethink their very definitions. In Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image, Ó Maoilearca begins by sympathizing with Andrew Light’s admission in Reel Arguments that Light has sometimes “wished he was a filmmaker rather than a philosopher.” When I read your novels, I often think of film: your characters frequently reference film and your writing borrows conventions from screenwriting. Would you talk about the influence of film on your writing? I also think of Laurelle and non-philosophy when reading your novels, especially the Spurious trilogy. Has Laurelle been an influence?

Iyer: I’m in debt to John Ó Maoilearca’s work for bringing Laruelle’s difficult ideas to life with such clarity. I admit I’m only the barest beginner when it comes to Laruelle, so you’ll have to take what follows with a pinch of salt … 

Looking through the Spurious trilogy just now, I couldn’t find the phrase “non-philosophy,” which I was sure I’d used … But I found a paragraph in a draft of Exodus, which I’d cut in the name of furthering the flow of my prose:

Why does he collaborate with me?, W. wonders. Why does he bother? He’s had to justify it so many times to his philosophical friends, W. says.—“Lars has developed his own legitimate madness,” he’s told them, paraphrasing Char’s poem. There’s a kind of greatness to my idiocy, he’s explained. Lars has discovered another kind of thinking, W.’s said. Non-thinking, that’s what W. calls it. Non-philosophy. But his friends never understand.

For W., Lars embodies a charismatic idiocy, a fascinating madness. Of course, W. spends most of his time in the novels berating Lars for his appetite and obesity (W. is said to eat, by comparison, very delicately), his love of squalor (W., by contrast, lives in a Georgian ship’s captain’s house), his apocalypticism (which altogether lacks W.’s supposedly counterbalancing messianism), his obsession with blogging (not real philosophical labor, apparently), his general hysteria (versus W.’s cool-headed sobriety), his penchant for Jandek and mass culture (instead of an exclusive diet of arthouse films and literature), his allegedly working class background (which W. supposedly shares, although he went to grammar school). 

Yet W. is fascinated by Lars, too — in particular, by his “non-thinking,” which he links to his friend’s former unemployment and low-status warehouse work, to his experience of the everyday as “the infinite wearing away.” Lars’s greatness, for W., lies in his position as an outsider thinker, who, like Deleuze’s figure of the idiot, is capable of “counter-thoughts,” questioning abstract, rational truths and the power of established order. 

Ó Maoilearca reminds us of Laruelle’s suspicion of this elevation of the idiot. Deleuze, according to Laruelle, retains the usual hierarchy, placing the philosopher higher than the “counter-thinker.” Sure, Deleuze might claim that the idiot is able to turn “the absurd into the highest power of thought,” but it still takes a philosopher to make this claim on the idiot’s behalf. 

This confirms what, for Laruelle, is an authoritarianism built into philosophy itself. In truth, “the philosopher does not really want idiocy.” Deleuze would never let himself really think like an idiot or write a truly idiotic philosophy. As Ó Maoilearca explains, Laruelle looks instead for a “transcendental idiot” who is not merely a philosopher’s stooge.

Is the Lars of the novels such a “transcendental idiot”? W. associates him with the non-logos that exceeds the order and sense of the philosophical logos, disclosing it as merely a restricted economy within a larger chaotic field. Lars is an outsider thinker, perhaps even an antiphilosopher, and is therefore immune to the usual temptations of the academic: careerism, selling out, writing student-friendly textbooks, etc. 

But perhaps we can understand W. to be assuming what, for Laruelle, is the typical position of the philosopher by trying to master Lars’s idiocy, seeking to translate Lars’s non-thought into philosophical thought, Lars’s non-logos into the philosophical logos. That’s the ambition of their Dogma movement. 

Of course, to complicate matters, W. does this in a book written by Lars, and in a literary and not a philosophical work. In so doing, is Lars fighting back? Is this Lars’s literary attempt at mastery? Is Lars trying to translate philosophical thought into a literary non-thought?

W.’s dream in the trilogy to allow Lars’s non-thinking to infuse his own thought with new life, to let idiocy rejuvenate the old verities and to give non-philosophy its philosophical head. He dreams their movement, Dogma, will combine his philosophy with Lars’s non-philosophy and lead to an entirely new form of thinking. 

But what of Lars’s dream, this blogger who has published literary books about his friend? What is the relationship of Lars’s novel Dogma, which narrates the rise and fall of this movement, to W.’s dreamed-of thought revolution? And where do stand with respect to Dogma as the Lars who is its real author?

