Three Accounts of Utopia, III
I am the kind of person for whom intimacy is impossible, the kind of person who can only hope to postpone solitude for very brief periods. I have managed to achieve at a young age the kind of violent humiliation most people don’t arrive at for decades upon decades, having never been any good at the squalid mercenary things you are expected to do to yourself to earn a chance at being loved. I view the experience as good practice. You cannot miss what you never had, and I have been always wanting. By the time I’m old my disappointment will have worn off its sharp edges.
This is what’s going through my head in the crowded, noisy bar where we come sometimes. It stinks of sweat. It’s the kind of place they, the others, go in for—illegal but not very. Just enough to give it an edge. I’m nursing my drink. Somebody’s elbow nudges me in the ribs. Tom.
‘Pretty good, right?’ he says.
Yeah, I say, and down the drink too fast. I’ve spilled some on my shirt.
We step away from the bar. Tom is hectoring me to have more fun. I’m making a token effort. I feel ill. I’m dying, here. We weave through a crowd of swaying, desperate bodies. We reach the table where we’ve been sitting and where we can hope to be I cannot say exactly undisturbed but at least less disturbed, or at least the same amount, having got used to it by now.¹ The others, they move languidly and speak well, I couldn’t tell you their names, I know nobody besides Tom whom I sit down next to. There are nine of us or perhaps ten or eleven.
‘…fact of the matter is that it has to be that way,’ one of the unknowns-to-me is saying, ‘you simply can’t—’
‘Can’t what? Be direct, we’re all on the same page, we all support the cause,’ says another, with an impatient, unfriendly motion.
‘̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶,̶ ‘The Cause, the Cause, that’s all too—’
‘Nebulous.’
‘Yes, nebulous, let’s be direct.’
This is more than the two initial voices, I don’t know any of them except for Tom, and he hasn’t spoken. I don’t possess more than the vaguest notion of what they’re talking about, or I do but would prefer not to. It feels important, in a way that frightens me.
‘What I am saying is,’ this is the first one again, ‘the Cause’—and here he holds out his hands to forestall interruption—‘is sooner or later going to ask more of us than just sitting in this bar talking about it! The Cause is going to ask some blood, sweat, and tears!’
‘He’s² right. We waste our energies on theory when The Cause demands action. How are we to start a revolution without praxis?’
When they say praxis, these serious young men, they mean something violent and conclusive, I know this much. When they say praxis they mean caving someone’s head in, at least I imagine it that way, squeamishly. I who lack the assurance, the capacity for ruthlessness necessitated by the profession, I for whom self-righteous is a bad fit—well, perhaps that’s too charitable an interpretation of my cowardice, but Here I am talking about my failures again instead of telling you the story. I have read some of the big books by the men they worship talk about. They intimidate me, the men they talk about. They are more decisive than I am. I get the feeling they killed and were killed in turn for their words. I sometimes want to do something drastic too, to fire a gun into a crowd on the basis that it is better to have done the thing than not, but when I envisage it I am the acted-through, it is always outside of me, in the life-cycles of civilizations, their bones—this force that will take full possession of me, and make me
The voices come back to me.
‘…says that the fact of resistance itself generates its own praxis, that we are in a situation in which violent struggle is itself absorbed and repurposed by the powers that be and that the best and only thing is to continue to passively resist.’
That’s comforting, I say I think out loud. I am ignored and someone else takes up the task of verbally demolishing the previous.
Tom’s elbow nudges me again.
He says, ‘Let’s go.’ When we are out of earshot he continues, ‘Those guys are getting nowhere.’
We go out into the respectable part of the bar, the part they don’t have to hide from the authorities but which no one really uses, and from there outside. He hands me a cigarette and lights it and I try to smoke. He has never asked me if I smoke.
‘Shit, man, I promise to show you something real and…’ He makes a big expressive gesture of resignation. It’s late but the moon is glowing and I can see him clearly.
I tell him it’s okay. Tom is one for rash decisions, he called and woke me this afternoon insistent that I must get out of my rut and besides that I ought to be more involved. We are very different people, but he has attached himself to me, whatever his reasons. (‘Don’t kill yourself,’ he once told me in a sort of desultory way.) You might say he sees unknowns as something like flipping a coin, maybe you get the good outcome, maybe the bad, whereas I see unknowns as more of a Russian roulette situation, which I suppose you could sum up the same way but it gives you rather a different feeling to say it. He does not shrink from the world as I do, on the contrary his lack of caution alarms me at times.
He repeats, ‘Those guys are getting nowhere.’
I tend to trust Tom, on these things. Tom knows. He has an air of knowing.
