This is the Ritual Page 10

  I thought hard on the course of that long, not to say interminable walk. I decided it was foolish to put myself under the impossible obligation of reading the entire nineteenth century before writing about Nietzsche – better to launch headlong into the writing itself, hurl myself at the project with a warlike and fearless mentality. (The image in my mind, for better or worse, was of kamikaze pilots slamming into an iceberg.) In the grip of these thoughts, while traversing the Heath for perhaps the eighth or ninth time as the sunny afternoon gave way to an overcast and chilly evening, I found myself reflecting on my first encounter with Nietzsche, more than a decade earlier. I had discovered Nietzsche’s work in a cubicle in the men’s toilets in the Dublin Mail Centre, a colossal, grey building in a business park in Clondalkin, where I worked for three awful years starting when I was nineteen, a period when I was dangerously depressed, impervious to all but the most experimental of medications. I hated the place, hated the people, hated myself for being there. The DMC felt to me like a concentration camp or a prison colony out of dystopian science fiction. The incessant noise of the mail-sorting machines made conversation impossible, which was just as well, considering that the workers who’d manned the machines for years and decades were such mindless, half-demented cretins. Bitter and resentful of everything, I calculated that, for at least an hour during each of my four-hour shifts, I could remove myself unnoticed from the workstations and hide in the toilets, where I was able to read. Reading, I felt, would partly justify my having to be in that horrible building, giving my time to those wretched machines and their wretched human overseers. With the machines screaming outside the toilet doors, I settled in and began reading Nietzsche, getting through The Antichrist, Human, All Too Human, Twilight of the Idols, On the Genealogy of Morals, and half of Thus Spoke Zarathustra over a period of several months. I should have quit the place, but the psychoanalyst I was seeing advised against making any major changes in my outward life, especially ones which would feed into what he saw as my dominant, dangerous tendency: withdrawing from human society into solitude, into silence, into stinking toilet cubicles.

  As I paced across the Heath, I grew more certain that the only hope I had of writing something honest, vital and true about Nietzsche lay in attacking the project in a more personal, urgent, even autobiographical manner – to write in blood, in Nietzsche’s own words. Perhaps, I thought, I should even write about that vile and stinking toilet in the Dublin Mail Centre, in order to discover what that said about Nietzsche, or about the post-Christian epoch more generally, if it said anything at all. It might even be possible, I thought, growing increasingly excited by the idea as I tramped over the Heath, to frame my study of Nietzsche around the image of that stinking toilet, which would speak eloquently to any discerning reader of the death of God, the putrefying carcass of God, not to mention the cauldron of depravity and hate underlying Christian slave morality. The filthy toilet was Christian morality itself, it seemed to me then, tramping across the Heath. I returned to the flat late that evening greatly relieved, with the sense I had finally discovered a way in to my project. I resolved that, as soon as I left London and began my travels in Europe, I would begin writing in blood. I slept soundly that night for what felt like the first time in months.

  A few days after that interminable walk on the Heath, Natasha called to tell me that her mother had died. The illness had developed more rapidly than anyone had anticipated, finally proving fatal. Needless to say, Natasha would now be staying in Russia for considerably longer than she had intended. Towards the end of our conversation, she told me in a low, tired voice that it might make sense if I were to begin my ‘Nietzsche journey’ alone, and she would join me later on, perhaps in Turin.