Is the Lars of the novel W.’s stooge? Or is W. Lars’s? Which one’s the idiot? And where do stand — the “real” Lars? Is literary writing philosophy’s stooge in my work? Or is it the other way round? These questions are performed in the trilogy by means of literary writing and the philosophical (or non-philosophical) manner of thinking that belongs to it.

Questions for future exploration: what would non-literary writing look like, in Laruellean terms? What would the relationship be between such a writing and the post-literary writing I call for in my Manifesto? … 

You ask me about film. Yes, film is indeed a constant concern of my characters, never more so than in the novel I’m currently writing. Simone Weil is based on the life of the philosopher, but set, like Nietzsche and the Burbs and Wittgenstein Jr, in the present. One character, Ismail (named after a character in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander) is a would-be film-philosopher, a PhD student, intent on making a film that does what only film can do. 

At first, Ismail tries to ape avant-gardism, to the derision of his friends. He moves on to remaking scenes from Tarkovsky and Malick films, pastiching the art-film and foregrounding its anachronism. Finally, under the influence of Jonas Mekas, he decides to work with fragments of everyday life instead — to film his friends larking about. 

Ismail now embraces his own technical shortcomings, no longer worrying about over- and under-exposure, variable focus, etc. Like Mekas, he wants simply to present his viewers with one epiphany after another, with fragments of paradisiacal life. He’s making a non-film, perhaps … 

As you mention, John Ó Maoilearca has said he’s sometimes wished he was a filmmaker rather than a philosopher. Back in the days before I wrote Spurious, or even started the blog on which it was based, I dreamed of becoming a literary writer. And now I am one … or am I? I’m reminded of the old story: 

Once upon a time, Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about enjoying himself. He didn’t know that he was Chou. Suddenly he awoke and was palpably Chou. He didn’t know whether he were Chou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was Chou.

Maybe I’ll wake up one morning and find myself as the academic philosopher I used to be, dreaming of non-philosophy or non-literature or who knows what … 

Lavender-Smith: Today is the eve of election day here in the U.S. I woke up this morning and found myself behaving in the manner of the MFA graduate student I used to be, cuddling an empty bottle of bourbon and Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born

Lately I’ve found myself yearning for transformation on the order of transcendence. Characters in your novels yearn for transcendence, as well, and yet so many recent philosophers insist on immanence as a frame for transformation. Nietzsche and Deleuze address the problem of maintaining this immanent frame by offering new solutions: nihilism must be “overcome” (Nietzsche); immanence must be made “pure.” Laruelle points to something like the “system error” of philosophy—but even in Laruelle I sense the same sort of one-upmanship that seems to persist throughout the history of Western philosophy: There’s a problem with past philosophers’ systemization of life and thought—and I’m going to solve it. Also like the characters in your novels, I sometimes find the so-called “theological turn” in philosophy appealing. I’m thinking of Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of perceiving “a trace of divinity in the face of the Other.” I’m also thinking of friends, including the friends in your novel.

There’s this beautiful movement at the end of Nietzsche and the Burbs that finds the group of friends taking LSD and heading out into woods together. Preceding their trip, Art makes an off-hand reference to neuroplasticity: “We’re going to remake our brains—collectively. The brain is plastic, man—it’s plastic.” And during the trip, Art suggests that the friends might become “spiritual terrorists … joyful terrorists.” You speak above of “the descent, the morning after … the vague nihilistic desire to say no to the world” that follows such an experience, but I’d like to believe that the brains of these characters are indeed plastic enough to be remade according to the terms of a Levinasian phenomenology: a revelation of the Other as the “primordial phenomenon of gentleness,” a perception of one’s “infinite responsibility” for the Other. Am I being naïve in my desire to sympathize with Art? Does the final movement of Nietzsche and the Burbs depict the friends’ approach toward an active and affirmative nihilism?

Iyer: Now we get to the heart of the matter. I waver on the question of the relationship between transcendence and immanence. Sometimes I’d like to say I’m a good immanentist, like so many recent philosophers. But sometimes I feel a notion of transcendence is indispensable.

Let me explain. The teen characters of my novel are the equivalent of the “higher men” of the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra who, although creative and ambitious, have succumbed to various temptations which prevent them from affirming the suburban world in which they live as immanently worthwhile. 

