Intermission: Against Nausea?
"It's nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist. I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.”
This essay is a swelling; I wondered where I ought to have taken the headings from. Should I have used Albert Camus’ A Happy Death (1971) or James Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (1916)? Or should I have taken F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest (1895), or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)? Perhaps Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time (1913), or a Buddhist scripture from the Nihon Ryōiki or the Lotus Sūtra, or William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603)?
Each of these texts has a significance to me, irrespective of the degrees to which I finished them, for behind each encounter with literature is a decision—a choice—which reifies itself firstly in the mere interest of approaching a text, and later in your fate of having read or not read it—in this voice from the Other, which could reveal to you, in its dissolution of abstract life—in the corrosive manner of Yukio Mishima’s white ants—another way to live, to gaze and to end this human life.
I first began with poetry—its sensibility has never left me. It infects every passage I write, as though I could not resist a beautiful line, if it would come to me, and I would embrace and enshrine it with love and balance in my expression. Poetry is like a mechanical puzzle—a tracing of a path outwards from the interior—of words and their sublime order within the self.
The sensibility is a distinction: there are beautiful words and even more beautiful sentences; the task of the poet is to arrange words into a beautiful way—into a balanced way—because even the ugliest poem could be beautiful if arranged in a way, and it could retain its ugliness—its character—and yet be beautiful. This negative capability, which is similar to the Buddhist term upaya, is a skill which separates the amateur from the master, in the similar fashion of any craft except literature and art.
The great democracy of Modern art—the act of self-becoming-patron—has muddied the waters of discipline: anyone can be an artist—and they should. But can everyone be a blacksmith? Or rather, even if everyone had a steel forge in their own home, how many could produce a great and beautiful work of steel out of the raw iron of themselves? It should go without mention: this is not a denigration against art-making; but an appreciation for the task of art-making itself and its heights—writing is like divination; it takes effort to be divine.
For a long time, I left poetry. I stopped writing altogether, as if I had no faith in myself, having seen the gulf between me and the old masters—an anxiety which I inherit through my very love of their texts, by their instilling of a nebulous poetic ideal in me, and the very possibility of my own literary life because of their abstracted one.
I have reclaimed poetry in my own ways: in the smallest ways, in its adoration of real life, in its gentle sentimentality of preserving a moment—holding it to the light, rolling it with the inner tongue, and fleshing it forever with the constrained effort of white ants, which nibble and secrete against the hard wood of reality.
But it is inexcusable for authors to write about themselves; this is your craft, so use it! If you want to say something, use your art! Otherwise, write an autobiography and leave yourself at its doorstep. Forgo it completely if you would cower before yourself.
So, I stop myself prematurely here; I could write about myself forever, but if I must, then I should do it with words, out of my own negative capability, which I abandoned poetry to better hone, and which might reveal my innermost depths in the most indirect way: or, as the great artist, Orson Welles, once described in F For Fake (1973), “Art is a lie—a lie that makes us realise the truth.” In other words, I cannot gesture to the burning building—only to its diversion outside—which might hopefully draw you out and let you see.
Hence, I no longer wonder what text I ought to choose; I must choose a text which is significant to me, and reflective of what I wish to say, as a contrapasso to what I really wish to say, but cannot express directly, and so which I must cover with all manners of artistry, so that I might offer it as closest to my heart as I can.
Embarrassingly or not—out of nostalgia and yet freedom—I choose Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) which, as strong as any other existentialist text, mirrors my personal philosophy in its three forms: a neurotic world of codified words, a free search for authenticity and a moral strictness, which could only be relevant to myself.
Crucially, I live this human life for myself; I am free in the most radical ways; hence, if I am free, then whatever I choose to do is meaningful, because I could have done anything else, and yet I chose you: this is the basis for value, for authenticity, for a personal code of ethics which I follow for my own sake, and do not challenge nor care for anyone else to follow nor repeat.
“Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity here.”
For a while, I was unable to accept that I held a similar attitude as Mishima’s Sun And Steel (1968). I could not accept that white ants preceded the wooden block of my body—that words formed the basis of my self and not the immediacy of my flesh, which appears so intuitive, and yet, which if I look back further into, feels distant when compared to the coldness of words, into which I stored all the warmness of my life.