  At this point, just when it was most crucial for me to save money so that I could get away from the wretched Hampstead flat which had begun to feel like a tomb, or like the inside of my own skull, the philosophy tutoring work I had been relying on inexplicably dried up. Alarmed, I emailed the tutoring agency, but my queries went unanswered. I called the office but everyone I spoke to was vague and evasive, suggesting that responsibility lay elsewhere. The suspicion grew in me that this sudden, drastic diminishment in my employment (admittedly precarious at the best of times) was related to a regrettable and worthless story of mine which had been published a couple of years previously in a scarcely credible online ‘literary journal’. The story concerned a drug dealer who spent his days hovering on the fringes of parks and children’s playgrounds, often masturbating furtively in the bushes, or just squeezing his balls through his trouser pocket. By night he wrote hate-fuelled tracts about ‘redneck hordes’, ‘girly-girls’ and ‘demon queers’, which he posted to Bashar al-Assad, Gerry Adams and Kanye West, neither expecting nor receiving any response. In what I had considered a daring post-modern flourish, I named this hateful and charmless character after myself, though he had nothing in common with me beyond his addiction to salt and vinegar Pringles and an uncontrollable twitch in his left eye. The story, ‘Permanent Erection’, had been written and submitted in a single evening while I was hammered on red wine, and had afforded Raoul and me a night of fantastic cackling. However, as soon as I had sobered up I realised that publishing this story online, and framing it in such a way that the reader might assume it expressed my own true, shameful fantasies, or else was straightforwardly autobiographical, might not have been the wisest of moves. In a series of increasingly frantic emails to the journal’s editor, I attempted to retract the story and have it taken off the internet. None of these emails was even acknowledged. It dawned on me that the online journal had been abandoned after its first issue, and no one was going to bother taking the site down.

  Now that my sole source of income had gone dry, and with Natasha on unpaid leave in Russia, giving no indication as to when she might return (‘we are a close family,’ she muttered frostily over the phone, implicitly criticising my own indifference to family), I realised that it would not be possible to leave London as early as I had hoped. After another long walk on the Heath, I decided there was nothing for it but to hurl myself into my Nietzsche project there and then, in our dingy flat in Hampstead, rather than wait till I got to Turin. Hurl myself into it, I repeated, standing before the mirror or lying in bed in the morning. Hurl myself into it. At first it was a kind of mantra, a declaration of intent and seriousness. Eventually, though, it was just a phrase I repeated to myself whilst doing absolutely nothing. The phrase even began to repeat itself, it seemed to me, of its own accord. This is difficult to explain, and no doubt it indicates nothing so much as my increasingly frayed nervous state during that strange, isolated period, as the summer set in outside my dim, dusty flat up on the fifth floor. But it really did seem to me that the phrase hurl myself into it had taken on a sinister life of its own. Sitting in the flat, immobilised by dread, I would hear the words hurl myself into it bounding through the dusty rooms and cramped hallway, alien and meaningless. And, whenever I needed to leave the flat to buy more coffee and instant noodles, it seemed to me that the phrase would continue to resound up there, repeating itself tirelessly and insanely, regardless of there being no one present to hear it.

  After Natasha had been gone for two months, my fears and insecurities gained such a hold on me that I took to going to bed at night with her red shoes clutched tightly to my chest, under the covers. In truth, I would even have worn them on my hands, or perhaps on my feet, were it not that both my hands and feet were too large for those dainty red shoes, Natasha’s devotion to which I fully understood.

  It was now the middle of summer. Having no job to go to, and with most of my friends out of town, I rarely left the flat at all. The sense of claustrophobia in the flat was surpassed by my fear of the world outside, which had never seemed more hostile and sinister. Crime in London no longer has any motive, I told myself, peering at the skyline through my binoculars. Hooded youths will emerge from the shadows and plunge a knife into your groin, or shatter your bones with iron
bars, or beat you to a coma in a park at night, raping your every orifice, all for no reason whatsoever. This new breed of London thug takes pride in its absence of motive, I reflected; motive is shame to the contemporary London thug, a creature whose thirst for cruelty is without limit. I imagined that the filth and horror of London was a rising tide, and that soon it would rise right up to our fifth-floor flat and pour in through the windows, a black tide of filth and horror, drowning everything.

