This is the Ritual Page 9
When the speed was gone the group got back to drinking, smoking weed and hanging around. The atmosphere seemed to have deteriorated, even when the after-effects of their drug-bender had worn off. Occasionally they ate some half-hearted vegan fare, attempting to quell the sickly heave of their guts. Julian perpetually had the runs, as if something inside him had melted or ruptured. It was like someone was wringing out a filthy towel in his bowels. He didn’t screw with Erika any more. Maybe it was time to move on. But Julian was unable to summon the will to break out of the inertia that hung over the block. He didn’t really care. The insidious thing about depression is that it snuffs out the desire to do anything about it, negates the notion that there’s any compelling reason not to be depressed. He thought he’d been at the squat for five weeks but he couldn’t be sure.
One afternoon Julian got back from the town with two bottles of tequila. Five or six of the punks sat in the glare of the courtyard, drinking straight from the bottle. Erika was even quieter than usual, staring as if into an invisible daytime campfire, sighing every now and then. Sebastian too was silent: he had hardly spoken in days. After a while, he took a deep swig on the bottle and walked away, into the gloom of the building. Someone put on a tape, an Arizona sludge-metal band, the awful sound of empty time, the abysmal truth of the desert, of all existence tumbling in the void. As they sat amid the drone, something made Julian look up: on the rooftop, veiled by the sun’s glare, stood Sebastian. He was gazing down into the courtyard below. Julian used his hand to block the sun, and watched. None of the others had noticed that he was up there. Sebastian stood very still, never once glancing towards the group far beneath him. Then, without prelude, he let himself fall forward, on his knees. He dropped from the rooftop and plummeted past the fourth, third, second floors. There was a thud and a flash of dust and he fused with the concrete. Julian cursed. The others all turned in the same instant. Sebastian had impacted head-first; his top half was flattened into a puddle of swirling human colour. His back half rose out of the fusion in low mounds, like the mesa on the empty expanse of the plains.
Erika and the others wouldn’t accept that Sebastian had killed himself. When, after a couple of days had passed, Julian tried to persuade them that that’s what had happened, they turned on him, hissing that he was scheming and malicious, he thought it was all some fucking game, he should fuck off back to England or anywhere else as long as it was out of their sight. Julian stayed one more night after that. The following morning he gathered his things. On his way out of the squat he took one last look at the patch of concrete where Sebastian had landed, which first the police and then the punks had hosed down. You could still see the blood, a rusty brown smear like a diarrhoea stain. Julian knew it would be there for ever, or at least long after the punks had moved on, or died or grown old, or just walked out into the desert to be felled by the sun. No one was awake to say goodbye when he left.
Anus – Black Sun
I found the video in the small hours, lodged in the murky peripheries of a horrendous porn site, the kind set up by Ukrainian deviants and then abandoned, forgotten, left to fend for itself in the wastelands of cyberspace. A kind of obscene and feral orphan, roaming the void, howling in abjection.
I had come home from a warehouse party and was off my face. I don’t know what kind of craving was in me that night. Restlessly I clicked through a series of conventional porno clips, leaving each one behind after a few seconds. Nothing was enough; I wanted something harder. I clicked on links that led to links that led to links – the infinite nexus of the internet, like the fabled Tora Bora caves that Bin Laden was said to have haunted.
The video I eventually uncovered, I have never forgotten. I clicked the flesh-filled thumbnail to begin streaming, noticing with surprise that the clip lasted forty-three minutes.
On the screen, in a window surrounded by ads so vile I felt soiled whenever my vision strayed to them, there was an anus, in close-up. It did not look dissimilar to the anal close-ups common in standard porn clips. Yet this one did not move. It was not a still image, however: there was a constant, subtle shifting of pixilation, and the low hum of background ambience – someone was filming the anus. My jaws gurning, I gazed uncomprehendingly at the gaping aperture nestled between taut buttocks. It was a pert anus, slightly strained, as if the woman (it was clearly feminine) was on all fours. But that was it. No penetration, no other organs, no agent of pleasure or violation. And no narrative – not even of the ultra-minimal variety favoured by modern pornographers, in which all extraneous details of character, plot and setting are effaced, leaving only the pure event of organ-in-organ-in-motion, and the hyperbolic wails of phantasmagorical desire.
