Threshold
Page 8
When I was better, I moved on to the sacred city of Varanasi, as otherworldly a place as could exist and still be on planet earth. Hindus from across India go there to die, then have their bodies cremated on the ‘burning ghats’ along the filthy Ganges. The motive of these death-pilgrims is instant moksha, release from the cycle of rebirth: grand prize in a faith that views worldly existence as an aeonic drag. I took Hindi lessons in the riverside home of a corpulent professor whose wife kept him fed with trays of snacks. He taught me to read the script aloud, even when I had no idea what it meant – the language is wholly phonetic, like Italian. I memorised a phrase with which to commence every faltering dialogue. It went something like Tutti phutti Hindi bolsakta hoo: ‘I speak broken-shattered Hindi.’
After further meditation retreats in Sarnath and the New Age bastion of Rishikesh, in search of respite from India’s clogged cities I travelled to Dharamsala, the airy town in the Himalayan foothills that is the home of the Tibetan community in exile. I hung around for a few weeks, eating dumplings and reading in cafes. There was talk of sightings of Richard Gere, though the Dalai Lama was said to be out of town. Prayer flags flapped in the wind. Monks carrying alms bowls walked the streets trailing burgundy robes. I attended a weekend retreat focused on death and dying, led by a white-haired American who felt there was nothing sadder than to expire in an indifferent hospital ward, the TV spewing out daytime banality. On the last day he guided us through the meditation practice in which one visualises one’s corpse in advancing stages of putrefaction. I became a skeleton, strips of rotting flesh clinging to my bones. When I came down from the retreat, Isolde had emailed me pictures of her naked body. I covertly masturbated in the back of a dingy web cafe while gazing at them, my heart thumping. At temples I peered into mandalas, speculating about their affinities with the visions I’d experienced on hallucinogens. Like its aesthetic traditions, Buddhist cosmology and metaphysics had found ample space to grow strange and complex at the roof of the world, centuries before China’s annexation of Tibet. The result was the psychedelic splendour of Vajrayana Buddhism.
In Dharamsala I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche’s modern commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. That book really is a trip. Famously, it describes the experiences we are said to undergo after death, adrift in a series of bardos – intermediate states – before being reincarnated. I read about these visions with keen but sceptical interest. Rooted in a materialist ontology – and, it seems to me now, intellectually blinkered – I equated truth with harshness: despair was proof that I was not bullshitting myself. I countered the woolly thinking of the dharma bums I met across India with a Nietzschean take on truth: each man is entitled to as much of it as he can bear. From the outset I had sought to practise a Buddhism without supernatural beliefs: it was not a faith but a contemplative practice grounded in empirical experience. I considered my resistance to soothing metaphysical fantasies a mark of good intellectual hygiene. The Vajrayana account of the afterlife, however, was hardly reassuring. Next to it, Western annihilationism seemed an easy way out, rendering not only death but life, too, weightless and without risk. The Tibetans believe that in the bardo following death, when one peers into ‘the mirror of past actions’ and the moment arrives to decide the nature of the next rebirth – hellish or exquisite, brilliant or debased – it is no external agency that issues the judgement, but one’s deepest self. The idea struck me as terrible, profound and, in some sense, true.
From Dharamsala I headed north to Kashmir, where I based myself for a few weeks to pursue my studies. Specifically, I rented a houseboat on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, and the object of my studies was ketamine. This drug had never breached the Dublin circles I moved in; I knew little about it, except that it was a dissociative and, at least according to popular myth, a horse tranquilliser. An Israeli told me that with a little bribe you could buy ketamine in many Indian pharmacies. It came in bottles and you dried it out on a tin plate under the sun. In the evenings, with the sun sinking on the rim of snowy mountains encircling the lake, I insufflated lines of ketamine in the seclusion of my houseboat. It was incredibly weird, inducing a state of abstract derangement that was unlike any of the other drugs I had tried. It was like putting on a VR headset to enter the reality of a psychotic who was also strapped into VR while on shattering drugs. The day after a session, I would write up my experience at absurd length in my battered journal. I imagined I was conducting important research at the limits of consciousness, but I see now I was just getting fucked up on a boat. Later, I was dumbfounded to learn that ketamine had caught on back home as a party drug – people were taking this stuff at nightclubs.