  Oddly, such morbid and gloomy thoughts as these, while inhibiting me from leaving the flat unless strictly necessary, also had the effect of liberating me from the dread that had prevented me from doing any work at all. Start with one true thing, I told myself in sudden clarity, and the rest would follow. And so it was that, on a bright Tuesday afternoon, with the sound of children’s laughter reaching me from the courtyard, I wrote the following sentence:

  Chief among Nietzsche’s virtues is that he is never boring.

  On the one hand, I reflected, looking over the sentence I had just written, this was a stunningly banal point to make. On the other hand, it expressed an important truth. The fact is, I told myself, many of even the very best writers are frequently boring, and not only the philosophers. Take, more or less at random, Don DeLillo, a novelist who I revere: all too often he bores me, I reflected. I sit through his books, enjoying them immensely and yet bored out of my head, tempted at every turn to put the book down and do something less boring, like look through my binoculars at the London skyline. Reading, in fact, is a fundamentally boring activity – which is not to say it isn’t the most satisfying thing you can do with your time. In truth, all I did was read, and it’s all I’ve ever done. It was simply that, with so many writers, you have to trawl through the dull parts – sentences, pages, whole dull chapters – to get the hit you’re after, the flash of gold in the tilted pan. Ideally, a book would offer an experience of consistent, unrelieved fascination, charged and compulsive in every sentence. Nietzsche, far too impatient himself to permit a moment’s boredom, offers precisely this ideal, book after book of it, I reflected. Reading him is an unadulterated hit, with nothing mediating between the reader and the ecstasy of pure idea. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is itself a strategy against boredom. He knew that reading was boring, and that bad books constituted a grave offence, so he was insistent on not adding to the deluge of books that should never have been written, let alone read. Towards the end, I recalled, he had given up reading almost completely, preferring to walk in the hills and mountains around Turin, by the lakes, given over to the ravishment of his senses and the dance of his mind. Having reflected thus for several minutes, I wrote another sentence:

  Reading Nietzsche is like smoking crack – an unadulterated hit.

  After writing this second sentence I felt good enough to take a walk on the Heath. While ascending Parliament Hill, a forest of cranes stretched across the far horizon, it began to seem to me that, in writing about Nietzsche, I was really writing about boredom, confronting the problem of boredom. All activities are boring, I thought then, because being conscious is boring, and although reading is boring too, it is less boring than all other activities. Consciousness, that was the real problem. To be conscious is to be bored, to seek distraction, and reading is among the least boring, most distracting of all boring activities. That is why I do it, and why I don’t bother doing anything else, if I can help it, I told myself.

  I returned to the flat and, too exhausted to work any more that day, stared at the window till the sun had gone down and it was necessary to stand up and turn on the lamp. Glancing in the mirror before going to bed, I was surprised to find that, without having noticed, I had fallen into a state of what can only be described as severe neglect. Not only did I look dishevelled, as was to be expected, but I looked like an old man. And not only that – I also looked demented. I looked like a demented old man, a demented old tramp of a man, the kind of person who should not be let near children nor vested with any responsibility whatsoever. My hair, which had been slowly going grey since my mid-twenties (the result, I was told, of a vitamin deficiency I had never bothered to learn about or rectify), had massively accelerated its process of greying, so that overnight, it seemed, I no longer had a head of black hair streaked with grey, but a head of grey hair flecked with little veins of black, tiny pockets of resistance mopped up by a merciless occupying force. The skin beneath my eyeballs sagged like that of a man twice my age. On the whole, I resembled nothing so much as a wilting plant, left in a pot by a window not facing the sun.

