Specter I. {& Only}

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear

~ T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

A prompt ending is preferable. But much of life persists, against our wishes. And what is a wish but a specter or phantasm of reason? At many levels reason fails. It is not at the level of the impersonal that such failure sends the person into an abyss of self-doubt, despair, and finally: the terror of dissolution. No. It is at the level of the personal, the part of us connected with this vibrating world of factuality and the dehydrating self-concern of others, that we finally see, with two eyes (and with infinite loathing), nothing but reflections of the hideous form that is desire.

If the above paragraph sounds out-dated and Romantic, it is because all that needs to be said has already been said – one needs only to listen. One can waste time teaching Bataille, the Situationist movement, the post-modern monsters who seek only to create more text for university classrooms, etc. (and we’ll have a Blast doing it!); but to do so is to ignore the fact that it’s all over. We are done. We have had done … with everything. The end of the story is this: there is no story, there is only the specter of a soul seeking salvation. And – dear God! – there is no such thing. Nothing at all.

The ignoble smile of a woman, which promises only future disappointment, is a far more bitter and organ-grinding poison to me than alcohol! I’d rather rot poisonously from inside, the gin coursing through my veins, than crumble alone in the darkness of a woman’s apathy. Her eyes do not appear! Whatever they were. I no longer remember the warmth of her gaze: only the harsh glare of her own personal – to me impersonal – light.

When one stands upon a hill of power, a point from which the world is observed and all is planned … When one stands such, it is hard to believe that the mind is finite. It is hard to imagine that humankind ever conceived of something so absurd as the Infinite. Damp cellars and dry brains seem more like it … a conglomeration of the human condition.

I remember an afternoon in Liverpool, fine ale pouring from casks beneath a well-worn counter. The stench of ages, and all that … But so what?

I remember a morning in New Orleans, fire under my feet and terror in my veins. The glory of dying youth!

I remember an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and eyes and infinite future and love and clandestine sex and prompt reciprocation of my emotions and a glorious revelation of shared ideals and promises and something that must be written and the power of a man and a woman contra naturam (speaking Latin as we went) and a sign and a signal and a whiff of life and lips and kisses on a subway platform not willing to say goodnight … I remember all this and die like a monster writhing in its own filth