those were the reasons, and that was New York
In those days it was not uncommon to hear how such and such a person who upon announcing they were going out for cigarettes saying, ‘see you later’, then went out, and didn’t come back. It was precisely the casual lightness of the words, ‘see you later’, that began its work upon those left behind, becoming both the source of an ever deepening sense of grievance and the recurrent trigger for endless rounds of recrimination. The world divides between those who go and those who stay. There are those, feeling their integrity so compromised by the run of recent events bringing them to /this/ place of contradiction with their belonging that they are seized by that all too familiar and ready made compulsion to start again. And there are those, confronted by the same complexity, who are driven by the thought that they might retrieve something from the conflagration.
We might ask ourselves a second question, ‘where should the point be located?’ when we ask ourselves the question, ‘what is the point of this?’ The first question raises the matter of the relative worth of continuing in the same way when set against /not continuing/. It is a question that might also be set in terms of relative losses. Which of them, of the ones who leave or the ones who stay, are most lost to the world? Those who stay, are lost in the other’s leaving. Those who go, are lost from the others’ staying. Some are lost in their own going. Some are lost in their own not going. The line drawn through families by inscrutable acts of self-disappearance mark a decisive break between routine of the home world and the fragmentation that follows. The line is as abrupt as it is trivial and as random as it is absolute - if there is a deeper, structural logic to such events then this is expressed through, but not by, those involved. We don’t possess nor direct our actions, nor our reactions - and even our later rationalisations are reheated truths from elsewhere. We have always performed the scripted economic dissolution of family ties as if it was something personal.
From within the individual’s behavioural repertoire as constrained by industrial routine, welfare institutions and the integrated relations of cultural convention, all events are experienced as severance and separation. Control society conditions its members to suspect the unfamiliar as potentially threatening and so vulnerable emotionality is withheld from encounters with the unprecedented and is instead re-reinvested in over-determined separations, a process which quickly consigns events to the past from where they are metabolised as nostalgic recall, /on this day, ten years ago/. Everyone says goodbye; fatality is everywhere. Routinised clock time, in which children are interrupted by what comes next, structures life as an eternally recurring goodbye: now is the time to wake, now is the time to eat, now is the time to go to school, now is the time to play, now is the time to wash, now is the time to sleep. The child perpetually torn from a state of immersion and thrown into the abstract structure of the routinised day learns how subjective agency is identical to preemptive departure. Only in anticipating the end of a moment, and by enforcing it through an abrupt /goodbye, I must be going/ may the individual participate in society as an agent of control.
The one who leaves the others behind is more agent than victim, no accident has befallen them, or rather, they enact the accident that befalls those they abandon. On the way to buy cigarettes, maybe they arrived at the corner shop but then kept walking. Maybe they had thought about it, fantasised it, planned it, and then found themselves following through on it, without giving it a thought, just as if it was another rehearsal - /cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira/. They assert control of their world by exiting it, they act upon those around them by disappearing. This most mysterious part of the story, the missing person’s motive, is not a mystery to you. You were one of them, you also went missing. You also said, ‘see you later’.
It was the first day of a new school term. You got on the bus, You got off the bus. You said you’d catch the others up. You said, you had something to do first. You walked to the train station, you bought a card, wrote goodbye on it, addressed it to your family, posted it on the platform, and took the next train into anonymity. As the station fell away from the moving train you thought you were leaving behind everything of your life up to that point. You were beginning again.
Look! There you are, in the moment of drawing a line under the past in the most abrupt and decisive manner you could then imagine. In one gesture, you are ridding yourself of the burden of who you think you are obliged to be. You are released and relieved from continuing along the same path, just as others might cut into their own flesh so as to interrupt with the flowing of their blood, the endless flowing of ever the same problems, and in cutting become the cut from which they emerge into the world as separate individuals. There is, in your life, a definitive break, the enactment of a before and an after. You now inhabit the after, you are open, or you think you are open, to what comes next. That is what it is like to seize control, and to think, ‘I’m doing it. I’m really doing it.’