Me writing this in the present tense is a lie. Not this but the previous thing and probably all the rest of it after this page. The bar thing happened maybe two weeks ago and I’m just writing about it now. I’m in my room which you wouldn’t want to be here. The start of me writing this diary journal is this:
I’m sitting with my face down on the desk, and thinking there has never been a worse time than this but there will be, and wondering if I can motivate myself to move today. Outside, somebody’s alarm has been going off for four hours with a piercing shriek. The best thing I can think of to do is to lie down on the floor and wait for death to take me. I try to imagine how long it would take for anyone to miss me. Probably too hastily³ I conclude, a long time. So I think before I do that why don’t I write it all down, and that’s what I’m doing now, but the other thing is still a tempting alternative so how long this journal lasts I don’t know.⁴
Which gives you a good enough sense of things and I promise I don’t mean to go on like this, I will try to spare you as many of the words as possible from now on but they get away from me sometimes. Basically I am writing this to give a full account of myself. Exactly the direction of the thing I don’t quite know yet, which seems like an odd thing to write now that I’ve written it but the life in question (mine) lacks direction. What I’m getting at is that this could end up being an indictment of the nation or of me.⁵ Insofar I guess as you have to judge for yourself whether I am a product of myself or of forces beyond myself. Nature–nurture. I could go either way.
I am not being very concise.
In my best moments I am able to distil the thing that I am feeling down to an aphorism or several, make it digestible if not appetizing, and I say write things like, It is resisting all day the desire to crawl back into bed, because there is no light in your days, or Why do I feel like tired houses and shrinking ambition? or It is possible to become addicted to despair, or Self-loathing is your brain trying desperately to assimilate to the world’s opinion of you, or
Which is all well and good but t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶k̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶e̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶f̶a̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶u̶n̶t̶i̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶f̶a̶l̶s̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶g̶n̶a̶n̶c̶y̶,̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶v̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶a̶c̶c̶e̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶r̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶e̶,̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶k̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶s̶a̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶I̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶u̶n̶t̶i̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶h̶o̶p̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶e̶ doesn’t lend itself to a coherent narrative like the one I am hoping to write here, so I guess the b̶e̶s̶t̶ only thing to do is to narrate you some episodes from my life which are hopefully informative of the general texture. Which is what I was trying to do by telling you about the bar. We’ll see.
The next one happens where I work. I have a sort of job, I work in a bookshop, though w̶h̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶k̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶y̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶e̶ not very hard. Sarah is the girl who works there with me.
There she is, twitching and blinking like a beautiful insect. She is increasingly thin; I do not think they feed her much at home. This is me watching her from outside, through the window before I enter for my shift, which is weird. She hasn’t noticed me yet, she’s busy with a customer. When she glances this way I’ll make like I was already on my way inside, but for the longest possible time I like to observe her in the wild, as it were. Before her face drops a little upon seeing me, for which who can blame her really. I can always sense other people’s d̶i̶s̶g̶u̶s̶t̶ disdain but it is not enough to repel me.⁶ I have to try to prolong the moments before I ruin everything.
Which is what I do next.
The subtext of every conversation I’ve had for the past two or three years was Help me, I am so lonely. Sometimes the text.
Sarah glances this way and makes a face I can’t read, which is my cue to enter. I do so, and approach her as the customer leaves, and say, Hello.
She says, ‘Oh, hi!’
This is a more enthusiastic greeting than I usually get. She is bubbling to tell me⁷ something. I wait.
‘I got the job!’
She seems under the impression she ever told me she was looking for a new job.
Not knowing what to say, I say, That’s great! and then unfortunately continue, I wish I could get in somewhere better than this. Well, I don’t. Well, I do. Sometimes. Sorry.
This is the sort of thing I do.
She says, ‘Okay.’
I fold the next thing I intended to say over and over on my tongue imperceptibly tiny and only then at the moment of highest tension let it out, inaudible: — — —
I am still very much in love with Sarah at this point. She walks everywhere with her head down and I sense in that common ground. Much of the time I am supposed to be working I stand around loudly desiring her from a little distance, thinking Oh please tell me I am good, am not too damaged. I am ignoring all the bad signs because I’ve taken them for part and parcel of the whole process, e.g. I have never seen her greatly moved by anything, passively tapping her foot to whatever music permeates the shop, yes, but not greatly moved. One of the possibilities I am trying to ignore is that she is quite tedious. I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶l̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶o̶n̶.̶
She says, ‘What?’
So where are you — the job, that is?