An anus, nothing more.
I tried to skip ahead but the video would not allow it. So, I let it play on, and watched, and waited. Nothing happened. Yet, as I watched, I began to feel a change taking place, not in the image onscreen, but in my perception, in myself. It was akin to the onset of a trance. Devoid of all context, even that of the body to which it belonged, the anus began to assume an abstract quality. It became unmoored from its functionality, from its historicity, from all sense of reference. It was neither arousing nor repulsive. I am tempted to suggest an affinity with Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’. In rapt free-association, I began to see in the anus intimations of a sublime geometry, of astronomy, of black holes, galaxy clusters, the swirl of incipient being-in-the-void which is how I envision the cosmic birth. I saw the sun, the black sun shining on a hazed primordial scene; I saw the solar eye, a god of war and carnage sucking everything into itself and rendering being as non-being, matter as void, darkness as light and light as darkness; I saw the all-seeing eye, the third eye of Shiva, the black core of the earth, the infinite sphere of Pascal’s nightmares, the silent portal wherein each man, in terror, must confront himself. The abyss from which all things arise and to which all things must return.
Twenty-eight minutes had passed. I realised this with some surprise – my subjective sense of time had fallen away. The screen: still no change, no development. Only the serene and gaping anus, and the soothing lull of ambient sound, like closing one’s eyes in an airport. I was awed, and somehow fearful. Scanning myself for the cause of my unease, I realised I was apprehensive that something sudden and monstrous would happen to the anus. I thought of Andy Warhol’s film Empire, in which we see nothing but the Empire State Building, from a static viewpoint, in real-time over the course of many, many hours: there is a celebrated moment in that film when, suddenly, after an immense period of monotony, all the lights in the building are turned on at once – a sublime and whimsical moment, indeed a moment of madness, and the severe freedom of madness. What if some surprise lay ahead in this bizarre, unearthly, and, it had to be said, beautiful video that I was watching? Perhaps the film-maker – the man behind the camera – was a sadist, luring me into a trance of vulnerability before unleashing a sight so horrific, I would be traumatised for ever, left pallid and mumbling, fearful of all sex, all anuses.
I commanded myself to become calm. I would watch the video to the end, come what may. Having resolved thus, I began to relax. And nothing happened – there was no Empire moment. Just an anus on screen, in real-time, close-up. Once more I began to recognise the strange beauty of the film, though I could not re-attain the state of transcendent resonance I had experienced before my anxieties took hold.
After forty-three minutes, the video ended, as abruptly and inexplicably as it had begun. I shut down my laptop and went to bed, no longer in thrall to fevers of drug-inflamed lust. I have since tried to find the video again, but even the degrading website where I saw it eludes me. I suspect it has been deleted; or rather, that it is still there, but invisible now, floating in the cybernetic mists, a kind of ghost-ship.
On Nietzsche
Some time ago, as my twenties drew to a close, I became filled with an overwhelming desire to write a book about Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work had fascinated me since I’d
first read him at age nineteen, exhilarated by the grandeur, strangeness and brilliance of his thought. I can see now that the desire to write a book about Nietzsche disguised a deeper, more personal need: to confront and drive out the sense of total futility that had pervaded my life and thoughts for more than a decade, and had driven me to a despair so chronic and total it was no longer even perceptible. By way of a protracted and intensive engagement with the work of Nietzsche I hoped to determine, once and for all, whether there was hope of ever forging a deeper, more sustaining sense of purpose in a world which, it seemed to me, had lost its vital illusions, its grand hopes and its narrative direction.