In the months leading to that day, you had reached the conclusion, and again you think now you were mistaken in this, that you could not stay, that you had no choice but to leave, and somehow change the circumstances of your life. You were certainly no James Dean but that sort of thing, all those ‘you’re tearing me apart’ declarations were still resounding in the world around you. You had taken to heart the widely broadcast message that nobody had a chance of /getting out of this alive/. You were still only a child but you had fully interiorised the end of the world as if it had already happened. That’s what Cold War meant - an inevitable end followed by the inexorable working out of what leads to it. And at the personal scale too, certainty of outcome combined similarly with uncertainty of process - redundancy was in the very air, everyone was to be replaced, everyone was being cast out, and you were to be replaced too, not by someone but by nothing, so you decided to preempt it, and you replaced yourself, you put nothing where you had been. ‘One acted by fleeing before the force of that which one could not oppose or otherwise influence.’
You thought you were already finished, you sensed everything was wrong. That is what a child is, the sense of not being a child. And your subsequent life has only served to realise this early intuition, by attaching destiny to a definite history of life events. You were known in your world, but you thought you were known wrongly. And when we talk of being known, we really mean your intuition of the right to being loved. You did not think, and could not think, because that would be intolerable, that others knew you rightly, that you were exactly what they thought you were and they knew you better than you knew yourself. It was intolerable back then, at that stage of life, to contemplate the thought that you were loved precisely to the measure that you deserved. The point in the question, ‘what’s the point in going on?’ is to increase your tolerance to the measure at which you are actually loved, which is always, /not much/. Interpersonal relations are never /about you/ but the reproduction of a web of connectedness directing sufficient energy through every node... submitting to routines, rituals, commitments, obligations, these are the real matter of family life. We reserve our capacity to love for those who have the power to leave us. We desire to bind them to us, to make up with our effort for what is objectively missing, and as if we were making offerings to gods who are so easily distracted. Immortality belongs to those who can forget, neglect, and forsake, and to those who drift from our world. We may only truly love those who escape us.
Your persona had become unbearable and even as you sought to tear it from your /true face/, you only managed to remove strips of it until you resembled a sort of Borgesian map melting into the territory it schematises. Even in the helter-skelter of your flight, you were still just another autobiography, wholly constrained by the conventions of the form. But there are people who live their entire lives on the principle of /wait until dark/ and you are one of them - disaster in common is the only circumstance in which you are able to do well. If you can’t compete in this game, change the rules. What is it to act outside of everyday life, to walk away from your own world, but the ratcheting down of everything to the point of a bare equality for all?
You were aware, at some level, as if observing your own fate from a vantage point outside yourself, of the permanent eclipse of your person, and therefore of the necessity of escaping from behind that suppressive black disc occluding your every move. Even so, if you knew you had to get out, shouldn’t you have got out better? Why did you make such a mess of it? You had nothing useful with you, nothing that would sustain you, no change of clothing, no bedding, no documentation. In your bag were the sandwiches your mother had made for school, your pencil case, copies of The Stranger, and 1984. You had also packed the first volume of HHGTTG.
You went out into the world from a village set in a valley knowing nothing of what lay beyond it but some interiorised metropolitan references. It was not as I walked out one midsummer morning but it was the same walking, and the same valley. You had been conditioned by the extraordinary cultural pessimism of the moment. You were young but it was already too late, you were just beginning but it was already autumn - the culture of protect and survive, the logic of staying in the place you know and where you are known; that culture and that logic which alienated everything familiar. Only those who are already out of position are commanded to stay where they are. The tone of public information propaganda intended to prepare for coming nuclear war also perfectly described the then reality of industrial uncoupling. And to the measure that it is natural to function within the strategy of tension and its proliferating crises in the world, as well as in the home, to that measure, your perpetual vigilance was natural, and the path that you took was perfectly understandable. You had no plan, no sense of orientation and no thought as to how you might make a living once the money in your pocket had run out. How did the runaway survive alone in the city before the ATM and smartphone? Happenstance, and a wing and a prayer.