When I was younger, I used to write short plays, joke books and minor poems. It was important that I catalogued my life, or rather, that I could codify my life into a series of objects and prides, whereby each one could be associated to a memory—an earthly proof of my life—and which could satisfy the neuroticism at the centre of my being: am I alive, and if so, have I lived?
Attached to a baby tooth is a memory of its falling; if not a specific fall, then of a general one as a summary of pure experience, which occurred sometime in the past, and which I fear, recedes with time from me—the only person who would care that such an event has passed by. This is to say, I have no doubt that these events occurred, and yet, I must know that they did: I am not satisfiable with the mere gestures of memory, and so I keep the tooth as a talisman against black oblivion.
In the same way that cave paintings are drawn, I gestured with a primitive childhood to the stampede of a landmark in time, which I could return to like a physical palace of memories, and from which I might later retrieve in the sheer instance of sight and touch, like a madeleine or a snippet of song from the office of the rector, and relive the past in real evidence of its present: I finger the tooth, I run it through my hands, and feel its hard pearl press against the pink of my palm.
Hence, art became a method of codification for me; for each song, I could potentially recall a peculiar moment with it: a car ride, a first kiss, and so on; and further I could create new moments by selecting, with taste, the correct song to codify such special moments with, and which, if I delivered to its power, could sustain, over the years in its function, as a lighthouse in the Brobdingnagian ocean of myself.
This is also my pathology of words too; I codified my world into words, as if they could taxidermise its experience, hanging in the back corridors of the mind, waiting for the sunlight of reality to shed once again, and thus they became devices for expression of my past and present selves.
Poetry was a lousy attempt at codification; I was too conscious of my sculpturing, without the finesse of experience to gently let myself go, and so I turned against poetry for several years, and substituted its passion for prose, which I could likewise only love, but which I finally excoriated from my desires, and lately came to a medium which combines my two loves, and yet, which cherishes its freedom from both as well: the form of the essay—and hints of the confessional.
“You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it.”
Most people are nebulous; they are always criticised like this. The writer is typically the exception: their sensitivity is unique, their expression is their own, and even if not they are not wholly original, at the least they are responsible for their own words.
Most people are not original and neither are they responsible for their words; for them, words are pure vectors of instinct, like an infant gesturing in hunger, or an old man eclipsed by something he feebly comprehends. The depths of words, their utter capacity to express the inner sphere of the self, is left untrained and underappreciated; if only others could be like me—this is what you say.
I have read Dostoevsky; therefore, I am the Übermensch. There is no satisfying impulse, especially as I stake my own individuality here, in acknowledging this cardinality: each of us, in believing ourselves to be our own, must act this way. We disguise our pride, which we steal from the arrant experience of our lives; however, we hold out for pride nevertheless and admit that we are human beings in of ourselves.
Yet I will treat myself—as if I did not know—in all ignorance of the worst of such offenders, and yell that I am unique, insofar as I am myself, and that this is the only qualification I require to live: to answer the question of life, I point towards myself first, and caterwaul outwards that it is only me—I am the only one in its relevance—and fundamentally my freedom is only to myself.
If words have codified my reality, then the next admission is to admit that words are relevant insofar as to my own reality. However, I am against solipsism, and I have few suspicions that other people exist. The illustration here is instead for this: if I am both unique and free, then this is only relevant to myself, and I cannot express this to anyone else, and must simply trust in their mutual sense of uniqueness and freedom, which we often forget and fall into inauthenticity as a result, but which throughout my life, I have raged against so that I might stem its interference with how should I live—I will not live in this way; I live according to my own mythic standards.
Fundamentally, I must believe that I am predestined in the most liberating way; I subscribe to a determinism of ignorance: that I am guided by unseen but natural forces, like a dice thrown against a wall with a certain amount of force, to which I will inevitably roll onto a particular side, but which I am unable to discern nor affect myself, and yet on which I will still gamble with my life, as if I could control my outcome and thus my life with full clairvoyance.
In this radical sense of freedom—with the obstinacy of ignorance—I declare that I am the master of my own life, insofar as I am unable to distinguish its ultimate fate, and yet I can witness enough of its die, such that I might, with pride, call it my own and act as if I were eternal over my own chance.