After filling scores of pages with trip reports, I left the lakes and mountains of Kashmir and headed south. My intended year away had elapsed, but rather than return to real life I decided to fly to South America. When my money ran out I would find a job in a bar or cafe, build on the Spanish I’d learned at school. I had grown weary of asceticism; I missed being ruled by my appetites. The same factors that had drawn me to Buddhism now repelled me from it. In Buddhist psychology, the three so-called defilements of consciousness are greed, hatred and delusion. One thing I was not deluded about was being prey to all of them, but I was not ready to let go. Greed was wont to tear through my life like a tornado, yet it was the force that animated me, gobbling up books and pleasure and experience. As for hatred, the very word excited me: hate, hate, hate. I don’t quite know where it came from, this vast capacity for hate, this hate-habit, which has never really diminished, fuelling daily reveries of carnage. It was present, certainly, in adolescence, when I would fantasise about smashing my father’s skull in as we sat watching football, whenever he did something I loathed like bite his nails. The hatred I felt for my mother, who had done nothing to deserve it except create me, was extreme and pathological. Yet hate gave me fire. At bottom I did not want the peace that Buddhism offered – not yet. I knew that whatever discipline I had as a student of the dharma would dissolve when I left Asia. The thought did not trouble me.
I booked a flight out of Mumbai. Before leaving India, I spent a few nights in New Delhi, in a windowless hotel room high above the city’s bustle. Throughout my travels in Asia, I had been keeping a blog, read by friends and family back home. It was conceived as an experiment in honesty, a bonfire of the inhibitions that would otherwise hamper the books I was determined one day to write. No matter how sordid or embarrassing my experiences, I typed them up and posted them on the blog. What happened next, though, in Delhi, was the one episode I declined to make public.
The day before I was due to leave for Mumbai, I poured my last bottle of ketamine on to the tin plate and left it to dry on the hotel roof. I spent the day sightseeing, and when I came back in the evening there didn’t seem to be as much crystallised matter as there ought to have been. I persuaded myself that someone had knocked into the tray, spilled most of my ket. As the sun retreated on Delhi, I sat in my boxers in my hotel room and trained the fan on my body to cool the sweat. This was the time of the Iraq War. On the television screen, marines stalked the peripheries of Baghdad or Fallujah in the glow of night-vision green. I had my earphones in, the music on shuffle. Using a bank card, I crushed up the crystallised ketamine and divided it into two fat lines. Then I rolled up a banknote, leaned over and inhaled them both. I imagined it was about an average hit. Later, it would become clear that the entire bottle had been concentrated into those two lines. The word for this is overdose.
It came on fast and severe. I was in the war, clomping over scrubland amid tracer fire. The war was an emanation of the synaesthesic music that ricocheted through my skull, music I was creating with my thoughts. And then there was no war, no music, no coherent mind to grasp such concepts. There was pure existence, and this immanence was me, I was the cosmos moving through an event of sublime magnitude. The everything folded into the nothing till there was no longer any distinction: the world was the same as the Void, the
Void was the same as the world. I had a sense of vast privilege at witnessing this transcendental climax. Then the Void grew tight and hot and ragged, as if Being were birthing and dying at once. It occurred to me that this was the end of it all, the eschaton. And then nothing. Aeons later, a scene slowly begins to cohere. There is blurred white light. It may be daylight, or fluorescence. There is a cube. A room. Someone is lying on the floor – a man, naked but for his underwear. He is face down in a pool of vomit. An indefinite moment passes before I realise it is me. I observe the tableau calmly, as if viewing a cadaver on a mortuary slab. Slowly the detached, hovering awareness forms an identification with the body, is drawn back into it. He twitches his fingers and toes. A hand clenches, unclenches. Finally he rises to his feet, groans, stands under the shower for half an hour. He is too out of it to feel shock – only the dull foreboding of it – at the realisation that he almost missed out on his own death.
