After a Night of Drinking (Pardon the Misogyny)
There it is. The feeling of the wet day on your face after a night of drinking. Refreshing to see the world still exists, to see bodies scurrying and flocking and the business vans puttering on around pedestrians. Ground is wet, air is wet, raincoats are wet, all as they well should be. The moment you step outside your hovel, which is what every room grandiose or crammed feels like after a night of drinking, your body begins to reintegrate. It is a quick resolute death of the slept-in sigh-yawned body, five minutes of acculturation whereby your mind picks up on the worries of yesterday's moment, resubscribing to the continuity of a moral existence. For these few marked minutes you are permitted to look at faces knowingly, solemnly and innocent, innocent of your plight and sins against the earth, and pardoning of all who have sinned with you. You thus stare straight at the faces that pass, knowing and unsmiling, unblinking and empathetic, and in this stare you wake them and make them uncomfortable, mostly because for a brief cathartic moment they are forced to make meaningful eye contact, and the harsh reality of an other who can see you for what you are threatens to unbalance carefully kept secrets of selfhood and irreplacibility.
But in any case this is not what is going through your head, nor through theirs; you are rather thinking about how the day tastes like writing, like your tongue ought to just protrude penlike and inscribe ink on the page. Concrete lines cut by buildings and cranes look beautiful, geometry for once looks beautiful, engineering the art of massive and practical sculpture seems a worthy enterprise, car traffic seems necessary, and you commune with anonymity and gravity and nothingness and whimless your legs carry you home. But soon there comes maturation and pulling and thoughts and the apple. You are walking with an innocent look on your face which is really just the look engendered by muscles still slack with alcohol. And you are no longer drunk. The day slips slowly into your consciousness because you cannot avoid inertia, you cannot debase continuity. The others, they become the objects they are, the faces the false idols and caricatures you have always and must know them by (even the woman you pray to will be but the Image, Christlike halo imposed painting on the wall). You slip into normality and the wetness of the day ceases to amaze you; you still have a few, a minute or two of wonder but you can feel it going and you know there's no point in holding to it.
The first indication is your mind's returning predilection for the past. How last night you. Everything reminds. Traffic cone in the construction site you pass says: "Guy last night who intoxicated drags a cone down the street in boisterous good humor and from a window someone rebukes him for it and he replies 'I don't judge you for your sexual preferences!'" And old man in black Heineken flapper over cream colored sweater and wearing spectacles and driving cap, he is just like the lonely bulging sweating man at the bar who for either friendly or sexual reasons wanted you to sit and talk. And scuddy remnants of vomit on pavement like in the alley where a stumbler projected columnar and painted a storefront pink. And girls in big pink jackets like the ones who dancing (and probably these present girls are the dancers same at night).
And then more specific recollections like how with a table of two men and 3 women (you one of the men) a man begins talking to the table about Russia and you and your friend are attentive and interested enraptured even but the girls! How they twiddle their hair and look around and 'How awkward that this guy would talk to us' because they don't want to be interrupted whereas the males that is you and your friend, you want interruption you crave it anything new captivating enthralling for a moment. It's not that the girls are boring: you just go out to have something like this happen. The girls will play dumb or ask stupid questions, then want to turn the attention back to themselves or something along such narcissistic lines, whereas the guys, they want to be thrown into situations, they want to get something out of it, they have real interest and they sincerely and eagerly show it. Worst part is the girls will talk about it later maybe relate the story to some third party and if you're there to hear it, you have to silently know how reserved and unkind they were, how the story is only objective, amusing, a conversation piece. Everything in a girl's life is a conversation piece.
So such thoughts resolve you towards the world again and the wetness in the air no longer intrigues and gratifies you. The day is the same but the appreciation, your appreciation, is lacking. The taste of writing in your mouth, that is the taste of cigarettes. What grim realization. Hate the residue of stale tobacco smoke, throw the rest away. That yellow taste of slow killing (filtered as if that could reduce the inherent slovenliness of it), it gives you illusions such as 'my mouth tastes like writing' and it regales you with promises of All, but like with anything else that you renege, you will do it again all the same and this inner conversation will recur in a few days regardless of whatever resolution you make now.
Morality returns, the ethics of a subjective judging inferential mind, individual to each man and inclusive of no other. Morality is the noose over aesthetics, it is relentless and irrevokable and it is superego and it will make you accept it because you're used to it, taught to be used to it. Morality is judging, it is righting and wrong, it is seeing the new based on and in connection with what you have experienced of old, and those free aesthetic minutes are limitless mercy the nature of which no politics can understand. The wetness of the day is immoral because it is a distraction from duties and responsiblities that one has to others. When you are the removed, the outsider willingly and wantingly contradicting the inside, you threaten-- but it is not society which will bring you back. It is yourself. Because thinking aesthetically is too much and it is chemically exhaustive, and your mind has tendencies which, indoctrinated or not, are distinctly and wholly a part of you now. They are in your control, because they are you, gained from without, but now in you, and though you cannot control the past which hulks forward in the form of such tendencies, you can control your present - but tendencies incurred by the past, they are difficult to overcome and the burden of bettering oneself is easily avoided by returning to morality. Aesthetics and infatuation with learning and experience must ultimately give way to retrospective dialogue with one's moral interlocutors. So you come back, down, and in, the wetness is back outside you and the others are others, oblique and incontrovertible, and the past envelopes you like a warm stinging sock and you embrace it.