And if I, in exception to all other freedom, choose to gamble on only one thing? If I eschew other possibilities, it is predetermined I should do so; however, I do not fear the lone darks of destiny nor the loss of tremendous worlds, because no one else can live this life instead of me; and the only value of freedom is to manifest my right to choose: to have chosen and not merely to be able to choose. The distinction is that we are simultaneously free and unfree; we are unchained and chained; we are contradictions living in the ignorance and secret knowledge of fate, and yet this is validated by our real living in the world—by the ineludible face of choice.
“I don't quite know which kind—but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.”
In the history of my life, I have possessed its essence to its fullest shame; I imagine its living as an eternal recurrence, insofar as I could not have acted differently—for if I could, I would have; if I would have, I would—and I would have eaten my tail in the same way again and again as an inescapable condition of my personhood.
Under the gravitas of eternity, the mere ownership of my human life is insignificant; however, it is significant to me, as the only life I have, and therefore, it is significant beyond compare. Its significance begets significance; its significance demands a moral seriousness to itself: I must act according to the ways in which I would always have acted, such that if I were to die, I would hold court with no contradiction between my passions and my faults, my desires and my degeneracies—there is only a completeness of my life, a sublime contrition for my living as if I were alive, in the faintest ignorance and a concupiscence for my own banner of life, for which I would endure martyrdom for, as a service for being able to live, and as the only postcondition for maintaining to do so.
I clarify that my ethics are relevant to myself alone; I have never asked to be accompanied into hellfire; neither have I asked for an easy life, but a life which I might call my own, even if it leads me to obsidian and brimstone.
If privilege now breathes into the room, then consider the opposite: that your life is not your own, and instead that it is spurned by the dumb wheel of a whole fate, with helplessness as a precondition to your existence in this life. I cannot accept any terms which rob me of ignorance to my fate—I declare myself ignorant! I refuse to acknowledge that which I cannot know; and more so, to let a transcendental ignorance interfere with my war of fate.
Hence, for each of my pleasures is owed a measure of my pain; I cannot accept a hedonism without responsibility, because each action is its own, insofar as bodies themselves must move through space to achieve them.
I reify within myself every action in turn to its larger cause within my life. If freedom is the condition of my existence; if words are its structure and demolition, then I act, with total moral seriousness, the freedom to be free as an affirmation of its significance and only value to me—as it could only be relevant to me.
Even servitude can be authenticity as a result; I am thrown into freedom—without purpose—and yet I adopt a purpose, wholly aware of my fundamental freedom, and yet which I adopt nonetheless as a purpose which forecloses other freedoms, and yet which I would adopt again and again if I had to live this life over, insofar as I could not have been anyone except myself—we might call this servitude love.
“Night falls. On the second floor of the Hotel Printania two windows have just lighted up. The building-yard of the New Station smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.”
Writhing; I exert my strength: I owe no explanation for myself. Any explanation arrives out of freedom—out of love—which is the highest value of human beings and our greatest gift: I do not have to love you, but I do, and that is the significance of my life.
In this life, I desire nothing less than its spectacularity; however, this exceptionalism must be held accountable to no one else except myself, inasmuch as I would not wish for anyone to innately travel my circular path, as if it were the correct road to Xanadu, as though its difficulty were admirable in of itself.
Vitally, I live for no one except myself; and yet, I live for many people, although I am unbound in freedom, and likewise, they are unbound too, and yet we might come together and call this our life, which we share, and for a short time, annihilate the breastwork between us, such that we offer each other a significance we do not need and yet likewise accept in reciprocation, and therefore become human together.
This short treatise is hence a reification; it is a mere side on the dialectic, which itself will be negated by everything else, and which will lose its significance, bit by little, as soon as it is written, and yet which I must stake into the earth and ring into heaven as proof—like a tooth or a song—of an earthly existence which I once called my own.
Even if I agree with Mishima, my white ants are mine; I do not imagine our species are alike; and likewise, my block of wood is different from his—it does not function in the same way nor in a normal way.
The path of its consumption is likewise separate, and I suspect that his despair—his turning towards steel—was a path that I could not observe as a point of difference within myself: instead, it was an expression of what Xenophon reflected of Socrates in his Memorabilia: in enclosing myself to an expression of both worlds, I found an understanding instead of a contradiction, I discovered a synthesis but not a dialectic, I took upon myself a completeness which I could call my own, and which demonstrated to me the intensity of my personage and the brilliance of my own spirit in this world—against a nausea which stirs against the ethos of my life.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.