You had acted like a nestling in panicked exit, its flight feathers not grown. Something startling, some perceived lifeworld-abolishing cataclysm, impelled you to take the one move you were programmed not to take. You suppose, in subsequent rationalisations, you must have assumed that any other life was going to be better than the life you lived. You don’t recall now what this ‘see you later’ indicated of your motive. It was as if you wanted to swim very far out of your depth in the hope that a passing trawler would catch you in its net, but you were determined nonetheless that you would only consent to rescue on strict condition that the crew did not return you to where you came from and set you down on another shore. Throughout your youth, and in later life, you gambled the highest stakes in this way, and gambled most recklessly, on the longest of odds. You habitually gave yourself to chance, put yourself at risk, as if it were the only path leading away from habit. After all, one does not gamble to win but to shed the accumulated past in a moment’s self abandonment to chance. You say, ‘We meet the circumstance of no exit by walking out the door, ‘see you later.’’
You had become vaguely aware of a nebulous cloud of feral children in the bigger cities identified by documentary makers as ‘runaways’. They were a phenomenon of the age, and another subgroup belonging to the growing general set of the missing. Hundreds and thousands of persons unknown abstracted from the particularity of their relationships, finding no prospect there to be themselves, and by one pretext or another, emigrating to another register, and thereby lapsing into always the same fixed, equivalent state - transience, potentiality, vacillation, replacement and redundancy: the bedsitting lonely; the errant husbands; the fugitive wives; the delinquent children; the absent fathers; the sexual non-conformists; the radicalised; the stars in their eyes; the suicides; the de-mobbed; the humiliated and the shamed; the cursed; the addicted; the evicted; the unemployed; the itinerant poor. All these unfixed souls scouring the surface of a world of platforms, a world that they never quite depart, and to which they never quite arrive - crowds in endless seething motion but also stuck at an invisible and uncrossable border:
// Unhappily those marvellous places which are railway stations are also tragic places. We must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed once we have made up our mind to penetrate into the pestiferous cavern through which we may have access to the mystery, into one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross. - Proust //
You imagined the subset of runaways as something like Barrie’s Lost Boys, and you wanted to join them. You remembered the /Double Deckers/. You were familiar with McCartney’s ‘She’s Leaving Home’, and the line, ‘fun is the one thing money can’t buy’ which you knew the world must turn on its head, like an hourglass: fun is the one thing, sooner or later, for which you must pay. Put another sixpence in the slot if you want the world to turn again. You were intuitively aware of the narrative conventions of irrational decision making deployed as a stand-in for true purpose, and so the exercise of impulsivity, the throw of imaginary dice, itself became your motivation. You wanted to become a runaway and so you ran away.
You have fractured memories of that time. Walking a Lincolnshire beach at dusk with no idea of what lay before you. Of sleeping in the station at Liverpool and being chased out with a crowd of others, emerging into the autumn evening, calling, complaining, like murmurating starlings. Their questions and your answers, the riot-ruined, and Britain-in-decline cityscapes. Your thought, as you walked suburban streets, ‘there are people behind those walls, inside their homes’. The end of things was all around. Did you know so and so? No, you didn’t know them. Come back to ours, you can stay with us, at least for a night. It was always dusk. The danger of bedlessness was always an hour away.
As you walked, unwashed, you remember overhearing someone say, ‘the Yorkshire ripper, could be anyone,’ that places you in your moment at least, and then they pointed at you, and said, ‘it could be him’, but you were an altogether other sort of monster, a creature unhomed and moving towards the domain that certain philosophers have named ‘otherwise’.
The interplay between the figure of the monster on the one side, homeless because unprecedented, fashioned from a re-combination of pre-existing body parts, and on the other side, the figure of the mythical being, an archetypical unity, precipitant of needs, which by the mechanism of family resemblance, occupies the thresholds of what we might call form-of-community - all this, the language game, is the stuff of Wittgenstein. Nothing is new under the sun and all that may emerge is your own participation in a staged re-combination of what is already there.