I don’t really have beliefs, but I do have an imagination, and now I imagine that I did die there, in that New Delhi hotel room, choked on vomit far from anyone who knew my name – and that I am there still, in that infinite instant, and all of this, the life that has happened since, is nothing but the judgement I have passed on myself, a torrent of visions ramified from who I was into what I have dreamed myself to be. Bleary and parched, beginning to apprehend the chasm I had peered into – all the shame and grief of those who loved me – I checked out of the hotel. In a daze that was like a dream of a dream of life, I cut my way through the throng, past the rickshaws and honking cars and limbless beggars, to the station, to board another train.
I agree with you about writerly self-pity. Nothing has given me more satisfaction and meaning than writing, though it can be so difficult. I won’t kill myself (at least ‘not tonight’), but I imagine that if for some reason I couldn’t write, I would feel suicidal. Before I figured out how to write with the requisite competency to attract readers, life was a torment in part because I didn’t know what to do with my experience: it wasn’t enough, somehow, just to be. I was maddened by the idea that life may as well have never happened, that existence leaves no trace. Now I write about my existence, and in a sense I exist so as to write about it, so that the writing refracts the manner in which I live.
There was a storm on Saturday night. Now the trees in the courtyard are stripped bare and I can see the square and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin from my window. I’ve been thinking about certain authors who haunt Paris or haunt me. I don’t think I need to explain to you that I admit no separation between literature and life. When I write about other writers, other artists, I’m writing about myself, and when I write about myself, I’m writing about the universe.
My friend Sam came to visit for a few days. On the first night, we drank a lot of wine in a bar on Oberkampf with an old friend of Sam’s, an English artist named Eddie, who has lived here for many years. Sam hadn’t seen his friend since he too lived here, fifteen years ago. Back then, Eddie was thirty-five and seemed to the young Sam like a kind of god – the embodiment of freedom and individuation, living with his beautiful artist wife in a dazzling house they owned in Montparnasse. Upon seeing him again, Sam had to suppress his shock at how Eddie has aged. His hair is silver now, he has a bad cough from years of smoking, and he’s lost the lustre he once had. He has long since separated from his wife, and lives alone in the thirteenth arrondissement.
It was unsettling to find Sam so taken aback: it confronted me with the inevitability of my own diminishment, the withering of all strength and grace. I’ve had the sense, over the past year or so, of enjoying a peak of life characterised by power and confidence. Hearing Sam talk about his old friend, I wondered if someone who knows me now, a young friend perhaps, would react in a similar way if they were to encounter me fifteen years into the future. The decline, the fading of the light, the falling short … Is it deterioration from here on in?
Which reminds me, you never told me what you imagine death will be like. Do you think about it much?
Knife
For three years in my early twenties I underwent weekly psychoanalysis, lying on a couch in a book-lined study to talk about my most humiliating secrets, anguished intuitions and perverse desires. On the shelves of that study I noticed a number of books by Georges Bataille. Like many of his readers, I knew Bataille only through his early pornographic novel Story of the Eye. My girlfriend and I used to read passages of the novel to each other, and we were vaguely, perhaps dutifully, aroused by the imagery, but for the most part we were just amused. It read like a screwball Sade: a pair of young libertines enact weird erotic scenarios involving eggs, eyeballs, priests and even bull’s testicles. At moments when I feared I was saying too much to my analyst, being too open about my aberrant thoughts, the sight of Bataille’s books on his shelves reassured me: if he was reading this stuff, he could take anything I might serve up.