At which point we get to ‘Oh didn’t I tell you?’ and I eventually find out she’s going to one of the Ministries. They’re recruiting new talent a̶f̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶u̶r̶g̶e̶. I should have something to say about all this, but I am mostly just thinking about her leaving and waiting for her to give any indication that she will miss me, that there is anything mutual here. She says she has to go into the backroom and can I take over on the counter for a bit and my heart sinks. But then she touches my arm absent-mindedly which stuns me and drives everything else from my brain even though it is most probably d̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶i̶t̶y̶.̶ ̶I̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶p̶a̶t̶h̶e̶t̶i̶c̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶u̶s̶u̶a̶l̶.̶ not significant.
I take over on the counter, still dazed. Across the street outside figures in red uniforms are going door to door checking for seditious materials. I watch with detached interest. Soon enough they’ll work their way around to us.⁸
The second worst thing about this display is that every customer who comes in here feels the need to comment on it.
Aimless. I’m sorry, the next one will be better, I could do it if it was only, no, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, enough.
My desires are stillborn, they figure out too quickly that they cannot attain their objects. Most days I just sit, because I don’t know what else to do. I fall asleep again four hours after waking. I don’t know how people construct lives for themselves. What does a normal day look like? How do you find friends? Where do you get meaning? I am supposed to be doing something, but I don’t know what or why or how. I try to pass the time by doing some of the things I am meant to be doing. There is always a long list of things you are meant to be doing but can’t because of innate weakness. I spend afternoons browsing job listings on the verge of tears. I send out signals into the void. I make a show of being an active member of the community, of fighting for the Cause. Sometimes I even venture out into the world, but I find that I cannot forgive the multitude their impenetrable distance from myself. It ends up exhausting all my energies to the point where I want nothing more than to return to my room and lock the door and draw the curtains and cocoon myself in the blankets where no light or life can reach.
Nobody wants to help you of course. What they want is to weaponize your resentment.
I sleep all afternoon, sun streaming in through the gaps in the blinds. I wake sweating from two dreams consecutively. In the first dream the stifling blanket takes on various physical forms, human and otherwise, and I feel smothered by the weight of it. In the second it takes on an ambient form, everything is dim and dark, mundane occurrences are coloured over with frustration, the whole world seems to collapse in a wave of minor breakages. I wake under an immense melancholy and cast off the blanket.
This whole business of writing is futile busywork, but I cannot not do it. It is important there should be an account of my actions. Already there isn’t much left. Perhaps broaden the scope? No. I am struggling enough. But one detail: this letter. I don’t know when it got here but I opened it today. I know it’s from my mother by the writing and by the faint perfume scent of the envelope which makes me feel even though it doesn’t say so. What it says is:
You deserve all good things,
and i hope you can get them. xxxx
I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶
It’s difficult. My mother never sends, for example,
Please, please be ok
because she lacks my impulse for melodrama, because in her own way she is confident that I will be, with just a nudge in the right direction.⁹ That there is no need to panic. I think this is what hurts the most. She is the place I come to surrender. S̶h̶e̶’̶s̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ I don’t believe her, but there’s no way to say that. I guess I am saying it now.
I sometimes call my mother crying, desperate, convinced there is nothing else to be done. At these times I always ask her Do you want me to come home? quite aware that it is the wrong question. It is not that she would ever prevent me coming home, not that at all. It is that I always ask her if she wants me home. And she does not. She has a quiet, unshakable optimism, a conviction that it will all come right if I keep at it.
I am inching towards decision.
I’m meeting Tom in a little lane just off the plaza. While I wallow, he is evidently busy with his own schemes. Things have taken a turn since the bar. When I hear from Tom now it is not to drag me out into the world for my own good, it is so that I can hear about his manic plotting. He is convinced something drastic is needed to move things along. I am uneasy about the direction of things, but I have never been able to contradict him.
The day is warm and bright. It’s the place where they stage the big circus shows. As I walk across the plaza, the only sound audible is muzak oozing uncomfortably from a nearby building. Otherwise, the place is empty. There should be riots, but there are only ghosts, is what I would say if I felt more incendiary. Mostly I am a little afraid.
In the little lane I meet Tom and manage to refuse his offer of a cigarette. He is less warm than usual, there is something a little desperate in his look. He asks me if I have heard about the most recent high-profile death. I say I haven’t.
‘They’re killing their own’, he says, ‘indiscriminately. It’s meant to make us afraid.’
I ask him i̶f̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶f̶r̶a̶i̶d̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶y̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶h̶e̶’̶s̶ ̶l̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ what we’re doing here.
‘Picking up the gun.’
He says that if Z is dead, that is good, that is a start, that if they are so interested in self-destructing we must help them, this and other things. While he is explaining the plan¹⁰ my stomach turns, my idle visions return. It isn’t so shocking in the grand scheme of things but I am easily scared. I go in the door in the little alcove with him, despite misgivings.