Most people who decide to write a book about Nietzsche or any philosopher will probably do so through the university system. And this is what my remaining academic acquaintances urged me to do, one former professor back in Dublin even offering to oversee my doctoral thesis. However, my desire to write about Nietzsche arose alongside another, equally strong desire: to travel, to move, to be elsewhere. I decided I would leave London at the soonest possible moment, in the company of my girlfriend Natasha; I would cram my backpack with books by and about Nietzsche, and work while on the move. Eventually I would stop in some attractive city or town – possibly Turin, where Nietzsche spent his last productive years before collapsing into insanity – and begin refining the notes I’d have made into the first draft of a book.
It was not, however, possible for Natasha and me to leave London immediately. It would take us, Natasha calculated, another four months to save enough money to travel for a year or so, leaving behind the Hampstead flat in which we had both come to feel so trapped. Four months was plenty of time, she said, for me to ‘lay the foundations’ of my book about Nietzsche.
In the meantime, I turned thirty. This was an interesting event. At thirty, for the first time in my life, I began to dwell compulsively on the reality of my own death. This came as a surprise, not to say a shock. I had believed throughout my teens and twenties that I was the kind of person who thought of death a great deal; in fact I had prided myself on it. But I hadn’t really been thinking of death, I saw now; I’d merely been hypothesising, or play-acting. The surprise in genuinely confronting my own mortality was that it had less to do with the future – the coffin I’m bound for – than with the past. Specifically, death was knowing that my twenties – those horny, traumatic years – were gone for ever.
As a consequence of turning thirty and feeling the shadow of my own death fall on me for the first time, I looked in the mirror and said firmly that there was no more time to waste, death had my scent now and I needed to be absolutely ruthless and focused on what I wanted to achieve, which was to write a book about Nietzsche. This newfound sense of urgency at first seemed like a valuable asset and a consolation for the loss of my youth. Before long, however, I realised that it had the effect of inhibiting me from doing what I wanted, from doing anything at all. The sense of urgency was so strong it became indistinguishable from the most crippling anxiety. I was unable to get down to anything other than worry about the hurtling of time and the blooming fortunes of my peers, most of whom had not squandered their twenties in a fog of drink, drugs, obsessive reading and pointless travel, as I had.
Seized by anxiety, I lost the ability to concentrate, or what little I’d had of it to begin with. I was like an empty can, blown all over the place. Though I had spent my life doing little apart from reading – doing little so that I could read – it struck me as a wild presumption and madness to begin writing a book on Nietzsche without having read in their entirety certain other nineteenth-century authors who, although having no direct bearing on Nietzsche, nonetheless constituted the deep background for any serious intellectual endeavour involving a subject from that era. I thought about all the significant nineteenth-century books I still hadn’t read – books which were invariably long and demanding – and the sheer scale of the task inhibited me from reading even one of them. Weeks passed and I read nothing. I just watched YouTube videos or loitered on Twitter, where I saw writers five years younger than me announce the publication of their new books. A few times, unable to bear the internet any longer, I shut down my laptop, took a breath, and actually launched myself into some or other dusty volume. ‘This is it,’ I would tell myself. ‘The anxiety is clearing. A new phase commences, the crisis has passed.’ By the time I’d reached page five, though, I’d have the niggling sense that I was reading the wrong nineteenth-century author, wasting my time on a dispens-able book during a period of great urgency. I shouldn’t be reading Fichte (say) but von Hartmann, not Weber but Spencer. By page ten or fifteen, this niggling sense would rise to an intolerable howling in my skull. Fighting off panic, I would put away Fichte and switch to von Hartmann – only to quickly feel that I should really be reading Stendhal, or Comte, or whoever. By the end of the day I’d be back on Twitter, all literature abandoned, or else I’d call Raoul, my alcoholic friend, to come out and get hammered with me. (I thought of Raoul as my alcoholic friend as a way of denying my own undeniable alcoholism. What’s worse, this is not a revelation that came later on: I knew I was doing it even then, and persisted in doing it.) My mounting anxiety brought with it a heightened need to drink, because only when I was drinking was I able to forget the hurtling weeks, the pile-up of years, and the fact that I wasn’t achieving anything at all. And the less I achieved, the more I drank, and the more I drank the less I was able to achieve, until my life consisted of waking up late, going on Twitter, opening a bottle of wine, and finally calling Raoul, my alcoholic friend – who eventually stopped taking my calls.