Bataille came to fascinate me, more for his theoretical works and for his life and personality than for his fiction. Two key words across his writings were ‘ecstasy’ and ‘excess’. The words resonated with me, engaged as I then was in my own pursuit of ecstasy by means of excess, which, as it happened, often meant swallowing excessive quantities of MDMA at raves, festivals and concerts. I felt myself to be at war with the world. The values I lived by stemmed in part from the conviction, attained at the age of sixteen and never really discarded, that work, as it was generally experienced by people of my own working-class background – i.e. dreary toil that you didn’t really believe in – was to be avoided as far as possible. Further, the exact contrary of such toil was the overpowering, life-justifying rapture that my friends and I found in music, clubs, art, books and drugs. Bataille, it seemed to me, had done the anthropological research to back up these ecstatic intuitions of mine. In his book Erotism, he argued that human beings had lost themselves in the work-world, rendering themselves means rather than ends. The systems of rationality and order we had erected to protect us from the dangers of nature had grown too rigid and powerful: they now enslaved rather than served us. Bataille was clear on what the solution was to this mass human self-abnegation: ‘exuberant eroticism’ and rapturous excess, which brought the sacred back into earthly existence, reinstating human ‘sovereignty’ against a dreary capitalist world that sought to deny it. Cosmic serfdom was cast off through useless acts of pleasure, self-destruction and sexuality.
Although I discovered him via my studies in philosophy, a large part of Bataille’s appeal was the alternative he offered to philosophy’s stock-in-trade, namely sober reflection and careful reasoning. While I found I could do very well in philosophy, intuiting what was needed to impress my lecturers and get good marks, I really wasn’t into sober reflection and careful reasoning. When it got right down to it, I wasn’t even really into philosophy. What had drawn me to the subject was its promise of astonishing flights of thought; shocking and dangerous ideas; a sense of vertigo; vistas of the sublime tinged with madness and horror. As the vast majority of academic philosophy turned out to be pretty antithetical to all that, I spent much of my time studying the subject in a state of catatonic boredom. During ethics lectures, unable to bear sitting through a meticulous unpacking of the complexities underlying the abortion or euthanasia debates, I would routinely skive off to play pool and smoke joints. For a while I considered dropping out, but I had come to philosophy after dropping out of an even duller subject, and to do so again would be to invite the dangerous conclusion that there was no subject that could hold my interest. Philosophy was all about the exaltation of reason, yet what got me through my studies was the often stridently unreasonable work of thinkers like Bataille and Nietzsche. While Bataille was treated warily by academic staff, he had far more draw for me than even such a colossal figure as Kant, who I could never really bring myself to read (which is a little like studying physics and ignoring Einstein). Like Borges, I viewed metaphysics as a branch of fantastical literature, embracing ideas not so much for their tr
uth value as for their force of astonishment. When I finished my studies and moved into the great open world, these wild and unreasonable thinkers were the ones who stayed with me, who I continued reading, who I am still reading now.
In the spring of 2015, not long after I had stayed with my friend Zoé while researching Emil Cioran, I fulfilled a long-held desire and moved to Paris. I lived in the nineteenth arrondissement, first near the Canal Saint-Martin with my girlfriend, then by the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, on my own. One afternoon in early summer, wandering through the Pompidou Centre, I came across a display detailing Georges Bataille’s relationship with the surrealist movement and his influence on the avant-garde in general. Bataille was acknowledged as a central figure in the avant-garde’s struggle to surmount the ‘absence of myth’ in the modern world. In black-and-white photographs taken on Paris streets, Bataille was as well groomed as ever, peering out from the past with those serene, kindly eyes that belied the rage and revulsion of his thought. Being at a loose end, I decided to visit some of the sites and addresses relating to the life of this weird author, whose work had marked my own weird youth.
On a drizzly late Sunday morning in August, I left my flat and took the Métro to Pigalle. As is not uncommon in Paris, there was a condom machine by the bottom of the stairway leading out of Pigalle station. Paris is widely known as the City of Lights, but to me it was the City of Condoms. Everywhere I looked I saw them. When I’d moved into my place by the park, a superlatively bohemian dwelling (it was falling apart, basically), the young woman I was renting from while she was away in Mexico had evidently been in too much of a rush to clean up the bedroom. I knew this because of the large, open box of condoms and the overfull ashtray on the bedside table – not to mention the clutter and dishevelment everywhere else. I didn’t mind. In fact, I was pleased by it, this unwillingness to dispel the stereotype of the Parisian artist (the woman was a film-maker) – languid sex, dubious hygiene standards, chain-smoking. To me the condoms and ashtray were like the sweet that hoteliers leave on the pillow for when you check in to a room: a welcoming touch.