  The following morning, after a good sleep, and heartened that I had finally made a start on my study of Nietzsche, even if I had written only two sentences, I arose early and went to buy the makings of a decent breakfast. It was a warm day, and I made a point of lingering for a moment at the grocer’s counter, issuing what I intended to be a casual remark about the weather. Having eaten breakfast, I shaved carefully, and combed my hair in such a way that the grey did not seem so overwhelming as it had the night before. I made myself a strong, very sugary coffee. In the living room I opened the window to let in some air, and sat down at my desk with sunlight streaming all around, to email Natasha. I told her I hoped she was doing well, and that her family was holding together in this very difficult time. I gently suggested she might call or email me soon, the fact being that I hadn’t heard from her in quite a while, though of course that was because she was stricken with grief and not thinking about phone calls or emails to a distant boyfriend. I made a jocular reference to her red shoes. Then I moved on to telling her about the development of my thoughts regarding my study of Nietzsche, hinting at significant progress already made. I explained my recent intuition that the core of my project was no longer Nietzsche himself, but boredom, the existential problem of boredom, as I put it. Nietzsche was merely the platform from which I could launch this enquiry, this meditation on boredom. Then again, I wrote, sipping my coffee, it was entirely possible that Nietzsche was the backbone of a more ambitious and expansive work that would meditate not only on boredom, but on the myriad existential quandaries brought to light by the experience of reading Nietzsche, of which boredom was only one. If this is the case, I must never stray from Nietzsche, I typed with sudden vehemence. Nietzsche is the prism through which I will analyse the human situation in all its multifarious components. I must never stray from Nietzsche.

  I pressed ‘send’, then got up to make another coffee.

  Days passed and I waited for Natasha to reply to my email, or to phone me, but she did neither. I tried calling her Russian number but there was no answer. Days drew out into weeks, time unmarked, indistinguishable time. I spent many hours sitting in the chair, more or less at peace now, contemplating Nietzsche and the study I would one day write of him. The work itself had stalled; I no longer wrote, only reflected, and reread the opening pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which I considered the essential Nietzschean passage. I myself was ‘the last man’; I understood that now. Mostly I read nothing, sitting in my chair in silence, whole days passing. My fears had dispersed. I would write my book on Nietzsche eventually, and even if I didn’t, somehow that was OK too, because I was living the book, encountering Nietzsche in a manner which went beyond literature. I knew I would never make it to Turin. I thought often of the filthy and stinking toilet in the Dublin Mail Centre where I had first read Nietzsche; I wondered if it was still in use, whether some earnest, anguished young man was sitting in there at that very moment, discovering the awe and terror of Nietzsche, of a world which was drifting away from all suns, falling as through an infinite nothing.

  Summer ended. I had stopped washing the dishes. It was over a month and a half since Natasha’s last email, and two months since her last phone call. My savings had dwindled and soon I would have to apply for benefits. I no longer read anything at all. One afternoon I opened my laptop and reactivated my Facebook account for the first time in years. I clicked on Natasha’s profile. There, I found a photograph, posted two week
s earlier by someone named Dmitri. The photo was of Natasha, her father and brothers, and several people I did not know, standing in a ballroom at some semi-formal occasion. Everyone in the picture was smiling. Natasha, with an enchanted expression, gazed past the others at this Dmitri, who smiled back at her with a calm, self-assured gaze. Natasha had one hand on her father’s chest, and she was wearing a pair of bright red shoes – brighter and redder than the shoes I had been sleeping with for the past several months. After staring at the photo for some time, I deleted my Facebook account and shut the laptop.

  In the bedroom, it seemed to me that Natasha’s old shoes were no longer as shiny as they had once been, and no longer as red. In fact, it seemed that they were not red at all, and perhaps never had been, but magenta, or wine. I now even recalled, or seemed to recall, hearing Natasha referring to them, not once but several times, as her ‘wine-coloured shoes’.

  Three Writers

  The Glasgow Novels of Malcolm Donnelly

  Growing up in a harsh, working-class area of Glasgow, Malcolm Donnelly turned to reading as a means of escape. From his teens onwards, writing served the same purpose. When he was sober, Malcolm’s widowed father, Angus, felt inadequate to the task of single-handedly raising three boys while working long shifts at the Tennent’s brewery. When drunk, he was no less inadequate, but alcohol dulled his frustration.