But you didn’t know that then. More dusks, endless forever dusk, as birds in the crisis of their roosting. What did you do in the London days? You suppose you walked. You suppose you were hungry. You remember a streaming cold, but not how you were cold. You still possess the same A to Z. No bed at Centrepoint. Then a hostel but you had to pay and then you slept outside, unable to share a room with a stranger, Australian you think. You bought a sleeping bag and a carry-all in the East End. But towards the end of day, you sought out the gardens and parks not locked at night. You encountered the kindness of the men frequenting those spaces which you now consider must be designed for nothing but such frequentings. Back then, you could not imagine anyone apprehending you: ‘Therefore I cannot consider the look which the Other directs on me as one of the possible manifestations of his objective being; the Other cannot look at me as he looks at the grass.’
You think of Paul Simon’s line, ‘I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.’ The approach of a stranger, and of becoming incorporated into their desires was not something you were able to anticipate until you read Genet and Sartre several years later, at which point you could, as it were, anticipate in retrospect, the other’s inexorability and how you might coalesce as figure in the field of their perception. If you are summoned into the world before the other as a random sum of its necessary hungers, you also discern there the operation of a contingent kindness that for no reason should be staged in some now unnamed London park. Are you ok? Yes. What are you doing? Do not say, nothing, that makes them concerned. Say, ‘I’m waiting for someone.’ Where have you come from. Answer vaguely.
In retrospect, you have transposed that West End square onto Sartre’s Parisian park, and the site for his encounter with the Other which, tellingly, is itself textually situated just before the infamous keyhole of Being and Nothingness. In any case, you must have given a very poor approximation of the ‘come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue.’ And yet also, rehearsing the categories of Sartre’s encounters, you retrieve, perhaps for the last time in your life, that shuddering sense of there being a very real drain at the centre of the anonymous city, ‘what I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I cannot in any case escape from the space in which I am without defense — in short, that I am seen.’
You cannot read that chapter without pouring into its formality the content of your own story. Even as you recall it, you are recalled by it. But aren’t you also to be found in the pomposity of Simon’s lyrics, ‘I do declare’, more like ‘I must confess’, but it strikes you now, in putting away such things, how the nature of what he calls his comfort diverges from the philosophical nature of consolation, just as the function of monsters becomes distinct from that of mythical beings: separation becomes operational at level of project, of practice, of game, of encounter and commitment.
In other words, what is monstrous separates from what is mythical, like what is mad separates from what is foolish - as a marker for the edge of the community. Myth condenses the imaginary, returning as drips and droplets to the world, a radically cooling steam at the left wall of the exterior. On the other hand, what is monstrous is that form given by the world to whatever of the exterior cannot retain form but which must manifest there in the world, at that moment. The madman is possessed by the real, the monster is the real incarnate, whilst the fool is a vessel, a cipher, an agent, for the hidden and musical message of the universe. What we learn from monsters and madmen is to not go there. What we learn from fools and mythical beings is to listen beyond the noise of the workaday. Kings might learn from fools - revolutionaries must heed the warnings of madmen.
The modes of engagement appropriate to the level of the form of life are fixed recursively by archetypical function; it is by this means that experiences are recognised, sorted, categorised, fitted in and consumed. Then, also at the next level of recursion appears the tendency to environmentalise as a process of homing/unhoming, of monstering/mythologising, operating as the means to reproduce the form of community and umwelt - the process itself is processed, set against its limits, turned upon itself and set within another movement. If, with reference to Boethius, consolation is always mythically implicated in a /quid pro quo/ with suffering, that is, as the means by which the answer of consolation may be anticipated and applied pre-formed to the problematic of an irreducible limiting pressure from outside, then Walter Benjamin considers the genealogy of the meaning of comfort as it passes from consoling to wellbeing to, what he calls, /rational convenience/ as a means for engendering the insular, kitsch, repudiation of madness, monsters and the darkness at the edge of town. Comfort blanket. Comfort food. Comfort women.
To take comfort is to flee the register of suffering altogether and, in a state of full abjection, lose oneself in immersive, obliterating, sensuality. The true monsters are already inside, isn’t that the only lesson of life? And they are those figures taking the compulsive form that causes us to respond to their wanting us to want to be them. You can see yourself discoursing with some man at breakfast, you think he was Greek. And how old he must be now. You talk with that confidence particular to precarious young lives, you are rehearsing what you could do, might do, next. How the world opened before you.