My character Art, for example, mishmashes scraps of older religions — from supposed Tantric Buddhism, ascetic anti-worldly Christianity, Gnosticism and pagan Earth-worship into an uneasy whole. Merv builds Minecraft cock-palaces in his bedroom and reads Anne Frank. Paula yearns to exit the suburbs for a queer bohemia. Chandra simply wants to destroy everything. 

For my Nietzsche, Art and the other teens should affirm their suburban reality just as it is, in its immanent plenitude and autonomy, without attempting to distract themselves from it. They should really experience their suburban despair, giving nihilism its head, thereby allowing it to be completed and possibly overcome.

My Nietzsche undertakes his own attempt to transfigure the suburbs, recording his experiences on his blog. He notes that the suburbs seem to slip out of phase with themselves, to double up. His psychogeography of the burbs shows him how their transparency, even their insignificance, can grow opaque, thick. He discovers a kind of temporal lag or slowness which means the suburbs never quite catch up with themselves, and a spatial sprawl that can never be quite contained.

You mention Levinas, who was a close friend of the thinker and writer Maurice Blanchot. They both develop the idea of what they call the “there is,” a primordial chaos that lurks “behind” the ordered world of particulars. Levinas does so philosophically, and Blanchot does so in his fiction and in his literary criticism. I understand the double or image of the suburbs as exactly this “there is.” 

For both thinkers, this “density of the void” (Levinas), this “night without truth” (Blanchot) is a constant threat to order and intelligibility. Our world is fragile; we cannot depend upon the distinctions and limits that structure our experience. 

Levinas and Blanchot differ on the significance of the “there is.” Levinas fears it, arguing that only the relation to the other person can save us from the truth of immanence, thereby grounding our experience and opening up an ordered and intelligible world. Only the transcendent relation to the other person — “the primordial phenomenon of gentleness” — will allow us to push the “there is” to the edges of our experience. 

Blanchot is more equivocal about the “there is,” embracing its impersonality in his accounts of literary creativity and in his literary writing itself. For him, it is experienced through a loss of agency, a movement from the first person “I” to the anonymous third person. This experience — if it can be called such — is the condition of the possibility of literary authorship, and can be made to echo in literary language itself. (Blanchot will also suggest that the relation to the other person can also be understood in terms of the “there is” — a difficult claim I’ve sought to understand in my philosophical work.)

No idea in literature and philosophy has been more suggestive to me than the “there is” as it is encountered in Levinas and Blanchot — in a philosopher and in a literary writer (there’s the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy again!). It lies at the heart of my account of “non-thinking” in the Spurious trilogy, and of the relationship between W. and Lars. 

I first came across the work of Blanchot after I left university, living in the same suburbs as my characters. I had graduated into a recession, work was sporadic and I spent much of my time in Reading University Library, a few miles from my home, which was open to anyone, and gave me my first sustained contact with continental philosophy. I happened upon Blanchot’s famous “Primal Scene” in a book by Hélène Cixous, in which he describes an experience of the “there is” when a young boy grows weary and looks up at the sky.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein — so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.

I was persuaded at once that it pointed to something fundamental in suburban life — in my suburban life … 

I often dream of finding myself back in the suburbs, back before I received my PhD scholarship to pursue my studies in continental philosophy — before I could return to Manchester and leave the suburbs behind. And I dream of the strange expansiveness of the suburbs too — of their very indefiniteness, the way they seem to sprawl forever.

I used to go cycling under the white skies, and air felt thick and heavy. But I could never leave the menace behind — that “eternullity,” as Blanchot calls it; that “infinite wearing away.”

It is this “eternullity” that is, I think, so difficult to affirm. What would have happened if I’d never found my way into Reading University Library, if I’d never discovered continental philosophy, if I’d never won my scholarship and moved away? 

There is, I think, another, ghostly life of mine that I’d never have the strength to affirm, in which I would have stayed stranded in those afternoons, alone with the “infinite wearing away” that belonged to them. (In the Spurious novels, W. explicitly admires Lars for his endurance of “eternullity” in long periods of unemployment; this, for W., is the source of Lars’s “non-thinking.”) Perhaps there can be a kind of beatitude of the suburbs as they give unto the void. Blanchot hints that this might be the case in his depiction of the “primal scene.” But there is danger, too. Too much nothingness can drive you mad.

