OH MY GOD THIS IS SO BLEAK. GOD DAMN YOU FRENCH AUTONOMISM WITH YOUR ALMOST CONVINCING NIHILISM.

God damn it French autonomism. Why'd ya have to be so utterly despondent? If I didn't have the friends that I do I might even take some of this on board.

I think life at it's worst fits the description here. This is how I picture the existential despair of the middle class. The life of the working class and poor is of necessity more social and therefore less alienated than this, although the effects of capitalist individualism do bleed in everywhere to some extent. The revolution will blast away these spiritual cobwebs forever and ever and ever. Anyway, enjoy, if that's the right word:

“I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?

“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.

Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society” hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.”

The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even love. All those “how’s it goings?” that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other’s temperatures. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it’s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything’s false, since it’s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since we’re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.

This is such a happy picture

Hastings

Hastings

You have drug problems, and some pretty good pubs

Hastings

You have beautiful woodland and back-alleys of grime

Hastings

You have Saturday night chaos and Sunday morning bemused tranquillity

Hastings

You have discarded heroin needles next to graffiti about love

Hastings

I grew up in you

Hastings

I have walked your surface as many different people

Hastings

I am a drop in your oceans

Hastings

I can feel the rhythm of your tides

Hastings

My tears have often got you wet

Hastings

In ecstasy, I have performed clumsy handstands on your withered grass

Hastings

Clarity and confusion run into each-other nightly, and dance dialectical in the space between your citizens

Hastings

I have skipped through you at 4am drunkenly shouting half remembered lines from Ginsberg

Hastings

I have thrown countless pebbles into your sea and felt calm

Hastings

I have kicked a pint glass at your coppers

Hastings

I am one of your very few Leninists

Hastings

You have provided everything that is important and beautiful to me

Hastings

I have felt your rain pour over my face, and perhaps

Something of me ran into the water

And soaked into your pavements, as past generations have

And will continue into the air of the future

As new feet walk over them

Living strange lives

Like you and me.

A little confession

I reall am a raging homosexual

.

It had been a dark and confused winter, and the authentic mind was hiding. It was as if the cold had seeped into our homes, and closed up our mutual spaces. All of our contact took on an alien, defensive quality. But in all the uncertainty, she was there. One night in November we stayed up, drinking on the sofa. I looked into her eyes, her face warm in the lamp-light. Rested my forehead against hers. With hot mulled wine on our lips we kissed and kissed and kissed, messy and wonderful, giggling, sighing, hands exploring, fucking and cuddling to sleep, as if with one great burst of affection we could shatter alienation forever and be free, and for a while we were.

Began

Michael was lying in bed, bored, when it began.
Lucy was downing her 6th shot when it began.
Greg was climbing a tree when it began.
Lucinda had just been mugged, and then it began.
The guardian had just gone to press, and a storm was brewing, and the unions had gone on strike, the day that it began.
It took most people a little while to realise what had happened after it began.
They were wrapped up in world-blanking kisses, screaming black howls of despair, hot with lust in high-wire fucks, kicking themselves in realisation and quietly contemplative as it began.
At first only a cracked and whiskered old tramp, drinking white cider with grit in it, noticed, and that was an hour after it began.
He muttered to the shoes walking past him that the shadows were missing but it was too late, because an hour earlier it began.
Above all of the ordinariness, at the top of a bell-tower, silhouetted shapes danced noiselessly and blended into a hellish myriad - and smiled as it began.

Koestler

There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

whirling dazed stupid delirious belligerent vitality spunked

old ride.

I remember

The giant merry-go-round

we found in the park at dark, the lights shone bright

and we marvelled at how no-one had found it before, as it beamed and shone in the night.

so we got on and rode, and oh!

the majestic lows and soaring highs

our liberated whoops and sighs

while we were spinning

it felt like,

winning

but in truth, the lights were dimming.

and dimming.

from the moment we arrived.