But in any case this is not what is going through your head, nor through theirs; you are rather thinking about how the day tastes like writing, like your tongue ought to just protrude penlike and inscribe ink on the page. Concrete lines cut by buildings and cranes look beautiful, geometry for once looks beautiful, engineering the art of massive and practical sculpture seems a worthy enterprise, car traffic seems necessary, and you commune with anonymity and gravity and nothingness and whimless your legs carry you home. But soon there comes maturation and pulling and thoughts and the apple. You are walking with an innocent look on your face which is really just the look engendered by muscles still slack with alcohol. And you are no longer drunk. The day slips slowly into your consciousness because you cannot avoid inertia, you cannot debase continuity. The others, they become the objects they are, the faces the false idols and caricatures you have always and must know them by (even the woman you pray to will be but the Image, Christlike halo imposed painting on the wall). You slip into normality and the wetness of the day ceases to amaze you; you still have a few, a minute or two of wonder but you can feel it going and you know there's no point in holding to it.
The first indication is your mind's returning predilection for the past. How last night you. Everything reminds. Traffic cone in the construction site you pass says: "Guy last night who intoxicated drags a cone down the street in boisterous good humor and from a window someone rebukes him for it and he replies 'I don't judge you for your sexual preferences!'" And old man in black Heineken flapper over cream colored sweater and wearing spectacles and driving cap, he is just like the lonely bulging sweating man at the bar who for either friendly or sexual reasons wanted you to sit and talk. And scuddy remnants of vomit on pavement like in the alley where a stumbler projected columnar and painted a storefront pink. And girls in big pink jackets like the ones who dancing (and probably these present girls are the dancers same at night).
And then more specific recollections like how with a table of two men and 3 women (you one of the men) a man begins talking to the table about Russia and you and your friend are attentive and interested enraptured even but the girls! How they twiddle their hair and look around and 'How awkward that this guy would talk to us' because they don't want to be interrupted whereas the males that is you and your friend, you want interruption you crave it anything new captivating enthralling for a moment. It's not that the girls are boring: you just go out to have something like this happen. The girls will play dumb or ask stupid questions, then want to turn the attention back to themselves or something along such narcissistic lines, whereas the guys, they want to be thrown into situations, they want to get something out of it, they have real interest and they sincerely and eagerly show it. Worst part is the girls will talk about it later maybe relate the story to some third party and if you're there to hear it, you have to silently know how reserved and unkind they were, how the story is only objective, amusing, a conversation piece. Everything in a girl's life is a conversation piece.
So such thoughts resolve you towards the world again and the wetness in the air no longer intrigues and gratifies you. The day is the same but the appreciation, your appreciation, is lacking. The taste of writing in your mouth, that is the taste of cigarettes. What grim realization. Hate the residue of stale tobacco smoke, throw the rest away. That yellow taste of slow killing (filtered as if that could reduce the inherent slovenliness of it), it gives you illusions such as 'my mouth tastes like writing' and it regales you with promises of All, but like with anything else that you renege, you will do it again all the same and this inner conversation will recur in a few days regardless of whatever resolution you make now.
Morality returns, the ethics of a subjective judging inferential mind, individual to each man and inclusive of no other. Morality is the noose over aesthetics, it is relentless and irrevokable and it is superego and it will make you accept it because you're used to it, taught to be used to it. Morality is judging, it is righting and wrong, it is seeing the new based on and in connection with what you have experienced of old, and those free aesthetic minutes are limitless mercy the nature of which no politics can understand. The wetness of the day is immoral because it is a distraction from duties and responsiblities that one has to others. When you are the removed, the outsider willingly and wantingly contradicting the inside, you threaten-- but it is not society which will bring you back. It is yourself. Because thinking aesthetically is too much and it is chemically exhaustive, and your mind has tendencies which, indoctrinated or not, are distinctly and wholly a part of you now. They are in your control, because they are you, gained from without, but now in you, and though you cannot control the past which hulks forward in the form of such tendencies, you can control your present - but tendencies incurred by the past, they are difficult to overcome and the burden of bettering oneself is easily avoided by returning to morality. Aesthetics and infatuation with learning and experience must ultimately give way to retrospective dialogue with one's moral interlocutors. So you come back, down, and in, the wetness is back outside you and the others are others, oblique and incontrovertible, and the past envelopes you like a warm stinging sock and you embrace it.
3 Comments:
Wow.
That is an amazing piece of writing. I'm sitting here listening to a mix I made with Blind Melon, African drums, and some downright blues and I'm fucking around a little on the guitar and reading and what I am reading here I can't even put into words what I'm feeling about it, but its coming across in the music that I'm hearing and that I'm playing and it's like Aristotle trying to explain Catharsis and it makes me want to go out and make movies that attempt in the very least way to try and touch some frayed lining of what I am feeling. But what is inspiring is the feeling that I CAN do that.
I love the mixed up relativity of the paragraphs and this should be published. I'm proud that it appeared on Pinko's Copies first.
Thanks man. I guess I've been feeling particularly inspired lately. See you over break.
Also, I've noticed that my unconscious libido may be talking a lot here; something about the 'wetness being outside you' and the sock enveloping you and you embracing it. The piece stings of sexual frustration and recourse to masturbation (which as a matter of fact is rather contrary to my current situation). But who wouldn't be looking for innuendo after reading Freud and Lacan for a week.
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