I found it easy to give up drinking. I simply replaced one addiction, to alcohol, with another, to caffeine. At the time, I didn’t realise I was performing such a substitution. I would simply tell myself, over and over, that I had stopped drinking, and then knock back my eleventh espresso of the afternoon. Eventually, it did dawn on me that I was addicted – not to caffeine, or even to alcohol; I was addicted to addiction. Without an addiction, my life was arid and pointless. Having an addiction was like having a pet: it was something to worry over and care for, whose essential function was to shield me from the glare of my disengagement and boredom.
During this period, while I was lost in a miasma of caffeine, Natasha needed suddenly to return to Russia because her mother had fallen ill. Though I had never met Natasha’s family, I knew they regarded me as a half-mad and wholly malign influence on their beautiful and intelligent daughter, who surely deserved better, deserved the hand of an oligarch or a media sorcerer, not the squalid Hampstead flat of an alcoholic, bookish weirdo. Despite Russia’s luminous literary past, the modern Russian hates and abhors books. There is only one thing that the modern Russian hates and abhors more than he hates and abhors books, and that is the people who read them. Russia’s luminous literary past, as far as the modern Russian is concerned, belongs in the past.
For several days before and after Natasha left for Russia, I was beset by fears that she would not return to London, or else that she would be unfaithful to me during her time away. Natasha had never done anything to warrant this latter suspicion: my insecurities, in truth, stemmed from an infidelity of my own, committed during the vaguely defined beginning of our relationship, when the parameters had not yet been clearly established, or so I had told myself. Even now, four years on, I worried about the slow, secret evolution of this betrayal in Natasha’s innermost heart and thoughts, despite her claim to have forgiven me, and the consequences it might yet hatch, specifically revenge or abandonment.
When Natasha left I looked around our flat, trying to tell myself that she would surely return to London because so many of her possessions were still here. These included her cherished red shoes, the ones her father had bought her as a gift when they had spent Christmas on the French Riviera two years previously, and which she had grown attached to in a manner I privately considered darkly Freudian. Those shoes were a guarantee that Natasha would indeed return.
Now, though, with Natasha away in Moscow and a great deal of time on my hands, I could do little but sit in the living room of our Hampstead flat up on the fifth floor, gazing at the wall or the window, immobilised by dread at the scale of the task I had set for myself, and my feelings of utter inadequacy before it. Not only did the authors on my list of background reading remain unread, but every day the list expanded as I thought of more and more authors who, if I were not to read them, would be unforgivable omissions from anything that called itself a serious book about Nietzsche. Soon, it began to seem as if, in order to write as much as a single credible page about Nietzsche, I would have to read (or reread) the whole of the nineteenth century – and much of the eighteenth, twentieth and even seventeenth centuries as well.
One midweek afternoon I took myself out to Hampstead Heath for a long walk that I hoped would revive my spirits and infuse me with the vitality of the approaching summer. And, out on the Heath, I did feel better – for about seven minutes. Then, without discernible reason, gloom and anxiety overcame me yet again. Roaming on the Heath like King Lear, I felt like blowing my own head off, or fleeing to Bangkok or Vientiane, where I would book myself into a cheap room and slowly drink myself to death, pausing only to fuck whores and write bitter, sarcastic letters to the great public figures of our age, blaming them for everything. Attempting to shake off these oppressive feelings and shady thoughts, I walked for hours on the Heath, pacing from one end to the other, again and again across its vast and undulating surface, by varying and convoluted routes. Had my pacing been witnessed from the air and then graphed on to a map, it seems to me now, the result would have resembled the last work of a depraved Viennese painter before he shot himself in the face.