He again wants to take the measure of his life, a verbal snapshot before details have shifted on. It is, as a matter of writing and perhaps even singing or rapping, a sort of seasonal intuition1. Spring is coming on, things are leaping into green, into bloom, and livelier states of animation. What this leads to is curious and mildly tragic. People get excited by all the renewal, leading them to false conclusions. What must be called the vernal fallacy: that life springs eternal, that carbon-based creatures&critters will forever start afresh because there exists this revenant post-vernal-equinox force, one has lapped Sol once again.
Horseshit, thinks the Infected One. He shoots a stream of purple saliva and it hits the spittoon sitting in the middle of the living room in a splashy sound. A few drops of spittle splash up and land on the parquet joining earlier, faded, light-pink stains. All his friends and acquaintances consider this habit disgusting but he is not sure why. They have partners, so he’s certain they rather frequently actively stick their tongues into other people’s saliva and even consider it quite a grand activity. That’s not disgusting either. He grips his forehead and rubs it thoughtfully, hoping his mind will let him coax out a few more pointless pontifications. Ever since a few weeks ago when his friend Mr. Motivado had an unfortunate encounter of the first kind with an automobile, he has not done any peyote. Instead he has shifted his emphasis to the near-ageless game of hit-the-spittoon. Splash, another bull’s eye. The Infected one smiles. A breeze sails through the open living room windows, pollen on a watery gust from the lake, directly enters his nostrils and reminds him forcibly of the topic he has been mulling.
Spring, Eternal life, pah! What is guaranteed is the utter certainty of individual death [either brusque and too sudden, or slow and cruelly unnecessary] and the more-or-less guaranteed, eventual, banal extinction of humankind as a whole. The glorious acronym for which is E.L.E.: ecological cataclysm, collision course comet, nuclear holocaust, extra terrestrial pogrom, could be anything. So the very opposite of spring is what will win in the end, he is convinced. It is neither a schadenfreudige nor a melodramatic nor an angry sentiment that accompanies this conviction, he takes it simply for what it is: one of those macro-scale constructs that has very little relevance for his actual life but the thinking about which provides a strange measure of satisfaction. Perhaps because it allows one to viscerally or mentally partake in realities that exceed the irritating limitations of being a human being.
SPLUSH! The Infected One lifts his fist and shakes it. He is on a monkeyfucking roll, best believe. He dislikes the word mo’fo, despite using it all the time.
Archaic spittoon: would u hit that?
But from the perspective of an individual life, well yes, it seems like spring keeps repeating itself ad infinitum as well, coming back time and again… This is not what the Infected One wants. He has willpower, a will that will dictate exactly what words end up on the page. He should not follow the example of the season and randomly grow colorful flowers wherever, just for the sake of growing colorful flowers. What is the topic? Spring, the season of change, mirroring changes in his own life. Excellent, the resonances between the inner, the outer and natural life, a trick so old and still it is gold.
But has anything really changed in his life? He used to spend his days pent up in his four walls, milking the thin air around him for words. Now, in the mornings and the evenings, there is the inevitable necessity to commute. Much has been written and said about this that does not need repeating. What is different now, compared to e.g. when he was in Windy City, Capetown, BK or Berlin2 are the particulars of the daily journey: A) sights B) space.
Streaking out of Luceria immediately, instead of heading for the placid, little Lake of the Gods, the train curves and curves [across the river, under Mount Bram] until it ends up racing along the northern shore of Lake Luceria where Alpine vistas abound. Panoramas of the Alps are difficult for language, as much an obstacle to the written word as they are to the physical, land-hugging traveler. One of the best things one can resort to is to attempt a domestication of the majestic granite & basalt & gneiss waves, lapping to frozen altitudes of three, four, five thousand meters, by naming them. Names have a poetic and anthropomorphic glow to them that we can then bestow on the mountains and pretend we somehow know them, know something about them. When the people who might know something about them are the Älpler, the unempathizable-with mountaineers who wasted their lives on them and the poor, lost souls who tunnel our way through under them [the folks of NEAT glory].
The Infected One sighs.
Things are going well only at an abstract level. Yet at the everyday, micro-level there’s an unending sequence of failures that interposes itself between him and the achievement of jackshit. Shit that could not even be washed away by the bitter tears of frustration which, occasionally, he feels himself tempted to let flow. It’s not, in the first instance, the doing and the thinking and the writing [ or even the performance of athletic activities] which go horribly, horribly awry but rather it is the grip of an elementary nihilism: that nothing matters, that all will eventually turn into dust [or there will be the Big Un-Bang, at least, the freaking Godot we’ve all been waiting for]. Destruction and pointlessness, but without any poetic beauty to redeem it, the Italo-Calvinesque void against which one can choose to struggle oh-so-valiantly but which will devour one in the end nevertheless.
The Infected One knows that it is said that even to cut off a single section of the pinkie will immediately rally the nihilist back to the powers of purpose. But that knowledge is not enough. The Infected One is not sure what he either needs or wants: c) a theory [ridiculous!] to show that life is meaningful despite its eventual extinction [and that are in tune with his personal conviction that it are individual subjects that get to constitute the meaning of their life within certain tight parameters and should then, to be ethical, life accordingly] g) to be more aware, on a moment to moment basis, that nihilist hypothesis do not really, in any relevant sense, have any influence on his life because while death/calamity/apocalypse can end life, it thus strictly exists outside of it and is deserving of no further consideration. This last point is important to him, he arrived at it about two years ago: that one is strictly immortal within one’s own life, that one is always alive within one’s own life [that death hath no dominion]. Then he read that Heidegger or one of those guys had said something along the same lines, the intellectual brilliance ratio of which can be depicted as: The Infected One=Our sun, H=Beteigeuze. The feeling is best described as a smooth blend of validation and deflation with an after-taste of resentment for philosophy.
Drizzy himself
1Agreed: Drake is fire
2He fondly recalls these places from a long ago era when he was a cosmopolitan nomad. The pretension attached to this label is still more agreeable than the stasis of his present life style. Things are actually going surprisingly well but that is never enough. Is it? The Infected One has come to acknowledge to himself that he, perversely, longs for adversity and resistances, which, as soon as they do turn up, he will definitely curse as unbidden.
THEMZINI • • • [gigben@gmail.com] 