And one only encounters the Other’s hearty approbation in such circumstances. The Other, constrained by the game of your otherness, cannot say, ‘go home, your parents will be worried.’ Who would he have to be to offer such advice? The one, or not the one, who wanted to bring this episode to an end and for you to exit his life forever? Better to say, ‘I’m sure you will make it, good luck, good bye.’ All of it, lies and jest. Exchanges and conventions. Within a certain register of bare life, that is all that might be retrieved from it, and although you have since considered the consolation of what it was to extract a bed from your predicament, you only now can make sense of how it was you, in effect, who had become the source of whatever comfort was to be taken there.
You were picked up by the police wandering north out of Lincolnshire, disoriented, deluded, like some later John Clare. You abandoned yourself to detainment in their custody as you have to every force that has snagged or accelerated your happening to be there, in that or another place, in that or another time. It has often seemed that your natural habitat, the place you are most at home, is the antechamber’s temporal eddy. You enjoyed the cell, it made sense to you. You recite Morrissey’s line, ‘I like it here, can I stay.’ Why are you taking my belt? Why are you taking my laces? Ah, the cops observed knowingly, you are reading Orwell - as if it were a sign, and their provincial copshop’s holding cells had played hostelry to an army of all too identifiable youthful literary itinerants. You were brought a fried egg sandwich, a cup of tea.
You spent the night on a blanket-free bunk reading the names and curses inscribed you know not how into the deep and silent wall. The light is not to be turned out. You try to inscribe your initials with your jacket’s zipper. ‘I like it here. I am home at last. Can I stay? Take me on, I can be your captive. Let me be your Jonah, and swallow me down into the belly of your beast. I want to abandon, and be abandoned. Let me be your monk, your hermit, the ghost haunting your ruin. Lock the door behind you - the turning is like a music box’s winding to my ears. Okay, I’ve had enough. What else can you show me? Throw away the key, or hang it on a hook just out of reach of this bent out of shape wire coat hanger. Bring me your books from lost property, and your canteen tea and your canteen eggs. And I shall be your Ben Gunn. Talk to me jovially, as would my gaoler, as would a zoo-keeper, as would a form of life from another dimension, strangely desirous that I should be alone with my own laughter.’
Pay close attention. You gave your real name. Your parents have driven through the night. You do not hug. It’s not like that. You say to them, I am going to be an anarchist. You draw symbols on your clothes. You announce, I am going to grow my hair long. I am going to be vegetarian. These are the gains you extracted. Not much later would come the face covering and the moves with others you made at night. You are interviewed by your village sergeant - when you see he is taking too keen an interest you cease to regale him with your traveller’s tales. Then you read the newspaper article about your disappearance. It is as if you have been caught at the keyhole of being and nothingness. You are shamed. You want to disappear, you are always, in that sense, swirling down the drain of being not missing enough. And the only means of, shall we say, /becoming imperceptible/, is never to talk about it again. You will be returned to school. Someone asks of another, ‘is he the one who went on holiday without telling anyone?’ The true form of the problem that is expressed by one’s motiveless behaviours is enduring the motives that others ascribe to them.
You twist on the hook of your own memory, on the principle of the true confession, you have buried the lie. Are you not now confronted with the falsity of your /do declaring-must confessing/? Should you not reduce yourself further, turning over other rocks? Perhaps you have still not descended deep enough. What is confession anyway but a story of ultimately unsatisfying generosity? ‘One makes a display of piously, humbly, giving more than what is comfortable but it still draws another veil over the miser’s hoard of other secrets and other shames.’ The black occluding disc is your jewel encrusted shell, your Hong Kong umbrella, your book bloc shield - still, your humanity is permanently eclipsed, you waited til dark but you didn’t get away, you only squirmed, retreating like an eel, into further and convoluted darkness. ‘We console ourselves whenever we are unable to bring ourselves to speak on the greater truth, the real truth, by making wretched and fawning sacrifices to other gods and to other truths. We control the fires by setting fires.’