My point is that my Nietzsche’s affirmation of the suburbs would include too much. He undergoes his own version of the “primal scene,” where he has a vision similar to that of Blanchot’s child. This is what leads him to want to say yes to the immanence of the suburbs as such, just as they are. But it is very difficult to affirm the “infinite wearing away,” because there is the risk of dissolution in the very anonymity of the “there is.” No wonder my Nietzsche ends up in a locked ward … 

Levinas tells us we can hold the “there is” at bay only through our transcendent relation to the other person. Perhaps he is right, and that such a relation might have saved my Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s close only to his girlfriend, Lou, and when he loses her, he loses his purchase on the world. Nothingness comes to claim him. 

My other characters are not so unfortunate. They have each other. Friendship always saves people in my work. So long as you can say, “this is the end” to someone, it is not the end. Even the “there is” is endurable in company. 

You ask me about the status of the characters’ ecstatic experience at the end of the novel. They’ve taken LSD. They’re high as kites, and full of wild plans for the future.

The anthropologist Victor Turner developed a fascinating notion of communitas, a radically egalitarian, non-hierarchical community of “associative friendship.” Communitas, Turner explains, can never last; its liberatory joy must inevitably give way to a restoration of order. But, for a time, a rapturous holiday from “societas” was possible — a vacation from familiar social bonds and roles, the usual hierarchies. Communitas, lived anarchy, might well be understood as temporary overcoming of nihilism — albeit one that can never be definitively completed.

This takes us back to the apocalyptic laughter with which I began our interview. Filled with such laughter, communitas might become a form of life akin to the “dancing star” that Nietzsche invokes. Sure, farcical life awaits — there will be hangovers the next morning, as well as the consolations of black humor. But the joy of communitas might renew societas, changing the way we live on the inevitable day after. This would be the “plasticity” you mention, which might lead us to a new ethos, akin, perhaps, to what the late Mark Fisher called “acid communism.”

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December 8th, 2020 / 11:04 am

Guided Meditation 2: The Inner Crystal Zone

*As, always, read gently, with contemplative pauses between each paragraph.*

In this guided meditation, I will guide you into your inner crystal zone.

It’s me, Dan, again. I apologize, but Charlene is still at home with her anxiety. She hopes to be back as soon as she is able.

She sends you her love, as fraught as it may be right now.

Charlene wanted me to remind you that it is ok for love to be tinged with anxiety.

Ok.

The inner crystal zone.

Let’s discover our inner crystal zones.

I’ve never personally been to my inner crystal zone, but I know how to get there. You must trust me. Charlene told me the way.

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December 1st, 2020 / 11:49 am

KALEIDOSCOPED: submissions open until 12/01

In times of uncertain endings, here’s a new journal who craves it. Full submission guidelines at kaleidoscopedmag.com.

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November 16th, 2020 / 12:13 pm

MUTE FEMALE FINCHES: a satire by Stephen Ira



Dramatis Personae:
LOU SULLIVAN was a
gay trans activist
who passed away
in 1991

ANDREW SULLIVAN is an
English-born American author
editor and blogger

DAVID TOMLINSON was
best known as Mr. Banks
in Mary Poppins (1961)


Special Thanks:
George Michael





(Lights up on LOU SULLIVAN, alone, impassioned.)


LOU SULLIVAN:
I feel so unsure!
As I take your hand, and lead you to the dance floor.


(The smoke of dry ice is general.)


LOU SULLIVAN:
As the music dies! Something in your eyes!
calls to mind a silver screen
and all
its sad
goodbyes!

(Some smoke, stage left, clears, revealing ANDREW SULLIVAN, who is sitting down.)


ANDREW SULLIVAN:
It is possible to tell who has won a tennis contest not by watching the game, but by monitoring testosterone-filled saliva samples throughout.


LOU SULLIVAN:
So I’m never gonna dance again!
Guilty feet have got no rhythm!
Though it’s easy to pretend,
I know you’re not a fool!


ANDREW SULLIVAN:
I have always tended to bury or redirect my rage. I once thought this an inescapable part of my personality. It turns out I was wrong.


(LOU SULLIVAN is becoming visibly upset at these interruptions.)


ANDREW SULLIVAN: Other scientists theorizing that it was—


(LOU SULLIVAN retrieves a large net from a bag)


ANDREW SULLIVAN: —testosterone that enabled the male zebra finches to sing—


(LOU SULLIVAN creeping up on him)


ANDREW SULLIVAN: —injected mute female finches with testosterone—


(LOU SULLIVAN catches ANDREW SULLIVAN first try)

ANDREW SULLIVAN:
(Frustrated, from within the bag, but not to be silenced:)
Sure enough,
the females sang.

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October 27th, 2020 / 12:43 pm