A small man leers at us for some time in a dingy room while Tom pays him for the gun. I imagine his hands to be slimy but I do not touch his hands or the gun so I don’t know. Tom might be uncomfortable too, but I can never read him. I am glad when we are back out in the light, but he says
‘So, are you on board?’
and this is where my legs give out.
I am passive, not in my head but in my hands, my mind a flurry of thought at all times but opportunities escape me, I idly track their flight while I wait in anxious silence for the opportune moment to call them back. I say
I cannot do this, Tom.
‘What?’
I cannot do this, Tom.
At which the whole thing shatters, Tom says some hard words about necessity, I respond in kind, Tom says he will do it alone, I say Fine, Tom stalks away, the years binding us evaporate, and I am left in desperate silent solitude in the hot humid street.
W̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶
Wake up again face wet, crying in my sleep.
Apologize for shortness of phrase, I tire o̶f̶
Who’s to blame for me?
Most of my dreams are of not-being. Not being what? No, just not-being.
L̶i̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶j̶o̶k̶e̶.̶ ̶H̶a̶,̶ ̶h̶a̶.̶
Shots in the night after I l̶e̶a̶v̶e̶ abandon Tom. I live not far from the plaza. It’s in the news next day. He missed. Who knows where he is now? If prison, I envy him that. The simplifying comfort of absolute limits. I̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶c̶i̶f̶u̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶o̶p̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶a̶t̶t̶i̶t̶u̶d̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶f̶f̶a̶i̶r̶s̶.̶ ̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶d̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶i̶c̶i̶s̶m̶.̶ Stupid. Not as if Tom’s unfreedom will be the restful, unbroken kind. They will make a big show of the trial and I will not be able to not watch the broadcast. That is if I am not an accomplice. Being quietly incapable of misdeed isn’t enough. How far do you have to go with the thing to earn the title accomplice I wonder. Better title than coward. I̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶c̶k̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶o̶r̶ ̶I̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶,̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶n̶t̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶i̶s̶h̶
I am reading the letter again which says
and i hope you can get them
and knowing I cannot.
The alarm still sounds in the street.
Spend rest of afternoon trying to remember the word abjection.
There isn’t any conclusion I can give you beyond stopping the pen.
I̶f̶
1. She tells me not to be as noncommittal as this. ^
2. They are all men except the one woman, whom I haven’t heard speak. I feel faintly ashamed of this, as though it is my fault. She is very aloof. ^
3. This is me trying to be fair to myself because she told me that was all I needed really, to be fair to myself, everyone else is fair to me and I just need to extend the same p̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶i̶t̶y̶ courtesy to myself. ^
4. I’m trying to write myself out of distress, but already it isn’t enough, and eventually I will stop trying to convince myself it is; there will be no other way to dress up the affliction, and nowhere left to run. If you strip away all the artifice from anything like this, you find at the core a suicide note. It is just a matter of how long you can keep writing to put off the deed. I̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶I̶’̶m̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶m̶a̶t̶i̶c̶.̶ ^
5. The most dispiriting thing is would be to figure out that for all the blame you can place on external factors, it is still you who is ultimately the problem. You could change everything you have ever expressed the desire to change, and for you, things would still not be greatly different. ^
6. It’s just frustration. Don’t dress it up. It’ll subside if only you don’t dress it up as something grandiose. You say things like It’s too late for me to be one of them, or The normal happy people, or It will only get darker, and I swear it’s emotional self-harm. ^
7. Not me specifically. She is bubbling to tell. ^
8. I already took home the really seditious stuff, the tomes I mentioned earlier. For now, they’re well hidden. I wonder what the officials do with them — file the author’s name down to a bare initial? I̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶f̶u̶r̶t̶h̶e̶r̶,̶ ^
9. Our disappointments arise I think from the promises made to us in the early stages of our lives and then broken. It is for this reason that I feel a perfect lack of anxiety about the vanishingly small chance I will ever be rich. Nobody ever led me to believe that this should happen to me, or even that it might. It is also why loneliness gnaws at my bones every day. Promises can be implicit or explicit; a promise can grow up in the space left by an evil never acknowledged. It is this way with solitude; nobody is ever very inclined to acknowledge the existence of the truly unlovable—the wretched, the damned, the ugly—even to themselves, let alone to their children. You are never promised the love of any particular person, but being unaware of the very condition of lovelessness, you begin to think you have been promised something. You never learn, until it is too late, that it is possible not to be part of the human community. It is possible never to be loved. ^
10. If you are reading this you know the plan, benefit of hindsight. ^