Perhaps you are being too harsh on yourself. After all, the true secret, the traumatic kernel, is but another in an aggregate. There is no single source, no true terrible history, no frightening biographical revelation - Blake’s soul of flea, for all its malignancy, is at its true scale, fleabound. You are composite, and we are all but monsters assembled from the world’s scrap heap of spare parts. We are vulnerable here, embarrassed perhaps, but not shamed, there is no shame. We are resilient elsewhere and functioning. And the pearl-like shame which we hoard to ourselves is just another reaction to one grain set in a universe that is becoming all sand. Who is speaking here? And to whom?
The story that we feel we are impelled to tell at certain junctures in our life is one story. There are others, perhaps conveying other messages, which would be equally /just so/. There is no, shall we say, real true story of one’s real true self. There is no actual continuity from the past to the present. The territory decomposes into the map describing it, and only occasional eroded outcrops, ruins and follies, tors and stacks, remain jutting through it. The decisive factor in selecting material for a story is the demand of the moment in which it is told - and the demand of this moment is that you should become like Zola’s Marthe Mouret, punching yourself in your face as proof of your love of revelation. ‘The function of one’s stories is not to realise the project of adjustment to one’s past at all, it is not about putting things to rest, laying ghosts, or coming to terms with the events of earlier days, but rather, it is a matter of traversing the terrain of the present.’
Our history is the means by which we compose the rationale for what comes next, for changing things, for continuing as we were, for staying or for going. It no doubt serves your purpose today, a purpose that is as yet still somewhat opaque, to present this story in the manner that you have. The black disc has not eclipsed your life. You are the black disc. And your life is the eclipse. The use of what you have recounted, whether it is wholly accurate, or too carefully filtered, is perhaps the means by which you are exploring both the present moment and what form your engagement might take as you seek to pass through it.
Whilst you are driven, fated perhaps, and wholly determined by forces beyond your control as you must ‘make history but not under conditions of your own choosing’, the manner and the means of your implication with the cosmos, is still constrained by the framework of narrative. Freud is helpful here, he tells us he is indifferent as to whether the subject accurately recounts their dreams; the truth of the dreamwork is not a matter of recall, it is not located in the dream itself but in the interpretative work applied to it.
Whether the story the subject tells is entirely invented or tortuously faithful, the presence of unconscious material is invariable. By anticipating and modifying the tells that give us away in the hope of misdirecting the Other’s gaze, we only succeed in amplifying them from traits into signs. At certain junctures, at New Year for example, we attempt to free ourselves, by the resolution to resort to decisive action, from the accretion of complex and unresolvable difficulties that have come to define us. Upon occasion, and very abruptly, we want to be known, and to know ourselves, on other terms. And when we talk of being known, we mean, we desire to be loved /for ourselves/, on our own terms, as if we really were something apart from everything else. More often than not, the struggle for recognition results only in an exhausted falling back onto old habits. We will never be, in the obituarist’s words, ‘much loved.’ We will only ever be loved at the level that sustains the web of relations which sustains us. And perhaps not loved at all but merely permitted, allowed, accepted, tolerated. It is, at some level, intolerable to be tolerated.
You say, your life’s history now appears to you as a series of wide plateaus interrupted by violent eruptions; as long periods of calm resignation punctuated by frenetic moments of rebellion; as a deep quiet forgetting shot through with startlingly vivid insight. There have been moments in your life, which you now see as forming a pattern of their own, where you have been brought to a threshold which you may only cross by bringing everything to a crisis. There are occasions where you have had to carve your way through something that is not even an obstacle just so as to release something else, located elsewhere, that has become tangled in another register. Lacan’s compulsion, ‘to act is to tear its certainty from anxiety; to act is to operate a transfer of anxiety.’ In a similar way, for those who have actively sought to die, death itself is not the objective. Self harming is a heuristic posing as an answer - it is the certainty in action by which an individual may cut across the otherwise insuperable torrent that cuts them off from the other side.
In our everyday life, just as the eye calibrates its aperture relative to the available light, so we seek to calibrate the dimensions of the frame within which the world will encroach upon our sense of self; by altering the frame of our experiences we are able to regulate the rate at which the world impacts upon us. But then, by changing all terms, by making a new frame for our life, we look to force an exit from the intolerable and wholly inescapable present. Our desire is for eclipse, as that is the closest we come to conceiving the emancipatory injunction, /wait until light/.
